[ecrea] New book on globalization and Indian media

> UNTIMELY BOLLYWOOD: Globalization and India's 
> New Media Assemblage (Duke University Press)
>
> Known for its elaborate spectacle of music, 
> dance, costumes, and fantastical story lines, 
> Bollywood cinema is a genre that foregrounds 
> narrative rupture, indeterminacy, and bodily 
> sensation. In Untimely Bollywood, Amit S. Rai 
> argues that the fast-paced, multivalent 
> qualities of contemporary Bollywood cinema are 
> emblematic of the changing conditions of media 
> consumption in a globalizing India. Through 
> analyses of contemporary media practices, Rai 
> shifts the emphasis from a representational and 
> linear understanding of the effects of 
> audiovisual media to the multiple, 
> contradictory, and evolving aspects of media 
> events. He uses the Deleuzian concept of 
> assemblage as a model for understanding the 
> complex clustering of technological, historical, 
> and physical processes that give rise to 
> contemporary media practices. Exploring the 
> ramifications of globalized media, he sheds 
> light on how cinema and other popular media 
> organize bodies, populations, and spaces in 
> order to manage the risky excesses of power and 
> sensation and to reinforce a liberalized postcolonial economy.
>
> Rai recounts his experience of attending the 
> first showing of a Bollywood film in a 
> single-screen theater in Bhopal: the sensory 
> experience of the exhibition space, the sound 
> system, the visual style of the film, the crush 
> of the crowd. From that event, he elicits an 
> understanding of cinema as a historically 
> contingent experience of pleasure, a place where 
> the boundaries of identity and social spaces are 
> dissolved and redrawn. He considers media as a 
> form of contagion, endlessly mutating and 
> spreading, connecting human bodies, 
> organizational structures, and energies, thus 
> creating an inextricable bond between affect and 
> capital. Expanding on the notion of media 
> contagion, Rai traces the emerging correlation 
> between the postcolonial media assemblage and 
> capitalist practices, such as viral marketing 
> and the development of multiplexes and malls in India.
>
> Amit S. Rai is Associate Professor of English at 
> Florida State University. He is the author of 
> Rule of Sympathy: Race, Sentiment, and Power, 1750?1860.
>
> ?Within a rapidly growing body of sophisticated 
> work on Indian cinema, media, and popular 
> culture, Untimely Bollywood stands out not only 
> for its originality but also for its audacity. 
> Its deft coordination of what at first would 
> seem wildly heterogeneous topics is simply 
> dazzling. There are wonderful discussions 
> throughout that involve themselves in surprising 
> but consistently illuminating topics, including 
> art deco theatres, DJ culture, and Dolby sound 
> in India. The movement through these topics is 
> as often fun as it is enlightening.??Corey K. 
> Creekmur, co-editor of Cinema, Law, and the State in Asia
>
> ?In bold divergence from representation-based 
> studies of social identity in cinema, Amit S. 
> Rai shifts our attention from the spectator?s 
> encounter with a discrete film text to the media 
> event or assemblage generating an ecology of 
> sensations. Packed with original research, a 
> heterodox range of theoretical influences, and 
> innovative explorations in the idea of 
> nonlinearity, Untimely Bollywood goes well 
> beyond a study of globalization?s impact on 
> India?s Hindi-language cinema. What it offers 
> instead is a provocative thesis on affective and 
> embodied experience under globalization?s new 
> regimes of media consumption in India.??Priya 
> Jaikumar, author of Cinema at the End of Empire: 
> A Politics of Transition in Britain and India

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Nico Carpentier (Phd)
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Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.56
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.36.84
Office: 5B.401a
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European Communication Research and Education Association
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E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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