Together Apart: Freshman Colloquium

The Orientalist Rendition of South Asia through Colonial Visual Practice

Poorvi Singh

Abstract

Orientalism is a heuristic that helps one understand how power works in a cultural sphere such as novels or artwork. Saidean Orientalism helps us to map how the relationships between economic, historical and political context, forms of valuation, and power dynamics shape not only the context of art but what was deemed as art in British India, and how this continues to seep into societal values and interactions today. In my essay, I unpack through Orientalism how the British employed colonial art to document the Indian natural world and project white saviorism, categorize South Asians to facilitate colonization and impose the European imagination, and influence coveted Indian artists and the representation of their cities.

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