The Public Sphere From Outside the West

The Public Sphere from Outside the West brings together established and emerging new voices from philosophy, literature, anthropology, history, migration studies and information technology to address the present reality of the public sphere. In the age where everyone is in the public and everything is visible, this volume creates a delay in which the internet of things, mass surveillance and social media are asked “What is/not the Public?”

The essays bring to attention the formation of geo-politically and historically distinct public spheres from South Africa, India, America and Europe. Such formations are found not only in the postcolonial histories of print, photography, cinema and caricature but also those underway in the digital era, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy movements and Anonymous. Through critical engagement with philosophers such as Kant, Heidegger, Benjamin, Habermas and Arendt , the determining concepts of the Public Sphere-privacy, secrecy, reason, the people-are shown to be undergoing epistemological and practical ruptures.

Demonstrating the necessity of these considerations to understand the world public that is rapidly transforming this concept in radical ways through technologies today, this is the first collection on the subject to feature an impressive range of international thinkers. Global and timely in outlook, it breaks new ground and changes our way of looking at politics in the 21st century.

Divya Dwivedi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India.

Sanil V is Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Humanities and social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India. He was the Watumall Distinguished Professor at the University of Hawaii, USA in 2010 as well as a Charles Wallace Fellow at the University of Liverpool and Directeur d'études Associés, at Maison des sciences de l'homme Paris, France.

1. Introduction, Sanil V. [Professor, Dept of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, ] and Divya Dwivedi [Assistant Professor, Dept of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India]
2. Principle of Sufficient Reason 2.0, Anish Mohammed [Cloud Security Lead Manager – Accenture UK; Doctoral Research fellow, Royal Holloway; Visiting Fellow Singularity University, NASA Research Park, California] and Shaj Mohan [Guest Lecturer in Philosophy, St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi (India)]
PART I
3. A Raghuramaraju, [Professor and Head of Dept of Philosophy, University of Hyderabad India]
4. Ubiquitous Public and the Ephemeral Public Spheres, P R K Rao [Professor in Electrical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India]
5. Cinema and Public Sphere: Malayalam cinema of the 1950's and 60's, C S Venkiteswaran, [Associate Professor, Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation, Trivandrum, Kerala, India]
6. Looking for Habermas in Cinema as Popular Entertainment, Susmita Dasgupta [Joint Chief Economist of Joint Plant Committee, Ministry of Steel, Government of India, India]
7. The Wound of the Negative, Saitya Brata Das [Assistant Professor of English, Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, India]
8. The digital public sphere, Nishant Shah [Director of Research Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India]
9. “Two Faces of Identity” ByAnuradha Veeravalli [Associate Professor in Dept of Philosophy, University of Delhi, India] 10. Mindscapes of space and landscapes of time- The spatialazation of the village in Kerala in Malayalam Cinema, Sanjay Kumar [Academic Writing instructor, Center for Academic Writing, Central European University, Budapes]
PART II
11. Controlling Population, Controlling Births: Fecundity as a Site of the Clash between the Public and the Private, Robert Bernasconi [Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania State, USA]
12. The Crisis of English Studies and the Public sphere in India, Subarno Chattarji [Associate Professor in Dept of English, University of Delhi, India]
13. Digitisation, Postcoloniality and Archives of the Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa, Premesh Lalu [Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa]
14. Indian Opinion and the Making of Satyagrahi, Tridip Suhrud [Translator of Gandhi, Director of Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust, Chief-editor of Gandhi Heritage Portal, India]
15. The Utaya Tarakai and Protestant constructions of 'public opinion' in nineteenth-century South India, Hephzibah Israel [Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK]
16.Ambivalences of Publicity: K. Ramakrishna Pillai's Conceptions of the Public, Udaya Kumar [Professor in Dept of English, University of Delhi, India]
17. Ravi Varma's Many Publics: Some Questions about the Circulation of the “Art-work”, G Arunima [Associate Professor, Centre for Women's Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru, India]
18. Personal Convictions, Public Performance: Representing Anna Hazare, Christel Devadawson [Associate Professor in Dept of English, University of Delhi, India]
19. Visuality & Public Spheres In Southern Africa, Patricia Hayes [Zimbabwean Historian, dept of History, University of Western Cape, South Africa]
PART III
20. Literate Natives, Analog Natives and Digital Natives: Between Hermes and Hestia, Bernard Stiegler [Philosopher at Goldsmiths, University of London and at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne;Director of the Institut de recherche et d'innovation, France]
20. Citizenship, Gender and Politics, Divya Dwivedi [Assistant Professor, Dept of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India]
21. On the relation between the Obscure, the Cryptic and the Public By Shaj Mohan [Philosopher based in India; Guest Lecturer in Philosophy, St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, India]
Index