Historicising the Banal

Abstract

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.