Global South Asia On Screen

With importance for geopolitical cultural economy, anthropology, and media studies, John Hutnyk brings South Asian circuits of scholarship to attention where, alongside critical Marxist and poststructuralist authors, a new take on film and television is on offer. The book presents Raj-era costume dramas as a commentary on contemporary anti-Muslim racism, a new political compact in film and television studies, and the President watching a snuff film from Pakistan. Hanif Kureishi's postcolonial 'fuck Sandwich' sits alongside Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, updated for the war on terror with low-brow, high-brow versions of Asia that carry us up the Himalayas with magic carpet TV nostalgia. Maoists rage below and books go up in flames while News network phone-ins end with executions on the Hanging Channel and arms trade and immigration paranoia thrives. Multiplying filmi versions of Mela are measured against a transnational realignment towards Global South Asia in a contested and testing political future. Each chapter offers a slice of historical study and assessment of media theory appropriate for viewers of Global South Asia seeking to understand why lurid exoticism and paralysing terror go hand-in-hand. The answers are in the images always open to interpretation, but Global South Asia on Screen examines the ways film and TV trade on stereotype and fear, nationalism and desire, politics and context, and with this the book calls for wider reading than media theory has hitherto entertained.

The emergence of new media today in South Asia has signalled an event, the meaning of which remains obscure but whose reality is rapidly evolving along gradients of intensity and experience. Contemporary media in and from South Asia have come to sense a new arrangement of value, sensation, and force - new forms of becoming that might be usefully termed as 'media ecologies'. This evolution from nation-based forms of communication (Doordarshan, All India Radio, the "national" feudal romance) to simultaneous global ones conform and mutate the structures of feeling of local, national, diasporic and transnational belonging. This collection of original essays is concerned with understanding how people are making meaning from the new media and how subaltern tinkering (pirating, peer to peer file sharing, hacking, noise jamming, indymedia, etc.) does things to and in the new media. This exciting works helps us to make sense of the creation of new publics, new affects and new experiences of pleasure and value in convergences of intermedia in a fast developing South Asia context. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Southern Screens: Cinema, culture and the global South adopts a transversal south-south approach to the study of screen culture across national and cultural territories. It examines the conditions by which screen culture participates in the generation, sharing, and circulation of new knowledge that is both southern and about the global South. The contributors, all of them residents of the world’s southernmost nations, examine new and traditional media that manifests an affinity with southern cultural imaginaries and territories identifiable through the sociological category of "Global South." Some of their chapters engage in analysis linked to specific national contexts, others follow comparative approaches to screen culture across national, regional, and socio-historical borders. Sketching a new tapestry of references to other areas of southern social science and cultural theory, Southern Screens traces a critical genealogy that here finds a productive place within an emerging, comparative discussion of the screen cultures of the Global South. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies.

From Bombay (Mumbai) and other production centres on the Indian subcontinent, Indian popular cinema has travelled globally for nearly a century, culminating in the Bollywood-inspired, Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. This volume brings together perspectives on Indian popular cinema, universally known as Bollywood now, from different disciplinary and geographical locations to look afresh at national cinemas. It shows how Bollywood cinema has always crossed borders and boundaries: from the British Malaya, Fiji, Guyana, Trinidad, Mauritius, and East and South Africa to the former USSR, West Asia, the UK, the USA, Canada, and Australia. While looking at the meanings of nation, diaspora, home, and identity in cinematic texts and contexts, the essays also examine how localities are produced in the new global process by broadly addressing nationalism, regionalism, and transnationalism, politics and aesthetics, as well as spectatorship and viewing contexts.

This first book in the new Foundations in Global Studies series offers a fresh, comprehensive, multidisciplinary introduction to South Asia. The variations in social, cultural, economic, and political life in this diverse and complex region are explored within the context of the globalising forces affecting all regions of the world. In a simple strategy that all books in the series employ, the volume begins with foundational material (including chapters on history, language, and, in the case of South Asia, religion), moves to a discussion of globalisation, and then focuses the investigation more specifically through the use of case studies. The cases expose the student to various disciplinary lenses that are important in understanding the region and are meant to bring the region to life through subjects of high interest and significance to today's readers. Resource boxes, an important feature of the book, are included to maintain currency and add utility. They offer links that point readers to a rich archive of additional material, connections to timely data, reports on recent events, official sites, local and country-based media, visual material, and so forth. A website developed by Syracuse University's South Asia Center will feature additional graphic, narrative, and case study material to complement the book.

This book explores the aesthetic forms of the political left across the borders of post-colonial, post-partition South Asia. Spanning India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the contributors study art, film, literature, poetry and cultural discourse to illuminate the ways in which political commitment has been given aesthetic form and artistic value by artists and by cultural and political activists in postcolonial South Asia. With a focused conceptualization this volume asks: Does the political left in South Asia have a recognizable aesthetic form? And if so, what political effects do left-wing artistic movements and aesthetic artefacts have in shaping movements against inequality and injustice? Reframing political aesthetics within a postcolonial and decolonised framework, the contributors detail the trajectories and transformations of left-wing cultural formations and affiliations and focus on connections and continuities across post-1947/8 India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

This volume contains seventeen path-breaking essays by Indian, European, Indo-Scottish, and Indo-American scholars. It seeks to affirm heterogeneity and difference, celebrating multi-dimensional modes of looking at South Asian diasporic cinema and theatre in the new millennium. The essays in the anthology engage in critical conversations around diverse themes-from 'home' and 'homeland' in Afghan Cinema, to the Partition of India. This co-mingling of multiple voices articulates the new, topical and sometimes radical dimensions of contemporary South Asian film and drama. In essence, the credo of this compendium is to breach extant disciplinary boundaries and establish a stimulating and thought-provoking rapport with its readers. With a polyvocality stemming from its panoply of eminent international contributors, this volume acts as a bridge, dissolving borders and addressing often-specious cultural pre-conceptions. It forges a cultural studies causeway across the largely reductionist duality of South Asian 'diasporic' and 'domiciled' visual arts. This anthology, arguably the first of its kind, will be useful to both research students and academics around the world. [Subject: South Asian Studies, Literature, Performing Arts, Theater Studies, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Literary Studies]