Raqs Media Collective: Seepage (2010)

Raqs is a word in Persian, Arabic and Urdu and means the state that “whirling dervishes” enter into when they whirl. It is also a word used for dance. At the same time, Raqs could be an acronym, standing for “rarely asked questions”…!

This book gathers together a compilation of texts authored by Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta). Raqs has been variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors, and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work, which has been exhibited widely in major international spaces and events, locates them at the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research, and theory—often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances, and encounters. They live and work in Delhi, based at Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, an initiative they co-founded in 2000. They are members of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series. In 2008 they were co-curators of the Manifesta 7 biennale.

Recent solo exhibitions include “Lightbox,” Tate Britain, London (2009), and “Escapement,” Frith Street Gallery, London (2009); group exhibitions include “Experimental Geography,” travelling exhibition, Canada and USA (2008–11), and “Indian Highway,” Serpentine Gallery, London (2008) and Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo (2009).

Publisher: Sternberg Press, April 2010
ISBN 978-1-933128-86-3
176 pages

publisher

PDF (updated on 2013-10-1)

Michael Adas: Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (1990)

Thorough and systematic study of the role of ideas of technological and scientific superiority in the European outlook on non-European peoples. Covering the historical gamut from the time of Columbus to post-WWII developments and including a stunning array of sources, studies and quotations to buttress its thesis, it is bound to impress even specialists in the field, let alone general readers.

Adas shows us a look at the industrialization of Europe and the colonization of the non-Western world in a viewpoint that is supported and hard to dispute, even if it does not sit easily with the pride associated with being a “Westerner,” as are the majority of his readers. Adas has no problem with this, however, and dives in wholeheartedly. It is hard to dispute him on anything, since he supports all sides and arguments with equal voices in quantity as well as in quality.

The book won the 1991 prize of the Society for the History of Technology.

Publisher Cornell University Press, 1990
Cornell studies in comparative history
ISBN 0801497604, 9780801497605
430 pages

publisher
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PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)

Ann Laura Stoler: Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2010)

“Along the Archival Grain offers a unique methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content of archival forms. In a series of nuanced mediations on the nature of colonial documents from the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura Stoler identifies the social epistemologies that guided perception and practice, revealing the problematic racial ontologies of that confused epistemic space.

Navigating familiar and extraordinary paths through the lettered lives of those who ruled, she seizes on moments when common sense failed and prevailing categories no longer seemed to work. She asks not what colonial agents knew, but what happened when what they thought they knew they found they did not. Rejecting the notion that archival labor be approached as an extractive enterprise, Stoler sets her sights on archival production as a consequential act of governance, as a field of force with violent effect, and not least as a vivid space to do ethnography.”

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2010
ISBN 0691146365, 9780691146362
314 pages

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PDF (updated on 2016-10-13)