Research Focus Group Talk: On the Problem of (Re-)Activity: Mobilizing Media with the Sikh Diaspora

A common refrain in political rhetoric is the charge that given instances of agonism are defective because they are in some crucial way reactive. However, “reactivity” is polysemous and opaque, despite any seeming transparency implied by the fluency by which it is so often attributed. This talk offers an analytic and ethnographic entrée into the problem of reactivity by considering diasporic investments in mass-mediated address. Sikh media activists scrutinize the reactivity seemingly cultivated by their own community-operated media institutions in their renowned capacity to both assemble and excite. In the wake of brutal state violence, the mediation of reactivity becomes both a vehicle to address injustice and itself a site to reckon justice that has been withheld.

Randeep Singh Hothi is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow affiliated with the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA. He is a philosophically trained anthropologist concerned with disruptive re-imaginations of the political and economic.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group and the Department of Anthropology