Full Description
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 spaces historically constituted through media, and analyses the conditions that made them possible. Individual essays deal with non-Western histories of technopolitics through distinctive perspectives on how to conceive the relationship between social form, everyday life, and utopian possibility, and by examining a range of media formats and genres — from print, sound, and film to new media. With contributions from major scholars in the field, this book will be of interest to researchers and scholars of media studies, culture studies, sociology, modern South Asian history, and politics.
Contents
Introduction Part I: Archive and Imagination 1. The Cinematic Soteriology of Bollywood 2. Fetish Power Unbound: A Small History of 'Woman' In Chinese Cinema 3. Civil Contract of Photography in India Part II: Genealogy 4. Tracking Utopias: Technology, Labour, and Secularism in Bombay Cinema (1930s-1940s) 5. National Becoming, Regional Variation, and Everyday Moments: U.P. and the Film Enquiry 6. Museum as Metaphor: The Politics of an Imagined Ahmedabad Part III: Nostalgia 7. The Labour of Self-Making: Youth Service Workers, and Post-Socialist Urban Development in Kolkata 8. Nostalgia and the Mediatic Imagination in Tito's Yugoslavia 9. Past Futures of Old Media: Gulam Mohammed Sheikh's Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home 10. Sonic Ruptures: Music, Mobility, and Media Part IV: Newness 11. Media and Imagination: Ramananda Chatterjee and His Journals in Three Languages 12. Radical Intervention in Dystopian Media Ecologies 13. Posthuman Amusements: Gaming and Virtuality Part IV: Word and the World 14. Populist Publics: Print Capitalism and Crowd Violence Beyond Liberal Frameworks Part VI: Political Theology 15. On Innocence: Blasphemy, Pan-Islam and the Uneven Mediation of Utopia
