Burn Completely

The semester is over. I’m burnt out, but not completely. I’ve tried to present to my students this semester a pragmatics of media assemblages (in an undergrad and grad course called Introduction to Media Assemblage Theory). Not what it means, but what one can do in and through media. What we are becoming through media, [...]

Race, Perception, and the Institutionalization of Networks

The aim then, again, to begin again as if at the beginning again. Patricia Clough recently asked me what my object is? I told her I wanted to understand the relationship between the rise of Barak Obama and Osama bin Laden. That’s not really of very great interest. The relation I want to get at [...]

Race and Colorism in Bollywood

Delanda talks movingly, yes movingly–what to do about Delanda’s style? there must be an untimely experience here as well–of the virtual; he writes, “The modelling process begins with a choice of manifold to use as a state space. Then from experimental observations of a system’s changes in time, that is, from actual series of states [...]

Toward a History of Media Assemblages

Let’s begin with Helen! What is a history of media assemblages/ecologies?  Take the example of race and colorism in Hindi-Urdu Cinema. This is a draft of a paper I delivered at the Duke University Public Policy Institute in a “Work in Progress” conference held jointly with UNC.               The analysis of cinema becoming media suggests to [...]