Graduation Year
2022
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Environmental Analysis
Second Department
Art
Reader 1
Susan Phillips
Reader 2
Phyllis J. Jackson
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2022 Olivia C Meehan
Abstract
This paper accompanies my senior art exhibition Picturing the Colonial Trace. Pulling from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars, I theorize the practice of critical white auto-ethnography through visual interrogations of family heirlooms. The heirloom as evidence holds within its form a colonial trace. I investigate this trace through my creative practice, revealing the environmental, economic, and interpersonal histories of the British colonization of the Indian subcontinent. My art disrupts my family’s narrative of a benevolent British Empire and redirects attention to the silences of my family archive. This thesis proposes a potential model for white scholars of Environmental Analysis to conjoin the study of the environment with the critical study of the self.
Recommended Citation
Meehan, Olivia, "The Heirloom as Evidence: Investigating the Colonial Trace Preserved within my Family’s Sandalwood Box" (2022). Pitzer Senior Theses. 143.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/pitzer_theses/143
Included in
Art Practice Commons, Educational Methods Commons, Environmental Studies Commons, Photography Commons
