In Association with the Friends of the Victoria University Library.

Historical and ethnographic research on the role of newspapers in the formation of the public sphere reveals that some concept of publicity is foundational for a number of theories of self-determination, but that the subject of publicity is irrevocably enmeshed in the very technological, linguistic, and conceptual means of its own self-production. Research on newspapers and publics is valuable because it has focused on this paradox of mediation at the center of modern political life. Whereas classical theories of the public sphere had sought to distinguish a rational reading public from what Habermas once termed “pressure from the street,” recent work on the politics of the crowd and that of the reading public reveals a closer relationship. Drawing on some examples from the history of print capitalism in southern India, this presentation has two aims:

1) To develop a framework for understanding how newspapers and newspaper discourse circulate in different ways to produce classed and gendered subjects of mass mediated publicity, and
2) To come to theoretical terms with a public sphere where physical force is deeply intertwined with the printed word.

Francis Cody teaches at the Asian Institute and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on written language and the social dynamics of collective political action in southern India. Francis’s first book, The Light of Knowledge (Cornell 2013), is a study of literacy activism, citizenship, and social movement politics in rural Tamilnadu. His current research is centered on the daily newspaper market, and it traces the emergence of populist politics through print-mediated publicity in Tamil cities and small towns. Both of these projects are concerned with developing a theoretical approach that might grasp modes of collective agency which escape standard vocabularies of community, civil society, and governmentality.