Amit S. Rai

Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots

This question opens on to others: How are the technologies that are being developed to combat “terrorism” departures from or transformations of older technologies of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and nationalism? In what way do contemporary counterterrorism practices deploy these technologies, and how do these practices and technologies become the quotidian framework through which we are obliged to struggle, survive, and resist? Sexuality is central to the creation of a certain knowledge of terrorism, specifically that branch of strategic analysis that has entered the academic mainstream as “terrorism studies.” This knowledge has a history that ties the image of the modern terrorist to a much older figure, the racial and sexual monsters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Further, the construction of the pathologized psyche of the terroristmonster enables the practices of normalization, which in today’s context often means an aggressive heterosexual patriotism. As opposed to initial post–September 11 reactions, which focused narrowly on “the disappearance of women,” we consider the question of gender justice and queer politics through broader frames of reference, all with multiple genealogies—indeed, as we hope to show, gender and sexuality produce both hypervisible icons and the ghosts that haunt the machines of war. Thus, we make two related arguments: (1) that the construct of the terrorist relies on a knowledge of sexual perversity (failed heterosexuality, Western notions of the psyche, and a certain queer monstrosity); and (2) that normalization invites an aggressive heterosexual patriotism that we can see, for example, in dominant media representations (for example, The West Wing), and in the organizing efforts of Sikh Americans in response to September 11 (the fetish of the “turbaned” Sikh man is crucial here).1 The forms of power now being deployed in the war on terrorism in fact draw on processes of quarantining a racialized and sexualized other, even as Western norms of the civilized subject provide the framework through which these very same others become subjects to be corrected. Our itinerary begins with an examination of Michel Foucault’s figure of monstrosity as a member of the West’s “abnormals,” followed by a consideration of the uncanny return of the monster in the discourses of “terrorism studies.” We then move to the relationship Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism

Untimely Bollywood : globalization and India's new media assemblage

Known for its elaborate spectacle of music, dance, costumes, and fantastical story lines, Bollywood cinema is a genre that foregrounds narrative rupture, indeterminacy, and bodily sensation. In Untimely Bollywood , Amit S. Rai argues that the fast-paced, multivalent qualities of contemporary Bollywood cinema are emblematic of the changing conditions of media consumption in a globalizing India. Through analyses of contemporary media practices, Rai shifts the emphasis from a representational and linear understanding of the effects of audiovisual media to the multiple, contradictory, and evolving aspects of media events. He uses the Deleuzian concept of assemblage as a model for understanding the complex clustering of technological, historical, and physical processes that give rise to contemporary media practices. Exploring the ramifications of globalized media, he sheds light on how cinema and other popular media organize bodies, populations, and spaces in order to manage the risky excesses of power and sensation and to reinforce a liberalized postcolonial economy. Rai recounts his experience of attending the first showing of a Bollywood film in a single-screen theater in Bhopal: the sensory experience of the exhibition space, the sound system, the visual style of the film, the crush of the crowd. From that event, he elicits an understanding of cinema as a historically contingent experience of pleasure, a place where the boundaries of identity and social spaces are dissolved and redrawn. He considers media as a form of contagion, endlessly mutating and spreading, connecting human bodies, organizational structures, and energies, thus creating an inextricable bond between affect and capital. Expanding on the notion of media contagion, Rai traces the emerging correlation between the postcolonial media assemblage and capitalist practices, such as viral marketing and the development of multiplexes and malls in India.

Of monsters : Biopower, terrorism and excess in genealogies of monstrosity

Monsters gave birth to modernity: those unnamable figures of horror and fascination shadow civilization as its constitutive and abjected discontent. In Europe, from the late eighteenth century on, the term monstrosity mobilized a set of discursive practices that tied racial and sexual deviancy to an overall apparatus of discipline, and, later in the nineteenth century, to the emergence of biopolitics. This article draws a history of monstrosity through overlapping discourses, tying the contemporary figure of the monster-terrorist to the sexual and racial deviancy of what Michel Foucault termed the ‘Abnormals.’ Beginning with an engagement with Deleuzes and Foucaults notion of ‘biopolitics,’ this article follows the emergence of the monster-terrorist in that subfield of policy studies known as ‘terrorism studies.’ This article argues that specific and implicit conceptions of the civilized psyche, linked to norms of the heterosexual family, ground the figure of the Islamic terrorist in an older colonial discourse of the despotic and licentious Oriental male.

Bollywood Audiences Editorial1

What processes constitute Bollywood’s different audiences? This special issue of South Asian Popular Culture brings together an exciting and heterogeneous set of essays on the complex contexts of Bollywood audiences, and their changing analyses. What emerges through each of these essays is a sense of the dynamic and interpenetrating multiplicities of reception, production, exhibition, and circulation of Hindi-Urdu popular film culture. Through these multilayered analyses of social, bodily, technological, economic, historical, material, transnational, psychic, and sexual processes, we also see emerging a new method for understanding the changing nature of Bollywood audiences globally. The method is pragmatic: not what does Bollywood mean, but what does Bollywood do? This question, and its assumption of a changing multiplicity, forms the basis of the articles collected in this special issue. The answers may surprise our readers; they will certainly challenge some of the accepted truisms that have saturated critical discourse in the moment of Bollywood’s ascendance into cosmopolitan chic. First, these essays foreground the various social contestations at the heart of Bollywood film culture. From immigrant enclaves and identity formations centred on the local movie theatre screening Hindi-Urdu films in Toronto, to the politics of Bollywood’s fashion sub-industry in Mumbai, the global, indeed transnationalizing contexts of this film culture need to be understood as local negotiations of historically shifting relations of image production and consumption. These essays insist that both social and psychic contestations are the very stuff of how audiences constitute their own relationship to changing film narratives, dance, and music; audio-visual technologies and theatre spaces; shifting aesthetic codes and values; and social norms in the moment of their dissolution and reconstitution. Active audiences are constantly renegotiating the terms of their pleasure. Second, meaning is secondary. As many of these essays make clear and in contrast to the dominant vein of scholarship on Bollywood, the negotiations of Bollywood audiences are not centred around securing meaning, but of articulating imagistic and aural regimes with social practices. This process is not essentially a semiological one (centring the cinematic signifier on a given identity); indeed, meaning is always a kind of ‘back-formation’ from processes whose own specific dynamism tends elsewhere. Rather, its main lines of differentiation constitute contingent, and hence temporary, articulations of image, sound, technologies, bodies, and social practice. These essays suggest a method of addressing these contingent

The affect of Jugaad: Frugal innovation and postcolonial practice in India’s mobile phone ecology

Previous studies have identified affect as constitutive of and woven into everyday life. Less work has focused on how affect is designed and produced through consumer services and goods to modulate human–technical assemblages for commercial and economic ends. In this paper, I draw on social geography, affect studies, and postcolonial media studies to analyse value creation in the Indian mobile phone market, specifically in the deployment of an Indian form of workaround called ‘jugaad’. Following nonrepresentational analyses of digital practices, I identify this market as a collection of human–technical assemblages that are marketed through a rhetoric of frugal innovation or jugaad. Moving through examples from fieldnotes, case studies, and reports, the analysis of the affective atmospheres of Indian mobile phone marketing communications appraises televised Bharti Airtel adverts. Findings of this analysis suggest affect has spatial, temporal, and economic dimensions, as well as being embedded in everyday experiences of a newly distributed subaltern agency.

For an ethnography toward the virtual: Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and nonlinear ImMedia

In this paper, I pursue a method of ethnographic media research that foregrounds the relation of embodied experience to what Gilles Deleuze called ‘transcendental empiricism.’ For Deleuze the critique of Kants theory of a transcendental subject grounding space-time moves thought toward an intuition of the time of becoming, the being of time itself: it is not we who constitute time, but time constitutes and reconstitutes subjectivity. The aim of such a method is to understand the organization of sensory-motor circuits that stabilizes the movement of becoming as clichés entrenched in habit. I argue that Deleuzes transcendental empiricism is a robust method to diagram South Asian medias empirical field in terms of its various circuits between the virtual and the actual. This method allows us to pragmatically diagram the doubleness of the mobile – as intensive potentializer and biopolitical control grid – in which media form dynamic feedbacked assemblages with the bodys sensorimotor processes. Mobile connectivity is unmediated and direct, which is why it is both virtual and actual at once. Thus, it has a definite history while also being part of the body as a center of indetermination (virtuality).

EVERY CITIZEN IS A COP WITHOUT THE UNIFORM

This essay explores the question of sexualization in Hindi-Urdu cinema by arguing for an analysis of the effects of the movement-image-sound as sets of habituations at the level of the sub-individual, in the shocks both disrupting and producing sensorimotor schemas, and thus for a media assemblages approach to the new angry young man genre in Bollywood that thinks through the politico-ontological implication of flashbacks and interruptions in these films.

Intermedia emergence: The fourth screen

We live today, in the Diaspora, and on the subcontinent enwrapped in increasingly instantaneous media flows. Yet this is not a more complex media ecology than that which prior generations experienced. It is qualitatively different, and its conceptual framework must also qualitatively change. Not surprisingly, many critics have noted how globalization is marked by intensive media becomings: rates of flow, density of information, gradients of noise (entropy) in communication channels, emergent media-body multiplicities, resonation of intensity across populations. In places as disparate as Jackson Heights (Queens, NY); Star City (Birmingham, UK); Jahangirabad, Bhopal (MP); Chor Bazaar, Mumbai (Maharashtra); or Maruthahalli (Bangalore), changes in access to technology, and shifts in computer-aided perception have transformed the very nature of value, consumption, pleasure, and work. Capitalist, non-capitalist, bazaar-capitalist, new media today moves and exists across technological platforms to valorize brands and logos, styles and sensation, movements and affects in a way that necessitates a clear consideration of the relevance and limitation of nation-based analyses of these becomings. Themovement of information is better understood not as the free play of virtual and arbitrary signifiers disseminating the order words of the secular, modernizing nation-state, but through concepts such as patterned flow, gradients of intensity, molar and minor becomings, controlled modulation, affective and emergent capacities, bodily kinesthesia, and creative value. These concepts taken from a range of contemporary forms of critique – feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, biopolitical – necessitate that we go back to older critical frameworks with a pragmatic understanding of their changing domain of validity. The emergence of the new media today in South Asia has signaled an event the meaning of which remains obscure, but whose reality is rapidly evolving along gradients of intensity. These phase transitions are the occasion when fluctuations (noise) in a volatile system (a body, a media ecology, a public sphere) have both macroscopic effects, and a new capacity to ‘sense’ shifts in force. Contemporary media ecologies in and from South Asia have come to sense a new arrangement of value, sensation, and force. This evolution from nation-based forms of communication (Doordarshan, All India Radio, the ‘national’ feudal romance) conforms and mutates the structure of feeling of national and local belonging. We, as scholars of South Asian popular culture, are as concerned with understanding how people are making meaning from the new media as how subaltern tinkering (pirating, peer to peer file sharing, hacking, noise jamming, ‘Indymedia,’ etc.) does things to and in the new media. Meaning and pragmatics, therefore, are feedback looped together in the creation of new publics, new affects, and new experiences of pleasure and value. Consider, for instance, this recent précis of the emergence of value added services (VAS) in India’s booming mobile phone market. The company making these prognostications is Delhi-based one-97.

The black spectre of sympathy: The "occult" relation in Jane Eyre

Amit S. Rai Dr. Amit S. Rai received his PhD in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University. Since 1995 he has been a Full-time Faculty member in Cultural Studies at Lang College, New School University. His work has appeared in Screen, Discourse, Diaspora, South Asia Research, Social Text, and South Asian Popular Culture among other journals. His study of sympathy and power, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power, 176

Intensive Bollywood: Media and nonlinear history in South Asia

This special issue of South Asian Popular Culture came about while the two editors, Priya Jha and Amit S. Rai, were in India researching respectively the transnational dimensions of Hindi cinema and mobile phone cultures. A conversation developed between us around the limits of representational analysis in South Asian film and media studies. This conversation quickly took both a political and historical form: How do we approach the emergence of various media forms? Looking over the development of expressive forms from precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts we see something that is always both potential and actual at once, embodied experiences of collective expressions and the material flows of sensation, information, and populations. This nonlinear history, nondialectical and intensive, calls for new experimental methods of analysis. This affirmation of an experimental methodology marks the untimely birth of this special issue. Today, from digital radio to the mobile phone, from precolonial tamashas to hatke Bollywood, different affects and novel perceptions resonate with new media ecologies. These media processes are covered over by a form of criticism that takes the actual media form for history itself. We are interested in returning criticism to the nonlinear field of potentiality from which these actual media forms emerge. The dominance of Hindi-Urdu cinema in South Asian media studies has shaped popular cultural criticism, to the point of often occluding this history. Thus, Hindi-Urdu cinema has been discussed for the most part in three ways: