Jain, Kajri
Associate Professor
Graduate Department of Art
University of Toronto
Canada
Biography
My research on popular image-cultures in India focuses on the interface between religion, politics and vernacular business cultures. My first book, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art(Duke University Press, 2007), examined printed religious icons; my second book project is on the emergence of monumental statues in post-liberalization India, in tandem with economic reforms and Hindu nationalist and Dalit political assertions. This project extends my interests in the efficacies of circulation, the aesthetics of modern religion, and vernacular capitalism to their interface with material infrastructures (construction in concrete, the automotive industry), domestic tourism, landscape/“nature”, governmentality, and democracy, particularly the politics of caste. It has been supported by a SSHRC Standard Research Grant. While my teaching is often based on South Asian materials, my courses take a postcolonial and transcultural approach to interrogating the disciplinary assumptions of art history, cinema studies, and visual studies. These critical perspectives inform my writing on contemporary art in India and elsewhere. I have also been a participant in inter-Asian workshops at the University of Toronto, the University of Heidelberg, Yale University/University of Hong Kong, and the Academia Sinica.
Research Interest
Image-cultures in modern India; Postcolonial approaches to aesthetics and politics; Art historiography and temporality; Religion and media; New materialism; Conceptions and representations of "nature" in South Asia.
