Chairs as Social History | Abigail McGowan | 13 January скачать в хорошем качестве

Chairs as Social History | Abigail McGowan | 13 January

In this talk titled ‘Chairs as Social History: Seating for Sociability in mid-century India’, speaker Abigail McGowan explored not the history of chairs but how chairs made history, focusing specially on how chairs shaped sociability around mid-century in India. By the 1920s, chairs were flooding into urban India. Modern offices, posh restaurants and clubs, elite schools, and wealthy homes all gave pride of place to chairs, seating bodies for work, relaxation, and entertainment. Tracing chairs designed by high-end firms like Kamdar Ltd and John Roberts, and mass-market retailers like Godrej, McGowan showcased how these new forms of seating brought bodies into conversation and exchange in new ways, levelling some forms of difference and reinscribing others. Abigail McGowan is Professor of History and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Vermont, USA. An historian of South Asian material culture in the late colonial period, she has published widely on craft development, the gendered politics of consumption, design history, textiles, domesticity, housing, retail, and domestic furnishings in India. This talk, held on Friday, 13th January at Title Waves bookstore, Bandra, Mumbai, was part of a series of events around our publication ‘From the Frugal to the Ornate: Stories of the Seat in India’, in which Abigail too has contributed a chapter.