Courtesans and Jogis: Ideologies of Gender and Public Culture in Empire

This presentation examines how colonial administrators utilized new and emerging technology to cultivate somatic forms of orientalism. Highlighting the affective economy and circulation of commissioned works such as The People of India (1868) and The Oriental Races and Tribes of India (1863), I trace how photographic technology, which preceded sound technology, encultured sensory, bodily, and emotional attachments to Indian subjects. I argue that somatic orientalism produces a racializing episteme— that the Indian body is and was always out of place or time. Through a combination of critical transnational feminist ethnographic and archival tools, I trace the emergence of somatic orientalism to the mid to late nineteenth century, focusing in particular on two figures in the colonial archive—the jogi and the courtezan. Ultimately, I interrogate the intellectual imperatives of somatic orientalism, arguing that the visual economies through which images of Indians circulated in the era preceding sound reproduction installed and continue to normalize mechanisms and epistemologies of empire.