Wednesday
15
MAY

06:00 PM

Producing Charisma: Clothing and Unclothing the Fatherly Body

Prof. Dr. Barbara Mittler, Universität Heidelberg, Centre of East Asian Studies
Prof. Dr. Sumathi Ramaswamy, Duke University (USA), History Department

The focus of this lecture is on the aesthetic charge of (un-)clothing the male body. We show how acts of dressing up (in the case of Mao) and undressing (in the case of Gandhi) built symbolic and moral capital or charisma for these men, especially among the vast peasant populations they tried to connect with through such sartorial acts.

While baring his body brought Gandhi some amount of global notoriety as the “half-naked fakir,” it also enabled him to tap into deep traditions of asceticism in the subcontinent that cemented his status as Mahatma. Artists of his time and since enthusiastically began to develop an aesthetic of asceticism around his body. Comparatively, we will focus upon those images that throw into relief Chinese artistic representations of a fully-clothed plump and rather feminized Mao whose rounded body is produced through an aesthetic of corpulence. We argue that while Gandhi’s emaciated body seemingly reaffirms a dominant colonial stereotype of a starving Indian nation, Mao’s well-fed form contests prevailing notions of “the sick man of Asia.” In juxtaposing the clothed corpulent Mao and the unclothed spare Gandhi, we intend to show how both father figures radically transgressed governing norms of masculine charisma, redefining the terms of patriotic masculinity. Yet, importantly, the baring of the body is among the least imitated of Gandhian somatic practices, even among Gandhians, while Mao’s feminine bodylines and their remakes by contemporary artists and advertisers have caused outrage in China and amusement abroad.

Address

Völkerkundemuseum VPST

Hauptstraße 235

69117 Heidelberg

Homepage Event

http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/newsevents/events/exhibition-envisioning-asia/program.html

Organizer

Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS); Völkerkundemuseum VPST

Alle Termine der Veranstaltung '„No Parallel? The Fatherly Bodies of Gandhi and Mao”':

This lecture series "No Parallel? The Fatherly Bodies of Gandhi and Mao" focuses on the two hyper-visible men of the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi and Chairman Mao, who had also been the object of Walter Bosshard’s fascination. It considers how these men have been transformed over the course of the last century through the work of visual imagery and image-events into globally recognizable “bio-icons.” Situated at the intersection of the visual politics of masculinity and the cultural politics of fatherhood, the talks seek to illuminate how the corporeal is critical to the affective and ethical reach of such bio-icons within the imagined communities of their respective nations.

Wednesday 15th May 2019, 06:00 PM

Producing Charisma: Clothing and Unclothing the Fatherly Body

Prof. Dr. Barbara Mittler, Universität Heidelberg, Centre of East Asian Studies Prof. Dr. Sumathi Ramaswamy, Duke University (USA), History Department

Thursday 23rd May 2019, 06:00 PM

Sovereign Performance: Toward an Aesthetic of the Ambulatory and the Aquatic.

Prof. Dr. Barbara Mittler, Universität Heidelberg, Centre of East Asian Studies Prof. Dr. Sumathi Ramaswamy, Duke University (USA), History Department

Wednesday 29th May 2019, 06:00 PM

Absent Presences: Death of a Father.

Prof. Dr. Barbara Mittler, Universität Heidelberg, Centre of East Asian Studies Prof. Dr. Sumathi Ramaswamy, Duke University (USA), History Department