The Pedagogy of the Piratical

Bhaskar Sarkar (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Even as techno-nationalist fantasies fuel India’s dreams of superpowerdom, inserting the country into a universal narrative of global ascension via market liberalization, this talk begins from the premise that contemporary India’s most inventive instances of home- spun entrepreneurialism remain outside the ambit of such top down mythologies. The presentation will focus on Malegaon video-cinemas as one striking instance of the often subaltern and piratical cultural-economic emergences from India that scuttle universal paradigms to forge southern trajectories of self-expression and global enterprise.