Seeing South Asia

This book critically examines the cultural politics of visuals in South Asia. It makes a key contribution to the study of visuals in the social sciences in South Asia by studying the interplay of the seen and unseen, and the visual and nonvisual. The volume explores interrelated themes including the vernacular visual and visuality, ways of seeing in South Asia and the methodology of hermeneutic sensorium, anxiety and politics of the visuals across the region and the trajectory of visual anthropology, significance of visual symbols and representations in contemporary performances and folk art, visual landscapes of loss and recovery and representation of refugees, visual public in South Asia and making of visuals for contemporary consumptions. The chapters unravel the concepts of visual, visibility, visuality while attending to determinant meta-ideas, such as memory and modernity, trajectories of tradition, fluidity and hybridity, and visual performative politics. Based on interdisciplinary resources, the chapters in this volume present a wide array of empirical findings across India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, along with analytical readings of the visual culture of the subcontinent across borders. The book will be useful to scholars and researchers of visual and cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, sociology, political studies, media and communications studies, performance studies, art history, television and film studies, photography studies, and South Asian studies. It will also interest practitioners including artists, visual artists, photographers, filmmakers and media critics.

In Unseeing Empire Bakirathi Mani examines how empire continues to haunt South Asian American visual cultures. Weaving close readings of fine art together with archival research and ethnographic fieldwork at museums and galleries across South Asia and North America, Mani outlines the visual and affective relationships between South Asian diasporic artists, their photographic work, and their viewers. She notes that the desire for South Asian Americans to see visual representations of themselves is rooted in the use of photography as a form of colonial documentation and surveillance. She examines fine art photography by South Asian diasporic artists who employ aesthetic strategies such as duplication and alteration that run counter to viewers' demands for greater visibility. These works fail to deliver on viewers' desires to see themselves, producing instead feelings of alienation, estrangement, and loss. These feelings, Mani contends, allow viewers to question their own visibility as South Asian Americans in U.S. public culture and to reflect on their desires to be represented.

Distributed to some depository libraries in microfiche.

The emergence of new media today in South Asia has signalled an event, the meaning of which remains obscure but whose reality is rapidly evolving along gradients of intensity and experience. Contemporary media in and from South Asia have come to sense a new arrangement of value, sensation, and force - new forms of becoming that might be usefully termed as 'media ecologies'. This evolution from nation-based forms of communication (Doordarshan, All India Radio, the "national" feudal romance) to simultaneous global ones conform and mutate the structures of feeling of local, national, diasporic and transnational belonging. This collection of original essays is concerned with understanding how people are making meaning from the new media and how subaltern tinkering (pirating, peer to peer file sharing, hacking, noise jamming, indymedia, etc.) does things to and in the new media. This exciting works helps us to make sense of the creation of new publics, new affects and new experiences of pleasure and value in convergences of intermedia in a fast developing South Asia context. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

This volume examines urban South Asia through the ideas of neighbourhood and neighbourliness. With a focus on the affective socio-spatial and sensorial experiences of non-metropolitan, small and intermediate cities, the chapters in the volume look at neighbourhoods as a key to exploring the textures of urban life. Bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, urban studies, planning, and social history, the book highlights urban heterogeneity and contemporary transformations in South Asia. It discusses the linkages between urban lived spaces and social life; memory, migration, and exile; and the city and its society through practices of everyday life in neighbourhoods. With studies from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and India, the volume addresses a wide range of issues pertaining to urban experiences in their regional specificities and in a broader context of the Global South. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of urban sociology, anthropology, urban studies, planning and development, social history, political studies, cultural studies, geography, and South Asian studies. It will also interest practitioners and policymakers, architects, planners, civil society organisations, and thinktanks.

'Tourism in South and South East Asia' is a comprehensive and solid introduction to tourism in South and South East Asia with a specific appeal both to institutions in the region, and other institutions who wish to expose students to one of the most dynamic tourism regions in the world. Despite downturns in outbound tourism (due to the current economic crisis), inbound tourism from outside the region has continued to increase with governments placing more emphasis on the economic significance of tourism than ever. 'Tourism in South and South East Asia' is the first tourism book to deal comprehensively with the implications of the Asian economic crisis for tourism. With South and South East Asia set to be the fastest growing area of tourism activity in the world well into the next century, 'Tourism in South and South East Asia' is an essential text for students both within and outside of this region. Dealing with concepts, themes and issues which are pertinent to tourism development, planning, marketing and management; these two internationally known authors have produced an authoritative text that covers all aspects of this topic through the use of illustrative and relevant case studies.

This book is a comprehensive examination of the society, polity and economy of South Asian countries and their future trajectories. The chapters included in the volume present key insights into the geopolitical dynamics of the region. New Futures for South Asia: draws on case studies from the region to discuss how democracy has fared in terms of state-society linkages, transformational possibilities and the globalization and radicalization of politics; studies possibilities of economic cooperation in South Asia, including common currency, regional imbalances and aid, transport connectivity and electricity consumption; examines the crucial role of SAARC and bilateralism in forging connectivities across the diverse geographies of the region. A major intervention in re-shaping South Asian studies, this book will be a great resource for scholars and researchers of security studies, strategic affairs, international relations, development studies and politics.