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In the past decade, a series of new intellectual encounters with the life sciences have prompted research in the humanities focused on the “problem of life,” biological and social, attenuating risk perceptions at planetary and molecular scales (Eugene Thacker 2010). Object-oriented philosophy, theories of genetic rationality, critiques of biopolitical modernity, and new vitalisms dominate the theoretical scene. My research focuses on globalizing biosecurity initiatives that take “life itself,” human and non-human, as their primary object. While anthropologists such as Andrew Lakoff, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Melinda Cooper, and Joe Dumitt pause on expertise, institutions, and practices of biological risk management, there remains much work to be done on the risk media that habituate us the biosecurity that follows. There is excellent research on risk communication (William Leiss, Paul Slovic) in mass media, but media-specific analyses of the visual and audiovisual risk discourse are still few and far between. Speculating Life, a comparative study of speculative communication in two disparate regions, South Africa and South Asia, addresses this lacuna. The managerial drive of contemporary biosecurity media necessitates the comparative frame, one that eschews a provincial focus on particular global regions (South Asia, Europe, Latin America).
A series of controversial billboard campaigns of the early 21stC first piqued my interest. Despite their well-documented success, they had met with resistance from their parent funding agencies. Not only was the basic “problem” between parent and local subsidiary a disagreement on the appropriate risk management, but I became aware of similar controversies in two postcolonial contexts, South Africa and South Asia, just as the BJP and Mbeki governments were reacting strongly to the UNAIDS epidemic projections. South Africa’s “loveLife” (launched 1999), for instance, a local endeavor featuring sexy messages (delivered on billboards, posters, local access television) ran into trouble with its transnational aid agencies (such as Global Fund Against Aids) on grounds congruent to India’s successful “Off the Beaten Track” (funded by Avahan). Two other metropolitan campaigns, the Buladi campaign (2000) associated with Kolkata’s new “mega-city” image and “Soul City” (2000) with Johannesburg’s “clean” post-apartheid image, sparked controversy as mediators of the city image. Together these outdoor media campaigns raised questions: why were these relatively successful campaigns regarded as unmanageable, ill-planned, perhaps too utopian, and often offensive enterprises? What underlying precepts of risk perception, assessment, and management of epidemics governed such evaluations? What “life”—quotidian, ephemeral, and precarious—did these media campaigns materialize that threatened the biopolitical management of “risky” populations? |
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Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches postcolonial theory, contemporary 20th and 21st literatures, and global media studies. Much of her scholarly work has been on the cultures of globalization (literature, visual culture, and cinema), the two published (When Borne Across and Global Icons) and one monograph in progress (The Unhomely Sense) variously investigating the relations between the global and the postcolonial; area studies and transnational cultural studies; popular, mass, and elite cultures.
Ghosh has published essays on literature, cinema and visual culture in several collections and journals such as boundary 2, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture and Screen, and a co-edited volume of critical essays on feminist cultural theory, Interventions (Garland 1997). Her first monograph, 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,” while her second, Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011), turned to visual popular culture as it constitutes the global. She is currently working on a third monograph on the spectral life of the postcolonial in contemporary cinemas, The Unhomely Sense: The Spectral Cinema of Globalization.
Apart from her work on global media, for the last four years, Ghosh has been involved in several collaborations relating to risk media and globalization: the “Speculative Globalities” research cluster housed at the UCHRI (University of California Humanities Research Institute), 2009; the “Speculative Futures” annual program at UCSB, 2011-12; and a planned collection of essays with a supplementary web-based project. Her short monograph on risk media, Speculating Life: Theorizing HIV/AIDS Pandemic Media, arises out of these collaborations.
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