Post-exotic India On Remixed Histories and Smart Images in the Contemporary Global

Lecture by Dr Ravinder Kaur, drinks afterwards.

The lecture

In this lecture Dr Kaur discusses the aesthetics of remixing history at the heart of the neoliberal project of India’s image makeover as ‘land of limitless opportunity’ for global tourists and investors. She argues that the project of remixing India’s history is predicated upon the ontological fault line of how to retain and erase the original simultaneously while shaping the new in the contemporary global. Taking Incredible India as an example, she shows how the original essence of India is revealed and authenticated in the very moment of its disappearance as it is remixed and morphed in the aesthetics of the contemporary global. The post-exotic self, she further argues, is not produced by effacing the exotic past, but by remixing, condensing, accelerating and fast-forwarding it into a timeless, infinite global present. And in doing so, it also reveals the blueprint of the ongoing visual rearrangement of nation’s civilizational past in the making of new India.

The speaker

Ravinder Kaur is Associate Professor of Modern South Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen where she also directs the Centre of Global South Asian Studies. She holds a Visiting Professorship at the Centre of India Studies in Africa, Witswatersrand University, Johannesburg. She is currently engaged in two long-term research projects. The first focuses on post-reform India’s transition into an attractive ‘emerging market’ in the global political economy, and second, explores the yet unfolding connections between Asia and Africa via a study of new business connections between India, China and Africa. Her previous research focused on the questions of forced migration, refugee resettlement, social class and caste and the making of modern citizenship during India’s Partition in 1947. Her publications include Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (Oxford, 2007), Religion, Violence and Political Mobilization in Contemporary South Asia (Sage 2005), a co-edited special issue ‘Governing Difference: Inequality, Inequity and Identity in India and China,’ Third World Quarterly 2012 as well as many journal articles.

Registration

Ms Heleen van der Minne, h.m.van.der.minne@iias.nl