This article takes up the insurrection in Washington DC, and the paranoid politics of QAnon. It analyzes the gamification of paranoia across QAnon and related paranoid publics, tracking such gamification as a political-economic demand generated by neoliberalism. Taking seriously Sigmund Freud’s insight that delusional formations are attempts at…[Read more]

This essay analyzes contemporary politics of truth across overlapping contexts: the predicament of whistleblowers, the proliferation of digital disinformation, the extractive imperatives of data economies, and the impossibility of exposing the truth when exposé becomes itself a game. The essay reads the recent cultural and political interest in…[Read more]

This article analyzes the discourse concerning the assimilation of Muslim minorities in the United States and suggests that calls for assimilation are solicitations for a form of self-renunciation and sacrifice. Yet such solicitations occur against the economic and political background of neoliberalism, in which all citizens are asked to make…[Read more]

This essay considers the place of abstraction in documentary photography, a genre whose primary aesthetic-political commitment is usually assumed to be on the side of figuration, denotation, and facticity. Taking up photographer Fazal Sheikh’s photographic series Desert Bloom, which records natural and human-made disturbances in the Naqab/Negev…[Read more]

This essay aims to rethink historical difference in light of Walter Benjamin’s formulation of mimesis and Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of difference. Divided into three parts, the essay engages Dipesh Chakrabarty’s account of historical difference, considers how an understanding of mimesis might safeguard against some of the philosophical pitfa…[Read more]

Analysis of photography’s engagement with history and its implications for photographic medium

Essay in contemporary Indian photography, for Fotofest 2018

Impunity : Zahid R. Chaudhary

Through a psychoanalytic reading of Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing, this essay considers the role of fantasy in genocidal Cold War violence. Considering both Oppenheimer’s film and also Frantz Fanon’s clinical case studies as investigations into impunity, the essay analyzes fantasy’s place in global violence and in the psychol…[Read more]

This article aims for an account of materiality that helps apprehend race as a material reality while attending to its semiotic, aesthetic, and cultural signification. Through a close reading of Alfonso Cuarón’s film, Children of Men (UK, 2006), the author argues that allegory is a figure for recasting the problematic of racial alterity as a…[Read more]