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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2012
Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2012
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2012
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Imagining India: The nation as a brand
More LessThis article critically analyses the phenomenon of nation branding as a technique of neocolonial governmentality. I focus on the ‘India Everywhere’ campaign that launched Brand India at the 2006 World Economic Forum to highlight postcolonial India’s attempt to imagine the nation and its people through the discourse of branding. I argue that India’s nation branding exercise hollows out the postcolonial imagination so that the nation can now only be imagined through a language and within a framework ‘always-already’ constituted for the postcolony. This article builds on Michel Foucault’s analysis of governmentality and utilizes a postcolonial framework to show that when the practice of nation branding is applied to a postcolonial nation it works to reinscribe the colonial legacy and reaffirm colonial power relations.
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English-language television news and the great Indian middle class: Made for each other?
More LessThis article highlights the interdependence of the urban Indian middle class and English-language news television in terms of their particular mixing of neo-liberal commercial interests, a newfound lifestyle focus and an assertive nationalism that is largely insular. After a brief analysis of a small sample of billboard advertisements for Indian news outlets in the context of the middle-class audience for news (and advertising), the article then focuses on mapping and identifying the particular values of the emerging Indian middle class and its media. For this, the article draws on Pavan K. Varma’s polemical work on the emergence and failings of the post-liberalization middle class, on Leela Fernandes’ fieldwork and interviews with the media and advertisers, and also on Nalin Mehta’s research on India’s argumentative tradition as remade on 24-hour news television. Mostly, however, the methodological approach here is to deconstruct the news producers’ construction of the middle-class audience through industry interviews and print media commentary, and highlight how this diverges from real-life middle-class complexities and further excludes the lower classes.
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Living for the other half: Slum specials on reality TV
By Rijuta MehtaThis article examines the transvaluation of urban poverty in neo-liberal India through a reading of Endemol’s reality television show The Big Switch (Season One, UTV Bindass, 2009). Formatted as Survivor for Indian D-list celebrities and Extreme Makeover for Mumbai’s slum dwellers, who were then teamed together in a simulated slum, the show promised to make one out of ten ‘slumdogs’ a millionaire. Paying attention to the quick fix that reality television provides to the shortage of living space, I frame my critique of the Switch House within what A. Appadurai calls Mumbai’s Great Housing Dream and what Michel Foucault has defined as heterotopia. I propose that The Big Switch (Hitesh Bhatia, 2009), as it stages the fantasy of millionairedom and celebrityhood for all, becomes a symptom of the antagonisms between global corporate formalism and the informal street economy at the heart of the illegal slum city. I situate the television text within the larger history of the Indian television industry, as well as the current turn towards ‘slum culture’ in global reality-based television programming, especially through shows like Famous, Rich, and In the Slums (Joyce Trozzo, 2011) and Slumdog Secret Millionaire (Rod Williams, 2010). Building on the media urbanism theory of Ravi Sundaram, I also suggest that a material analysis of the TV set in the slum is important in articulating the specificities of slum citizenship and spectatorship. I argue that slum tourism (and its visual capture in photography, cinema and television) is not only an archive of the ephemeral kinetic city but of an illegal yet necessary dwelling in constant threat of demolition, whose moment of exhibition to the world cannot be separated from the moment of its destruction by that world.
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‘Aadat Se Majboor’/‘Helpless by Habit’: Metrosexual masculinity in contemporary Bollywood
More LessThis article considers the growth of neo-liberal culture in India through the advent of metrosexuality in contemporary, Bombay-based popular Hindi cinema, aka Bollywood. If, by the end of the twentieth century, the iconic ‘angry young man’ of 1970s popular Hindi cinema had been replaced by the ‘creative young man’, the first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed the emergence of the metrosexual male protagonist – one largely defined by his physical fitness, grooming and cosmopolitanism. This article explores the ways in which such a masculinity is ‘packaged’ in several recent films. In particular, these films appear to signal to their audience a certain postmodern savviness about the artifice of such masculinity, as well as its commercial underpinnings in marketing global consumer culture. Such metrosexualization, this article concludes, has now gone one step further with the emergence of the con man protagonist, reworking earlier models of urban Indian masculinity towards an increasingly neo-liberal aestheticization and promotion of individual enterprise, sexual and ethical decadence, and sculpted physiques.
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Consuming lifestyles: Local television, neo-liberalism and divergent social imaginaries in India
More LessUsing as its case study examples from both vernacular and English language, metropolitan lifestyle television in India, this article explores the different aspirations among the westernized, urban elites and the more ‘traditional’ populations, and diverse patterns of affiliation these entail. Analysing the complex cultural economy of consumption practices, television programming and lifestyle ambitions, this article argues, requires a new conceptual framework that takes on board refinements of concepts such as hybridity and modernity while attempting to track the ways in which the cultural is manifest in the material.
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‘What an Idea Sirji!’: Intersections of neo-liberal subjectivities and development discourses in Idea Cellular ads
More LessThe Idea Cellular ad campaign has included advertisements dealing with themes ranging from participative democracy and education for all to ending caste wars and controlling population. I examine the ads for their tendency to posit technology as a solution to solving socio-political problems and in turn idealizing a neo-liberal subject who, aided by technology, can be a unit all into itself. These ads may then be seen to operate as ‘technologies of subjectivity’, with the cell phone network enabling the ‘self-activating capacities’ of the neo-liberal subject. Specifically, I analyse how the ads mix the discourses of inclusive development and neo-liberal reform by reconfiguring the relationship between the state, corporations and the consumer-citizen. Furthermore, I unravel the creative tensions the ads negotiate while forging individual desires and responsibilities into collective goals by exploring how their construction of neo-liberal subjectivities exists in multi-layered processual relations with brand management strategies, development narratives, technological affordances of cell phones and advertising cultures in India.
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