About the book
This volume features the writings of leading media scholars from South Asia and Europe on the topic of how media articulates political energies and transformational logics. The research traverses the press, newsreels, entertainment cinema, photography, television, music, social media and data-driven politics. The authors consider how media industries, institutions and practices constitute sites where conflicts relating to wider social change are observable. Authors address media materiality and aesthetics in tracking political effects and resonances on subjects such as wire photo transfers, film set design, the formal structures of the newsreel, the role of television audience surveys, the relationship between digital and paper records, the place of media in courts of law and the phenomenon of the media trial. The overall approach in understanding media and the political is not only to access formal institutions, both of media and politics but also to expand perspective to trace the wider dispersed appearance of the political in and through media.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction Ravi Vasudevan
PART I A Mediatized Territoriality
Films in the Diplomatic Bag: Sovereignty, Censorship and the Foreign Mission Film in East Pakistan and Bangladesh Lotte Hoek
East German Media in a Changing Society: Press, Music Culture and Regional Identity after 1990 Frank Bösch
Configurations of Partition: The Indian Newsreel Archive in the 1940s Ravi Vasudevan
PART II Infrastructures and Ecologies
Political Photography in the 20th Century Annette Vowinckel
Courting the Amateur Photographer: The Contested Worlds of Advertising in Mid-century India Sabeena Gadihoke
The Cinematic Map of the Bombay Slum Ranjani Mazumdar
PART III Media Publics
Television Viewers and Feminism in 1970s’ North America: How All in the Family Drove Value Change Christina Von Hodenberg
Fandom and Performative Political Regimes S. V. Srinivas
The Affective Surplus of Judicial Populism: Law, Media and Mimicry Lawrence Liang
PART IV Digital politics
The Fringe as Media Infrastructure Ravi Sundaram
Target Politics: Digital and Data technologies and Election Campaigns—A View from India Srirupa Roy
Index
Editor
Ravi Vasudevan is Professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), and works in the area of film and media history. With Ravi Sundaram, he directs Sarai, the CSDS media research programme, and with Srirupa Roy, the thematic module on media for the International Centre for Advanced Studies: Metamorphoses of the Political (ICAS:MP). His publications include Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (2000), The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (2010) and Documentary Now (Marg special issue 2018). He is the founding editor of the screen studies journal BioScope. His current research is on the documentary film archive and the writing of history.
