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In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd's murder on May 25, 2020, global protests against racialized police brutality targeted statues and other public art forms symbolizing racism. Either framed as a "weird global media event" or "global iconic event," Floyd's murder forced a reckoning with histories of oppression and systemic racism, with a potential enduring social effect and a transnational historical significance by inviting resonance and global solidarity. This article focuses on the U.K. context and spans a decade to invite a rethinking of ideas of crisis, history, and hero through a consideration of the toppling of Edward Colston's statue and its pushing into the Bristol Harbour on June 7, 2020, by Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters, and Yinka Shonibare CBE's artwork Nelson's Ship in a Bottle (2010–2012), commissioned for the "Fourth Plinth" temporary exhibits in Trafalgar Square. Such consideration bears on this contemporary moment when we are witnessing globally connected protest actions calling for the decolonization of public material culture.

AbstractIn 2000, the writer Rana Dasgupta moved from New York to Delhi, reversing his father's act of migration in the 1960s, to find a new, but already obsolescent, 'rising India'. This was the India of the economic boom, whose extent and import have been increasingly under scrutiny. With reference to the temporalities of 'rising India', the purpose of this article is to examine the representation of globalization's multiple temporalities in Dasgupta's non-fiction work Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (2014). Capital is a returnee author's personal attempt to inhabit the multiple temporalities of Delhi, wherein the pull of globalization—here understood as neo-liberal corporate economic globalization—is alternatively embraced and resisted. This article argues that the conceptual limitations of the multiple-modernities framework are reflected in Dasgupta's representation of the multiple temporalities of globalization. It is through politicized and territorialized genealogies of 'imperial debris' such as Dasgupta's that we can arrive at new critiques of modernity. At the same time, this article is concerned with the ways in which Dasgupta's fractured and multi-temporal present of Delhi, inhabited by the old and the new, is being captured by a returnee from the United States of America to India who is concurrently the 'other' from 'abroad' and the 'same' at 'home'. Ultimately, the book's re-Orientalist frame underscores, from the outset, the difficulty in decoupling ideas of modernity and progress from a Eurocentric, Enlightenment project.

As theorised by Theodor Adorno, the "culture industry" is a pervasive structure that produces cultural commodities for the mass audience, while supporting dominant political and economic imperatives. What interests me here is not so much to focus on an apparent Adornian tendency to unify the culture industry, but to underscore the dynamic and conflictual makeup of the cultural industries. In an attempt to recoup Adorno's arguments, critics have revisited them over the years and argued that the culture industry thesis is more counterbalanced and less pessimistic than it appears at first sight. Such double-edged nature of the Adornian critique might be relevant in understanding the workings of postcolonial cultural production. Hence, as an update to the concept of culture industry, and as a variation of Ellis Cashmore's notion of a "black culture industry" (1997), I propose the idea of a "brown culture industry". This conceptual category will allow for a fusion between one of the foundational theories in the study of popular culture, and a prevailing concern of postcolonial theories regarding the commodification of cultural difference investigated most prominently by John Hutnyk and Graham Huggan. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Contributing to the debate on decolonising the curriculum, this reflective article questions: What does a safe space in a decolonised classroom mean? For whom is it safe? And at what cost? Must we redraw the parameters of 'safe'? Prompted by a real-life 'n-word incident' in the classroom, this article unpacks the collision of decolonising the curriculum to continue making teaching and learning more pluriversal and inclusive, with the enactment of the 'wounded attachments' of identitarian politics and the playing of 'Privilege or Oppression Olympics'. Using snippets from British parody and satire on decolonising the university, we query how far wokeness in a university setting can become political correctness taken to extremes that threaten decolonising efforts. In its concluding reflections, the article makes tentative recommendations for setting up safe spaces, away from self-silencing or censoring, and backing away from contention and provocation in the classroom. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Ai Weiwei positions himself first and foremost as a thinker, driven by curiosity and even selfishness, and not shying away from ridicule. Through immersion and direct response to different, unfamiliar conditions, he aims to defamiliarize pre-set thinking, not letting himself be trapped by rationality and led by simplified, predetermined conclusions about the world. Despite the self-proclaimed selfishness at their core, Ai's artistic acts become selfless through resonance, inviting the viewer into his thought experiments with the world, which he engages with as if the world were a readymade. This conversation departed from the transnational film Tree (2021), where Ai meticulously documents the work of Brazilian and Chinese artisans in creating his 32-metre iron sculpture Pequi Tree (2018–2020). We began with political curiosity as a creative driver for the artist, the influence of Duchamp and Warhol, and the choice of the audiovisual medium to reflect reality. The conversation branched out to consider aesthetics, tying the issue of aestheticization to Ai's role as a public intellectual, from an earlier refusal of aesthetics or 'beautification' in the interest of unmediated transparency to the realization that new aesthetics are needed for new publics. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

The branding and marketing of post-millennial India as a global service provider has been relentless. Indian cities have now been de-exoticized from their previous association to elephants, snake-charmers, and slums, and are now being marketed as the hub of Global North medical infrastructure and scientific advancement, at attractive Global South rates. Legalized only in 2002, international commercial gestational surrogacy (ICGS) in India, a lucrative niche market within the sector of medical and healthcare tourism, has been an industry worth US$ 2.3 billion annually at its peak. Now, however, it stands on the brink of being banned by a bill introduced in the Indian parliament in 2016. This essay advances the argument that the selling points of ICGS have been premised on structural and systemic inequalities of gender and class, as well as of biopolitical power. We further build on Graham Huggan's early twenty-first-century thesis on the marketing of the postcolonial margins to explore the emergent gendered subjectivities and attendant fictional representations of ICGS and its various actors in the novel The House of Hidden Mothers (2015) by the diasporic British Indian author Meera Syal. Drawing on this novel, we map and examine the perceptions and representations of ICGS, investigating that which facilitates and promotes exploitation to deduce the resultant impact on the stakeholders and active agents in this industry in the space of India and in the West. The essay concludes that, seen through the lenses of re-orientalism, the exploitations within India's ICGS are not merely along national or ethnic and gender lines, but also class based and geographically enabled.