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This dissertation develops a history of experimental art emerging in India in the final decades of the twentieth century. It addresses the turn to video, performance and mixed-media installation – conceptually driven, circulation friendly, critical artistic modes – by artists who share a generational consciousness, shaped in part by their class position and metropolitan location. My arguments are constructed through a historical and formal analysis of significant transformations in the works of two Bombay-based artists, Nalini Malani (b. 1946) and Rummana Hussain (1952- 1999), between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s. This post-Emergency period is marked by the spectacle, symbolism and horror of the Babri Masjid demolition (December 1992) and numerous instances of targeted violence against minority communities (1984, 1992-93, 2002). The coinciding legislative passage of economic liberalization (1991) also had far-reaching implications, including a decline in state dominance over culture and artistic patronage. I contend that these dramatic shifts in the market, media and art institutional landscape catalyzed the development of postmodernist art practices. As artists like Malani and Hussain confronted the limitations and failings of their postcolonial, cosmopolitan imaginaries, their artistic responses were driven by the affective and reflexive tendencies of despair and melancholia, enlivening radical praxis in the face of derailments and lost causes. My work problematizes the notion of rupture that has often been deployed in discussions of these artist’s trajectories, referring to the transition from conventional formats of oil painting and sculpture towards expanded media experiments⁠. This study examines both specific shifts and underlying continuities in the formal and conceptual registers of the practices in question, while situating theoretical debates around postmodernism, feminism, periodization and artistic generation in the context of India.

This study examines the interaction of the Second World War with the selfhood of Kenneth Preston, a Keighley schoolmaster, using primarily the exceptionally rich content of Preston’s Diary, maintained 1941-1945. In tracing Preston’s home front experience, attention is given to the ways in which the war interacted with the individual’s own self and social conceptions, as well as ways in which subjective experiences and perceptions translated into objective realities, such as in Preston’s participation in the war effort. Illuminating the personal dimensions of the war experience enabled a broad range of meanings and “webs of significance” to emerge, allowing for examination of the interplay between the conflict and understandings of class, community, gender, citizenship, social mores, and aspects of social change during the conflict. Preston’s understandings of himself and of society are intriguing contributions to the discussion surrounding active wartime citizenship, and further historical awareness of the meanings and understandings held within the British population during the era of the Second World War. In particular, the prestige the war offered to modernistic notions of science and technical intelligence is shown to have held a central place in the war experience of this particular individual and in his perception of the rise of the welfare state. With its focus on selfhood, the study is distinguished from arguments grounded in analysis of cultural products from the era; it also contributes to understandings of the causes and implications of social change, as well as the war’s personal impact on the male civilian.

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Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal. / Pour respecter les droits d'auteur, la version électronique de cette thèse ou ce mémoire a été dépouillée, le cas échéant, de ses documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale de la thèse ou du mémoire a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Humans thrive on placing everyday perceptions into discrete categories. These categories, including genres in popular music, help us understand the world around us and process new information in a relatively efficient way. But music theorists often take genre for granted, by which I mean most scholars rarely unpack how social and musical categories work together to codify and reinforce often racial and gendered lines placed between categories of people and music. In Reconceiving Genre, I address some the methodological issues around genre in popular music. This dissertation argues for a reframing of genre and what these labels can convey. Through different generic case studies in each chapter, I develop a framework for analyzing genre from multiple musical and cultural traditions. I critically examine social and commercial constructions of popularity and authenticity in relation to artist’s presentations of gender, race, class, and sexuality— positionalities that are often taken for granted in popular music analysis. This dissertation’s most distinctive contribution to both music theory and popular music studies is that it dismantles the idea that genre is only a marketing label that conveys details about an artist’s musical style, and challenges assumptions that genre is “dead” or beyond repair to be a meaningful tool. These assumptions dull the transgressive force of how we can use genre to understand issues of authenticity, popularity, and society more broadly. In short, my project demonstrates that genre categories can reveal as much about an artist’s identity as they can about a piece’s musical features. Thus, theories of genre need to account for identities like race, gender, and sexuality of artists, listeners, and even analysts in order to be fully inclusive, meaningful, and accessible.