- http://hutnyk.wordpress.com
- Social Sciences, Geography, Culture, Political Science, Education, Marxism, and 99 moreCultural Studies, Media Studies, Political Economy, Politics, Music, Global History, Shipbuilding, Urban Studies: Constantinople/Istanbul, Istanbul, Popular Music, Academic Capitalism, Precariat, Labor History and Studies, Shipyard Technology, Outsourcing, Automotive History, Comparative History, Informaly Economy-Informality, Spatial History, Industrial History, Diaspora Studies, Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Derrida, South Asian Diasporas, Postcolonial Theory, Walter Benjamin, Michael Taussig, Ars Industrialis, Slavoj Žižek, Graeme Turner, Henri Lefebvre, Frankfurt School, Social and Political Philosophy, Michel Foucault, Continental Philosophy, Apocalypse Theory, Post Apocalypse, Critical Posthumanism, New Materialism, Speculative Realism, Gilles Deleuze, Poststructuralism, Contemporary French Philosophy, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Political Philosophy, Political Sociology, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural Theory, Comparative Politics, Postcolonial Studies, Political Anthropology, Nationalism, Visual Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Empire, Imperial History, Colonialism, Anthropology of space, Turkish and Middle East Studies, Criminology, Urban Geography, Cities, Globalization, Global cities, Literature, Comparative Literature, Humanities, Psychosocial Studies, Maritime History, Ports, Indian Ocean Trade, India, Indian Politics, Indian Philosophy, South Asia, South Asian History, South Asian Studies, China, China studies, Maoism, Karl Marx, Marxist political economy, Autonomist Marxism, Theodor Adorno, Adorno, Frankfurt School (Philosophy), Books, Theories of Money, Sociology of Money, Prison Museums, Prison Tourism, Dark Tourism, Anthropology of Tourism, Dark Tourism, Communist Heritage Tourism, Nostalgia Tourism, History of Slavery, Comparative Urbanism, and Comparative urban historyedit
- John Hutnyk works in the area of Asian cultural studies, Asian history, diaspora and media, and is currently Associat... moreJohn Hutnyk works in the area of Asian cultural studies, Asian history, diaspora and media, and is currently Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam. In 2016 he was a Government of India GAIN scholar at Jadavpur University. Before that he was Visiting Professor at the Institute for Cultural Studies at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. In 2015 he was at the Department of InterCultural Studies at Nagoya City University Japan, and since 2014 was Visiting Researcher in the Global Institute of RMIT University in Australia, and also in 2014 at Mimar Sinan University (Architecture University) in Turkey. He has held visiting scholar posts in Germany at the South Asia Institute and Institute fur Ethnologie at Heidelberg University, and Visiting Professor posts at Zeppelin University and in Anthropology at Hamburg University, Germany. For 14 years he was at Goldsmiths University of London including from 2008 as Professor of Cultural Studies.
Hutnyk is the author of 5 single author books: The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation (1996 Zed), Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industry (2000 Pluto); Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies (2004 Pluto); Pantomime Terror: Music and Politics (2014 Zero); and Global South Asia on Screen (2018 Bloomsbury); as well as co-authored with Virinder Kalra and Raminder Kaur of Diaspora and Hybridity (2005 Sage) and editing both a festschrift for Klaus Peter Koepping called “Celebrating Transgression” (2006 Berghahn, co-ed with Ursula Rao) and the phd colloquium volume “Beyond Borders” (Pavement books 2012). He has several other books and more than a dozen journal special issues (TCS, Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Left Curve, and recently convened two major International conferences in 2019 and 2021 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam).edit
In this article, a reading of early travel literature confronts indifference to the latitudes of colonialism in resort tourism. The historical role of the East India Company needs to be told in its uneven and questionable... more
In this article, a reading of early travel literature confronts indifference to the latitudes of colonialism in resort tourism. The historical role of the East India Company needs to be told in its uneven and questionable coordinatesindividualist, opportunist, exoticist, imperious, calculated, collectivein a way that acknowledges implied responsibilities. Might latter-day Robinsons be encouraged or even obliged to respect the past enough to seek out local histories as a kind of repair of the past? Wanting to place the interests of domestic visitors, respect for the dead, and martyrdom in a broader context, the article addresses some less often noticed connections in touristic invocation of Robinson Crusoe, reading Defoe's book alongside some of its precursors. The article considers the work of the 'real life' pirate, navigator, captain, mapmaker, and journal writer, William Dampier. It also considers the unfortunate stewardship of the East India Company Factor Allan Catchpole on Con Dao. Resorting to archival histories and holiday reading, the article navigates an argument about diplomacy and colonial intrigue, raising issues for tourism and Vietnamese studies.
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Research Interests:
In his essay, `The culture industry reconsidered' , Theodore Adorno writes, `To take the culture industry as seriously as its unquestioned role demands, means to take it seriously critically, and not to cower in the face of its... more
In his essay, `The culture industry reconsidered' , Theodore Adorno writes, `To take the culture industry as seriously as its unquestioned role demands, means to take it seriously critically, and not to cower in the face of its monopolistic character.' 2 Thus, while noting that `culture ...
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James Clifford’s work is discussed, in the first half of this article, through the prism of Malinowski, travel and the ’trinketization’ of culture. In the second half, Clifford’s ’ethnography’ of the Fort Ross tourist-heritage project,... more
James Clifford’s work is discussed, in the first half of this article, through the prism of Malinowski, travel and the ’trinketization’ of culture. In the second half, Clifford’s ’ethnography’ of the Fort Ross tourist-heritage project, and his sloppy reading of Marx, are brought in to contrast/comparison with Malinowskian perspectives to argue against the well-meaning pessimism of ’post- exoticist’ modes of culture commentary. The article is a polemical review of Clifford’s Routes (Clifford, 1997), demanding greater attention to the political context of anthropological work.
Keywords Clifford; Malinowski; post-exoticism; travel; trinketization
Keywords Clifford; Malinowski; post-exoticism; travel; trinketization
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This paper considers the importance of examples from India in the text of Marx’s Capital. In tracking Marx’s preoccupations, it is possible to show the relevance, especially for today, of his critique in a global frame, as political... more
This paper considers the importance of examples from India in the text of Marx’s Capital. In tracking Marx’s preoccupations, it is possible to show the relevance, especially for today, of his critique in a global frame, as political economy pivots and returns to its sources. Along the way, countering misreading and mistranslation, it becomes possible to see why studies of the agrarian, trading route and subaltern histories of capital in relation to the subcontinent, as well as of market spaces and early commercial exchange in Asia, are crucial for rethinking Marxist approaches to urbanism today. Targeting the archetypal corporate entity of his time, and its ideological supporters, the themes of tribute, exoticism, animals and the slave trade restore a reading practice that owes as much to Marx’s biography as to any one Marxist mode of analysis. The idea of a postcolonial, vegetarian or saffron Marx is not on the cards—since Asia is not simply a place to which Marx goes—but a more careful and at
the same time experimental reading can perhaps restore enthusiasm for the critique of political economy and provide ways of teaching old texts that remain relevant, and by remaining relevant, indicate what is to be done.
the same time experimental reading can perhaps restore enthusiasm for the critique of political economy and provide ways of teaching old texts that remain relevant, and by remaining relevant, indicate what is to be done.
Research Interests: History, Marxism, Indian studies, Post-Marxism, History of Slavery, and 11 moreMarxist theory, Marxism (Political Science), Karl Marx, Marxist Historiography, Friedrich Engels, Indian History, Calcutta \ Kolkata, Kolkata, History of Marxism, History Of Calcutta, and Third world Marxisms/Tricontinental Marxisms (Mao
The Bengali new wave cinema of the 1960s and 1970s addressed historically important world events through an aesthetic inspired by Marxism and longstanding anti-colonial traditions dating to the middle nineteenth century. At the same time,... more
The Bengali new wave cinema of the 1960s and 1970s addressed historically important world events through an aesthetic inspired by Marxism and longstanding anti-colonial traditions dating to the middle nineteenth century. At the same time, an aesthetic derived from folk and artistic traditions was embraced as a cultural style in the middle twentieth century by local Marxist progressive theatre and writers’ associations. In 1968, the Bengali film director Ritwik Ghatak published a short speculation for the Bengal Youth Festival explaining the scenario for “A Film I want to make about Vietnam.” The film was not made, but the imagined detail is very much in the style of the Bengali new wave. Also important—and made, so we can see it—is Satyajit Ray’s short film “on” Vietnam, Two: A Film Fable (1964). The two films express, in different ways, the enthusiasm among Bengali intellectuals for Vietnam at the time when revolutionary youth solidarity with the antiimperialist struggle was strong. What were Ghatak and Ray thinking with these films “on” Vietnam? Can they tell us anything of the times, the engaged role of film, the director as intellectual agitator, the politics of solidarity from afar? By evaluating the reception of historically focussed film from the perspective of the Bengali New Wave, I show how that cinema’s fascination with Vietnam evokes both much older folk traditions, yet now leads to a more worrying contemporary coda with the adaptation in 2019 of the old slogan by the Hindutva right to include Jai Ram.
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Research Interests:
The papers of this special issue come from a series of workshops on ‘Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context’, convened as part of a CHCI-Mellon Global Humanities Institute (GHI) in Taiwan, Malaysia, and... more
The papers of this special issue come from a series of workshops on ‘Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context’, convened as part of a CHCI-Mellon Global Humanities Institute (GHI) in Taiwan, Malaysia, and Vietnam across 2021-2022. The GHI are multi-year projects devoted to a research theme, method, practice, or problem in the humanities
that would benefit directly from a sustained international and collaborative approach
with multiple disciplinary perspectives
that would benefit directly from a sustained international and collaborative approach
with multiple disciplinary perspectives
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The papers of this special issue come from a series of workshops on ‘Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context’, convened as part of a CHCI-Mellon Global Humanities Institute (GHI) in Taiwan, Malaysia, and... more
The papers of this special issue come from a series of workshops on ‘Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context’, convened as part of a CHCI-Mellon Global Humanities Institute (GHI) in Taiwan, Malaysia, and Vietnam across 2021-2022. The GHI are multi-year projects devoted to a research theme, method, practice, or problem in the humanities that would benefit directly from a sustained international and collaborative approach with multiple disciplinary perspectives
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The following introduces the second set of papers from the conference “Innovations in the Social Sciences and Humanities,” in December 2021, at Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. As mentioned in the January issue of... more
The following introduces the second set of papers from the conference “Innovations in the Social Sciences and Humanities,” in December 2021, at Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. As mentioned in the January issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, the idea of “transforming knowledge production” (Chen 2010, 216) brings us to this special section interested in the ways media connects Indian audiences with the world through different formats. We reach back from the “imagined communities” of “print capitalism” (Anderson 1983), through global-social “mediascapes” operating through new technologies and connectivities, that now mediate a “naked struggle between the pieties and realities of Indian politics” (Appadurai 2006, 595).
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TourismStudies cannot rely upon studies of tourism alone to cover its range. While the anthropology of tourism had once sustained a revival, disciplinary inertia suggests a renewal is again overdue and anthropology might justify a... more
TourismStudies cannot rely upon studies of tourism alone to cover its range. While the anthropology of tourism had once sustained a revival, disciplinary inertia suggests a renewal is again overdue and anthropology might justify a reconstruction. The possibilities of tourism as ‘study’ perhaps remain unfulfilled, despite significant antecedents in Malcolm Crick’s work, where anthropology exactly glosses as travel plus study. This builds upon the desire to know worlds, to contribute to human togetherness across differences, economic disparity, languages, faiths, and political inclinations. Thus, calling for engagement with the political, postcolonial, and ontological concepts of anthropology, including multi-site ‘fieldwork’ methodologies, reanimates tourism studies via the critical idealism of study as priority for anthropologists, workers and tourists. Alongside questions of privilege, re-booting tourism studies through anthropology in the service of knowledge posits tourism as much more than study tours, finding out about heritage sites, or guides with stories to tell. Crick’s credo of ‘going to have a look for yourself’ could be a rallying cry for participatory ethnography in tourism. In a more vulnerable world, anticipating future ethnographic work in Vietnam, the paper seeks insights and opportunities for a new engagement in the study of anthropology as tourism studies and tourism more widely.
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TourismStudies cannot rely upon studies of tourism alone to cover its range. While the anthropology of tourism had once sustained a revival, disciplinary inertia suggests a renewal is again overdue and anthropology might justify a... more
TourismStudies cannot rely upon studies of tourism alone to cover its range. While the anthropology of tourism had once sustained a revival, disciplinary inertia suggests a renewal is again overdue and anthropology might justify a reconstruction. The possibilities of tourism as ‘study’ perhaps remain unfulfilled, despite significant antecedents in Malcolm Crick’s work, where anthropology exactly glosses as travel plus study. This builds upon the desire to know worlds, to contribute to human togetherness across differences, economic disparity, languages, faiths, and political inclinations. Thus, calling for engagement with the political, postcolonial, and ontological concepts of anthropology, including multi-site ‘fieldwork’ methodologies, reanimates tourism studies via the critical idealism of study as priority for anthropologists, workers and tourists. Alongside questions of privilege, re-booting tourism studies through anthropology in the service of knowledge posits tourism as much more than study tours, finding out about heritage sites, or guides with stories to tell. Crick’s credo of ‘going to have a look for yourself’ could be a rallying cry for participatory ethnography in tourism. In a more vulnerable world, anticipating future ethnographic work in Vietnam, the paper seeks insights and opportunities for a new engagement in the study of anthropology as tourism studies and tourism more widely.
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We can now see in the public sphere almost everything written by Karl Marx and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Both are widely read, and both have had major impacts on how many people, if not all in some way, understand political activity.... more
We can now see in the public sphere almost everything written by Karl Marx and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Both are widely read, and both have had major impacts on how many people, if not all in some way, understand political activity. Both were prolific writers, but their ideas would exceed the forms in which they were expressed. Access to even their most intimate writings—diary, drafts, notebooks, personal letters—perhaps allows us to better see, in a retrospective way, their thinking unfold. Looking at private correspondence, notebooks and diaries of famous political figures reveal writing as a tool of self-clarification, providing insight into the labour required as a prelude to formal publication. Seeking out how public texts were rehearsed and assembled in more intimate forms for the ears of others also raises questions about who gets to write and read, and of course, what is retained and what is excluded by publication. Comparing Marx’s notebooks and drafts with Capital or Gandhi’s daily diary with its published versions might mean asking different self-clarifying questions, in our different contexts of distraction. And of Marx and Gandhi, might we ask if it is still possible for someone politically engaged to write all the time? An emphasis on “adversaria” may itself be a privileged diversion, available only to those who will be measured in turn.
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The following four papers were first brought together at the conference “Innovations in the Social Sciences and Humanities,” in December 2021, at Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. They anticipate further contributions... more
The following four papers were first brought together at the conference “Innovations in the Social Sciences and Humanities,” in December 2021, at Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. They anticipate further contributions from the conference to the pages of this journal and the expansive focus upon Asia as a means of “transforming knowledge production” (Chen 2010, 216). In this special section, the papers attend to reading the late work of Karl Marx and associated comrades and fellow travellers of a sort – Rosa Luxemburg, Marxist-Feminists, socialist-leaning Gandhians – but in a way that also seeks to transform scholarship with a more careful reading of what Marx was up to after Capital.
The theme is the significance of South Asia in Marx’s analysis of colonialism and culture. We take up the innovations Marx sought in his notes, letters, historical commentaries, and how these influences were accepted, or were critiqued, by later scholars. This by no means exhausts the scope of what has already been a massive contribution to global Marxism in Asia, we seek instead to find new ways to invigorate attention to Marx’s efforts after Volume One and our modest contributions here are aimed at an appreciation and an attentive renewal.
The theme is the significance of South Asia in Marx’s analysis of colonialism and culture. We take up the innovations Marx sought in his notes, letters, historical commentaries, and how these influences were accepted, or were critiqued, by later scholars. This by no means exhausts the scope of what has already been a massive contribution to global Marxism in Asia, we seek instead to find new ways to invigorate attention to Marx’s efforts after Volume One and our modest contributions here are aimed at an appreciation and an attentive renewal.
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Two decades of 'terror' crises have seen politicians, legal professionals and scholars struggle to cope with atrocities organised around some joke. From the alt-right smirk of the Christchurch killer at his televised court arraignment to... more
Two decades of 'terror' crises have seen politicians, legal professionals and scholars struggle to cope with atrocities organised around some joke. From the alt-right smirk of the Christchurch killer at his televised court arraignment to the 'Danish cartoons' and the targeting of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine in France, a series of funny-not-so-funny international 'incidents' prompt us to ponder the cartoon nature of politics. Our investigation into cartooning, contextualised as part of ongoing war efforts, reveals a cultural-economic project that peddles weapons for conflicts against caricatured Muslim adversaries. To illustrate this point, we examine copycat cartoon tropes and conclude that while international cartoon politics is nothing new, cartoon contests and terrorist show-trials indicate an ever-greater reification hand-in-glove with the arms trade.
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This article explores how purpose-built museums interpret the story of colonial imprisonment in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Prisons integral to the 100-year French colonial occupation, and the subsequent American War, have been... more
This article explores how purpose-built museums interpret the story of colonial imprisonment in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Prisons integral to the 100-year French colonial occupation, and the subsequent American War, have been re-purposed, destroyed, or obscured. In response, memorial museums have an important role presenting prison history to international tourists and local visitors alike. Our approach interprets artefacts relating to restraint and torture, the reconstruction of prison cells, and the use of photography in three museums in the city—the War Remnants Museum, the Ton Duc Thang Museum, and the Museum of Southern Vietnamese Women—each featuring recreations of the Tiger Cages from a further notorious prison site, some 200 kilometres southeast of HCMC on the Côn Đảo archipelago. Memoirs, photographs, objects, and plaques from prisons in HCMC and Côn Đảo offer domestic and international tourists narratives stories of Vietnamese resistance to imprisonment. Considering the way former prison sites and museums memorialising prisons can be taken together as a series, we use the concept of the “penalscape” to indicate the contextual links between prison, education, and political struggle in an abolitionist framework.
Research Interests: History, Museum Studies, Tourism Geography, Colonialism, History of Museums, and 13 moreVietnamese History, French colonialism, Vietnam, Punishment and Prisons, Prisons, Prison Abolition, Tourism Sector, Human Georgraphy, Geography of Tourism, The Visual Culture of French Colonialism, Prison Museums, Colonial Vietnam, and Modern Vietnamese History, French Colonial History
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Book review essay on Cine-Politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India
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Asking who gets to compare, this paper advocates inclusive research methodologies through a discussion of comparison and collaboration in urban anthropology. It reports on difficulties in trying to include otherwise excluded perspectives... more
Asking who gets to compare, this paper advocates inclusive research methodologies through a discussion of comparison and collaboration in urban anthropology. It reports on difficulties in trying to include otherwise excluded perspectives that have particular importance for port city heritage redevelopment, while asking how ethical ethnographic research can still be done. It evaluates ongoing research on two recent maritime restoration projects by considering comparative urban and heritage studies within the framework of collaborative ethnography with informal workers, the unemployed, and other local residents. It asks how to engage “new” researchers in the community to study that community—in this case, those impacted by heritage redevelopment at two sites: in South East London and West Bengal. The paper is conceived as a contribution to ethnographic methodologies in urban anthropology, arguing in support of inclusive and responsive approaches to knowledge creation in the social sciences.
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Asking who gets to compare, this paper advocates inclusive research methodologies through a discussion of comparison and collaboration in urban anthropology. It reports on difficulties in trying to include otherwise excluded perspectives... more
Asking who gets to compare, this paper advocates inclusive research methodologies through a discussion of comparison and collaboration in urban anthropology. It reports on difficulties in trying to include otherwise excluded perspectives that have particular importance for port city heritage redevelopment, while asking how ethical ethnographic research can still be done. It evaluates ongoing research on two recent maritime restoration projects by considering comparative urban and heritage studies within the framework of collaborative ethnography with informal workers, the unemployed, and other local residents. It asks how to engage “new” researchers in the community to study that community—in this case, those impacted by heritage redevelopment at two sites: in South East London and West Bengal. The paper is conceived as a contribution to ethnographic methodologies in urban anthropology, arguing in support of inclusive and responsive approaches to knowledge creation in the social sciences.
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‘To write history and to live history are two very different things’, said Marc Bloch in 1943. In this paper, the Second World War reminiscences of an anti-hero sailor are interpreted according to Bloch’s credo: ‘there should be... more
‘To write history and to live history are two very different things’, said Marc Bloch in 1943. In this paper, the Second World War reminiscences of an anti-hero sailor are interpreted according to Bloch’s credo: ‘there should be heretics’, and an approach to historical interpretation is tested through the fictocritical ethnographic moves of Michael Taussig, Stephen Muecke and the life-writing of Bart Moore-Gilbert. An unpublished autobiographical manuscript, telling tales of warships and A.W.O.L. adventures in North Africa and across the Mediterranean, is annotated according to contemporary concerns, in the era of permanent war, with an ‘ethnographic’ revisiting practice permitting meditations on camouflage, souvenirs, diaries, memory, slavery, writing and history.
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This paper offers a typology of university management roles in the age of permanent austerity. The repackaging of every function within the university administration as a cost centre – meaning of course a potential profit centre – has... more
This paper offers a typology of university management roles in the age of permanent austerity. The repackaging of every function within the university administration as a cost centre – meaning of course a potential profit centre – has long been seen as an unsustainable market model. Yet perversely it persists, and we would do well to name the hyperbolic functionaries of this administered institutional reconstruction, in a place where a humourless credentialism prevails. The paper revives the work, and temperament, of the early twentieth century sociologist Thorstein Bunde Veblen as a heuristic aid. With Veblen, the protocols of commercial imperative in the state education sector masquerades as education as a social good while the 'university' itself is skewered with the tragic realism of forms.
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This essay suggests an alternative accountability process on the basis of critiques of current evaluation practice in higher education. Using cases in the British university system, with some international commentary and thinking through... more
This essay suggests an alternative accountability process on the basis of critiques of current evaluation practice in higher education. Using cases in the British university system, with some international commentary and thinking through experience in Asian universities in four countries in the wake of 'audit culture', the work of Thorstein Bunde Veblen is revived. With Veblen, the current structures and mechanics of the corporate and fully-monetised university might once more be challenged. The risk of importing the metrics and audit culture of Britain, and the neoliberal managerialist administration-led university of North America, wholesale into Asian universities is questioned by acknowledgment that exiting hierarchies are persistent, and competing on Euro-American terms is a recipe for disaster. Due recognition is curtailed, hard work and standards are ignored, prospects for junior staff are constrained to a kind of intellectual and social penury. Resources based on research skills more robust than the current axiomatic research assessment calculus are suggested from within the university. The solution is not to emulate a declining system, but to innovate and invent new horizons and terms of engagement. The proposals offered here are only a suggestion for reflexive inquiry and informed self-examination-criticism-self-criticism from co-research sociology, ethnographic film and urban geography, among others-offered as alternate concurrent paths to accountability. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1735357
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Introduction to the special issue Education Philosophy and Theory. Innovating Institutions: Instituting Innovation, https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rept20/52/11?nav=tocList The critique of the university has had more than its share of... more
Introduction to the special issue Education Philosophy and Theory. Innovating Institutions: Instituting Innovation, https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rept20/52/11?nav=tocList
The critique of the university has had more than its share of professional, storied and sometimes harsh polemic, and many are well-versed in sounding out the crisis of education and research. Indeed, the ‘crisis’ has kept some in business for good and for ill. We have, for example, heard much about the way neoliberalism has traded scholarship for vocation, education for training, instruction for market, collegiality for competition, and turned academic commitment into asset-stripped, bureaucratic, managerialism. On the other hand, the administrative sections of the university have commissioned and produced reams of reports that deserve close analysis, as we shall see, as a way to clear a path to elsewhere. The number of times the crisis has been cured by new expansion exceeds plausibility, topped only by excessive statistical data purporting to explain away less positive consequences and questioning. As the higher education sector in Asia and Australia morphs yet again, this time tinted by intimations and imitations of policy from elsewhere, this special issue attempts to redirect discussion from the cul-de-sacs of innovation as policy, to new and innovative institutions, based on intuitions of institutional need and responsive changes within the world we have.
The critique of the university has had more than its share of professional, storied and sometimes harsh polemic, and many are well-versed in sounding out the crisis of education and research. Indeed, the ‘crisis’ has kept some in business for good and for ill. We have, for example, heard much about the way neoliberalism has traded scholarship for vocation, education for training, instruction for market, collegiality for competition, and turned academic commitment into asset-stripped, bureaucratic, managerialism. On the other hand, the administrative sections of the university have commissioned and produced reams of reports that deserve close analysis, as we shall see, as a way to clear a path to elsewhere. The number of times the crisis has been cured by new expansion exceeds plausibility, topped only by excessive statistical data purporting to explain away less positive consequences and questioning. As the higher education sector in Asia and Australia morphs yet again, this time tinted by intimations and imitations of policy from elsewhere, this special issue attempts to redirect discussion from the cul-de-sacs of innovation as policy, to new and innovative institutions, based on intuitions of institutional need and responsive changes within the world we have.
Research Interests: Alternative Education, Higher Education, Sociology of Knowledge, Sustainability in Higher Education, Knowledge sharing, and 7 moreHistory of higher education, Neoliberalism, Higher Education Management, Higher Education Policy, Internationalisation of Higher Education, Internationalization of higher education, and University
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In the university system today, co-research may be a decolonising strategy. We evaluate teaching a ‘Modernization and Social Change’ course in Vietnam as an experiment in co-research anthropology training. If for visitors, the idea of... more
In the university system today, co-research may be a decolonising strategy. We evaluate teaching a ‘Modernization and Social Change’ course in Vietnam as an experiment in co-research anthropology training. If for visitors, the idea of ‘Vietnam’ is nurtured by Hollywood action cinema, 1960s–1970s protest movements and documentary television, a process of collective research can rearrange orientations for students and teachers. The essay describes the making of a ‘model’ film as a teaching tool for international faculty, and as an evaluation of general teaching practice. A co-research approach to the classroom, assuming the students as researchers, engaging their own collaborative interests together, invites further discussion on teaching mapping as model for ethics-oriented coresearch anthropology training; on teaching Capital in Vietnam using maps and counter-mapping as collaborative practice; and on using participatory methods for foreign faculty in a politically charged field.
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An outpouring of books on the Sundarbans delta and other Bengal waterways immerses us in a new ecological analytic. An amazing liquid world churns at the end of long river systems, the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Meghna and Hooghly. These rivers... more
An outpouring of books on the Sundarbans delta and other Bengal waterways immerses us in a new ecological analytic. An amazing liquid world churns at the end of long river systems, the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Meghna and Hooghly. These rivers are sourced in the Himalaya, venerable mountains created when the shifting mass of the Indian subcontinent crashed into the Eurasian tectonic plate, throwing up land that reaches the sky. Snow on the mountains thaws into rivers—more than ever now with climate change—running across rich alluvial plains, depositing ever more silt and producing, on meeting the Bengal Basin, the largest delta area of forest and shifting islands in the world. That the Sundarbans and the rivers themselves confront imminent environmental and ecological catastrophe is a story told in each of the three books under review with a fluent yet turbulent style, wholly appropriate for tempestuous times.
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I increasingly find it problematic to write analytically about “diaspora and music” at a time of war. It seems inconsequential; the culture industry is not much more than a distraction; a fairy tale diversion to make us forget a more... more
I increasingly find it problematic to write analytically about “diaspora and music” at a time of war. It seems inconsequential; the culture industry is not much more than a distraction; a fairy tale diversion to make us forget a more sinister amnesia behind the stories we tell. This paper nonetheless takes up debates about cultural expression in the field of diasporic musics in Britain. It examines instances of creative engagement with, and destabilisation of, music genres by Fun^da^mental and Asian Dub Foundation, and it takes a broadly culture critique perspective on diasporic creativity as a guide to thinking about the politics of hiphop in a time of war. Examples from music industry and media reportage of the work of these two bands pose both political provocation and a challenge to the seemingly unruffled facade of British civil society, particularly insofar as musical work might still be relevant to struggles around race and war. Here, at a time of what conservative critics ca...
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Robinson Crusoe has been conjured with in many ways over the course of 300 years. While there has been an anti-orientalist critique of the figure of Friday, and some exposure of Crusoe’s investments in the slave trade, there are other... more
Robinson Crusoe has been conjured with in many ways over the course of 300 years. While there has been an anti-orientalist critique of the figure of Friday, and some exposure of Crusoe’s investments in the slave trade, there are other aspects of Defoe’s book that receive less consideration. Post-structuralist and Marxist readings that have been made familiar again in recent work, look decidedly more interesting when the role of the English East India Company is reinstated as backdrop. What then of the resurgence of interest in the models that Robinson provides across the centuries: isolated individual, self-reliant, economic rational and civilising force, alone among nature … ? If Marx were writing of Robinson today, would the colonial corporation feature? The possibility must be that the environment would be in focus, and a target would be the transnational corporate polluters who accumulate profits through exchanges that risk any future rescue. To think of Robinson is to seek again an allegory for our times, as ever. Perhaps every interpretation of the text leaves us isolated and stranded, left to our own devices with only the sketchiest tools, and a vague textual-moral compass, with which to reproduce a livelihood on an island planet far from home.
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Charting an anti-colonial or even postcolonial current, this article recovers ironic and satirical meanings in Robinson Crusoe. After he leaves the island, Crusoe trades isolation for commercial opportunities in Asia. Alongside other... more
Charting an anti-colonial or even postcolonial current, this article recovers ironic and satirical meanings in Robinson Crusoe. After he leaves the island, Crusoe trades isolation for commercial opportunities in Asia. Alongside other books plundered by Defoe, Dampier’s Voyages is comparable because the pirate-navigator-cartographer is one among many models. As Defoe was negotiating the politics of the English Royal Court at the time of the wars of the Spanish succession, the Farther Adventures (book two) involves Crusoe in a transformative crisis. Reading Defoe and Dampier together supports an argument about postcoloniality, understood in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ironic and restricted sense of a critical broadside against the decolonial hoax that smuggles in neocolonial ideologies. In parallel with Dampier, Crusoe ends up hauling opium from Bengal and running from the East India Company in Cochinchina (present day Vietnam), as Defoe launches a Lockean critique of violence, and profit remains the currency of the realm.
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Charting an anti-colonial or even postcolonial current, this article recovers ironic and satirical meanings in Robinson Crusoe. After he leaves the island, Crusoe trades isolation for commercial opportunities in Asia. Alongside other... more
Charting an anti-colonial or even postcolonial current, this article recovers ironic and satirical meanings in Robinson Crusoe. After he leaves the island, Crusoe trades isolation for commercial opportunities in Asia. Alongside other books plundered by Defoe, Dampier’s Voyages is comparable because the pirate-navigator-cartographer is one among many models. As Defoe was negotiating the politics of the English Royal Court at the time of the wars of the Spanish succession, the Farther Adventures (book two) involves Crusoe in a transformative crisis. Reading Defoe and Dampier together supports an argument about postcoloniality, understood in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ironic and restricted sense of a critical broadside against the decolonial hoax that smuggles in neocolonial ideologies. In parallel with Dampier, Crusoe ends up hauling opium from Bengal and running from the East India Company in Cochinchina (present day Vietnam), as Defoe launches a Lockean critique of violence, and profit remains the currency of the realm.
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Recent film and television treatment of South Asia from UK producers have introduced new angles on the violent politics of colonial past, whether this be the activities of the East India Company in the early days of Empire, or about... more
Recent film and television treatment of South Asia from UK producers have introduced new angles on the violent politics of colonial past, whether this be the activities of the East India Company in the early days of Empire, or about Partition, at the ostensible Raj's end. The controversy over Gurinder Chadha's 2017 film Viceroy's House is taken as an opportunity to consider the new South Asian film and television studies and the emergent scholars that are challenging conventional media studies models. The co-constitution of here and there is given as an analytic lens through which to comprehend representation and stereotyping in films "about" politics in South Asia, and the view taken is that a debilitating divide and rule, via mechanisms of representation, remains strongly in place, despite the fighting efforts of the new South Asian media scholarship. This essay addresses a flurry of recent commercial film and television on British colonial rule and the partition of India. Films like Viceroys's House (2017) and television serials like Taboo (2017) seem to return in only slightly reconstructed ways to the Raj nostalgia of the mid-1980s, as then exemplified in Merchant Ivory romances and television serial dramatisations: Heat and Dust (1983) and Jewel in the Crown (1984). Yet at a wider level, the essay will also be necessarily less about new partition films as such and much more framed by the critique of division and divisiveness in media and politics and the need to renew contextual reception. However speculative my argument about differing films, genres and formats, the larger task of making an analysis across multiple divides raises questions that must hold the co-constitution of here and there, now and then, together. Forced into continuing historical reas-sessments of capital, exploitation, and war-as an unavoidable ever-present backstory-what imposes itself is an originary violence, so that even those films on partition that are not violent have avoidance of violence as their mission. While it would not do to think of South Asia only in terms of violence, or even violence brought from Europe to crush the romantic idyll of pre-colonial times, or the non-violent resistance to that civilisational attack, or even the promises of a successful and shining future beyond violence, all are just too handy not to be understood and examined as enabling fictions. Nevertheless, a second set of questions revolves around the issue of who makes films and with what intent-the colonial project perhaps continues even as a new South Asian film and television scholarship is largely overlooked in the old metropolitan centres. It is, this paper agues at the end, a new scholarship that could suggest new and better renderings of film as history and understand the history of "over there"
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This article examines a recurrent film motif across a number of South Asian films, mostly called Mela. It also offers some observations on melas, actual and allegorical, as represented in films but often seeming to exceed their... more
This article examines a recurrent film motif across a number of South Asian films, mostly called Mela. It also offers some observations on melas, actual and allegorical, as represented in films but often seeming to exceed their containment in context so as to say more about the conviviality of life, where this is at issue, where life is at a juncture in need of resolution within the cycle of becoming. The issues of violence, loss, national identity, politics of interpretation and repetition in ideology are canvassed. While the essay is focused upon Mela films themselves, and South Asian film more broadly, it has of course been important to note the importance of work by scholars such as M. Madhava Prasad, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Anjali Gera Roy, Tejaswini Niranjana, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the help of my students, some of whom are named below.
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This debate piece reports on ongoing research addressing local experience of heritage regeneration in waterfront and port cities (informed by the work of Subramanian [1999. "Indrani Ray’s French East India Company and the Trade of the... more
This debate piece reports on ongoing research addressing local experience of heritage regeneration in waterfront and port cities (informed by the work of Subramanian [1999. "Indrani Ray’s French East India Company and the Trade of the Indian Ocean". New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers; 2008. "Ports, Towns and Cities: A Historical Tour of the Indian Littoral". Mumbai: Marg Publications; 2016. "The Sovereign and the Pirate: Ordering Maritime Subjects in India’s Western Littoral". Delhi: Oxford University Press] and Mukherjee [2006. "Strange Riches: Bengal in the Mercantile Map of South Asia". Delhi: Foundation Books; 2013. "Oceans Connect: Reflections on Water Worlds Across Time and Space". Delhi: Primus]). An ongoing research project on port cities is evaluated, and a museum of impossible objects is proposed to counter commercially driven regeneration from mainstream developers
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Book review essay on Cine-Politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India
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From Strangely Beloved, Ed Nilanjana Gupta Calcutta s wealth is not in ancient monuments, medieval courtrooms or modern skyscrapers. It is in its stories. Perhaps no city in India has inspired the responses of love and disgust as... more
From Strangely Beloved, Ed Nilanjana Gupta
Calcutta s wealth is not in ancient monuments, medieval courtrooms or modern skyscrapers. It is in its stories.
Perhaps no city in India has inspired the responses of love and disgust as sharply as Calcutta, now Kolkata, where the old and the new, the beautiful and the squalid coexist side by side. Once a global city second only to London, it has often been written off as a dying city . But despite perhaps because of all its problems, Calcuttans love the city with the illogical passion of true love.
Calcutta s wealth is not in ancient monuments, medieval courtrooms or modern skyscrapers. It is in its stories.
Perhaps no city in India has inspired the responses of love and disgust as sharply as Calcutta, now Kolkata, where the old and the new, the beautiful and the squalid coexist side by side. Once a global city second only to London, it has often been written off as a dying city . But despite perhaps because of all its problems, Calcuttans love the city with the illogical passion of true love.
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Introduction: Cultural Studies As Capitalism Section 1. Clifford's Ethnographica 1. Clifford and Malinowski 2. Fort Ross Mystifications Section 2. derrida@marx.archive 1. Fever 2. Specters 3. Struggles Section 3. Tales from the Raj 1.... more
Introduction: Cultural Studies As Capitalism Section 1. Clifford's Ethnographica 1. Clifford and Malinowski 2. Fort Ross Mystifications Section 2. derrida@marx.archive 1. Fever 2. Specters 3. Struggles Section 3. Tales from the Raj 1. On Empire 2. Difference and Opposition 3. The Chapatti Story Section 4. Bataille's Wars Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Conclusion: The Cultivation of Capital Studies Notes Index
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'Hutnyk packs more dynamite in his sentences than any other writer I know.' Amitava Kumar, Penn State University Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. Cultural theorists... more
'Hutnyk packs more dynamite in his sentences than any other writer I know.' Amitava Kumar, Penn State University
Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. Cultural theorists love to toy with Marx, but critical thinking seems to fall into obvious traps.
After an introduction which explains why the 'Marxism' of the academy is unrecognisable and largely unrecognised in anti-capitalist struggles, Bad Marxism provides detailed analyses of Cultural Studies' cherished moves by holding fieldwork, archives, empires, hybrids and exchange up against the practical criticism of anti-capitalism. Engaging with the work of key thinkers: Jacques Derrida, James Clifford, Gayatri Spivak, Georges Bataille, Homi Bhabha, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Hutnyk concludes by advocating an open Marxism that is both pro-party and pro-critique, while being neither dogmatic, nor dull.
Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. Cultural theorists love to toy with Marx, but critical thinking seems to fall into obvious traps.
After an introduction which explains why the 'Marxism' of the academy is unrecognisable and largely unrecognised in anti-capitalist struggles, Bad Marxism provides detailed analyses of Cultural Studies' cherished moves by holding fieldwork, archives, empires, hybrids and exchange up against the practical criticism of anti-capitalism. Engaging with the work of key thinkers: Jacques Derrida, James Clifford, Gayatri Spivak, Georges Bataille, Homi Bhabha, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Hutnyk concludes by advocating an open Marxism that is both pro-party and pro-critique, while being neither dogmatic, nor dull.
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With importance for geopolitical cultural economy, anthropology, and media studies, John Hutnyk brings a new circuit of scholarship to attention where the color of film and television is offered as a stark challenge to political realities... more
With importance for geopolitical cultural economy, anthropology, and media studies, John Hutnyk brings a new circuit of scholarship to attention where the color of film and television is offered as a stark challenge to political realities rendered in black and white. The snuffing of Osama bin Laden and the romantic embrace of Omar and Johnny are two poles of a global image machine that renders South Asia in full color; yet as Eric Idle’s Indian dancing at the London Olympics showed, misrepresentation and stereotyping prevail. Current South Asian media scholars, alongside critical Marxist and poststructuralist authors, offer other takes on film and television in South Asia and across its many diasporas. But here, the exoticist image and the terror image are displaced in nuanced readings of Global South Asia on screen near you.
Each chapter offers a slice of historical study and assessment of media theory approaches appropriate to a political and cultural appreciation of changes in South Asia. Global South Asia on Screen is about the politics of exoticism and terror imagery, the ways film and TV trade on stereotype and fears, and national longing and desire.
Each chapter offers a slice of historical study and assessment of media theory approaches appropriate to a political and cultural appreciation of changes in South Asia. Global South Asia on Screen is about the politics of exoticism and terror imagery, the ways film and TV trade on stereotype and fears, and national longing and desire.
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An extraordinary study of the politics of representation, this book explores the discursive construction of a ‘city of intensities‘. The author analyses representations of Calcutta in a wide variety of discourses: in the gossip and... more
An extraordinary study of the politics of representation, this book explores the discursive construction of a ‘city of intensities‘.
The author analyses representations of Calcutta in a wide variety of discourses: in the gossip and travellor-lore of backpackers and volunteer charity workers; in writing - from classic literature to travel guides; in cinema, photography and maps. The book shows how the rumours of westerners contribute to the elaboration of an imaginary city; and in doing so, circulate in ways fundamental to the maintenance of international order.
A provocative and original reading of both Heidegger and Marx, the book also draws upon writers as diverse as Spivak, Trinh, Jameson, Clifford, Virilio, Bataille, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari. As such it is essential reading for students and scholars in cultural studies, anthropology, development and sociology
The author analyses representations of Calcutta in a wide variety of discourses: in the gossip and travellor-lore of backpackers and volunteer charity workers; in writing - from classic literature to travel guides; in cinema, photography and maps. The book shows how the rumours of westerners contribute to the elaboration of an imaginary city; and in doing so, circulate in ways fundamental to the maintenance of international order.
A provocative and original reading of both Heidegger and Marx, the book also draws upon writers as diverse as Spivak, Trinh, Jameson, Clifford, Virilio, Bataille, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari. As such it is essential reading for students and scholars in cultural studies, anthropology, development and sociology
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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... more
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 iek, 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.
Research Interests: Sociology, Political Sociology, Geography, Music, Musicology, and 27 moreAnthropology, Media Studies, Theatre Studies, Humanities, Popular Music Studies, Social Sciences, Popular Music, Diasporas, Music Video, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Theodor Adorno, Political Science, South Asia, Political Violence and Terrorism, Jacques Derrida, Ethnography of Communication, Indian Diaspora (Migration and Ethnicity), Hip-Hop/Rap, Diaspora Studies, Diaspora and transnationalism, War on Terror, Hip-Hop Studies, India, Fundamentalism, Critical Terrorism Studies, Hip hop, and Hip Hop Culture
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... more
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. <br> 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 norm...
Research Interests: Political Sociology, Geography, Music, Musicology, Anthropology, and 15 moreMedia Studies, Humanities, Diasporas, Music Video, Political Science, Jacques Derrida, Ethnography of Communication, Diaspora Studies, Diaspora and transnationalism, India, Fundamentalism, Critical Terrorism Studies, Hip hop, Hip Hop Culture, and Hip Hop Studies
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In this book John Hutnyk questions the meaning of cultural hybridity. Using the growing popularity of Asian culture in the West as a case study, he looks at just who benefits from this intermingling of culture. Focusing on music, race and... more
In this book John Hutnyk questions the meaning of cultural hybridity. Using the growing popularity of Asian culture in the West as a case study, he looks at just who benefits from this intermingling of culture. Focusing on music, race and politics, Hutnyk offers a cogently theorised critique of the culture industry. He looks at artists such as Asian Dub Foundation, FunDaMental and Apache Indian to see how their music is both produced and received. He analyses ‘world’ music festivals, racist policing and the power of corporate pop stars to market exotica across the globe. Throughout, Hutnyk provides a searing critique of a world that sells exotica as race relations and visibility as redress.
on diaspora and hybridity with Raminder Kaur and Virinder Kalra
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'Diaspora and 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... more
'Diaspora and 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' - Rohit Barot, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol
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, providing the reader with a framework to evaluate and displace the key ideological arguments, theories and narratives deployed in culturalist academic circles today. The authors demonstrate how diaspora and hybridity serve as problematic tools, cutting across traditional boundaries of nations and groups, where trans-national spaces for a range of contested cultural, political and economic outcomes might arise.
Wide ranging, richly illustrated and challenging, it will be of interest to students of cultural studies, sociology, ethnicity and nationalism.
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, providing the reader with a framework to evaluate and displace the key ideological arguments, theories and narratives deployed in culturalist academic circles today. The authors demonstrate how diaspora and hybridity serve as problematic tools, cutting across traditional boundaries of nations and groups, where trans-national spaces for a range of contested cultural, political and economic outcomes might arise.
Wide ranging, richly illustrated and challenging, it will be of interest to students of cultural studies, sociology, ethnicity and nationalism.
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essay collection from events like Sonic Borders, Border Documents, Border Theatre, Border Audio
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(contents page)
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essay colection
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“This book writes back the presence of South Asian youth into a rapidly expanding and exuberant music scene; and celebrates this as a dynamic expression of the experience of diaspora with an urgent political consciousness. One of the... more
“This book writes back the presence of South Asian youth into a rapidly expanding and exuberant music scene; and celebrates this as a dynamic expression of the experience of diaspora with an urgent political consciousness. One of the first attempts to situate such production within the study of race and identity, it uncovers the crucial role that South Asian dance musics – from Hip-hop, Qawwali and Bhangra through Soul, Indie and Jungle – have played in a new urban cultural politics …”
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Research Interests: Asian Studies, South Asian Diaspora Literature, Indian Diaspora (Migration and Ethnicity), Diaspora Studies, South Asian Diaspora, and 4 moreDiaspora and transnationalism, South Asian Diasporas, South Asian Diaspora, Diaspora Studies, Afro-Pessimism, African American Studies, Antiblackness In Communities of Color (Primarily South Asian), Intersectionality, Critiques of Post-Colonialism, the Subaltern, and Neo-liberalism, Psychoanalysis, and asian popular music
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I increasingly find it problematic to write analytically about “diaspora and music” at a time of war. It seems inconsequential; the culture industry is not much more than a distraction; a fairy tale diversion to make us forget a more... more
I increasingly find it problematic to write analytically about “diaspora and music” at a time of war. It seems inconsequential; the culture industry is not much more than a distraction; a fairy tale diversion to make us forget a more sinister amnesia behind the stories we tell. ...
I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditio ns.... Ammonia, Tibet and Africa fill the bookshops in the form of travelogues, accounts of exhibitions and collections of photographs, in all of... more
I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditio ns.... Ammonia, Tibet and Africa fill the bookshops in the form of travelogues, accounts of exhibitions and collections of photographs, in all of which the desire to impress is so ...
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The recent work of the Sri-Lankan-British musician and sonic ‘curator’ known as M.I.A. (real name: Mathangi Arulpragasam) is considered as a commentary on atrocity and read alongside the well known essay ‘The Storyteller’ by Walter... more
The recent work of the Sri-Lankan-British musician and sonic ‘curator’ known as M.I.A. (real name: Mathangi Arulpragasam) is considered as a commentary on atrocity and read alongside the well known essay ‘The Storyteller’ by Walter Benjamin and comments on Auschwitz by Theodor Adorno. The storytelling here is updated for a contemporary context where global war impacts us all, more or
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Culture is considered as a key term in anthropology, now in critical mode, and to be worked through powerful tropes that lead to issues in politics, interpretation, translation, stereotype and racism. Anthropology is described as a... more
Culture is considered as a key term in anthropology, now in critical mode, and to be worked through powerful tropes that lead to issues in politics, interpretation, translation, stereotype and racism. Anthropology is described as a cultural system itself, with a large supporting institutional apparatus, not unlike the culture industry as critiqued by Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The high mass culture/high culture distinction is considered and some distortions explained (away). Street culture and culture as (development) resource are evaluated, leading to an assessment of culture as souvenirs, trinkets and the ephemera of tourism as a modern commodity fetish. How this measures up to political struggles is again considered in the light of work by critics such as Fanon and those engaged with anti-imperialist struggles worldwide.
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Appendix: Tiếng Anh va Tiếng Việt (the text of the video in English and Vietnamese): Model of Co-research in the Sociology Classroom Every soldier is a farmer Background slides [words in English italics transcribe the slides that are... more
Appendix: Tiếng Anh va Tiếng Việt (the text of the video in English and Vietnamese): Model of Co-research in the Sociology Classroom Every soldier is a farmer Background slides [words in English italics transcribe the slides that are visible in the background, the plain text is the commentary of the film as spoken by us and the
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Abstract: The figure of the factory inspector is set out by Marx, primarily in ‘The Working Day’ chapter of Capital, volume one, not as an uncritically approved person of unassailable credentials, but as an advocate of investigation that... more
Abstract: The figure of the factory inspector is set out by Marx, primarily in ‘The Working Day’ chapter of Capital, volume one, not as an uncritically approved person of unassailable credentials, but as an advocate of investigation that does a service for the working class ‘that should never be forgotten’. The Factory Inspector most often named is Leonard Horner, and his work in the Blue Books, parliamentary reports appearing at least annually, was read by Marx as raw material for his examination of conditions in the industrial factories of 19th Century capitalism. For this chapter Marx also read Dickens and Engels, and many other sources for his commentaries on the struggles over wages, hours, child labour and education. The introduction of the Factory Acts ensured a modicum of education for children, with limits on the number of consecutive hours they may be forced to work. Marx’s critique of these concessions develops within an argument that exhorts collective struggle, and investigation of the workers themselves involve in this struggle. That his argument was also against slavery, bonded labour, and exploitation worldwide is a contextual lesson that can suggest practical ways to engage ethnography and workplace inquiry today.
Key words: Factory, workplace, inquiry, ethnography, Marx, Dickens, Engels, Spivak
Key words: Factory, workplace, inquiry, ethnography, Marx, Dickens, Engels, Spivak
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Abstract: First delivered as a the last session of a Music and Censorship conf in Olso, its now a bit long and still jumps about, also I am only now working out how these discussions work - but the last one has been hugely productive.... more
Abstract:
First delivered as a the last session of a Music and Censorship conf in Olso, its now a bit long and still jumps about, also I am only now working out how these discussions work - but the last one has been hugely productive. All comments and suggestions welcome.
This one is a discussion of Wagner, Adorno, Žižek, Badiou, Rancière, Lacoue-Labarthe Spivak, Marx a bit, and erscheinungsform (follows on from an earlier text on the first sentence of Capital).
First para: There are many kinds of censorship, of which the ‘plague’ of saturation media coverage is perhaps not the least significant. Marx, as far as we know, unfortunately never responded to requests for his views on Wagner, though he is already referred to without being named, as ‘musician of the future’, in Capital volume 1 (CW 35:179). As there is much at stake in the many and varied forms of censorship which could be discussed, we might start with this oblique and rare omission. And just as nearly everything has already been said of Wagner, as well as of censorship, this admission, or even admonition, that there is nothing to say is resonant. Marx in chapter 6 of Capital, with this cryptic reference, is talking of the inability of any, even the most futuristic virtuoso, to live upon future products. The political economists on the side of capital forget that the purchase of labour power will not be enough to produce value, it must be set to work, and even then the surplus value must be valourised through sale and circulation in the market. A source of much confusion, actual labour and actual exchange are necessary, but not sufficient explanations of the secret of value production.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Music, Music History, Media and Cultural Studies, Journalism, and 20 more
First delivered as a the last session of a Music and Censorship conf in Olso, its now a bit long and still jumps about, also I am only now working out how these discussions work - but the last one has been hugely productive. All comments and suggestions welcome.
This one is a discussion of Wagner, Adorno, Žižek, Badiou, Rancière, Lacoue-Labarthe Spivak, Marx a bit, and erscheinungsform (follows on from an earlier text on the first sentence of Capital).
First para: There are many kinds of censorship, of which the ‘plague’ of saturation media coverage is perhaps not the least significant. Marx, as far as we know, unfortunately never responded to requests for his views on Wagner, though he is already referred to without being named, as ‘musician of the future’, in Capital volume 1 (CW 35:179). As there is much at stake in the many and varied forms of censorship which could be discussed, we might start with this oblique and rare omission. And just as nearly everything has already been said of Wagner, as well as of censorship, this admission, or even admonition, that there is nothing to say is resonant. Marx in chapter 6 of Capital, with this cryptic reference, is talking of the inability of any, even the most futuristic virtuoso, to live upon future products. The political economists on the side of capital forget that the purchase of labour power will not be enough to produce value, it must be set to work, and even then the surplus value must be valourised through sale and circulation in the market. A source of much confusion, actual labour and actual exchange are necessary, but not sufficient explanations of the secret of value production.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Music, Music History, Media and Cultural Studies, Journalism, and 20 more
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Social Theory, Music, Musicology, Anthropology, and 15 morePolitical Philosophy, Media and Cultural Studies, Journalism, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Theodor Adorno, Cultural Theory, Political Science, Fascism, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Adorno, Theodor W. Adorno, Anti-Fascism, and Commodification
Draft-‐ currently this text includes a section with cut and paste source material such as Marx's letter to Abraham Lincoln, poems from Schiller, letters from colonial officials, overly long block quotes from Marx especially in the last... more
Draft-‐ currently this text includes a section with cut and paste source material such as Marx's letter to Abraham Lincoln, poems from Schiller, letters from colonial officials, overly long block quotes from Marx especially in the last third – apologies, these are eventually to be summarized and to be folded into the text, but at this stage I think it useful to include them in full. Biblio also has a few missing items as yet and capital is referred to in several different versions LW = Lawrence and Wishart, Erbhar = online, P = Penguin, D = Deutsche Verlag.
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'The English East India Company, as is well known, obtained, besides the political rule in India, the exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as well as of the Chinese trade in general, and of the transport of goods to and from Europe. But... more
'The English East India Company, as is well known, obtained, besides the political rule in India, the exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as well as of the Chinese trade in general, and of the transport of goods to and from Europe. But the coasting trade of India and between the islands, as well as the internal trade of India, were the monopoly of the higher employees. The monopolies of salt, opium, betel and other commodities, were inexhaustible mines of wealth. The employ themselves fixed the price and plundered at will the unhappy Hindus' 2 The animal story. Maybe it is plausible to begin with a raw hide. This will invoke the image or allegory of a coat that seemed something like a rhinoceros, and concern for this rhinoceros would in turn be evoked by Marx at the end of his life in a way that, I think, can be speculatively, and as 'postulation', fictively read as a key to uncover a renewed appreciation of Marx's textual appropriations of India. This reading presents a gift to the present, by rereading the gifts of the past, even as it has long been acknowledged that the gift is never just a gift. I want to argue that colonial era traffic in gifts to smooth political manoeuvres starts with animals.
Research Interests: History, Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Marxism, Cultural Heritage, and 14 moreHeritage Studies, Postcolonial Studies, International Trade, Indian studies, History of Slavery, Colonialism, Postcolonial Theory, Karl Marx, India, East India Company, Gayatri Spivak, Rhinoceros, Bengal, and Marxist History, Philosophy and Theory
Chapter 7 is a discussion of labour, distinguishing only to disregard it, skilled and unskilled labour and the 'penal code' imposed by the capitalist to ensure he gets the most from his purchase of labour. Architects and bees, spiders,... more
Chapter 7 is a discussion of labour, distinguishing only to disregard it, skilled and unskilled labour and the 'penal code' imposed by the capitalist to ensure he gets the most from his purchase of labour. Architects and bees, spiders, mules and self-acting mules. The capitalist we had left with a smirk now at first seems to frown, but the equation of surplus value is at the heart of the chapter and the trick at last succeeds (CW 205) and the capitalists laughter is assured (paraphrasing Goethe's Faust Act 1 scene 3) Slavery and the distinction between skilled and unskilled labour, class society, and between animals, tools and labour of ancients. Two consecutive footnotes.
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This is the third in the series on capital vol 1. lecture notes, this time less polished than the others, even. Much more to do here on money and coins, numismatists shall be deployed. Also much of what is to come is anticipated here -... more
This is the third in the series on capital vol 1. lecture notes, this time less polished than the others, even. Much more to do here on money and coins, numismatists shall be deployed. Also much of what is to come is anticipated here - slavery for example. Comments as ever welcome as I work this up, slowly, for eventual publication. Previously there were two lecture notes texts, plus the commentary on the first Sentence, and the commentary on Robinsonades. So that's five so far in all. Here we get as far as the abode of production, well, its threshold.
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on chapter one of capital
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There are dozens of commentaries and guides and introductions and prefaces on Marx and Marxism. Indeed the history of Marxism is an instructive lesson in how reading is multiple and contested. A fratricidal spectacle even.
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Click the weblink or copy: https://hutnyk.wordpress.com/videos/ Culture Now in conversation with Antony Gormley at ICA feb 2013 On 26 Jan 2013, a talk at Tate Modern on the Sharjah Art Foundation Biennale proposed theme of New... more
Click the weblink or copy: https://hutnyk.wordpress.com/videos/
Culture Now in conversation with Antony Gormley at ICA feb 2013
On 26 Jan 2013, a talk at Tate Modern on the Sharjah Art Foundation Biennale proposed theme of New Cultural Cartographies.
Translating Capital – Subversive Festival, Zagreb (1st vid)
Quid pro Quo – Subversive Festival, Zagreb (2nd vid)
Pantomime Terror – inaugural Professorial Lecture 30.9.2008 Goldsmiths
Pantomime Terror MIA as Provocateur (Geissen Lecture): 21 Nov 2013
Culture Now in conversation with Antony Gormley at ICA feb 2013
On 26 Jan 2013, a talk at Tate Modern on the Sharjah Art Foundation Biennale proposed theme of New Cultural Cartographies.
Translating Capital – Subversive Festival, Zagreb (1st vid)
Quid pro Quo – Subversive Festival, Zagreb (2nd vid)
Pantomime Terror – inaugural Professorial Lecture 30.9.2008 Goldsmiths
Pantomime Terror MIA as Provocateur (Geissen Lecture): 21 Nov 2013
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Click the weblink: ___
Antony Gormley, Hugh Brody, John Hutnyk
Antony Gormley, Hugh Brody, John Hutnyk
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Click the weblink: ___
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Click the weblink: ___ John Hutnyk: Translating Capital in context, politics, struggles The School of Contemporary Humanities moderator: Dunja Matić the dedication, the prefaces, the first sentence, the tenth/eight chapter, the... more
Click the weblink: ___
John Hutnyk: Translating Capital in context, politics, struggles
The School of Contemporary Humanities
moderator: Dunja Matić
the dedication, the prefaces, the first sentence, the tenth/eight chapter, the teaching factory, malignant and parasitic, etc…
[errata: New York Daily Tribune, not herald. Fudged Horace and Dante quote, not rude enough about Zombie’s… but otherwise…]
John Hutnyk: Translating Capital in context, politics, struggles
The School of Contemporary Humanities
moderator: Dunja Matić
the dedication, the prefaces, the first sentence, the tenth/eight chapter, the teaching factory, malignant and parasitic, etc…
[errata: New York Daily Tribune, not herald. Fudged Horace and Dante quote, not rude enough about Zombie’s… but otherwise…]
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Click the weblink: ___ This talk in a series of three on capital was at the Subversive Festival in Zagreb. The second talk is here (Translating Capital in Context) and it makes sense to see the second talk first [the first one in... more
Click the weblink: ___
This talk in a series of three on capital was at the Subversive Festival in Zagreb. The second talk is here (Translating Capital in Context) and it makes sense to see the second talk first [the first one in Rijeka was not recorded, but was based on my text on Citizen Kane], not least because it will help explain why the conceit in this third talk has Marx relocated to India, which of course he was always deeply interested in, but he never went, only picking up bits of info, and some myths – eg the horror stories of Jagannath etc – from his wide-ranging and varied reading. I think it is justified to deploy Marx to Calcutta, at least in fantasy, though its true not even Engels took his father’s advice to go to Calcutta to start in business. The old boys were European bound, but this did not mean they did not seek out the revolution elsewhere.
What also should be mentioned (the parts here are – great job – edited and slightly reordered, and the opening by Bernard missed) is that in this talk I set out to look at three different moments. 1) the arrival of Clive in Calcutta after the ‘sham scandal’ of the Black Hole in 1756; 2) the first all-India war of Independence, the so-called ‘mutiny’ 100 years later and; 3) the quid pro quo return of originary capital to the site of the East India Company shipyard in London in present times, under the aegis of the Farrell’s development of Convoys’ Wharf, Deptford, for Hutchinson Whampoa.
I am slowly writing this out as a long, too long, chapter, so this version is pretty schematic, but you will get the drift of new work. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks also to the crew at Subversive, especially Karolina Hrga, and Bernard Koludrović who was chair.
Abstract:
“Marx writing on India is key to understanding Capital. My argument is that we can make sense of Marx today by examining his theoretical and journalistic work together, each informed by an emergent anthropology, by historical hermeneutics, by a critique of political economy and by attention to a global political contest that mattered more than philosophy. Marx reading history, already against the grain and without being able to make actual alliances, is nevertheless seeking allies in a revolutionary cause. Is it possible to observe Marx coming round to realise, after the shaping experience of the 1848-1852 European uprisings, the possibilities for the many different workers of the world to unite? I consider the sources Marx finds available, what he reads, and how his writing practice parses critical support as habitual politics, and how far subcontinental events, themes and allegories are a presence in the key moves of his masterwork Capital almost as if India were a refocused bromide for Europe, just as slavery is for wages. I will take up four cases – the ‘founding’ of Calcutta by Job Charnock (disputed); the story of Clive sacking Chandernagore and going on to defeat Suraj-ud-duala at Palashi/Plassey in 1757 in retaliation for the ‘Black Hole’ (did it exist?); Disraeli verbosely saying nothing about the so-called Indian ‘mutiny’ 1857 (‘the East as a career’); and the question of legalizing Opium in China and the advent of Matheson-Jardine Company after the East India Company comes to an end (‘quid pro quo’). All of this brings us back to the realities of global investment and regeneration in Europe today, as international capital returns to the port of London to redevelop the old East India Company shipyards in Deptford.”
15/5/2014, 21h, Cinema Europa, Zagreb, Croatia
John Hutnyk: Quid pro quo: the East as a career
7th Subversive festival: “Power and Freedom in the Time of Control”
Moderator: Bernard Koludrović
This talk in a series of three on capital was at the Subversive Festival in Zagreb. The second talk is here (Translating Capital in Context) and it makes sense to see the second talk first [the first one in Rijeka was not recorded, but was based on my text on Citizen Kane], not least because it will help explain why the conceit in this third talk has Marx relocated to India, which of course he was always deeply interested in, but he never went, only picking up bits of info, and some myths – eg the horror stories of Jagannath etc – from his wide-ranging and varied reading. I think it is justified to deploy Marx to Calcutta, at least in fantasy, though its true not even Engels took his father’s advice to go to Calcutta to start in business. The old boys were European bound, but this did not mean they did not seek out the revolution elsewhere.
What also should be mentioned (the parts here are – great job – edited and slightly reordered, and the opening by Bernard missed) is that in this talk I set out to look at three different moments. 1) the arrival of Clive in Calcutta after the ‘sham scandal’ of the Black Hole in 1756; 2) the first all-India war of Independence, the so-called ‘mutiny’ 100 years later and; 3) the quid pro quo return of originary capital to the site of the East India Company shipyard in London in present times, under the aegis of the Farrell’s development of Convoys’ Wharf, Deptford, for Hutchinson Whampoa.
I am slowly writing this out as a long, too long, chapter, so this version is pretty schematic, but you will get the drift of new work. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks also to the crew at Subversive, especially Karolina Hrga, and Bernard Koludrović who was chair.
Abstract:
“Marx writing on India is key to understanding Capital. My argument is that we can make sense of Marx today by examining his theoretical and journalistic work together, each informed by an emergent anthropology, by historical hermeneutics, by a critique of political economy and by attention to a global political contest that mattered more than philosophy. Marx reading history, already against the grain and without being able to make actual alliances, is nevertheless seeking allies in a revolutionary cause. Is it possible to observe Marx coming round to realise, after the shaping experience of the 1848-1852 European uprisings, the possibilities for the many different workers of the world to unite? I consider the sources Marx finds available, what he reads, and how his writing practice parses critical support as habitual politics, and how far subcontinental events, themes and allegories are a presence in the key moves of his masterwork Capital almost as if India were a refocused bromide for Europe, just as slavery is for wages. I will take up four cases – the ‘founding’ of Calcutta by Job Charnock (disputed); the story of Clive sacking Chandernagore and going on to defeat Suraj-ud-duala at Palashi/Plassey in 1757 in retaliation for the ‘Black Hole’ (did it exist?); Disraeli verbosely saying nothing about the so-called Indian ‘mutiny’ 1857 (‘the East as a career’); and the question of legalizing Opium in China and the advent of Matheson-Jardine Company after the East India Company comes to an end (‘quid pro quo’). All of this brings us back to the realities of global investment and regeneration in Europe today, as international capital returns to the port of London to redevelop the old East India Company shipyards in Deptford.”
15/5/2014, 21h, Cinema Europa, Zagreb, Croatia
John Hutnyk: Quid pro quo: the East as a career
7th Subversive festival: “Power and Freedom in the Time of Control”
Moderator: Bernard Koludrović
Research Interests:
Click the weblink: ___
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Click on the 'View on web' link not the title: ___
Research Interests:
Click on the 'View on web' link not the title: ___ Culture Now in conversation with Antony Gormley at ICA feb 2013 On 26 Jan 2013, a talk at Tate Modern on the Sharjah Art Foundation Biennale proposed theme of New Cultural... more
Click on the 'View on web' link not the title: ___
Culture Now in conversation with Antony Gormley at ICA feb 2013
On 26 Jan 2013, a talk at Tate Modern on the Sharjah Art Foundation Biennale proposed theme of New Cultural Cartographies.
Translating Capital – Subversive Festival, Zagreb (1st vid)
Quid pro Quo – Subversive Festival, Zagreb (2nd vid)
Pantomime Terror – inaugural Professorial Lecture 30.9.2008 Goldsmiths
Culture Now in conversation with Antony Gormley at ICA feb 2013
On 26 Jan 2013, a talk at Tate Modern on the Sharjah Art Foundation Biennale proposed theme of New Cultural Cartographies.
Translating Capital – Subversive Festival, Zagreb (1st vid)
Quid pro Quo – Subversive Festival, Zagreb (2nd vid)
Pantomime Terror – inaugural Professorial Lecture 30.9.2008 Goldsmiths
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Review Essay of Debjani Bhattacharyya's 'Ecology and Empire', Amites Mukhopadhyay's 'Living with Disasters' and Annu Jalais' 'Forest of Tigers' (mention also made of Laura Bear, Iftekhar Iqbal and Amitav Ghosh' books) by John Hutnyk. "An... more
Review Essay of Debjani Bhattacharyya's 'Ecology and Empire', Amites Mukhopadhyay's 'Living with Disasters' and Annu Jalais' 'Forest of Tigers' (mention also made of Laura Bear, Iftekhar Iqbal and Amitav Ghosh' books) by John Hutnyk. "An outpouring of books on the Sundarbans delta and other Bengal waterways immerse usin a new ecological analytic. An amazing liquid world churns at the end of long river sys-tems, the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Meghna and Hooghly. These rivers are sourced in theHimalaya, venerable mountains created when the shifting mass of the Indian subcontinentcrashed into the Eurasian tectonic plate, throwing up land that reaches the sky. Snow onthe mountains thaws into rivers—more than ever now with climate change—runningacross rich alluvial plains, depositing ever more silt and producing, on meeting the Bengalbasin, the largest delta area of forest and shifting islands in the world. That theSundarbans and the rivers themselves confront imminent environmental and ecologicalcatastrophe is a story told in each of the three books under review with a fluent yet tur-bulent style, wholly appropriate for tempestuous times."
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Hiya - here are the conference abstracts and agenda for the conference Innovations in the Social Sciences and Humanities at Ton Duc Thang University in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It is on in 17th-18th December 2021. There are 75 talks,... more
Hiya - here are the conference abstracts and agenda for the conference Innovations in the Social Sciences and Humanities at Ton Duc Thang University in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It is on in 17th-18th December 2021. There are 75 talks, should be great. Attend via zoom for free - sign on in a day or two before by filling the registration form at http://issh2021.tdtu.edu.vn best, John