NUS MUSEUM
&
SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES PROGRAMME
FACULTY OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

A public lecture on

Wednesday, 13 February 2008,
5.30pm to 7pm
Celadon Room, NUS Museum

by
Dr Sandria Freitag,
Associate Director, North Carolina Centre for South Asian Studies, Duke University &
Isaac Mannasseh Meyer Fellow, South Asian Studies Programme

“Thick Description:
Experiments with Visual Media in 20th Century India”

Abstract
Treating visual culture as a source of evidence for understanding the past is a relatively new effort by historians.  In this talk, I'd like to explore what happens when we treat the visual evidence of 20th century India for what it tells us about new ways of conceptualizing individual and collective identities, while selecting and expressing important values in dramatically changing circumstances.  Over the last several years, analysts have been able to identify a range of patterns and larger developments that we can draw from this visual evidence (and it is such that it significantly alters the "master narrative" that has been created by elite-written texts.  I want to sketch these out for you, but then I'd like to move towards the next steps (which are questions I will grapple with during my stay at NUS):  to what extent do these various visual and material expressions represent aspects of the same processes/phenomena, and to what extent are they distinguishable if complementary in their evocations and functions within a changing world?

Speaker
Dr Sandria Freitag, Associate Director of the North Carolina Centre for South Asian Studies, headquartered at Duke University, is here as Issac Mannasseh Meyer Fellow. She will be based at SASP till mid-February. Dr Freitag earned her PhD in History at the University of California at Berkeley. Dr Freitag has held a number of positions: these include Strategic Planning Manager for the University of California Press and Executive Directorship of the American Historical Association. She has worked throughout her career to expand the range of source materials and, thus, the questions that can be asked of the modern South Asian past.  This work has included studies of communal (politicized religious) riots as collective action; collective criminality; and the use of the visual for forging individual and collective identities.  This latter work has resulted in essays in several collections and journal articles, and will serve as the subject matter for her presentations at NUS. Her recent writings have appeared in the most recent IESHR as well as these essay collections edited by: Richard Davis, Picturing India, Dane Kennedy & Durba Ghose, Decentering Empire, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Beyond Appearances, and Christopher Pinney & Rachel Dwyer, Pleasure and the Nation.