Improvised Futures

In an atmosphere of growing authoritarianism, how can we draw attention to performance as a transaction of sensorial agency – the right to be seen, heard, recognized – the right to be palpable? Improvised Futures attempts to frame performance as doing, as fraught negotiations of agency and identity. As it considers the performative effect of a range of ideas, actions and situations that have shaped society and defined cultural expression since the 1990s, it frames the body as a site of radical imagination. The volume comprises texts and artworks by artists, academics and activists, placing these works in conversation with each other in order to elicit new meanings and connections.

India Since the 90s (general editor: Ashish Rajadhyaksha) is a series of six titles exploring recent history from the standpoint of the present moment. As we face new and unprecedented phenomena in the twenty-first century, along with the new, there is also a ghostly re-evocation of things we have seen and done that relentlessly suggest that we may have been here before. Familiar forms and arguments become curiously prescient revealing new relevance. This series includes texts and images from diverse academic disciplines, curated and assembled by practitioners looking back to reconsider our past.