This essay and the articles included in this special issue theorize the possibilitiesand pitfallsthat emerge as anthropologists utilise a combination of audio, video, text, still images, performance methodologies, and web platforms to iteratively, collaboratively, and sensually generate relations with research participants, interdisciplinary colleagues and beyond. We are not necessarily interested in developing multimedia approaches to representing or disseminating anthropological knowledgerather, we are concerned with how multimodality may contribute to a politics of invention for the discipline. We argue that multimodality offers a line of flight for an anthropology yet to come: multi-sensorial rather than text-based, performative rather than representational, and inventive rather than descriptive. This reimagined anthropology requires a move away from established forms of
In this article, I reflect on a gallery exhibition of self-portraits by young Somali refugees. These images were selected from a collection of digital photographs that were shot while producing a collaborative ethnographic film project on the racialization of African nationals in Delhi, India. The images that my youthful interlocutors produced while shooting for our collaborative film project, however, were not originally intended for display but were an extension of their already prolific visual and textual self-documentation on social media. Utilizing select images and texts from the exhibition we culled from this "accidental" photographic archive to evoke what it means for these young Somalis to wait for asylum in Europe or North America while they make their lives in India, I argue for an attention to the digital image-making practices of young people as a site where subjectivities are self-fashioned and ethnographic insights emerge. [Delhi, ethnography, photography, photovoice, selfie, Somalia]
3In this article we show how subject positions are assumed when hip hop is used by 4 institutions supported by western nation-states as a 'cultural intervention' in the global south. 5
This article attends to the ways in which user-generated video content presumed destined for online social media circulation polices the sensible and, in turn, is policed because of its capacity to reveal the messy, turbulent politics of the everyday. Focusing on an incident that targeted African students and entrepreneurs residing in Delhi, the article argues that the policing of user-generated audio-visual content of unfolding events in this milieu reveals a politics of the sensible that imagines digital circulation beyond national borders as a key site of contestation and that pushes us to reconsider simplistic ideas that valorize the democratization of representation as an interruption of the social order in one sociotemporal scale.
This article argues for an attention to the DIY digital studio as a key site where aspiring hip hop MCs in the contemporary moment negotiate between their desire for individual success and their commitments to various forms of local belonging, not least which includes staying true to
a hip hop ethos of collectivity. We follow Sonal, a b-boy and MC we worked with in a studio that we set up in Delhi, India in 2013 to work with aspiring MCs in the city’s scene. We trace his subsequent rise to fame in India to argue for an attention to the DIY studio as the material
and metaphoric realization of the digital infrastructures of global capitalism. The studio manifests economic and social opportunities for young men like Sonal in Delhi, and, we suspect, for young people across the world who now have access to social media and inexpensive production hardware
and software. Yet, in creating opportunities for individual economic and social uplift, the studio poses a threat to the ideal of a hip hop community that undergirds its possibility even as it opens up opportunities to enunciate commitments to other forms of belonging.
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