BRIEF BIO:
Bhaskar Sarkar’s primary research interests include post-colonial media theory, political economy of global media, and history and memory. Broadly speaking, his work addresses questions of modernity and nationhood, paying close attention to the institutions, circuits, and practices constituting global media assemblages.

Sarkar is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2007), a critical exploration of the cinematic traces of a particular historical trauma. He has published essays on philosophies of visuality, and Indian and Chinese popular cinemas in anthologies and journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Rethinking History: Theory and Practice, and New Review of Film and Television Studies. At present, he is working on a comparative study of India and China's repositioning within the global cultural economy, as a way of tracking “plastic nationalisms” within a world-historical frame.

Sarkar has also co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Postcolonial Studies on “The Subaltern and the Popular,” anthologizing the proceedings from a 2004 conference. That conference provided the impetus for a multi-year research project involving scholars from multiple UC campuses and other research institutions (visit website). Recently, he has initiated another collaborative research project, “Speculative Globalities,” which will explore uncertainty as both a productive and a critical logic informing globalization. Sarkar also serves on the advisory boards of two research centers at UCSB: Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music, and the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies.