Picturing resistance and resilience : South Asian identities in the work of Chila Kumari Burman

Correia, A

Abstract

The issues of migration and the allocation of passports is a contentious issue in twenty-first-century Britain. This paper offers a timely assessment of Chila Kumari Burman’s diptych, Convenience, Not Love, 1986–7, which uses the passport motif to present a scathing indictment of British immigration policy in the post-1945 era, which champions the resilience of the British South Asian diaspora in the face of persistent racial discrimination. Taking issue with the stereotype of South Asian women as ‘meek and passive victims’, the paper concludes with a discussion of Burman’s self-portraits from the 1990s, proposing them as ‘radically narcissistic’.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 1, 2020
• Online Publication Date: May 24, 2020
• Publication Date: May 24, 2020
• Deposit Date: Mar 19, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 24, 2021
• Journal: Visual Culture in Britain
• Print ISSN: 1471-4787
• Electronic ISSN: 1941-8361
• Publisher: Routledge
• Volume: 21
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 199-226
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2020.1760128
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2020.1760128
• Related Public URLs: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rvcb20/current
• Additional Information: Access Information : This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Visual Culture in Britain on 24th May 2020, available online: http://www-tandfonline-com.salford.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/14714787.2020.1760128