Anandam Kavoori

Mediated resistance: Tourism and the Host Community

Abstract This ethnographic study focuses on the mediation of tourism by the host community in the pilgrimage town of Pushkar, India. It provides a framework for understanding the impact of Western tourism in the context of a Hindu religious community. Locally, tourism is perceived as a threat to “tradition” and religion even while a large segment of the population is dependent on its economic benefits. This ambivalence is resolved through three types of rhetoric: exclusionary, political, and religious. This strategy of rhetorical resistance, termed here as “mediated resistance”, allows the host community to condemn tourism collectively while participating in it on an individual basis. The theoretical focus of the study draws from cultural anthropology, religion, and communication research.

Media imperialism revisited: some findings from the Asian case

The media imperialism thesis has long argued that the expansion of Western media production into developing countries has resulted in the domination of their national media environments and the consequent destruction of their indigenous media production. This article examines the empirical tenability of this claim with regard to Asia. Delineating the regions media developments, it identifies forces such as national gate-keeping policies, the dynamics of audience preference and local competition, all of which inhibit and restrict the proliferation of Western cultural production. On the basis of this empirical evidence, the article argues that the claims made by proponents of the media imperialism thesis seem overstated in the Asian context. In conclusion, the article suggests that although media imperialism is perceived as a very real danger by governments, there are in fact several other problematic trends such as the rampant growth of commercialization and the decline of public broadcasting, the dominance of entertainment programming and a lack of genuine diversity in program genres and formats that collectively represent a more significant threat to media systems in Asia.

Mapping a critical framework for the study of travel journalism

This article provides a programmatic framework for the investigation of travel journalism. We argue that travel journalism is an important site for studying the ideological dimensions of tourism, transcultural encounters and the ongoing dynamics of media globalization. Based on the literature on tourism in sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, we identify three distinct but interrelated theoretical perspectives for the analysis of travel journalism structured by issues of periodization, power and phenomenology.

The Cultural Turn in International Communication

This summative/programmatic essay outlines how the field of International Communication today is underpinned by a central concern with issues of “culture.” An epistemic model for how to understand this new use of culture is sketched, arguing that the term “culture” operationalizes issues of nationalism, modernism, capitalism, postmodernism and post colonialism. The relationship of this model for media forms such as television is then undertaken. Detailed End Notes engage with relevant literature from the field of International Communication.

Critical Media Pedagogy: Lessons from the Thinking Television Project

This article examines the results of a 4-year long student-based media education project entitled “Thinking Television.” This project focuses on interrogating the cultural terrain of contemporary television and developing an alternate vocabulary with attention paid to issues of multiculturalism and popular culture. Students in a media research class were simultaneously exposed to literature in critical/cultural studies and were asked to develop television show proposals. The findings from the “Thinking Television” project allow us to re-think issues of critical media literacy and television criticism. We raise questions about the limits of critical media literacy and those of identity formation in an information society. These two concerns are then tied into our central concern which is of the disjunction between production and theory and the creation of alternate pedagogies of media education.

Discursive texts, reflexive audiences: Global trends in television news texts and audience reception

This study examines the process of media globalization at the level of meaning generation (by television news texts) and interpretation (by audiences) based on the analysis of news‐texts and focus groups from four countries. It is suggested that the narrative of television news is discursive: it provides a specific vision of cultural “others”. At the audience level there is the emergence of a global culture of critical media consumption. This reflexive mode is born of a familiarity with the narrative conventions of the genre and the institutional imperatives of the media industries.

Mapping India's television landscape: constitutive dimensions and emerging issues

Over the last few decades, the Indian television sector has experienced a profound transformation with regard to policies, players, production and practices. Exploring this altered landscape, this essay argues that the present television landscape in India represents a heterogeneous, ‘rhizomatic’ formation characterized by complex constitutive dimensions that simultaneously reflect both the forces of media globalization and local, contextually rooted elements and realities. These dimensions include the primacy of the market and the growing alliances between global and local media companies (which mimic global trends) on the one hand, and the dominance of limited formats, the film industrys invasion of televisual space, the meteoric rise of the regional in television and the paradoxical condition of the public broadcaster which combines massive reach with a viewership confined increasingly to poorer, rural audiences (which variously represent the specificities of the Indian situation) on the other.

Media Literacy, "Thinking Television," and African American Communication

This essay is a critical, reflexive engagement with the practice, politics and pedagogy of a student centered media literacy project titled `thinking television.` Written as a theoretical diagnostic, the essay examines the projects value-providing a new vocabulary for democratic communication-and drawbacks, the restrictive nature of narrative possibilities around race in the student projects.

Bollyculture: Ethnography of identity, media and performance

This article offers the concept of ‘Bollyculture’ as a paradigmatic frame for understanding the media/dance cultures and life-space of young South-Asian Americans. Drawing on an extended ethnographic study of India Nite1 (a performance of Bollywood inspired dances), the essay argues that concepts like Bollyculture capture the hybrid and contested nature of diasporic subcultures, while offering concrete ways of observing the longitudinal and discursive impact of Bollywood on issues of identity, gender and culture.

Colonial Discourse and the Writings of Katherine Mayo

Abstract This article examines the writings of Katherine Mayo (1867–1940), an influential writer and journalist on international issues in the 1920s and ′30s, and locates them within the genre of “colonial discourse.” The authors begin with a chronological overview of her writing on Dutch Guiana, the United States and Europe and then scrutinize in greater detail her work on the Philippines and India. It is suggested that using culturally and racially essentialist tropes, Mayo painted a culturally and politically regressive picture of colonial “others” while simultaneously reifying the Anglo-Saxon “self.” In doing so, she functioned not as the objective reporter she claimed to be but as an active supporter of continued United States and British colonial rule in different parts of the world and an opponent of the immigration of Asians, namely Indians and Filipinos, to the United States.