Francis Cody's "The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization" Book Launch
Friday, September 15th, 2023
| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, September 15, 2023 | 2:00PM - 4:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, This event took place in Room 208N, North House, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON, M5S 3K7 |
Description
ABOUT THE BOOK
Biography courtesy of the University of Chicago Press
In the hypermediated world of Tamil Nadu, Francis Cody studies how “news events” are made.Not merely the act of representing events with words or images, a “news event” is the reciprocal relationship between the events being reported in the news and the event of the news coverage itself.
In The News Event, Francis Cody focuses on how imaginaries of popular sovereignty have been remade through the production and experience of such events. Political sovereignty is thoroughly mediated by the production of news, and subjects invested in the idea of democracy are remarkably reflexive about the role of publicly circulating images and texts in the very constitution of their subjectivity. The law comes to stand as both a limit and positive condition in this process of event making, where acts of legal and extralegal repression of publication can also become the stuff of news about news makers. When the subjects of news inhabit multiple participant roles in the unfolding of public events, when the very technologies of recording and circulating events themselves become news, the act of representing a political event becomes difficult to disentangle from that of participating in it. This, Cody argues, is the crisis of contemporary news making: the news can no longer claim exteriority to the world on which it reports.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Francis Cody is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto, where he is the Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Contemporary Asian Studies and the Centre for South Asian Studies. He has been teaching at U of T since 2008. His research focuses on language, politics, and media in southern India.
After the event, we invite attendees to join us in room 202N, down the hallway from the book talk, for a book sale hosted by the University of Toronto Bookstore.
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