Tatiana Oranskaia, Anvita Abbi (Eds.)
The Heart of Change: Issues on Variation in Hindi

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.

Mariana Münning
Sound, Meaning, Shape: The Phonologist Wei Jiangong (1901–1980) between Language Study and Language Planning

One of the leading proponents of the radical linguistic reforms in 20th century China, Wei Jiangong remains hardly known in the West. This book describes how Wei, who was rooted in traditional philology and conceptualizing language as a tool, helped to promulgate a standard language, led the compilation of the world’s most popular dictionary, and helped to drive script reform. While these measures were characterized as violent intervention in the Chinese language sphere, Wei’s careful negotiating of linguistic description and political prescription illustrates how they also may have been steps that helped to achieve linguistic self-determination.

Barbara Schuler
Theorising Emotions: An Enquiry into the Emotion Knowledge of Premodern Tamil Treatises

It is impossible to imagine human history without emotions. But what is known about theoretical emotion knowledge in premodern South India? This volume offers a first systematic examination of emotion knowledge as found in Tamil treatises and commentaries written from the 11th to 17th century. By following different theoretical strands, it sheds light on the questions that were raised by various emotion theorists, as well as their agenda and theorising practices. It points out changes, linearity, and disruptions in their ideas, as well as historically marginal knowledge. Perhaps surprisingly, the only systematic works on emotion produced by medieval and early modern Tamil thinkers were on emotion in poetics.

Nadja-Christina Schneider (Ed.)
Media and Cultural Studies