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.

Philippe Bornet, Nadia Cattoni (Eds.)
Significant Others, Significant Encounters: Essays on South Asian History and Literature

This volume is dedicated to Maya Burger, professor emerita at the Faculty of Arts, University of Lausanne. It gathers contributions by friends, colleagues, and former students that echo the multiple dimensions of her work. Organised in four parts, Indology, History of Religions, History of Orientalism, and Hindi and Translation, these contributions explore different examples of encounters with “significant others”. Analysing original historical and literary sources and reflecting on the methodological dimensions, the authors offer innovative perspectives on various processes of interaction and exchange between the Indian subcontinent and the wider world and within the subcontinent itself.

Monika Horstmann, Dalpat Singh Rajpurohit
In the Shrine of the Heart: Sants of Rajasthan from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

In the early modern period, the Sants emerged in North India as devotees of a formless interior god. The volume introduces seven Sant authors living in Rajasthan in the period from the first half of the sixteenth to the eighties of the seventeenth century. It explores their complex cultural background, their literary conventions, and their sectarian network, and presents samples of their poetry in the original Hindi with English translations. By far the most of the compositions in this volume have not been translated before, and of one of these the original text is published also for the first time.

Sant poetry has been transmitted in oral and written form. It owes its continuing vitality largely to congregational and private performance. This fact has been illustrated by a number of audio and video samples.

Tony Robinson & Minsun Ji
A Flying Dragon. King Taejo, Founder of Korea’s Choson Dynasty

In 1392, King Taejo became the founding monarch of Korea’s 518-year Joseon Dynasty, ruled by 26 successive descendants of his line, taking Korea all the way to 1910, when Joseon was terminated by Japanese colonization. This biography tells the story of how an unknown soldier (Yi Seong-gye) rose to capture the throne of Korea as King Taejo and examines his enduring impact on Korean society and the broader East Asian region.

When Yi Seong-gye was born in 1335, the Korean peninsula was dominated by the joint rule of Genghis Khan’s world-shaping Mongol empire and the nearly 500-year-old Korean Goryeo dynasty. At this watershed East Asian moment, Yi Seong-gye rose to become a powerful military general, assaulted Mongol forces, launched a dramatic coup d’état against his Goryeo King, and forged a new Korean dynasty (Joseon) under his banner By the end of Taejo’s reign, Mongol armies had been driven off the peninsula, a recognized border with China had emerged, northern tribes were offering tribute to Joseon, Japanese marauding pirates had been subjugated, and Joseon had firmly established the boundaries of the nation that became Korea. King Taejo also began a social transformation of his country, holding hands with a rising class of ideologically driven Confucian scholars who were intent on remaking the cultural foundations of their country. As Korea became Asia’s most thoroughly Confucianized nation, a broad range of social reforms improved agricultural production, tax codes, land allocation, and legal procedures.

Through military might, charismatic will, and ideological imagination, Yi Seong-gye became King Taejo, remembered in Korean legendry as a “Flying Dragon” who forged an enduring new order out of the turbulent and corrupted wreckage that characterized late-Goryeo society of his time.

Mette Gabler
Creating Slogans for Social Change: An Inquiry into Advertising, Gender Imagery and the Politics of Change in Urban India
Media and Cultural Studies ; 4

What role media content plays in processes of change is an ongoing and multi-layered discussion. Therein, advertising and gender have an extraordinary position. In the context of advertising production in urban India, this book deals with the understanding of social change in the early 2010s. Through an inquiry of the production of advertising created for commercial and/or social purposes, the perceptions of advertising producers are highlighted. The analysis presents the realities of the producers as well as debates surrounding the creation processes. Thereby, the complexities and intertwining of advertising are uncovered, while dynamics of gender, media, and change are discussed.