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 two book-length projects. The first, "Cannibals Enjoy Comedies": Apprehending the Cinema in Late Colonial India, is a historical study of the colonial administration's efforts to harness and regulate the cinema as a medium redolent of both promise and panic. The second, tentatively titled The Myth of the Multitude, combines a critical consideration of the place of 'affect' in cultural theory with ethnographic interpretations of key events in recent Indian public culture.
E-mail: mazzarel@uchicago.edu
Publications:
n.d. Censored?: Cultural Regulation in Contemporary India (Co-ed. with R. Kaur) (forthcoming).
2007 '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. PDF
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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