Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates the interplay of technological constraint with sociopolitical context from sound and the film image, religious polemic to literary narrative, and old to new media. It explores archives of media forms and inquiring into the different ways in which economy and imagination may be linked. The book also demonstrates different approaches to elucidating the kinds of social difference embedded within the image as representation, whether through overt regulation, informal censorship or patterns of cultural reification. It also explores expressions of nostalgia and precarity that have yet to find an appropriate form to render them widely intelligible or to make them a springboard for intervention. The book draws on the utopia Sheikh constitutes drawing on select figures from different segments of the past, with an unembarrassed idealization of pre-modern selves.