Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts

These are short excerpts from reviews of Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts. Wherever possible external links have been provided to the full texts.

"A running thread – meditations on the idea of “illegality” – just about manages to hold together this rich, exuberant and indisciplined collection. And indisciplined it certainly is, in terms of every possible meaning associated with the word “discipline” – control, boundaries, compliance. Indisciplined in the form of the collection: contributions ranging from theoretical papers that meet the demands of academic protocol (footnotes and all), to prose writings that can only be described as poetic, to essays of visual images, to textured field-note diaries and accounts based on these. Indisciplined too, in terms of the content: everything adding up to a relentless questioning of notions of borders, ownership, legibility and propriety."

The idea of 'Illegality': Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts
Nivedita Menon, The Economic and Political Weekly, November 26th, 2005.

"The Reader brings together an assortment of voices to consider the fraught relationship between ‘Bare Acts’ – the textual essence of legal codes, or the very letter of the law – and ‘bare acts’ – the range of acts of interpretation, negotiation, disputation and witnessing that reinforce or subvert the law. It is an ambitious attempt to map the relationship between words that seek to exert normative force (whether in the guise of formal legal codes or otherwise) and the world. In a collage-like rendition, it offers incisive accounts of this ceaseless, mutually constitutive dynamic in a staggering variety of contexts – urban studies, media, technology, environment, gender, migration, social movement politics, etc.

Legitimate Transgressions: Bare Acts between Words and Worlds
Rahul Rao, The Oxonian Review of Books, hilary 2005. volume 4. issue 3

"As all Sarai Readers, this one too, compulsively locates itself within the public domain, thinking at length of the everyday lives in the city, the technologies that shape our forms of existences and the representations of our times...From Begum Samru and cinema viewing in Delhi to driving lessons, and homosexual bodies and popular literature of law, the Reader winds around various ideas, experiences and forms of existence within, and in negotiation with the city, its social and cultural spaces. ...Such projects are crucial to establish as well as understand how cities and societies are more about tactics, negotiations and such fluidities, rather than the formality of laws and prescriptions."

Review of Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts
Kaiwan Mehta, Architecture

"Following the Sarai tradition of being what the editors call `a strange attractor' of diverse views and voices, a collision-point for `unlikely encounters', Sarai Reader 05 is shaped around the theme of the `Bare Act' — the letter of the law stripped of annotative, interpretative gloss. This notion gets examined and re-examined over 13 sections. Covering a vast and vastly over-exposed terrain (ranging from piracy and encroachment to censorship and media-spectacle) the best essays are the ones that offer the unknown fact, the unseen perspective, and the unorthodox opinion. ...In much the same way as interpretations, negotiations and disputations (some of the section heads in the book) erode and elude the textual foundation of the `Bare Act' of the law, the reader's relationship to the individual texts and subtexts, picture-essays and cyber-logs, statistical-chart and comic-strip, erodes and eludes the heavy, bound-between-covers materiality of the book you finally put down."

Point, counterpoint
Sampurna Chatterjee, The Hindu, Tuesday, December 13, 2005.

"Over the last few years, the annual Sarai Readers have come to be associated with a certain zara hatke quality of pioneering insight and design hitherto rarely found in Indian publications, and this new Reader certainly lives up to that promise again. This is a book of incredible scope and variety, with about 60 different essays which range widely across both themes and genres, making it quite a remarkable and unique collection...This is a remarkable volume and is highly recommended."

Review of Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts
Anuj Bhuwania, Biblio: A Review of Books, Vol X. Nos 9&10, September-October 2005.

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