Drama of Democracy: thinking the political from India
ICGC Commons for Critical Inquiry (537 Heller Hall) and livestream (register here!).
In an era of global political passions, many have wondered whether some sort of natural affinity exists between political style and substance. Does liberal democracy speak the language of rationality and sincerity while political emotion, imagery, and embodiment properly belong to authoritarianism? Taking an ethnographic approach to the relationship between political form and political content, Drama of Democracy explores the material substance of representations (things like heady crowds and rousing images) together with language-based forms of political communication, such as public oration and community meetings.
Drawing on a decade of research in the city of Mumbai, Lisa Björkman shows that embodied performance is the very site and substance of representation and demonstrates how Mumbaikars evaluate performative bids to represent. The ethnographic accounts demonstrate the extraordinary fluency in this evaluative work in Mumbai, where people from all walks of life are remarkably astute at navigating and assessing political signs and representations, endlessly discussing and debating possible meanings of the city’s dense material-semiotic ecologies—whether words or images, cash or crowds, flyers or flowers.
In Mumbai, Björkman argues, the evaluative criterion of representation is not whether something is sign or substance, or even whether people are deemed to utter truths or falsehoods. Rather, what matters is whether and how a performance activates and actuates the social relations and political subjectivities that it professes to display. Drama of Democracy highlights Mumbaikars’ communicative fluency and theatrical acumen to offer a conceptual toolbox through which contemporary political churnings around the globe might be understood.
Discussant: Eesha Kundari (Geography)
Co-sponsored by UMN Institute for Global Studies.
About the Speaker
I am a political ethnographer with a research focus primarily in the Indian city of Mumbai. My work has studied how global-level processes of urbanization and urban transformation are redrawing lines of socio-spatial inclusions and exclusions in that city, animating new arenas of political mobilization, contention and representation. My first book, Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press 2015) was awarded the American Institute of Indian Studies Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. My second monograph, Waiting Town: life in transit and Mumbai’s other world-class histories, will be published in November 2020 by Columbia University Press (Association of Asian Studies). I have also convened and edited a collaborative monograph titled Bombay Brokers, which is forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2021. I am currently researching a book-length study of the theatrical idiom of Mumbai’s political life.
Research Interests: South Asia, infrastructures, displacement and migration, new materialisms, mass politics
Education
Doctor of Philosophy, Politics, New School for Social Research
Bachelor of Arts, History, Reed College
Courses
UPA 602: The Urban Political
UPA 680: Urban Ethnography
UPA 680: Urban Dis/placement and Dis/possession
Field Courses (e.g., Naples, Mumbai, Louisville)
Recent Publications
Bombay Brokers: urban ethnography across the gap (Björkman, ed). Forthcoming with Duke University Press (forthcoming 2021).
Waiting Town: life in transit and Mumbai’s other world-class histories. Association of Asian Studies, Asia Shorts (Columbia University Press, 2020).
Björkman, Lisa and Chitra Venkataramani (2019) “Mediating Mumbai: ethnographic explorations of urban ‘linkage’.” International Planning Studies, 24:1, 81-95.
Björkman, Lisa (with Alan M. Jacobs and Tim Büthe et al) (2019) “The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: An Overview” in Perspectives on Politics.
Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai. Duke University Press (2015); Orient BlackSwan (2015). Awarded American Institute of Indian Studies Joseph W. Elder Prize (2014)