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.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations. Notes on Editors and Contributors. Introduction: Arvind Rajagopal Part I: Archive and Imagination 1. The Cinematic Soteriology of Bollywood Arjun Appadurai 2. Fetish Power Unbound: A Small History of ‘Woman’ In Chinese Cinema Rey Chow 3. Civil Contract of Photography in India Christopher Pinney Part II: Genealogy 4. Tracking Utopias: Technology, Labour, and Secularism in Bombay Cinema (1930s-1940s) Debashree Mukherjee 5. National Becoming, Regional Variation, and Everyday Moments: U.P. and the Film Enquiry Suzanne L. Schultz 6. Museum as Metaphor: The Politics of an Imagined Ahmedabad Pooja Thomas Part III: Nostalgia 7. The Labour of Self-Making: Youth Service Workers, and Post-Socialist Urban Development in Kolkata Saikat Maitra 8. Nostalgia and the Mediatic Imagination in Tito’s Yugoslavia Gabi Bockaj 9. Past Futures of Old Media: Gulam Mohammed Sheikh’s Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home Karin Zitzewitz 10. Sonic Ruptures: Music, Mobility, and Media Shikha Jhingan Part IV: Newness 11. Media and Imagination: Ramananda Chatterjee and His Journals in Three Languages Kalyan Chatterjee 12. Radical Intervention in Dystopian Media Ecologies Anindya Sekhar Purakayashta and Saswat Samay Das 13. Posthuman Amusements: Gaming and Virtuality B. S. Bini Part IV: Word and the World 14. Populist Publics: Print Capitalism and Crowd Violence Beyond Liberal Frameworks Francis Cody Part VI: Political Theology 15. On Innocence: Blasphemy, Pan-Islam and the Uneven Mediation of Utopia On Barak
