April 30.īoy, John D., and Justus Uitermark. Exploring the idea of the “reading being” on the Metro and how it parallels the idea of “going along” as one does on public transport, I examine how reading, an aspirational activity, becomes part of Delhi’s public culture through the aspirational infrastructure of Delhi’s Metro.īooksontheDelhiMetro. On the Metro, reading (books, newspapers, phones) becomes part of the identity of Metro riders and group formation. This essay reflects on the acts of reading in public that I witnessed in my years-long study of the Delhi Metro. My next project was something entirely different-a study of Delhi’s new metro rail system-but I never forgot Boyarin’s idea of the reader reading. This approach was more about the politics of literary production, and the book that resulted, English Heart, Hindi Heartland, was a little more Bourdieu than Boyarin nevertheless, my “ethnography of literature” also analyzed texts to understand specific moments when India’s radical multilingualism appeared in literature, when for instance English was mediating Hindi and Urdu worlds. I was interested in how literature was being read by publishers, reviewers, translators, award committees, and wondered how I could do an ethnography of the literary field. Boyarin’s edited volume helped me imagine a bridge between anthropology and literary studies. I first came to The Ethnography of Reading when I was studying how novels from India were being read transnationally and how the hierarchies of language created by colonialism, competing nationalisms, and globalization constructed “the literary” on India’s national, regional, and global stages.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |