ABSTRACT

Collective political projects have become ephemeral and are subject to radical forms of erasure through cooptation, division, redefinition or intimidation in present times. Media and Utopia responds to the resulting crisis of the social by investigating the links between mediation and political imagination. This volume addresses those utopian spaces historically constituted through media, and analyses the conditions that made them possible. Individual essays deal with non-Western histories of technopolitics through distinctive perspectives on how to conceive the relationship between social form, everyday life, and utopian possibility, and by examining a range of media formats and genres � from print, sound, and film to new media. With contributions from major scholars in the field, this book will be of interest to researchers and scholars of media studies, culture studies, sociology, modern South Asian history, and politics.

chapter |16 pages

Introduction

part I|62 pages

Archive and imagination

chapter 2|22 pages

Fetish power unbound

A small history of ‘woman’ in Chinese cinema 1

part II|70 pages

Genealogy

chapter 4|22 pages

Tracking utopias

Technology, labour and secularism in Bombay cinema (1930s–1940s)

chapter 5|30 pages

National becoming, regional variation and everyday moments

The Film Enquiry Committee, Uttar Pradesh and the student cinema-goer

chapter 6|16 pages

Museum as metaphor

The politics of an imagined Ahmedabad

part III|86 pages

Nostalgia

chapter 7|20 pages

The labour of self-making

Youth service workers and postsocialist urban development in Kolkata 1

chapter 9|20 pages

Past futures of old media

Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home

chapter 10|26 pages

Sonic ruptures

Music, mobility and the media

part IV|52 pages

Newness

chapter 11|16 pages

Media and imagination

Ramananda Chatterjee and his journals in three languages

chapter 13|17 pages

Posthuman amusements

Gaming and virtuality

part V|30 pages

Word and the world

chapter 14|28 pages

Populist publics

Print capitalism and crowd violence beyond liberal frameworks 1

part VI|37 pages

Political theology

chapter 15|35 pages

On innocence

Blasphemy, pan-Islam and the uneven mediation of utopia