Mrinalini Rajagopalan. Building Histories

When and why are particular buildings transformed into monuments? What discursive modalities structure this monumentality? And why do some monuments generate affective meanings that exceed the regimes of truth within which they are sought to be contained? This critically engaged book, Building Histories, sets out to address these questions through an exploration of five monuments in modern Delhi. Architectural monuments, Mrinalini Rajagopalan argues, “are made in the space between archive and affect” (191). In other words, a monument is not only the product of specific state-sanctioned regimes of knowledge, but also a repository of emotive attachments and symbolic meanings that contest or subvert these disciplinary protocols. The central argument of the book is elaborated through five case studies. Eschewing a linear history, each chapter deals with a single monument at a moment “when institutional narratives and policies collided with informal practices of commemoration or preservation” (19). These singular moments, however, are framed in ways that take account of both the past of the monument and its subsequent historical transformation.

Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics) · Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · CONTEST · Emotive · Literature · Narrative · New delhi · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science) · Anthropology · Computer Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies