The Public Sphere From Outside the West

The Public Sphere from Outside the West brings together established and emerging new voices from philosophy, literature, anthropology, history, migration studies and information technology to address the present reality of the public sphere. In the age where everyone is in the public and everything is visible, this volume creates a delay in which the internet of things, mass surveillance and social media are asked “What is/not the Public?” The essays bring to attention the formation of geo-politically and historically distinct public spheres from South Africa, India, America and Europe. Such formations are found not only in the postcolonial histories of print, photography, cinema and caricature but also those underway in the digital era, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy movements and Anonymous. Through critical engagement with philosophers such as Kant, Heidegger, Benjamin, Habermas and Arendt , the determining concepts of the Public Sphere-privacy, secrecy, reason, the people-are shown to be undergoing epistemological and practical ruptures. Demonstrating the necessity of these considerations to understand the world public that is rapidly transforming this concept in radical ways through technologies today, this is the first collection on the subject to feature an impressive range of international thinkers. Global and timely in outlook, it breaks new ground and changes our way of looking at politics in the 21st century.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: From Outside the West: Whence? Whither?, Divya Dwivedi and Sanil V. Part I. Secret Munitions: Genealogies of Crypto-Politics 1. Democracy, Consumerism and Industrial Populism, Bernard Stiegler 2. Arcanum: The Secret Life of State and Civil Society, Howard Caygill 3. On Secrets and Sharing: Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida on the Economics of the Public Sphere, John Russon 4. On the relation between the Obscure, the Cryptic and the Public, Shaj Mohan Part II. Birth of 'Public': Translating Media, Travelling Contexts 5. Ambivalences of Publicity: Transparency and Exposure in K. Ramakrishna Pillai's Thought, Udaya Kumar 6. The crisis of English Studies and the public sphere in India, Subarno Chattarji 7. Indian Opinion and the making of a Satyagrahi, Tridip Suhrud 8. In search of a Suburb: Exploring the relation between city and village in India, A. Raghuramaraju Part III. Seeing/Doing: Mediatization, Passive Publics and Dissents in Images 9. The Colour of History: Photography and the Public Sphere in Southern Africa, Patricia Hayes 10. Ravi Varma's Many Publics: Circulation and the Status of the “Art-work”, G. Arunima 11. Personal Convictions, Public Performance: Representing Anna Hazare, Christal Devadawson 12. Looking for Habermas in Cinema as Popular Entertainment – Cinema as Public Sphere with special reference to India, Susmita Dasgupta Part IV. Inside Out: Individuation, Digitization and New Global Publics 13. Literate Natives, Analogue Natives and Digital Natives: Between Hermes and Hestia, Bernard Stiegler 14. The Virtual Stampede for Africa: Digitization, Postcoloniality and Archives of the Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa, Premesh Lalu 15. Principle of Sufficient Reason 2.0: On Information Metaphysics, Anish Mohammed and Shaj Mohan Part V. (Whose?) Inclusion (Where?) 16. Politics in Public: The History of Identity and the Aspiration to Universality, Shannon Hoff 17. The Rift Design of Politics: 'Let the Right One In'?, Divya Dwivedi 18. The Public, the Private, and the Aesthetic Unconscious: Reworking Rancière, Tina Chanter 19. Law and Bhava: Notes towards a Treatise on Freedom, Milind Wakankar References to Introductions Index

About the Author :
Divya Dwivedi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. Sanil V is Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Humanities and social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India. He was the Watumall Distinguished Professor at the University of Hawaii, USA in 2010 as well as a Charles Wallace Fellow at the University of Liverpool and Directeur d'études Associés, at Maison des sciences de l'homme Paris, France.

Review :
A stunning collection, altogether timely, embracing literature, philosophy, the social sciences, Asia, Europe, and Africa, digital globality from thoroughly pluralized perspectives. -- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University, USA This compelling and rich volume boldly moves past a long tradition of scholarship on the public sphere that has too simply focused on commitments, philosophical and political, to its ideals and norms in the West and their deviations. Strikingly shifting the frame, this volume offers critical and wide-ranging pieces that explore the work that ideas and practices of publicity do in the world at large. This worldliness, at once particular and universal in its strivings, reframes the philosophical history of the concept itself while critically interrogating its various cultural-political lives. Spanning the internet and the digital world, cinema in India, politics in South Africa, European and non-European philosophical, literary and political writings, and visual art in India and South Africa, the volume covers key areas of philosophy, technology, visual culture, literature and politics in and through which the public sphere is crucial and compelling site for understanding our global present. -- Ritty Lukose, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and South Asian Studies, New York University, USA