The context for the paper is the inclusion of a 64-year old cartoon in the Political Science textbook that caused an uproar in the Indian parliament in 2012. The controversy draws attention to the two-facedness of any political cartoon which is an artistic representation of a historical event. It is, hence, ambivalent by being an expression of artistic freedom as well as a humorous comment on history where the axis of representation intersects the axis of history. The representation of the Dalit icon, Ambedkar, was objectionable to the political party espousing the Dalit cause which, through its leader, Tirumavalavan, raised the issue in parliament. The paper posits that the reaction was an event that was hitherto dormant and that it erupted on account of elements that fed its potential for virality in the environment, thereby, turning it into a fact. To this end, the paper revives interest in the imitation theory of the French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde, who, incidentally, was an intellectual influence on Ambedkar. Moreover, it employs Zeno Vendler’s distinction between an “event” and a "fact”, the Deleuzian idea of “assemblage,” and the idea of “conceptual metaphor” as laid out by Lakoff and Johnson. The paper reads the vicissitudes of the cartoon in order to theorize the elements that cause virality in a communicative environment.
This paper examines media representation and its role in manifesting a banal rhetoric that compels a subnational discourse to emerge from the quotidian. The everyday discrimination experienced by the people of India’s North-East, who migrate and live in the metropolitan cities of India, exacerbates a rupture with the sign of national pedagogy, the constitution. The national discourse simultaneously appropriates these banal fractures, rendering them incidences of negligible importance. Thus, the quotidian sphere becomes the temporal site for the contentious interaction between the subnational and national discourses. When the quotidian events obtain a criticality in relation to their representation in the media, they become transcripts of everyday reality. Thus, the television becomes a site where the representations of everyday subnational ruptures reach the wider ideological and territorial space of the nation-state, transcending its immediate space of emanation. Eventually, the archive of subnational discourse is constructed from the inevitable result of textualization by the media. These media transcripts come to rest in the subnational archive with a viability that allows them to be deployed as the building blocks of a subnational history, which, in turn, deconstructs the romantic assertions of national historiography. Thus, in these historiographical sites, the discursive practices constitute the subnational archive that must be of interest to the Foucauldian historian who chooses the epistemological approach of archaeology. The authors elucidate this process by deploying seven tele-media texts with respect to the nation-state, drawn from two different locations.
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