ABSTRACT
Until 2007, Burma/Myanmar’s military regime denied foreign entry to most. After reopening, tourism slowly increased, expats settled, and foreign businesses found new economic potential. In 2015, a French-owned fashion and household goods company, Yangoods, was established in the city of Yangon. Their products display prints of digitally manipulated images from the colonial period (1886-1948), mostly featuring female ‘beauties’ in traditional garb. The company’s goals to ‘revitalize Myanmar’s heritage’ and ‘to take tradition and make it fashionable’ are scrutinized here through visual and historical analysis. This chapter focuses on the photographs used by Yangoods, which were originally taken by foreign photographers such as Felice Beato (1832-1909) beginning in 1852 during Burma’s colonization under British rule. The use of this type of visual and material culture has regained popularity today, as the works do not carry copyright restrictions and can be employed to evoke nostalgia for the idea of a ‘lost heritage’. Through visual analysis, this study considers the contemporary use of such images as a tool for the commercialization of the past. Although the original creation and treatment of Burma’s visual milieu was informed by an orientalizing gaze that simultaneously commodified and fetishized the native population, today the images are repackaged for tourist consumption and consumed as a new form of fashion. This study problematizes this commercial practice by considering Myanmar’s long and rich heritage, one which has developed in a complicated relationship to the colonial gaze.
