Raminder Kaur – författare

This pioneering book presents a history and ethnography of adventure comic books for young people in India with a particular focus on vernacular superheroism. It chronicles popular and youth culture in the subcontinent from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary era dominated by creative audio-video-digital outlets.

The authors highlight early precedents in adventures set by the avuncular detective Chacha Chaudhary with his ‘faster than a computer brain’, the forays of the film veteran Amitabh Bachchan’s superheroic alter ego called Supremo, the Protectors of Earth and Mankind (P.O.E.M.), along with the exploits of key comic book characters, such as Nagraj, Super Commando Dhruv, Parmanu, Doga, Shakti and Chandika. The book considers how pulp literature, western comics, television programmes, technological developments and major space ventures sparked a thirst for extraterrestrial action and how these laid the grounds for vernacular ventures in the Indian superhero comics genre. It contains descriptions, textual and contextual analyses, excerpts of interviews with comic book creators, producers, retailers and distributers, together with the views, dreams and fantasies of young readers of adventure comics. These narratives touch upon special powers, super-intelligence, phenomenal technologies, justice, vengeance, geopolitics, romance, sex and the amazing potentials of masked identities enabled by navigation of the internet.

With its lucid style and rich illustrations, this book will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of popular and visual cultures, comics studies, literature, media and cultural studies, social anthropology and sociology, and South Asian studies.

This pioneering book presents a history and ethnography of adventure comic books for young people in India with a particular focus on vernacular superheroism. It chronicles popular and youth culture in the subcontinent from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary era dominated by creative audio-video-digital outlets.

The authors highlight early precedents in adventures set by the avuncular detective Chacha Chaudhary with his ‘faster than a computer brain’, the forays of the film veteran Amitabh Bachchan’s superheroic alter ego called Supremo, the Protectors of Earth and Mankind (P.O.E.M.), along with the exploits of key comic book characters, such as Nagraj, Super Commando Dhruv, Parmanu, Doga, Shakti and Chandika. The book considers how pulp literature, western comics, television programmes, technological developments and major space ventures sparked a thirst for extraterrestrial action and how these laid the grounds for vernacular ventures in the Indian superhero comics genre. It contains descriptions, textual and contextual analyses, excerpts of interviews with comic book creators, producers, retailers and distributers, together with the views, dreams and fantasies of young readers of adventure comics. These narratives touch upon special powers, super-intelligence, phenomenal technologies, justice, vengeance, geopolitics, romance, sex and the amazing potentials of masked identities enabled by navigation of the internet.

With its lucid style and rich illustrations, this book will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of popular and visual cultures, comics studies, literature, media and cultural studies, social anthropology and sociology, and South Asian studies.

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. It relates the topics to contemporary social struggles and cultural contexts, providing the reader with a framework to evaluate and displace the key ideological arguments, theories and narratives deployed in culturalist academic circles today. The authors demonstrate how diaspora and hybridity serve as problematic tools, cutting across traditional boundaries of nations and groups, where trans-national spaces for a range of contested cultural, political and economic outcomes might arise.

Wide ranging, richly illustrated and challenging, it will be of interest to students of cultural studies, sociology, ethnicity and nationalism.

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.

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.

Issues of identity, culture and difference remain central to the politics, policies and encounters of global societies in the 21st century. Changes in the speed, scale, scope and form of international and internal migration, new and resurgent religious and ethnic solidarities, the emergence of ‘new’ multicultural societies, and the fusions and fissures of ‘old’ multicultural societies, have challenged and redrawn our understandings of nation and community, citizenship and belonging, exclusion and equality.

This landmark collection, which marks the relaunch of the ground-breaking journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, brings together some of the leading international scholars in the field of race, ethnicity, migration and transnationalism to reflect on the changing landscape of research, theorisation and politics in this challenging contemporary context. The collection includes a powerful and typically provocative article by renowned race scholar Paul Gilroy, along with short ‘state of the field’ articles, critical interventions and think-pieces, each of which explores different geographical regions, emerging areas of research and new ways of ‘thinking’ identity in ‘uncertain times’.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

Issues of identity, culture and difference remain central to the politics, policies and encounters of global societies in the 21st century. Changes in the speed, scale, scope and form of international and internal migration, new and resurgent religious and ethnic solidarities, the emergence of ‘new’ multicultural societies, and the fusions and fissures of ‘old’ multicultural societies, have challenged and redrawn our understandings of nation and community, citizenship and belonging, exclusion and equality.

This landmark collection, which marks the relaunch of the ground-breaking journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, brings together some of the leading international scholars in the field of race, ethnicity, migration and transnationalism to reflect on the changing landscape of research, theorisation and politics in this challenging contemporary context. The collection includes a powerful and typically provocative article by renowned race scholar Paul Gilroy, along with short ‘state of the field’ articles, critical interventions and think-pieces, each of which explores different geographical regions, emerging areas of research and new ways of ‘thinking’ identity in ‘uncertain times’.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

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. It relates the topics to contemporary social struggles and cultural contexts, providing the reader with a framework to evaluate and displace the key ideological arguments, theories and narratives deployed in culturalist academic circles today. The authors demonstrate how diaspora and hybridity serve as problematic tools, cutting across traditional boundaries of nations and groups, where trans-national spaces for a range of contested cultural, political and economic outcomes might arise.

Wide ranging, richly illustrated and challenging, it will be of interest to students of cultural studies, sociology, ethnicity and nationalism.