UC Santa Cruz

Native motion picture karma proposes a critical study of European Modernism as a performative model for thinking about South Asian film and art. The principal thrust of my dissertation is to delineate the erased and suppressed minor1 South Asian histories through the lens of South Asian art and cinema, practiced as what Karl Marx dubbed sensuous knowledge or “practical, human sensuous activity,”2 contra the systemic violence of Euro-universality and, the modernism-fascism complex.

My original contribution to the field of cinema study and art history would be to evidence that interwar Modernism is a Eurasian production; this modernism is founded on the heady mix Vedantic goddess worshipping, tantra and syncretic and riverine Islam of the larger Bengal-Balkan Islamic Complex —not the desert Islam of the Arabia—with its deep and radical emphasis on spiritual ecology or ziraat (زراعة) in relation to insaf (انصاف) or justice and development of spirit or ruhaniyat ( ش ر و ع) trafficked as Traditionalist knowledge.

My dissertation is not only a critical study of the muted matrix of fascism in Modernism, but a historical accounting for key erased events that mark what Gilles Deleuze called the shift from the “true” grand narratives—of Europeanness, nationalism, subjecthood—to an eliminated history in Eurasian cultural memory vis-à-vis modernism-fascism complex.Entangling cinema study, art history, and media archeology, my theoretical endeavor will identify and interrogate the protocols and procedures that enable a politics of erasure, as well as the historical blind spots that have maintained the coherence of Anglo-Eurasian art history and film study within the context of modernism. Using key figures like renowned Oscar-winning Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray and Dutch artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, I will trace an alternate polluted history, susceptible to plurality and heterogenous influences of the native practices as soft philosophy machines performing a unique form of sensuous knowledge contra the Eurouniversality of modernism and art history.

I started this project with the premise that, research is a process, not just a product1. This act of examining the research process in the context of my positionality can be described, at least in part, as reflexivity. This reflexivity involves constant self-scrutiny on the part of a non-Anglo-European, minority researcher discoursing on European modernism and its fascist roots; a self- conscious awareness of the relationship between the researcher and an “other.”The self-reflexive mode of my methodology demonstrates how the construction of the “other” is intrinsic to the self-making process of European subject hood, race theory, whiteness and European-ness.

In the process, I have deployed theory not only to describe a certain historical reality, but also, as a prescription of a particular approach—which, more often than not, is paradigmatic and deterministic—to media studies and art history. Albeit I draw on cinema studies, art history, post-colonial, cultural, visual, media studies and findings from the interviews, but sensitive to the ongoing struggle between cultural modes that seek to determine and confine the visual subject, as a minority and non-European scholar from Bangladesh, in my work I have underlined the potential challenges and opportunities of being cognizant of one’s South Asian, minority, and non-European positionality vis-à-vis Anglo- Eurouniversalist supremacy and biopolitics. On a tangential register, let me add that South Asian or Indian subcontinental art historical and visual cultural practices are established by “colonial archaeologists,” often driven by the detheologized Christian expectation of empirical truth—as opposed to what Christian philosopher Kierkegaard would call relativism and fideism3. Indian art historian and theorist Partha Mitter critiques that, these colonial archaeologists, the first generation of art writers and historians, conjectured and believed, their practice engendered “value-free scholarship.” Antiquated and ideologically tinged desire of “objectivity” notwithstanding, the chronological telos of the Euro- universalist art historical texts, too, has been rooted in Christianity, and the Enlightenment’s paradigm of history has been propelled by notions of progress.

In the Art historical telos, to follow influential German idealist philosopher Friedrich Hegel’s edict—time is self-motivated; time’s passage corresponds with unfolding of Sprit as it courses through eternities—constructed a developmental model of writing about art with a purposive direction. While art historians—since the publication of the Jacob Burckhardt’s influential Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) through Clement Greenberg’s mid-twentieth century oeuvre on the progressive realizations and triumphs of avant-garde—consolidated the Hegelian developmental model. My research and theorization owe immense debt to George Kubler in the USA, Gottfried Boehm, Horst Bredekamp, Hans Belting in Germany, and critics and theorists like Mieke Bal, Ernst van Alphen et al. who have hemmed the network of multiple contradictions of the institutions and protocols of interpreting arts to reclaim the art fields in the vicinity of art history, visual studies, and other disciplines qua history. But, I particularly attempted to tame and renew a telos of media archeological analysis—impacted by French philosopher Michel Foucault, and Jussi Parikka—which seeks “to describe the history of discourse, the set of 'things said' in all its interrelations and transformations. These processes occur at a very specific level, which is neither the level of the events of history, nor the level of a teleological 'progress' of ideas, nor the level of an accumulation of formal knowledge, nor the level of the popular or unspoken 'spirit of the times.’”

Most importantly, the media archeological analysis of discourse, for me, commenced with constructing a framework to interrogate historical a priories and presuppositions and to break down the illusion of smooth historicaltransition, unity and, continuity, i.e., true narration5 exposing, in the process(es), the ideological operation of discourse-building by leveling, erasing, and suppressing disruptions, thresholds, differences, and complex taxonomies. Also, as we will see in the third chapter of the dissertation, media archeological intervention enables a mobilization of the procedures to situate historical blind that have maintained the coherence of the Eurouniversalist true narration. This theoretical trajectory illuminates one of the key traveling disciplinary telos of media archaeology, in terms of both its practical application as a form of ‘theoretical circuit breaking’ and its most imaginative speculations as a material approach to media while meta-critiquing the value of media archaeology as a creative methodology for media research in relation to more established methodologies like art history or cultural studies to tease out both the political stakes of the field and its potential contribution to studies of digital media.