Channeling cultures : television studies from India /
edited by Biswarup Sen, Abhijit Roy.
- First edition.
- xix, 322 pages ; 23 cm
CONTENTS: Introduction / Biswarup Sen and Abhijit Roy -- TV after television studies: recasting questions of audiovisual form / Abhijit Roy -- Televisual temporalities and the affective organization of everyday life / Purnima Mankekar -- Television, narrative identity, and social imaginaries: a hermeneutic approach / Sanjay Asthana -- Spaces of television: rethinking the public/private divide in postcolonial India / Shanti Kumar -- From clients to consumers: the missing citizens among the Indian television audience / Dipankar Sinha -- Television news and an Indian infotainment sphere / Daya Kishan Thussu -- When live news was too dangerous: the early history of satellite TV in India / Nalin Mehta -- NDTV 24x7 remix: Mohammad Afzal guru frame by frame / John Hutnyk -- Big brother, bigg boss: reality television as global form / Biswarup Sen -- The saffron hues of gender and agency on Indian television / Santanu Chakrabarti -- Sange Thakun: Bangla news channels and media-citizenry / Nilanjana Gupta -- Tears, talk, and play: a window to gender and sexuality on Tamil television / Uma Vangal -- Afterword / by Arvind Rajagopal.
Channelling Cultures: Television Studies from India is a seminal collection of essays on regional, national and global itineraries of Indian television in the twenty- first century. At a time when the television landscape in India is undergoing a second wave of change with compulsory digitization, new interactivity and convergence, unforeseen forms of televisual publicness and renewed debates on self-censorship, media ethics and the code of content, the essays in the volume seek to provoke a fresh understanding of television as a crucial player in Indian culture and politics. Featuring work by leading experts in the field, it locates the study of television within the myriad histories of the nation as well as various trajectories in global culture and politics. With a special focus on the genres of news, reality TV and soap opera, it addresses issues such as postcoloniality, citizenship, democracy, development, globalization, consumerism, liveness, affect, and gender. The volume demonstrates that Indian television provides an indispensable context for interrogating and critically engaging with the standard assumptions of television studies and more broadly global media studies.