Dev Nath Pathak

Ravi Kumar

Sasanka Perera

Against the Nation invites readers to explore South Asia as a place and as an idea with a sense of reflection and nuance rather than submitting to conventional understanding of the region merely in geopolitical terms. The authors take the readers across a vast terrain of prospects like visual culture, music, film, knowledge systems and classrooms, myth and history as well as forms of politics that offer possibilities for reading South Asia as a collective enterprise that has historical precedents as well as untapped ideological potential for the future.

Thinking Like South Asians

Against the Nation

Biswajit Das

Ratan Kumar Roy

This book critically examines the cultural politics of visuals in South Asia. It makes a key contribution to the study of visuals in the social sciences in South Asia by studying the interplay of the seen and unseen, and the visual and nonvisual. The volume explores interrelated themes including the vernacular visual and visuality, ways of seeing in South Asia and the methodology of hermeneutic sensorium, anxiety and politics of the visuals across the region and the trajectory of visual anthropology, significance of visual symbols and representations in contemporary performances and folk art, visual landscapes of loss and recovery and representation of refugees, visual public in South Asia and making of visuals for contemporary consumptions. The chapters unravel the concepts of visual, visibility, visuality while attending to determinant meta-ideas, such as memory and modernity, trajectories of tradition, fluidity and hybridity, and visual performative politics. Based on interdisciplinary resources, the chapters in this volume present a wide array of empirical findings across India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, along with analytical readings of the visual culture of the subcontinent across borders. The book will be useful to scholars and researchers of visual and cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, sociology, political studies, media and communications studies, performance studies, art history, television and film studies, photography studies, and South Asian studies. It will also interest practitioners including artists, visual artists, photographers, filmmakers and media critics.

Visuals Beyond Borders

Seeing South Asia

This book critically examines the role and politics of humour and the performance of power in South Asia. What does humour do and how does it manifest when lived political circumstances experience ruptures or instability? Can humour that emerges in such circumstances be viewed as a specific narrative on the nature of democracy in the region? Drawing upon essays from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, this volume discusses many crucial historical and contemporary themes, including dance-drama performances in northern India; caste and stand-up comedy in India; cartoon narratives of citizens’ anxieties; civic participation through social media memes in Sri Lanka; media, politics and humorous public in Bangladesh; the politics of performance in India; and the influence of humour and satire as political commentaries. The volume explores the impact of humour in South Asian folklore, ritual performances, media and journalism, and online technologies. This topical and interdisciplinary book will be essential for scholars and researchers of cultural studies, political science, sociology and social anthropology, media and communication studies, theatre and performance studies, and South Asian studies.

Anxiety, Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times

Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia

Taking South Asia as its focus, this wide-ranging collection probes the general reluctance of the cultural anthropology to engage with contemporary visual art and artists, including painting, sculpture, performance art and installation. Through case studies engaged equally in anthropology and visual studies, contributors examine art and artistic production in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal to bring the social and political complexities of artistic practice to the fore. Demonstrating the potential of the visual as a means to understand a society, its values, and its politics, this volume ranges across discourses of anthropology, sociology, biography, memory, art history, and contemporary practices of visual art. Ultimately, Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia simultaneously expands and challenges the disciplinary foci of two fields: it demonstrates to art criticism and art history the necessity of anthropological and sociological methodologies and theories, while at the same time challenging the “iconophobia” of social sciences.

Decoding Visual Worlds

Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia

What does the idea/concept of South Asia mean in a time when borders have become absolute, predetermining our sense of self, culture, and politics? In a critical and creative engagement with this question, Another South Asia! attempts to explore novel possibilities beyond the stratagem of nation states. Amidst the shrinking utopias in the various disciplinary discourses due to the predominance of cartographic reason, the essays in this book propose a new lease to the utopian imagination of the region. Grounded in history, civilization, culture, and people across boundaries, located in the domain of post-disciplinary enquiries, this book enables a dialogue among the Sociologists and Social Anthropologists, students and scholars of International Relations, Literary and Performance studies, Art History, Diaspora studies, Historical and Civilizational studies and South Asian studies to name a few. This book will interest scholars as well as ordinary readers and persuade them to imagine another South Asia to ensure a better future of the region.

Another South Asia

Amiya Kumar Das

Compiling various strands of the dis/enchantment with development discourse in contemporary South Asia, with specific focus on the cases from India, this edited book brings together anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians to refresh the understanding of development. It introduces ways of thinking “otherwise” about development discourse and what the contributors term “developmentalism”—the social enchantment with development. The cultural discourse of development in contemporary South Asia manifests not only in the official programs of state agencies, but in cinema, television, and mass media. Dear to various stakeholders—from government leaders and manufacturers to consumers and the electorate—is the axiom of a “development(al) society.” Organized to bridge familiar understandings of development with radical ways of thinking through developmentalism, this book holds value for those engaged in the anthropology and sociology of development, development studies, South Asian studies, as well as for development professionals working for state and non-governmental organizations.

Dev Nath Pathak

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