Papers by William Mazzarella
Oxford Handbook of Cosmopolitanism, 2025
This chapter explores the curious fate of the “creative revolution” generation of Indian advertis... more This chapter explores the curious fate of the “creative revolution” generation of Indian advertising people. Men and women who came of professional age in the 1960s, they were at once romanticized and reviled by the “globalizing” generation that followed in the 1980s and 1990s. Refusing both nostalgic
recuperation and easy dismissal, the author examines the contrasting narratives of these two generations in Indian advertising as a tale of clashing cosmopolitanisms. The author suggests that the 1960s generation should not be understood as an early but incomplete iteration of later consumerist
liberalization so much as a distinct expression of cosmopolitan aspiration at a time when consumer citizenship was by no means a hegemonic ideological formation in India. By the same token, the author argues that the ostensibly populist, demotic approach of the globalizing generation should not too hastily be equated with democratization.
Dialectical Anthropology , 2024
This piece was written as a speculative afterword to a special issue of Dialectical Anthropology,... more This piece was written as a speculative afterword to a special issue of Dialectical Anthropology, edited by Max Kramer and Jürgen Schaflechner, on the Limits of Visibility for South Asian Religious Minorities
New Lines Magazine, 2023
There is something deeply disturbing about the ongoing rehabilitation of the Reagan-Thatcher year... more There is something deeply disturbing about the ongoing rehabilitation of the Reagan-Thatcher years. The right-wing radicals of the 1980s now smile down on us, implausibly, as kindly beacons of moderation and benevolent parental authority. What gives? In part, it’s a sliding scale: As brutal and violent as those regimes were, it only takes some airbrushing — and not a little wishful thinking — to make them look positively cozy next to the terrors of today. We all know the obscene alchemy of which nostalgia is capable. But the difference between Maggie and Ronnie and the parents that Philip Larkin so scabrously eulogized in “This Be the Verse” is that … well, these guys did mean to fuck us up. “Us” being the 99%, as we later came to be known.
Current Anthropology, 2026
I explore the profound anxiety that democratic theory has about political incarnation in a time o... more I explore the profound anxiety that democratic theory has about political incarnation in a time of global populism. Putting pressure on liberal political norms, populist politics raises, once again, the “impossible” question of the incarnation of democratic sovereignty. Why is this question so very anxious? Why does it bring us back, again and again, to the supposedly regressive motifs of political theology and authoritarian charisma? I consider some alternatives in dialogue with a text by “L,” a participant in the Iranian “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising of 2022.
In Daniel White, Emma Cook, and Andrea De Antoni, eds, 'Affect as Cultural Critique' (2026), 2026
Kathleen Stewart turned me. It was the late nineties in Cambridge, Massachusetts; we were sitting... more Kathleen Stewart turned me. It was the late nineties in Cambridge, Massachusetts; we were sitting in a café. I was living there at the time, teaching, recently returned from the field, writing up my dissertation. Katie was a regular visitor, kind enough to sit down with me several times to hear me talk through my ideas. The way I remember it, not without embarrassment, is that I talked, and Katie listened. But it was the way she listened: actively. I don't remember her specifically agreeing or disagreeing with anything I said. It was more like she punctuated whatever I was saying, sometimes by not saying anything when I expected her to speak. I came away believing that, however idiosyncratic it might seem, the place I was finding my way into was a place worth being in. Katie shared a couple of readings with me. One was Brian Massumi's now canonical "The Autonomy of Affect." The other seems, looking back, a little more surprising: the last chapter of Slavoj Žižek's Tarrying with the Negative, "Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!," a typically spirited discussion of the perverse enjoyments animating genocide. I understand now that the Massumi and the Žižek would form two parts of a trinity together with a book I had stumbled upon, quite accidentally, a few months earlier, Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the Aesthetic.
This article starts from a startling order promulgated by the Supreme Court of India in late 2016... more This article starts from a startling order promulgated by the Supreme Court of India in late 2016. The order demanded not only that the national anthem be played before every film screening, but also made it mandatory for all members of the audience to stand up and show respect. The event was widely interpreted as yet another chapter in the government’s ongoing authoritarian clampdown against any form of dissent. I argue that while these are real and important concerns, the longer genealogy of the Supreme Court order as well as the public reactions that it triggered open up deeper and broader questions too. At one level, these are questions about the incitement and management of patriotic sentiment in India, especially vis-à-vis popular media in a time of majoritarian nationalism. At another level, they are questions of comparative theoretical interest, pointing to the paradox of what I call ‘prior commitment’: the volatile affective grounds that inform – and threaten – the ways in which ritual attempts to animate and to stabilize social order.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2022
Summer 2021 draft Note to the reader. Thanks for engaging with this text. This is the most recent... more Summer 2021 draft Note to the reader. Thanks for engaging with this text. This is the most recent draft of a piece that, in various iterations, has existed since early 2020. Originally, I wanted to do a book-length project around patiency, an idea that I first began to develop at the end of my piece on Trumpian jouissance, 'Brand(ish)ing the Name, or, Why is Trump So Enjoyable?' The projected patiency book would have included chapters on at least three major existing modalities of patiency: mysticism, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis (especially the dynamics of transference). At some point, I decided that I wanted to work on these things separately, over time, and instead to complete a more compact preliminary/promissory statement on patiency in the form of a free-standing piece. That is what you are looking at now. Even in this form, I've struggled to find the right size/scope. I did a couple of talks on the material in the fall of 2020. A longer version of the text was rejected by a major journal some months ago. Quite rightly: it was a mess in ways that I could only see after some time had passed. I spent some time cutting it down and rearranging/rewriting it this summer. I think it's a lot better now, but it's still a draft awaiting completion. There are notes to myself. There isn't really a proper ending. I'd be very grateful for any insights or suggestions you might have about how to land this thing. Fallowships Not so long ago, someone that I know as a tireless engine of Facebook wit posted a status update that said that if he were suddenly to come into a large amount of money, the first thing he would do would be to establish a fallowship for artists and academics. A fallowship? Yes, a fallowship: a grant that would fund a year or so of doing nothing in particular. I was at that time just coming up to a year of sabbatical after three years of being department chair and responded that this sounded pretty much like what I had in mind for the coming year. Whereas every previous bit of time off that I had enjoyed during my academic career had been earmarked for working on something or other-a book, a series of articles, a new bit of fieldwork, whatever-this time it seemed important to get out from underneath the punishing superego that I'd internalized somewhere along the tenure track. The superego that,
Note to reader. This piece was written as a talk that I gave at Columbia University in the spring... more Note to reader. This piece was written as a talk that I gave at Columbia University in the spring of 2019 (that's why it contains prompts for PowerPoint images). I reworked it slightly in order to give it another outing in the spring of 2020, but the global pandemic intervened. Given that I now have some extra time, as it were, to develop the ideas sketched here, I'm opening it up to your reading and commentary. Many thanks, WmM. I hope you'll indulge me. I have the feeling that in what follows I will, more than once, be stating the obvious. But I can't shake the feeling that there's something about the present moment that cries out for this kind of movement back over very familiar ground. A bit like when we retrace our steps, looking for something that we've lost. As if precisely because everything looks so familiar, it's easy to miss something that should be obvious but isn't. Something that's hiding in plain sight. You'll notice as I go along that I won't really be defining my key terms: "populism" and "political theology." I've made this choice quite intentionally, on the principle that definition is too often a way of stopping thought rather than starting it. A way of convincing ourselves that stable points exist in a world of movement and that processes can be reduced to things. My approach will instead be to speak, as it were, in the neighbourhood of these terms, to see what they might yield when they don't know we're looking at them. That said, I do want to say something about why I chose to include the term "political theology" in the title of this talk.
Problemi International , 2022
If you know Sigmund Freud's book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), you will pr... more If you know Sigmund Freud's book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), you will probably remember his story about the modern authoritarian leader as a return of the primal father. This is the primal father who was overthrown and killed by his sons, a killing that sets the stage for the invention of law. The killing also establishes the perpetual guilt that from then on keeps the survivors tied to that law-tied more tightly, more insidiously, than they ever were to the living father. The primal father, says Freud, was the original 'superman.' His authority was total, and would brook no autonomy among his sons. He was everything; his people were nothing. What survives of him after the killing is a potent but disavowed charisma of violence that continues to cling to the law. All this is well known, and was already well known to readers of Freud when Group Psychology was published, since that part of the story was really just a rehash from Freud's earlier work Totem and Taboo (1913). What is less well remembered is that Freud theorized authoritarian leaders not only as regressive repetitions of the one primal father, but also as revenants of "the first epic poet" (1959 [1921], p. 87)-which is to say the later man who, first among equals, decided to set himself up as the people's leader. By calling him the first epic poet, Freud is suggesting that the leader doesn't just establish patriarchal dominion; he creates a world. More precisely, the leader performs the fetish trick: he makes us
Annual Review of Anthropology, 2019
This article suggests that although there is not much of an explicitly defined anthropology of po... more This article suggests that although there is not much of an explicitly defined anthropology of populism, anthropologists have nevertheless been working for many years on the things we talk about when we talk about populism. Anthropologists should thus be exceptionally well situated to divert the debate on populism in creative ways. In particular, I argue that the term populism registers an intensified insistence of collective forces that are no longer adequately organized by formerly hegemonic social forms: a mattering-forth of the collective flesh. The article also shows why populism is such an awkward topic for anthropologists. In part, this discomfort has to do with a tension between anthropologists' effectively populist commitments to the common sense of common people at a time when that common sense can often look ugly. In part, it has to do with how the populist challenge to liberalism both aligns populist politics with anthropological critiques of liberal norms and puts pressure on anthropology's continued dependence on liberal categories for its own relevance to broader public debates. 45 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2019.48:45-60. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by University of Chicago Libraries on 11/16/19. For personal use only.
That's just the thing, gentlemen, that there may well exist something that is dearer for almost e... more That's just the thing, gentlemen, that there may well exist something that is dearer for almost every man than his very best profit, or (so as not to violate logic) that there is this one most profitable profit (precisely the omitted one, the one we were just talking about), which is chiefer and more profitable than all other profits, and for which a man is ready, if need be, to go against all laws, that is, against reason, honor, peace, prosperityin short, against all these beautiful and useful things-only so as to attain this primary, most profitable profit which is dearer to him than anything else.
Roundtable on The Mana of Mass Society featuring Jean Comaroff, Leela Gandhi, Michael Taussig, Bh... more Roundtable on The Mana of Mass Society featuring Jean Comaroff, Leela Gandhi, Michael Taussig, Bhrigupati Singh, Aarti Sethi and William Mazzarella
Interview with Elayne Oliphant
The May 2017 issue of Cultural Anthropology included a Retrospectives collection on “Affect,” edi... more The May 2017 issue of Cultural Anthropology included a Retrospectives collection on “Affect,” edited by Daniel White. This collection included the article “Sense out of Sense: Notes on the Affect/Ethics Impasse,” by William Mazzarella, who is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of an interview that contributing editors Andrés Romero and Toby Austin Locke conducted with Mazzarella about his article’s arguments and their relationship to his broader research agenda.
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Papers by William Mazzarella
recuperation and easy dismissal, the author examines the contrasting narratives of these two generations in Indian advertising as a tale of clashing cosmopolitanisms. The author suggests that the 1960s generation should not be understood as an early but incomplete iteration of later consumerist
liberalization so much as a distinct expression of cosmopolitan aspiration at a time when consumer citizenship was by no means a hegemonic ideological formation in India. By the same token, the author argues that the ostensibly populist, demotic approach of the globalizing generation should not too hastily be equated with democratization.