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Explores the diverse aspects of Ashish Avikunthak's work, whose films are art as resistance. For more than 25 years, Indian filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak has been making self-financed films that have robustly resisted capital and market logic. Starting from his early 16mm short films Etcetera (1997) and Kalighat Fetish (1999) to longer feature length works that he has made in the past decade-Rati Chakrayuh (2013), The Kali of Emergency (2016), Vrindavani Vairagya (2017), and several more projects in various stages of production. His body of work now amounts to seven short films and seven feature length works. These essays rigorously interrogate, contextualize, theorize, and interpret Avikuntha...
Bureaucratic Archaeology is a multi-faceted ethnography of quotidian practices of archaeology, bureaucracy and science in postcolonial India, concentrating on the workings of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This book uncovers an endemic link between micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of the ASI to the manufacture of archaeological knowledge, wielded in the making of political and religious identity and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest courts of India. This book is a rare ethnography of the daily practice of a postcolonial bureaucracy from within rather than from the outside. It meticulously uncovers the social, cultural, political and epistemological ecology of ASI archaeologists to show how postcolonial state assembles and produces knowledge. This is the first book length monograph on the workings of archaeology in a non-western world, which meticulously shows how theory of archaeological practice deviates, transforms and generates knowledge outside the Euro-American epistemological tradition.
Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett uses ‘voice’ as a prism to investigate Samuel Beckett’s work across a range of texts, genres, and cultures. Twenty-one international contributors evaluate Beckett’s contemporary artistic legacy in relation to music, media, performance, and philosophy.
It departs from the scholarship produced on Sri Lanka, and re-introduces the neo-Marxist approaches through the works of Antonio Gramsci.
The global reception of Samuel Beckett raises numerous questions: in which areas of the world was Beckett first translated? Why were Beckett texts sometimes slow to penetrate certain cultures? How were national literatures impacted by Beckett's oeuvre? Translating Samuel Beckett around the World brings together leading researchers in Beckett studies to discuss these questions and explore the fate of Beckett in their own societies and national languages. The current text provides ample coverage of the presence of Beckett in geographical contexts normally ignored by literary criticism, and reveals unknown aspects of the 1969 Nobel Prize winner interacting with translators of his work in a number of different countries.
How do borderland dwellers living along militarised frontiers negotiate regimes of state security and their geopolitical location in everyday life? What might 'freedom' mean to those who do not resist captivity engendered by borders? Focusing on the predicaments of a double-minority, Freedom in Captivity examines the affective attachments, political imaginaries, and ethical claims-making among the Shia Muslims of Kargil. In contrast to calls for freedom in the Kashmir Valley, Shias on the frontiers of Kashmir have sought belonging to India. Yet they do not entirely succumb to its hegemonic ideological boundaries. Departing from the dominant focus on physical cross-border mobility, this book is an invitation to reimagine borderlands as cartographies of ideas, cutting across spatial scales. Based on original ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2021, this monograph offers a unique long durée insight into the lives of people residing at the intersections of the biggest states in Asia.
This book examines the relationship between the newly independent Indian state and its New Cinema movement. It looks at state formative practices articulating themselves as cultural policy. It presents an institutional history of the Film Finance Corporation (FFC), later the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), and their patronage of the New Cinema in India, from the 1960s to the 1990s, bringing into focus an extraordinary but neglected cultural moment in Indian film history and in the history of contemporary India. The chapters not only document the artistic pursuit of cinema, but also the emergence of a larger field where the market, political inclinations of the Indian state, and...
This ethnography connects the memories of the 1947 Partition to Hindu nationalism and the global swing to the right.
This book offers interdisciplinary examination of gender representations in cinema and SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) platforms in India. This book will identify how the so-called feminist enunciations in twenty-first century film and SVOD content in India are marked by an ambiguous entanglement of feminist and postfeminist rhetoric. Set against the backdrop of two significant contemporary phenomena, namely neoliberalism and the digital revolution, this book considers how neoliberalism, aided by technological advancement, re-configured the process of media consumption in contemporary India and how representation of gender is fraught with multiple contesting trajectories. The book looks ...
Post-millennial Marathi cinema is a dynamic and expanding practice that is celebrated as a “new-wave” but has not received much critical engagement. This book presents the first comprehensive inquiry of contemporary films and examines their textual, industrial, and cultural intersections to understand what constitutes the “new-ness” of Marathi cinema. Establishing the vernacular particularity of Marathi cinema, the book argues that newage films are actively engaged in a reflexive intellectual and social critique as a mark of new filmmaking in India. In the diversity of genres and topics handled by Marathi filmmakers since 2004 this study identifies four broad affective topographies f...