Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Current Issue

In this article, I attempt to understand the global K-pop fandom among young women, from the perspective of non-metropolitan locations like the state of Kerala in southern India. I examine the ‘sub-visible’ nature of K-pop fandom and situate it in relation to existing discourses surrounding visibility in youth subcultures and fan cultures, both in India and the West. I argue that the key to understanding this fandom is in the cultural process of feminization that it produces – a feminization of male K-pop idols through the ‘free labour’ (to use a concept by Tiziana Terranova) that K-pop fans engage in on digital spaces – labour that has the structure of work and the function of enjoyment and enthusiasm. Drawing on existing discourses on the ‘feminine’, I analyse the peculiar mode of feminization in K-pop fandom as a response to the precarity and vulnerability experienced by young people in the contemporary world.

This article traces two interrelated strands of documentary film aesthetics in India that have steadily developed since the early 2000s. One concerns the presiding influence of personal narratives and subjectivity, manifesting in diverse thematic interrogations. The other relates to the increased tendencies of working with the cinematographic tropes and idioms of fictional storytelling. These directions, evolving over distinctive historical circumstances, have significantly revised the generic assumptions of the documentary. Two films feature centrally in this discussion, Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing and Shaunak Sen’s All that Breathes. Both uniquely explore the personal and fictional registers of working with the genre. While Kapadia intimately thinks through the reigning political crises in India, Sen devises inventive means to visualize the graded, interrelated layers of ecological catastrophe in the world’s most polluted capital city. A critical review of these films seeks to understand the emerging narratorial, formal and technical logic informing the hybrid nature of contemporary documentaries and their intersecting issues.

The term ‘technostalgia’ refers to a range of admittedly quirky and often collectible devices that frequently hit the market, promising customers the experience of past technology in the present. Using this marketing trend as a starting point, this article attempts to trace ‘other’ technostalgias in their plurality elsewhere in order to plump the philosophical dimensions of the concept. Upon unpacking the underlying structure of technostalgia (in terms of subject–object relations, as social practice, etc.), we may relocate the technological subject within the global–local horizon and rethink the social history of technology as a history of becoming-obsolete – i.e. a history of what we may do (or not do) with the fate of ‘becoming-obsolete’ other than being subjected to it. To this effect, the article describes the structure of technostalgia not once but thrice and from three different vantage points: the first being the most evident and ‘first’ market version of technostalgia, the second being technostalgia as contemporary art practice in the form of hand-drawn or graphic non-fiction narratives, and the third being technostalgia as a historical ‘incident’ of sorts related to the advent of photography against the colonial context.

Data is often read as an algorithmic object, a bot and a tool for interpreting media markets. While speculative box-office figures have been conventionally used to make sense of industry trends, data analytics has emerged as a new tool. Films are increasingly seen as value-accruing enterprises and neoliberal markets define them from the singular logic of content. As a result, much like any other neoliberal product, a film has to be further divisible into other monetizable traits and entities that add to the long chain of value, helping in prolonging its shelf life. Moreover, the audience has increasingly migrated towards individual device-based screenings as opposed to theatrical viewing, making it possible to monetize their viewing activities and trace them as dividuals. Storytelling becomes about beats, as data becomes a tool for reifying the speculative financial framework for the film industry. This article attempts to map the changing contours of Hindi film industry by examining how data is appropriated to make projections about the future and interpret trends and preferences.

This is a field note from my research project that aims to study the practice of playing film music on the commuter buses operated by private owners in Kannur district of Kerala. The practice became prevalent during the early 2000s with the advent of compact discs and portable music libraries of film songs in MP3 format, despite the Kerala Motor Vehicles Rules (1989) prohibiting passenger buses from playing music or videos during daily commutes. This field note proposes that the practice of playing the songs becomes part of an aural network that places itself through its (mere) presence as something not to be consciously attentive to and be affected by.