Paper short abstract:

Scenes from Old Delhi is a short experimental film that re-presents Old Delhi through a series of encounters. This paper uses the film as a topic and resource to discuss the ethics of producing work for a transnational audience and the concept of alternative modernities.

Paper long abstract:

What does it mean to be "modern"? Within a post-colonial context, is "modernity" a lost cause—a predominantly "Western" concept that serves as a hegemonic metric scale on which the global South remains "less developed"? Or is it possible to compose a multi-centered form of modernity outside of dualistic East/West, nature/culture and traditional/modern binaries? What would such a formulation mean in a theoretical and political sense? And finally, how can film help us think through both the contextual specificities and broader implications of these questions differently?

Dekho, Purani Dilli (Scenes from Old Delhi) is an essayistic, experimental film that uses the aesthetics of ethnography to explore the entangled issues of re-presentation and subjectivity of place. The film is composed of a series of encounters, where objects and people form part of a material network and a filmic context for the question "Is Old Delhi Modern?" In this paper, I will use the film as both a subject and a resource towards a discussion of the questions posed at the start of this abstract. Drawing on the themes of the conference, I will first briefly describe the production, re-construction and strategies of re-presentation of the film itself using Barthes' proposal of the "Text". Building on this discussion, the final section of the paper will use still images from the film as a form of "image thinking," generating audio-visual questions that will be placed in dialog with ideas about media, modernity and Old Delhi by Ravi Sundaram and Jyoti Hosagrahar. While the question of alternative modernities is very much the focus of discussion, the over-arching goal of this paper is in part to produce a form of hybrid scholarship, where theory and practice work together to diffract the subjectivity of the text into (to rephrase Deleuze) a belief in a multi-centered world.

As part of the presentation, I would like to screen a short clip of the film, which is available online at:

http://vimeo.com/35069603

password: seeingdouble

Paper Download (3.3 MB)