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Focusing on the culture of piracy in the Indian capital, this book looks at what has happened to the city in the wake of the dissemination of the new media and the ways in which it has, and will, affect urban cultures in an age of globalization.
Using Delhi’s contemporary history as a site for reflection, Pirate Modernity moves from a detailed discussion of the technocratic design of the city by US planners in the 1950s, to the massive expansions after 1977, culminating in the urban crisis of the 1990s. As a practice, pirate modernity is an illicit form of urban globalization. Poorer urban populations increasingly inhabit non-legal spheres: unauthorized neighborhoods, squatter camps and bypass legal technological infrastructures (media, electricity). This pirate culture produces a significant enabling resource for subaltern populations unable to enter the legal city. Equally, this is an unstable world, bringing subaltern populations into the harsh glare of permanent technological visibility, and attacks by urban elites, courts and visceral media industries. The book examines contemporary Delhi from some of these sites: the unmaking of the citys modernist planning design, new technological urban networks that bypass states and corporations, and the tragic experience of the road accident terrifyingly enhanced by technological culture. Pirate Modernity moves between past and present, along with debates in Asia, Africa and Latin America on urbanism, media culture, and everyday life. This pioneering book suggests cities have to be revisited afresh after proliferating media culture. Pirate Modernity boldly draws from urban and cultural theory to open a new agenda for a world after media urbanism.
Dystopic imagery has figured prominently in modern depictions of the urban landscape. The city is often portrayed as a terrifying world of darkness, crisis, and catastrophe. Noir Urbanisms traces the history of the modern city through its critical representations in art, cinema, print journalism, literature, sociology, and architecture. It focuses on visual forms of dystopic representation--because the history of the modern city is inseparable from the production and circulation of images--and examines their strengths and limits as urban criticism. Contributors explore dystopic images of the modern city in Germany, Mexico, Japan, India, South Africa, China, and the United States. Their topics include Weimar representations of urban dystopia in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis; 1960s modernist architecture in Mexico City; Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and 1950s; the recurring fictional destruction of Tokyo in postwar Japan's sci-fi doom culture; the urban fringe in Bombay cinema; fictional explorations of urban dystopia in postapartheid Johannesburg; and Delhi's out-of-control and media-saturated urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerges in Noir Urbanisms is the unsettling and disorienting alchemy between dark representations and the modern urban experience. In addition to the editor, the contributors are David R. Ambaras, James Donald, Rubén Gallo, Anton Kaes, Ranjani Mazumdar, Jennifer Robinson, Mark Shiel, Ravi Sundaram, William M. Tsutsui, and Li Zhang.
Despite China's recent emergence as a major global economic and geopolitical power, its association with counterfeit goods and intellectual property piracy has led many in the West to dismiss its urbanization and globalization as suspect or inauthentic. In Underglobalization Joshua Neves examines the cultural politics of the “fake” and how frictions between legality and legitimacy propel dominant models of economic development and political life in contemporary China. Focusing on a wide range of media technologies and practices in Beijing, Neves shows how piracy and fakes are manifestations of what he calls underglobalization—the ways social actors undermine and refuse to implement the specific procedures and protocols required by globalization at different scales. By tracking the rise of fake politics and transformations in political society, in China and globally, Neves demonstrates that they are alternate outcomes of globalizing processes rather than anathema to them.
DIVExamines the role of media technologies in shaping urban Africa through an ethnographic study of popular culture in northern Nigeria./div
Across the global South, new media technologies have brought about new forms of cultural production, distribution and reception. The spread of cassette recorders in the 1970s; the introduction of analogue and digital video formats in the 80s and 90s; the pervasive availability of recycled computer hardware; the global dissemination of the internet and mobile phones in the new millennium: all these have revolutionised the access of previously marginalised populations to the cultural flows of global modernity. Yet this access also engenders a pirate occupation of the modern: it ducks and deranges the globalised designs of property, capitalism and personhood set by the North. Positioning itself against Eurocentric critiques by corporate lobbies, libertarian readings or classical Marxist interventions, this volume offers a profound postcolonial revaluation of the social, epistemic and aesthetic workings of piracy. It projects how postcolonial piracy persistently negotiates different trajectories of property and self at the crossroads of the global and the local.
With its analytic focus on the cultural production by Tibetans-in-exile, this volume examines contemporary Tibetan fiction, poetry, music, art, cinema, pamphlets, testimony, and memoir. The twelve case studies highlight the themes of Tibetans’ self-representation, politicized national consciousness, religious and cultural heritages, and resistance to the forces of colonization. This book demonstrates how Tibetan cultural narratives adjust to intercultural influences and ongoing social and political struggles in exile.
It is apparent that file sharing on the Internet has become an emerging norm of media consumption—especially among young people. This book provides a critical perspective on this phenomenon, exploring issues related to file sharing, downloading, peer-to-peer networks, "piracy," and (not least) policy issues regarding these practices. Andersson Schwartz critically engages with the justificatory discourses of the actual file-sharers, taking Sweden as a geographic focus. By focusing on the example of Sweden—home to both The Pirate Bay and Spotify—he provides a unique insight into a mentality that drives both innovation and deviance and accommodates sharing in both its unadulterated and its compliant, business-friendly forms.
Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Now, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. But urbanization is accelerating in some places and slowing down in others. The sprawling megacities of Asia and Africa, as well as many other smaller and medium-sized cities throughout the “Global South,” are expected to continue growing. At the same time, older industrial cities in wealthier countries are experiencing protracted socioeconomic decline. Nonetheless, mainstream urban studies continues to treat a handful of superstar cities in Europe and North America as the exemplars of world urbanism, even though current global growth and development represent a dramatic break with past patterns. Martin J. Murray offers a groundbreaking guide to the multiplicity, heterogeneity, and complexity of contemporary global urbanism. He identifies and traces four distinct pathways that characterize cities today: tourist-entertainment cities with world-class aspirations; struggling postindustrial cities; megacities experiencing hypergrowth; and “instant cities,” or master-planned cities built from scratch. Murray shows how these different types of cities respond to different pressures and logics rather than progressing through the stages of a predetermined linear path. He highlights new spatial patterns of urbanization that have undermined conventional understandings of the city, exploring the emergence of polycentric, fragmented, haphazard, and unbounded metropolises. Such cities, he argues, should not be seen as deviations from a norm but rather as alternatives within a constellation of urban possibility. Innovative and wide-ranging, Many Urbanisms offers ways to understand the disparate forms of global cities today on their own terms.
How do people access movies today? What are the most popular and powerful channels for media distribution on a global scale? How are film industries changing in the face of media convergence and digitisation? To answer questions such as these, argues Ramon Lobato, we must shift our gaze away from the legal film business and toward cinema's shadow economies. All around the world, films are bought from roadside stalls, local markets, and grocery stores; they are illegally downloaded and streamed; they are watched in makeshift video clubs, on street corners, and in restaurants, shops and bars. International film culture in its actually-existing forms is a messy affair, and it relies to a great extent on black and grey media markets. Examining the industrial dynamics of these subterranean film networks across a number of different sites – from Los Angeles to Lagos, Melbourne to Mexico City – this book shows how they constitute a central rather than marginal part of audiovisual culture and commerce. Combining film industry analysis with cultural theory, Shadow Economies of Cinema opens up a new area of inquiry for cinema studies, putting industry research into dialogue with wider debates about economic informality and commodity circulation. Written in an accessible style, this book offers an original 'bottom-up' perspective on the global cinema industry for researchers and students in film studies, cultural studies, and media and communications.