[Reader-list] MIT STS: Perception, Consumption, Politics

[Shekhar Krishnan]

Dear All:

My friend Arvind Rajagopal will be speaking in our department colloquium this coming Monday from his work on urban space, visual culture, and politics in Mumbai. Please come for this talk and forward this invitation on to others in your network. 

Best, 


Shekhar

--

MIT Science, Technology & Society Spring 2006 Colloquium
presents

"Visual Culture in an Emerging Market: Perception, Consumption, Politics"


ARVIND RAJAGOPAL
New York University
http://education.nyu.edu/dcc/people/bio.php?id=1221

MONDAY 20 MARCH 2006
4.00-6.00 P.M.
MIT E51-095
http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=E51&mapsearch=go


As the political project of making modern citizens in India is threatened by the legitimation crisis of the political process on the one hand, and the ascendancy of Hindu nationalism and caste-based parties on the other, the pedagogical task of the developmental state has  increasingly been taken up through the market itself. With the disintegration of an earlier secular consensus, and the ascendancy of a neo-liberal regime, the market becomes both a means and a model for renewing the political process. Drawing from examples of visual culture between the mid 1980s and 2004, the paper will trace the interaction of practices located in various institutional sites, such as advertising, commercial and documentary cinema, to map the changing techniques of the market in a shifting political context. The aim is to clarify the methodologies appropriate to understanding visual culture in a comparative and global context.


ARVIND RAJAGOPAL is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at New York University. His interests include political economy of culture, contemporary South Asia, social theory, audiences and reception theory, and globalization. He is the author of Politics after Television: Religious Nationalism and the Retailing of Hinduness (Cambridge, 2001); Guest Editor of Social Text No. 68, on Technologies of Perception and the Cultures of Globalization; Coauthor of Mapping Hegemony: Television News and Industrial Conflict (1992) and several articles in scholarly journals. 

To read the essay "The Violence of Commodity Aesthetics: Hawkers, Demolition Raids, and a New Regime of Consumption" by Arvind Rajagopal, published in Social Text 68 on Technologies of Perception, go to http://www.mit.edu/~shekhar/urban-media/rajagopal_hawkers.pdf


-- 

Shekhar Krishnan
Apt.302, Edgerton House
143, Albany Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
U.S.A.

http://www.crit.org.in/members/shekhar
http://www.mit.edu/~shekhar