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Remember, Repeat, Inhabit looks at three questions in relation to the idea of the viewer: What happens when one reads someone else's reading of someone else? What happens when something repeats itself in Kieslowski's work? Is there a possibility of an ontology of space? The book attempts to understand the idea of 'viewing' from the inside, not simply as an ontological premise but definitely affected by it. Three differing contexts are looked at-a French madman's notion of the 'self', a Polish filmmaker's notion of the 'everyday' and an Indian performance artist's notion of 'memory'. Through these on-the-surface contrasting artists and texts, a particular idea of a 'viewer' emerges. This viewer is the key to an understanding of something almost elemental in the nature of the idea of 'viewing' in the contemporary context of twenty-first-century Delhi.
Drawing on a global history of politicized writing, this book explores literature's utility as a mode of activism and aesthetic engagement with the political challenges of the current moment. The question of literature's 'uses' has recently become a key topic of academic and public debate. Paradoxically, however, these conversations often tend to bypass the rich history of engagements with literature's distinctly political uses that form such a powerful current of 20th- and 21st-century artistic production and critical-theoretical reflection. The Political Uses of Literature reopens discussion of literature's political and activist genealogies along several interrelated lines: As a foundatio...
While there is overwhelming support for democracy in India and voter turnout is higher than in many Western democracies, there are low levels of trust in political parties and elected representatives. This book is an attempt to look beyond Indian elections, which has increasingly occupied analysts and commentators. It focuses on the Lok Sabha (The House of the People), comprising 543 members directly elected for five years by a potential 800 million plus voters in 2019. The book seeks to answer two questions: Is the Indian Parliament, which has the unenviable task of representing a diverse nation of a billion-plus people, working, if not in an exemplary manner, at least reasonably well, to articulate the diverse demands of the electorate and translate them into legislation and policy? To what extent has the practice of Indian democracy transformed the institution of parliament, which was adopted from the British, and its functioning?
As India’s power and prominence rise on the international stage, its longstanding tradition of democracy is under threat. Since establishing a secular and democratic constitution in 1950, India has held elections at the local, state, and national levels with frequent transitions of power between opposing parties. This commitment to democracy has provided political order to a country that is twice the size of Europe and with a stunning array of social and economic divides. Despite this rich tradition, India’s democracy faces an unprecedented threat with the rise of Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party. After decisively winning general elections in 2014...
Stadiums in Calcutta: A new Genre of Sports Culture is set in the format of micro-study, which deals with different aspects of sports life. We know that that sports culture is an important aspect of history, which has been borrowed from the West. The indigenous people accepted this new culture of games in Bengal. The native middle-class of Calcutta was showed an eagerness for Western games such as Football and Cricket. When they saw the English of white town playing such as an engaging game. The adopted game of Cricket and football in course of time introduced new institutions and new avenues, the stadium being the most important among them. The book reflects on the politics around the stadium.
Explore an insightful and original discussion of the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire In Why Rome Fell: Decline and Fall, or Drift and Change?, celebrated scholar of Roman history Dr. Michael Arnheim delivers a fascinating and robust exploration of the causes of and reasons for Rome’s fall in the West. Steeped in applications of elite theory to the later Roman Empire, the author discusses several interconnected issues that influenced the decline of Rome, including monarchy, power structure, social mobility, religion, and the aristocratic ethos. Incisive comparisons of the situation in Rome to those in the Principate and the Byzantine Empire shed light on the relative lack of “indis...
Investigation into how a shared narrative of law and cinema produces ways of collectively remembering mass violence in postcolonial India.
The study of Indian politics has witnessed a dramatic revival worldwide in the last few decades. There have been significant developments in national politics since 2014 with the advent of the single-party majority government of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the first such majority since 1984. Moreover, the results of the 17th Lok Sabha (Lower House) election in India in 2019 have had major implications for the party system in India. In the light of these developments, The Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics provides the most comprehensive, up-to-date coverage of the state of contemporary Indian politics. To that end, it examines the evolution of core institutions, processes, policies, and asso...
It is believed that law and violence generally share an antithetical relationship in liberal democracies. Lawlessness is understood to produce violence, and law is invoked and deployed as a means to resist and undo that. Violent Modernities attempts to establish that this relationship is not one of animosity, but of a deep, counterintuitive intimacy and is at the base of what makes India a modern nation-state. Delving into the patterns of law and violence through the cultural imaginaries of justice, marked by the combined rise of neoliberalism and Hindutva—the book argues that legal imagination in India does not only emanate from courtrooms, legislations and judgments, but is also lived in the practices of ordinary disobediences and everyday failures. The author suggests that it is only when law can be re-imagined as such, that the violence at the foundations of state law can be unsettled.
This book takes up the challenge of legally defining religion in contemporary India by investigating the intellectual history of colonial law.