Hardcover

Published: 26th February 2013
For Ages: 22+ years old

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Drawing on recent theories of virtuality, performativity, and governmentality, and on post-colonial activist scholarship, this book presents a series of ethnographic and archival studies of what Mukhopadhyay terms 'vernacular globalisation' in India. The book's six provocative chapters cover a wide range of events, objects, histories, narratives and episodes with the intent of interrogating what Franz Fanon called the 'zone of occult instability where the people dwell'. They span subjects as diverse as the quotidian commodity fetishism of rural cargo cults which thrive on bazaar rumours about Chinese dumping in Communist Calcutta; desi cyberporn showcasing 'fat aunties' and Gandhi; Indo-Persian travelogues about England and women's travel narratives to Japan, embodying local traditions of cosmopolitanism; folk scroll paintings about 9/11 in the art historical mode; and vernacular civic traditions of urbanism as interpreted through grotty slum photographs. The Rumour of Globlization presents facades of vernacular India negotiating globalising forces through a distinctive style of ethnography (fabulation) which is sensitive to subaltern political aspirations while maintaining a broad commitment to Marxist theory, Subaltern Studies scholarship and post-structuralist theory.

With its broad erudition deeply grounded in an exploration of vernacular practices, above all in his native Bengal, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay's The Rumor of Globalization is an exemplary analysis of the social imaginary: urgent, attentive, and theoretically and politically dissident -- an accomplished work of the scholarly imagination. -- John Frow, author of Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity There is a subaltern global that critiques the globalized world of the elite. Bengal villagers imagine that there are amazingly cheap Chinese bicycles -- "a gift of globalization" -- that they are being prevented from buying; Bengal scroll painters sing about the burning towers in New York; Indian males fantasize on cyberporn sites not about supermodels but about fat aunts. Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay argues with great power and erudition that the everyday lives of ordinary people have become globally connected through vernacular imaginaries. -- Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University, author of The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World Working against the pieties of the Left, The Rumor of Globalization foregrounds the active participation of the marginalized and the excluded in the narrative of globalization with their own desires, agencies, and economies. Combining grassroots fieldwork with theoretical flair, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay inserts a new corporeality and grit into the reading of subaltern contemporaneity in India today. -- Rustom Bharucha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, author of The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization

ISBN: 9780231702928
ISBN-10: 0231702922
Series: Columbia/Hurst
Audience: Tertiary; University or College
For Ages: 22+ years old
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 288
Published: 26th February 2013
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Dimensions (cm): 22.2 x 14.0  x 2.3
Weight (kg): 0.454