Raminder Kaur

Identities: new directions in uncertain times

In the inaugural issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, founding editor Nina Glick-Schiller wrote of the ways in which issues of identity and culture had emerged as central to “the current historical moment” (1994, p. 1). The original vision for the journal was to “explore the relationship between racial, ethnic and national identities and power hierarchies within national and global arenas” (1994, p. 3), to critically engage with the processes of cultural representation and politics, to explore the relationship of culture and power, and to examine “the multiple processes by which cultural representation, domination and resistance are embedded in social relationships” (1994, p. 3). The view of culture which lies at the heart of this vision was one inseparable from processes of struggle in political, economic and social arenas, and which considered the resurgence of strong racial, ethnic, nationalist and transnational exclusionary identities alongside processes of resistance, hybridization and change – what Glick-Schiller described as “a paradox of our time” (1994, p. 1). In the nearly two decades since the journal was founded, issues of culture and identity have moved to the centre of analysis across the humanities and social sciences. This has been linked to the decline of traditional forms of social affiliation and action and the emergence of new forms of solidarity and collective identities, captured in the notion of identity politics from the 1960s onwards (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, Appiah 2005). These are contiguous with, and inseparable from, the mass migrations from the old imperial peripheries to the post-imperial metropolitan centres, which in the post-war period have transformed the societies of the global north and west permanently. Since the 1980s, the challenges of contemporary forms of globalization, a shifting post-Cold War world order, the age of migration (Castles and Miller 2009), the redrawing of nation-state boundaries and the proliferation of new nations, new loyalties and new citizens as well as the development of innovative technologies that subvert classical notions of time and space, here and there, “us” and “them”, have transformed and unsettled traditional certainties, raising important and troubling questions about who exactly “we” are, who belongs and who, more importantly, does not. The new (and recurring) wars of the past decade, in particular, have reframed the geopolitical cartography of a post-9/11 world order, sharpening old hostilities and discovering new enemies (Calhoun et al. 2002).

At the Ragged Edges of Time: The Legend of Tilak and the Normalization of Historical Narratives

This article questions our understanding of the construction of histories based on a variety of sources. It critiques the power of ‘the word’and the fetish of the archive in the construction of histories and alters the focus by placing the material remnants of the past at centre stage, with oral narratives and archival texts as supporting ‘illustrations’. It does this by focusing on Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s purported role in mobilizing a festival in tribute to the god Ganapati as part of the incipient anti-colonial struggle in the 1890s. It argues that colonial, nationalist and scholarly discourse converge to perpetuate the notion that Tilak was the pioneer of the public festival, when ethnographic work of material culture reveals that there were in fact other community leaders who pioneered the politicized festival. Tilak was more a publicist: he wrote about the festival in the press giving it his wholehearted support as well as helping to disseminate the phenomenon across the region. The article seeks to demonstrate how academic discussions in scholarly articles and books, however critical of hegemonic formations, have unwittingly perpetuated the views of not just colonial discourse, but also contemporary nationalists in India.

Sovereignty without Hegemony, the Nuclear State, and a ‘Secret Public Hearing’ in India

How can sovereignty provide the premises to think outside of sovereignty? In other words, how is it possible to perceive of resistance to sovereignty which itself is deemed to have been caught up in the double bind of sovereignty? With a critical appraisal of theories on the ‘state of exception’ in conversation with Robert Jungk’s consideration of the ‘nuclear state’, I account for the nuclear state of exception which has acquired sovereignty in several nations in the post-Second World War scenario, before going on to consider ‘spaces of exception’ to it. I then provide a critical appraisal of studies of resistance. Using the case of a public hearing on the Koodankulam nuclear power plant in south India, I account for how ways of conceptualizing contestation and challenges in the shadows of sovereignty can be pursued in what I describe as a case of ‘sovereignty without hegemony’.

The Nuclear Imaginary and Indian Popular Cinema

In this article I consider the interface between state policy and popular culture by examining the issue of nuclear weapons in and around Indian popular cinema. Whilst it has been pointed out that there are no cinematic examples of nuclear annihilation in Indian film, I propose instead that the threat of it is nevertheless evident. Nuclear technology is deeply entangled in anxieties about the nation, its constituents such as the family, and its detractors such as forces to do with communalism and separatism. These disquieting dynamics do not enable a straightforward alliance between the nuclear and the national as official state discourse would have it, where nuclear weapons are advocated as a measure of Indias military might in the contemporary era, or in other words, ‘nuclear nationalism’. Rather than being nation-builders, films present nuclear weapons as dangerous nation-destroyers, for missiles harbour threats to people and civilisations especially in the hands of the figurative terrorist and those with designs against the nation of India. With this formulation there lies a latent critique of state policy, which nevertheless is imbued with patriotic rhetoric by the end of the film, when the hero averts disaster and/or invokes the state as the paragon of nuclear management.

Atomic comics: parabolic mimesis and the graphic fictions of science

The cumulative effect of the (post)colonial predicament is to see cultural productions in the global South such as films, comics and artworks, as imitative, transformations or, at worst, travesties of originals in the West, thus denying agency to those who develop them. Eurocentric legacies impel the development of discursive approaches which enable an appreciation of postcolonial cultural productions without seeing them as shadows of a master print. In this article, I propose that theories of mimesis need to be shifted away from planar mirrors of reflection and adaptation to coeval vectors of parabolic intersections where the ontological status of ‘original’ and ‘copy’ is put under question. With this approach, I consider the emergence of superhero comics in the context of a post-liberal and nuclearized India with a particular focus on fictions of science, superheroism, the state and gendered universes with respect to the comic book series on the atomic superhero Parmanu.

‘Ancient cosmopolitanism’ and the South Asian diaspora

When considering the South Asian diaspora in Britain, attention is more often than not drawn to migration and settlement patterns in the country from the mid-twentieth century. A more extended scope has been provided in terms of considering movements between the two regions in the colonial period, particularly from the nineteenth century with a couple of studies focusing on the period since the 1600s. This article considers a frame further back in time when European cities like London first became a site of ‘ancient cosmopolitanism’ open to migration from regions including South Asia during the period of the Roman Empire. The approach adopted in this article is critical of colonial, regional and nationalist blinkers on the tracts of history, and enables a means of considering ancient connections between Europe and South Asia as well as other modes of interpretation of the cultural and material legacy of the Roman era.

Rethinking the Public Sphere: the Ganapati Festival and Media Competitions in Mumbai

centres around the world. 1 the promotion of media networks was initiated by Rajiv Gandhi’s government in the mid-1980s; it was accentuated by the economic liberalisation programmes instituted by the former Congress Finance Minister, Manmohan Singh, in the early 1990s, and many multinational companies have opened shop in the port city, vying with other Indian-run organisations for scarce space and business. 2 ’ Religious events in the city do not represent a respite from the quotidian but have been, and continue to be, entangled in the skein of the city’s public culture. They show the direct influences of media the adoption of film music, film-influenced spectacles, advertisements, and the actual use of film and video during festival events and displays. Newspaper and cable, satellite and terrestrial television provide day-to-day coverage of these events. For the more privileged, the internet provides sites on various gods and festivals. Most significantly, the media organise festival competitions which encourage social work for the community and nation, regulate criteria to do with

Skipping Memories on Partition and the Intersensory Field in Subcontinental Britain

Abstract This article is based on the research and development of a theatre drama in 2016, Silent Sisters. I consider how the Partition of India-Pakistan, when over ten million people were displaced, is remembered in diasporic contexts of Britain. These recollections and representations may be explored in terms of three main registers. The first broad context may encompass memories and artefacts that are directly from the period of mass displacement, the latter extremely rare in that most people were too caught up in the urgency of carrying only bare essentials if anything at all. The second series of contexts may refer to free-floating representations, created in and on different time-spaces, but once embedded in semiotically rich contexts about a Partition recreated take on new meanings and resonances that can be equally emotive. Relatedly, the third case is of how objects and memories become part of a generative archive that encompasses a range of media on the theme of Partition – a canon that is potentially endless. In this case, the archive is pieced together out of ‘skipping memories’ and tendrils that remain, tangible and intangible. It is an intersensory and fragmentary archive that is not just retrospective but also future-orientated in terms of what the fragment might catalyse to create wider synergies, whether they be visual, narrativised, sung, embodied, recited, enacted, digitalised, imagined and/or created.

Mediating Rape: The Nirbhaya Effect in the Creative and Digital Arts

While references to Nirbhaya, referring to the brutal gang rape of a young woman on a moving bus in New Delhi 2012, have been plentiful, less attention has been paid to creative representations on the subject. In this article, I consider how the atrocity has been mediated through multiple outlets in India as part of a reinvigorated aesthetics of grief, anger, critique, and protest against sexual violence. Building on earlier feminist modes of artistic engagement, I consider the “Nirbhaya effect” through outlets such as online films, canvas art, posters, photography, murals, comic books, satirical skits, and staged interventions on the streets that have been described as social experiments. These creative outlets may be considered in terms of five overlapping registers: memorialization, affirmative solidarity, ironic provocations, rescripting the master narrative, and sensationalization. Altogether, they indicate the many potentials and limitations of a violent wound in the social fabric, channeled through the creative arts and digital media.

A nuclear cyberia: interfacing science, culture and ‘e-thnography’ of an Indian township’s social media

The article’s aims are twofold – to investigate the potentials and limitations of online ethnography and to delineate the discursive dynamics of Indian technoscientific cultures as evident on a nuclear township’s online social network site. Technoscientific cultures of the south cannot be simply seen through a postcolonial lens in terms of north–south tensions over the global political economy or merely through a developmentalist paradigm. There are more complex and illuminating territories with which to appreciate such cultures through the eyes of their protagonists. I note that while Weberian trends towards bureaucratisation are discernible among Indian nuclear technocrats, there is also a considerable counter-narrative in which there is a ‘reconstitution of the cultural’ that demonstrates a strong proclivity towards reinventing particular strains of religio-cultural discourse. I illustrate these dynamics by providing an ‘e-thnography’ of the material posted on the social network site set up in 2010 by scientists who live in a nuclear township in Mumbai. In so doing, I diverge from liberal human-centric understandings of the context of media technologies to consider critical junctures where the subject interfaces with informational technologies in such a manner that notions of the centred and corporeal self dissipate, but traces of his or her embodied self remain.