About the Speaker
With a doctorate from Northwestern University, Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches environmental media and global postcolonial studies. Much of her early scholarly work interrogated the relations between the global and the postcolonial; area studies and transnational cultural studies; popular, mass, and elite cultures. While publishing essays on literary, cinematic, and visual culture in several collections and journals such as boundary 2, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture and Screen, in her first two books, Ghosh focused on contemporary elite and popular cultures of globalization. When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) addressed the dialectical relations between emerging global markets and literatures reflexively marked as “postcolonial,” and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011) turned to visual popular culture as it constitutes the global.

Apart from works that address global mediascapes, in the last decade, Ghosh turned to risk distributions and their relationship to media. She has written several essays on the subject and has co-edited collection (with Bhaskar Sarkar), The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (2020). She is completing a single-authored work, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media which considers how mediatic processes detect and compose epidemics as crises events.

About the event 
This essay explores the concept of the “vernacular” less as a classification that arbitrates between languages (a historical locus in postcolonial studies) and more as a relational space between lingual performances in relation to contemporary "Indian rap movies." As theorists of accented speech (Pooja Rangan, Akshya Saxena, Pavitra Sundar) argue, India’s vast multimodal, multilingual mediascapes unassailably situates us in a vernacular sensorium. Complex lingual performances span not just reading and writing, but also speaking, listening, and viewing. This media saturation offers a kind of test-bed for the theoretical and methodological promise of the vernacular. I explore Indian rap in moving image studies to pursue that promise: specifically, I analyze Indian regional rap embedded in commercial-industrial and independent avant-garde cinemas as lingual performances that activate the vernacular sensorium. That vernacular sensorium emerges in relational acts between vocalic bodies and their sensorial sounds as well as the enactment of lingual difference from normative or standard speech. If rap as a musical form molds, torques, and unsettles the spoken word, then it takes aim at the cultural, social, and economic hegemon. In these politics of non-standardization, rap vernacularizes speech to foreground an everyday politics of the possible.