Post-Exotic India: On Remixed Histories and Smart Images

TY - JOUR

T1 - Post-Exotic India

T2 - On Remixed Histories and Smart Images

AU - Kaur, Ravinder

N1 - Special Issue: Aesthetics of Arrival: Spectacle, Capital, Novelty in Post-reform India

PY - 2016/5/3

Y1 - 2016/5/3

N2 - This paper examines the aesthetics of remixing history at the heart of the neoliberal project of India’s image makeover as the ‘land of limitless opportunity’ for global tourists and investors. I argue that the project of remixing India’s history is predicated upon the ontological fault line of how to retain and erase the original simultaneously while shaping the new in the contemporary global. Taking the Incredible India campaign as an example, I show how the original essence of India is revealed and authenticated in the very moment of its disappearance as it is morphed in the aesthetics of the contemporary global. The post-exotic self, I further argue, is not produced by effacing the exotic past, but by condensing, accelerating and fast-forwarding it into a timeless, infinite global present. And in doing so, it also reveals the blueprint of the ongoing visual rearrangement of nation’s civilisational past in the making of new India.

AB - This paper examines the aesthetics of remixing history at the heart of the neoliberal project of India’s image makeover as the ‘land of limitless opportunity’ for global tourists and investors. I argue that the project of remixing India’s history is predicated upon the ontological fault line of how to retain and erase the original simultaneously while shaping the new in the contemporary global. Taking the Incredible India campaign as an example, I show how the original essence of India is revealed and authenticated in the very moment of its disappearance as it is morphed in the aesthetics of the contemporary global. The post-exotic self, I further argue, is not produced by effacing the exotic past, but by condensing, accelerating and fast-forwarding it into a timeless, infinite global present. And in doing so, it also reveals the blueprint of the ongoing visual rearrangement of nation’s civilisational past in the making of new India.

U2 - 10.1080/1070289x.2015.1034134

DO - 10.1080/1070289x.2015.1034134

M3 - Journal article

SN - 1070-289X

VL - 23

SP - 307

EP - 326

JO - Identities - Global Studies in Culture and Power

JF - Identities - Global Studies in Culture and Power

IS - 3

ER -