Media and Utopia : History, Imagination and Technology

Collective political projects have become ephemeral and are subject to radical forms of erasure through cooptation, division, redefinition or intimidation in present times. Media and Utopia responds to the resulting crisis of the social by investigating the links between mediation and political imagination. This volume addresses those utopian space

Arvind Rajagopal is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, and an affiliate faculty in the Department of Sociology, and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His book Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (2001) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize, and his edited volume The Indian Public Sphere appeared in 2009. His recent essays have been on the political culture of post-independence India. He is currently writing about the history of publicity.

Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History, Barnard College, Columbia University. She has research and teaching interests in the history of anti-colonialism; gender and sexuality studies; caste and race; historical anthropology, social theory, and colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism. Her book The Caste Question (2009) theorises caste subalternity, with specific focus on the role of anti-caste thought (and its thinkers). She is currently working on a book on the political thought of B. R. Ambedkar as well as a project titled Dalit Bombay, which explores the relationship between caste, political culture, and everyday life in colonial and postcolonial Bombay.