Excess in the City

The Consumption of Imported Prints in Colonial Calcutta, c.1780-c.1795

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2390823
AutoresNatasha Eaton (Manchester University, UK,, autor de correspondencia)
Año2003
Volumen8
Número1
Páginas45-74
Fecha de publicación2003-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Material Culture (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1359183503008001762
OpenAlexW2124365608
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas19

This article examines the role of imported prints in early colonial Calcutta. It explores the critical entanglements of this art of mechanical reproduction within the cosmopolitics of imperialism. Questioning the 18th-century 'consumer revolution' and contemporary 'actor network theory', it asks whether either help us to comprehend fully these picture-human relations. In time of economic boom and recession within this early East India Company state, art was valued not so much as an inalienable possession but for its seemingly contradictory status as both quasi-fetish and as an aesthetic of the ephemeral. Patriotic yet disposable, such pictures participated within a visual labyrinth driven by lotteries and gambling, theft and debt. Using Indo-Muslim and British attitudes towards the colonial art market, this article exposes the centrality of chance and luxury for a creole heterotopia that ultimately hinged on a tense ambivalence

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Boom · Colonialism · Creole language · Ephemeral key · Fetishism · Political economy · Political science · Possession (linguistics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Psychology · South Asian Cinema and Culture