Aswin Punathambekar

Sriram Mohan

Digital media histories are part of a global network, and South Asia is a key nexus in shaping the trajectory of digital media in the twenty-first century. Digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and others are deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, shaping how people engage with others as kin, as citizens, and as consumers. Moving away from Anglo-American and strictly national frameworks, the essays in this book explore the intersections of local, national, regional, and global forces that shape contemporary digital culture(s) in regions like South Asia: the rise of digital and mobile media technologies, the ongoing transformation of established media industries, and emergent forms of digital media practice and use that are reconfiguring sociocultural, political, and economic terrains across the Indian subcontinent. From massive state-driven digital identity projects and YouTube censorship to Tinder and dating culture, from Twitter and primetime television to Facebook and political rumors, Global Digital Cultures focuses on enduring concerns of representation, identity, and power while grappling with algorithmic curation and data-driven processes of production, circulation, and consumption.

Perspectives from South Asia

Global Digital Cultures

Amanda D. Lotz

Daniel Herbert

The study of media industries has become a thriving subfield of media studies. It already comprises a diverse intellectual history, a range of fascinating questions and topics, and many theoretical and methodological frameworks. Media Industry Studies provides the roadmap to this vibrant area of study. Blending a comprehensive overview of foundational literature with an examination of the varied scales and sites media industry studies have considered, the book explores connections among research questions, topics, and methodologies. It includes examples from many media industries – film, television, journalism, music, games – and incorporates emerging scholarship considering the industrial contexts of social and internet-distributed media. Offering an account of the intellectual traditions and approaches that have defined the subfield to date, Media Industry Studies is an indispensable resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars.

Media Industry Studies

Anandam P. Kavoori

Table of contents: The Bollywoodization of the Indian cinema: cultural nationalism in a global arena / Ashish Rajadhyaksha -- Surviving Bollywood / M. Madhava Prasad -- Mumbai versus Bollywood: the Hindi film industry and the politics of cultural heritage in contemporary India / Tejaswini Ganti -- Hollywood, Bollywood, Tollywood: redefining the global in Indian cinema / Shanti Kumar -- The globalization of Bollywood-the hype and hope / Daya Kishan Thussu -- Our violence, their violence: exploring the emotional and relational matrix of terrorist cinema / Vamsee Juluri -- Exoticized, marginalized, demonized: the Muslim other in Indian cinema / Kalyani Chadha and Anandam P. Kavoori -- The mirror has many faces: the politics of male same-sex desire in BOMgAY and Gulabi Aaina / Parmesh Shahani -- Bring back the old films, our culture is in disrepute: Hindi film and the construction of femininity in Guyana / Atticus Narain -- From villain to traditional housewife!: the politics of globalization and women's sexuality in the new Indian media / Padma Govindan and Bisakha Dutta -- Songs from the heart: musical coding, emotional sentiment, and transnational Sonic identity in India's popular film music / Natalie Sarazzin -- Deewar/Wall (1975)-fact, fiction, and the making of a superstar / Jyotika Virdi -- The Indian film magazine, Stardust / Rachel Dwyer -- Bollyweb: search for Bollywood on the web and see what happens! / Ananda Mitra -- We're online, not on the streets: Indian cinema, new media, and participatory culture / Aswin Punathambekar -- Afterword: fast-forwarding into the future, haunted by the past: Bollywood today / Arvind Rajagopal.

Global Bollywood

From Bombay to Bollywood analyzes the transformation of the national film industry in Bombay into a transnational and multi-media cultural enterprise, which has come to be known as Bollywood. Combining ethnographic, institutional, and textual analyses, Aswin Punathambekar explores how relations between state institutions, the Indian diaspora, circuits of capital, and new media technologies and industries have reconfigured the Bombay-based industry’s geographic reach. Providing in-depth accounts of the workings of media companies and media professionals, Punathambekar has produced a timely analysis of how a media industry in the postcolonial world has come to claim the global as its scale of operations. Based on extensive field research in India and the U.S., this book offers empirically-rich and theoretically-informed analyses of how the imaginations and practices of industry professionals give shape to the media worlds we inhabit and engage with. Moving beyond a focus on a single medium, Punathambekar develops a comparative and integrated approach that examines four different but interrelated media industries--film, television, marketing, and digital media. Offering a path-breaking account of media convergence in a non-Western context, Punathambekar’s transnational approach to understanding the formation of Bollywood is an innovative intervention into current debates on media industries, production cultures, and cultural globalization.

Aswin Punathambekar

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