Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.

Digital Space and Religious Intolerance in South Asia

Abstract: The digital space, dominated by social media, has provoked a real information revolution by placing the public foremost in the network. By heralding free speech and facilitating access to unfiltered information, the Digital Age has ended monopolies over information access and extended the boundaries of democracy. However, the same tools have also exposed the dark underside of technology and democracy as networking has produced ‘misinformed masses’ – often religiously intolerant and heavily influenced by disinformation. Dystopian narratives, averse to alternate facts and figures, and constantly disseminated online, are causing an emergency in democratic societies, including India and Bangladesh. This chapter seeks to critically examine the contemporary narratives around online religious campaigns targeting the minorities in both countries. The rise of far-right extremism and the spread of radical messages and propaganda, occasionally challenging bilateral ties and disrupting the goals of public diplomacy, have also been focused in the chapter.

Sonic Subjection: Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible and the Dystopian Limits of the Resonant Body

Abstract: This chapter takes forward notions of the ‘unlistenable’ developed in Chapter One as it discusses Gapar Noé’s Irréversible, another film that has been explored in relation to ‘extreme cinema’ and an unwatchable aesthetic. Noé deploys noise as a form of violence, domination and torture in ways that provide a different understanding of how we might become ‘all ears’ in the filmic experience, challenging previous positive conceptions of the resonant body. I show how sound works at a vibratory level in Noé, disrupting our relation to the spaces and time of the film, working to destroy an anthropocentric framework of subjectivity that would allow a subject to constitute a world. This reveals some of the more dystopian limits of Nancy’s resonant body as it considers the vulnerability of a model of subjectivity based on vibration and feedback.

At home in the metropolis

Abstract: In the last two decades, narratives about China’s rapid transformation have emphasized the country’s architectural feats of construction, demolition, and renovation, as well as the large-scale movement of labor migration to urban centers, and new modes of technology. In global news headlines, the Chinese metropolis is often associated with its dystopian elements of social alienation, surveillance, and environmental degradation. But a closer look at Chinese multimedia visual culture reveals alternative visions of belonging and home-making in the big city. This chapter provides an overview of China’s two most iconic cities: the political capital of Beijing, and its cosmopolitan counterpart, the commercial metropolis of Shanghai. Surveying a range of screen media from the first two decades of the 21st century, the chapter draws from TV miniseries, photography, and mainstream, experimental, and independent documentary film to examine how contemporary forms of media build on and also complicate earlier images of Beijing and Shanghai and their inhabitants. While both first-tier cities have long occupied distinct roles in the Chinese cultural imaginary, media representations of everyday urban life now provide reflection on how individuals can feel at home and belong amidst the constantly shifting landscape of the metropolis.