Image operations and political affect: Thinking with Jacques Rancière   

Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh

Looking at the circulation of the drowned Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, in social media, my talk will consider what images "do" in an affective-performative politics that has emerged as a dangerous supplement to deliberative democracy. How does the infectious transmission of popular images create social circuitries central to the popular? 

With a doctorate from Northwestern University, Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor of Global Studies and English at UCSB, where she teaches postcolonial theory and global media studies. Much of her scholarly work interrogates the relations between the global and the postcolonial; area studies and transnational cultural studies; popular, mass, and elite cultures. While publishing essays on literary, cinematic, and visual culture in several collections and journals such as Boundary 2, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture and Screen, in her first two books Ghosh focused on contemporary elite and popular cultures of globalization. When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) addressed the dialectical relations between emerging global markets and literatures reflexively marked as “postcolonial,” and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011) turned to visual popular culture as it constitutes the global. Research is underway for a third monograph, The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization that tracks the relations between globalization and cinematic/post-cinematic images.