Following general reflections on the relations between global media, local and oral history, this paper addresses the paradoxical constraints imposed by language specialization, which focuses Western historians on particular regions and languages at the expense of demotic and oral cultures. Taking up the idea that translation is never an ideologically innocent act, Stein addresses the ambiguous status of English in the Indian context, both as the language of British imperial power, but also as a vehicle for challenging and “writing back” against colonial discourse. To illustrate the linguistic pitfalls that accompany research on South Asian art, the paper investigates the relations between temple art, iconoclasm, and the zinc smelting industry in Jawar, Rajasthan.
This article examines Chang Chao-tang’s photography in its social and cultural contexts and reads his photographic images with a special focus on the temporal–spatial syntax at work: “superimpositions” between “the sculptural” and/over the natural, the still life and/over the transi- ent, and so on. Through this two-pronged analysis of both the social–historical and the formal, the article addresses questions regarding how Chang’s photographs manage to be both “Surrealist” and “real,” and how exactly Surrealist imagery and the social documentary work together in his art.