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<div align="center"><font size=4><b><u>STS Colloquium -- Monday, March
20th<br><br>
</u></font><font size=5 color="#800000">Visual Culture in an Emerging
Market: Perception, Consumption, Politics<br>
</b></font></div>
<font color="#800000"> <br>
</font><div align="center"><font size=5 color="#800000"><b>Arvind
Rajagopal, New York University<br><br>
</font>4:00 pm, MIT, E51-095<br><br>
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<u>Abstract:<br>
</u>As the political project of making modern citizens in India is
threatened by the legitimation crisis of the political process on the one
hand, and the ascendancy of Hindu nationalism and caste-based parties on
the other, the pedagogical task of the developmental state has
increasingly been taken up through the market itself. With the
disintegration of an earlier secular consensus, and the ascendancy of a
neo-liberal regime, the market became both a means and a model for
renewing the political process. In my paper, drawing from examples of
visual culture between the mid 1980s and 2004, I will trace the
interaction of different practices located in various institutional
sites, e.g., advertising, commercial and documentary cinema, to map the
changing techniques of the market as the political context itself shifts
over time. My aim in this paper is to clarify the methodologies
appropriate to understanding visual culture in a comparative and global
context.<br><br>
Arvind Rajagopal is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Communication and Culture at New York University. His interests
include political economy of culture, contemporary South Asia, social
theory, audiences and reception theory, and globalization. He is the
author of <i>Politics after Television: Religious Nationalism and the
Retailing of Hinduness </i>(Cambridge, 2001); Guest Editor of Social Text
No. 68, on Technologies of Perception and the Cultures of Globalization;
Coauthor of <i>Mapping Hegemony: Television News and Industrial
Conflict</i> (1992) and several articles in scholarly journals. <br><br>
Please join us on Monday!<br><br>
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Debbie Meinbresse<br>
STS Program, MIT<br>
617-452-2390<br>
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