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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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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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Research Interests:
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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Research Interests: History, Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, South Asian Studies, and 12 moreSouth Asia, Melodrama, Film History, Bollywood (Anthropology), Indian Cinema, India, Festivals, Bollywood cinema, Communication and media Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, South Asian Film Studies, and movie theater
This is an introduction to the section on Music and Politics including a description of the context of these essays, their individual contributions and their thematic interrelations.
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Chapter on William Burroughs and Fieldwork. From Celbrating Transgression, co-ed with Ursula Rao, Berghahn, 2005. It is crazy expensive in Hardback but can be found used on amzn for way less. What this chapter tried to do is throw out... more
Chapter on William Burroughs and Fieldwork. From Celbrating Transgression, co-ed with Ursula Rao, Berghahn, 2005. It is crazy expensive in Hardback but can be found used on amzn for way less.
What this chapter tried to do is throw out some speculations of fieldwork that might help me rethink the anthro project I got tangled up with but never thought quite worked. Enemy of anthropology from within and all that. this book was a festschrift to klaus Peter Koepping, a most brilliant anthropologist and model for the discipline of ill-discipline. he to writes on films.
1. The idea that anthropology is about one culture understanding another, in some sort of binary exchange mechanism, seems absurd. There are no distinct cultures, understandings are multiple. Balance sheets are false documents. But these absurdities are the ethic of anthropology, as a trickster discipline, conjuring its way to a faulty comprehension (Köpping 1989). Ethnographers might lie. They might be brilliant. They might be government spies, or worse, revolutionaries. In an anxious history, the drive to rethink culture must engage with diversity, media, commerce and yet is nothing if it does not encourage the opening of minds that only transgressive quest(ion)ing can ensure.
What this chapter tried to do is throw out some speculations of fieldwork that might help me rethink the anthro project I got tangled up with but never thought quite worked. Enemy of anthropology from within and all that. this book was a festschrift to klaus Peter Koepping, a most brilliant anthropologist and model for the discipline of ill-discipline. he to writes on films.
1. The idea that anthropology is about one culture understanding another, in some sort of binary exchange mechanism, seems absurd. There are no distinct cultures, understandings are multiple. Balance sheets are false documents. But these absurdities are the ethic of anthropology, as a trickster discipline, conjuring its way to a faulty comprehension (Köpping 1989). Ethnographers might lie. They might be brilliant. They might be government spies, or worse, revolutionaries. In an anxious history, the drive to rethink culture must engage with diversity, media, commerce and yet is nothing if it does not encourage the opening of minds that only transgressive quest(ion)ing can ensure.
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1.1 The idea that anthropology is about one culture understanding another, in some sort of binary exchange mechanism, seems absurd. There are no distinct cultures, understandings are multiple. Balance sheets are false documents. But these... more
1.1 The idea that anthropology is about one culture understanding another, in some sort of binary exchange mechanism, seems absurd. There are no distinct cultures, understandings are multiple. Balance sheets are false documents. But these absurdities are the ethic of ...
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How are challenging pasts remembered, and how are they forgotten? Fifty years after the end of the American war, 70 years after the end of the war with France, the remnants of trauma remain real and tediously present. Psychological and... more
How are challenging pasts remembered, and how are they forgotten? Fifty years after the end of the American war, 70 years after the end of the war with France, the remnants of trauma remain real and tediously present. Psychological and historical-representational violence continues: simultaneously an impossible burden to carry and difficult to move beyond. A popular slogan insists that Vietnam is a country, not just a war. However, worldwide images and understandings of war are shaped by what happened in Vietnam, and a critique of violence must take up the structural role of memory even as time passes. Commemoration challenges form a grid to contain and suppress unwanted and resistive elements.
The research for this essay took up a series of images in connected consecutive frames: history, heritage, commercial and global manifestations of the “same” material iconography. Considering a central and famous representation depicting the defeat of the French, contradictions and ambiguities are built into the material context gleaned from news reports, documentaries, cinema, memoirs, archives, museums, art and scholarship. Memory’s double entendre plays with the relevance of structure in images that demand close attention, even when institutionalised as reified consumer entertainments. Here, the war may still be wholly political, especially where artefacts remain visible but, in interesting ways, are also ignored.
The research for this essay took up a series of images in connected consecutive frames: history, heritage, commercial and global manifestations of the “same” material iconography. Considering a central and famous representation depicting the defeat of the French, contradictions and ambiguities are built into the material context gleaned from news reports, documentaries, cinema, memoirs, archives, museums, art and scholarship. Memory’s double entendre plays with the relevance of structure in images that demand close attention, even when institutionalised as reified consumer entertainments. Here, the war may still be wholly political, especially where artefacts remain visible but, in interesting ways, are also ignored.
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In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx notes that the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel had observed that “all the great events and characters of world history occur twice” (Marx 1852/2002:19). To this Marx added the wry observation... more
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx notes that the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel had observed that “all the great events and characters of world history occur twice” (Marx 1852/2002:19). To this Marx added the wry observation that this repetition meant that the second time round things happened as farce. Few would disagree that this sentiment captures a key element
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Ravi Rants Okay!'The sitar star [Ravi Shankar] has® nally come out and said what most of us have been thinking all alongÐthat the White bands who try to be cool with Asian music suck! ¼ The Maestro has blasted Kula Shaker for... more
Ravi Rants Okay!'The sitar star [Ravi Shankar] has® nally come out and said what most of us have been thinking all alongÐthat the White bands who try to be cool with Asian music suck! ¼ The Maestro has blasted Kula Shaker for being unoriginal ¼
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1989 review of Works and Lives.
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Clifford Geertz was among the relatively few academics and even fewer anthropologists who attained the status of public intellectual. (How many anthropologists have been received by the pope?) Among his peers in an age when obscurantism... more
Clifford Geertz was among the relatively few academics and even fewer anthropologists who attained the status of public intellectual. (How many anthropologists have been received by the pope?) Among his peers in an age when obscurantism is likely to be taken for professionality, he brought intelligence into the living room. There were rewards as well as punishments for this accomplishment. He was more influential among scholars and intellectuals generally than in anthropology, although he certainly had a devoted following within a field he considered elusive if not evasive. Indeed, he rarely engaged with anthropologists directly on their own terms, although he could, on occasion, make acerbic remarks about some of them. As an anthropologist, it is difficult to know whom to compare him with. A possible candidate only in relation to the profession because her approaches were quite opposite to his, although their subject matter at times overlapped, was perhaps Mary Douglas. She was very much her own kind of structuralist, where one might argue that Geertz was his own kind of hermeneutician. Both viewed the world as sufficiently idiosyncratic to require somewhat idiosyncratic ideas for its examination.2
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review essay of Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer, focussing on his pics.
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ABSTRACT
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Review of Gillespie