Raj Thakur
@cujammu.ac.in
Assistant Professor
Central University of Jammu
Scopus Publications
Scopus Publications
Isha Malhotra, Eva Sharma, and Raj Thakur
SAGE Publications
The article makes a biopolitical study of commercial surrogacy in India through the case studies of Bollywood celebrities prioritizing bioengineered babies through surrogacy. Drawing upon the theories of the culture industry and neoliberal subjectivity, the entanglement between the cultural economy of celebrity and the medico-industrial complex is decoded. The study attempts to focus on the existing popular public discourse using newspaper articles, tabloid press, interviews, and journal articles to investigate how Bollywood celebrities, as bioconsumers in the neoliberal surrogacy market, further genetic essentialism and neoliberal eugenics. Celebrities, as agents of new reproductive subjectivities, invite critical forays into bioeconomies of intensity, intimate life and belongings through the affective bonds of familial ties and kinship. Examining the moral economy of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in India, the study highlights the exploitative use of the reproductive labour of surrogates, who are treated as effaced entities and as collateral ‘prosthetics’ in the ART industry.
Karuna Gupta and Raj Thakur
Informa UK Limited
Isha Malhotra, , and Raj Thakur
Aesthetics Media Services
The paper outlines the politics of gendered athleticism appropriated and instrumentalised through the medico-juridical apparatus of the sports governing bodies. The biomedical discourse governing the atypical athletic body and the embodied nature of its pathologised deviancy is drawn through the critical reflection of athletic regulatory bodies’ testing regimes and policies. It is through the detailed analysis of the Indian sprinter Dutee Chand’s case that one of many confounding disqualification charges and trials of hyperandrogenism against athletes with differences of sex development (DSD’s) is foregrounded. Drawing on the critical scholarship of gender theorists and activists, the legitimacy of the stipulated biological mechanism of testosterone as a regulatory performance index in female elite sport is contested and problematized. Pertinent here is Dutee Chand’s narrative of trial and triumph that destabilises the reductive embodiments of sex institutionalised in and beyond the sporting track. Significantly, the paper also delineates the premises of the constitutive exclusionary and arbitrary regulatory regimes propounded by the athletic governing bodies like the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). These concerns border on the geopolitics of race and nation framing the normative, prescriptive and reserved rights of femininity, able-bodiedness and heteronormativity in international women’s elite sport.
Raj Thakur
Informa UK Limited
ABSTRACT Broadcasting commentary has developed a unique relationship with cricket wherein it performatively mediates the changing discourse that surrounds the game. Although, the social history of cricket in India has gained a considerable academic space, the cultural history of cricket commentary in India remains a fairly uncharted territory. The paper by placing it within the cultural studies framework attempts to trace cricket’s auratic presence in the popular imagination. Cricket’s acculturation in India is unique to its radio sonic mapping, televisual spectacle and its experience with modernity. It argues how the cultural economy of cricket through radio and television commentary, covering cricket’s varied format over the years constantly informed and negotiated its linguistic, cultural and economic registers. The attempt is to foreground the ways in which its distinct structures of listening experience uniquely fostered decolonisation and indigenous appropriation of the game. Above all, interpreting the materialistic aesthetics of the broadcast medium, the shifting trajectory of cricket broadcast delineates how IPL’s subcultural sporting codes challenges the discursive ‘Englishness’ of cricket. What anchors in IPL through the playful transaction of the contemporary cricket culture, especially, through commentary, is the tension between global cultural reproduction and the forces of indigenisation at work.
Ritika Pathania, , and Raj Thakur
Aesthetics Media Services
The paper through iconographic and spatial dynamics, critically engages with the performative aspect of the select war memorial sites in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir. While the interdisciplinary study of war memorials in relation to memory and commemorative politics have been studied, its materialistic aesthetics informed through spatial and affective contours remains a burgeoning field of enquiry if not an unexampled one. The study is premised on the photographic field work of the sites envisioned through the cultural geography of war memorials. In approaching war memorial sites as a landscape of memory, we take the position that memory is simultaneously a material and immaterial phenomenon and these cannot be detached from affective and visceral human bonds and their roles in (re-)formulations in space and place. The materialistic aesthetics of memory- memorial continuum are ideated through spatial and affective contours, which, in turn, inform the predominant and everyday experience of grief and bereavement, both imagined and lived. The study dominantly attests its claims through Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’ in relation to commemorative sites. The heterotopic tensions of multiple experiences and belongings are unpacked through both tangible and affective domains ranging from dominant public commemorative sites to parks and shopping complexes.
RAJ THAKUR and ISHA MALHOTRA
SAGE Publications
The Uri attack in 2016 and the Pulwama attack in 2019 by terrorist in Jammu and Kashmir have brought to the center-stage the Kashmir conflict as a core issue between the two South Asian neighbors, India and Pakistan. This research analyzes the mediatized indulgence of terror in reporting of these two incidents in television and print media. The politics of representation in this analysis entails that these frames do not just involve reportage but an act of performance, how events are choreographed and predated on emotions and sentiments as cultural practices mobilizing its effective economy. This paper through the prism of media-industrial-terror complex draws upon the theory of critical events and focuses on how particular events – Uri and Pulwama activate and mobilize a discursive master narrative of Pakistan inspired/directed terrorism by ascribing a particular meaning to the war on terror. The semiotics of media reporting of Uri and Pulwama is analyzed through the tripartite motive quotient of gham (remorse), gussa (anger), and garv (pride).
Rana Nayar, P. Syal and Akshaya Kumar
Routledge
Prologue. Part I: Cultural Studies & Indian Context 1. Culture and English Studies in India Kapil Kapoor 2. The Return of the Silenced Oral: Culture and Study in Our Time Ganesh N. Devy 3. The Relevance of Classical Indian Aesthetics to Contemporary Culture Studies Saugata Bhaduri Part II: Cultural Studies & Literary Studies 4. Popular Culture Studies in India today: Issues and Problems Simi Malhotra 5. Postcolonial Cultural Studies at the Crossroads: Theoretical Approaches and Practical Realities Rumina Sethi 6. Dalit Autobiographies in the Punjabi Context Akshaya Kumar Part III: Cultural History & Local Traditions 7. Indianness: A Battlefield Sushil Kumar 8. Cultural Studies in Indian History: Dominant Models from South Asia Mahesh Sharma 9. History, Historiography & Punjabi Folk Literature: Issues of Canons and Cultures I. D. Gaur 10. Uses of the Folk: Towards a Cultural History of the Guga Tradition Anne Murphy Part IV: Cultural Politics & Mass Media 11. (In)visible Publics: Television and Participatory Cultures in India Abhijit Roy 12. The Transformative Energy of Performance Tutun Mukherjee 13. Re-invention and Appropriation of Folk in Daler Mehndi's Pop Videos Pushpinder Syal 14. Subverting the Male Gaze: A Case Study of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara Vivek Sachdeva Part V Cultural Imagination & New Identities 15. 'I Sing Body Biometric': Identity, Identification, Surveillance and Biological Citizenship Pramod Nayar 16. Romantic Imagination: Science and Empire in the works of Amitav Ghosh Sakoon K. Chhabra 17. Cultural Economy of Leisure and IPL Raj Thakur