Resumen de Gods in the Time of Automobility
Alongside an explosion in print, televisual, and digital media, India�s late twentieth-century economic reforms produced an unexpected new genre: monumental statues, mostly Hindu deities built in cement, now steadily proliferating across India and its diaspora. How do we think about the newness of such a form given, on one hand, the genealogy of its publicness in late colonial religio-cultural nationalism, debates on electoral representation, and a particular form of politico-devotional public designated as sarvajanik and, on the other, its coemergence with the reconfigurations of space, time, and affect unleashed by the booming postliberalization automobile and construction industries? The newness of �new media� and of the publics they engender is still too often unwittingly framed within the much-critiqued modernist narratives of linear progress and evolutionary succession. In this paper, however, I attempt to address the layered temporalities and spatialities at work here that simultaneously remediate and initiate circuits with �older� forms of iconopraxis, sociality, territoriality, and distributions of the sensible. In doing so I propose a processual view of media/objects that disaggregates them into assemblages of multiple processes unfolding stochastically and at varying speeds, drawing their force from potentially vastly different yet intercalated �moments.�
