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Representations of Calcutta are analysed, and the author shows how the rumours of westerners contribute to the elaboration of an imaginary city. In doing so, they circulate in ways fundamental to the maintenance of international order.
With importance for geopolitical cultural economy, anthropology, and media studies, John Hutnyk brings South Asian circuits of scholarship to attention where, alongside critical Marxist and poststructuralist authors, a new take on film and television is on offer. The book presents Raj-era costume dramas as a commentary on contemporary anti-Muslim racism, a new political compact in film and television studies, and the President watching a snuff film from Pakistan. Hanif Kureishi's postcolonial 'fuck Sandwich' sits alongside Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, updated for the war on terror with low-brow, high-brow versions of Asia that carry us up the Himalayas with magic carpet TV nostalgia. Mao...
Critical political analysis of how Cultural Studies has used and abused Marxism, offering a close reading of Derrida and Negri.
Pantomime is a theatrical form that has come to rule our everyday lives as terror. In the early years of the 21st century, a dissembling political demonology has sometimes placed otherwise merely lyrical musicians in a volatile predicament. The discussion here is of Fun-da-Mental's Aki Nawaz portrayed as a 'suicide rapper', Asian Dub Foundation striking poses from the street in support of youth in Paris and Algiers, and M.I.A., born free fighting immigration crackdown with atrocity video. Along the way, bus bombs, comedy circuits, critical theory, Arabian Nights, Bradley Wiggins, Dinarzade, Karl Marx, Paris boulevards, Molotov, Mao, the Eiffel Tower, reserve armies, lists, Richard Wagner, Samina Malik, Slavoj Žižek, Freudian slips, red-heads, Guantanamo. The book offers some sharp critiques of our contemporary complacency, and the failures of theory as more than ten years of war on terror turns anxiety at home and drone-strike assassinations abroad into a normal everyday. This pantomime is a terror story told over and over to distract from the workings of a despotic power. The need for an adequate (winning) counter-narrative was never more clear. ,
Challenges academic complicity in the reification of exotica
Everyone's Got a Traveller's Tale, but Travel Worlds tells them with a sting: African-American musicians head East for Kung-Fu kicks while paedophiles go for cheap sex pilgrimage; Western bible-bashers adopt missionary positions in India while heroic Saint George signs on as an Arab soldier in Britain; the scars of Partition mock the protocols of transit, while nomadic insurgents resist the Bangladeshi nation state with lyrical persuasion; Kula Shaker and Madonna trinketize the 'Orient' while dead tourists exchange values with travelling 'terrorists'; British Mirpuris and Black women travel back to the 'Old Country' and beyond in ways that are not quite as they seem; and ethnographers collide with tourists in the carousel of Goa's resorts. Including poetry and fiction alongside academic essays, this book refuses simplistic dichotomies of north/south and east/west and confronts head on existing conventions of writing about travel in post-colonial, literary and cultural studies.
9. Between meaning and significance: reflections on ritual and mimesis / Alexander Henn -- 10. Animism on stage: tracing anthropology's heritage in contemporary African dance in Europe / Nadine Sieveking -- 11. Transgression and the erotic / Vincent Crapanzano -- 12. Michael Leiris: master of the ethnographic failure / Peter Phipps -- 13. Boundary confusion in anthropology and art: Pablo Picasso and Michael Leiris / Klaus Peter Buchheit -- 14. The concatenation of minds / Klaus Peter Buchheit -- 15. Transgressions of fieldwork/filed works: method in madness / John Hutnyk.
Diaspora & Hybridity deals with those theoretical issues which concern social theory and social change in the new millennium. The volume provides a refreshing, critical and illuminating analysis of concepts of diaspora and hybridity and their impact on multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies’ - Dr Rohit Barot, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol What do we mean by 'diaspora' and 'hybridity'? Why are they pivotal concepts in contemporary debates on race, culture and society? This book is an exhaustive, politically inflected, assessment of the key debates on diaspora and hybridity. It relates the topics to contemporary social struggles and cultural contexts, p...
′Diaspora & Hybridity deals with those theoretical issues which concern social theory and social change in the new millennium. The volume provides a refreshing, critical and illuminating analysis of concepts of diaspora and hybridity and their impact on multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies′ - Dr Rohit Barot, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol What do we mean by ′diaspora′ and ′hybridity′? Why are they pivotal concepts in contemporary debates on race, culture and society? This book is an exhaustive, politically inflected, assessment of the key debates on diaspora and hybridity. It relates the topics to contemporary social struggles and cultural ...
By bringing queer theory to bear on ideas of diaspora, Gayatri Gopinath produces both a more compelling queer theory and a more nuanced understanding of diaspora. Focusing on queer female diasporic subjectivity, Gopinath develops a theory of diaspora apart from the logic of blood, authenticity, and patrilineal descent that she argues invariably forms the core of conventional formulations. She examines South Asian diasporic literature, film, and music in order to suggest alternative ways of conceptualizing community and collectivity across disparate geographic locations. Her agile readings challenge nationalist ideologies by bringing to light that which has been rendered illegible or impossib...