Umar Rashid’s work challenges the legacies and linearities of imperial and colonial historiographies and their influence on the construction of modernity. Across portraits, maps, flags, artefacts, vignettes and drawings and other visual remnants of an imagined empire and its multiple interactions, Rashid reveals pivotal events and the ever-changing fortunes of a lively array of protagonists, both elite and quotidian, all peculiar to a highly novel parallel universe. In this polyglot and multi-racial world of the mid 17th and late 19th centuries, Rashid collapses time, geography and the real-life dichotomies of race, class, gender, religion, sexuality and power. ...
