On April 15, Professor Zirwat Chowdhury presented “Clarinda’s Power of Circulation” at Cornell University. Her talk situates the compositional form of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of The Hancock Household (1765-67) within a colonial economy in 18th-century Bengal, constituted by the warped and overlapping circulation of goods and, often enslaved, women. Circumventing the contemporary art historical drive to identify marginalized figures in British (and more widely, European) portraits, her paper traces instead the portrait’s figuration of South Asian and Eurasian women’s intractable value amid the risks of colonial circulation.
Source: https://arthistory.cornell.edu/news/pulse-art-history-zirwat-chowdhury-4152025
