Purnima Mankekar

The Recursive Public Sphere, “New Media,” and Cinema in the New India
In this paper I wish to briefly examine the relationship between “new media” and discourses of democracy. I will focus on a popular Hindi film, Satyagraha: The Revolution Has Begun! as an example of how new media in particular, and information technology in general, is configured in notions of futurity, particularly with regards to the future of the nation. The problematic of this paper is not empirical: in other words, I am not concerned with whether new media do or do not contribute to democracy in India. Instead, my interest lies in what representations and discourses of new media signify: what hopes, desires, and fantasies to they engender? How do they participate in the creation of a recursive public sphere – one that (re)constructs the public sphere even as they represents it through a curious doubling, a convergence of the iconicity and indexicality of a public as a particular kind of sign that might provide a blueprint of the future of a nation beset with problems of social inequality and, most importantly, corruption. Satyagraha seeks to construct the future of the nation, and the new media that will enable it, in affectively-charged terms. I am concerned with how these affectively-charged representations enable us to engage the power of affects in the formation of public spheres and, indeed, of democracy.

Thus, my paper seeks to make the following interventions. First, it engages how “new media” function as particular kind of semiotics in discourses of democracy in the New India through constructions of recursive public spheres. Second, by foregrounding the role of affects, I wish to rethink constructions of publics and the public sphere that have, in canonical representations, been defined as a zone of reasoned debate as opposed to passion or affect. In the final section of this paper, I will return to how affectively-charged representations of new media signify particular kinds of futurities for the New India.

Biography
Purnima Mankekar is a faculty member in the Departments of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of “Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television” and Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India”,and is co-editor of “Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia” and “Caste and Outcast” by Dhan Gopal Mukherji. Her most recent book is “Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality published by Duke University Press.”