97. The Once and Future Rebellion: Echoes of the 1857 Indian Uprising

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 generated a radical reassessment of Britain’s relationship to its largest colony, creating a lasting crisis of representation that questioned the formation of shared identity and “cultural memory” in relation to the uprising. This panel invites papers that consider visual responses to the Indian Rebellion as a form of “perpetual incitement,” to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s term. We seek to understand how imperial and nationalist entities sustained themselves by incessantly re-stoking fears about a possible repetition of the uprising in anxious narratives of colonial conflict and how these took shape in visual art.

We are interested in knowing:  What filters did artists deploy to represent the events of that conflict? How did it become part of Britain’s or India’s political unconscious, and what visible form(s) did that unconscious take? How did people visually process this event during the years immediately following the revolt, as well as afterward? And how does the imagery associated with 1857 resonate with later and current imperialisms? In addition to established artistic forms, we are interested in exploring how ephemera captured this experience, as well as inviting approaches beyond the conventional metropole-colony divide.

Themes: Cultural Memory, National Identity, British Colonialism

Lead Convenor: Jeff Rosen, Scholar-in-Residence, The Newberry Library, USA

Co-convenors: Aisha Motlani, Independent Scholar, USA

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.