Launch of DigiNaka: Subaltern Politics and Digital Media in Post Capitalist India – School of Media and Cultural Studies, TISS

The edited volume Diginaka: Subaltern Politics and Digital Media in Post Capitalist India, edited by Anjali Monteiro, KP Jayasankar and Amit Rai, and published by Orient Blackswan, was launched by Prof. Gopal Guru at the Data Societies Seminar, held on February 7, 2020.

About the Book

Differential and changing access to the Internet in India, along with the increasing availability of cheap mobile phones and WiFi, has led to an explosion of user-created content across various platforms and media. This turn to the digital also has political and economic consequences, as seen in the imposition of AADHAAR and demonetisation. While the digital divide intensifies social hierarchies of caste, class and gender, it can also become part of the logistics of postcapitalist ecologies, traversing the formal and informal sectors, even as the digital becomes central to social and political practices in different marginalised communities. Diginaka: Subaltern Politics and Digital Media in Post-Capitalist India explores this complex space of the digital from multiple perspectives and locations. The chapters in the book are mentioned below.

Introduction: A Test of Time: Digital Commoning against Neoliberal Precarity
Amit S. Rai, Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar

PART I: DIGITAL POLITICS

1. Interactive Documentaries: The Politics of an Emerging Genre
Paolo S. H. Favero

2. Mumbai Sub-version: The Place of Affect in Digital Video Activism
Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar

3. ‘Gauseva’ by WhatsApp: Hindu Nationalism and Online Mobilisation
Abir Dasgupta

4. Whose Free Wi-Fi is it Anyway? Politics of Online Access and the Rise of Digital Populism in Urban India
Aasim Khan and Faiz Ullah

5. Dalit Aesthetics in Digital Mumbai
Amit S. Rai, Rachna Ramesh Kumar and Shiva Thorat

PART II: DIGITAL NEGOTIATIONS

6. Cinema, in Your Pocket: Theorising Film-watching on a Mobile Screen
Maanvi

7. Digital Devices and New Narratives of Bengali Cinema
Kunal Ray

8. The Other Cinemas: Recycled Content, Vulnerable Bodies, and the Gradual Dismantling of Publicness
Nikhil Thomas Titus

9. Digitising Memories: A Digital Archive of Kolkata’s Forgotten Colonial Cemeteries
Souvik Mukherjee

PART III: DIGITAL AFFECT

10. Interface Intimacies
Namita Aavriti

11. Circuits of Affect, Care and Materiality
Radhika Gajjala and Sriya Chattopadhyay

12. Isolated Bubbles: Reflections on Performing New Motherhood on Facebook

Shilpa Phadke