Rebecca M. Brown

Festival of India

rmbrown47 — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:22:28 +0000

By examining the performative and exhibitionary practices of the 1985-86 Festival of India in the US, this project probes the production of national identities and development of international relations at the end of the Cold War. The Festival included over 70 art exhibitions across the US. This research addresses the production of canonical works for the history of art, the rising prominence of Indian culture within the US, the consolidation of participating diaspora communities, and the diplomatic relations between the US and India, even as India and the USSR also pursued cultural and economic exchanges.

Publications: 1 book chapter, 1 journal article

Papers at ACSAA 2011, National Museum of Korea 2011, Walters Art Museum 2012, University of Virginia Museum 2012, The Long 1980s conference (AIIS Delhi) 2012, CAA 2013

Image: Installation, National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, Aditi exhibition

Colonial Rhythms

rmbrown47 — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 12:19:25 +0000

This project examines painting in India at the turn of the 19th century and photography in India in the later 19th century. What did paintings and photographs, particularly of people, produce during this period? What kinds of epistemologies and temporalities do they communicate and construct? Taking seriously the objects themselves as they circulated around the globe, and examining closely the types of depictions and modes of imaging, this project seeks to reformulate our understanding of 19th century Indian figural imagery.

Paper: CAA 2011, article forthcoming in Visual Anthropology

Image: Victoria & Albert Museum, Fish Women, Patna, 1826, IS.28-1964

Modernity & Visual Culture

rmbrown47 — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 00:25:40 +0000

This project explores how Indian modernity is produced by and through the paradox of how to be both modern and Indian in the post-Independence period from 1947-1980. If the modern involves universal communication and pure form, a turning away from religion to reason, and a reliance on a (usually colonized) Other as productive foil, then how can one produce a modernism that also constructs the particularity of a new, formerly colonized, nation? Examining the interconnections among fine art, architecture, photography, and vernacular visual culture after Independence, this research provides a new, overarching examination of this crucial period in Indian art history.

Publications: monograph, 4 articles, 3 book chapters, 1 catalog essay and 5 artist entries; 2 book chapters forthcoming

Exhibitions: 2: Akhoury and Rubin Collections (2009), Rubin Collection, with catalog (2011-12)

Colonial Patna

rmbrown47 — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 19:29:09 +0000

Drawing from maps, surveys, extant architecture, paintings and lithographs of the city, and travel narratives, the various phases of this project elucidate the ways that the British colonial presence in Patna, a city on the Ganges river in Bihar, India, reshaped the city space. Through various case studies, the research included here describes the discourse of colonialism as read through the city space, arguing that the narrative of urban change supported the colonial presence in the subcontinent. Comparative research included the cities of Calcutta, Dhaka, Lucknow, Kanpur, and, in a separate study, Kochi (Kerala).

Publications: 5 articles, book proposal under review

Image: Golghar, Patna, by FWA De Fabeck, 1888, V&A

Genealogy of Spinning

rmbrown47 — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:00:51 +0000

In an anti-colonial move toward Indian self-sufficiency, Gandhi in 1909 decided to revive the hand-spinning of cotton into thread. Gandhi’s programme of spinning (as practice) and deployment of the spinning wheel (as icon) represents one of the most significant unifying elements of the nationalist movement in India.

This project traces the genealogy of the image of spinning. By examining the colonial roots of spinning imagery in painting, prints, and photography, and investigating how the nationalist movement deployed both the visual image and the physical practice, this study probes spinning as symbol and ritual.

Publications: monograph, 1 article, 1 book chapter (forthcoming), 1 article in development

Image: 1930s-40s, Sir Malcom Darling Collection, Cambridge UK

Film & TV

rmbrown47 — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 22:30:55 +0000

Film and TV provide rich texts for understanding shifts in cultural politics, from questions of Orientalism to understandings of modernity and constructions of the past. These smaller projects examine individual films or TV series to address particular questions of interest, usually intersecting with theoretical frames also developed in the other three research areas.

Publications: 2 articles, 1 co-authored piece in development