Roma Chatterji - Böcker

This book gives a detailed account of thecommunal riots between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai in 1992-93. It departs from the historiography of the riot, which assumes that Hindu-Muslim conflict is independent of the participants of the violence.Speaking to and interacting with the residents of Dharavi, the largest shanty town in the city, the au

This book explores graphic narratives and comics in India and demonstrates how these forms serve as sites on which myths are enacted and recast. It uses the case studies of a comics version of the Mahabharata War, a folk artist’s rendition of a comic book story, and a commercial project to re-imagine two of India’s most famous epics – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – as science fiction and superhero tales. It discusses comic books and self-published graphic novels; bardic performance aided with painted scrolls and commercial superhero comics; myths, folklore, and science fiction; and different pictorial styles and genres of graphic narration and storytelling. It also examines the actual process of the creation of comics besides discussions with artists on the tools and location of the comics medium as well as the method and impact of translation and crossover genres in such narratives. With its clear, lucid style and rich illustrations, the book will be useful to scholars and researchers of sociology, anthropology, visual culture and media, and South Asian studies, as well as those working on art history, religion, popular culture, graphic novels, art and design, folk culture, literature, and performing arts.

This book explores graphic narratives and comics in India and demonstrates how these forms serve as sites on which myths are enacted and recast. It uses the case studies of a comics version of the Mahabharata War, a folk artist’s rendition of a comic book story, and a commercial project to re-imagine two of India’s most famous epics – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – as science fiction and superhero tales. It discusses comic books and self-published graphic novels; bardic performance aided with painted scrolls and commercial superhero comics; myths, folklore, and science fiction; and different pictorial styles and genres of graphic narration and storytelling. It also examines the actual process of the creation of comics besides discussions with artists on the tools and location of the comics medium as well as the method and impact of translation and crossover genres in such narratives. With its clear, lucid style and rich illustrations, the book will be useful to scholars and researchers of sociology, anthropology, visual culture and media, and South Asian studies, as well as those working on art history, religion, popular culture, graphic novels, art and design, folk culture, literature, and performing arts.

This book gives a detailed account of the ‘communal riots’ between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai in 1992-93. It departs from the historiography of the riot, which assumes that Hindu-Muslim conflict is independent of the participants of the violence.Speaking to and interacting with the residents of Dharavi, the largest shanty town in the city, the authors collected a wide range of narrative accounts of the violence and the procedures of rehabilitation that accompanied the violence. The authors juxtapose these narrative accounts with public documents exploring the role language, work, housing and rehabilitation have on the day-to-day life of people who live with violence.

Speaking with Pictures offers a path-breaking exploration of visual narratives in folk art. It foregrounds folk art’s engagement with modernity by re-looking at its figurative modes and the ways in which they are embedded in mythic thought. The book discusses folk art as a contemporary phenomenon which is a part of a complex visual culture where the ‘essence’ of tradition is best captured in a ‘new’ form or medium. Each chapter picks up a theme that moves between the local and the global, thereby attempting to problematise the stereotypical view of folk artists as carriers of ‘timeless tradition’. The volume provides an ethnographic account of innovations through a detailed analysis of the scroll painting tradition of the patuas of West Bengal and the Pardhan-Gond style of Madhya Pradesh, highlighting some recent attempts at inter-medium exchange in storytelling.The book will interest those in visual and popular culture in anthropology, sociology, literary criticism and folklore. It will also be of immense value to art historians, museologists, curators and NGOs working in media and communication, apart from those with a general interest in folk art.

The essays in this book explore the critical possibilities that have been opened by Veena Das's work. Taking off from her writing on pain as a call for acknowledgment, several essays explore how social sciences render pain, suffering, and the claims of the other as part of an ethics of responsibility. They search for disciplinary resources to contest the implicit division between those whose pain receives attention and those whose pain is seen as out of sync with the times and hence written out of the historical record.Another theme is the co-constitution of the event and the everyday, especially in the context of violence. Das's groundbreaking formulation of the everyday provides a frame for understanding how both violence and healing might grow out of it. Drawing on notions of life and voice and the struggle to write one's own narrative, the contributors provide rich ethnographies of what it is to inhabit a devastated world.Ethics as a form of attentiveness to the other, especially in the context of poverty, deprivation, and the corrosion of everyday life, appears in several of the essays. They take up the classic themes of kinship and obligation but give them entirely new meaning.Finally, anthropology's affinities with the literary are reflected in a final set of essays that show how forms of knowing in art and in anthropology are related through work with painters, performance artists, and writers.

There is a prevailing sense that commercial Superhero Comics cannot be serious objects of academic enquiry. It is the hallowed graphic novel, with its auteur/author, for which serious work is reserved. This volume presents the work of three publishing houses who publish Superhero Comics in Delhi and Mumbai. It analyses their techniques of narration associated with the serial publication of commercial comics such as open-ended plots, frequent re-boots of the storyline, extended story arcs, and a complex narrative universe to throw into sharper relief the value of superhero comic books as distinct from the graphic novel. Through an exploration of commercial Superhero Comics, the authors wish to draw attention to a fluidity embedded in Superhero Comics, which is influenced by external pressures of distribution and production that are generally ignored in the desire to view a comic text as a discrete and disembodied whole. Superhero Comics then emerge as a post-modern vehicle to test serious socio-political issues in the mode of fantasy. This ethnographic attempt to understand the contexts of production, circulation, and consumption of Superhero Comics will be of interest to comics scholars, students of popular culture, sociology, social anthropology, literature, and the arts.

There is a prevailing sense that commercial Superhero Comics cannot be serious objects of academic enquiry. It is the hallowed graphic novel, with its auteur/author, for which serious work is reserved. This volume presents the work of three publishing houses who publish Superhero Comics in Delhi and Mumbai. It analyses their techniques of narration associated with the serial publication of commercial comics such as open-ended plots, frequent re-boots of the storyline, extended story arcs, and a complex narrative universe to throw into sharper relief the value of superhero comic books as distinct from the graphic novel. Through an exploration of commercial Superhero Comics, the authors wish to draw attention to a fluidity embedded in Superhero Comics, which is influenced by external pressures of distribution and production that are generally ignored in the desire to view a comic text as a discrete and disembodied whole. Superhero Comics then emerge as a post-modern vehicle to test serious socio-political issues in the mode of fantasy. This ethnographic attempt to understand the contexts of production, circulation, and consumption of Superhero Comics will be of interest to comics scholars, students of popular culture, sociology, social anthropology, literature, and the arts.