What is popular in ‘popular culture’?

Speaker: Susie Tharu

August 29, 2003 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Susie Tharu, a distinguished cultural theorist, is a Professor and Coordinator, School of Critical Humanities, Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad and has lectured and published many books and papers on a number of topics on Indian Culture and Literature, Literary Theory, Feminist Theory and Criticism, Film Theory, Subaltern Studies and Popular Culture.

With developments associated with the new art history and cultural studies, the idea of popular culture has acquired an energetic new life. The discussion is by no means conclusive. All the same it has generated considerable excitement because it promises to pitch the discussion of culture into the center of public life. The speaker aims to review and comment on recent discussions around this concept, drawing on cultural/political theory as well as art practice. Among the questions that will be addressed in this discussion are: How does the concept pull away from earlier ideas of folk art, people’s culture, mass culture, or kitsch? What are the sites in which it engages the new thinking around ideas of population, democracy or citizenship and what is its challenge to critical humanist thought today?