The authoritarian narratives and images swamping India's screens since the 1990s have been accompanied by powerful refutations and refusals from the nation's independent multimedia artists and documentary filmmakers. This book establishes Jain as an indispensable curator of their political aesthetics of hope, protest and resistance. A vital contribution.

Priya Jaikumar, Professor of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

This monograph rests on a pair of analytical moves, equally bold and creative. First, Anuja Jain isolates dissonance as a key affect induced by the Indian polity's rapid transformations at the end of the twentieth century, developing it into a generative concept to study societies in radical flux. Second, drawing on India's independent documentary and video installation art practices (the book's primary focus) that emerged concurrently and in conversation with these sweeping transformations, Jain tracks how certain autonomous mediamakers parlayed dissonance into dissensus, parsing and challenging official narratives as well as majoritarian dispositions. The outcome is a vital archive that offers a riveting critical-cognitive map of that tumultuous conjuncture, remaining available as an inspiring repertoire for ongoing and future cultural-political struggles.

Bhaskar Sarkar, Professor, Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara