English - Publications

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    Packaging life: Cultures of the everyday
    ( 2009-01-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
    This book explores the cultural politics of four aspects of everyday life - health, comfort, risk and mobility - as manifest in public culture. It examines the commodification of these aspects, arguing that our experience and perception are mediated by discourses circulating in the mass media. The book is an essential reading for those who want to understand modern urban cultural rhetorics. Scholars and practitioners working in the fields of media and communication, consumer behaviour studies and cultural studies will find it highly engaging as well as provocative.
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    English writing and India, 1600-1920: Colonizing aesthetics
    ( 2008-01-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
    This book explores the formations and configurations of British colonial discourse on India through a reading of prose narratives of the 1600-1920 period. Arguing that colonial discourse often relied on aesthetic devices in order to describe and assert a degree of narrative control over Indian landscape, Pramod Nayar demonstrates how aesthetics furnished a vocabulary and representational modes for the British to construct particular images of India. Looking specifically at the aesthetic modes of the marvellous, the monstrous, the sublime, the picturesque and the luxuriant, Nayar marks the shift in the rhetoric – from the exploration narratives from the age of mercantile exploration to that of the ‘shikar’ memoirs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s extreme exotic. English Writing and India provides an important new study of colonial aesthetics, even as it extends current scholarship on the modes of early British representations of new lands and cultures.
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    Seeing stars: Spectacle, society and celebrity culture
    ( 2009-01-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
    Celebrity Culture explores the ways in which celebrities are ‘manufactured’, how they establish their hold on the public imagination, and how social responses enable them to be what they are. Celebrity culture is marked by three main responses: adulation, identification, and emulation. The book proposes that these responses are generated as a result of media constructions of celebrities. Therefore, celebrity culture is something that must be studied as a consequence of new forms of media representation and mass culture.
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    Affective travel: Terror and the human rights narrative in Véronique Tadjo's the Shadow of Imana
    ( 2009-09-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
    Travel writing, this paper argues, is linked to human rights discourse because it constructs genocidal spaces through an ethnography of mourning within its narrative of witnessing, the creation of new contact zones of suffering and violation, and generating an affective literacy about the world as constituted by genocidal spaces. It examines Véronique Tadjo's The Shadow of Imana, a travel narrative about Rwanda, for this purpose. Beginning with the assumption that human rights demand a narrative, it explores two major components of Tadjo's work. It is proposed here that Rwanda is constructed as a 'genocidal space' because it is a space of human rights violation. The first part of the paper deals with Tadjo's 'narrative of witnessing'. This 'narrative' is generated through two modes: the semi-ethnographic 'observation' mode and the deeply subjective. The narrative also constructs an ethnography of mourning through representation of 'sites of mourning'. Further, it also enacts individual stories of terror. It is in this last that the individual subject emerges-and the individual, as Michael Ignatieff and others have argued, is the locus of human rights. The second part of the paper develops the idea of 'affective geographies'. Adapting the notion of 'contact zones' from M L Pratt, it argues that the emergence of 'new' contact zones is built on the recognition of suffering. This 'contact zone' is one where Tadjo encounters violations, deprivation, death and mourning. By folding the singularity of suffering terror into something larger (an ethnography), Tadjo's travel narrative enables the creation of an entire archive of feelings, and this is the affective geography of the world. By widening our knowledge of suffering about the world, travel writing creates an 'affective literacy'. This 'affective literacy' induced by narratives such as Tadjo's, is the source of the discourse of human rights. © 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.