The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India

Bargaining with Capital

By (author) Jyotsna Kapur

Publication date:

15 October 2013

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

229x153mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780857281098

This book traces the heightened time-consciousness that has emerged since the 1990s in popular Indian discourses – across cinema, television, print and consumer culture – and argues that these anxieties concerning time are symptomatic of the struggle between labor and capital. Drawing on critical theory, cinema and media studies and Marxist-feminist concepts, Kapur shows how the recent political-economic shift in India toward neoliberalism has been accompanied by a new emphasis on youth and a preoccupation with change, novelty and the acceleration of time, with profound consequences for conceptions of time, youth and the relations between generations.

Acknowledgments; Introduction: After Me the Flood; Chapter 1: Brand India’s Biggest Sale: The Cultural Politics and Political Economy of India’s “Global Generation”; Chapter 2: Arrested Development and the Making of a Neoliberal State; Chapter 3: For Some Dreams a Lifetime is Not Enough: The “Rasa” Aesthetic and the Everyday in Neoliberalism; Chapter 4: An “Arranged Love” Marriage: India’s Neoliberal Turn and the Bollywood Wedding Culture Industry; Chapter 5: “Ek Haseenah Thi” (There Once Was a Maiden): The Vanishing Middle Class and Other Neoliberal Thrills; Conclusion; Notes; References; Index

“Jyotsna Kapur is one of the most brilliant scholars working in the US humanities and social sciences today. This blend of close reading, participant observation and political economy exemplifies her many achievements. This book is marked out by thorough research, clear prose, and pointedness – these chapters have things to say about the great issues of our day.” —Toby Miller, University of California, Riverside