E G Dattatreyan
Biographic Data
| ID | 18923 |
|---|---|
| NAME | E G Dattatreyan |
| GIVEN NAMES | E G |
| FAMILY NAME | Dattatreyan |
| SIGNATURE | DATTATREYAN E G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3788-401X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 113 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Globally Familiar Revisited: Ethnographic returns and changing masculinities
This article revisits a key concept – the globally familiar – developed in and through fieldwork with aspirational hip hop artists from migrant backgrounds in Delhi starting in 2011 and culminating in a monograph in 2020 (Dattatreyan 2020). It argues that as the ethnographic field that shaped the original articulation of the concept has shifted and changed and participants from the original study have grown older, new readings of the globally fam…
Screen as stage
Ethnographic research can be a wonderous and revelatory journey into the heart of relations and relationality with other earthly beings, with the land, and with our shared histories. Yet, often it is confined—when it finds its form in conventional academic textual production—to an exercise in maintaining and reproducing inherited epistemic horizons that bend towards Euro-Western logocentrism and what Anna Tsing, in this issue (FORM), describes as…
Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity
The Impossible Portrait: Networked Image‐events, Counter‐bureaucratic traces, and Anti‐Blackness in Delhi, India
This article focuses on a portrait of a young Somali man living in Delhi, India. The portrait depicts him in a park in South Delhi wearing a cap distributed by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) during their insurgent 2012‐2013 campaign to establish themselves as an alternative political force. I argue this parodic portrait and the text it accrues in its circulations on Facebook functions as a networked image‐event that evinces the impossible contradictio…
The squeegee man
In this "hundreds" honoring Kathleen Stewart, I evoke a scene from my childhood to dwell on misrecognition and the intensities of what José Estaban Muñoz (2020) describes as a "sense of Brown," that plural yet particular relatedness that emerges out of the displacements and intimacies of coloniality
The Intimacy of Occupation: Care and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the University
In March 2019, a group of Black and POC students at Goldsmiths College, University of London, occupied a key administrative and historically symbolic building on campus to protest institutional racism. Calling themselves Goldsmiths Anti-racism Action (GARA), the occupiers wrote a 12-point manifesto that detailed what the institution had to do to change its exclusionary white institutional culture, labor practices, curriculum, and pedagogy. This p…
Counter-narratives in the First Person: Whiteness and the Limits of Diversity
This short article focuses on Sara’s experience as the first-ever student BAME department representative at a large post-secondary institution in the UK. Written as a first-person testimonial but grounded in a dialogic method of ethnographic recovery and remembrance, we argue that diversity initiatives that seek to create inclusion and representation, without a careful engagement with power, end up reproducing the university as a white public spa…
Pedagogies of the Senses Multimodal Strategies for Unsettling Visual Anthropology
Drawing from our experiences teaching the subdiscipline of visual anthropology, we coin the term pedagogies of the senses to refer to a series of teaching strategies aimed at unsettling anthropology's visual archive through sonic displacements, figure–background reversals, and redactions. We argue for an attention to how experiments with the senses in the visual anthropology classroom have the capacity to actively interrupt colonial visual regime…
Multimodal Ambivalence and the Struggle against Techno-Supremacies
Multimodal Ambivalence: A Manifesto for Producing in S@!#t Times
For those of us located in the Global North, 2021 began with a barrage of media content documenting a coup attempt in the United States, the United Kingdom's split from Europe after four years of Brexit deliberations, and talk of mass vaccinations amid the uneven global devastation of COVID-19. For the three of us, with our connections to South Asia, Latin America, and West Africa, current Euro-American mediatized stories were supplemented by ong…
The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi
Desiring Bollywood: Re-Staging Racism, Exploring Difference
In this article, I engage with the insights that emerged through the making of Desiring Bollywood, a collaborative ethno-fiction project I produced in 2018. The project recruited academics, amateur actors, novice filmmakers, and enthusiastic university students to narrate the story of Jason, an aspiring actor and filmmaker from Nigeria who I first met in 2013, soon after his release from Tihar Prison in Delhi, India. My goals are two-fold: first,…
Brexit and the temporalities of racism in British higher education
Brexit has brought into visibility various strands of racist thinking and practice that have, for many years, simmered under the surface in British life. Discourse about Brexit reveals an enduring nativist and imperialist sentiment that calls into question British liberalism and its purported multiculturalism. Much writing regarding Brexit has focused on issues of class and urban and rural divides related to the disenfranchised white working clas…
Policing the “Sensible” in the Era of YouTube: Urban Villages and Racialized Subjects in Delhi
This article attends to the ways in which user-generated video content presumed destined for online social media circulation polices the sensible and, in turn, is policed because of its capacity to reveal the messy, turbulent politics of the everyday. Focusing on an incident that targeted African students and entrepreneurs residing in Delhi, the article argues that the policing of user-generated audio-visual content of unfolding events in this mi…
Introduction: Multimodal Anthropology and the Politics of Invention
This essay and the articles included in this special issue theorize the possibilitiesand pitfallsthat emerge as anthropologists utilise a combination of audio, video, text, still images, performance methodologies, and web platforms to iteratively, collaboratively, and sensually generate relations with research participants, interdisciplinary colleagues and beyond.We are not necessarily interested in developing multimedia approaches to representin…
In the Dark All Cats Are Black
Photo-essay in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Special issue: Southern Futures
Multimodal Ethnography and the Possibilities for Engaged Anthropology
Waiting Subjects: Social Media–Inspired Self‐Portraits as Gallery Exhibition inDelhi,India
In this article, I reflect on a gallery exhibition of self‐portraits by young S omali refugees. These images were selected from a collection of digital photographs that were shot while producing a collaborative ethnographic film project on the racialization of A frican nationals in D elhi, I ndia. The images that my youthful interlocutors produced while shooting for our collaborative film project, however, were not originally intended for display…
Diasporic sincerity: Tales from a ‘returnee’ researcher
This essay explores how my diasporic ‘returnee’ status positions me with the participants in my research endeavours within education reform non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in and around Bangalore, India. I argue that in addition to forcing me to reassess the scripts of ‘belonging’ I hold as an Indian American, the very stories that make me part of the diaspora reshape the research context by offering my interlocutors new narrative tropes by…
Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in Self‐Deconstruction – By George W. Stocking. Jr
Introduction: Multimodal Anthropology and the Politics of Invention
This essay and the articles included in this special issue theorize the possibilitiesand pitfallsthat emerge as anthropologists utilise a combination of audio, video, text, still images, performance methodologies, and web platforms to iteratively, collaboratively, and sensually generate relations with research participants, interdisciplinary colleagues and beyond.We are not necessarily interested in developing multimedia approaches to representin…
Multimodal Ambivalence: A Manifesto for Producing in S@!#t Times
For those of us located in the Global North, 2021 began with a barrage of media content documenting a coup attempt in the United States, the United Kingdom's split from Europe after four years of Brexit deliberations, and talk of mass vaccinations amid the uneven global devastation of COVID-19. For the three of us, with our connections to South Asia, Latin America, and West Africa, current Euro-American mediatized stories were supplemented by ong…
Waiting Subjects: Social Media–Inspired Self‐Portraits as Gallery Exhibition inDelhi,India
In this article, I reflect on a gallery exhibition of self‐portraits by young S omali refugees. These images were selected from a collection of digital photographs that were shot while producing a collaborative ethnographic film project on the racialization of A frican nationals in D elhi, I ndia. The images that my youthful interlocutors produced while shooting for our collaborative film project, however, were not originally intended for display…
Pedagogies of the Senses Multimodal Strategies for Unsettling Visual Anthropology
Drawing from our experiences teaching the subdiscipline of visual anthropology, we coin the term pedagogies of the senses to refer to a series of teaching strategies aimed at unsettling anthropology's visual archive through sonic displacements, figure–background reversals, and redactions. We argue for an attention to how experiments with the senses in the visual anthropology classroom have the capacity to actively interrupt colonial visual regime…
Multimodal Ambivalence and the Struggle against Techno-Supremacies
Desiring Bollywood: Re-Staging Racism, Exploring Difference
In this article, I engage with the insights that emerged through the making of Desiring Bollywood, a collaborative ethno-fiction project I produced in 2018. The project recruited academics, amateur actors, novice filmmakers, and enthusiastic university students to narrate the story of Jason, an aspiring actor and filmmaker from Nigeria who I first met in 2013, soon after his release from Tihar Prison in Delhi, India. My goals are two-fold: first,…
Policing the “Sensible” in the Era of YouTube: Urban Villages and Racialized Subjects in Delhi
This article attends to the ways in which user-generated video content presumed destined for online social media circulation polices the sensible and, in turn, is policed because of its capacity to reveal the messy, turbulent politics of the everyday. Focusing on an incident that targeted African students and entrepreneurs residing in Delhi, the article argues that the policing of user-generated audio-visual content of unfolding events in this mi…
Multimodal Ethnography and the Possibilities for Engaged Anthropology
The Intimacy of Occupation: Care and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the University
In March 2019, a group of Black and POC students at Goldsmiths College, University of London, occupied a key administrative and historically symbolic building on campus to protest institutional racism. Calling themselves Goldsmiths Anti-racism Action (GARA), the occupiers wrote a 12-point manifesto that detailed what the institution had to do to change its exclusionary white institutional culture, labor practices, curriculum, and pedagogy. This p…
Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in Self‐Deconstruction – By George W. Stocking. Jr
Diasporic sincerity: Tales from a ‘returnee’ researcher
This essay explores how my diasporic ‘returnee’ status positions me with the participants in my research endeavours within education reform non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in and around Bangalore, India. I argue that in addition to forcing me to reassess the scripts of ‘belonging’ I hold as an Indian American, the very stories that make me part of the diaspora reshape the research context by offering my interlocutors new narrative tropes by…
Waiting Subjects: Social Media–Inspired Self‐Portraits as Gallery Exhibition inDelhi,India
In this article, I reflect on a gallery exhibition of self‐portraits by young S omali refugees. These images were selected from a collection of digital photographs that were shot while producing a collaborative ethnographic film project on the racialization of A frican nationals in D elhi, I ndia. The images that my youthful interlocutors produced while shooting for our collaborative film project, however, were not originally intended for display…
Multimodal Ethnography and the Possibilities for Engaged Anthropology
In the Dark All Cats Are Black
Photo-essay in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Special issue: Southern Futures
Policing the “Sensible” in the Era of YouTube: Urban Villages and Racialized Subjects in Delhi
This article attends to the ways in which user-generated video content presumed destined for online social media circulation polices the sensible and, in turn, is policed because of its capacity to reveal the messy, turbulent politics of the everyday. Focusing on an incident that targeted African students and entrepreneurs residing in Delhi, the article argues that the policing of user-generated audio-visual content of unfolding events in this mi…
Introduction: Multimodal Anthropology and the Politics of Invention
This essay and the articles included in this special issue theorize the possibilitiesand pitfallsthat emerge as anthropologists utilise a combination of audio, video, text, still images, performance methodologies, and web platforms to iteratively, collaboratively, and sensually generate relations with research participants, interdisciplinary colleagues and beyond.We are not necessarily interested in developing multimedia approaches to representin…
The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi
Desiring Bollywood: Re-Staging Racism, Exploring Difference
In this article, I engage with the insights that emerged through the making of Desiring Bollywood, a collaborative ethno-fiction project I produced in 2018. The project recruited academics, amateur actors, novice filmmakers, and enthusiastic university students to narrate the story of Jason, an aspiring actor and filmmaker from Nigeria who I first met in 2013, soon after his release from Tihar Prison in Delhi, India. My goals are two-fold: first,…
Brexit and the temporalities of racism in British higher education
Brexit has brought into visibility various strands of racist thinking and practice that have, for many years, simmered under the surface in British life. Discourse about Brexit reveals an enduring nativist and imperialist sentiment that calls into question British liberalism and its purported multiculturalism. Much writing regarding Brexit has focused on issues of class and urban and rural divides related to the disenfranchised white working clas…
Counter-narratives in the First Person: Whiteness and the Limits of Diversity
This short article focuses on Sara’s experience as the first-ever student BAME department representative at a large post-secondary institution in the UK. Written as a first-person testimonial but grounded in a dialogic method of ethnographic recovery and remembrance, we argue that diversity initiatives that seek to create inclusion and representation, without a careful engagement with power, end up reproducing the university as a white public spa…
Pedagogies of the Senses Multimodal Strategies for Unsettling Visual Anthropology
Drawing from our experiences teaching the subdiscipline of visual anthropology, we coin the term pedagogies of the senses to refer to a series of teaching strategies aimed at unsettling anthropology's visual archive through sonic displacements, figure–background reversals, and redactions. We argue for an attention to how experiments with the senses in the visual anthropology classroom have the capacity to actively interrupt colonial visual regime…
Multimodal Ambivalence and the Struggle against Techno-Supremacies
Multimodal Ambivalence: A Manifesto for Producing in S@!#t Times
For those of us located in the Global North, 2021 began with a barrage of media content documenting a coup attempt in the United States, the United Kingdom's split from Europe after four years of Brexit deliberations, and talk of mass vaccinations amid the uneven global devastation of COVID-19. For the three of us, with our connections to South Asia, Latin America, and West Africa, current Euro-American mediatized stories were supplemented by ong…
The Intimacy of Occupation: Care and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the University
In March 2019, a group of Black and POC students at Goldsmiths College, University of London, occupied a key administrative and historically symbolic building on campus to protest institutional racism. Calling themselves Goldsmiths Anti-racism Action (GARA), the occupiers wrote a 12-point manifesto that detailed what the institution had to do to change its exclusionary white institutional culture, labor practices, curriculum, and pedagogy. This p…
Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity
The Impossible Portrait: Networked Image‐events, Counter‐bureaucratic traces, and Anti‐Blackness in Delhi, India
This article focuses on a portrait of a young Somali man living in Delhi, India. The portrait depicts him in a park in South Delhi wearing a cap distributed by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) during their insurgent 2012‐2013 campaign to establish themselves as an alternative political force. I argue this parodic portrait and the text it accrues in its circulations on Facebook functions as a networked image‐event that evinces the impossible contradictio…
The squeegee man
In this "hundreds" honoring Kathleen Stewart, I evoke a scene from my childhood to dwell on misrecognition and the intensities of what José Estaban Muñoz (2020) describes as a "sense of Brown," that plural yet particular relatedness that emerges out of the displacements and intimacies of coloniality
Screen as stage
Ethnographic research can be a wonderous and revelatory journey into the heart of relations and relationality with other earthly beings, with the land, and with our shared histories. Yet, often it is confined—when it finds its form in conventional academic textual production—to an exercise in maintaining and reproducing inherited epistemic horizons that bend towards Euro-Western logocentrism and what Anna Tsing, in this issue (FORM), describes as…
The Globally Familiar Revisited: Ethnographic returns and changing masculinities
This article revisits a key concept – the globally familiar – developed in and through fieldwork with aspirational hip hop artists from migrant backgrounds in Delhi starting in 2011 and culminating in a monograph in 2020 (Dattatreyan 2020). It argues that as the ethnographic field that shaped the original articulation of the concept has shifted and changed and participants from the original study have grown older, new readings of the globally fam…
Sociology (16 works) · History (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Art (8 works) · History (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Media studies (7 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works)