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Papers by William Mazzarella

Originally published as the introduction of our edited volume in 2009, 'Censorship in South Asia:... more Originally published as the introduction of our edited volume in 2009, 'Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation Between Sedition and Seduction,' this is a somewhat refurbished version that came out in 2024 as part of Rahaab Allana's edited volume 'Another Lens,' itself part of the 'India Since the 90s' series.

Dialectical Anthropology , 2024

This piece was written as a speculative afterword to a special issue of Dialectical Anthropology,... more This piece was written as a speculative afterword to a special issue of Dialectical Anthropology, edited by Max Kramer and Jürgen Schaflechner, on the Limits of Visibility for South Asian Religious Minorities

New Lines Magazine, 2023

There is something deeply disturbing about the ongoing rehabilitation of the Reagan-Thatcher year... more There is something deeply disturbing about the ongoing rehabilitation of the Reagan-Thatcher years. The right-wing radicals of the 1980s now smile down on us, implausibly, as kindly beacons of moderation and benevolent parental authority. What gives? In part, it’s a sliding scale: As brutal and violent as those regimes were, it only takes some airbrushing — and not a little wishful thinking — to make them look positively cozy next to the terrors of today. We all know the obscene alchemy of which nostalgia is capable. But the difference between Maggie and Ronnie and the parents that Philip Larkin so scabrously eulogized in “This Be the Verse” is that … well, these guys did mean to fuck us up. “Us” being the 99%, as we later came to be known.

This article starts from a startling order promulgated by the Supreme Court of India in late 2016... more This article starts from a startling order promulgated by the Supreme Court of India in late 2016. The order demanded not only that the national anthem be played before every film screening, but also made it mandatory for all members of the audience to stand up and show respect. The event was widely interpreted as yet another chapter in the government’s ongoing authoritarian clampdown against any form of dissent. I argue that while these are real and important concerns, the longer genealogy of the Supreme Court order as well as the public reactions that it triggered open up deeper and broader questions too. At one level, these are questions about the incitement and management of patriotic sentiment in India, especially vis-à-vis popular media in a time of majoritarian nationalism. At another level, they are questions of comparative theoretical interest, pointing to the paradox of what I call ‘prior commitment’: the volatile affective grounds that inform – and threaten – the ways in which ritual attempts to animate and to stabilize social order.

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2022

Note to reader. This piece was written as a talk that I gave at Columbia University in the spring... more Note to reader. This piece was written as a talk that I gave at Columbia University in the spring of 2019 (that's why it contains prompts for PowerPoint images). I reworked it slightly in order to give it another outing in the spring of 2020, but the global pandemic intervened. Given that I now have some extra time, as it were, to develop the ideas sketched here, I'm opening it up to your reading and commentary. Many thanks, WmM. I hope you'll indulge me. I have the feeling that in what follows I will, more than once, be stating the obvious. But I can't shake the feeling that there's something about the present moment that cries out for this kind of movement back over very familiar ground. A bit like when we retrace our steps, looking for something that we've lost. As if precisely because everything looks so familiar, it's easy to miss something that should be obvious but isn't. Something that's hiding in plain sight. You'll notice as I go along that I won't really be defining my key terms: "populism" and "political theology." I've made this choice quite intentionally, on the principle that definition is too often a way of stopping thought rather than starting it. A way of convincing ourselves that stable points exist in a world of movement and that processes can be reduced to things. My approach will instead be to speak, as it were, in the neighbourhood of these terms, to see what they might yield when they don't know we're looking at them. That said, I do want to say something about why I chose to include the term "political theology" in the title of this talk.

Problemi International , 2022

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2019

Roundtable on The Mana of Mass Society featuring Jean Comaroff, Leela Gandhi, Michael Taussig, Bh... more Roundtable on The Mana of Mass Society featuring Jean Comaroff, Leela Gandhi, Michael Taussig, Bhrigupati Singh, Aarti Sethi and William Mazzarella

Interview with Elayne Oliphant

The May 2017 issue of Cultural Anthropology included a Retrospectives collection on “Affect,” edi... more The May 2017 issue of Cultural Anthropology included a Retrospectives collection on “Affect,” edited by Daniel White. This collection included the article “Sense out of Sense: Notes on the Affect/Ethics Impasse,” by William Mazzarella, who is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of an interview that contributing editors Andrés Romero and Toby Austin Locke conducted with Mazzarella about his article’s arguments and their relationship to his broader research agenda.

Originally published as the introduction of our edited volume in 2009, 'Censorship in South Asia:... more Originally published as the introduction of our edited volume in 2009, 'Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation Between Sedition and Seduction,' this is a somewhat refurbished version that came out in 2024 as part of Rahaab Allana's edited volume 'Another Lens,' itself part of the 'India Since the 90s' series.

Dialectical Anthropology , 2024

This piece was written as a speculative afterword to a special issue of Dialectical Anthropology,... more This piece was written as a speculative afterword to a special issue of Dialectical Anthropology, edited by Max Kramer and Jürgen Schaflechner, on the Limits of Visibility for South Asian Religious Minorities

New Lines Magazine, 2023

There is something deeply disturbing about the ongoing rehabilitation of the Reagan-Thatcher year... more There is something deeply disturbing about the ongoing rehabilitation of the Reagan-Thatcher years. The right-wing radicals of the 1980s now smile down on us, implausibly, as kindly beacons of moderation and benevolent parental authority. What gives? In part, it’s a sliding scale: As brutal and violent as those regimes were, it only takes some airbrushing — and not a little wishful thinking — to make them look positively cozy next to the terrors of today. We all know the obscene alchemy of which nostalgia is capable. But the difference between Maggie and Ronnie and the parents that Philip Larkin so scabrously eulogized in “This Be the Verse” is that … well, these guys did mean to fuck us up. “Us” being the 99%, as we later came to be known.

This article starts from a startling order promulgated by the Supreme Court of India in late 2016... more This article starts from a startling order promulgated by the Supreme Court of India in late 2016. The order demanded not only that the national anthem be played before every film screening, but also made it mandatory for all members of the audience to stand up and show respect. The event was widely interpreted as yet another chapter in the government’s ongoing authoritarian clampdown against any form of dissent. I argue that while these are real and important concerns, the longer genealogy of the Supreme Court order as well as the public reactions that it triggered open up deeper and broader questions too. At one level, these are questions about the incitement and management of patriotic sentiment in India, especially vis-à-vis popular media in a time of majoritarian nationalism. At another level, they are questions of comparative theoretical interest, pointing to the paradox of what I call ‘prior commitment’: the volatile affective grounds that inform – and threaten – the ways in which ritual attempts to animate and to stabilize social order.

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2022

Note to reader. This piece was written as a talk that I gave at Columbia University in the spring... more Note to reader. This piece was written as a talk that I gave at Columbia University in the spring of 2019 (that's why it contains prompts for PowerPoint images). I reworked it slightly in order to give it another outing in the spring of 2020, but the global pandemic intervened. Given that I now have some extra time, as it were, to develop the ideas sketched here, I'm opening it up to your reading and commentary. Many thanks, WmM. I hope you'll indulge me. I have the feeling that in what follows I will, more than once, be stating the obvious. But I can't shake the feeling that there's something about the present moment that cries out for this kind of movement back over very familiar ground. A bit like when we retrace our steps, looking for something that we've lost. As if precisely because everything looks so familiar, it's easy to miss something that should be obvious but isn't. Something that's hiding in plain sight. You'll notice as I go along that I won't really be defining my key terms: "populism" and "political theology." I've made this choice quite intentionally, on the principle that definition is too often a way of stopping thought rather than starting it. A way of convincing ourselves that stable points exist in a world of movement and that processes can be reduced to things. My approach will instead be to speak, as it were, in the neighbourhood of these terms, to see what they might yield when they don't know we're looking at them. That said, I do want to say something about why I chose to include the term "political theology" in the title of this talk.

Problemi International , 2022

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2019

Roundtable on The Mana of Mass Society featuring Jean Comaroff, Leela Gandhi, Michael Taussig, Bh... more Roundtable on The Mana of Mass Society featuring Jean Comaroff, Leela Gandhi, Michael Taussig, Bhrigupati Singh, Aarti Sethi and William Mazzarella

Interview with Elayne Oliphant

The May 2017 issue of Cultural Anthropology included a Retrospectives collection on “Affect,” edi... more The May 2017 issue of Cultural Anthropology included a Retrospectives collection on “Affect,” edited by Daniel White. This collection included the article “Sense out of Sense: Notes on the Affect/Ethics Impasse,” by William Mazzarella, who is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of an interview that contributing editors Andrés Romero and Toby Austin Locke conducted with Mazzarella about his article’s arguments and their relationship to his broader research agenda.

Straddling a range of disciplinary perspectives and covering a variety of geographical regions, t... more Straddling a range of disciplinary perspectives and covering a variety of geographical regions, the contributors to Enchantments of Modernity imaginatively explore questions of colonization and decolonization, memory and madness, affect and authority, and cosmopolitanism and fundamentalism. The authors incisively elaborate on issues of imperial power and nationalist knowledge, metropolitan histories and vernacular pasts, secular principles and democratic practices, and global economics and postcolonial politics.

Table of Contents and Introduction for the forthcoming book (Trios Series, University of Chicago ... more Table of Contents and Introduction for the forthcoming book (Trios Series, University of Chicago Press, December 2019).