Tamil Nadu Politics and Tamil Cinema: A Symbiotic Relationship?

From the second-half of the twentieth century, a nascent Tamil cinema became increasingly influential in Tamil society and more prominent in political life. The Dravidar Kazhagam, founded by Periyar E. V. Ramasamy in 1944, morphed into the DMK and AIADMK, two dominant state political parties in Tamil Nadu. Through the medium of film, some of its leading lights, C. N. Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi, M. G. Ramachandran and Jayalalitha, cultivated cinema audiences and the voting public in the political ideologies of the Dravidian movement and subsequently became Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu. The symbiotic relationship between politics and Tamil cinema has meant that political and social commentaries and the assertion of Tamil nationalistic ideas was commonplace in Tamil films. In recent years, Tamil cinema has become the vehicle for raising a wide range of concerns ranging from caste, class and gender and state/nation politics, marking a shift that focusses on everyday politics in the state. In this article, we present a critical survey of the role of Tamil cinema in disseminating particular realities and politics of identity that speak to an essentialised notion of Tamil cultural and linguistic identity, the concomitant disavowal of broader conceptions of Indian-ness or belonging to the Indian nation, as well as the use of cinema to address everyday politics in the State.

Book review - Cultivating the Nile: the everyday politics of water in Egypt

Book review of “Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt” written by Jessica Barnes (2014). The book presents the everyday interactions of the communities and the state with the Nile River.

Resenha: Autesserre, Séverine. Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention. Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 2014

Resenha: Autesserre, Séverine. Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention. Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 2014

Everyday Politics of Economic Life in Small Town North India: A Social History of Kannauj through the Lens of the Ittar (Perfume) Business

This article attempts to understand the recent social history of Kannauj, a small town in North India famous for manufacturing ittar and associated products. Social history is captured by understanding the interconnectedness of society, economy and politics. The article argues that various social networks—meshed, cluster-based and transactional—facilitate business in ittar and associated products and also shape everyday politics of economic life interconnecting economy, society and politics.

“DEAR CONGRESS, JUST PLAY DEAD”: TIKTOK’S ABSURD GUIDE TO SURVIVING #LOCKDOWN

This paper examines how young TikTok creators enact strategies of playfulness and absurdity in response to gun violence and trauma. Through a ludic-carnivalesque reading of young people’s irreverent engagement with school shootings, we demonstrate how youth use TikTok to reclaim emotional control of uncontrollable situations. We situate our analysis of playful #schoolshooting videos as part of an imitation public that is constituted through practices of mimesis, replication, and imitation. However, we broaden our focus to consider the latent political potential of the publics that memetic practices create. Within this framework we ask: What discourses and shared practices emerge through playful #schoolshooting memes on TikTok and what are the implications for the everyday politics of youth citizenship? Our methodology consists of two phases conducted over an 18-month period. The first phase of analysis, performed August–December 2019, relies on collated systemic searches for specific hashtags and sounds that young people use to memeify school shootings. In the second phase, we identified two seemingly unrelated events that young people discursively and memetically linked to school shootings: COVID-19 lockdowns from March-May 2020 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol building by radicalized Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. By analyzing these practices through the lens of the ludic-carnivalesque, patterns reveal the ways young people enact strategies to demarcate boundaries, articulate cogent critiques of policies and policymakers that do not prevent school shootings, and to turn painful and traumatic realities into a fun and harmless Bakhtinian carnival.