Globalisation and culture

Third Text

Volumn 11, Issue 39, 1997, Pages 21-38

  Kapur, Geeta ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0040050849     PISSN: 09528822     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09528829708576670     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Verso, London, 1994, p 348.
2. Marxist economist Prabhat Patnaik argues today that the liberalisation programme in India should be cautiously paced out rather than opposed altogether. The old agenda of economic nationalism, he says, was worked out at a time when an international economy worth the name did not exist; initiated in Latin America during the Depression, the subsequent ideological variations on that theme have been based on the actual experience and intellectual developments of the 1930s. "Other developing countries like India adopted such strategy, properly speaking, only after independence when the consolidation of the international economy had not progressed far and when the process of internationalisation of capital in our sense was still in its infancy." He admits that the programme of economic nationalism is unsustainable; but he also argues that "the 'marketist' response, which has the backing of leading capitalist powers and agencies like the Fund and the Bank, and has internal support within a section of the capitalists (seeing in 'globalisation' a means of expansion, even as rentiers), and in a section of affluent middle classes (seeing in it a means of access to new commodities), is likely to be detrimental to the working masses, not only transitionally but over a protracted period. A neo-mercantilist strategy is neither easily replicated nor workable in the context of world recession, nor necessarily desirable in the context of India's extant democratic structures. Is it possible then for an economy like India to evolve a response of its own?" P Patnaik, 'International Capital and National Economic Policy: A Critique of India's Economic Reforms', Economic & Political Weekly, Vol XXIX No 12 (19 March 1994), pp 686, 688.
3. See also P Patnaik, Whatever Happened to Imperialism and Other Essays, Tulika, Delhi, 1995.
4. Partha Chatterjee's continuing interrogation of the nation-state in relation to the polity finds recent elaboration in his Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1993.
5. Anthropologist Veena Das writes: "The emergence of communities as political actors in their own right is related in India to changes in the nature of political democracy. We know that the anticolonial struggles, as embodied in several local, regional and national level movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were about the sharing of power. Yet by the end of the twentieth century the nature of representative democracy has itself been put into question, for it has become clear that even when power is exercised in the name of representation it tends to become absolute, and 'to speak in the name of the society it devours' (Tourraine, 1992, p 131)." She continues: "It is this political context of the state's assertion and arrogation of authority which explains why so many social scientists have raised powerful voices in support of 'tradition', and why they have expressed the hope that alternative visions of life may be available in the form of traditional ways of life, of which diverse communities are the embodiment."
6. Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1995, p 14.
7. For an elaboration of this Gramscian concept in the Indian context, see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1988, pp 131-166.
8. For the Gandhi-Tagore debate, see Truth Called Them Differently, (eds) R K Prabhu and Ravinder Kelkar, Navajivan, Ahmedabad, 1961.
9. For a recent interpretation of the significance of this debate, see Suresh Sharma, 'Swaraj and the Quest for Freedom - Rabindranath Tagore's Critique of Gandhi's Non-Cooperation', Thesis Eleven 39,1994, pp 93-104.
10. For a brief evaluation of Tagore's international engagement see Tan Chung, 'The Rabindranath Thunder of Oriental Dawn: A Sino-Indian Perspective of Tagore'
11. S. Mazumdar The East-West Colloquy: Tagore's Understanding of the West', in Rabindranath Tagore and the Challenges of Today, (eds) Bhudeb Chaudhuri and K G Subramanyan, Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 1988, pp 265-285, 294-306 respectively.
12. For an elaboration of this argument, see Geeta Kapur, 'Cultural Creativity in the First Decade: The Example of Satyajit Ray', Journal of Arts and Ideas, No 23, 1993, pp 17-49.
13. See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic, Screen Unit, Bombay, 1982;
14. and The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, (eds) Ashish Rajadyaksha and Paul Willemen, BFI, London, and Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1994, pp 95-96.
15. For a further exposition on his last film, see Geeta Kapur, 'Articulating the Self into History: Ritwik Ghatak's Jukti Takko Ar Gappo', Questions of Third Cinema, (eds) Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, BFI, London, 1989, pp 179-194.
16. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman's Text from the Third World', in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, Methuen, New York and London, 1987, p 243.
17. Fredric Jameson, 'Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism', Social Text 15, 1986.
18. This should be read in the context of the now famous reply by Aijaz Ahmad, 'Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory', Social Text 16,1987.
19. James Clifford, 'On Ethnographic Allegory', in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, (eds) James Clifford and George E Marcus, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986.
20. For a passionate polemic with Homi Bhabha on the continuing validity of the anticolonial struggle as against the more elusive track of postcolonial discourse, see Benita Parry, 'Signs of Our Times: A Discussion of Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture', Third Text 28/29, 1994, pp 5-24.
21. K G Subramanyan, The Creative Circuit, Seagull, Calcutta, 1992, pp 24-52.
22. For a contextualisation of Subramanyan's eclectic art practice, see Geeta Kapur, K G Subramanyan, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi, 1987.
23. Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London and New York, 1994.
24. Homi Bhabha, 'Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition', in Remaking History, (eds) Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, Bay Press, Seattle, 1989, p 131-148.
25. Quoted in Alok Rai, 'Black Skin, Black Masks', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XXVII No 39, 26 September 1992, p 2103.
26. For a sustained polemic on the travails of otherness, see Rustom Bharucha, 'Somebody's Other: Disorientations in the Cultural Politics of our Times', Third Text 26,1995, pp 3-10.
27. See Third Text, No 11,1990, the special issue titled 'Beyond the Rushdie Affaiŕ.
28. K A Appiah, 'Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?', Critical Inquiry, No 17, 1991, p 348.
29. Theodor Adorno and Mark Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, London, 1979, pp 120-167.
30. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London, 1991.
31. Néstor García Canclini, 'Memory and Innovation in the Theory of Art', The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol 92 No 3, 1993, pp 423-443.
32. For a discussion on the conditions for a historical avant-garde that not only accommodates but derives from the conditions of radical disjuncture in the three worlds alike, see Paul Willemen, 'An Avant-Garde for the 90s', Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, and BFI, London, 1994, pp 141-161.
33. Born in India in 1940, Kumar Shahani graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India in 1966, where he was a student of Ritwik Ghatak. He went to France for the advanced study of cinema and spent the tumultuous years of 1967-68 in Paris. Here, he gained the experience of an apprenticeship with Robert Bresson while the latter was shooting Une Femme Douce (1969). Back in India, Shahani became famous with his first feature film, Maya Darpan (1972), following which his major films Tarang (1984), Khayal Gatha (1989), Kasba (1990) and Bhavantarana (1991) have won awards and been shown in a range of mainstream and avant-garde film festivals all over the world. Problems of commercial release make his films rare to see. He has been designated a difficult film-maker, intellectual and ideological in ways that make him controversial and at the same time seminal in the Indian cultural context. A forthcoming film, based on a Tagore novella, Char Adhyaya, is supplemented with a whole series of unproduced films: these include scripts in various stages of completion on the psychoanalyst W R Bion; on the Indo-European woman painter, Amrita Shergil (1913-41); on Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; and on the world history of the production of cotton. A theoretician of cinema, Kumar Shahani has written and published extensively. For a selection of his essays, see 'Dossier: Kumar Shahani', Framework 30/31, 1986.
34. Kumar Shahani in an unpublished letter to the historian, Ravinder Kumar, Bombay, September 1994.
35. Excerpts from an unpublished letter to the author (Bombay, 14 October, 1994).
36. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Verso, London, 1974, p 60.