Browsing by Author "Mathew, Paul"

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Co-Option of Graffiti and the Persona of the Artist in the Neoliberal Age
(Wiley, 2019-10) Mathew, Paul
This history of modern graffiti from 1970, specifically in the United States and Britain, is a story of the co-option of graffiti into the sanitized, deradicalized form of street art. From its oppositional politics in the 1940s–60s period, graffiti undergoes significant transformations in the forty years after 1970. This transformation is catalyzed by neoliberalism, which leads to significant changes in the structuring of the city, the culture industry, and the functioning of the artist within them. Within popular culture, this process is defined as a dialectic of containment/resistance. Within this dialectic, graffiti is first transformed into a product for upper-class consumption. In later stages, this form of graffiti is further transformed into a middle-class art form—street art. Graffiti is reconfigured and reified through various strategies of the neoliberal city to be imbued with ritual functions and thus aura. In this way, street art commodifies the art and aura of graffiti, as well as the persona of the artist, in a process of co-option that employs various strategies in each decade.
Crisis of capitalist patriarchy: renegotiating masculinity and the heteronormative family in Kumbalangi Nights
(Taylor & Francis, 2022-01) Mathew, Paul
The Malayalam language film Kumbalangi Nights was released in 2019 and narrated the story of working-class people negotiating structures of capitalist patriarchy, encountered at moments of its crisis, which are also moments that indicate possibilities for social transformation. The trajectory of its narrative, the characters, and the tropes addressed in the film offer a new synthesis—both, of hegemonic masculinity and the kinship structure of the heteronormative family. Here, working-class lives are foregrounded in the contemporary crisis of patriarchy, accelerated by the crisis of social reproduction under neoliberal capitalism. Central to this crisis of masculinity and the bourgeois family form depicted in the film is the “crisis of care” that has been explained in recent scholarship on social reproduction. Nancy Fraser uses the expression to analyse the contradictory capitalist tendency to strain the conditions of social reproduction necessary for its own reproduction and stability. Through an analysis of the film, and the social realities of contemporary Kerala, this paper identifies the contours of this new synthesis. The film imagines a new mode of existence for subordinate masculinities, and challenges some of the ideologies of capitalist patriarchy, while continuing to valorise romantic love and its relationship to work.
The Image-Regime of Cinema in Postmodern Malayalam Literary Fiction
(Taylor & Francis, 2019-05) Mathew, Paul
Scholars have hitherto examined the twentieth century as a period strongly influenced by the cultural and aesthetic impact of cinema. This cultural influence has spread across the globe, through colonial empires and then through globalization. In the south Indian state of Kerala, the influence of this cinematic image-regime is evident in the postmodern fiction that achieves a niche readership in the late 1990s. Postmodern culture in Kerala receives some popular interest in the 1990s, through the pervasiveness of technological culture and ubiquitous access to television and cinema. Through a theoretical and textual engagement with the fiction of Maythil Radhakrishnan, this paper seeks to show that in Kerala, this new mode of writing is made possible and intelligible under the image-regime of cinema. Maythil’s oeuvre expresses its postmodern aesthetics through a new process of articulating thought, space, time and affect1 – a new kind of articulation made possible in the age of cinema.