ASNST-220 Empire of Books: Media, Society and Imagined Community

What was social about media before Twitter? What kind of practices and ways of imagining the world change with the rise of print publishing in South Asia? We consider the relationship between media as material objects, such as manuscripts and print books, and the social worlds of different cultural and linguistic communities across South Asia from the early modern to the modern period. This includes the cultures of oral performers - poets, storytellers and also scribal communities, publishers and authors. Understand how state power, commercial publishing and civil society interact to affect reading tastes and political community.

Maximum Enrollment

Standard Course (40)

Credits

1.00