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Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that the spread of social media has given birth to a self-portraiture genre among Dalits that simultaneously enhances possibilities for image production of victims of violence but also multiplies representation to include novel aesthetics, style and affect.

Paper long abstract:

The image repertoire for subaltern communities in India, in particular Dalits, is variously framed by colonial taxonomies, indentured labour records, and more prominently, representations of violence against them – while self-representation has remained largely absent from this layered history. In more recent decades, this repertoire has been dominated by standardised visual-material artefacts mainly political in their subject matter. Widely-circulated renditions of Dalit leaders have come to constitute the ideal mould for what stands as the ‘Dalit image’ and this has been actualised via the construction of monumental parks in their honour and the mass production of statues and images placed in public spaces and households. In 19th century India, the mass production of photographs saw ‘the quantitative turn[ing] into the qualitative – [while] the sheer velocity and intensification of representation produce[d] new social forms’ (Pinney 2008: 136) and made new aesthetics available to those who could afford them. Expanding on this set of interlocked changes, this paper contends that the spread of social media has given birth to a self-portraiture genre among Dalits that simultaneously enhances possibilities for image production of victims of violence but also multiplies representation to include novel aesthetics, style and affect. In the context of this newly-found representational freedom, Dalit self-portraiture also achieves something else. It brings to the fore intimate, composite and beyond-the-political worlds that textual, visual and material representations have been largely unable to capture. Examples from across social media platforms will be analysed through the categories of immediacy, leisure, and luminosity.