The Pedagogy of the Piratical (In Light of Malegaon Videocinemas)

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

With Bhaskar Sarkar

Even as techno-nationalist fantasies fuel India’s dreams of superpowerdom, inserting the country into a universal narrative of global ascension via market liberalization, this talk begins from the premise that contemporary India’s most inventive instances of home-spun entrepreneurialism remain outside the ambit of such top down mythologies. To think of India “as method” is to locate, understand, and learn from the myriad grass-root initiatives that seek to solve everyday problems and to conjure lifeworlds beyond the foreclosed horizons named by G20 and Davos. The presentation will focus on Malegaon videocinemas as one striking instance of the often subaltern and piratical cultural-economic emergences from India that scuttle universal paradigms to forge southern trajectories of self-expression and global enterprise.

Bhaskar Sarkar, Professor, Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara, works in the areas of Indian cinema, piracy and the global South, and queer subcultures. He is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition, and coeditor of Documentary Testimonies, Asian Video Cultures, and Routledge Companion to Media and Risk. Sarkar is currently finishing up the draft of his next monograph, Cosmoplastics: Bollywood’s Global Gesture.

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