kriticulture

  Editor’s Note A lot of good South Asian writing is taking place outside the dominant circuits of recognition. It was our assumption when we started SAE . Five years down the road, it is a conclusion. Leafing through pages from the past, we see many installed stereotypes crumbling. Yet much survives that seems to identify us.             What is still awaited is a radical mobilization of the elements of the ensemble that is us and our experience, a mobilization that dislocates, disassembles and creates afresh beyond merely reproducing. This would require infusion of energies from outside the ensemble’s boundaries. But haven’t cultures always outsourced? Isn’t imagination the great outsourcing machine? Isn’t literature always in another place, always already elsewhere?             South Asia is a horizon that must be transcended. Only when it begins to...

Sunday 16th February 2014     1. How How did you get to write these essays? What motivated you? I believe I am also responsible for the world in which we find ourselves. I have tried to respond to this world from time to time. As a person who teaches – and who can read and write – I think I have an obligation to make some sense of it and to share the resulting attempts with others, and so contribute to the dialogues that are the motors of civilization. 2. Rajesh, why in/disciplines for a title? Though the title is explained in the Introduction towards the end, let me add (and repeat) that education, culture and politics are ‘in/disciplines’. That they nevertheless require a disciplined effort to study them. That they demand that the disciplinary boundaries between them be challenged in order to reveal how none of them is self-constituted and self-limited/limiting. The ...

By Rajesh Sharma Lawlessness is coming to be the destiny of India.  And it goes masked under lawfulness and propriety.  As we fathom greater depths of venality and deceit, experts, specialists, technocrats, managers and ‘intellectuals’ are working overtime to produce effects of oh-so-much happening. A reactive hyperactivity, whose fountainhead is the media, is radiating from tv screens.  Has not the media, whatever the intentions of those who are motivated nobly, come to function as a machine of distraction, consolation, vicarious rage? In short, the Bad Conscience of the Indian people?

The shutdown of library.nu is creating a virtual showdown between would-be learners and the publishing industry. in Share 95 The shutdown of library.nu doesn't bode well for those who wish to learn, but can't afford to pay for textbooks [GALLO/GETTY]  Los Angeles, CA - Last week a website called "library.nu" disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. Library.nu (formerly Gigapedia) had offered, if the reports are to be believed, between 400,000 and a million digital books for free. And not just any books - not romance novels or the latest best-sellers - but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting-edge research ...

Monday 19 December 2011 by Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed Source: Here In both the United States and  many other countries, students are protesting against rising tuition fees, the increasing financial burdens they are forced to assume, and the primacy of market models in shaping higher education while emphasizing private benefits to individuals and the economy. Many students view these policies and for-profit industries as part of an assault on not just the public character of the university but also as an attack on civic society and their future.  For many young people in the Occupy movement, higher education has defaulted on its promise to provide them with both a quality education and the prospects of a dignified future. They resent the growing instrumentalization and accompanying hostility to critical and oppositional ideas within the university. They have watched over the years as the university is losing ground as a place to think, dissent, and develop a cult...