Famine and the Reproduction of Affect
Famine and the Reproduction of Affect
Pleas for Sympathy
This chapter focuses on photography in the context of the multiple famines across the Indian subcontinent in the late nineteenth century. It examines how sympathy as an affect enters the domain of technological reproducibility and the slippery nature of the photographic medium with respect to sympathetic feeling, drawing upon Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century notion of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments through the nineteenth-century circulation of W. W. Hooper’s famous photographs from the Madras famine of 1876–79 in conjunction with the various pleas for sympathy in the popular British and Indian press. The sentiments that images of social suffering arouse, if understood through Smith’s formulation of sympathy, reveal not only the deeper representational conundrums that all projects of “awareness raising” face with respect to their subjects but also the unpredictable nature of photography’s own sympathetic mimesis.
Keywords: photography, famines, India, Adam Smith, sympathy, W. W, Hooper, social suffering, mimesis
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