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Werner Sollors is one of the first scholars of American literature to focus on African American literature before it was thought to constitute a canon in the academy. Unlike many other scholars who shared his focus, he completed his education in postwar Germany. The title of his doctoral dissertation on LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), completed at the Free University of Berlin in 1975, has a still-contemporary ring: "The Quest for a 'Populist Modernism.'" He taught at Columbia University, received a Guggenheim fellowship, and spent the bulk of his career in the United States. In this interview he discusses his intellectual formation and offers reflections on the development of his field, the evolving institutional culture of the university, and 1970s-era multiculturalism.

The public sphere of debate and discussion predicated on transparency has given way to a public sphere of image and spectacle.

The conclusion of the Cold War era led to triumphal predictions about the end of history. In fact, the moment marked an end to mass utopias, that is, to the widespread belief in collective emancipation fostered by technologies of the modern state. To reflect on utopia as both artifact and genre is one way to understand how it has changed, and for what reasons. Today the utopian projects of the past are widely questioned; meanwhile social and political debates are crisis-driven rather than shaped by longer-term visions. But utopias continue to emerge—witness the many expressions of hope and struggle, individual and collective, often lacking what movements are reckoned by: leaders, blueprints, manifestos, and cadre. Their performative and material practices of communication, and modes of mediation more broadly, are increasingly prominent, and increasingly difficult to separate from the aspirations expressed. As grand utopian narratives fragment, Rajagopal asks, can attention to their forms of mediation clarify the different kinds of futures being imagined today? Given the idealism inherent in most utopian endeavors, can questions about media and mediation help improve understandings of earlier visions of the future and so cast light on the way utopias may be redrawn for present purposes? Media may not determine our situation, contra Friedrich Kittler, but they may help illuminate it.

AbstractRecent accounts of the National Emergency of 1975–1977 concur that the deviations it represented, while genuine, did not represent any fundamental change on the part of the Indian state, and that the period offers little distinct insight on the post-independence period as a whole. This paper seeks to argue, to the contrary, that the Emergency was a watershed in post-independence history. With its ban on dissent and suspension of constitutional rights, the Emergency sought to suppress all political disturbances to governance. By doing so, it forefronted the problems of postcolonial politics in at least three respects. First, the Emergency demonstrated that coercion was inextricably combined with consent in state-led development. Second, this led to a heavy reliance on practices of communication to redefine coercion and to stage popular consent. Third, in the process, the boundaries of the political were reinforced, emphasizing the friend/enemy difference fundamental to politics. Governance in the aftermath of the Emergency placed an overt reliance on consent over coercion, but in ways that are themselves significant. Categories of culture and community, and related forms of social distinction, gained in importance over earlier developmental distinctions premised on an authoritarian relationship between state and the people. The change meant a shift away from the Nehruvian focus on the economy as the crucial arena of nation-building, involving labour as the key modality of citizenship. Instead, culture and community became the categories that gained political salience in the period of economic liberalization. The mass media were central to this redefinition of the political, multiplying in size and reach, and acquiring market-sensitive forms of address couched in the rhetoric of individual choice. These events, I suggest, are critical to understanding the formation of the new middle class in India, as a category that increasingly defines itself through cultural and consumerist forms of identity, and is less identified with the state.