عنوان

The 'Effeminate' Buddha, the Yogic Male Body, and the Ecologies of Art History in Colonial India

LA29n573t9

The 'Effeminate' Buddha, the Yogic Male Body, and the Ecologies of Art History in Colonial India

[Article]

Ray, SUGATA

© Association of Art Historians 2015. Internalizing colonial accusations of the effeminacy of the native male body, nineteenth-century Indian ideologues and reformers attempted to redeem the national body through a range of phallocentric body cultures. Anti-colonial art history, however, deliberately appropriated colonizing discourses of the effeminate native body to epistemologically challenge the hegemonic hyper-masculinity advocated by both the regulatory mechanisms of the British empire and a larger nationalist body culture in colonial India. The ingenious invention of a discursive intimacy between yoga and an aesthetics of demasculinization led to the strategic resignification of the male body in early Indian sculpture as both a sign and the site of an imagined national life. Through a close analysis of art writing and photography, art pedagogy and colonial archaeology, visual practices and sartorial cultures, the essay delineates the fin-de-siècle politics and aesthetics of demasculinization that had led to the establishment of anti-colonial Indian art historys disciplinary and methodological concerns.

2015

UC Berkeley

[Article]

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