South Asian Popular Culture最新文献

{"title":"Bollywoodizing Netflix or globalizing Hotstar? The cultural-industrial logics of global streaming platforms in India","authors":"Swapnil Rai","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2023.2270863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2023.2270863","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the localization strategies of Netflix and Disney+ Hotstar, positing India as a distinctive cultural-industrial contact zone. The Indian market’s size, scale, and cultural and linguistic diversity make it a remarkable region for an epistemic inquiry into global industrial contact zones created by transnational streaming platforms. I map the relative power of Netflix and Disney+ Hotstar in relation to India’s strong local film and entertainment industry. In doing so, I identify two types of localization strategies: the cosmopolitan local and the indigenized global. These strategies encompass content, aesthetics, audiences, and local industry dynamics. This essay explains the cultural and global mobility of media forms tied to cricket and Bollywood and argues that these forms accord the Indian mediascape a distinctive agency, presenting an antipodal inversion of imperialistic discourses of Western hegemonic media power.KEYWORDS: Media GlobalizationNetflixHotstar Disney+cricketBollywoodindustrial contact zoneslocalizationIndia AcknowledgmentsI would like to thank Alisa Perren and Joe Straubhaar for their feedback on an earlier version of this article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. For more on debates about platform imperialism, see Jin, Dal Yong. 2017. ‘Digital Platform as a Double-Edged Sword: How to Interpret Cultural Flows in the Platform Era’. International Journal of Communication 11: 3880–3898; Fitzgerald, Scott. 2019. ‘Over-the-Top Video Services in India: Media Imperialism after Globalization’. Media Industries 89–115.2. The promotional video for Narcos- Mexico using characters from Sacred Games: https://youtu.be/2-ScsCrc0cA3. See Hotstar’s extensive slate of current local indigenized programming https://www.hotstar.com/in/tv, and the announcement for future shows https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/disney-hotstar-india-original-series-films-1234988653/.4. In July 2023, a US T20 Major Cricket league premiered. It can be watched live on Disney-owned ESPN+ in the US. It caters to a small but commercially lucrative diasporic Indian population.5. In 2023, Disney+ Hotstar lost its Indian Premier League streaming rights to its emergent Indian rival, Jio Cinema, owned by Indian billionaire Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani. Hotstar lost over five million subscribers immediately thereafter. The event demonstrates the centrality of cricket to Hotstar’s strategy and the robust Indian media market that can present strong rivals such as Jio Cinema, which emerged as a challenger in a short time. The development is making the Disney conglomerate review its strategic options in India and revert from its wholesale takeover of Hotstar to a strategic partnership with an Indian company. For more, see https://variety.com/2023/global/asia/disney-india-business-potential-sale-joint-venture-1235667496/6. The show was a prelude to establishing a T20 cricket ","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"1 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135679623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The women of Miranda House: Building archival collections, digital humanities and feminist digital history","authors":"Shweta Sachdeva Jha","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2023.2271273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2023.2271273","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT These notes are based on an ongoing project for building an archive of a premier women’s college, Miranda House (established 1948), University of Delhi. We begin with a brief overview of the processes and methodologies involved in identifying materials to shape our collection, discuss processes of cataloguing, digitization, planning digital collections and a website. Our collection lies at the cusp of being an institutional archive, women’s archive, archive of college women as well as an archive for doing public history. Despite the challenges of infrastructure, trained staff, technological expertise, digital humanities offer us immensely exciting possibilities. We use social media to reach out to alumni to build our collections, social media presence to showcase our materials, digital tools to widen access, share skills and create awareness regarding the significance of archiving the history of college women. Our attempts at DH have been quite successful. However, as DH opens up a plethora of opportunities, doing digital history also has its methodological challenges as well as conceptual and financial concerns for feminist projects like ours.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"29 1","pages":"279 - 289"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139343111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Digital expression from the shadow states: The in-betweeners in the late-capitalist era","authors":"Sagorika Singha","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2023.2260989","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2023.2260989","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the social media-induced affective notion of fame from the perspective of people living in peripheries, such as the region of Northeast India, whom the mainstream media (and by extension, the popular imagination) have always obscured, or somewhat suppressed. When they come across these visibility-inducing social media platforms, does this lead to the creation of new forms of celebrityhood? This article observes three specific people from the region – a filmmaker, a small-time Bollywood actor, and an Instagram dancing sensation. The case studies outline their usage of the affordances of the social media platforms through which they acquire a kind of cultish fame. It examines how they leverage fame to instil the greater North-east region in the popular national imagination. This article claims that social media is not merely a platform for these artists to connect with and maintain their audiences, but also a place to create awareness, to define their identity and reveal the socio-historical fractures that they have inherited. This article extends the notion of micro-celebrity (Senft, ”Keeping It Real on the Web”) to dwell on the relationship between media-managed obscurity and social media-enabled self-promotion to conceptualise the category of in-betweeners.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"43 1","pages":"325 - 341"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139343123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sensory infrastructures of 21st century Delhi: Urban vistas, digital memories and aesthetic imaginaries of a postcolonial media-city","authors":"Akhil Goswami","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2023.2266910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2023.2266910","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the recent decades of post-globalization India, a digital explosion in media platforms and technologies has created a new cartography of the city. This ‘informational’ vocabulary addresses the city not merely through built urban architecture but also through a mobile infrastructure of screens. MMS clips, surveillance footage, television news, home videos, memes, and so on are all symptomatic of this new digital archive of the city. This essay attempts to reflect on how Delhi’s urban imaginary is given a graphic volatile form through the viral circulations of its digital profile. As a new generation of Delhi-born directors emerge in the landscape of Bombay cinema, some of these filmmakers mobilize the recent televisual archive of crime in Delhi to respond to the city. At the same time, it is also interesting how a more generalized relation between the space of the night and urban violence is given a specific concrete iconography in these fictionalized accounts. Located within an intersection of Delhi’s urban imaginary, its expanding media infrastructure, and an aesthetic mobilization of the night, this essay examines Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha (2010), Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D (2009), and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi-6 (2009) to argue that the violence in these films as much material as it is technological. It is not only the anxiety related to murder itself, but the viral circulation of death and a television aesthetic of replayed and sensationalized crime that haunts the contemporary metropolitan experience.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"39 1","pages":"343 - 359"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139343250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The constituency of Digital Humanities in India","authors":"Sunanda Kar, Avishek Ray","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2023.2271275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2023.2271275","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Digital Humanities (DH), as an emergent field, is increasingly gaining traction within the Indian academe. It is credited with pumping fresh life into studying the Humanities at a time when the relevance of Humanities is being questioned. However, the role of the ‘digital’ in studying the Humanities – whether DH is an autonomous field, or merely a data-driven technique/application, or characterises new methodologies that equip us to probe into new ‘objects of inquiries – is often debated. In this article, we revisit the debates, contentions and contingencies around DH, with the intent to stir up conversations on the concerns about and faultlines of what may be referred to as an ‘Indian framework’ of DH practice. We examine the constituency of DH in India and the epistemic implications of the attempts towards its formalisation, which must be understood as a knowledge project linked to the prevailing episteme. In brief, we examine the ‘epistemic rupture’ that marks the emergence of DH in India.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"44 1","pages":"273 - 278"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139343297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The rise of streaming culture: SVOD media and the digital revolution in India","authors":"Šarūnas Paunksnis","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2023.2271270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2023.2271270","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article analyses the reasons and the effects of the rise of digital platforms in India, specifically focusing on SVOD platforms. The proliferation of various digital video platforms of different types has been tremendous both in India and the world since early years of 21st century. Taking into consideration the fact that digitality in India is a recent phenomenon, the article, by drawing upon some of the most significant theories in new media studies analyzes the questions of remediation and mediatization in the context of streaming culture in India by taking an example of an emergent media form – web series. The article also takes into consideration the impact of infrastructural development of streaming culture in India, and looks at several examples illustrating digital revolution in India – the remediation of television and the regulation of SVOD content as an example of entanglement of media and society.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"70 1","pages":"291 - 305"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139343244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Why do Indians cry passionately on Insta?”: Grief performativity and ecologies of commerce of crying videos","authors":"Soma Basu","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2023.2215227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2023.2215227","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article attempts to explore the specific performative and digital practice of users sharing digital self-images and videos on social media platforms in which they cry, with or without a ‘tear filter’. In this article, the author employs Netnography (Kozinets, 2010) to look at social media accounts and online archives to track the origins of the trend of ‘crying videos on TikTok’ and through comments, reactions, and user interactions, attempts to understand how grief is performed on Instagram and TikTok. The article offers a diversion from the ossification of the current scholarship on self-images and identity construction on social media by looking at the marketability and entanglements in ecologies of commerce and sociality that the crying videos lead to.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45584528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Between ‘Cheeni’ and ‘Nupi Maanbi’: Transgender politics in Manipur at the intersection of nation and Indigeneity","authors":"Maisnam Arnapal, Debanuj Dasgupta","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2023.2232174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2023.2232174","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The 2020 crime thriller web series Paatal Lok featured a Nepali trans woman by the name of Mary Lyngdoh who is referred to as ‘Cheeni’ (a racial epithet for persons from India’s Northeast region and East Asia). The series has been lauded for its inclusive representation of a transgender actor, Henthoi Mairembam from Manipur, yet the choice of a Khasi name, ‘Mary Lyngdoh’, for a Nepali character as well as the use of ‘Cheeni’ as an alias raise multiple questions about racialization and queer politics in India. This arbitrary racialized characterization in Paatal Lok and its queer Northeast representation can serve as critical points of departure to examine the emerging LGBTQ politics in Northeast India. This paper attempts to highlight the convergences and incommensurability of LGBTQ politics in the region, particularly in Manipur, with that of mainland India. Against the backdrop of the history of militarization and conflict in Northeast India, LGBTQ individuals migrants from the region are further racialized in India’s metropolitan centers. This geopolitical alienation is felt by LGBTQ persons from the Northeast at the scale of the body. LGBTQ politics in Manipur represents a new form of resistance that introduces ‘Indigeneity’ as an identity and an epistemic category to counter the assimilationist projects of Hindutva’s authoritarian nationalism.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"21 1","pages":"223 - 234"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48534205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mirrors and murals: Reflections on embodied and state violence","authors":"K. Ghisyawan","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2023.2232175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2023.2232175","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT On 29 April 2022, a new mural called ‘Home is Where We Make It’, designed and installed by Amrisa Niranjan, an Indo-Guyanese artist was vandalized, just three days after completion. Black spray paint attempted to cover the artist’s name, and the letters ‘USA’ were printed over the portrait of a hijabi woman. Other signs saying ‘USA’ were taped to the mural and removed by police. By that same evening, the Star of David had been added across the woman’s face in an attempted erasure of her presence. Drawing on an interview with Amrisa Niranjan, I discuss the implications of being Indo-Caribbean migrants at the nexus of Islamophobic, xenophobic, and sexist rhetoric that mark us as ‘unbelonging’. In this paper, I address this event as part of a continuum of white supremacist racist, sexist and xenophobic violence that gets played out at the national, institutional, and interpersonal levels. This incident highlights how border policing occurs in everyday spaces, from microaggressions to overt acts of violence and erasure, in communities, universities, and even in supposed sanctuary spaces, where hatred is hidden under banners of diversity and inclusion but resurfaces in these moments.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"21 1","pages":"235 - 242"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42583746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Instagram representation of trans and hijra identities in Bangladesh","authors":"Tanvir Alim","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2023.2234183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2023.2234183","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This working note examines the social media presence of Hijra and trans communities in Bangladesh. Visibility filters and representation has created new forms of community making and empowerment. Whilst some of this is created through self representation, this note also argues the role played by international bodies and neoliberal agendas in this creation of online identities. Through an exploration of digital identities, these working notes seek to enrich our understanding of queer, trans and hijra lives in Bangladesh and also help in envisioning radical possibilities of connection and identity.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"21 1","pages":"243 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46207027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}