J Hutnyk
Biographic Data
| ID | 51405 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Hutnyk |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Hutnyk |
| SIGNATURE | HUTNYK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ton Duc Thang University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4826-8949 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 116 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Contested Glories of Selective Renovation in West Bengal
The preservation of old buildings and work to restore the architecture of otherwise intangible socio-cultural heritage, memory, history, even trauma, entails multiple social and economic costs. Using critical concepts of contested understanding, project planning opportunity and local perspectives on renovative purpose, this article assesses political issues in a ‘heritage colonialism’ case study. Appraisal of the Serampore Initiative of the Natio…
Ghosting Taiwan: Sound, lights, and action in recollections of the White Terror
The Prison School in Vietnam: A Course Interpreting Revolutionary Education in the Historical Museums of Ho Chi Minh City
This paper considers a course on critical thinking in Vietnam with a case study focus on historical prisons as they are represented in museums. Reflections on prison narratives in history and literature, texts, film excerpts, and museum visits were used in classes for students of anthropology and sociology. In Ho Chi Minh City (hereafter HCMC), a series of museums tell versions of the wider colonial and military story and in part turn that story …
Introduction: Challenging transformations for Vietnam
Elemental structures of memory: Marston Mats in Vietnam and beyond
Black, white, blue, red: Struggles against death and vampires in Marx’s Capital
The Strategic Plan of the Working Day
“The Working Day” chapter of Capital makes sense today as an illustration of collective struggle over the sale of labor power by the hour. The historical materials in the chapter are instructive if read under the tutelage of Gertrud Kugelmann, considering the advice Karl Marx offers to her on where to start. A reassessment of Marx’s writing process is possible via his various plans in letters, his comments on method, the various sources used, and…
Obstinate Memory: A Radical Participatory Film-Based Research Approach
Obstinate memory is an insistent resource for communities. Migrant Media advocates the methodology of a 'documentary of force' as a research tool for filmmakers and academics. As a U.K.-based collective of filmmaker-activists involved in community struggles, Migrant Media's resistance-based work uses cameras and screens to challenge racism and police violence. Drawing on film documentary history from figures as diverse as Dziga Vertov, Jean-Luc G…
Tomar naam, amar naam, Vietnam Vietnam ! Folk styles and solidarity in the Bengali new wave cinema
The Bengali new wave cinema of the 1960s and 1970s addressed historically important world events through an aesthetic inspired by Marxism and long-standing anti-colonial traditions dating to the middle nineteenth century. At the same time, an aesthetic derived from folk and artistic traditions was embraced as a cultural style in the middle twentieth century by local Marxist progressive theatre and writers’ associations. In 1968, the Bengali film …
Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur
Comparative adversaria of Gandhi and Marx: Self-clarification through thinking in diaries and letters
We can now see in the public sphere almost everything written by Karl Marx and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Both are widely read, and both have had major impacts on how many people, if not all in some way, understand political activity. Both were prolific writers, but their ideas would exceed the forms in which they were expressed. Access to even their most intimate writings—diary, drafts, notebooks, personal letters—perhaps allows us to better se…
Subcontinental media
Studying tourism means going to have a look for yourself: Co-research, vulnerabilities and opportunities after the pandemic
Tourism Studies cannot rely upon studies of tourism alone to cover its range. While the anthropology of tourism had once sustained a revival, disciplinary inertia suggests a renewal is again overdue and anthropology might justify a reconstruction. The possibilities of tourism as ‘study’ perhaps remain unfulfilled, despite significant antecedents in Malcolm Crick’s work, where anthropology exactly glosses as travel plus study. This builds upon the…
Robinson Crusoe: After the island
Charting an anti-colonial or even postcolonial current, this article recovers ironic and satirical meanings in Robinson Crusoe. After he leaves the island, Crusoe trades isolation for commercial opportunities in Asia. Alongside other books plundered by Defoe, Dampier’s Voyages is comparable because the pirate-navigator-cartographer is one among many models. As Defoe was negotiating the politics of the English Royal Court at the time of the wars o…
Comparative urbanism and collective methodologies: Restoration projects in West Bengal and South East London
Asking who gets to compare, this paper advocates inclusive research methodologies through a discussion of comparison and collaboration in urban anthropology. It reports on difficulties in trying to include otherwise excluded perspectives that have particular importance for port city heritage redevelopment, while asking how ethical ethnographic research can still be done. It evaluates ongoing research on two recent maritime restoration projects by…
Saigon’s penalscape: Interpreting colonial prisons in Vietnam
This article explores how purpose-built museums interpret the story of colonial imprisonment in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Prisons integral to the 100-year French colonial occupation, and the subsequent American War, have been re-purposed, destroyed, or obscured. In response, memorial museums have an important role presenting prison history to international tourists and local visitors alike. Our approach interprets artefacts relating to restraint…
Identities on the move: Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context
The papers of this special issue come from a series of workshops on ‘Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context’, convened as part of a CHCI-Mellon Global Humanities I
Robinson on Con Dao: Mango writing and faltering diplomacy in the precursors of Crusoe in Vietnam
In this article, a reading of early travel literature confronts indifference to the latitudes of colonialism in resort tourism. The historical role of the East India Company needs to be told in its uneven and questionable coordinates – individualist, opportunist, exoticist, imperious, calculated, collective – in a way that acknowledges implied responsibilities. Might latter-day Robinsons be encouraged or even obliged to respect the past enough to…
Robinsonades: Pertaining to allegories from the East India Company in Ceylon and other islands, from Marxism to Post-structuralism, and in which, dear reader, a 300-year-old adventure book may still h…
Robinson Crusoe has been conjured with in many ways over the course of 300 years. While there has been an anti-orientalist critique of the figure of Friday, and some exposure of Crusoe’s investments in the slave trade, there are other aspects of Defoe’s book that receive less consideration. Post-structuralist and Marxist readings that have been made familiar again in recent work, look decidedly more interesting when the role of the English East I…
An intuition of innovative new institutions
The critique of the university has had more than its share of professional, storied and sometimes harsh polemic, and many are well-versed in sounding out the crisis of education and research. Indee
The pecuniary animus of the university
This essay suggests an alternative accountability process on the basis of critiques of current evaluation practice in higher education. Using cases in the British university system, with some international commentary and thinking through experience in Asian universities in four countries in the wake of ‘audit culture’, the work of Thorstein Bunde Veblen is revived. With Veblen, the current structures and mechanics of the corporate and fully-monet…
Co-research in Vietnam for the anthropology classroom
In the university system today, co-research may be a decolonising strategy. We evaluate teaching a ‘Modernization and Social Change’ course in Vietnam as an experiment in co-research anthropology training. If for visitors, the idea of ‘Vietnam’ is nurtured by Hollywood action cinema, 1960s–1970s protest movements and documentary television, a process of collective research can rearrange orientations for students and teachers. The essay describes …
The corporate menagerie
This paper offers a typology of university management roles in the age of permanent austerity. The repackaging of every function within the university administration as a cost centre - meaning of course a potential profit centre - has long been seen as an unsustainable market model. Yet perversely it persists, and we would do well to name the hyperbolic functionaries of this administered institutional reconstruction, in a place where a humourless…
Sociology in Vietnam
What did you do in the war? Revisiting the WW2 memoirs of Stoker Thomas Mouat Tate
To write history and to live history are two very different things', said Marc Bloch in 1943. In this paper, the Second World War reminiscences of an anti-hero sailor are interpreted according to Bloch's credo: 'there should be heretics', and an approach to historical interpretation is tested through the fictocritical ethnographic moves of Michael Taussig, Stephen Muecke and the life-writing of Bart Moore-Gilbert. An unpublished autobiographical …
Hybridity
This exploration of hybridity begins by offering a description of the term and its uses in divergent and related fields, then a critique of assumptions (those of purity, of marginality and identity). A discussion of cultural creativity, syncretism, diffusion, race and biology (the history of migration, language, culture, and 'blood') leads on to consideration of how syncretism and hybridity seem to do duty as terms for the management of the more …
Music & Politics: An Introduction
This is an introduction to the section on Music and Politics including a description of the context of these essays, their individual contributions and their thematic interrelations
Brimful of agitation, authenticity and appropriation: Madonna's 'Asian Kool
Adorno at Womad: South Asian crossovers and the limits of hybridity-talk
(1998). Adorno at Womad: South Asian crossovers and the limits of hybridity-talk. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 401-426
Clifford's Ethnographica
■ James Clifford's work is discussed, in the first half of this article, through the prism of Malinowski, travel and the 'trinketization' of culture. In the second half, Clifford's 'ethnography' of the Fort Ross tourist-heritage project, and his sloppy reading of Marx, are brought in to contrast/comparison with Malinowskian perspectives to argue against the well-meaning pessimism of 'post exoticist' modes of culture commentary. The article is a p…
Comparative Anthropology and Evans-Pritchard's Nuer Photograph y
Culture
Culture is considered as a key term in anthropology, now in critical mode, and to be worked through powerful tropes that lead to issues in politics, interpretation, translation, stereotype and racism. Anthropology is described as a cultural system itself, with a large supporting institutional apparatus, not unlike the culture industry as critiqued by Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The high mass culture/high culture distinction is considered and…
The Dialectic of Here and There: Anthropology 'at Home' and British Asian Communism1
Ethnographers in Britain seem to have by and large ignored left wing political activity among South Asian settlers on these islands. The lustrous career of South Asian communists active in the UK is however not to be romanticized and of course there were many more people not involved in class politics than can be registered in the annals of communist champions. But it is clear that the groundwork for many of the kinds of political positions taken…
The chapatti story: How hybridity as theory displaced Maoism as politics in Subaltern Studies
The displacement of concepts is another, sometimes overlooked, mode in the general disorientation of our times that sells us rightwards drift in the guise of a committed politics. My contention is that recent theoretical discussions disconnected from really existing Asias have used that place as a sounding board or punching bag for ever more abstract and unhelpful speculations. In this case, the conceptual theme is ‘hybridity’ and this is examine…
Jungle studies: The State of Anthropology
Media, Research, Politics, Culture: Review article
Robinson Crusoe: After the island
Charting an anti-colonial or even postcolonial current, this article recovers ironic and satirical meanings in Robinson Crusoe. After he leaves the island, Crusoe trades isolation for commercial opportunities in Asia. Alongside other books plundered by Defoe, Dampier’s Voyages is comparable because the pirate-navigator-cartographer is one among many models. As Defoe was negotiating the politics of the English Royal Court at the time of the wars o…
Robinson on Con Dao: Mango writing and faltering diplomacy in the precursors of Crusoe in Vietnam
In this article, a reading of early travel literature confronts indifference to the latitudes of colonialism in resort tourism. The historical role of the East India Company needs to be told in its uneven and questionable coordinates – individualist, opportunist, exoticist, imperious, calculated, collective – in a way that acknowledges implied responsibilities. Might latter-day Robinsons be encouraged or even obliged to respect the past enough to…
Bataille's Wars: Surrealism, Marxism, Fascism
Georges Bataille's experience of the First World War and his syphilitic father are considered as context for his engagements with Surrealism, Communism and Fascism. His anti-war sentiment, somewhat ambivalent, is mediated through his notions of expenditure and sacrifice and his post-Second World War studies of the gift. These offer material that might be worth considering in the light of contemporary political questions. On the eve of a new globa…
Hybridity Saves? Authenticity and/or the Critique of Appropriation
(1999). Hybridity Saves? Authenticity and/or the Critique of Appropriation. Amerasia Journal: Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 39-58
Studying tourism means going to have a look for yourself: Co-research, vulnerabilities and opportunities after the pandemic
Tourism Studies cannot rely upon studies of tourism alone to cover its range. While the anthropology of tourism had once sustained a revival, disciplinary inertia suggests a renewal is again overdue and anthropology might justify a reconstruction. The possibilities of tourism as ‘study’ perhaps remain unfulfilled, despite significant antecedents in Malcolm Crick’s work, where anthropology exactly glosses as travel plus study. This builds upon the…
Robinsonades: Pertaining to allegories from the East India Company in Ceylon and other islands, from Marxism to Post-structuralism, and in which, dear reader, a 300-year-old adventure book may still h…
Robinson Crusoe has been conjured with in many ways over the course of 300 years. While there has been an anti-orientalist critique of the figure of Friday, and some exposure of Crusoe’s investments in the slave trade, there are other aspects of Defoe’s book that receive less consideration. Post-structuralist and Marxist readings that have been made familiar again in recent work, look decidedly more interesting when the role of the English East I…
The pecuniary animus of the university
This essay suggests an alternative accountability process on the basis of critiques of current evaluation practice in higher education. Using cases in the British university system, with some international commentary and thinking through experience in Asian universities in four countries in the wake of ‘audit culture’, the work of Thorstein Bunde Veblen is revived. With Veblen, the current structures and mechanics of the corporate and fully-monet…
The corporate menagerie
This paper offers a typology of university management roles in the age of permanent austerity. The repackaging of every function within the university administration as a cost centre - meaning of course a potential profit centre - has long been seen as an unsustainable market model. Yet perversely it persists, and we would do well to name the hyperbolic functionaries of this administered institutional reconstruction, in a place where a humourless…
The museum of vernacular regeneration: Comparative urbanism and port cities
This debate piece reports on ongoing research addressing local experience of heritage regeneration in waterfront and port cities (informed by the work of Subramanian [1999. Indrani Ray’s French East India Company and the Trade of the Indian Ocean. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers; 2008. Ports, Towns and Cities: A Historical Tour of the Indian Littoral. Mumbai: Marg Publications; 2016. The Sovereign and the Pirate: Ordering Maritime Subj…
Marx in Calcutta
This paper considers the importance of examples from India in the text of Marx's Capital. In tracking Marx's preoccupations, it is possible to show the relevance, especially for today, of his critique in a global frame, as political economy pivots and returns to its sources. Along the way, countering misreading and mistranslation, it becomes possible to see why studies of the agrarian, trading route and subaltern histories of capital in relation …
The Dialectics of European Hip‐hop: Fun ˆda ˆmental and the deathening silence
This article takes into account debates about the provenance of hip‐hop in Europe, examines instances of the band Fun ˆda ˆmental's creative engagement with, and destabilisation of, music genres, and takes a broadly culture critique perspective as a guide to rethinking hip‐hop journalism. Music and ethnicity are core parameters for discussion, and the idea that musical cultures are variously authentic, possessive or coherent is questioned. The wa…
Music for Euro-Maoists: On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among Pop Stars
This article takes up the appearance in the club circuits of Europe of cultural matter derived from radical peasant insurgency in West Bengal. It asks why the political content of cultural performance is so often glossed as exotica, and writes back some of the history of transnational, or internationalist, politics into this forum. Linking this to the celebrated Booker Prizewinning text of Arundhati Roy, and Gayatri Spivak's translations of Mahas…
Customs Review of Public Culture: The US and Africa in Melbourne
Research Article| January 01 1989 Customs Review of Public Culture: The US and Africa in Melbourne John Hutnyk John Hutnyk Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1989) 2 (1): 130–135. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2-1-130 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation John Hutnyk; Customs Review of Public Culture: The US and Africa in Melbourne. Public Cultu…
Comparative Anthropology and Evans-Pritchard's Nuer Photograph y
The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation
An extraordinary study of the politics of representation, this book explores the discursive construction of a city of intensities . The author analyses representations of Calcutta in a wide variety of discourses: in the gossip and travellor-lore of backpackers and volunteer charity workers; in writing - from classic literature to travel guides; in cinema, photography and maps. The book shows how the rumours of westerners contribute to the elabora…
Media, Research, Politics, Culture: Review article
Brimful of agitation, authenticity and appropriation: Madonna's 'Asian Kool
Adorno at Womad: South Asian crossovers and the limits of hybridity-talk
(1998). Adorno at Womad: South Asian crossovers and the limits of hybridity-talk. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 401-426
Clifford's Ethnographica
■ James Clifford's work is discussed, in the first half of this article, through the prism of Malinowski, travel and the 'trinketization' of culture. In the second half, Clifford's 'ethnography' of the Fort Ross tourist-heritage project, and his sloppy reading of Marx, are brought in to contrast/comparison with Malinowskian perspectives to argue against the well-meaning pessimism of 'post exoticist' modes of culture commentary. The article is a p…
Hybridity Saves? Authenticity and/or the Critique of Appropriation
(1999). Hybridity Saves? Authenticity and/or the Critique of Appropriation. Amerasia Journal: Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 39-58
Music for Euro-Maoists: On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among Pop Stars
This article takes up the appearance in the club circuits of Europe of cultural matter derived from radical peasant insurgency in West Bengal. It asks why the political content of cultural performance is so often glossed as exotica, and writes back some of the history of transnational, or internationalist, politics into this forum. Linking this to the celebrated Booker Prizewinning text of Arundhati Roy, and Gayatri Spivak's translations of Mahas…
Music & Politics: An Introduction
This is an introduction to the section on Music and Politics including a description of the context of these essays, their individual contributions and their thematic interrelations
Tales from the Raj
What is Empire? What is not? Where is it? Where is it not? The most general backand- forth questions to begin. We could start by asking whether there is now anything outside the Empire of capital. Hardt and Negri declare as their initial task “to grasp the constitution of the order being formed today” (2000, 3). It is undoubtedly helpful to see an increased arsenal of concepts available for the difficult task of naming the conjuncture at which co…
Jungle studies: The State of Anthropology
The chapatti story: How hybridity as theory displaced Maoism as politics in Subaltern Studies
The displacement of concepts is another, sometimes overlooked, mode in the general disorientation of our times that sells us rightwards drift in the guise of a committed politics. My contention is that recent theoretical discussions disconnected from really existing Asias have used that place as a sounding board or punching bag for ever more abstract and unhelpful speculations. In this case, the conceptual theme is ‘hybridity’ and this is examine…
Bataille's Wars: Surrealism, Marxism, Fascism
Georges Bataille's experience of the First World War and his syphilitic father are considered as context for his engagements with Surrealism, Communism and Fascism. His anti-war sentiment, somewhat ambivalent, is mediated through his notions of expenditure and sacrifice and his post-Second World War studies of the gift. These offer material that might be worth considering in the light of contemporary political questions. On the eve of a new globa…
Photogenic Poverty: Souvenirs and Infantilism
This article discusses the photograph and the souvenir together as relics of a trinketizing touristic countenance. It argues that the reified image memorializes the exotic other, and a romanticized view of childhood, in the midst of war and deprivation. Charity and memory are bound together here with geo-politics. An analysis of similarities and differences in the ways photographs and souvenirs trace encounters with ‘photogenic poverty’ is urgent…
Transgressions of Fieldwork/Filed Works: Method in the Madness
The Dialectics of European Hip‐hop: Fun ˆda ˆmental and the deathening silence
This article takes into account debates about the provenance of hip‐hop in Europe, examines instances of the band Fun ˆda ˆmental's creative engagement with, and destabilisation of, music genres, and takes a broadly culture critique perspective as a guide to rethinking hip‐hop journalism. Music and ethnicity are core parameters for discussion, and the idea that musical cultures are variously authentic, possessive or coherent is questioned. The wa…
The Dialectic of Here and There: Anthropology 'at Home' and British Asian Communism1
Ethnographers in Britain seem to have by and large ignored left wing political activity among South Asian settlers on these islands. The lustrous career of South Asian communists active in the UK is however not to be romanticized and of course there were many more people not involved in class politics than can be registered in the annals of communist champions. But it is clear that the groundwork for many of the kinds of political positions taken…
Hybridity
This exploration of hybridity begins by offering a description of the term and its uses in divergent and related fields, then a critique of assumptions (those of purity, of marginality and identity). A discussion of cultural creativity, syncretism, diffusion, race and biology (the history of migration, language, culture, and 'blood') leads on to consideration of how syncretism and hybridity seem to do duty as terms for the management of the more …
Culture
Culture is considered as a key term in anthropology, now in critical mode, and to be worked through powerful tropes that lead to issues in politics, interpretation, translation, stereotype and racism. Anthropology is described as a cultural system itself, with a large supporting institutional apparatus, not unlike the culture industry as critiqued by Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The high mass culture/high culture distinction is considered and…
Eruptions: NYC MustTagAliens
Eruptions: NYC MustTagAliens Marlène Ramírez-Cancio, Brenda Iijima, Delores Jones-Brown, Diana Taylor, Gil Anidjar, Gregory Fried, Hamid Dabashi, John Hutnyk, Linda Martín Alcoff, Sunita Viswanath, Steven Pludwin, and Daniel Skinner For the Safe Issue, we asked contributors to reflect on the MTA’s “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign, what they thought it was hailing them to do and what they thought of that interpellation. We requested …
Proletarianisation
This essay takes up the work of Bernard Stiegler to evaluate and critique his use of Marx and Engels’ notion of proletarianization in the context of new media, television, education and activism. The impact of technology and the notion of the general intellect is measured against Stiegler’s worry about a ‘short circuit’ that threatens humanity and requires a ‘new critique’. Talk of an ‘attention economy’ might be better understood if we deploy a …
Beyond television studies
That a new media studies is needed is clear; that a rapid, inspiration-seeking survey can find this from South Asia in an international frame, after 10 years of the War of Terror, comes as no surprise. The obsessions and ideologies of television globally are still there to be critiqued, and this can be done with some of the authors considered here. That these readings are contingent only means that reviewing contemporary events through a distorti…
Poetry after Guantanamo: M.i.A
The recent work of the Sri-Lankan-British musician and sonic ‘curator’ known as M.I.A. (real name: Mathangi Arulpragasam) is considered as a commentary on atrocity and read alongside the well known essay ‘The Storyteller’ by Walter Benjamin and comments on Auschwitz by Theodor Adorno. The storytelling here is updated for a contemporary context where global war impacts us all, more or less visibly, more, or less, acknowledged. It is argued that th…
Sexy Sammy and Red Rosie? From Burning Books to the War on Terror
Writing within the sonic register of a soundtrack that plundered the diasporic mind-set of a certain “London” massive, Hanif Kureishi was widely criticized for his contribution as writer to two films in the 1980s: My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987). Less lyrically perhaps—and less filmic—Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses was famously set on fire in Bradford in 1989. Antiracist sexualities, street riots, and …
Sociology (40 works) · Political science (33 works) · Law (29 works) · Politics (26 works) · History (25 works) · Law (24 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · History (21 works) · Art (19 works) · Philosophy (17 works)