Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of plates -- Notes on contributors -- Introduction -- PART I Archive and imagination -- 1 The cinematic soteriology of Bollywood -- 2 Fetish power unbound: a small history of 'woman' in Chinese cinema -- 3 Civil contract of photography in India -- PART II Genealogy -- 4 Tracking utopias: technology, labour and secularism in Bombay cinema (1930s-1940s) -- 5 National becoming, regional variation and everyday moments: the Film Enquiry Committee, Uttar Pradesh and the student cinema-goer -- 6 Museum as metaphor: the politics of an imagined Ahmedabad -- PART III Nostalgia -- 7 The labour of self-making: youth service workers and postsocialist urban development in Kolkata -- 8 Nostalgia and the mediatic imagination in Tito's Yugoslavia -- 9 Past futures of old media: Gulammohammed Sheikh's Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home -- 10 Sonic ruptures: music, mobility and the media -- PART IV Newness -- 11 Media and imagination: Ramananda Chatterjee and his journals in three languages -- 12 Radical intervention in dystopian media ecologies -- 13 Posthuman amusements: gaming and virtuality -- PART V Word and the world -- 14 Populist publics: print capitalism and crowd violence beyond liberal frameworks -- PART VI Political theology -- 15 On innocence: blasphemy, pan-Islam and the uneven mediation of utopia