AMIT S. RAI, Associate Professor, PhD, 1996 from the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. He has previously taught at the New School for Social Research, and since January 2004 has taught courses in Victorian literature, Human Rights, and Global literatures and film studies in the English department at FSU. His research interests include postcolonial perspectives on Victorian studies, the history of sentiment and affect, globalization studies, new media and popular Hindi and Hong Kong cinema,, and the anthropology of monstrosity.

He has been the recipient of an NEH fellowship, as a Senior Researcher through the American Institute of Indian Studies. In that project he studied the relationship between economic and cultural globalization and Hindi film culture in Bhopal, India. That line of research is being continued in his recent work (supported by a grant from the British Academy, and in collaboration with his colleauge Rajinder K. Dudrah from the University of Manchester): the comparative analyses of Bollywood in Jackson Heights, Queens, and Times Square, Manhattan (in the US) with diasporic film cultures in Birmingham and Manchester (in the UK) and Mumbai and Bhopal (in India). He has also been the recipient of a First year Assistant Professor Grant from FSU. He was also a recipient of a Department of Education grant to visit Israel and Palestine to research recent cultural production, which he completed in May-June 2006.

Dr. Rai has published on a wide array of cultural phenomenon, from sexuality and the body in Gandhi, to the idea of mimicry as resistance in images of Elvis in Hindi films. His first book, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race and Power, 1760-1860 (St.Martins-Palgrave, 2002), is a political history of sentiment and humanitarianism in different forms of colonial power (West Indian slavery, and missionizing evangelicalism in India). His most recent articles include a new narratology of gender, sexuality and power in contemporary diasporic Asian film narratives (South Asian Popular Culture); a questioning of the figure of the Muslim in Hindi films (Harvard Asia Quarterly); analyses of monstrosity and terrorism (Cultural Studies, and, with Dr. Jasbir K. Puar [Dept. of Women's Studies and Geography, Rutgers University], in Social Text); and occasional reviews and essays for Art India, Humanscape (Mumbai, India) and SAMAR (New York).

Submitted -- BOOK MANUSCRIPT

• Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and Indias New Media Assemblage, forthcoming from Duke University Press, Ken Wissoker, editor. From the Duke University Press spring catalogue:

  "Known for its elaborate spectacle of music, dance, costumes, and fantastical story lines, Bollywood cinema is a genre that foregrounds narrative rupture, indeterminacy, and bodily sensation. In Untimely Bollywood, Amit Rai argues that the fast-paced, multivalent qualities of contemporary Bollywood cinema are emblematic of the changing conditions of media consumption in a globalizing India. Through analyses of contemporary media practices, Rai shifts emphasis from a representational and linear understanding of the effects of audiovisual media to the multiple, contradictory, and evolving aspects of media events. He uses the Deleuzian concept of assemblage as the model for the complex clustering of technological, historical, and physical processes that give rise to contemporary media practices. Exploring the ramifications of globalized media, he sheds light on how cinema and other popular media organize bodies, populations, and spaces in order to manage the risky excesses of power and sensation and reinforce a liberalized postcolonial economy.

  Recounting his experience of attending the first showing of a Bollywood film in a single-screen theater in Bhopal, Rai recalls the sensory experience of the exhibition space, the sound system, the visual style of the film, the crush of the crowd. From that event, he elicits an understanding of cinema as a historically contingent experience of pleasure, a place where the boundaries of identity and social spaces are dissolved and redrawn. He considers media as a form of contagion, endlessly mutating and spreading, connecting human bodies, organizational structures, and energies, thus creating an inextricable bond between affect and capital. Expanding on the notion of media contagion, Rai traces the emerging correlation between the postcolonial media assemblage and capitalist practices, such as viral marketing and the development of multiplexes and malls in India."

PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES

• "'Every Citizen is a Cop without the Uniform': The Populist Outside in Bollywoods New Angry Young Man Genre," in Interventions (Vol. 8, no. 2), Summer 2006, 193-227.
• "The Future is a Monster," in Camera Obscura, 61 (vol. 21, no. 1), Spring 2006, 58-63.
• "Haptic Bollywood," (with Rajinder K. Dudrah, Senior Lecturer, Department of Theatre, University of Manchester) in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 3:3 (2005), 143-158.
• "The Promise of Monsters: Terrorism, Monstrosity, and Biopolitics," in International Studies in Philosophy, 37:2 (2005), 81-92.
• "Of Monsters and Terror-Tali-Tubbies: Biopower, Terrorism and Excess in Genealogies of Monstrosity," in Cultural Studies, 18:4 (2004) 538-570.
• "The Remaking of a Model Minority: Perverse Projectiles Under the Spectre of Counter-Terrorism," (with Jasbir Puar, Associate Professor, Womens Studies, Rutgers University) in Social Text 80 (2004), 75-104.
• "'Start Narrative Here': Excess and the Space of History in Asian Diasporic Films" in South Asian Popular Culture (UK), 1:1 (2003), 13-32.
• "The Black Spectre of Sympathy: The Occult Relation in Jane Eyre," in Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 14 (3), 2003, 243-268.
• "Terrorist, Monster, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots," (with Jasbir Puar, Associate Professor, Womens Studies, Rutgers University) in Social Text, Fall (72), Vol. 20, no. 3, 2002, 117-148.
• "'Thus Spake the Subaltern . . . ' Post-colonial Criticism and the Scene of Desire" in Discourse (USA), vol. 19, no. 2, 1997.
• Rpt. in Special Collection on The Psychoanalysis of Race, edited by Chris Lane, published by Columbia University Press, 1998, 91-119.
• "India On-Line: Electronic Bulletin Boards and the Construction of a Diasporic Hindu Identity" in Diaspora (USA), vol. 4, no. 1, 1995.
• "An American Raj in Filmistan: Images of Elvis in Indian Films" in Screen (UK), vol. 35, no.1, Spring, 1994.
• "A Lying Virtue: Ruskin, Gandhi and the Simplicity of Use Value" in South Asia Research (UK), vol. 13, no. 2, November 1993.

REVIEWS

• "Review of Painted Photography in India," in Art India (Mumbai, India), 8:3 (2003) 22-23.
• "Review of Post Independence Indian Art at the Robeson Gallery," in Art India (Mumbai, India), 8:2, (2003), pp. 24-25.
• Review of Darius Coopers The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Modernity and Geeta Kapurs When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India in Interventions, Vol. 4, no. 1, 2002.
• Review of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks Critique of Postcolonial Reason, in Criticism, vol. 42, no. 1, 2000.
• "The Empire's Last Stand" (book review) in Victorian Studies, vol. 40, no. 4, 1997.
• "The King is Dead," book review of Orientalism and the Post-colonial Predicament in Oxford Literary Review (UK), vol. 16, no. 1-2, 1994.

In Press -- INVITED REVIEWS

• Review of Roy Armes, Postcolonial Images; Shohat and Stam, Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media; Mowitt, Re-Takes; S. Kramer and Natascha Gentz, eds., Globalization, Cultural Identities, and Media Representations; Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film; Esther C. M. Yau, ed. At full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World; to be published in The Journal ofCommonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.

In Press -- INVITED ARTICLE

• "India's New Media Assemblage," forthcoming in Postmodern Culture.

Submitted -- BOOK CHAPTERS

• "On the Purple Pleasures of Bollywood," in a collection on cyberspace and Indias new media economy; manuscript under consideration at Peter Lang Publishing; edited by Radhika Gajjala, Associate Professor, School of Communication Studies, Bowling Green State University.
• "Mediating Secularism: Communalism and the Media Assemblage of Hindi-Urdu Film," in a collection on Secularism and the Media in South Asia; manuscript under consideration at University of Michigan Press; edited by Srirupa Roy, Associate Professor, Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
• "India's Globalizing Media Assemblage and Muslim Bhopal," in a collection on "Muslim identities in Hindi films"; manuscript under consideration at Manohar (India); edited by Claudia Preckel and Nirmal Kumar.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

• "Reflection On the West Indian Carnival in New York," Art India (Mumbai, India), 9:3 (2004), pp. 70-71.
• "Patriotism and the Muslim Citizen in Hindi Films," in Harvard Asia Quarterly, 7:3 (2003) http://www.asiaquarterly.com/content/view/136/40/.
• "Life, Debt and the Pitfalls of Romantic Resistance," Shobak Outsider Asians (November 2003).
• "Going to the Pictures: Review of 'Heat: Moving Picture Visions, Phantasms and Nightmares,'" in Art India (Mumbai, India), 8:4 (2003) 22-23.
• "Bollywood through a Pedagogy of Crisis," in Humanscape (Mumbai, India) August, 2003, pp. 23-25.
• "The Pleasure and Politics of Hindi Film Culture," in Samar: South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection, Summer/Fall 2002, No. 15, pp. 44-49
• "First Day, First Show," in The Times of India, November 24, 2000.
• "Global Bhopal," in The Times of India, October 6, 2000.
• "An Interview with Homi Bhabha" (with Maria Koundera) in The Stanford Humanities Review, vol. 3, no. 1, Winter 1993.
• "A New Flower" (fiction) in Manushi: A Journal of Women and Culture (India), November, 1991.
• "India's New Brahmanism" in Z Magazine (USA), July/August, 1991.
• "A footnote to translation" (fiction) in The Toronto South Asian Review (Canada), March, 1991.
• "Western Plans" (fiction) in Z Magazine, January, 1991.