Tejaswini Niranjana: Subjectivity and Sociality in Mumbai's Musicophilia

Date
Thu May 30th 2019, 12:00 - 1:30pm
Event Sponsor
Center for South Asia
Location
Encina Hall West Rm 219
Tejaswini Niranjana: Subjectivity and Sociality in Mumbai's Musicophilia

Tejaswini Niranjana (Lingnan University), "Subjectivity and Sociality in Mumbai's Musicophilia"

Professor Niranjana will present her forthcoming book, Musicophilia in Mumbai, which tracks the place of Hindustani music in Mumbai in the long twentieth century. The love of Hindustani music, which emerged in Mumbai around the mid-19th century, led to the formation of a ‘lingua musica’ that connected the diverse inhabitants of the city and also contributed to new forms of sociality, of being together in public. This new urban subject is a social subject, embedded in a metropolitan unconscious that creates the conditions for performing modernity. People’s ways of living and experiencing feed into this sedimented repertoire of a collectivized unconscious that is continually transformed by the conditions of present-day life. This coming together of past and present habits produce the musicophilia that marks Mumbai’s social subjects. Professor Niranjana argues that the musicophilia of Mumbai's inhabitants gives us new material with which to think through questions of urbanity, subjectivity, and culture. The book suggests that the relationship between cultural practice and the formation of the social subject can speak to many other contexts, especially in the non-west.

Tejaswini Niranjana is currently Professor and Head, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She is also Visiting Professor with the School of Arts and Science at Ahmedabad University, India. She is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, which offered an innovative inter-disciplinary PhD programme from 2000-2012. During 2012-16, she headed the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and was Indian-language advisor to Wikipedia. She is the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, 1992), Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, 2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai(forthcoming in 2019). Among her edited volumes is Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Delhi, 2015), with Wang Xiaoming.

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Free and Open to the Public.

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