Archive for publications, May 2009

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[ecrea] New book on globalization and Indian media

Fri May 29 10:15:15 GMT 2009



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
Web: http://www.ecrea.eu
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E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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