Consuming Modernity

Consuming Modernity PDF Author: Carol Appadurai Breckenridge
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816623068
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The book aims to illustrate that what is distinctive about any particular society is not the fact of its modernity, but rather its own unique debates about modernity. Behind the embattled arena of culture in India, for example, lie particular social and political interests such as the growing middle class, the entrepreneurs and commercial institutions, and the state. The contributors address the roles of these various intertwined interests in the making of India's public culture, each examining different sites of consumption. The sites which are explored include cinema, radio, cricket, restaurants and tourism. The book also makes distinct the differences among public, mass and popular culture.

Consuming Modernity

Consuming Modernity PDF Author: Carol Appadurai Breckenridge
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816623068
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
The book aims to illustrate that what is distinctive about any particular society is not the fact of its modernity, but rather its own unique debates about modernity. Behind the embattled arena of culture in India, for example, lie particular social and political interests such as the growing middle class, the entrepreneurs and commercial institutions, and the state. The contributors address the roles of these various intertwined interests in the making of India's public culture, each examining different sites of consumption. The sites which are explored include cinema, radio, cricket, restaurants and tourism. The book also makes distinct the differences among public, mass and popular culture.

Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India

Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India PDF Author: Sara Dickey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521040075
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This study of the Indian cinema is concerned particularly with cinema-goers in Madurai, a city in Tamil Nadu, South India. Sara Dickey reviews the history of Tamil film, explains the structure of the industry, and presents the perspective of the filmmakers. However, the core of the book is an analysis of the films themselves and the place they have in the lives of poor people, who organize fan clubs, discuss the films and the actors, and in various ways relate these fantasy worlds to their own lives. Dickey argues that the effect of these films is ultimately conservative, for they glorify poverty while holding out the hope of a better future. Her rich ethnography makes an interesting contribution to the study of film in India and, more generally, to the understanding of popular culture in an Indian city.

Popular Cinema and Politics in South India

Popular Cinema and Politics in South India PDF Author: S. Rajanayagam
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317587731
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
This work breaks new ground in the understanding of South Indian cinema and politics. Through incisive analysis and original concepts it illustrates the private, public and cinematic personas of MGR and Rajinikanth. It challenges the popular and scholarly myths surrounding them and shows the constant negotiation of their on-screen and off-screen identities. The book revisits the entire political history of post-Independent Tamil Nadu through its cinema,and presents a refreshing psycho-political and cultural map of contemporary South India. This absorbing volume will be an important read for scholars, teachers and students of film studies, culture and media studies, and politics, especially those interested in South India.

A Companion to Indian Cinema

A Companion to Indian Cinema PDF Author: Neepa Majumdar
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119048265
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description
A new collection in the Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas series, featuring the cinemas of India In A Companion to Indian Cinema, film scholars Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar along with 25 established and emerging scholars, deliver new research on contemporary and historical questions on Indian cinema. The collection considers Indian cinema's widespread presence both within and outside the country, and pays particular attention to regional cinemas such as Bhojpuri, Bengali, Malayalam, Manipuri, and Marathi. The volume also reflects on the changing dimensions of technology, aesthetics, and the archival impulse of film. The editors have included scholarship that discusses a range of films and film experiences that include commercial cinema, art cinema, and non-fiction film. Even as scholarship on earlier decades of Indian cinema is challenged by the absence of documentation and films, the innovative archival and field work in this Companion extends from cinema in early twentieth century India to a historicized engagement with new technologies and contemporary cinematic practices. There is a focus on production cultures and circulation, material cultures, media aesthetics, censorship, stardom, non-fiction practices, new technologies, and the transnational networks relevant to Indian cinema. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students of film and media studies, South Asian studies, and history, A Companion to Indian Cinema is also an important new resource for scholars with an interest in the context and theoretical framework for the study of India's moving image cultures.

Anthropology & Mass Communication

Anthropology & Mass Communication PDF Author: Mark Allen Peterson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571812780
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Anthropological interest in mass communication and media has exploded in the last two decades, engaging and challenging the work on the media in mass communications, cultural studies, sociology and other disciplines. This is the first book to offer a systematic overview of the themes, topics and methodologies in the emerging dialogue between anthropologists studying mass communication and media analysts turning to ethnography and cultural analysis. Drawing on dozens of semiotic, ethnographic and cross-cultural studies of mass media, it offers new insights into the analysis of media texts, offers models for the ethnographic study of media productio and consumption, and suggests approaches for understanding media in the modern world system. Placing the anthropological study of mass media into historical and interdisciplinary perspectives, this book examines how work in cultural studies, sociology, mass communication and other disciplines has helped shape the re-emerging interest in media by anthropologists. A former Washington D.C. journalist, Mark Allan Peterson is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He has published numerous articles on American, South Asian and Middle Eastern media, and has taught courses on anthropological approaches to media t at he American University in Cairo, the University of Hamburg, and Georgetown University.

Cinema India

Cinema India PDF Author: Rachel Dwyer
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813531755
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
"The unique style of this cinema is explored through an analysis of the mise-en-scene of the film itself - the locations, sets and costumes - and shows how they, along with the song and dance sequences, construct the 'look' and meaning of a film. Equally important to India's visual culture is publicity. Cinema India explores the development of film advertising and its range of aesthetic influences, from indigenous sources, for example, the Ajanta cave paintings, to foreign styles, such as Art Deco, and examines how publicity material is able to convey social, political and economic information about the society in which it is produced."--BOOK JACKET.

Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas

Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas PDF Author: K. Moti Gokulsing
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113677291X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 741

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Book Description
India is the largest film producing country in the world and its output has a global reach. After years of marginalisation by academics in the Western world, Indian cinemas have moved from the periphery to the centre of the world cinema in a comparatively short space of time. Bringing together contributions from leading scholars in the field, this Handbook looks at the complex reasons for this remarkable journey. Combining a historical and thematic approach, the Handbook discusses how Indian cinemas need to be understood in their historical unfolding as well as their complex relationships to social, economic, cultural, political, ideological, aesthetic, technical and institutional discourses. The thematic section provides an up-to-date critical narrative on diverse topics such as audience, censorship, film distribution, film industry, diaspora, sexuality, film music and nationalism. The Handbook provides a comprehensive and cutting edge survey of Indian cinemas, discussing Popular, Parallel/New Wave and Regional cinemas as well as the spectacular rise of Bollywood. It is an invaluable resource for students and academics of South Asian Studies, Film Studies and Cultural Studies.

Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity

Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity PDF Author: Zakir Hossain Raju
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317601815
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cinema has been adopted as a popular cultural institution in Bangladesh. At the same time, this has been the period for the articulation of modern nationhood and cultural identity of Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh. This book analyses the relationship between cinema and modernity in Bangladesh, providing a narrative of the uneven process that produced the idea of "Bangladesh cinema." This book investigates the roles of a non-Western "national" film industry in Asia in constructing nationhood and identity within colonial and postcolonial predicaments. Drawing on the idea of cinema as public sphere and the postcolonial notion of formation of the "Bangladesh" nation, interactions between cinema and middle-class Bengali Muslims in different social and political matrices are analyzed. The author explores how the conflict among different social groups turned Bangladesh cinema into a site of contesting identities. In particular, he illustrates the connections between film production and reception in Bangladesh and a variety of nationalist constructions of Bengali Muslim identity. Questioning and debunking the usual notions of "Bangladesh" and "cinema," this book positions the cinema of Bangladesh within a transnational frame. Starting with how to locate the "beginning" of the second Bengali language cinema in colonial Bengal, the author completes the investigation by identifying a global Bangladeshi cinema in the early twenty-first century. The first major academic study on this large and vibrant national cinema, this book demonstrates that Bangladesh cinema worked as different "public spheres" for different "publics" throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Filling a niche in Global Film and Media Studies and South Asian Studies, it will be of interest to scholars and students of these disciplines.

Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema

Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema PDF Author: Prem Chowdhry
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719057250
Category : Colonies
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
An empirico-historical inquiry into the empire cinema in Hollywood and Britain during the turbulent 1930s and 1940s. It shows how the empire cinema constructed the colonial world, its rationale for doing so, and the manner in which such constructions were received by the colonized people.

Cinema, Transnationalism, and Colonial India

Cinema, Transnationalism, and Colonial India PDF Author: Babli Sinha
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136765077
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Through the lens of cinema, this book explores the ways in which the United States, Britain and India impacted each other politically, culturally and ideologically. It argues that American films of the 1920s posited alternative notions of whiteness and the West to that of Britain, which stood for democracy and social mobility even at a time of virulent racism. The book examines the impact that the American cinema has on Indian filmmakers of the period, who were integrating its conventions with indigenous artistic traditions to articulate an Indian modernity. It considers the way American films in the 1920s presented an orientalist fantasy of Asia, which occluded the harsh realities of anti-Asian sentiment and legislation in the period as well as the exciting engagement of anti-imperial activists who sought to use the United States as the base of a transnational network. The book goes on to analyse the American ‘empire films’ of the 1930s, which adapted British narratives of empire to represent the United States as a new global paradigm. Presenting close readings of films, literature and art from the era, the book engages cinema studies with theories of post-colonialism and transnationalism, and provides a novel approach to the study of Indian cinema.