Wimal Dissanayake

The desire to excavate Asian theories of communication: one strand of the history

Abstract The last 20 years have seen a great upsurge of interest in investigations into Asian theories of communication. A number of influential scholars have chosen to focus their attention on this field of inquiry. In this article, I seek to explicate my early involvements in the project of excavating Asian theories of communication. My primary focus is on classical Indian concepts of communication and their relevance to us as we aim to widen the discursive boundaries of communication. As I explore some of the classical Indian concepts, I try to point out the ways in which they display affinities to, and differences from, modern Western understandings of human communication.

The Need for the Study of Asian Approaches to Communication

AbstractTo develop “more pertinent and heuristically useful” theories and models of communication that reflect the cultural ethos of Asia, Asian communication scholars must replace the Aristotelian model, which admittedly, serves the West but does not fit in with the cultural characteristics of Asian societies.Bhartrharirs Vakyapadiya is used to show that scholars can turn to the East, classical India, for example, when persuing modern communication studies.

The production of Asian theories of communication: contexts and challenges

The past two or three decades have witnessed an intense interest in rediscovering Asian theories of communication and exploring their applicability to modern communication studies. I myself have been deeply involved in this project for the past thirty years. While this should be welcomed as a much-needed project, it is imperative that we realize that this effort is as important as it is complex and many-sided; there are several perilous pitfalls in the way such as those presented by romanticism, essentialism and ahistoricism. In this article, I discuss some of these issues, and the ways in which we can profitably engage Western formulations of communication, in relation to what I term Type A and Type B theories.

Asian television dramas and Asian theories of communication

Television dramas have become dominant forms of mass entertainment in most regions of the world. They are a vital part of the offering of almost all national television services. The way television...

Melodrama and Sinhalese Cinema

Melodrama, as a term of cultural re-description, has come to the fore in recent years. Until about two decades ago, it was de-valorised as a term that indexed superficial, ersatz and inferior modes of cinematic entertainment that were characterised by a rhetoric of excess. However, owing to a variety of factors ranging from the influence of postmodernism to the interrogations of feminist scholars, melodramatic films have begun to be subject to a re-evaluation. One important consequence of this has been the recognition of the importance of studying melodramas that inhabit diverse cultural terrains. In this essay, my focus of interest is on Sri Lankan melodramas. From the very inception, Sinhalese film melodramas were inescapably melodramatic, adhering to a well tried out formula. Many of these films were crude, vulgar and trite. However, in recent times, a number of modernist filmmakers in Sri Lanka have sought to harness the vigour and vitality of these films and their willingness to confront strong emotions, as a way of forwarding their modernist aesthetic while retaining the loyalties of the audiences. This essay focuses on some of these film directors.

Representation of the city in cinema: ‘The Calcutta trilogy’

Communication has had a profound influence on the process of urbanization, while the processes of urbanization have shaped the nature of communication technologies and philosophies. In this paper the authors focus their attention on a third aspect of this interplay between communication and urbanization, namely, how communications media represent the discourse of urbanism. Their chosen medium of communication is film. By examining the complex ways in which films represent urbanization with special reference to Satyajit Rays Calcutta Trilogy, the authors aim to illuminate the vital relationship that exists between space, time and identity in a rapidly changing urban space.

Bengali cinema: ‘an other nation’

Sharmistha Gooptu, Oxford:, Routledge, 2011, 231 pp., UK£85.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-57006-0 Recent literature on the evolution of the Bollywood phenomenon has further marginalised the Regiona...