Overview

The performative arts of political communication and representation in Mumbai In an era of global political passions, many have wondered whether some sort of natural affinity exists between political style and substance. Does liberal democracy speak the language of rationality and sincerity while political emotion, imagery, and embodiment properly belong to authoritarianism? Taking an ethnographic approach to the relationship between political form and political content, Drama of Democracy explores the material substance of representations (things like heady crowds and rousing images) together with language-based forms of political communication, such as public oration and community meetings. Drawing on a decade of research in the city of Mumbai, Lisa Bjrkman shows that embodied performance is the very site and substance of representation and demonstrates how Mumbaikars evaluate performative bids to represent. The ethnographic accounts demonstrate the extraordinary fluency in this evaluative work in Mumbai, where people from all walks of life are remarkably astute at navigating and assessing political signs and representations, endlessly discussing and debating possible meanings of the city's dense material-semiotic ecologies-whether words or images, cash or crowds, flyers or flowers. In Mumbai, Bjrkman argues, the evaluative criterion of representation is not whether something is sign or substance, or even whether people are deemed to utter truths or falsehoods. Rather, what matters is whether and how a performance activates and actuates the social relations and political subjectivities that it professes to display. Drama of Democracy highlights Mumbaikars' communicative fluency and theatrical acumen to offer a conceptual toolbox through which contemporary political churnings around the globe might be understood.

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9781517918941

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Reviews

""Lisa BjÖrkman is one of the great observers of actually existing politics in the world’s largest democracy. In Drama of Democracy, she combines dizzying accounts of Mumbai’s often spectacular political manifestations with compelling reflection on the slippery ideas of performance and representation that animate those spectacles. The result is a triumph of theoretically sophisticated political ethnography."" - Jonathan Spencer, University of Edinburgh ""Deeply researched and analytically astute, Drama of Democracy parses theories of representation and theories of performance in Mumbai. Lisa BjÖrkman reveals the problem with generalized accounts of politics that use universalizing frames such as ‘crisis’ and ‘populism,’ offering new, ethnographically derived insights about the politics of the city."" - Laura Kunreuther, author of Voicing Subjects: Public Intimacy and Mediation in Kathmandu

""Lisa Björkman is one of the great observers of actually existing politics in the world's largest democracy. In Drama of Democracy, she combines dizzying accounts of Mumbai's often spectacular political manifestations with compelling reflection on the slippery ideas of performance and representation that animate those spectacles. The result is a triumph of theoretically sophisticated political ethnography.""--Jonathan Spencer, University of Edinburgh

Author Information

Lisa Bjrkman is associate professor at the University of Louisville and senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She is author of Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai; Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbai's Other World-Class Histories; and Bombay Brokers.

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