An investigation of arts and aesthetics in their widest senses and experiences, presenting a variety of perspectives ranging from the metaphysical to the political. Moving beyond art as an expression of the inner mind and invention of the individual self, the volume bridges the gap between changing perceptions of contemporary art and aesthetics and maps globalizing currents in a number of contexts and regions.The volume includes an impressive variety of case studies offered by established leaders in the field and original and emerging scholarly talent covering areas in India, Nepal, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Rwanda and Germany, as well as providing transnational or diasporic perspectives. From the contradictory demands made on successful artists from the south in the global art world such as Anish Kapoor, to images of war and puppetry created by female political prisoners, the volume compels creative and political interpretations of the ever-changing and globalizing terrain of arts and aesthetics.

Atomic Mumbai offers an insightful historical and ethnographic account of how nuclear issues are represented in popular culture, print media, films, documentaries, advertising and superhero comics, driven by perceptions of those based in the city of Mumbai, a prime site of nuclear establishments in India since the mid-1940s. Based on long-term fieldwork, and including rare photographs, narratives and extensive interviews, the volume documents urban nuclear imaginaries, along with their terrifying association with genetic mutation and death.

Product Description: Diaspora & Hybridity deals with those theoretical issues which concern social theory and social change in the new millennium. The volume provides a refreshing, critical and illuminating analysis of concepts of diaspora and hybridity and their impact on multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies′ - Dr Rohit Barot, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol What do we mean by ′diaspora′ and ′hybridity′? Why are they pivotal concepts in contemporary debates on race, culture and society? This book is an exhaustive, politically inflected, assessment of the key debates on diaspora and hybridity...read more

Product Description: This volume brings together a group of international scholars to analyze the globalized networks of Indian cinema. It provides a critique of a common scholarly tendency in the field of popular cinema of defining Indian films in terms of their modernity and desire for nationhood...read more

Product Description: 'Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism' focuses on one of the major festivals of western India, the Ganapati Utsava, dedicated to the elephant-headed god. Raminder Kaur uses this occasion as the central anthropological and historiographical site within which to examine the dynamic relationship between spectacle, religion and nationalist politics...read more

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