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'Enchanted Traps?' The historiography of art and colonialism in 18th-century India

Location and context: Eaton’s article is an exploration of the problem of historiography, focused on the History of British Art in relation to colonialism. It appeared in Literature Compass, which is a peer-reviewed on-line journal primarily based in literary studies. This article demonstrates Eaton’s interdisciplinary interests and reach. Another version of the article appeared in Ashgate’s Research Companion to Modern Imperial Histories (2012).

Research imperatives and process: Eaton’s essay examines the visual culture of 18th-century India in the light of recent historiographical debates in art history, postcolonial studies and anthropology. In this theoretically informed consideration of the long-neglected issue of the ‘imperial turn’, Eaton raises the question of whether we need to provincialize European scholarship as championed by postcolonial writer Dipesh Chakravarty, or whether, following Rustam Bharucha, ‘Europe’ (i.e. the Western episteme broadly defined) is already hopelessly ‘parochial’ in outlook.