The last two decades have witnessed a notable proliferation of media industries producing low-budget digital films and music videos. These media industries routinely stage a confrontation between modernity and a fantasy of pure cultural traditions. The bulk of their content deploys the male star as an extraordinary crossover figure – the only one capable of bringing modernity and its vernacular outsides on the negotiating table. Drawing upon the trajectory of Bhojpuri media industry – referring to the language spoken in parts of eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar – this paper discusses, via Bruno Latour, the fundamental discord at the heart of modernity. I argue that the libidinal economy has emerged as a narrative simplification of the purifying imperative of modernity, haunted as it is by the concurrent hybridizing force-field.
Beginning with the mid-1990s when a visual opulence saturated in color and light appeared on the Hindi film screen, a battle between visuality and performativity ensued so as to regulate the star-body while retaining its ability to withstand different orders of investable capital. This article argues that the multiplex economy made multiple tiers of stardom possible so as to shift Hindi cinema away from the high-risk industry that revolved around major stars featuring in action melodramas. The animated visuality—a result of cinematographic and editorial intensifications—was then devised to regulate minor stars' appeal within emerging genre films. Engaging with the resultant configurations of form, style, sovereign representation, and masculinity, this article maps the analytical trajectory of mise-en-scène, performativity, and stardom in Hindi cinema. In the end, it highlights the agitated restlessness of contemporary Hindi film form as a symptom of its inability to find a stable formal dwelling. Instead of doing formal analysis alone, this article then aspires to bring the formal, technological, economic, and political imperatives together in the analytics of Hindi cinema.
The 'great integration' of disparate economic sectors by 'Big Tech' has been fuelled by the massive expansion of mobile infrastructure, especially in developing countries, and the systemic enclosure of users within multi-sided marketplaces operating under the euphemism of 'platform ecosystems'. Taking the case study of India's 'national champion' Reliance Jio, this article considers the ways in which India's leading 'corporate' has deployed the 'ecosystem' blueprint and adopted the strategic role of the oligopolistic megacorp in India's digital economy. It has done so, seemingly, without adopting the institutional form upon which Eichner's founding proposition rests. Consequently, we argue that the separation of ownership and management as per the North American corporate form is not fundamental to the status, function or strategy of a conglomerate oligopoly. Rather, we propose that the megacorps of the digital age have an arisen as an inevitable consequence of market hierarchies in the digital economy, and that the key institutional factor in the consolidation of their market power is the licence of the state.
Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of figures -- Prologue -- Notes on contributors -- Part I Cultural studies and Indian context -- 1 Culture and English studies in India -- 2 The return of the silenced oral: culture and study in our time -- Part II Cultural studies and literary studies -- 3 The relevance of classical Indian aesthetics for contemporary culture studies -- 4 Popular culture studies in India today: issues and problems -- 5 Postcolonial cultural studies at the crossroads: theoretical approaches and practical realities -- 6 Dalit autobiographies in the Punjabi context -- Part III Cultural history and local traditions -- 7 Indianness: a battlefield -- 8 Cultural studies in Indian history: dominant models from South Asia -- 9 History, historiography and Punjabi folk literature: issues of canons and cultures -- 10 Uses of the folk: cultural historical practice and the Guga tradition -- Part IV Cultural politics and mass media -- 11 (In)visible publics: television and participatory culture in India -- 12 Transformative energy of performance: 'Budhan Theatre' as case study -- 13 Reinvention and appropriation of the folk in Daler Mehndi's pop videos -- 14 Subverting the male gaze: a case study of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara -- Part V Cultural imagination and new identities -- 15 New cultures of remembering: the Indian memory project -- 16 Romantic imagination: science and empire in the works of Amitav Ghosh -- 17 Cultural economy of leisure and the Indian Premier League -- Index
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