Ruin aesthetics and the (post)colonial state: Reading a South Asian palimpsest

Join us for the SSAI Annual Lecture 2025 by Sadia Abbas. This talk examines Manganhar’s critique of colonial narratives, from Greek antiquity to post-1857 photography, revealing how art exposes enduring structures of power, ethnicity, and borders in post/neocolonial South Asia. A provocative exploration of history, memory, and resistance

This talk reads the work of the Pakistani painter Ahmed Ali Manganhar, particularly a show—Taxila Revisited—which engaged the use of Greek antiquity to justify the colonial state while suggesting postcolonial violence.  Manganhar’s references to Felice Beato’s photographs of Indian monuments in post -1857 India as well as of Nixon’s 1963 visit to Pakistan and Greek antiquity recall Rudyard Kipling’s references to Gandhara and Viceroy Curzon’s recourse to archaeology as a supplementary tool of colonial management.

Through this reading, the talk aims to show the persistence of colonially designed structures of ethnicity, power and bordering in the post and neocolonial contexts.   

Speaker

Sadia Abbas grew up in Karachi and Singapore, lives in New York and spends all the time she can in Siena, Lesbos and London. She has served as director of the Center for European Studies at Rutgers-New Brunswick and associate professor of postcolonial studies at Rutgers University-Newark. She is Humanities and Education Advisor for the Climate Action Center Karachi. 

She is the author of At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament, winner of the MLA first book award, and the novel The Empty Room, shortlisted for the DSC prize for South Asian Literature, and co-editor (with Jan Howard of the RISD museum) of Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities, which was listed as one the best art books of 2021 by the New York Times.

She has written numerous essays on subjects including Jesuit poetics and Catholic martyrdom in Early Modern English poetry, neoliberalism and the Greek debt crisis, Pakistani art, the uses of Reformation in contemporary Muslim thought, and Jewish converts to Islam and treatments of subjectivity in contemporary theorizations of Muslim female agency. 

She has also written essays and opinion pieces for Dawn and Daily Times (the Pakistani dailies), Naya Daur, OpenDemocracy, CommonDreams and TANK magazine. She is currently completing, Revenant Ruin: Origins, Revival and the Management of Life, a book about ruin discourse in India, Greece and the Americas and its role in the production and control of racial, religious and ethnic identities and the creation of borders across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Her current interests include, the global rise of the far right, European policy, migration and the idea of Europe.

Teaser image credit: Annie Spratt via unsplash