2025 Essays
Visualizing the Urban Crowd: Political Spectatorship in the Age of Cinema
Drawing on the Nursey album of Civil Disobedience–era mobilizations in 1930s Bombay city, this essay introduces spectatorship as a key, under-theorized mode of political presence. By placing still photographs of urban crowds in dialogue with contemporaneous histories of cinemagoing, the essay argues that cinema functioned as a mass perceptual apparatus that trained urban populations in new ways of seeing. It traces the spatial and sensorial continuities between cinema halls and city streets, reframing visual, collective spectatorship as a form of political action.
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Also Published In
- Title
- Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay 1930-1931
- Publisher
- Mapin Publishing
- URL
- https://www.mapinpub.com/products/photographing-civil-disobedience?variant=47321199018198
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
- Published Here
- May 5, 2026
