Friday, November 6th, 2015 Law, the Commodity Image and the Consuming Public

Description

Although the discourse of globalization following the fall of the Soviet Union was sudden and celebratory, many distinct historical developments were brought together in most of the invocations, converging around the argument, either latent or patent, that a verdict had been delivered with the end of the Cold War, on the side of freedom and against overarching state authority.
My paper will address two specific sets of developments that instance the globalization of media and markets, namely advertising and trademark regulation. There are interesting differences between these developments, and to some extent they reflect consequential differences in nomenclature and usage, between the brand and the trademark. Although in a sense these are the same entity as intellectual property, and can be figured together in the idea of the commodity image, the former is in a lightly regulated zone at best, while the latter is subject to strenuous adjudication seeking to protect manufacturers’ and merchants’ rights while regulating market behavior. Studying examples from Indian case law and the history of Indian marketing and advertising, I will seek to understand how, when key aspects of the development of Indian markets have not replicated western conditions, the relevant differences appear to remain as aberrations to the given norms of understanding market-led globalization.

Arvind Rajagopal’s work explores questions of political aesthetics vis-à-vis postcolonial state formation. His book Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge, 2001) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association of Asian Studies in 2003, and his edited volume The Indian Public Sphere appeared in 2009. Recent articles include “The Emergency and the New Indian Middle Class” in Modern Asian Studies, 2011, and “Special Political Zone” on the anti-Muslim violence in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in South Asian History and Culture, 2011. He has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. In addition, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Goettingen, Germany, the Delhi School of Economics at the University of Delhi, and the Central University of Hyderabad. His current research draws on archives in five countries, including India and the United States, and seeks, among other things, to link the disciplinary history of media studies with the history of communication technology.