Malini Ambach, Jonas Buchholz, Ute Hüsken (Eds.)
Temples, Texts, and Networks: South Indian Perspectives.

For many centuries, Hindu temples and shrines have been of great importance to South Indian religious, social and political life. Aside from being places of worship, they are also pilgrimage destinations, centres of learning, political hotspots, and foci of economic activities. In these temples, not only the human and the divine interact, but they are also meeting places of different members of the communities, be they local or coming from afar. Hindu temples do not exist in isolation, but stand in multiple relationships to other temples and sacred sites. They relate to each other in terms of architecture, ritual, or mythology, or on a conceptual level when particular sites are grouped together. Especially in urban centres, multiple temples representing different religious traditions may coexist within a shared sacred space. The current volume pays close attention to the connections between individual Hindu temples and the affiliated communities, be it within a particular place or on a translocal level. These connections are described as “temple networks,” a concept which instead of stable hierarchies and structures looks at nodal, multi-centred, and fluid systems, in which the connections in numerous fields of interaction are understood as dynamic processes.

Johann Arnold Dohmen
Das EU-Indien-Freihandelsabkommen in deutschen, französischen, britischen und hindi- sowie englischsprachigen indischen Nachrichtenmedien

This analysis of 270 articles in news media from India and the EU, which reported on the negotiation of a free trade agreement between the EU and India from 2007 to 2013, concludes inter alia that the attempts of the EU to exert pressure on the Indian side, and to impose its own social and moral values, influenced the negotiations negatively. It also becomes clear that the Indian side perceives the EU as virtual rather than real, and views the "strategic partnership" between the two parties primarily in the context of military aspects. These factors seem to have significantly contributed to the failure of the negotiations to date.

Bindu Bhadana
Post-national Perceptions in Contemporary Art Practice
Media and Cultural Studies ; 3

The role of the nation has increasingly come under question since the 1990s as ongoing debates emphasize the shifting and fluid modes of identification in our post-modern, post-colonial and post-structuralist world. The nation in such debates is viewed alternately as a marker of plural belonging or as a monolithic relic that has outgrown its usefulness. How important is the nation and national identity in the contemporary moment? This monograph takes up the artworks of three artists, one from the diaspora, Chitra Ganesh (b.1974, New York), and Tejal Shah (b.1979, Bhilai) and Nikhil Chopra (b.1976, Calcutta) from India, to understand the transforming relationship of the gendered body with national identity in contemporary art practice. It demonstrates that ideas of national belonging are being challenged precisely through a concerted focus on post-colonial, racial histories and through identities marginalized by the nation – women, queer, transgender. It proposes the ‘post-national’ as an empowering term and a critical framework to understand the shifting dynamics of belonging being articulated through diverse medias in contemporary art.