Imperial Balls: The Arts of Sex, War, and Dancing in India, England, and the Caribbean, 1780-1870

This dissertation is a study of figures dancing or in attitudes of extraordinary physical metamorphosis who, by means of their translation into flat images, create a new typology in the history of art: the "dancing image." Characterized by highly decorative and expressive gestures, poses, and steps, the figures in these "dancing images" bear the hallmarks of many different choreographic traditions from across the globe. These expressive movements are then translated by the "dancing image" onto the flat surfaces of lithographs, mica paintings, tinsel prints, oil paintings, photographs, theatrical cut-outs, and other visual media of empire. Staged by the establishment of what historian C. A. Bayly calls the "nnperial meridian" of British commerce and colonization linking India, England, and the Caribbean, the "dancing image" emerged simultaneously across the oceanic spaces of empire as the dominant solution to the problem in art of how to represent the figure in motion in the 1770s. By the 1870s film had begun to take over from prints and paintings as the dominant means by which to produce "dancing images"; it also became the source of their most progressive ontology. The evolution of the idea of movement in the history of art is the theoretical background against which this dissertation is set. The "dancing image" rises out of the intellectual genealogy of Heinrich Wulfflin, Aby Warburg, Henri Focillon, Geoge Kubler, and Robert Farris Thompson as an extra-European phenomenon of art with roots in the early baroque-a period coincident with the global expansion of European colonial powers; it reaches forward also into the present era of international dance and performance art. This dissertation argues that, because they are sensitized to depict physical metamorphosis, in the overall history of art "dancing images" show with high synchronic explicitness the way things moved in specific places at specific times in the history of colonialism, and also, for the same reason, that they exhibit collectively the movements and changes of art and history diachronically across the imperial meridian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore this dissertation argues that the art histories of "dancing images" in India, England, and the Caribbean, can only be fully understood in light of one another. Thus the dissertation takes a double shape: India, England, the Caribbean; India, England, the Caribbean. Chapter 1 argues that the colonial phenomenon of "nautch" dancing in India created an entirely new strata of shared formal language in colonial visual culture which critiqued the destiny of empire through the art and movement of nautch girls and tawa'ifs. Chapter 2 presents the new mediums of cut-outs and tinsel prints alongside lithography to argue that in England "dancing images" exhibited a stylized assembly and artificial disfiguration of the moving parts of the body which expressed the ideological tensions of empire. Chapter 3 proposes a new genre in the history of art and colonialism through an analysis of the dancing images of Agostino Brunias and the history of the Caribbean couple dance: the fete Caraibe; this genre, it is argued, signifies the development of a new creole culture-in-motion through "dancing images." Chapter 4 returns to India to argue that the creation of "dancing images" in the princely states of India during the period of the British Raj directly preceded and foretold the potential of the princely state to enact revolutionary violence. Chapter 5 argues that the "lightness," "ease," and "gracefulness" traditionally associated with the classic ballet are ultimately derived from the freedom to move implied by colonial paramountcy. Chapter 6 concludes the dissertation by pinpointing the ineradicable traceries inscribed by ephemeral gestures on the Caribbean landscape and the anti-colonial possibilities of choreographic Marronage.