Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India

Acknowledgments

197 Acknowledgments This book began with a conversation with Finbarr Barry Flood about Felice Beato’s famous photograph from Sikanderbagh. The conversation snowballed into a graduate seminar paper for Natalie Melas and Susan Buck-Morss, both of whom kindly allowed me to submit the same paper for their seminars, thereby giving me the time to conduct extensive research and to fall under the spell of my first major academic obsession. I was soon writing a dissertation on colonial photography in India. I am grateful to Barry for sparking this interest in the first place and to Natalie and Susan for allowing me to explore where it might take me. I was fortunate to have the mentorship, encouragement, and patience of an eclectic and brilliant think tank as my dissertation committee at Cornell University: Susan Buck-Morss, Biodun Jeyifo, Natalie Melas, and Geoffrey Waite. None of these thinkers is known for following the paths of inherited doxa, and everything I have learned about the value of taking intellectual risks I learned from them. Thanks are due as well to Sheetal Majithia, Lisa Brooks, and Joseph Campana for inspiring me since graduate school. A special thanks is due Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi, who followed this project from its first foray to its current form. Iftikhar has been a particularly important interlocutor and read multiple versions of the chapters. At the University of Washington (Seattle), my colleagues Eva Cherniavsky, Tom Foster, Gillian Harkins, Chandan Reddy, Caroline Simpson, Nikhil Singh, Alys Weinbaum, and Kathleen Woodward supported the book with their friendship and intellectual generosity. At Princeton University, Eduardo Cadava, Anne Cheng, Jeff Dolven, Diana Fuss, Simon Gikandi, and Michael Wood generously shared their expertise and pushed the project forward at key moments. I will forever be grateful to Ben Conisbee Baer and Gayle Salamon, both for their friendship and for their feedback on the first draft of the Introduction; together, they grasped my intentions better than I had done myself and helped to reorient the project in an exciting direction. Daphne Brooks, Mia Fineman, Devin Fore, Sophie Gee, Brooke Holmes, Michael Jennings, Claudia Johnson, Deborah Nord, Jeff Nunokawa, Sara Rivett, Esther Schor, Joel Smith, Valerie Smith, Susan Stewart, acknowledgments 198 Alexandra Vasquez, and Tamsen Wolff supported the project in more ways than they know. Thanks are due, as well, to Patricia Doskoczynski, Christine Faltum, Pat Guglielmi, Kevin Mensch, Karen Mink, Marcia Rosh, and Nancy Shillingford for making it all run so smoothly—and for their good humor. I am grateful to Michael Barry for coming to the rescue with translations of the Farsi inscriptions in Plates 11 and 12, at short notice and with meticulous attention to details. Heartfelt thanks to my amazing fellow traveler and friend Meredith Martin. My tireless and brilliant research assistants and editors, Sarah Wasserman and Emily Hyde, went above and beyond the call of duty, not least by making themselves available at the last minute, especially in the final year of the manuscript preparation. Their own work, as well as that of Ellen Smith, continues to nourish me intellectually. I thank the graduate students in my seminars, who have taught me so much, both at the University of Washington and at Princeton. Generous readers who took time to offer me feedback include Anjali Arondekar, Mrinalini Chakravorty, Rey Chow, Kajri Jain, Fredric Jameson, and Christopher Pinney. A special thanks is due Sangeeta Ray for her incisive feedback and her ample generosity with both her time and her intellect. Thanks to Robyn Wiegman’s Seattle sojourns, I benefited from her feedback as well as her friendship during my time there. Thanks are in order for Dana Seitler’s and Jonathan Flatley’s exciting provocations and questions during a campus interview at Wayne State University, which became formative to the shape Afterimage of Empire would take. No words can convey the gratitude I owe Geeta Patel, an ideal interlocutor who can enter fully into any thought with someone, no matter how far removed from her own interests; conversations with her have been indispensable, from dissertation to this final publication. Writing a book is like running a marathon: it requires people to cheer one on. For sustaining me with friendship and brilliance so that I could write at all, I am grateful to Albert Aurand, Ben Conisbee Baer, Hristina Dantcheva, Nishchaya Gera, Darlene Lee, Gerard Mannion, Meredith Martin, Tilar Mazzeo, Jesnee Mohamed, Gayle Salamon, Siona Wilson, and Catherine Zimmer. They are my bedrock and my home base. A special thanks...