Post-exotic India: on remixed histories and smart images

Abstract

This paper examines the aesthetics of remixing history at the heart of the neoliberal project of India’s image makeover as the ‘land of limitless opportunity’ for global tourists and investors. I argue that the project of remixing India’s history is predicated upon the ontological fault line of how to retain and erase the original simultaneously while shaping the new in the contemporary global. Taking the Incredible India campaign as an example, I show how the original essence of India is revealed and authenticated in the very moment of its disappearance as it is morphed in the aesthetics of the contemporary global. The post-exotic self, I further argue, is not produced by effacing the exotic past, but by condensing, accelerating and fast-forwarding it into a timeless, infinite global present. And in doing so, it also reveals the blueprint of the ongoing visual rearrangement of nation’s civilisational past in the making of new India.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.