Ramaswami Harindranath

Civil Society Movements and the ‘Twittering Classes’ in the Postcolony: An Indian Case Study

Abstract Using Partha Chatterjees insights on the formation of ‘civil society’ and how this is distinct from ‘political society’, this paper theorises the mobilisation of popular support via social media during the so-called ‘anti-corruption movement’ in India in 2011. It tracks the main themes of the civil society-led movements Twitter feeds during two crucial phases of fasting by its self-proclaimed Gandhian leader, Anna Hazare. This highlights the mixing of nostalgic pre-independence discourses with new media savvy and provides a means of contextualising what such discursive mobilisation means for contemporary political formations in a post-colonial society such as India. The case study also sheds light on the urban- and middle-class-centred nature of the protest and its preference for media over electoral representation—this is in line with Chatterjees conceptualisation of a civil society that undermines the authority of the state and excludes the rural and urban poor.

Performing terror, anti-terror, and public affect: Towards an analytical framework

This essay contends that there is a need for a new conceptual framework in order to analyse the interconnections between three different discourses on global and local terrorism: acts of terror; state mobilizations of anti-terror policy and rhetoric; and thirdly, public affect, which manifests expressions among others of insecurity, suspicion of religious and ethnic Others, and national allegiance. Often the interactions between these three domains enact the ways in which local extremist acts are refracted through global discourses on terror and anti-terror. This paper argues that Butlers notion of ‘performativity’ provides an analytical tool for the examination of these discourses, and that the internet offers the opportunity to analyse these three domains and the ways in which they interact with each other.

Mediated Terrorism and Democracy in India

In a recent essay in The Age newspaper, John Roskam accused Judith Brett of denying the existence of the threat of terrorism in Australia, and of erecting an entire edifice of ‘left-leaning’ thought which, according to him, construed the powers that use such threats to national security of cynically manipulating the electorate during an election year. ‘Terrorism’ he argued, ‘is real. Just ask those who have lost loved ones’. This intellectual stand-off is symptomatic of the deep rifts that are evident in discussions and debates on terrorism as a quintessentially twenty-first century threat to society. In regions such as the Indian subcontinent, acts of terror and the existence of organisations willing to resort to violence have been a fact of life for quite a while. But here too the currency of terrorism has recently assumed new value and a novel configuration.

Documentary as sense-making

The aim of this special issue is to contribute to debates over the nature of documentary as an expanding set of practices within online, mobile, networked media. Dovey has noted that ‘the digital documentary, in its online form, exists within a pattern of connectivity, interactivity and relationality’ (Dovey 2014, 14). Within a digital ecology characterised by rapidly expanding social practices of documentation, including streams of visual and audio-visual material designed to be shareable within the algorithmic processes of social networks, documentary takes on distinctive new characteristics and roles. Within this environment of expanding ephemera, documentary retains its significance as a discourse and series of practices which ‘make sense’ of digital materials which are aligned with reality, which carry the ‘ethical charge’ of the real. Documentary is refashioned as a number of specific assemblages within networked media; as a curatorial imperative, a rhetorical template for designing pathways through online databases of everyday documents, a discourse to be applied into the design of multimedia sites, and an embedded logic within new forms of software tools available to an expanded continuum of ‘practitioners’. The key focus of this special issue is how we can understand ‘documentary’ as sense-making practices within the digital ecology. What qualities of online media are implicit within this assemblage, what tools are being used, and what patterns are generated? What new forms are emerging which are aligned with documentary as a cultural discourse, and how do we need to rethink the idea of the documentary form? Do we need to reconsider the notion of the producer and of the audience? What roles are generated through these practices, from those collating and creating content to those engaging with the material as completed forms or coherent processes? Each of the articles included here examines the nature of ‘sense-making’ practices which can be associated with the label of ‘documentary’. Ramaswami Harindranath’s article ‘Online crowd-sourced documentary and the politics of veridicality and authority’ considers the truth claims made by crowd-funded documentary content, using 18 Days in Egypt as a key example. Andrew Murphie, in ‘Making sense: the transformation of documentary by digital and networked media’, employs Jean-Luc Nancy and François Zourabichvili to assess the ‘sense of sense’ operating through recent digital and/or networked documentary. Adrian Miles in ‘Materialism and interactive documentary: sketch notes’ undertakes a materialist analysis of the Korsakow interactive documentary software system to suggest the ways in which its programmatic and generative functions shape distinctive documentary forms. Kate Nash’s contribution addresses the comparative absence Studies in Documentary Film, 2014 Vol. 8, No. 3, 177–178, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2014.964950

Online crowd-sourced documentary and the politics of veridicality and authority

While online and digital technologies have enabled the democratisation of content provision, this also raises issues regarding the veridicality of the documentary as a genre. Where does the authority of online, crowd-sourced documentaries come from? And what expectations do audiences retain regarding the truth claims of digital documentary? With digital technologies offering the opportunity to not only record and upload ‘real’ events as they unfold, but also to manipulate images, questions continue being asked concerning the ethics and politics of such forms of representation. Using 18 Days in Egypt as an example, this essay examines the truth claims of crowd-sourced online documentaries, how these relate to the testimonies provided in such practices of media witnessing, and the underlying geo-politics of knowledge production that has been explored in scholar-activist groups such as Coloniality/Modernity.

The Indian public sphere: Histories, contradictions and challenges

This article traces the complexities inherent in the formation of the public sphere in India and how this can be seen as impinging on specific kinds of media discourses. After highlighting a few of the apparent contradictions in the Indian public sphere, the article builds on the insights offered by Partha Chatterjee, Kuan-Hsing Chen and Walter Mignolo to argue the case for the need to reconceptualise the concept of the public sphere in order to make it more suitable for the Indian context. Using media reports on terrorism and terrorist activities in India and the diverse conceptualisations of terrorism that underpin them as examples, this article demonstrates the exercise of symbolic power by the state and the media, and how this is indicative of the contradictions intrinsic to the public sphere in India.

The cultural politics of metropolitan and vernacular lifestyles in India

Using English-language and Tamil cookery shows on Indian television as examples, this article examines the complex cultural terrain traversed by contemporary Indian lifestyle TV, and argues that the gastro-politics inherent in such programming is indicative of the ways in which such shows appeal to and develop diverse social imaginaries in a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multicultural society such as India. The article argues that these shows both enact the creative tensions intrinsic to contemporary neo-liberal forms of cultural nationalism and demonstrate the constitutive co-presence of the global, the national and the vernacular in contemporary Indian culture.

A decade on: New approaches to media and security

This collection of essays was born from a concern we shared regarding the rise of cultures of security and insecurity, the politics that underpinned them, and the ways in which the media contributed to and explored them. Nearly ten years after the 9/11 attacks, it is an opportune moment to take stock of the prevailing security cultures and their relationship to the media. With this in mind, scholars were invited to attend a Symposium on Media and Security Cultures in Melbourne, Australia, in May 2010. This was the impetus for a number of papers in this collection. The Symposium also heard from film-makers and security analysts as we looked to develop ideas on just how the changes in security since 9/11 had impacted on media. The essays in this collection explore audiences, representations, and relevant legislative frameworks as media grapple with the complexities of cultures preoccupied with security at international, local, and personal levels. They track audience reactions to media representations (McClean) and policy discourses (O’Loughlin et al.), as well as how security cultures play in television popular drama (Andrejevic, Stockwell, Wilken, and Nikolaidas) and film comedy (Seja). Apart from visual media culture, the internet (Harindranath) as a site of research on media discourse and the genealogy of listening media (Tebbutt) are also explored within the context of contemporary security cultures. More generally within the collection, differing views (Bossio and McGarrity) debate the way that media in Australia has coped with unprecedented change in legislation and policy frameworks. Further, the way legislative definitions of information have become vital to the expansion of security cultures is discussed with reference to Australia (Rix) and the United States (Davies and Albert). Specifically, the work collected here offers new perspectives on how media and security cultures interact. Based on original data from a study in the UK and France, O’Loughlin et al. provide a multi-methodological analysis of ordinary language to examine the disjuncture between audiences’ conceptions of radicalization and official discourses. The disconnect they discover, the authors argue, has profound implications for public debate on the legitimacy of policies on security. McClean’s essay draws from a larger study of audience responses to and understandings of the TV drama series EastWest 101, a cop show with a self-proclaimed ‘wog squad’, in which a significant proportion of the dramatic tension arises from apparent cultural differences and attitudes between the police who are its main characters. McClean is interested in tracking the viewers’ evaluation of and attitudes to the series for insights into how racial politics can be negotiated in post-9/11 multicultural Australia.