William T.S. Mazzarella
(PhD, UC Berkeley 2000) Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, writes and teaches on mass media, globalization, public culture and consumerism, critical theory, commodity aesthetics, and post-coloniality in contemporary India. His book, Shoveling Smoke (Duke, 2003), is an ethnography of the Bombay advertising business and its role in the rise and elaboration of mass consumerism in India in the 1980s and 1990s. The book develops a general theory of how the production and circulation of ‘commodity images’ mediates the local and the global, affect and discourse, image and text. Mr. Mazzarella is currently working on a book project tentatively titled The Censor's Fist: Affect, Cinema and Mediation in Modern India. The book juxtaposes an ethnographic exploration of Indian film censorship debates in the post-liberalization period against a historical reading of the colonial foundations of cinema regulation in the 1910s and 1920s. The book explores how the medium-specificity of the cinema has been understood across these two historical moments: as a space for the management of public affect vis-à-vis the cinematic image, and as a site for the articulation of social and cultural difference vis-à-vis imagined audiences.
E-mail: mazzarel@uchicago.edu
Publications:
2010 Branding the Mahatma: The Untimely Provocation of Gandhian Publicity. Cultural Anthropology (forthcoming).
2010 A Torn Performative Dispensation: The Affective Politics of British World War II Propaganda in India and the Problem of Legitimation in an Age of Mass Publics. South Asian History and Culture 1(1) (forthcoming).
2010 The Obscenity of Censorship: Rethinking a Middle Class Technology. In A. Baviskar & R. Ray, eds., 'We're Middle Class': The Cultural Politics of Dominance in India. Routledge (forthcoming).
2009 Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Co-ed. with R. Kaur). Indiana University Press.
2009 Between Sedition and Seduction: Thinking Cultural Regulation in South Asia (co-authored with R. Kaur). In Kaur & Mazzarella, eds., Censorship in South Asia.
2009 Making Sense of the Cinema in Colonial India. In Kaur & Mazzarella, eds., Censorship in South Asia.
2009 'Affect: What is it Good For?' In S. Dube, ed., Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization. Routledge.
2006 Internet X-Ray: E-Governance, Transparency and the Politics of Immediation in India. Public Culture 18(3).
2005 Public Culture, Still. Biblio: A Review of Books (Special Issue). X(9-10), Sept.-Oct.
2005 Indian Middle Class. In R. Dwyer, ed., South Asia Keywords.
2004 Culture, Globalization, Mediation. Annual Review of Anthropology. 33: 345-67.
2003 Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Duke University Press.
2003 ‘Very Bombay’: Contending with the Global in an Indian Advertising Agency. Cultural Anthropology. 18(1)
2003 Critical Publicity / Public Criticism: Reflections on Fieldwork in the Bombay Ad World. In T. Malefyt & B. Moeran, eds., Advertising Cultures. London : Berg.
2002 On the Relevance of Anthropology: A Review Essay. Anthropological Quarterly. 75(3)
2002 Cindy at the Taj: Cultural Enclosure and Corporate Potentateship in an Era of Globalization. In S. Lamb & D. Mines, eds., Everyday Life in South Asia . Indiana University Press.
2002 The Limits of the Local: A Review of The Perception of the Environment by Tim Ingold. Mind, Culture and Activity. 9(1).
2002 Branding the War: Terror and the Commodity Image. In The Sarai Reader 02. Sarai Media Lab, Delhi & The Society for Old and New Media, Amsterdam .
2001 ‘Citizens Have Sex, Consumers Make Love’: Marketing KamaSutra Condoms in Bombay. In B. Moeran, ed., Asian Media Productions. University of Hawai’i Press.
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