UCL Material and Visual Culture seminar series presents:
**Aporia of Smart Images: On Spectacle, Capital, Novelty in post-reform India**
*Ravinder Kaur (University of Copenhagen)*
2 November, 5-6.30pm, Department of Anthropology, 14 Taviton Street, London. Followed by drinks
Abstract: This paper examines the aesthetics and politics of India's image makeover as the 'land of limitless opportunity' - an attractive global brand of emerging market in the global political economy. The 1990s economic reforms were not only predicated upon India's ability to transform the nation-form into commodity form, but also a new version of the ancient civilizational past that could be morphed in the aesthetics of the contemporary global. In this paper, I explore the im/possible desire of retaining and erasing the original simultaneously while shaping the new. This remixed version, I further argue, 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 past in the making of new India.
Bio: 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 Ghana. 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.
For more information please contact [log in to unmask]
-
Constance Smith
PhD candidate
Dept of Anthropology
University College London
14 Taviton St
London
WC1H 0BW
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