Global South Asia on Screen

by John Hutnyk

Overview

With importance for geopolitical cultural economy, anthropology, and media studies, John Hutnyk brings South Asian circuits of scholarship to attention where, alongside critical Marxist and poststructuralist authors, a new take on film and television is on offer.

The book presents Raj-era costume dramas as a commentary on contemporary anti-Muslim racism, a new political compact in film and television studies, and the President watching a snuff film from Pakistan. Hanif Kureishi's postcolonial 'fuck Sandwich' sits alongside Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, updated for the war on terror with low-brow, high-brow versions of Asia that carry us up the Himalayas with magic carpet TV nostalgia. Maoists rage below and books go up in flames while News network phone-ins end with executions on the Hanging Channel and arms trade and immigration paranoia thrives. Multiplying filmi versions of Mela are measured against a transnational realignment towards Global South Asia in a contested and testing political future.

Each chapter offers a slice of historical study and assessment of media theory appropriate for viewers of Global South Asia seeking to understand why lurid exoticism and paralysing terror go hand-in-hand. The answers are in the images always open to interpretation, but Global South Asia on Screen examines the ways film and TV trade on stereotype and fear, nationalism and desire, politics and context, and with this the book calls for wider reading than media theory has hitherto entertained.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501324963
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/14/2018
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

John Hutnyk currently holds posts at both National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan and RMIT University, Australia. Hutnyk is the author of The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation (1996), Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industry (2000); Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies (2004); Pantomime Terror: Music and Politics (2014); and co-authored with Virinder Kalra and Raminder Kaur: Diaspora and Hybridity (2005).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Snuff Movie
Chapter 1: Sexy Sammy and Red Rosie
Chapter 2: Panoramas of the Electronic Hearth
Chapter 3: The Hanging Channel
Chapter 4: Mela: Two Augusts
Conclusion: Global South
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Hutnyk has written a book that keeps faith with the project of radical critique. Paying careful attention to relations between semiotic detail and socio-political context, he traverses a complex body of cultural production and cultural theory too often consigned to the margins. Global South Asia on Screen tests every term in its title, working through an array of films, TV series and other media with a forensic eye that disconcerts and excites. Hutnyk's book challenges us to understand the reverb of colonial pasts and postcolonial critiques in networked, politically-narrowed presents" --Scott McQuire, Professor of Media and Communications, University of Melbourne, Australia

"Exploring the materiality of the visual - and the visuality of the material - this book resolutely refuses to sequester and segregate street politics and cinematic blockbusters, book-burning and mobile-borders, exoticism and identity, consumer capital and convivial desires. It articulates instead the coming together and falling apart of these sedimented yet shifting terrains. Hutnyk makes a critical case, thereby, for the possibilities and problems of a reinvigorated Global South Asia, screened and unscreened." --Saurabh Dube, Research Professor of History, CEAA, El Colegio de México, Mexico

"Hutnyk's critical film analysis is thrilling and full of original insight. It convincingly ties together careful examinations of contents and styles of films, considerations of political contexts, reflections on the social positions of filmmakers, and the argumentative effects unfolding in a landscape of convergent media. By painting a sharp image of how film, politics, economy and cultural reproduction are entangled, Hutnyk produces a framework for an engaged postcolonial media theory. As an exercise in critical pedagogy, the book also forces us to pay attention to our own position as media practitioners and consider the power of viewing habits and interpretative reflexes for stabilizing or destabilizing hegemonic regimes." --Ursula Rao, Professor of Anthropology, University of Leipzig, Germany

"Scurrilous, profound, overflowing with life - global cultural studies at its best." --Michael Taussig, Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, USA

From the Publisher