Event overview
Using media aesthetics and political theory to understand recent events in India.
Populist Media Aesthetics?
Twenty-first century populist movements have actively mobilised sensory infrastructures of digital media. Sensory infrastructures create vehicles of connection, imitation and temporary collective association. Our contemporary technological milieu increasingly frames political aesthetics, particularly the questions of collective action and public speech. These emerge from the environmentality of contemporary digital media: this expanded landscape suggests that populist affect may not be an exception to liberal normativity but a routine form of the political in the twenty-first century.
This lecture draws from research in India on right-wing populist aesthetic techniques in the context of sensory infrastructures. This lecture draws from two research sites where violence and aesthetic strategies come together. The first is a legal event where activists are tried under anti-terror laws, where selective ‘evidentiary’ information is leaked in right-wing fora. The second looks at the routine referencing of anti-Muslim videos by once-peripheral vigilante actors, these now proliferate across public media, including television. Violence is now a running thread in the sensory world of technological populism. The lecture will look at these questions by bringing in recent debates on media aesthetics and the political.
Bio
Ravi Sundaram co-founded the Sarai programme at the CSDS along with Ravi Vasudevan and the Raqs Media Collective. Sarai grew to become one of India’s best-known experimental and critical research sites on media. Sundaram has co-edited the Sarai Reader series, The Public Domain (2001), The Cities of Everyday Life (2002), Shaping Technologies (2003), Crisis Media (2004). Sundaram is the author of Pirate Modernity: Media Urbanism in Delhi (2010) and edited No Limits: Media Studies from India (2015). His recent book Technopharmacology (with Joshua Neves, Aleena Chiaand Susanna Paasonen) came out in 2022. Sundaram’s essays have been translated into various languages in India, Asia, and Europe.
This event is held jointly with the German Historical Institute London: https://www.ghil.ac.uk/
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Jun 2024 | 5:30pm - 7:30pm |
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