Monday, October 13th, 4 pm, Billings North Lounge
Dan and Carole Burack President’s Lecture Series
“Art on the Line: Cartography & Creativity in a Divided World”
Sumathi Ramaswamy, Duke University
In recent years, historians of cartography have shown us how and why lines, dashes, and contours drawn on a piece of paper (or sometimes, parchment or cloth) have had such profound, even violent, consequences in our times by reaching deep into our lives to shape the physical spaces we inhabit. Beginning with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 when an imaginary line was drawn across the Atlantic Ocean to parcel out the globe between two emergent empires, through the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 when other lines were drawn on pieces of paper laid out on a table in Europe that decided the fate of a continent elsewhere, to the bloody partitions of the past century (Ireland, India, Palestine, to name the most prominent of them), acts of cartographic defining have been catastrophically constitutive and world-altering. In my presentation, I explore one such act of drawing a line in the summer of 1947 when British India was partitioned, and examine the responses to that cartographic act that have emerged in recent years among visual artists in India and Pakistan.
Professor Ramaswamy is a cultural historian of South Asia and the British empire whose recent research focuses on visual studies, the history of cartography, and gender. Recent publications include The Goddess And The Nation: Mapping Mother India (Duke, 2010); and two edited volumes, Barefoot Across The Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain And The Idea Of India (Routledge, 2010), and Empires Of Vision (co-edited with Martin Jay, Duke, 2014). As a National Humanities Center Fellow in 2013-2014, she completed a monograph titled Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest Of The World As Globe exploring debates in colonial India about the shape of the earth and examining science education using the terrestrial globe as a pedagogic object. She is currently working on a pictorial monograph titled Husain’s Raj: Postcolonial Visions Of Empire And Nation. Ramaswamy’s work in popular visual history led her to co-establish Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture at http://www.tasveerghar.net/.
For more information, please contact Professor Abigail McGowan by email or phone her at 802-656-3532.