“With The News Event being read across the disciplines, a symposium seemed an appropriate forum to discuss broader issues of technopolitics and its relationship to politics as such. Taken together, the reflections assembled here each propose conceptual approaches to media based on studies in India that reach toward broader horizons of application.“
Read More“The work of factual truth remains central here: as witness, testimony, or material traces demanding forensic analysis and broader circulation despite the weakness of such forms of public representation in contemporary political “realism” at the level of the state, leaving aside the betrayal of international law.”
Read More“There is no media, or narrative, that is not intersected by the dynamic of state power, often enough manifested in the arbitrary application of law. In the event, certain narratives are also encouraged and escape all legal scrutiny. To be clear, there is still political “viral content” that may slip through the cracks, but more often such content, which showcases a spectacle like the “midnight arrest” is devoid of any immediate political implications.”
Read More“This, then, is how mediated circuits of actual and virtual bodies literally “hit the ground” in one kind of choreographic oeuvre, one genre of political mise-en-scène that modulates and supplements spaces of appearance via invitations to embodied style and presence within theme-park-like, propaganda-heavy communicative environments.”
Read More“The understanding of the industry that if it has to grow its market within India it has to toe the political line of the BJP shows that the government’s management of the political remains central to both formal policy conversations and informal pressures on content creators and OTT services. In this scheme of things, where government bodies positioning themselves as neutral mediators and public watchdogs together collude in which streaming becomes a space where the enmeshment of corporate and government interest decides what the public watches. Hence, public interest itself is marginalized.”
Read More“Politics is in a crisis because the only firmament of change seems to be the globalized market. What comes into being is a political society of fierce transactions rather than just the state-civil society dyadic arrangement of civic and legislative conversation.”
Read More“The emergence of the influencer as an arbiter of visibility should not be seen as a moment that will pass. What we have in India is a new architecture of public accountability that allows parties and their leaders like to invest in charismatic politics over substance. “
Read More“What kinds of media epistemic practices constitute a leak of secret information for the production of truth? And what dominant affective and knowledge formations do they contest?”
Read More“What is your vision of life and the world? Grand questions like these are often thrown at me.” - Devanoora Mahadeva.
This is the second in a series of wide-ranging discussions focused on art practice, the work of the hand and the eye, aesthetic training, and the politics of reception. This conversation between Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi, Devanoora Mahadeva, and Anupama Rao, occurred on March 11, 2021.
Read More“They are trying to isolate us from the mainstream. That’s why we didn't title our movement “Dalit Art Movement,” or the “Dalit Artist Movement.” It is the “Secular Art Movement.” It is more than the identity, more than just a caste issue. It is about democracy. It is about the society which is intended by the Constitution. How long shall we carry these caste names? This should be a step to annihilate caste, to leave the identity which is based on caste” - Prabhakar
Read MoreThe journalists who were active in the early days of the press were quick to point out the continuities they saw with the manuscript age. Many of those who authored articles on the use of taqriz (commendations) highlighted the importance of the genre historically as an institution of initiation and as a way to foster professional relations, and noted how these functions were retained in their own time. Book commendations powerfully unveil the world of letters in which they operate: the editors of periodicals possessed a kind of social capital, accumulated and maintained in the publication through its commendation sections, which provided them with the capacity to attract new and established authors.
Read MoreIn this second part of the interview, Carmen De Schryver and Zeyad el Nabolsy discuss how Hountondji's philosophy can shed light on contemporary debates about Enlightenment, Universality, and Postcolonialism
Read MoreAjay Skaria opens up a conversation on presentism in historty for Borderlines: Skaria writes: “to get to the historical approach as a—the—modern regime of historicity, it helps to revisit the classic distinction between the judge and the historian. Since Marc Bloch, we have often thought of the juridical as engaged in the act of judging and the historical as engaged in the act of understanding. This is correct, but it is still too preliminary a way of putting matters. As Carlo Ginzburg, Ranajit Guha, and others have shown, historians also usually act as judges—for example, in deciding on the veracity of their sources or in privileging a certain narrative over others”.
Read MoreSharad Chari responds to Skaria from the viewpoint of a geographer: Chari writes: “I am therefore convinced alongside Skaria that the ‘presentism’ debate could benefit from reflecting on its conditions of possibility. I hope to have offered Marxist fodder for this task. Marxist social historians and geographers, at their best, have tended to keep their critical insights to absolute space and time and relative space-times. But several dissident Marxist traditions have also offered insights that bring the genealogical and what Skaria calls the historial into the frame, but in relation to the diagnosis of absolute and relative spacetimes as well”.
Read MoreMichael E. Sawyer responds to Skaria; Sawyer writes: “the feeling of intellectual utopia troubles me here and is the motivation for the title. Some people want a Wonderland without Alice to take us there and translate it for our understanding. Isn’t that the point of Lewis Carroll’s work? That Wonderland is only wonderful because it is viewed in relation to the world that Alice visits from otherwise it is just “Land” qua itself. Incidents of historical moral depravity are not isolated and only to be properly understood vis-à-vis the moment in which they occur because, and here I’m reluctantly returning to Maher, the reason he stashed the gum in his pocket rather than take it to the cash register is because he knew then as he knows now that what he was doing was wrong”. Read more here.
Read MorePatricia Hayes adds to the conversation, drawing from photographs and images. Writing on the image excerpted on this thumbnail, Hayes writes: “This photograph [Fig. 1] appears to inscribe, or record, a formal occasion–what seems almost a ritual practice–to mark the moment a new sovereignty came into being. This followed two military campaigns, the first in 1904 a disaster. In the album I studied in Luanda, Angola, the caption for the Portuguese photograph in 1907 holds a set of specific references, in terms of the protocols of capitulation, for it was termed as: auto de vassalagem, or act of vassalage, a term associated with feudalism. What does this vestige of feudalism in the Portuguese nomenclature imply? I ask this because this particular periodization break tends to clump things: it sets up the medieval/feudal against the modern/commercial or capitalist.”
Read MoreTo think with Sikander about method in these forums—about the everyday craft of a historian, as one might that of an artist—was to call forth “an archive in process, taking place at that moment.” She spoke of the anti-monumentality—the classically minor status—of works on paper, contrasting their putative frailty and insignificance with the revelation, the epiphany, of viewing Mughal-era miniatures in real life—and of reworking them, as in Faiz’s Gift, pictured above. The micrographic details; the colors so intense that they seem to swim, as if the scene were animated; a non-hierarchy of gaze, everything everywhere happening all at once.
Read MoreThe journey of the Medici fonts reveals the multiscalar, transregional, long-durationalprocesses that partook in the early history of Arabic printing, connecting North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean to Southern Europe over the course of more than two centuries.
Read MoreIn conversation with the recent publication of The Annotated Arabian Nights (Seale & Horta, 2021), I ask: can the Nights be harnessed to a materialist history of the Islamic Mediterranean and Indian Ocean? Can they be seen as a window into how people struggled to understand and make sense of an emergent world system? Treated as the product of a social imaginary actively grappling with a set of radical historical transformations, texts like the Nights act as an indispensable supplement to a novel and burgeoning understanding of commercial or ‘precocious’ capitalism in the medieval Islamic and Indian Ocean world systems.
Read MoreIn the third conversation of History Sounds, Andrew Simon tells us about cassette culture, consumption, taste, and music in Egypt from the 1970s through the 1990s and beyond.
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