Priyasha Mukhopadhyay – författare

Music and sound studies have increasingly turned their attention to questions of empire and postcolonial thought in recent years, raising new questions about the forms and circulation of cultural, technological, political, and military power as manifest in and through sound. However, most of this scholarship has focused on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Conversely, sound and media studies have made nineteenth-century histories of science and technology a central part of their canonical repertoire, but largely overlooked the ways in which these technological developments emerged from contexts of empire. Acoustics of Empire provides a cultural history of global acoustics in the Age of Empire. Examining histories of sound, listening practices, and audiovisual technologies of the long nineteenth century through the lens of geopolitical power, the authors recover a sonic history that is irrefutably entangled with questions of imperial power and colonial rule. This volume brings together historians, musicologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to consider topics ranging from Indian music treatises and vocal practices in Brazil to Egyptian traffic noises and stethoscopes-as-props in South Africa. Across its chapters more broadly, it also draws attention to a period when Euro-American academic disciplines like musicology and linguistics were created, shaped by the imperial contexts in which they emerged. These intertwined legacies of sound and power are not simply historical curiosities; rather, they stand as formative influences in cultural modernity and its discontents that continue to shape the ways we hear and experience the world today.

Music and sound studies have increasingly turned their attention to questions of empire and postcolonial thought in recent years, raising new questions about the forms and circulation of cultural, technological, political, and military power as manifest in and through sound. However, most of this scholarship has focused on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Conversely, sound and media studies have made nineteenth-century histories of science and technology a central part of their canonical repertoire, but largely overlooked the ways in which these technological developments emerged from contexts of empire. Acoustics of Empire provides a cultural history of global acoustics in the Age of Empire. Examining histories of sound, listening practices, and audiovisual technologies of the long nineteenth century through the lens of geopolitical power, the authors recover a sonic history that is irrefutably entangled with questions of imperial power and colonial rule. This volume brings together historians, musicologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to consider topics ranging from Indian music treatises and vocal practices in Brazil to Egyptian traffic noises and stethoscopes-as-props in South Africa. Across its chapters more broadly, it also draws attention to a period when Euro-American academic disciplines like musicology and linguistics were created, shaped by the imperial contexts in which they emerged. These intertwined legacies of sound and power are not simply historical curiosities; rather, they stand as formative influences in cultural modernity and its discontents that continue to shape the ways we hear and experience the world today.

How ordinary forms of writing—including manuals, petitions, almanacs, and magazines—shaped the way colonial subjects understood their place in empire In Required Reading, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read.Mukhopadhyay’s account is populated by a cast of characters that spans the ranks of colonial society, from bored soldiers to frustrated bureaucrats. These readers formed close, even intimate relationships with everyday texts. She presents four case studies: a soldier’s manual, a cache of bureaucratic documents, a collection of astrological almanacs, and a women’s literary magazine. Tracking moments in which readers refused to read, were unable to read, and read in part, she uncovers the dizzying array of material, textual, and aural practices these texts elicited. Even selectively read almanacs and impenetrable account books, she finds, were springboards for personal, world-shaping readerly relationships.Untethered from the constraints of conventional literacy, Required Reading reimagines how texts work in the world and how we understand the very idea of reading.

How ordinary forms of writing—including manuals, petitions, almanacs, and magazines—shaped the way colonial subjects understood their place in empire In Required Reading, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read.Mukhopadhyay’s account is populated by a cast of characters that spans the ranks of colonial society, from bored soldiers to frustrated bureaucrats. These readers formed close, even intimate relationships with everyday texts. She presents four case studies: a soldier’s manual, a cache of bureaucratic documents, a collection of astrological almanacs, and a women’s literary magazine. Tracking moments in which readers refused to read, were unable to read, and read in part, she uncovers the dizzying array of material, textual, and aural practices these texts elicited. Even selectively read almanacs and impenetrable account books, she finds, were springboards for personal, world-shaping readerly relationships.Untethered from the constraints of conventional literacy, Required Reading reimagines how texts work in the world and how we understand the very idea of reading.

This book is an edited volume of essays that showcases how books played a crucial role in making and materialising histories of travel, scientific exchanges, translation, and global markets from the late-eighteenth century to the present.