We speak of [the body] to others as of a thing that belongs to us; but for us it is not entirely a thing; and it belongs to us a little less than we belong to it. In line with the publication of People of the Twentieth Century , the Tate title for this work is simply Circus Workers. While the Weimar historian Eric D. Around these revolved the dialectics of vital transnationalism and national shame, of progress and decay.
Since the late nineteenth century modern Western artists such as Edouard Manet β , Paul Gauguin β and Pablo Picasso β had been painting pictures of non-Caucasian subjects and exotic cultures β understood within a colonial context β and such works had served to assert their own bohemian status.
There was a slippage in their work, however, between their study of tribal art and received notions of the primitive promulgated by popular culture. Barnum enterprise that toured Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A major attraction at P. With the advent of film β a far cheaper means of producing and showing such spectacles β circus acts of this kind declined but did not die out.
The Romantic poet and critic A. This was not an expression of racial kinship, but of Romantic ideals that endured in the convictions of a minority of twentieth-century colonialists who urged Germany to capture India from the British.
Unlike the painters discussed above, Sander did not define himself, personally, in relation to the subjects of Circus Workers. This essay explores these attitudes to find out to what extent this photograph speaks about, to, or on behalf of its Indian subject, or indeed whether or not it provides an opportunity for him to speak for himself.
