Page 264 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

what our relationship is to the representations of the present which the mass
media now provide. Such a defamiliarization would enable revisiting the con-
temporary discourses on marginality, postcolonial identity, and especially the
“return of religion” within public discourse.
Intellectually savvy commentators for some time now have rightly rejected
the triumphalist and teleological grands récits of historical inevitability and
progress that subtended the discourse of Western Enlightenment. Their politi-
cal investments in rescuing the margins (and the “marginal”) from obscurity
and dragging them into the light of day might nevertheless have opened a Pan-
dora’s box. For if a univocal and transcendental logic that found expression in
the “voice from nowhere” must now be abandoned, there is no guarantee that
“alternative discourses” might not slot in as easily, if not more complexly, within
the rejected paradigm. Religious nationalism, to take one potent example circu-
lating in popular and intellectual circles, is now (problematically) cast as a “re-
turn of the repressed,” the dark underbelly of postmodernity, that threatens the
stability of a vocal discourse of triumphalist capitalist globalization. In this
chapter I want to look at one visual discourse that vocalizes its alterity to the
reigning hegemony of contemporary globalization. However, as my own narra-
tive is cobbled-together, it should become apparent that discourses of hybridity,
“the margin,” and “the politics of minoritization” do not possess any a priori,
ontological claim to resistance against discourses of modernization and linear
progress. The theoretically informed empirical study below, then, is ranged at
two targets: the political discourses of contemporary religious nationalism, as
well as the hegemonic discourses of hybridity, migrancy, and liminality within
the academy.
Visual culture analyses have yielded an impressive set of diagnoses of the
contemporary postmodern condition. In a sense, the phenomenological inten-
sities of reading images as they circulate through the complex spatial and tem-
poral dimensions of contemporary “global culture” have provided eloquent ar-
guments for the destabilization of notions of identity, the making of meaning,
and wholeness. But what if this ®uidity of contemporary visual culture were
perceived through the seemingly organic, identitarian, and narrow logic of re-
ligious discourses? By focusing on the complex interplay between the ecology
of global media in India, and the stridently identitarian discourse of Hindu
nationalism, I will explore how the political and cultural explanations thus gen-
erated construct notions of cultural identity that ground themselves on the
complex dialectical processes of the local and the global. Methodologically it
is by analyzing the concept of the “aura” in Walter Benjamin’s texts that my
analysis will track the nexus between economic and cultural value in the crea-
tion of a ®uid and complex notion of Hindu Indian identity. The argument I
present brie®y connects our considerations around Benjamin’s notion of the
“aura” to Habermas’s articulation of the “public sphere.” Such an articula-
tion provides the entry point for an analysis of the political and economic pur-
chase of the discourse of cultural identity within contemporary Hindu nation-
alism.

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