Excess in the City
The Consumption of Imported Prints in Colonial Calcutta, c.1780-c.1795
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2390823 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Natasha Eaton (Manchester University, UK,, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 45-74 |
| Publication date | 2003-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Material Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1359183503008001762 |
| OpenAlex | W2124365608 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 19 |
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
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Entangled Objects
Exhibiting cultures
Modernity at large
We Have Never Been Human
The Social Life of Things
Distinction
Scarcity and Modernity
The Nation and Its Fragments
Archive Fever
India and British Portraiture, 1770-1825
Aramis, or, The Love of Technology
Imagined communities
Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
History and Criticism
Imperialist Nostalgia
European Agency Houses in Bengal
Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
What's in a Price
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,29 |
| Citation span | 2005 - 2014 (10) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |