Arvind Rajagopal

New York University | NYU · Department of Media, Culture, and Communication

How Film Histories Were Made is dedicated to film history’s own history: It provides insights into the fabrication of film histories and the discourses on their materials and methods in the past in order to better understand and reconsider film history today. The interventions unpack unspoken assumptions and hidden agendas that determine film histo...

Comment on Matteo Bortolini’s A Joyfully Serious Man: The Life of Robert Bellah

Werner Sollors is one of the first scholars of American literature to focus on African American literature before it was thought to constitute a canon in the academy. Unlike many other scholars who shared his focus, he completed his education in postwar Germany. The title of his doctoral dissertation on LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), completed at the...

Architects today work in an age where all-embracing visions for the masses appear in the past. Far from being renewed today, those older visions are discredited in favor of more embattled and exclusive political programs. ln fact we seem to be entering a period defending rather than celebrating collective values, demanding battlements and not monum...

The generalisation of “media” as a term for all forms of communication technologies occurred in part as a result of Cold War history. The implication was that every medium was in some abstract sense equivalent, whether it was print, radio or television for example. Media acquired emancipatory connotations, as if their growth would bring progress in...

The public sphere of debate and discussion predicated on transparency has given way to a public sphere of image and spectacle.

This chapter examines television advertisements shown between 1992 and 2003, in order to trace the cultural patterns and trajectories of democratization in India during the period of economic liberalization that began in 1991. From catering to an elite, wealthy audience that appeared to represent the entire nation, advertising evolved to reflect th...

In January 1987, the Indian state-run television began broadcasting a Hindu epic in serial form, The Ramayana, to nationwide audiences, violating a decades-old taboo on religious partisanship. What resulted was the largest political campaign in post-independence times, around the symbol of Lord Ram, led by Hindu nationalists. The complexion of Indi...