Embodying imperial spectacle: dressing Lady Curzon, Vicereine of India 1899-1905

• Published in: Cultural geographies Vol. 14; no. 3; pp. 369 - 400
• Main Author: Thomas, Nicola J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England Sage Publications 01.07.2007; SAGE Publications; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Attention; Authority; Biographies; Cloth; Colonial history; Colonialism; Consumption; Cultural factors; Cultural identity; Culture; Curzon, Mary Victoria (1870-1906); Dress; Dresses; Embodiment; Embroidery; Fabrics; Fashion; Fashion design; Geography; Identity; India; Nobility; Peafowl; Politics; Spectacle; Subjectivity; Textiles; Wardrobes; India; colonialism; dress; Curzon; performance; biography; materiality
• ISSN: 1474-4740; 1477-0881
• DOI: 10.1177/1474474007078205

This article contributes an embodied historical cultural geography that pays attention to the interplay between the dressed body, material culture and textual representation. Debates concerning the politics of identity, performance and subjectivity, transnational circuits of consumption, clothing as material culture, and the place of dress and colonial power, are drawn on to configure a material and embodied biography of the clothes and the clothing of Lady Curzon, Vicereine of India 1898-1905. The geographies of exchange, appropriation, transculturation and hybridity that are woven into her clothing practices are examined in relation to discussions of the regulation and performance of colonial power and authority. This article pays close attention to the material culture approach to the 'lived garment', examining cloth and associated wearing practices in the broader context of cultures of consumption. In so doing it charts the intimate historical cultural geographies of modernity and colonial power.