Sepia Paise: The Politics and Poetics of Art and Photography in South Asia and Beyond
Can the world be thought of in terms of sepia and light? This talk will explore the relationship between archaic labour and photography in colonial Ceylon with an emphasis on pearlescence and how this might contribute to phenomenologies of light. The economies of pearls and their relationship with visual representation perhaps can act as an allegory of colonialism pushed to the threshold of governmentality.

Natasha Eaton is currently a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow conducting research on labour and representation in the Indian Ocean. She is the author of Mimesis across Empires (Duke, 2013) and Colour Art and Empire (I.B.Tauris, 2013). She is an editor of the journal Third Text where she runs the online platforms: Artist and Empire, Decolonial Imagination and Decolonising Colour.
Date: 24 October 2017, 14:00 (Tuesday, 3rd week, Michaelmas 2017)
Venue: Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street OX1 2PH
Venue Details: Headley Lecture Theatre
Speaker: Natasha Eaton (University College London)
Organising department: St Antony's College
Organisers: Mallica Kumbera Landrus (Ashmolean), Rosalind O'Hanlon (Oriental Institute, Oxford), Matthew McCartney
Organiser contact email address: asian@sant.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Modern South Asia Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Cost: None
Audience: Public
Editors: Maxime Dargaud-Fons, Laura Spence