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  TO APPLY:   
 
  BHASKAR SARKAR

Film and Media Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

Curriculum Vitae

  RESEARCH PROJECT

Risk discourse produces fissures in the very notion of the human. In seeking to domesticate uncertainty and to normalize a whole range of human attributes and practices in the name of social order, it has to isolate and demonize all imputed deviations. The classification of certain human figures as vermin allows for a biopolitics of extermination: reduced to threatening pests, they become disposable. Lost in such rhetoric of inoculation and securitization are the potentialities of precisely such parasitical vexations and transgressive agencies. Focusing on the media pirate, and recent attempts to yoke it to the threatening figure of the terrorist, this project will explore the promises and contradictions of a more open, more accommodating conception of the human. 

In particular, I will investigate contemporary media piracy in its technological and historical specificities, while situating it within a longer trajectory of piracy as a necessary underside of capitalist modernity. I will engage historical accounts of piracy flourishing alongside an ethos of exploration and entrepreneurship, and often working in tandem with early capitalist forces and colonialist projects to establish the outposts of Euro-American modernity. This scholarship demonstrates that while pirates have been widely demonized as a threat to “all mankind,” in reality they have often been highly productive agents and the harbingers of democratic values and exploratory social behaviors (including non-normative sexualities). What, then, has been the function of the popular imagination of the pirate--at once menacing and swashbuckling, the locus of fear and fantasy?  How do the multivalent itineraries of the pirate figure help us understand the current demonization of media piracy as a profound threat to security, and simultaneously recognize the limits of such cognitive gerrymandering? How do we transform the cultural imagination of pirates from exterminable vermin to generative parasites within a post-humanist, post-liberal framework?
  BIO

Bhaskar Sarkar, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, works in four broad fields: 1) Postcolonial Media Theory, 2) Globalization and Media, 3) Asian Film and Video Cultures, and 4) Risk, Uncertainty and Speculation. He is currently associated with two long-term collaborative research projects, with multiple volumes in the works: “The Subaltern and the Popular,” and “Speculative Globalities.” The author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2009), he has also co-edited a volume of essays, Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, 2009), and special issues of The Journal of Postcolonial Studies (“The Subaltern and the Popular,” 2005) and BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies (“Indian Documentary Studies,” 2012).  He has also published widely in journals such as Cultural Dynamics, Rethinking History, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

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