Output details

Tourism, Occupancy, and Visuality in North India, ca. 1750-1858.

Context and contribution: Eaton’s essay about Indian and British genealogies of the spectacle and experience of the painted panorama is a chapter is an edited volume which is the first to address the importance of travel in relation to the historical emergence of modernity in and across global contexts. Written and edited by scholars concerned with cross-cultural encounters the collection of essays challenges assumption about geopolitical boundaries and the agency of images in the expanding early modern world.

Research imperatives and process: Using rare archival material from Calcutta, London and Yale, Eaton’s chapter addresses the creole nature of the panorama: its vertiginous nature, its sense of disorientation and its negotiation with the spectral. In her theoretically engaged account, Eaton provides a critique of questions of occupancy as a revisionist take on recent panorama/technologies literature. Instead, following recent anthropological writing, she proposes what might be understood as the ‘xeno-real’ aesthetic of Indian panoramas in painterly, writerly and photographic terms.