Aswin Punathambekar

Bollywood in the Indian-American diaspora Mediating a transitive logic of cultural citizenship

This article brings together ethnographic detail and a thematic reading of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (K3G) to examine the mediation of consensus regarding ‘Indianness’ in the diaspora. I argue that K3G’s emotional resonance with viewers in the diaspora is attributable in part to the departure that its narrative marks from Hindi cinema’s earlier efforts to recognize and represent expatriate Indians. In positioning and drawing the diaspora into the fold of a ‘great Indian family’, K3G articulates everyday struggles over being Indian in the US to a larger project of cultural citizenship that has emerged in relation to India’s tentative entry into a transnational economy and the centrality of the NRI (non-resident Indian) figure to India’s navigation of this space. I argue that this process of mediation follows a transitive logic involving K3G’s representational strategies, first generation Indian immigrants’ emotional investment in the idea of India and the Indian nation state’s attempts to forge symbolic and material ties with the expatriate community.

Reality TV and Participatory Culture in India

This article focuses on events surrounding the third season of Indian Idol in order to assess the changing relationship between television, everyday life, and public political discourse in contemporary India. In the summer of 2007, media coverage of Indian Idol focused on how people in Northeast India cast aside decades-old separatist identities to mobilize support for Amit Paul and Prashant Tamang, the two finalists from the region. Situating this media phenomenon in relation to the changing landscape of Indian television and the socio-historical context of ethno-national politics in Northeast India, I explore how reality television, combined with mobile media technologies and practices, has enabled new modes of cultural and political expression. Positing the notion of “mobile publics,” I argue that participatory cultures surrounding television create possibilities for the renewal of everyday forms of interaction in public settings that may have been forgotten, subdued, or made impossible under certain political circumstances.

Back to the future: media and communication studies in the 21st century

It is ten years to the month since the last themed issue of this journal was published on the work of social memory (MCS, 2003, 25:1). We now resume the regular publication of themed issues with a special ‘bumper’ number that looks at the state of the field of media and communication studies at the start of this century. It seemed appropriate to do this by looking backwards and forwards: back to where we began, forwards to what lies ahead. Themed issues were a defining feature of MCS in its first 20 years – partly of necessity. We reluctantly abandoned them when the rate of acceptance for non-commissioned articles submitted to the journal had grown so much that they squeezed themed numbers out in order to ensure their publication within reasonable time from acceptance. But to begin with there was no flow of copy from our readership (it did not exist at first; it had to be built, incrementally, through the years) and it fell to the editorial board to generate the journal’s content. We did so, for the first 20 years, often through commissioned articles on themed issues, the identification of which was a key editorial task in the journal’s formative years. It was a way of keeping up with current work in the study of media and of trying to point the way forward by identifying emergent topics of enquiry and research. To re-launch themed numbers the present editorial board has looked back and tried to identify some topics that have been central to the journal’s self-definition and sustained through the years as recurring concerns. After lively discussion we came up with three: identities, globalization and the public sphere. All have been long-running interests for the journal and our readership. We invited guest editors to develop these themes for us and all our contributors were asked to write shorter, more reflective articles, in conversation with each other, rather than the standard length, stand-alone academic articles that we routinely publish. We wanted to take a moment’s pause to reflect on the ongoing life of the journal and take stock of where have we come from, where are we now and where are going. So where are we now – the journal, the field and its academic community? To answer this we must look back to get some measure of the distance travelled and the

Debating Big Data

‘Big Data’ has become a flashpoint in conversations in a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. As advances in computational methods expand the terrain of the measurable, the identifiable, and the knowable, they also raise thorny questions around the politics and ethics of academic research. In an era marked by the thoroughgoing digitalization of virtually every domain of our lives, changes in how information about human behavior is gathered, circulated, and made sense of both unsettles and reinforces existing power dynamics. This Special Crosscurrents Issue aims to spark a debate on ‘Big Data’ from the disciplinary location of ‘media and communication studies’ and more specifically, the emergent field of digital media studies. Our starting point is danah boyd and Kate Crawford’s (2011) important article, ‘Critical questions for Big Data’, in which they reflect on ‘what all this data means, who gets access to what data, how data analysis is deployed, and to what ends’ (p. 3). We asked our contributors to draw on their own research on different aspects of digital and global media as a way to respond to one of more of the issues that boyd and Crawford identified – the definition of knowledge, claims to objectivity and accuracy, context and meaning-making, access to data, and ethics and accountability. Moving well beyond the domain of social media, this collection of essays shows that the story of Big Data is part of a long-standing debate about methods and approach in

Race and Ethnicity in Post-network American Television From MTV-Desi to Outsourced

This article examines post-network American television’s fraught relationship with race and ethnicity by exploring two recent media ventures focused on South Asian Americans: MTV-Desi and NBC’s Outsourced. Approaching these media ventures as productive failures, we examine how industry workers narrate these failures to trace how the contemporary television industry in the United States imagines racial and ethnic identities. Bringing together interviews with media industry professionals, observations at a media industry convention, and thematic analyses of trade press and news coverage, we argue that both media ventures are symptomatic of nationalist logics that inform the operations of television industry professionals even as they seek to target audiences increasingly embedded in transnational media circuits. Industry professionals’ misreading of South Asian Americans’ position in the racial economies of the United States and changes in patterns of media circulation reveal the challenges confronting the media industry when it comes to issues of race and ethnicity.

Media, activism and the new political: ‘Istanbul conversations’ on new media and left politics

Held in October 2013, ‘Istanbul Conversations’ was the first public event organized by the Social Science Research Council’s Transregional Virtual Research Initiative (TVRI) on media, activism, and the new political. The TVRI brings together scholars from a range of disciplines and world regions to examine the interrelationship of media and politics within and across ‘InterAsia’, a spatially and historically networked expanse stretching from the Middle East through East Asia. In recent years there has been much interest in media and activism, focusing primarily on the role of new media and its potential to mobilize social and political change. For the most part, current discussions explore the mediated dynamics of mass mobilization and collective action. Thus, a central question concerns how the new networks of mobile, social and digital media alter capabilities of physical amassment and amplification – the spontaneous scaling up of conversion of individuals into collective, visible, and audible

Television at large

All the essays in this special issue deal with the theme Television at large in the political, economic, cultural, and technological contexts of contemporary South Asia. In different ways, each essay outlines the empirical and theoretical significance of understanding television as a dynamic technology, a creative industry, and a vibrant cultural form that is ‘at large’ in a dual sense. In one sense, the phrase ‘at large’ refers to television as a technology that is not bounded by the traditional borders of the modern nation-state, or by the modernist dichotomies of the public and the private, the inside and the outside, the spiritual and the material, or the home and the world. In another sense, the phrase ‘at large’ refers to the ability of television as a cultural form to represent a whole range of ideas, ideals, ideologies, images, and imaginations across time and space. After all, television unlike most other media and cultural productions, can be seen and heard 24 hours a day, 7 days a week both within and beyond the boundaries of South Asia. Thus, television, it can be argued, represents – or ought to represent – the collective imaginations of its audiences in the same way as some political representatives are deemed to represent the collective will of the people ‘at large’ rather than representing some specific state or a department or a constituency (as in a ‘minister at large’ or an ‘ambassador at large’). How then do we understand the new constellations of collective imaginations that are constantly represented (and re-presented) on South Asian television both within and beyond the traditional boundaries of South Asia? In approaching this question, we take our cue in part from recent scholarship in Television Studies that has begun mapping and examining how television has evolved under the impact of various technological, institutional, political-economic, and cultural changes. One of the most influential formulations of television-in-transition has been ‘television after TV’, a phrase that Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson deploy to explore a media landscape that is no longer defined by the ‘technologies, industrial formations, government policies, and practices of looking that were associated with the medium in its classical public service and three-network age’ in the United States.1 Engaging primarily with television in the United States and Europe, the essays in Spigel and Olsson’s influential anthology offer a wide-ranging account of an emerging ‘after TV’ world: new production practices, experiments with narrative and storytelling techniques, changing sponsorship models and franchising practices, media convergence and the expansion of spaces and modes of ‘watching TV’, new modes of imagining and mobilizing audiences, and so on. If the concern is, broadly speaking, coming to terms with what constitutes ‘TV’ as an object of study in the post-broadcast era, there is no doubt that South Asia would be as

From Indiafm.com to Radio Ceylon: new media and the making of the Bombay film industry

How did Bombay emerge and maintain its position as the pre-eminent media capital in India? Focusing on the film industry in particular, scholars have identified a number of key factors: the city’s position as a center of trade and commerce, and the influx, through the decades, of mercantile capital into filmmaking; its status as a vibrant cultural center, with established theater movements initially providing the film industry with a range of creative personnel; the use of Hindi which accorded the Bombay-based film industry (located in a multi-lingual city and in a state where the official language is Marathi) ‘national’ status whereas film industries in cities like Madras and Hyderabad were ascribed ‘regional’ status; and the impact of India’s partition on other centers of film production, most notably Calcutta and Lahore, and the migration of a number of producers, directors, actors and technicians to Bombay during this period (Ganti, 2004; Rajadhyaksha, 1999; Thorner and Patel, 1995). In this article, I seek to add another important factor that might account for why Bombay has managed to maintain its position as a national media capital and claim ‘global’ status in ways that no other center of media production has been able to: the role played by new media – radio, television, the internet and the mobile phone – in enabling the Bombay film industry to consistently imagine andmobilize a ‘national’ and now, ‘transnational audience’. Specifically, this article provides a case study of Indiafm.com, one of the most popular and successful film websites, to illustrate the role played by dot.com companies in the film industry’s construction of an overseas market over the past decade. From being ignored as a medium that a majority of Indians could not access, how did dot.com companies become an integral part of the film industry within a brief span of two or three years? How did these websites become key

Localizing YouTube: Language, cultural regions, and digital platforms

This article analyzes the significance of linguistic and cultural regions for the global expansion and localization of digital platforms. Bringing issues of globalization and cultural difference to bear on the study of platforms, we explore the industrial and cultural logics at work when digital platforms like YouTube navigate new markets. We first map YouTube’s trajectory in India and outline how the company came to recognize and value southern India’s linguistic and cultural diversity as crucial for its national and global expansion. Through close readings of videos produced by a leading channel (Put Chutney), we then outline how ‘region’ emerges as the dominant scale for localization and examine different conceptions of the region that are mobilized to secure an online audience. More broadly, we argue that platform localization is the contingent outcome of the interaction of algorithmic and representational logics that structure the operations of digital platforms.

Satire, Elections, and Democratic Politics in Digital India

This article is concerned with understanding the role of satire as a crucial narrative and communicative form for thinking and caring about politics in contemporary India. In an era marked by the relentless corporate makeover of news media and a concomitant decline in public trust in journalism, satirical videos that took on Narendra Modi, Arvind Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi, and other political figures during the 2014 election campaign season offered a strikingly different and immensely popular mode of engagement with the political. Moving past well-worn paradigms for understanding the relation between entertainment and politics, this article situates online satire within a vibrant field of everyday digital media production that marks contemporary Indian public culture. I show how satirical videos became part of an intricate, networked, yet comprehensible intertextual field that linked the 2014 elections to long-standing political issues and debates around caste, class, gender and sexuality, and religious nationalism.