This seminar examines approaches to the efficacies of images from the standpoint of South Asia, where — as elsewhere, only more clearly — the force of the aesthetic far exceeds the arena of "fine" art. In doing so, this seminar explicitly reflects on postcolonial and decolonizing challenges to art history's Eurocentric presuppositions. While based in South Asian materials, the course therefore has wider relevance to issues of art historical method. Each week, representative scholarship and critical texts on South Asian images, mostly (but not exclusively) from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, will be examined in relation to the questions they pose about art history's objects, categories, methods, and narratives. The course does not require background knowledge of South Asia, however participants will be expected to fill this in as required for the weekly reading, as they are for unfamiliar Western materials.