John Hutnyk

Photogenic Poverty: Souvenirs and Infantilism

This article discusses the photograph and the souvenir together as relics of a trinketizing touristic countenance. It argues that the reified image memorializes the exotic other, and a romanticized view of childhood, in the midst of war and deprivation. Charity and memory are bound together here with geo-politics. An analysis of similarities and differences in the ways photographs and souvenirs trace encounters with ‘photogenic poverty’ is urgent. A critical political response would aim to do more than the infantilizing gestures of charity and aid now favoured by liberal concern under late imperial capitalism.

Tales from the Raj

What is Empire? What is not? Where is it? Where is it not? The most general backand- forth questions to begin. We could start by asking whether there is now anything outside the Empire of capital. Hardt and Negri declare as their initial task “to grasp the constitution of the order being formed today” (2000, 3). It is undoubtedly helpful to see an increased arsenal of concepts available for the difficult task of naming the conjuncture at which contemporary capitalism currently sits, but a deft handling of concepts requires careful contextualization and consideration. Notions of difference, hybridity, travel, subsumption, dialectic, multitude, and rights are, in various ways, all conjured with terms. There will be reason to examine the tricks more closely. It is also very good news to find these concepts discussed in a “postmodernist” text that does not pretend that the political heroes of the working class are never-tobe- mentioned ghosts. Stalin, Lenin, Luxemburg, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh are cited on occasion; names airbrushed out of the academy far too often are at least given recognition here. A kind of camouflage-oriented airbrushing wafted for many years throughout Western scholarship as demonic and un-American activities were reified and simplified and the notion of Marxism, and the future of Communism, became a congealed orthodoxy. Such misrepresentation is hard to dislodge, and it is welcome news that now at least some attempt to rework the terms has arrived.

Jungle studies: the state of anthropology

Abstract The anthropological project, tired and exhausted after years searching for ‘methodological absolution’, remains mired in a spiral of self-doubt and self-indulgent ‘crisis’. Anthropological teaching continues the very complicities that a self-critical reflexivity professed to avoid. Co-option and incorporation, even at the best of times. This essay asks just what would break the cycle of ‘suicidal rejoicing’ for an ‘end of anthropology’ that never comes, that continues to be taught anew, over and over? Nietzsche once suggested that what is falling down should be pushed. A reconfigured anthropology would be a different discipline, perhaps reinvesting the tasks of knowledge production with a purpose that was not wholly slave to the same interests of power. There is much to be cleared away.

Music & Politics: An Introduction

This is an introduction to the section on Music and Politics including a description of the context of these essays, their individual contributions and their thematic interrelations.

Poetry after Guantanamo: M.I.A.

The recent work of the Sri-Lankan-British musician and sonic ‘curator’ known as M.I.A. (real name: Mathangi Arulpragasam) is considered as a commentary on atrocity and read alongside the well known essay ‘The Storyteller’ by Walter Benjamin and comments on Auschwitz by Theodor Adorno. The storytelling here is updated for a contemporary context where global war impacts us all, more or less visibly, more, or less, acknowledged. It is argued that the controversy over M.I.A.s Romain Gavras video Born Free is exemplary of the predicament of art in the face of violence, crisis and terror – with this track, and video, M.I.A.s work faced a storm of criticism which I want to critique in turn, in an attempt, at least, to learn to make or discern more analytic distinctions amongst concurrent determinations of art. A careful reading of Adorno can in the end teach us to see Born Free anew.

Comparative Anthropology and Evans-Pritchard's Nuer Photograph y:

For all the heat generated in the debates about the authenticity of ethnograpy, it seems that anthropology goes on in pretty much the same ways as always. A major theme that can be traced, in some manner or other, through all anthropological pronouncements, is that of comparison. There can be no doubt that this singular but massively broad interest informs various manifestations of anthropology from Herodotus onwards. There are many forms of comparison self compared to other, other to other, and so on and there has been in the past much discussion of the problems of comparison, the validity of comparisons, and of the generalizations, with varying degrees of boundedness, to which comparisons so often give rise. Why then does it seem that comparison, theory, generalization (I am not suggesting these as synonyms, but as linked in important ways) have not attracted the same degree of attention that ethnography, in its ’crisis of representation’, has attracted? Things have become so difficult in anthropology that we are no longer able to be sure of our descriptions, let alone having time to worry about what we might or might not make of what we describe. Of course at first this will look like a false separation to writers who have long learnt that every description is already an interpretation but since interpretation has been going on, with considerable prestige, and immunity from the doubts raised even doubts raised by ’master’ interpreters like Geertz ( 1988) it does seem that it will be

Music for Euro-Maoists: On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among Pop Stars

This article takes up the appearance in the club circuits of Europe of cultural matter derived from radical peasant insurgency in West Bengal. It asks why the political content of cultural performance is so often glossed as exotica, and writes back some of the history of transnational, or internationalist, politics into this forum. Linking this to the celebrated Booker Prizewinning text of Arundhati Roy, and Gayatri Spivaks translations of Mahasweta Devis writing, the contradictions of cultural politics are foregrounded.

Contexts for Distraction

This paper discusses the events of August 2011 through our reading of a series of reports and responses by academics and commentators. These are critically and collectively evaluated as lacking in so far as we see the deployment of gang-talk, the promotion of role models, narrow-cast notions of race and platitudes about the justice system as a distraction from wider issues. Providing context for “reading” the riots/uprisings, we suggest that, at stake in each case, we see the limits of a scholarly commentary that remains unprepared to address the conflict and turmoil of “Big Society” austerity thinking.

Sexy Sammy and Red Rosie? From Burning Books to the War on Terror

Writing within the sonic register of a soundtrack that plundered the diasporic mind-set of a certain “London” massive, Hanif Kureishi was widely criticized for his contribution as writer to two films in the 1980s: My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987). Less lyrically perhaps—and less filmic—Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses was famously set on fire in Bradford in 1989. Antiracist sexualities, street riots, and book burnings were taken to mark the mobilization of a diverse and complicated British Asian presence on the streets of the United Kingdom. The point that interests the author here is the reconfiguration of the streetscape of diaspora and terror in the years since these films and the burning of the book. Burning streets and books (not particularly good in themselves) are replaced with a more virulent racial profiling in contemporary times—a constant anxiety about and accusations againstMuslims (and by extension all British Asians), who are made uncomfortable at best, bombed into democracy elsewhere.

Beyond television studies

That a new media studies is needed is clear; that a rapid, inspiration-seeking survey can find this from South Asia in an international frame, after 10 years of the War of Terror, comes as no surprise. The obsessions and ideologies of television globally are still there to be critiqued, and this can be done with some of the authors considered here. That these readings are contingent only means that reviewing contemporary events through a distorting lens is also a part of the game and a wider remit of media studies is now urgent. From the anti-Muslim ultra-racist attacks by Breivik in Norway to the photographed-but-not-televised scenes in the White House situation room in May 2011, through the grainy aesthetic of green night vision combat patrol videos, there is a need to deploy critical ideas gleaned from the work of authors such as Ravi Sundaram, Arvind Rajagopal, M. Mhadava Prasad and Ashish Rajadhyaksha. The contemporary has a political purchase that was once national, but is now both wider and more specific, and more urgent. For a new media studies.