عنوان

Optics of American Empire:

Number

TL5mv5s9zt

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

Optics of American Empire:

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Winter, Mitchell Arthur

Title Proper by Another Author

James Ricalton and Stereoscopic Ethnography in Early Twentieth Century India, 1888-1907

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Kamehiro, StacyEvangelatou, Maria

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2018

Body granting the degree

Kamehiro, StacyEvangelatou, Maria

Text preceding or following the note

2018

Text of Note

During the mid-nineteenth century, stereoscopy became a monumentally popular and heavily studied component of British and American optical science. James Ricalton (b. 1844-1929), an American photographer and traveler, utilized stereoscopy and stereography for the production of travel cards that displayed 'non-Western' locations and peoples. This thesis examines Ricalton's deployment of stereography and shows that Ricalton's brand of stereographic practice participates in contemporaneous ideological formations concerning social Darwinism, civilizationism, and American exceptionalism. I visually analyze fifteen of Ricalton's original 100 stereographic prints from India Through the Stereoscope: A Journey through Hindustan" (1900) to show that Ricalton's orientation towards the people and places he photographs is a complex negotiation of his own masculinity, narratives of American nationhood, and dominant ideologies of nineteenth century colonial apologism. I argue that Ricalton's usage of stereoscopy and stereography forms a 'hybridized' archive that does not fit into standard photographic typologies of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.

Brown, Michelle

Winter, Mitchell Arthur

UC Santa Cruz

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y