Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No.3/Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 2018/2019 | Page 14

INTRODUCTION: UNDERSTANDING MULTIMODALITIES
IN ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
technologies that made the West “modern” and prosperous. These technical solutions,
unsurprisingly, did not work. They were divorced from history and cultural context.
A literary or fictional narrative is different. It speaks to both the limits and impossibilities
of situating development interventions, and foremost provides a place to understand
how people themselves negotiate their cultural identities, values, and lives. In the recently
released Bollywood film “Gully Boy” (lit: Street Boy) Director Zoya Akhtar presents
both the limits and agency of youth in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum through hip-hop. The
syncretic result challenges structural practices at several levels including religion, family,
class, and gender.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC5tAqtXuTg
Video 4. Gully Boy (2019) trailer with English translations
of “Asli (real) Hip Hop” song.
Remixing a narrative from the ground-up is different from a gaze far away. The Western
fictional genre is replete with narratives where the protagonist finds the spiritual plenitude
of one’s inner self in the hustle and bustle of the developing world. Alternatively,
s/he is either running away from uncivilized people or appearing as their savior. The
Remix technique makes the author aware of these biases while also forcing them to piece
together a narrative from “found” texts and materials. In the examples posted above, we
are left with intertextual narratives about gender from J.P. Singh’s ex-students Hillá Meller
and Kelsey Burns, or the depictions of life in favelas from Patrick Scullin.
A digital remix is a translation and one that demands a close adherence to the found texts,
and a carefulness in re-presenting them. The students often spoke to several themes that
stood out for them in the remix project: their own reflexivity; humanization of the subjects
they presented; the possibilities of locating cultural voices and agency, and the structural
limitations of doing so; and cultural hybridity in any narrative. This is very different
from the “othering” in most top-down narrative that stereotypes people with distinct
traits, including the one that imagined industrialization for a “backward” Third World.
J.P. Singh’s student Patrick Scullin was critiqued by his classmates for presenting a narrative
of violence about Brazil, which a few found to be stereotypical, even though he was
merely remixing existing materials. He provides the following reflexivity for his narrative
in his vimeo link:
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