Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209432
John Hutnyk
The following is the second set of papers from the conference “Innovations in the Social Sciences and Humanities,” in December 2021, at Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. As mentioned in the January issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, the idea of “transforming knowledge production” (Chen 2010, 216) brings us to this special section interested in the ways media connects Indian audiences with the world through different formats. We reach back from the “imagined communities” of “print capitalism” (Anderson 1983), through global-social “mediascapes” operating through new technologies and connectivities, that now mediate a “naked struggle between the pieties and realities of Indian politics” (Appadurai 2006, 595). The theme is the significance of the formations of Indian media, though without covering all angles, the section investigates newspapers, film, video and television news. The indicator of note is that there is more to be done to build on the new South Asian media studies work represented in texts as diverse as Madhava Prasad (1998, 2014), Gera Roy (2012, 2015), and Ravi Sundaram (2009; 2013), among others. There are five papers here. The first tells the story of the emergence of English and vernacular language newspapers in India, entailing engagement with the early formation of the Bengali intelligentsia—the bhadralok class fraction prominent. Some older controversial history, about papers like Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (Otis 2018) is required to understand why the nineteenth-century formation of the press is still hugely relevant to how thewidermedia sees itself today. Reforming and informing, campaigning and campafflicted, knowledge-promoting and seemingly all-knowing, Shaswati Das shows how this estate took some time to negotiate its path between the forces of Government (then the British colonial regime) and the factional aspirations of emergent nationalism. Film history has been central to Indian political imaginings since the emergence of cinema— the first films made in the 1910s as “mythologicals” and by the 1960s cinemahad a political and national role without question. Within this, as John Hutnyk shows, the Bengali auteur cinema of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak made international linkages, in this case reacting to the struggle in Vietnam, but verymuch fromwithin the sensibilities of a national Indian andBengali, even Calcuttan imaginary (see Mrinal Sen in Reinhard Hauff’s film, Ten Days in Calcutta, Hauff 1987). The importance of international solidarity and a cinema of the world was very much a part of the self-understanding of Indian media from its earliest manifestations. Histories of the cinema spaces, and subsequently video halls, are an aspect of this same trajectory. Still, the paper of Dattatreya Ghosh alerts us to critical submerged aspects of this narrative that need to be brought out through close, careful archival media work.
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Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209425
Wei Wang, A. P. Hoang, L. Jordan
ABSTRACT Racial prejudice and discrimination towards Africans in Guangzhou have been widely documented and are systemic. Nonetheless, conjugal unions and family formation between Chinese citizens and members of the African diaspora have become more prevalent in recent years. Together, Afro-Chinese couples confront quotidian threats of violence, arrest, and deportation of the African partners, which threats affect their families and livelihoods. Studies thus far have neglected the complex dynamics and negotiations of racism that manifest in the interracial domestic sphere. Through reflexive observational fieldwork and qualitative interviews, this study provides a contemporary analysis of negotiating racism in intimate family life, especially from the unique standpoint of the Chinese spouse in an Afro-Chinese marriage. Drawing upon empirical data and the Althusserian notion of interpellation, we develop the concept of the intimate affliction of vicarious racialization to analyze how multiple inequities intersect and condition the couples’ overlapping lived experiences. Vicarious racialization particularly emphasizes processes by which Chinese women become interpellated but also resist anti-Black racism. This intimate affliction destabilizes the prevailing discourse on racism, which focuses on targeted (racialized) minorities, and the dichotomy of direct/indirect discrimination against them. This study highlights the often-overlooked role of women’s agency across multiple borderlands with their partners as they negotiate gendered, racialized, and classed subjections in familial and social spaces.
{"title":"The intimate affliction of vicarious racialization: Afro-Chinese couples in South China","authors":"Wei Wang, A. P. Hoang, L. Jordan","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2209425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2209425","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Racial prejudice and discrimination towards Africans in Guangzhou have been widely documented and are systemic. Nonetheless, conjugal unions and family formation between Chinese citizens and members of the African diaspora have become more prevalent in recent years. Together, Afro-Chinese couples confront quotidian threats of violence, arrest, and deportation of the African partners, which threats affect their families and livelihoods. Studies thus far have neglected the complex dynamics and negotiations of racism that manifest in the interracial domestic sphere. Through reflexive observational fieldwork and qualitative interviews, this study provides a contemporary analysis of negotiating racism in intimate family life, especially from the unique standpoint of the Chinese spouse in an Afro-Chinese marriage. Drawing upon empirical data and the Althusserian notion of interpellation, we develop the concept of the intimate affliction of vicarious racialization to analyze how multiple inequities intersect and condition the couples’ overlapping lived experiences. Vicarious racialization particularly emphasizes processes by which Chinese women become interpellated but also resist anti-Black racism. This intimate affliction destabilizes the prevailing discourse on racism, which focuses on targeted (racialized) minorities, and the dichotomy of direct/indirect discrimination against them. This study highlights the often-overlooked role of women’s agency across multiple borderlands with their partners as they negotiate gendered, racialized, and classed subjections in familial and social spaces.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43920872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209426
A. Zemanek, L. Momesso
ABSTRACT This study contributes to research into multiculturalism and Taiwan’s public discourse on marriage migrants, arguing for the everyday as a site for inquiry into cultural negotiations, hybridity and homemaking in multicultural societies. It analyses two documentaries—My Imported Bride (2003) and Out/Marriage (2012) from the perspective of voice, defined as the filmmaker’s way of seeing the world. It explores migrants’ ownership of their narratives and inhabited spaces and assesses whether the documentaries grant a voice to migrants, speaking with rather than for them. These films show that migrants have already gained a formalized representational space in Taiwan’s public discourse. The narrative power remains with the directors, and their framing of migrants accommodates Taiwanese audiences’ expectations, but in different ways. The earlier documentary successfully showcases typical problems underlying brokered marriages and obstacles in adapting to a new living environment. The more recent film employs discursive categories established by official multiculturalism policies, NGO-led activism, and previous media representations, which echo existing migrant-related stereotypes. Nevertheless, this film, directed by a migrant, also uses visual and auditory strategies that open a window onto migrants’ intimate physical and social home spaces in Vietnam. Thus, it builds potential for alternative representations that can counteract the risk of othering migrants and solidifying ethnic and cultural boundaries, posed by representational categories coming from hegemonic sources.
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Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209431
Jian Xiao, Zheng Wan
On 21 August 1980, Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) was officially born and the guideline of “the whole country supports the SEZ, and the SEZ serves the whole country” was set. As the first shot of China’s reform and opening up, Shenzhen Shekou industrial zone broke ground in 1979 and immediately started a high-intensity practice. The slogan “time is money, efficiency is life” proposed by Yuan Geng, was affirmed by Deng Xiaoping and gradually spread from the region to the whole country. Similar to other big cities, migrant workers serve as a crucial role in making it. In this visual essay, we focus on those city actors and use nine pictures of the migrant workers’ portraits taken by professional photographers in Shenzhen from 1980 to 2000 in order to understand the relationship between the process of urbanization and the impacts of it on people who build it up. This approach is in line with how Xiao and Chen (2022) regards photographic archive of normal people and their daily life as a way of demonstrating the China modernity and can become an important method to understand a city. In contrast to the “new” Chinese era featured with platform economy and digital labors, it presents a pre-digital working and living lifestyle of the “old” Chinese. Overall, one of the most common pictures associated with Shenzhen is mobility: many foreign visitors make a short transition through the Shenzhen Customs, and many leave and return for long periods of time; the gap between the rich and the poor in Shenzhen and Hong Kong breeds a desire to move, and the border encourages flight and return, deeply manifested in the geographical memory. The infinite expansion of the power of capital is accompanied by profound social changes. In the constant fusion of capital, culture, and social forces, the process of globalocalization eventually leads to cultural uniqueness, the transformation of villagers’ roles, the tremendous growth of wealth, and the rise of the creative, financial, and technological classes, the prevalence of consumerism and the transformation of the power of capital into one dream after another. Being constantly constructed and shattered, the city is narrated in ever more grotesque images. Urban mobility is often encouraged to fit in the urban development initiated by the government. This would also result in many social consequences and problems such as gentrification, displacement, and mental issues. In the case of Chinese migrant workers who mostly live in the urban villages, gentrification would often happen when those places are in demolition and rebuilt to attract the white-collar workers or the middle class. In consequence, the migrant workers would either leave the city or join into a new style of economy such as working for the digital platforms. The
{"title":"Nomads in a city of their own making: a portrait of migrant workers in Shenzhen, 1980–2000","authors":"Jian Xiao, Zheng Wan","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2209431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2209431","url":null,"abstract":"On 21 August 1980, Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) was officially born and the guideline of “the whole country supports the SEZ, and the SEZ serves the whole country” was set. As the first shot of China’s reform and opening up, Shenzhen Shekou industrial zone broke ground in 1979 and immediately started a high-intensity practice. The slogan “time is money, efficiency is life” proposed by Yuan Geng, was affirmed by Deng Xiaoping and gradually spread from the region to the whole country. Similar to other big cities, migrant workers serve as a crucial role in making it. In this visual essay, we focus on those city actors and use nine pictures of the migrant workers’ portraits taken by professional photographers in Shenzhen from 1980 to 2000 in order to understand the relationship between the process of urbanization and the impacts of it on people who build it up. This approach is in line with how Xiao and Chen (2022) regards photographic archive of normal people and their daily life as a way of demonstrating the China modernity and can become an important method to understand a city. In contrast to the “new” Chinese era featured with platform economy and digital labors, it presents a pre-digital working and living lifestyle of the “old” Chinese. Overall, one of the most common pictures associated with Shenzhen is mobility: many foreign visitors make a short transition through the Shenzhen Customs, and many leave and return for long periods of time; the gap between the rich and the poor in Shenzhen and Hong Kong breeds a desire to move, and the border encourages flight and return, deeply manifested in the geographical memory. The infinite expansion of the power of capital is accompanied by profound social changes. In the constant fusion of capital, culture, and social forces, the process of globalocalization eventually leads to cultural uniqueness, the transformation of villagers’ roles, the tremendous growth of wealth, and the rise of the creative, financial, and technological classes, the prevalence of consumerism and the transformation of the power of capital into one dream after another. Being constantly constructed and shattered, the city is narrated in ever more grotesque images. Urban mobility is often encouraged to fit in the urban development initiated by the government. This would also result in many social consequences and problems such as gentrification, displacement, and mental issues. In the case of Chinese migrant workers who mostly live in the urban villages, gentrification would often happen when those places are in demolition and rebuilt to attract the white-collar workers or the middle class. In consequence, the migrant workers would either leave the city or join into a new style of economy such as working for the digital platforms. The","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41712277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209438
A. Roy
ABSTRACT This article calls for enhancing the horizon of Political Communication Studies, drawing attention to certain relation between the media, the state and the public in a globalised world. Focusing on private mainstream news television in post-liberalisation India, it tries to show how Media, in its singularised popular sense of sensationalising news, generating live-stream of public opinion, conducting parallel investigation of crimes, judging the sub judice and posing as sovereign by perennially endorsing the logic of self-regulation, tries to appropriate the functions, image and rhetoric of the state institutions (the executive, the judiciary and the legislature). The article primarily explores the quasi-executive functions to understand the role of a seemingly autonomous public in Indian democracy. The increasing tussle that we are witnessing between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, the article argues, is to a large extent due to Media’s claim to represent the public more effectively than any state institution, pushing “pillars of democracy” to fight with each other for their share of credit in serving the public.
{"title":"Spectacle of democracy: the quasi-executive functions of television news in India","authors":"A. Roy","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2209438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2209438","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article calls for enhancing the horizon of Political Communication Studies, drawing attention to certain relation between the media, the state and the public in a globalised world. Focusing on private mainstream news television in post-liberalisation India, it tries to show how Media, in its singularised popular sense of sensationalising news, generating live-stream of public opinion, conducting parallel investigation of crimes, judging the sub judice and posing as sovereign by perennially endorsing the logic of self-regulation, tries to appropriate the functions, image and rhetoric of the state institutions (the executive, the judiciary and the legislature). The article primarily explores the quasi-executive functions to understand the role of a seemingly autonomous public in Indian democracy. The increasing tussle that we are witnessing between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, the article argues, is to a large extent due to Media’s claim to represent the public more effectively than any state institution, pushing “pillars of democracy” to fight with each other for their share of credit in serving the public.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46507954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209434
John Hutnyk
ABSTRACT The Bengali new wave cinema of the 1960s and 1970s addressed historically important world events through an aesthetic inspired by Marxism and long-standing anti-colonial traditions dating to the middle nineteenth century. At the same time, an aesthetic derived from folk and artistic traditions was embraced as a cultural style in the middle twentieth century by local Marxist progressive theatre and writers’ associations. In 1968, the Bengali film director Ritwik Ghatak published a short speculation for the Bengal Youth Festival explaining the scenario for “A Film I want to make about Vietnam.” The film was not made, but the imagined detail is very much in the style of the Bengali new wave. Also important—and made, so we can see it—is Satyajit Ray’s short film “on” Vietnam, Two: A Film Fable (1964). The two films express, in different ways, the enthusiasm among Bengali intellectuals for Vietnam at the time when revolutionary youth solidarity with the anti-imperialist struggle was strong. What were Ghatak and Ray thinking with these films “on” Vietnam? Can they tell us anything of the times, the engaged role of film, the director as intellectual agitator, the politics of solidarity from afar? By evaluating the reception of historically focussed film from the perspective of the Bengali New Wave, I show how that cinema’s fascination with Vietnam evokes both much older folk traditions, yet now leads to a more worrying contemporary coda with the adaptation in 2019 of the old slogan by the Hindutva right to include Jai Ram.
{"title":"Tomar naam, amar naam, Vietnam Vietnam! Folk styles and solidarity in the Bengali new wave cinema","authors":"John Hutnyk","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2209434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2209434","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Bengali new wave cinema of the 1960s and 1970s addressed historically important world events through an aesthetic inspired by Marxism and long-standing anti-colonial traditions dating to the middle nineteenth century. At the same time, an aesthetic derived from folk and artistic traditions was embraced as a cultural style in the middle twentieth century by local Marxist progressive theatre and writers’ associations. In 1968, the Bengali film director Ritwik Ghatak published a short speculation for the Bengal Youth Festival explaining the scenario for “A Film I want to make about Vietnam.” The film was not made, but the imagined detail is very much in the style of the Bengali new wave. Also important—and made, so we can see it—is Satyajit Ray’s short film “on” Vietnam, Two: A Film Fable (1964). The two films express, in different ways, the enthusiasm among Bengali intellectuals for Vietnam at the time when revolutionary youth solidarity with the anti-imperialist struggle was strong. What were Ghatak and Ray thinking with these films “on” Vietnam? Can they tell us anything of the times, the engaged role of film, the director as intellectual agitator, the politics of solidarity from afar? By evaluating the reception of historically focussed film from the perspective of the Bengali New Wave, I show how that cinema’s fascination with Vietnam evokes both much older folk traditions, yet now leads to a more worrying contemporary coda with the adaptation in 2019 of the old slogan by the Hindutva right to include Jai Ram.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47588889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209423
Yuqi Na, N. Pun
ABSTRACT Ideology works. This article examines how the Internet as a capital actor has become a nationalist ideology in China. Disclosing how nationalism serves to facilitate the expansion of China-based Internet platforms in the age of informational capitalism, we directly confront the Chinese Internet as an ideology apparatus that works to fulfill a dual logic of capital and territorial power. This article contributes to the study of three types of Chinese Internet workers: programmers, white-collar employees (excluding programmers), and assembly-line workers, and focuses on how nationalist discourses are created, which enthrall but at the same time are questioned by different workers who help fabricate nationalism as well as challenge it. We conceptualize topos of threat and referential strategy of collectivization as cultural and media tactics, driven by the nationalistic sentiments that form part of the “common sense” of Chinese users. We further analyze the multiple subject positions of Chinese Internet workers into hegemonic position, negotiated position, and oppositional position to discover the complexity of labor subjectivity which may create discrepancy or sometimes even challenge the Chinese Internet as an ideology. This study sheds light on how subject positions could disrupt a homogenous process of merging nationalism with populist sentiments, a conservative ideology that is prevalent in today’s China.
{"title":"Internet as an ideology: nationalistic discourses, and multiple subject positions of Chinese internet workers","authors":"Yuqi Na, N. Pun","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2209423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2209423","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Ideology works. This article examines how the Internet as a capital actor has become a nationalist ideology in China. Disclosing how nationalism serves to facilitate the expansion of China-based Internet platforms in the age of informational capitalism, we directly confront the Chinese Internet as an ideology apparatus that works to fulfill a dual logic of capital and territorial power. This article contributes to the study of three types of Chinese Internet workers: programmers, white-collar employees (excluding programmers), and assembly-line workers, and focuses on how nationalist discourses are created, which enthrall but at the same time are questioned by different workers who help fabricate nationalism as well as challenge it. We conceptualize topos of threat and referential strategy of collectivization as cultural and media tactics, driven by the nationalistic sentiments that form part of the “common sense” of Chinese users. We further analyze the multiple subject positions of Chinese Internet workers into hegemonic position, negotiated position, and oppositional position to discover the complexity of labor subjectivity which may create discrepancy or sometimes even challenge the Chinese Internet as an ideology. This study sheds light on how subject positions could disrupt a homogenous process of merging nationalism with populist sentiments, a conservative ideology that is prevalent in today’s China.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46858265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209437
Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis
ABSTRACT This essay problematises representations of Indian women on the SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) platforms. The oft-invoked image of Indian woman as the repository of traditional values and feminine virtues has undergone a phenomenal transformation in recent years owing to several factors such as economic liberalisation, globalisation and technological revolution. Female characters in most of the SVOD contents are often depicted as independent, agentic and empowered. Nevertheless, the nature of empowerment that these contents uphold is highly controversial from a feminist standpoint. Employing critique of postfeminism as an analytical tool, this paper argues that the representation of Indian women on SVOD platforms as empowered subjects is an outcome of a negotiation between postfeminism, patriarchy and neoliberal culture of consumption.
{"title":"Empowered, thy name is woman: lite feminism and Hindi SVOD platforms in India","authors":"Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2209437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2209437","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay problematises representations of Indian women on the SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) platforms. The oft-invoked image of Indian woman as the repository of traditional values and feminine virtues has undergone a phenomenal transformation in recent years owing to several factors such as economic liberalisation, globalisation and technological revolution. Female characters in most of the SVOD contents are often depicted as independent, agentic and empowered. Nevertheless, the nature of empowerment that these contents uphold is highly controversial from a feminist standpoint. Employing critique of postfeminism as an analytical tool, this paper argues that the representation of Indian women on SVOD platforms as empowered subjects is an outcome of a negotiation between postfeminism, patriarchy and neoliberal culture of consumption.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42897167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209427
Jessica Ka Yee Chan
ABSTRACT Based on the life story of the Hong Kong film producer, Roger Lee, A Simple Life/Taojie (Ann Hui [2011] 2012) is a semi-fictional biographical film about the life of Taojie, an amah (Cantonese migrant domestic servant) who served three generations of Lee's family for more than sixty years. The intervention of this essay is two-fold. First, this essay situates A Simple Life in the burgeoning but understudied journalistic and documentary discourse on aging as a postcolonial condition in Hong Kong since the 2010s. An intertextuality between the film and its adjacent media productions, such as journalistic reportage and TV documentaries, reveals the social anxiety about the lack of holistic and accessible elderly care in Hong Kong's medical and social welfare system and the profit-driven nursing home industry. Second, this essay argues that A Simple Life responds to the postcolonial anxiety of old age by articulating an intergenerational kinship through Roger Lee and Taojjie, a diasporic Asian icon of amah that is localized, nationalized, internationalized under the framework of CEPA (Hong Kong and Mainland Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement). Multiple imaginaries of home, family, and community—Roger Lee's home, a local nursing home, Roger Lee's transnational family, and a new Hong Kong–Mainland cinematic community—co-exist in this film as interconnected and interdependent sites of care, demonstrating how a postcolonial, national, and transnational sense of home and belonging are simultaneously articulated under the framework of CEPA.
{"title":"Postcolonial aging, amah, and diaspora in A Simple Life","authors":"Jessica Ka Yee Chan","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2209427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2209427","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Based on the life story of the Hong Kong film producer, Roger Lee, A Simple Life/Taojie (Ann Hui [2011] 2012) is a semi-fictional biographical film about the life of Taojie, an amah (Cantonese migrant domestic servant) who served three generations of Lee's family for more than sixty years. The intervention of this essay is two-fold. First, this essay situates A Simple Life in the burgeoning but understudied journalistic and documentary discourse on aging as a postcolonial condition in Hong Kong since the 2010s. An intertextuality between the film and its adjacent media productions, such as journalistic reportage and TV documentaries, reveals the social anxiety about the lack of holistic and accessible elderly care in Hong Kong's medical and social welfare system and the profit-driven nursing home industry. Second, this essay argues that A Simple Life responds to the postcolonial anxiety of old age by articulating an intergenerational kinship through Roger Lee and Taojjie, a diasporic Asian icon of amah that is localized, nationalized, internationalized under the framework of CEPA (Hong Kong and Mainland Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement). Multiple imaginaries of home, family, and community—Roger Lee's home, a local nursing home, Roger Lee's transnational family, and a new Hong Kong–Mainland cinematic community—co-exist in this film as interconnected and interdependent sites of care, demonstrating how a postcolonial, national, and transnational sense of home and belonging are simultaneously articulated under the framework of CEPA.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43732765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209436
Dattatreya Ghosh
ABSTRACT The lack of archival materials and objects appears as a primary challenge in conducting research on the history of media and communications in India, specifically while writing a comprehensive historical account of Bengali cinema. This paper will try to look at video halls and video tapes as the transient media spaces and objects. In the case of West Bengal, video tapes and video halls are an important part of media history about which little has been written or researched. This paper will try to look into the process of writing media history of scarcely archived media forms following the method of media archaeology and question how the method becomes important in cases of absence of archival materials. This paper will also try to enquire how media ethnography unfolds a different narrative of media history which is otherwise absent in the material archives or institutional records. Using the theoretical framework of the study of archives, this paper tries to explore new archives which present a different history of intermedia transactions in the history of Bengali cinema.
{"title":"Tracing the rise of video halls and transient media forms in Bengal: an archaeology of the non-archived","authors":"Dattatreya Ghosh","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2209436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2209436","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The lack of archival materials and objects appears as a primary challenge in conducting research on the history of media and communications in India, specifically while writing a comprehensive historical account of Bengali cinema. This paper will try to look at video halls and video tapes as the transient media spaces and objects. In the case of West Bengal, video tapes and video halls are an important part of media history about which little has been written or researched. This paper will try to look into the process of writing media history of scarcely archived media forms following the method of media archaeology and question how the method becomes important in cases of absence of archival materials. This paper will also try to enquire how media ethnography unfolds a different narrative of media history which is otherwise absent in the material archives or institutional records. Using the theoretical framework of the study of archives, this paper tries to explore new archives which present a different history of intermedia transactions in the history of Bengali cinema.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42258993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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