The Global-Popular

Bishnupriya Ghosh
English
UC Santa Barbara

Bhaskar Sarkar
Film and Media Studies
UC Santa Barbara

Culturally and politically, we now inhabit the realm of the global-popular. And yet, the two terms whose hyphenated conjugation names our contemporaneity remain notoriously vague and widely contested. This two day workshop theorized this conjugation—not as an additive model, but in terms of a historically informed approach that does justice to the fundamental transformations that have led to this moment. Our objective was to develop the categories and frameworks that capture the multi-sited and multiscalar fecundities of the global-popular without capitulating to a universal teleology or resorting to simplistic binaries of general/particular, center/periphery, and complicity/resistance.