[Commlist] Call for chapter proposals on Celebrity Politics

Call for chapter proposals

Title: Mediated Cultures, Political Discourses, and the Celebrity: 
 Perspectives from India


Edited by Swapna Gopinath, Ramna Walia, and Rutuja Deshmukh

Email: (celebritypoliticscfp /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(celebritypoliticscfp /at/ gmail.com)>


The new millennium has witnessed radical transformations in the 
political, economic and cultural ecosystems in India, with a distinct 
paradigm shift towards a neoliberal normative system. This shift has 
altered the sensibilities of the Indian citizen and one witnesses this 
in the cultural practices and texts, cinema being the most popular and 
influential among them. Cinema, in its production, circulation and 
reception has evolved, corresponding to these changes as well as the 
massive changes in the communication networks, SVOD platforms and 
similar digital spaces invading the homes of the citizens. Film icons 
are no longer superheroes confined to the theaters and film magazines, 
they are omnipresent, compressed into the spaces of mobile screens and 
spread out to humongous proportions on the huge interactive screens on 
the streets. Film celebrities in India, especially South India, have 
successfully emerged as political leaders, successfully contesting in 
elections and establishing themselves as political icons. MGR, 
Jayalalitha, NTR – are some of the names to be mentioned in this 
context. Their screen persona helped them in transitioning themselves 
into active politics. They expressed their political identity with 
clarity and proved capable of political leadership. Contemporary India 
functions differently, with the political leaders using social media 
platforms and other digital media spaces to assert their presence and to 
propagate their agenda and identity.

In the global mediascape, the intersection between film celebrities, 
media, and politics in film industries like Hollywood has led to 
generative accounts of an ongoing “culture war.” Digital media’s 
propensity to share, connect, and disseminate images at a mind-numbing 
speed has led to the commodification of the public sphere where the 
world of politics, citizenry, and entertainment converge.  In India, 
political figures like Narendra Modi have become celebrities, with 
global social media visibility, while film celebrities publicly engage 
in political narratives of resistance or endorsements. Political 
narratives on governance, war, and history have become staple genres in 
both textual and extratextual sites.

This volume will explore the mobilization of the figure of the film 
celebrity in the last two decades through hagiographies, implicit and 
allegorical plot lines on state policies and ideological rhetoric that 
present the complex confluence of patronage and security on the one 
hand, and narratives of protest emerging out of Dalit and Adivasi 
cinemas on the other. By studying this coupling of celebrity and 
politics in its regional cinemas, seemingly incommensurate accounts 
emerge out of the excesses of cinema. In the global capitalist circuits 
of production and consumption of celebrity image and branding, Indian 
film stars have restructured their public image to suit these circuits. 
We aim to bring forth film celebrity branding and its connectedness to 
the nationalist discourse and hyperconnected global economy.

The text will use a mixed methods approach, with chapters exploring the 
concept both qualitatively and quantitatively. Celebrities emerging as 
political personae with their mediated presence in the public sphere, 
both online and offline will be studied in depth, not just in the larger 
Indian perspective, but also from the regional spaces, which are 
dynamic, politically and culturally, with the potential to shape the 
discursive practices that define the subcontinent. The work will look at 
these macro and micro paradigm shifts in the public sphere, post-2000 - 
the narratives built around film celebrities and their political 
branding styles, the dialectics of socio-cultural changes and media 
dynamics and so on.

This edited text will have 11 chapters, including an introduction. The 
contributors will include established scholars as well as research 
scholars pursuing Film Studies and Celebrity Studies. We propose to send 
out a CFP in order to identify papers of quality along with a couple of 
papers from reputed scholars, on request.


Chapters are expected to address but are not limited to:

  *

    Social media activism and celebrity culture

  *

    Fandom, media, and politics

  *

    Media regulation and celebrity politics

  *

    Celebrity, politics, and digital networks

  *

    Language, representation, and celebrity politics

  *

    Instagram’s visual culture and the star image

  *

    Film personalities as political influencers

  *

    Hate speech, rhetoric and the star image

  *

    Film stars and acts of resistance in the context of contemporary India

  *

    Subaltern/Dalit representations and political branding

  *

    Tweeting political agendas and the film persona

  *

    Regional political identities and film industry


Editor biographies:


Swapna Gopinathis an Associate Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at 
Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, Pune, India. She is a 
Fulbright fellow and has completed postdoctoral research on Urban 
spatiality and ideological dimensions in India. She writes on film and 
culture, contextualizing contemporary India. Her work on historicals in 
popular Hindi cinema, co-edited with Ms. Rutuja Deshmukh, will be 
released by Routledge, in December 2022.


Ramna Waliais a scholar of film and digital media. She earned a doctoral 
degree in Media Studies from the Department of Radio-Television-Film, 
The University of Texas at Austin, and an M.Phil in Cinema Studies from 
the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. She is currently working on a 
book project that looks at the spatialized material history of 
inter-regional networks of video and digital productions in India. Her 
research interests include digital and video cultures, technology, 
counter-histories, and film recycling and remakes. She has published in 
peer-reviewed journals like Bioscope, Synoptique, Studies in South Asian 
Film and Media and has recently published a chapter in a book titled, 
Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India (Routledge 2021).


Rutuja Deshmukhis a visiting faculty of Cinema at  Savitribai Phule Pune 
University. She also teaches Film and Culture at FLAME University, Pune. 
She is currently a Research Fellow at Symbiosis International 
University, Pune. Her research areas include popular cinema, popular 
cultures, and questions of gender and representation at the intersection 
of neoliberalism. Her work has previously appeared in Economic and 
Political Weekly, The Feminist Review, The Wire, FemAsia, 
Countercurrents, and HimalSouthAsian. She is the author of a book 
chapter – “Film Viewing and Netflix: An Enquiry into Politics of the 
Internet and Visual Pleasure”(forthcoming Palgrave). Another book 
chapter on Food and Women and Food during the pandemic, was published by 
Harmattan Paris. She is co-editing a book with Dr Swapna Gopinath  
(forthcoming Routledge India) on Historical Films in Bombay Cinema.


The proposed volume has provisional support from Bloomsbury as a part of 
their book series on *Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studie*s. Series 
editors Dr Jian Xu and Professor Sean Redmond have expressed keen 
interest in this volume, and we will be submitting a formal proposal by 
the end of the year.


Please submit an abstract of 500 words and a short biographical note (50 
words) to (celebritypoliticscfp /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(celebritypoliticscfp /at/ gmail.com)>  by 30th September 2022.If 
selected for publication, full papers will be due around 15 June 2023.

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