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One
Hundred Years One Hundred Voices .NEERA ADARKAR
has been active in the women's movement for 20 years.
She is a practising architect and urban researcher and visiting
faculty in the Academy of Architecture in Bombay. She is also
a founding member of Majlis, a legal and cultural centre. She
is one of the Convenors of Girangaon Bachao Andolan (Save Girangaon
Movement). She is based in Mumbai. |
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Biology as Politics
Somnath Zutshi ISBN 81 7046 2746 Culture Studies Price : Rs 100 'How many of us, as children, felt that it was entirely right that Tarzan should be the unquestioned leader of hordes of "natives"? Or . . . that Flash Gordon should vanquish Ming the Merciless, who was the very quintessence of the "Evil Oriental", even if he was from another planet?' What is interesting about race as a concept is that it seems to be-and is used as-one of the most precise of categories. However, a few moments' careful scrutiny reveals race to be precisely the opposite, loosely used to indicate ethnic origin, class, religion, nationality, even caste. Standing at the intersection of science and politics, race might be described as both politics disguised as biology, as well as a biological investigation which in most cases has a political goal. It is this simultaneity of reference which gives race its 'slippery' quality. This investigation ranges over crucial concepts and practices such as racism, slavery and the slave trade, anthropology, intelligence testing and I. Q., anti-semitism, fascism and the Nazis, colonialism, and the nation-state, to unpack and hold up to rational scrutiny one of the most problematic but unquestioned terms in current usage today. DR SOMNATH ZUTSHI, a psycho-analyst by training, studies and writes on cinema. |
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City Flicks
Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience Edited by Preben Kaarsholm ISBN 81 7046 2509 Film Studies/Urban Studies/Cultural Studies Price : Rs 300 $ 14.95 £ 9.95 The growth of Indian film production, the significance of cinema in Indian society within and beyond India, and the rapid expansion of Indian cities and the urban lifestyle are closely linked phenomena. The relationship between cinema and modernity in the Indian context is both complex and multifaceted, and in this volume, some of the leading names in film and cultural studies explore its many dimensions. The introductory essay sets the parameters of the discussions to follow, analysing the interfaces between cinematic representation, globalization and city life. The essays range from discussions of urbanity and film language to realism and the Indian city in Bengali film of the 1940s; from the cultural resonances of popular Hindi film songs and the idea of the 'city' to realism and fantasy in cinematic representations of metropolitan Indian life; from cinematic aspects of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children to genre, narrative form and film style in contemporary Indian urban action films; from the complexities of female spectatorship for the urban vigilantism of Telugu heroine Vijayasanthi, to an analysis of the current primacy of 'Bollywood' in today's media-driven urban environment; and finally, to the cultural impact and influence of Indian films in diaspora communities in Fiji, Australia, Nigeria and South Africa. Dealing as it does with the intersection of vital contemporary cultural phenomena-cinema, the city, and the modern-these thought provoking essays are a valuable addition to current scholarship in the field. Contributors: Moinak Biswas, Vashna Jagarnath, Preben Kaarsholm, Sudipta Kaviraj, Brian Larkin, Peter Larsen, M. Madhava Prasad, Tejaswini Niranjana, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Manas Ray, Ravi S. Vasudevan, Martin Zerlang. |
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Over Under and Around
Essays on Performance and Culture Richard Schechner ISBN 81 7046 2622 Performance Studies/Culture Studies Price : Rs 450 £ 12.95 $ 19.95 The essays collected in this book represent Schechner's lifetime in performance studies. Political theatre, the avant garde, the secular and sacred rituals of performance, the nature of belief and its suspensions in theatre, aesthetics, performance theory, and performance studies have been his recurring subjects even as his knowledge has changed and deepened from seeing performances of all kinds, all over the world. So he is in a position to compare the incomparable-Yaqui and Ramlila, dixi and namahage-in a manner that furthers the study of ritual and indicates the ways performance is similarly and differently imbricated in different communities. Schechner has also learned that the avant garde is more than a historical occurrence localized in, or originating in, a single culture. Schechner asserts that we can also understand the avant garde as a particular kind of articulation of the traditional and the oral. The range and depth of Schechner's scholarly endeavour informed by his artistic practice has led him to think about the deep structure of performance and theorize its construction across cultures. This confluence of practice and scholarship, where each realm wholly informs the other, is second only to Schechner's far ranging contact with diverse types of performance in generating his exceptional thinking on the meaning and importance of performance as the paradigm for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries RICHARD SCHECHNER is a theatre director, author and teacher. He founded The Performance Group and East Coast Artists. He has directed plays, conducted performance workshops and lectured in Asia, the Americas, Australia and Europe. His books include Performance Studies-An Introduction, Performance Theory, and Between Theatre and Anthropology. He is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.. |
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Inventing
the Sarod
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Archives
for the Future
Edited by Anthony Seeger and Shubha Chaudhuri ISBN 81 7046 223 1 Culture Studies/Anthropology/Music Price : Rs 350 £ 19.95 $ 20 Archives for the Future global perspectives on audiovisual archives in the 21st Century This unique book is based on a workshop for an international group of administrators of research-based archives held near New Delhi in December 1999, the aim of which was to bring together archivists from industrializing countries which have a relatively recent history of audiovisual archives, principally from the Southern Hemisphere; to take concerns of audiovisual archives outside the national and regional boundaries that so often define them; and to focus on audiovisual archives that document musical and folklore traditions or ethnomusicology. Pooling the experience of participants from Austria, Australia, China, Cuba, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Peru, The Philippines, South Africa, Sudan, and the United States, the volume will be of interest to cultural workers both as an introductory textbook in ethnomusicology courses and as a book for specialists. The book begins with a theoretical introduction, including general observations on archives, a discussion of the principal points in the participant papers, a description of the workshop itself, and how the process of the workshop has been transformed into this volume. Section One deals with archive structure and operations, including a chapter on recording technology which begins with a paper by the world-renowned expert in technology for audiovisual archives, Dr Dietrich Schuller, Director of the Vienna Phonogramm-Archiv, Austria, the oldest such archive in the world; and one on issues of copyright and ethics by Grace Koch. Section Two consists of the participants' papers. The volume also includes useful material such as sample agreement forms, a bibliography of major resources on audiovisual archives, and a website list of the most important professional organizations and archive sites. |
