Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk, Ashwani Sharma (eds.): Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (1996)

Blurring the boundaries between academic and cultural production, this book produces a new understanding of the world significance of South Asian culture in multi-racist societies. One of the first sustained attempts to situate such production within the study of race and identity, it uncovers the crucial role that contemporary South Asian dance music has played in the formation of a new urban cultural politics.

The book opens by positing new theoretical understandings of South Asian cultural representation that move beyond essentialist ethnicity in the cultural studies literature. Contributors narrate the formation of South Asian expressive culture coming emerging from the highly charged context of UK Black politics. Part three assumes the task of historical recovery, looking at the antecedents of political South Asian musical performance, autonomous anti-racist organising and problems of alliance with the white Left. Part four engages with the movements and translations of cultural productions across the world – not just in Britain or South Asia, but also Canada, North America, Fiji, Malaysia, Australia, West Africa, Europe, but particularly in the fractured spaces of a postcolonial Britain in decline.

Publisher Zed Books, 1996
ISBN 1856494705, 9781856494700
248 pages

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Simon Reynolds: Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (2011)

We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band reformations and reunion tours, revivals and reissues, remakes and mash-ups … Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival resources of rock history have been exhausted? What happens when we run out of past?

Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have reached a tipping point. Earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity, but never before has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past.

Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own era?

Publisher Faber & Faber, 2011
ISBN 0865479941, 9780865479944
458 pages

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Joseph Nechvatal: Immersion Into Noise (2011)

“The noise factor is the ratio of signal to noise of an input signal to that of the output signal. Noise can block or interfere with the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication. But in Information Theory, noise is still considered to be information.

By refining the definition of noise as that which addresses us outside of our preferred comfort zone, Joseph Nechvatal’s Immersion Into Noise investigates multiple aspects of cultural noise by applying the audio understanding of noise to the visual, architectural and cognitive domains. Nechvatal expands and extends our understanding of the function of cultural noise by taking the reader through the immersive and phenomenal aspects of noise into algorithmic and network contexts, beginning with his experience in the Abside of the Grotte de Lascaux.

Immersion Into Noise is intended as a conceptual handbook useful for the development of a personal-political-visionary art of noise. On a planet that is increasingly technologically linked and globally mediated, how might noises break and re-connect in distinctive and productive ways within practices located in the world of art and thought? That is the question Joseph Nechvatal explores in Immersion Into Noise.”

Publisher Open Humanities Press; in conjunction with the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office, 2011
Critical Climate Change series
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9781607852414

Author interview: Taney Roniger (Anti-Utopias)
Review: Yuting Zou (The Brooklyn Rail, 2011).

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