Author Ravi Sundaram

Ravi Sundaram

Ravi Sundaram’s work rests at the intersection of the postcolonial city and contemporary media experiences. As media technology and urban life have intermingled in the postcolonial world, new challenges have emerged for contemporary cultural theory. Sundaram’s work has looked at the phenomenon that he calls ‘pirate modernity’, an illicit form of urbanism that draws from media and technological infrastructures of the postcolonial city. Sundaram’s current research looks at urban fear after media modernity. Sundaram recently published Pirate Modernity: Media Urbanism in Delhi (2009) (Routledge, London and Delhi), and is finishing two edited volumes, No Limits: Media Studies from India and Delhi’s Twentieth Century, both from Oxford University Press.

Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution by Roman Lobato

Ravi Sundaram

November 2012

Book Reviews

In her powerful story of early cinema, the scholar Jaine Gaines suggested that informal and pirate duplication was essential to the film form even as it arrived mythically in the early years. Once copied, pirat...