John Hutnyk

Challenges academic complicity in the reification of exotica

Music, Politics and the Culture Industry

Critique of Exotica

''... brilliantly original ... brings cultural and post-colonial theory to bear on a wide range of authors with great skill and sensitivity.' Terry Eagleton

Raminder Kaur

Virinder Kalra

Diaspora & Hybridity deals with those theoretical issues which concern social theory and social change in the new millennium. The volume provides a refreshing, critical and illuminating analysis of concepts of diaspora and hybridity and their impact on multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies’ - Dr Rohit Barot, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol 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.

Diaspora and Hybridity

Everyone's Got a Traveller's Tale, but Travel Worlds tells them with a sting: African-American musicians head East for Kung-Fu kicks while paedophiles go for cheap sex pilgrimage; Western bible-bashers adopt missionary positions in India while heroic Saint George signs on as an Arab soldier in Britain; the scars of Partition mock the protocols of transit, while nomadic insurgents resist the Bangladeshi nation state with lyrical persuasion; Kula Shaker and Madonna trinketize the 'Orient' while dead tourists exchange values with travelling 'terrorists'; British Mirpuris and Black women travel back to the 'Old Country' and beyond in ways that are not quite as they seem; and ethnographers collide with tourists in the carousel of Goa's resorts. Including poetry and fiction alongside academic essays, this book refuses simplistic dichotomies of north/south and east/west and confronts head on existing conventions of writing about travel in post-colonial, literary and cultural studies.

Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics

Travel Worlds

Ursula Rao

9. Between meaning and significance: reflections on ritual and mimesis / Alexander Henn -- 10. Animism on stage: tracing anthropology's heritage in contemporary African dance in Europe / Nadine Sieveking -- 11. Transgression and the erotic / Vincent Crapanzano -- 12. Michael Leiris: master of the ethnographic failure / Peter Phipps -- 13. Boundary confusion in anthropology and art: Pablo Picasso and Michael Leiris / Klaus Peter Buchheit -- 14. The concatenation of minds / Klaus Peter Buchheit -- 15. Transgressions of fieldwork/filed works: method in madness / John Hutnyk.

Method and Politics in Anthropological Studies of Culture : a Book in Honour of Klaus Peter Köpping

Celebrating Transgression

Representations of Calcutta are analysed, and the author shows how the rumours of westerners contribute to the elaboration of an imaginary city. In doing so, they circulate in ways fundamental to the maintenance of international order.

Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation

The Rumour of Calcutta

This collection of essays, graphics and theatre displaces our understandings of borders so that we cannot look the same way at that which invades our everyday, that which kills and excludes, that which sounds out across divides and that which connects or cleaves. Addressing activism, philosophy, film, art and music, the book includes a graphic essay on the Gaza Flotilla and an original play The Detention Centre. Essays by prominent scholars and writers address citizenship, visa queues, the home economy, philanthropy, student fees, transportation, terror, camps, poetic license and more. The book makes a virtue of the chance encounter of creativity with structure so as to invent new angles on the politics of borders and movement, breaking with regulatory thinking and always looking to slip under or over the wire. The border effect is everywhere, even between our pages. We are for rampant transgressions - and an end to borders of death.

Beyond Borders

Pantomime is a theatrical form that has come to rule our everyday lives as terror. In the early years of the 21st century, a dissembling political demonology has sometimes placed otherwise merely lyrical musicians in a volatile predicament. The discussion here is of Fun-da-Mental's Aki Nawaz portrayed as a 'suicide rapper', Asian Dub Foundation striking poses from the street in support of youth in Paris and Algiers, and M.I.A., born free fighting immigration crackdown with atrocity video. Along the way, bus bombs, comedy circuits, critical theory, Arabian Nights, Bradley Wiggins, Dinarzade, Karl Marx, Paris boulevards, Molotov, Mao, the Eiffel Tower, reserve armies, lists, Richard Wagner, Samina Malik, Slavoj Žižek, Freudian slips, red-heads, Guantanamo. The book offers some sharp critiques of our contemporary complacency, and the failures of theory as more than ten years of war on terror turns anxiety at home and drone-strike assassinations abroad into a normal everyday. This pantomime is a terror story told over and over to distract from the workings of a despotic power. The need for an adequate (winning) counter-narrative was never more clear.

Music and Politics

Pantomime Terror

Sanjay Sharma

Ashwani Sharma

Aims to produce a new understanding of the world significance of South Asian culture in multi-racist societies. It focuses on the role that contemporary South Asian dance music has played in the formation of a new urban cultural politics.

John Hutnyk

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