Empire's bodies: Images of suffering in nineteenth and twentieth-century India and Ireland

This dissertation analyzes how images of suffering bodies---violated women's bodies in India and starving bodies in Ireland---have been mobilized within competing narratives to define and redefine the British empire, its ideological investments, and modes of anti-colonial resistance. My project explores how the same images can be used to articulate justifications for empire as well as critiques of it, to advance imperialist ideologies and to subvert them. Using a case study model, I analyze images of bodily suffering drawn from the colonial and neocolonial contexts of India, Ireland, and Northern Ireland: images of Indian women's bodies from nineteenth-century British representations of sati; images of raped and mutilated women's bodies from the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan; images of starving bodies from Ireland's Great Famine in 1845--1851; and images of IRA prisoners' bodies from the 1980--81 hunger strikes in Northern Ireland.; I make three central arguments. First, through the affective potential of body images to elicit in readers or viewers an emotional response to the suffering of others, representations of the corporeal effects of empire function as mediations between those in positions of power and those subject to that power, as a means of articulating the relationships between colonizers and colonized, between nationalist leaders and marginalized groups within national contexts. Second, the insertion of these corporeal images within different narratives, histories, forms, and genres enables the manipulation of this affective power for competing articulations of colonialism and the nationalisms that have emerged from colonial contexts. And third, once these images have been put into play, once they begin to circulate publicly, they become available to be deployed and redeployed in ways that both engage with their earlier uses and revise their meanings for changing historical and political contexts.