| Summary/Abstract |
This essay suggests the expanded scholarly terrain created to analyse ‘the public’ that has been mapped between an initial special issue of the journal South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (published in 1991) and this current essay collection (of 2015). In the process, it suggests not only what new scholarly interests and skills, as well as new sites for analysis, have opened up, but also points to issues yet unaddressed, along with elements of visual culture that scholars interested in ‘the public’ could consider. For the realm of the visual remains, even after 25 years, largely unconnected to analyses of ‘the public’, despite its centrality to the ways in which public issues, enactments and interests are expressed and debated. To provide overarching ways to think about how the essays presented here treat ‘the public’, as well as to draw attention to issues still not addressed that offer future challenges, this essay suggests conceptualising the subject around four aspects that emerged when the authors met together: the public as enacted; the public as envisioned; public space, both rhetorical and actual; and concepts of the public expressed as belief, interpretation, understandings, values and ‘public opinion’—that is, as concepts understood to motivate and influence their audiences.
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