Avishek Ray – författare

This book discusses the epistemic foundation of the heuristic construct ‘vagabond’ and the convergence between the politics of itinerancy and that of dissent in the context of South Asia. It describes the fraught relationship between ‘native’ itinerant practices and techniques of governmentality which have furnished different categorizations and taxonomies of mobility. The book demonstrates the historical seismic breaks – from the Orientalist to the post-Orientalist, from the premodern to the modern, and from the colonial to the post-colonial – in the representation of the vagabond in the juridico-political imagination, in historiography and cultural articulation. For instance, the drunk European sailor, the quasi-religious mendicant, and the helpless famine refugee have all been referred to as ‘vagabonds’ in the colonial archive. This book examines the histories and conditions behind these conceptual overlaps, as well as the uncanny associations among categories that uneasily coexist and mirror each other as subsets of a vast range of phenomena, which may loosely be called ‘vagabond(age)’.This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of literature, cultural studies, colonial and post-colonial studies, history, migration studies, sociology, and South Asia studies.

This book discusses the epistemic foundation of the heuristic construct ‘vagabond’ and the convergence between the politics of itinerancy and that of dissent in the context of South Asia. It describes the fraught relationship between ‘native’ itinerant practices and techniques of governmentality which have furnished different categorizations and taxonomies of mobility. The book demonstrates the historical seismic breaks – from the Orientalist to the post-Orientalist, from the premodern to the modern, and from the colonial to the post-colonial – in the representation of the vagabond in the juridico-political imagination, in historiography and cultural articulation. For instance, the drunk European sailor, the quasi-religious mendicant, and the helpless famine refugee have all been referred to as ‘vagabonds’ in the colonial archive. This book examines the histories and conditions behind these conceptual overlaps, as well as the uncanny associations among categories that uneasily coexist and mirror each other as subsets of a vast range of phenomena, which may loosely be called ‘vagabond(age)’.This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of literature, cultural studies, colonial and post-colonial studies, history, migration studies, sociology, and South Asia studies.

This book explores how the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped urban spatialities through the rise of digitally mediated "temporal spaces" in Calcutta. Focusing on Uber-enabled mobility, cycling pathways, and cafés, it examines how digital infrastructures and human practices intersect to create fluid, dynamic urban experiences. Challenging fixed notions of place-making, the book interrogates what it means to "return to normal" and how digitality reconfigures urban life, sociality, and imagination. By foregrounding the entanglement of digital and material realms, it offers a critical framework for understanding contemporary urban transformations in the wake of crisis and technological mediation.Part of the Academics, Politics and Society in the Post-Covid World series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of sociology, social anthropology, media and cultural studies, digital humanities, human geography, political sociology and postcolonial studies, and those interested in the coronavirus pandemic.

The book examines the social and cultural role of selfies in India. It looks at how the selfie, unlike the photograph, which was a gesture towards an external reality, remains intimately self-referential, yet reconfigures social ordering, identity formation, agency, and spaces in curious ways.This volume approaches questions about the construction and performance of the self through the digital selfie and uses this situated, contextualized, and culturally specific phenomenon as a site to explore the themes of self-making, place-making, gender, subjectivity, and power. Highlighting the specific contexts of production, the authors examine the array of self-expressive capabilities realized in a multitude of uses of the selfie that simultaneously reconfigure the self, the space, and the world.An important study of visual social media culture, the volume will be useful for interpreting everyday media experiences and will be of interest to students and researchers of image studies, visual studies, photography studies, visual culture, media studies, culture studies, cultural anthropology, digital humanities, popular culture, sociology of technology, and South Asian studies.

The book examines the social and cultural role of selfies in India. It looks at how the selfie, unlike the photograph, which was a gesture towards an external reality, remains intimately self-referential, yet reconfigures social ordering, identity formation, agency, and spaces in curious ways.This volume approaches questions about the construction and performance of the self through the digital selfie and uses this situated, contextualized, and culturally specific phenomenon as a site to explore the themes of self-making, place-making, gender, subjectivity, and power. Highlighting the specific contexts of production, the authors examine the array of self-expressive capabilities realized in a multitude of uses of the selfie that simultaneously reconfigure the self, the space, and the world.An important study of visual social media culture, the volume will be useful for interpreting everyday media experiences and will be of interest to students and researchers of image studies, visual studies, photography studies, visual culture, media studies, culture studies, cultural anthropology, digital humanities, popular culture, sociology of technology, and South Asian studies.

This volume brings together scholarship on indigenous forms of travel to decolonize travel theory. It looks at certain minoritarian-vernacular traveling cults – very rarely examined – that compel us to rethink, on the one hand, the conventional tropes of and rationales for travel; and, on the other hand, notions of (post)coloniality, nationalism and modernity in the context of India. The book illustrates the enduring problematic of the ‘colonial episteme’: how it deploys pervasive categories through which travel practices are sought to be understood, and why such categories are inadequate in accounting for the vernacular traveling cults in question. In studying the vernacular world-making in and through these cults, this book offers critical insights on how they defy the log(ist)ics of the ‘imperial categories’ and why they must be read as expressions of decoloniality. An important contribution to travel studies, the book will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of South Asian studies, travel theory, Indian literary and cultural studies, cultural history and anthropology, sociology, and decoloniality.

From the shaping of identities and belongings through to current reconfigurations of nation, governance and state under a Hindu-Right dispensation, this book tracks the sentiments and structures that sustain the nation and nationalism in India. Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere: Religious Politics in India provides wide-ranging accounts of the growth and transformations of the nation, focusing especially on the intimate interplay of nation-state and nationalism with dominant religion. Drawing upon the perspectives of history, politics, anthropology, literature, film and media studies, this book explores key themes such as the appropriation and impact of western concepts of religion and the modern in postcolonial India and Pakistan, corporate bids to foster faith by erecting temples, formations of contemporary cosmopolitan religious imaginaries, the politics of cow protection, the rise of Narendra Modi as a national hero, and the fetish of the national in news channel debates. The book provides important insights into the success of the Hindu-Right, the discourse of religious–cultural nationalism, and their ramifications for democracy and citizenship.