requiem: sacredmediacow
We have now finally gotten peer-review comments back from a book that I have been co-editing the past year. The book “Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change” will now be published sometime 2010 after a few relatively standard changes / edits / modifications. My chapter passed without any edits required so quite happy to avoid the extra work.
Why this book is important is that this book also represents the requiem for the research collective I co-ran a few years and through with which we had a lot of fun and made quite a lot noise in its heyday. This is how we described ourselves:
SACREDMEDIACOW was an independent postgraduate centre for research and production at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Having said that, we are not really a centre for India media research (perhaps, a periphery of Indian media research would be a more appropriate title), but more of a Collective. In any case, being both practitioners as well as academics interested in India media, our aim is to provoke, to intervene and to entertain. Perhaps all three at the same time, until even we can’t tell the difference. While a significant part of our activities will take place at our web portal, we will also be making links between practitioners and researchers globally by generating events and conferences where such activity can take place.
While active, we organized panels, a conference, events, web interventions and all kinds of things that combined the few things that are rarely together in academia: theory and fun. Now, time has passed on and we have all moved onto other exciting things. HOWEVER, as there have been a lot of interest in Sacredmediacow, I had a chat with our politbyro recently and we would be happy to PASS THE BATON ON to a younger generation if there is interest in this. So those interested specifically in South Asian Media and serious about continuing the work, do get in touch with me (or any other one of us).
In any case, stay tuned with the book that will come out shortly. A tentative description for the book reads as follows – besides the introduction, my chapter will be titled “Theory and Practice in Emerging Digital Cultures in India.”
Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change: Concept Note
Rhetoric about India’s rapid economic growth and burgeoning middle classes suggests something new and significant is taking place. Something is changing, we are told: India is shining, the elephant is rising and the 21st century will be Indian.
Arguably, one key loci where such re-imaginings of India’s contested future take place is in its mass media. Yet much of the analysis on contemporary India has overlooked the complex role media has in articulating India’s economic and cultural landscape. The proposed book “Indian Mass Media and Politics of Change” aims to be an intervention towards empirically-driven yet theoretically-nuanced analysis of the politics of change taking place daily across the cinema halls, TV screens, newspapers and computer monitors in India today.
But what do we mean by change? French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once remarked that research should look at two things. The first is that the abstract does not explain anything but it instead must be explained; the second is that the aim of research is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal but instead is to find the conditions under which something new is produced (ie how things change). Similarly, the aim of the book is to provide a systematic analysis of the broader issues that underlie this abstract and often muddled notion of change. What do these articulations tell us about the broader questions of tradition and modernity played out in the media in India today? How can it help us understand the problems of history, teleology and how the future is talked about? And how are these articulations of change ultimately implicated in wider political projects of development and progress?
The different chapters of the book provide snapshots from Indian media today where the articulations of change are refracted in myriad and different ways. By doing so, it provides the opening towards a more systematic analysis of the role the mass media has today, both in India and globally, in articulating the politics of change: this elusive boundary between the past, the fleeting present and the constantly re-imagined horizon of our open futures.
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