This book explores the utopian spaces that have historically been created through media, and analyses the conditions that made them possible. The essays in the volume address non-Western histories of technopolitics, through distinctive perspectives on how to conceive the relationship between social form, everyday life, and utopian possibility.
Collective political projects have become ephemeral and are subject to radical forms of erasure through cooptation, division, redefinition or intimidation in present times. Media and Utopia responds to the resulting crisis of the social by investigating the links between mediation and political imagination. This volume addresses those utopian space
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xi | |
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xiii | |
| Notes on contributors |
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xiv | |
| Introduction |
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1 | (16) |
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PART I Archive and imagination |
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17 | (62) |
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1 The cinematic soteriology of Bollywood |
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19 | (15) |
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2 Fetish power unbound: a small history of `woman' in Chinese cinema |
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34 | (22) |
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3 Civil contract of photography in India |
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56 | (23) |
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79 | (70) |
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4 Tracking Utopias: technology, labour and secularism in Bombay cinema (1930s-1940s) |
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81 | (22) |
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5 National becoming, regional variation and everyday moments: the Film Enquiry Committee, Uttar Pradesh and the student cinema-goer |
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103 | (30) |
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6 Museum as metaphor: the politics of an imagined Ahmedabad |
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133 | (16) |
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149 | (86) |
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7 The labour of self-making: youth service workers and postsocialist urban development in Kolkata |
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151 | (20) |
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8 Nostalgia and the mediatic imagination in Tito's Yugoslavia |
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171 | (18) |
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9 Past futures of old media: Gulammohammed Sheikh's Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home |
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189 | (20) |
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10 Sonic ruptures: music, mobility and the media |
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209 | (26) |
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235 | (52) |
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11 Media and imagination: Ramananda Chatterjee and his journals in three languages |
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237 | (16) |
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12 Radical intervention in dystopian media ecologies |
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253 | (17) |
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Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha |
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13 Posthuman amusements: gaming and virtuality |
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270 | (17) |
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PART V Word and the world |
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287 | (30) |
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14 Populist publics: print capitalism and crowd violence beyond liberal frameworks |
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289 | (28) |
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PART VI Political theology |
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317 | |
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15 On innocence: blasphemy, pan-Islam and the uneven mediation of Utopia |
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319 | |
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Arvind Rajagopal is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, and an affiliate faculty in the Department of Sociology, and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His book Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (2001) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize, and his edited volume The Indian Public Sphere appeared in 2009. His recent essays have been on the political culture of post-independence India. He is currently writing about the history of publicity.
Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History, Barnard College, Columbia University. She has research and teaching interests in the history of anti-colonialism; gender and sexuality studies; caste and race; historical anthropology, social theory, and colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism. Her book The Caste Question (2009) theorises caste subalternity, with specific focus on the role of anti-caste thought (and its thinkers). She is currently working on a book on the political thought of B. R. Ambedkar as well as a project titled Dalit Bombay, which explores the relationship between caste, political culture, and everyday life in colonial and postcolonial Bombay.
