Niyati Shenoy

*NOW (2023),* from Havah…to breathe, air, life (2023)

I want to begin with a connection made many times. The monumental golden sculpture by the artist Shahzia Sikander that sat atop the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court this spring—part of a work named Havah…to breathe, air, life—was a figure that had stepped off a page.¹ This figure came out of no storybook onlookers could immediately recognize; that was not where the page was from. Rather, it was a deep sediment of art-school tracing-sheets—translucent, unforgiving slices of paper steeped and leathered together with blotchy seepages of paint or ink—upon which, decades earlier, Sikander first daubed studies for the iconic Slight and Pleasing Dislocation. The early shape of this figure, which still inhered in the shining cast of the sculpture’s body, was conceived as an experimental counterpoint to the slow, enameled perfection of the miniature paintings she had produced as an art student in Lahore, seeking to capture precisely what those miniatures did not contain.² “Stepped off” is perhaps not quite right either: the figure’s legs end in swirling, drifting roots, pedestaled upon a lotus. She rose and grew, breathed herself to life, acquired new face, new surface. Sikander’s allegory—here, an emphatic rejection of the bloodless, sightless figure of Justitia—has changed its form. What remains hidden of her meaning?

*A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation* (1993)

When I first saw A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation, pictured above, it was in a seminar taught by Sikander herself, in which she described the fast-paced, breakthrough conditions of the figure’s emergence: “I had to unlearn many ways of working. I had to fight for a place that wasn’t going to isolate me. I had to think of making a mark differently.” I was reminded from something of my own world as a student of history: a chapter in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments titled ‘A Minor Figure’.³ “The small naked figure reclines on the arabesque sofa,” it begins. Hartman’s words shelter her, an unnamed young black child forced to pose for a predator, by overwriting the very photograph that ostensibly makes it possible to believe we could know something about her life: an image “redolent of the auction block, the plantation, and the brothel”, before which the descriptor ‘violent’ is an inarticulate sound, and which will not be reproduced here.⁴ In a fierce and searing ekphrasis, the photograph is withheld from us while at the same time being revealed for what it truly is:

It is not a lush silver print, but an inexpensive albumen print that measures 1 7/16 × 2 7/16 inches; its tiny size announces its minor status. It is a compelled image, an image taken without the permission of the sitter; it is an image intended to classify, isolate, and differentiate. It is not the kind of photograph that she would have wanted and it was not taken at her request...

The odalisque, an image of a reclining nude, conjoins two distinct categories of the commodity: the slave and the prostitute. The rigidness of the body betrays the salacious reclining posture, and the girl’s flat steely-eyed glare is hardly an invitation to look. She retreats as far away from the camera as possible into the corner of the sofa, as if seeking a place in which to hide. Her direct gaze at the camera is not a solicitation of the viewer, an appeal for recognition, or a look predicated on mutuality. The look assumes nothing shared between the one compelled to appear and those looking. The private wish is that the harm inflicted won’t be too great and that there will be an exit from this room and others like it…

Was it possible to annotate the image? To make my words into a shield that might protect her, a barricade to deflect the gaze and cloak what had been exposed?

In the hardback edition of Hartman’s book, the image of the Minor Figure is embedded within a single page of the chapter: a faint greyscale shadow beneath the blackness of the print, painfully and unsettlingly evoking a watermark. As the image evades your eyes, Hartman brings all of her fabulist skill to bear upon the feel and texture of violation inherent to your own gaze, which stands in for her experience of his:

Anticipating the pressure of his hands, did she tremble? Did the painter hover above the sofa and arrange her limbs? Were his hands big and moist? Did they leave a viscous residue on the surface of her skin? Could she smell the odor of sweat, linseed oil, formaldehyde, and clothes worn for too many days? Did she notice the slippers, tattered shirt, and grubby pants, and then become frightened? Had the other models left their imprint in the lumpy surface, the oily patina of the upholstery, and the rank musky odor?

He—the painter—is the famed American realist Thomas Eakins, whose experiments with nude photography in the 1880s are a breathtaking catalog of systemic abuse. Other artists—such as Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter—have attempted to materialize Black feminine escape and evasion from these images in a similar vein; but Hartman’s words hold back nothing, including the body itself.⁵

Sikander’s signature figure—a papery ghost, an inkling of fugitive, “beheaded” pasts—is a different kind of stark than this.⁶ A mark that mottles, distorts, and spills off the page on which she is set, she performs a different escape from both constraints of medium and histories of violence. Like Hartman, however, Sikander’s practice engages the fictionality of the archive itself by confronting the visceral, tangible material of its presence, and drawing out what is minor, invisible, untraced, in a kind of counter-consecration against chauvinistic colonial assessments of historical meaning and value. Refracting the world of early modern Persianate manuscripts through “a queer optic”, locating the radical potential of contemporary art squarely in her own technical and disciplinary mastery of the ancient miniature form, she “deploys the female figure…as a biographical device, a critique of medium, and an avatar of disruption that entirely subverts the very history of illustrative painting.”⁷

As is clear from the title of her new sculpture of the minor figure in a courtly avatar—NOW (2023), as in the protest slogan “[what do we want?] Justice! [when do we want it?] NOW!”—Sikander asks how time can be incorporated into artistic work.⁸ Intently aware that the body will escape the archive, her visions of the feminine reflect on the traces and impressions of that vanishing, with histories of craft and labor serving as the mirror for that reflection. This lens opens up a breadth of insight: how much time it takes to build and create, but how rapidly our perspectives may change; how ultimately, change can seem both too slow and too profligate, exacting a pace that is unsustainable; and how radical retellings of history are torn between “the archive as a way of seeing, or a way of knowing; the archive as a symbol or form of power.”⁹

In Derrida’s famous Archive Fever, the archive “appears to represent the now of whatever kind of power is being exercised, anywhere, in any place or time”—echoing her sculpture’s name.¹⁰ But with and against this display of ‘factual’ power, Sikander shows that archives can also cast a kind of spell of visual distillation, functioning “as a reflection that shows us quite simply, and in shadow, what all those in the foreground are looking at”, restoring “as if by magic, what is lacking in every gaze.”¹¹ Embodying many shadowed and suppressed histories, the feminine figure of NOW steps into the foreground, precariously atop what is as yet a mere façade of justice, and invites us to follow the direction of her gaze—to bring “the simultaneity of constraint, wisdom, and desire in girls and women” to bear on our pursuit of justice—and to think on how to change the law, shift the paradigm of enunciability, to transform what may, in the future, be said, believed, and hoped.¹²

This essay is not a piece of art criticism. I both know and see hardly enough for that. It is, however, an attempt to pose myself a question of method in history aside from one of absence or plenitude, through the prism of art. How do we transfigure our archives? How do we escape, confrontationally, spectacularly, from supposedly abject histories of gender, sexuality, and coloniality? Hartman teaches us how to attend to rage and mourning, to write back to the fiction of what is supposedly unsayable, unportrayable. Sikander’s Slight and Pleasing Dislocation, in turn, shows how letting go can transform the way we see: tradition is not that which clings to us or hinders our vision, but that which extends our reach, and opens up a space of creation that is both vast and intimate. I will explore—mostly inconclusively—how this practice of art might apply to the craft of history.

Parallel to Havah’s exhibition in New York, and as mentioned before, Sikander taught a spring seminar series at Columbia University’s Institute of Comparative Literature and Society titled Art, Aesthetics, and the Itineraries of the Modern Miniature. Graduate students in South Asian Studies, art history, literature, and anthropology were invited to engage with “the material history, and the infrastructural contexts of training and apprenticeship through which South Asian art and aesthetics has typically approached the study of this form, among many other themes. Art-making as embodied labor, questions about the archive and its availability for creative repurposing, and the relationship between the artwork and museum will be explored.”¹³ Together we visited Madison Square Park to examine Sikander’s installation, explored her forays from painting into digital art, animation, and sculpture in the context of her archival praxis, and put together a weeklong collaborative Media Movement Salon at Barnard College’s Movement Lab, where students as well as fellow South Asian-American artists—Chitra Ganesh, Sa’dia Rehman, Vijay Iyer, and Anurima Banerji—presented their work in conjunction with hers.¹⁴

To think with Sikander about method in these forums—about the everyday craft of a historian, as one might that of an artist—was to call forth “an archive in process, taking place at that moment.”¹⁵ She spoke of the anti-monumentality—the classically minor status—of works on paper, contrasting their putative frailty and insignificance with the revelation, the epiphany, of viewing Mughal-era miniatures in real life—and of reworking them, as in Faiz’s Gift, pictured above. The micrographic details; the colors so intense that they seem to swim, as if the scene were animated; a non-hierarchy of gaze, everything everywhere happening all at once. “I want to demystify the manuscript as a point or site of discipline,” she told us, recalling the slow, small, and simultaneously infinite work of painting a single scene for fourteen or fifteen hours a day. We discussed the prolonged intensity and brutal physical toll of skilled workshop labor—the hairsplitting, or mu-shikaf, applications of brush and pigment in a layering technique called pardakht—that effected such visions, whose execution left “no trace of manual production”.¹⁶ We spoke of how the Mughal emperors patronized manuscript illustration as a flagship of state power and ideology, with commissioned works depicting utopia as a universalist, imperial vision of the here and now, accessed through the mystical experience of darshan, or ‘beholding’—and of how miniature artists secreted in scenes of autonomous expression to disrupt and dismantle such statist representations, signing their names in the margins, un-effacing their own point of view.¹⁷ We sat—amid all this paper, and despite the divine visions and subaltern subversions it intimated—with the knowledge that the real name of not a single early modern South Asian female miniaturist has yet come down to us.

Like many artists who specialize in non-monumental media in a world that values the larger-than-life, Sikander herself has effectively lost access to much of her earliest work: it is shut up in museums, rarely displayed or engaged with critically. “I can’t borrow my own work to show in Pakistan,” she said during a session at the Movement Lab. “Certain artists will never have the privilege of having the work seen or understood.” As in Sikander’s experience, so in Derrida’s words: archival acquisition is a kind of house arrest. “The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently, marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret.”¹⁸ That passage is worn by years of tired, Orientalist cliché. “Miniatures were always described,” she told us, “in a way that made you think they were not intelligent paintings—nothing below the surface, no humor or metaphor. Anything experimental has to happen because of your encounter with the West—that’s still the assumption.”

Movement Lab, Barnard College, April 15, 2023

Repudiating this discourse, Sikander conceived of creating paintings as an encounter between two antithetical temporal dimensions that has been described thus: “One plane is a meticulously painted surface, crafted with a precision that is in keeping with the tradition, the other is its violation.”¹⁹ The encounter between these two planes is explosive and electrifying—the tiny, vivid splendor of miniatures, with their proximity of colors activating a different field of vision, is painstakingly recreated and then defaced. “If forms are broken apart, then how do they get put back together?” she asked us. What conjunctions are drawn out as hair turns into birds and feet into roots, as patterns fractalize and fragment? How might the emerging figures seem continental, but also fleeting and contingent? Is reclamation also a kind of vandalism? “Her rupture of the space of the miniature”, Jan Howard has said of Sikander’s process, “made explicit the disruption of patriarchal representation.”²⁰ It is also a powerful challenge to artistic provenance—our ideas about skill, origin, acquisition, preservation, and belonging, all of which are also ideas of history.

I do not paint—but I do stare at and submerge myself in paper, day in, day out. It sometimes feels to me as if time did not exist before the page. Reflecting in Sikander’s class on the training and trajectory that got me here, I realized that memory, consciousness, and literacy had all appeared on the scene of my life abruptly and at once, a family trio, like Fates or Furies, to constrain and shape my knowing. To read was to assimilate the greater part of my cognitive existence to a complex, abstract, non-intuitive, and arbitrary system of signs, the hallmarks of which were iteration, repetition, practice. Time became a surface. The surfaces multiplied. One learned how uncannily thoughts, feelings and dispositions rearrange themselves as they are placed on a page. Wrestling subjectivity into line with approved forms of written expression left behind sheaves of grubby, ephemeral juvenilia; fading and badly-spelled diaries from which some inexplicable live current of personality still leaps like an occupying spirit. To record, prove, and preserve full personhood; that, too, is a matter of showing paper. In class, I thought of the 19th-century Bengali autobiographer Rassundari Debi committing the ultimate thought-crime, hiding a book stolen from her husband and palm leaves stolen from her son beneath the bricks and soot of her household stove. Peering at them in secret, she memorized their script so that she could teach herself the Chaitanya Baghabat—a Vaishnavite hagiography of a saint who imagined himself both Radha and Krishna.²¹ I thought of how, forbidden to look, she was nonetheless unable to tear herself away from the page. And I imagined what it would mean to identify this pathbreaking writer, in my mind’s eye, as one of the playful, adulterous devotees of Sikander’s Gopi Crisis (pictured below)—caught in a secret and defiant moment. “This body, this mind, this very life of mine,” Rassundari opened, “have taken on different forms”—her story of her self is built, from the very beginning, to throw the self into question.²² All along, though, “[t]hat page was a headache.”²³

Researching South Asian history in the archive has perhaps overdetermined my experience of ‘that page’ as a medium that resurfaces an awareness of time: the toil of deciphering a page leads one to view the process of one’s own understanding as a strange kind of desecration. Manuscripts have a thisness, whether thick, thin, or falling apart: a dusty, deviant, almost ectoplasmic materiality. They seem to collapse dimensions and reconstitute them elsewhere. One still wonders whether one is meant to use them, or simply to behold them. It is provokingly jarring to be permitted to their presence in the ordered and hierarchical sanctities of Western intellectual institutions—manuscripts in their dismembered incongruity, detached, dispersed, indecipherable. The early modern Persian manuscript, too, is redolent of the auction block. It exists in today’s apparently postcolonial world primarily as possession—as loan, theft, extract, hostage—rather than as experience or shared human heritage.²⁴ What would an archive be, after all, if it did not contain what it was never meant to—sometimes for the better, mostly for the worse? Are we to think of the small, the fragmentary, the minor, as somehow valorized (and value-ized) by such airless, confining display? We learn from scholars of the miniature that:

‘[m]anuscripts and album paintings, treated as precious objects embodying an ideal of beauty per se, were…meant to be viewed at close and intimate range, laid out on a flat surface with a slight inward incline. Such close physical intimacy called for solitary viewing and intense concentration, imbuing the experiencing of seeing with a devotional flavor. The term taswir (image) was defined in the Ain-i-Akbari as…a ‘magical art’ through which ‘inanimate objects look as if they had life’.²⁵

David Roxburgh has spoken of the “reality effect” of the Persian miniature—how it transcends its relegation to the low, craftly status of ‘decoration’ or ‘ornament’ by soliciting a “right of endless return”, in which the viewer who comes back is able to continuously notice details and make connections she had missed before.²⁶ In this sense, the miniature is perhaps a prime archival candidate, flush with the uncanny: scenes, like words, are skimmed or scoured over before provoking the double-take of intimate acquaintance. “The unsettling nature of phantoms and coincidental repetitions [within archives] is not their strangeness but their repressed familiarity. The shock of archival discovery comes with an intense jolt of recognition—whether it be a handwritten note, a lost photograph or a particularly fitting fact.”²⁷ But how many of us in or from South Asia have the wherewithal to return to Western archives over and over? How do we experience an inheritance to which we fundamentally lack access—and which we sometimes feel we have no claim to use usefully, to change or be changed by?

I returned to the park to see Havah again, alone. To breathe, air, life. The archive is rarefied, cloying. It is, as Carolyn Steedman observed, a place to breathe dust. Historians and artists—who work on or with paper—often share this ambiguous inhalation.²⁸ It was not only premodern makers of the paper, leather, pigments and glue that went into books who were immiserated by dust’s attendant respiratory ailments: in parallel, “a range of occupational hazards was understood to be attendant on the activity of scholarship” itself, arising from “want of exercise, very frequently from breathing the same atmosphere too long, from the curved position of the body, and from too ardent exercise of the brain.”²⁹ Steedman discusses how, for the revolutionary French historian Jules Michelet—originator of the term Renaissance—the dust of archival manuscripts was the substance of the most fervent imagination: “as I breathed their dust, I saw them rise up…This frenzied dance…I have tried to reproduce in [my] work.”³⁰ “It is the historian’s act of inhalation that gives life”, she writes; but:

It must remain uncertain…who or what rises up in this moment. It cannot be determined whether it is the manuscripts or the dead, or both who come to life, and take shape and form. But we can be clearer than Michelet could be, about exactly what it was that he breathed in: the dust of the workers who made the papers and parchments; the dust of the animals who provided the skins for their leather bindings.³¹

These are the bodies in the archive that Sikander shows us how to see: their traces all but invisible in each spotless expanse of propagandic calligraphy, each unfathomable margin, each perfect stroke of paint. What do we choose to bring to life? Has art lost its ability to evoke utopia? Has history?

Movement Lab, Barnard College, April 14, 2023

One afternoon at the Movement Lab, as pictured above, we projected images of Sikander’s miniatures at dozens of times their original size onto the walls and floors, and marveled at how they held up to this scrutiny, as complete objects at heroic scale: to deface something was not the same as to render it incoherent. Renewing our conversations about archives, we spoke about intangibles—about sensory experiences and environments, childhood memories, family legends, true stories that have no evidence. But at the same time, many of us struggled to step into the projections, to interrupt the frames of the painting as we sat or walked; it was as if the surface we were on had changed, and the scuffed studio floor had accumulated something of the fragility and sanctity of the original paper. And yet, as we became comfortable, and as we sprawled out on cushions across that surface and shared poems and pieces of music, it was a way of being together with art that evoked a South Asian baithak—with the scenes and windows of the miniature opening around us like a fourth dimension, a floating edge, in which we both were and were not.

Niyati Shenoy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University. She is writing a history of rape and retributive justice in colonial India. Her broader interests include caste studies, sexuality studies, affect theory, anticarceral feminisms, early modern Persianate histories and cultures, life-writing, and autobiography.

-Prepared with the editorial assistance of Charles Milne-Home

Endnotes

[1] Wei, Lily, ‘Shahzia Sikander: Havah…to breathe, air, life’. The Brooklyn Rail, February 2023. Accessed at https://brooklynrail.org/2023/02/artseen/Shahzia-Sikander-Havahto-breathe-air-life.

[2] Sikander earned a B.F.A. in 1991 from the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, where she received rigorous training from master miniaturist Bashir Ahmad. She became the first woman to teach in the Miniature Painting Department at NCA, alongside Ahmad. Sikander moved to the United States to pursue an M.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1993 to 1995.

[3] Hartman, Saidiya, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, W. W. Norton, 2019: p. 13. In this chapter Hartman dwells on her search for images of waywardness and free Black life in early 20th century New York and Philadelphia. She rejects many of the images she finds in state archives, scholarly studies, and sociological surveys from the period: “The photographs coerced the black poor into visibility as a condition of policing and charity, making those bound to appear suffer the burden of representation. In these iconic images of the black urban poor, individual persons were forced to stand in for sweeping historical narratives about the progress or failure of the Negro, serve as representatives of a race or class, embody and inhabit social problems, and evidence failure or improvement. These photographs extended an optic of visibility and surveillance that had its origins in slavery and the administered logic of the plantation. (To be visible was to be targeted for uplift or punishment, confinement or violence.)” Hartman, Wayward Lives, p. 21.

[4] Hartman, Wayward Lives, p. 25-28. “In a compelled photograph, a girl’s name is of no greater consequence than her desire for a different kind of likeness. (The only thing I knew for sure was that she did have a name and a life that exceeded the frame in which she was captured.)… Years later when another anatomist, another man of science, was found with a cache of nude pictures of colored schoolgirls, no one remembered her.” Hartman, Wayward Lives, p. 15

[5] Baxter’s Consecration to Mary, “a multipart photographic work that connects the histories of abuse faced by Black children to “adultification bias,” a social reality in which Black youths are systemically treated as adults”, utilizes the same image from Eakins’ catalog. “Baxter inserts herself into two of Eakins’s photographs, to protect the violated, and presents other images as closed daguerreotype cases, obscuring them from public view. A third open photograph of Baxter as a child links the artist herself to these histories of societal abuse.” These descriptions are taken from the exhibit “Ain’t I a Woman” at the Brooklyn Museum, on view January to August 2023: https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/mary_enoch_elizabeth_baxter_aint_i_a_woman.

[6] Gayatri Gopinath writes: “Sikander herself underscores the violence embedded in her signature image when she comments: ‘So much of the shared history between India and Pakistan dates back centuries, and the idea of the female divinity was very present within a complex system. That’s been expunged from so many cultures and religions, specifically Islam, and the headless form—for me, a beheading—emphasizes the removal of the feminine.’ The headless figure with roots for feet, then, is a deeply ambivalent image: it connotes the sense of both potentiality and peril that emerges from the contradictory space of diasporic rootedness, as well as the epistemic violence of patriarchal nationalist and religious ideologies that efface both the feminine and the intimacies of syncretic traditions.” Abbas, Sadia, and Howard, Jan, eds. Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities, HIRMER, 2020: p. 121.

[7] Abbas and Howard, Shahzia Sikander, p. 125 and p. 42.

[8] Wei, ‘Shahzia Sikander: Havah…to breathe, air, life’, The Brooklyn Rail.

[9] Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, Rutgers University Press, 2002: p. 2.

[10] Ibid, 1.

[11] Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences Vintage, 1973: p. 15.

[12] Lal, Ruby, Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 6. Foucault, Michel, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, Vintage, 1982, p. 129.

[13] Class Syllabus, Art, Aesthetics, and the Itineraries of the Modern Miniature.

[14] Movement Lab, Barnard College. Accessed at https://movement.barnard.edu/events/memosa-series-shahzia-sikander.

[15] Steedman, Dust, p. 5.

[16] David Roxburgh writes of the developing medieval Persian miniature form: “Technical virtuosity and perfection of execution became of paramount importance and artists were praised for it in written sources…The pigment is applied with such perfect execution that no trace of the brush is left…No matter how close our eyes move to the surface of the picture—and at some point they give up from tiredness—the depicted subjects never give up their identity. Things do not melt away and become patches of fractured brushstroke.” Roxburgh, David J. ‘Micrographia: Toward a Visual Logic of Persianate Painting.’ RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 43, Islamic Arts (Spring 2003), p. 27-28.

[17] Juneja, Monica, ‘On the Margins of Utopia: One more look at Mughal Painting’. The Medieval History Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2, p. 209-211. She writes: “A central prerequisite of experiencing utopian projections as a sacral vision, a darshan, was the invisibility of the artist, the effacing of all traces of his painterly activity. By making his presence visible, the artist transforms vision into an act of representation. From the point where the viewer becomes a participant in the process through which a utopian vision comes into being, the dissolution of that vision is already underway.” Juneja, ‘On the Margins of Utopia’, p. 240.

[18] Derrida, Jacques, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 2-3.

[19] Abbas and Howard, Shahzia Sikander, p. 126.

[20] Ibid, 83.

[21] The English translation from Bengali of Rashsundari’s text, Amar Jiban, or My Life, appears in Words to Win: The Making of a Modern Autobiography, by Tanika Sarkar, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999. I own the 2013 reprint by Zubaan Books of this text.

[22] Sarkar, Words to Win, p. 162.

[23] Ibid, 193-4.

[24] Melikian, Souren, ‘Destroying a Treasure: The Sad Story of a Manuscript’, International Herald Tribune, April 27, 1996, accessed at https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/27/style/IHT-destroying-a-treasure-the- sad-story-of-a-manuscript.html

[25] Juneja, ‘On the Margins of Utopia’, p. 208.

[26] Roxburgh, ‘Micrographia’, p. 29.

[27] Robinson, Emily, ‘Touching the void: Affective history and the impossible’, Rethinking History, Vol. 4, No. 14, 2010, p. 514.

[28] “You know perfectly well that the infinite heaps of things they recorded, the notes and traces that these people left behind, constitute practically nothing at all. There is the great, brown, slow-moving strandless river of Everything, and then there is its tiny flotsam that has ended up in the record office you are at work in. Your craft is to conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater, and your competence in that was established long ago.” Steedman, Dust, p. 18.

[29] Steedman, Dust, p. 21, and John Forbes, Alexander Tweedie, and John Connolly, The Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine, 3 vols. (London, Sherwoord, 1833), Vol. 1, p. 156.

[30] Michelet, Jules, ‘Preface di l’Histoire de France [1869]’, Ouvres Completes, Tome IV, Flammarion, 1974, p. 613.

[31] Steedman, Dust, p. 27.

Unmaking the Manuscript: Archives, Labor, and the Art of Shahzia Sikander

Niyati Shenoy

Endnotes