The Vernacular Sensorium

ConTrust Research seminar „India as Method: Challenges and Perspectives in the Study of Media and Politics in Contemporary South Asia“

With Bishnupriya Ghosh

“My presentation will explore the concept of the “vernacular” less as a classification that arbitrates between languages (a historical locus in postcolonial studies) and more as a relational space between lingual performances. As theorists of accented speech (Pooja Rangan, Akshya Saxena, Pavitra Sundar) argue, India’s vast multimodal, multilingual mediascapes unassailably situates us in a vernacular sensorium: complex lingual performances span not just reading and writing, but also speaking, listening, and viewing.  Indeed, this media saturation offers a kind of test-bed for the theoretical and methodological promise of the vernacular. While this rethinking of the vernacular is based in sound studies, I turn to moving image studies to inquire  into the lingual visualities of the vernacular sensorium.”  

Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches in global media at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published two monographs on the cultures of globalization: When Borne Across: Cosmopolitics in the Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011). Her current research is on media, risk, and globalization: the co-edited Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge 2020) and a new monograph on viral pandemics, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke University Press, 2023). She is starting research on media environments of viral infection in a book of essays tentatively titled Epidemic Intensities.

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