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This book provides perspectives on how South Asian - often, more specifically, Indian - diasporas inhabit techno-mediated environments through their economic and socio-cultural activities. The themes examined include religion, caste, language, and gender in online communities and call centers, and the roles of these factors in the global economy, Bollywood online and offline, digital music, websites for arranging marriages, and so on. The book attempts to map «South Asia» in relation to global technospaces produced through and as a consequence of economic globalization efforts.
Drawing together the insights of postcolonial scholarship and cultural studies, Popular Postcolonialisms questions the place of ‘the popular’ in the postcolonial paradigm. Multidisciplinary in focus, this collection explores the extent to which popular forms are infused with colonial logics, and whether they can be employed by those advocating for change. It considers a range of fiction, film, and non-hegemonic cultural forms, engaging with topics such as environmental change, language activism, and cultural imperialism alongside analysis of figures like Tarzan and Frankenstein. Building on the work of cultural theorists, it asks whether the popular is actually where elite conceptions of...
Life is increasingly governed and mediated through digital and smart technologies, platforms, big data and algorithms. However, the reasons, practices and impact of how the digital is used by different institutions are often deeply linked to social oppression and injustice. Similarly, the ability to resist these digital impositions is based on inequality and privilege. Challenging the ways in which we are increasingly dependent on the digital, this book raises a set of provocative and urgent questions: in a world of compulsory digitality is there an opt out button? Where, when, how, why and to whom is it available? Answering these questions has become even more relevant since the COVID-19 pa...
Bollywood Sounds focuses on the songs of Indian films in their historical, social, commercial, and cinematic contexts. Author Jayson Beaster-Jones takes readers through the highly collaborative compositional process, highlighting the contributions of film directors, music directors (composers), lyricists, musicians, and singers in song production. Through close musical and multimedia analysis of more than twenty landmark compositions, Bollywood Sounds illustrates how the producers of Indian film songs have long mediated a variety of musical styles, instruments, and performance practices to create a uniquely cosmopolitan music genre. As an exploration of the music of seventy years of Hindi films, Bollywood Sounds provides long-term historical insights into film songs and their musical and cinematic conventions in ways that will appeal both to scholars and to newcomers to Indian cinema.
Pantomime is a theatrical form that has come to rule our everyday lives as terror. In the early years of the 21st century, a dissembling political demonology has sometimes placed otherwise merely lyrical musicians in a volatile predicament. The discussion here is of Fun-da-Mental's Aki Nawaz portrayed as a 'suicide rapper', Asian Dub Foundation striking poses from the street in support of youth in Paris and Algiers, and M.I.A., born free fighting immigration crackdown with atrocity video. Along the way, bus bombs, comedy circuits, critical theory, Arabian Nights, Bradley Wiggins, Dinarzade, Karl Marx, Paris boulevards, Molotov, Mao, the Eiffel Tower, reserve armies, lists, Richard Wagner, Samina Malik, Slavoj Žižek, Freudian slips, red-heads, Guantanamo. The book offers some sharp critiques of our contemporary complacency, and the failures of theory as more than ten years of war on terror turns anxiety at home and drone-strike assassinations abroad into a normal everyday. This pantomime is a terror story told over and over to distract from the workings of a despotic power. The need for an adequate (winning) counter-narrative was never more clear. ,
This book examines the phenomenon of "technocultural Hindu nationalism" or the use of the internet by global Indian communities for the promotion of Hindu nationalist ideologies. Since the introduction of Western science and technology under colonial rule in the eighteenth century, science and technology have been used as instruments of transforming Indian society. Scientific and technological expertise have been authorized as essential attributes of a modern Indian selfhood. And the possessors of technological skills have historically been vested with the authority to speak for the nation. The associations between technology and nationalism have condensed in ideas about self and other, they...
This thought-provoking study by historian Monique Laney focuses on the U.S. government–assisted integration of German rocket specialists and their families into a small southern community soon after World War II. In 1950, Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket experts relocated to Huntsville, Alabama, a town that would celebrate the team, despite their essential role in the recent Nazi war effort, for their contributions to the U.S. Army missile program and later to NASA’s space program. Based on oral histories, provided by members of the African American and Jewish communities, and by the rocketeers’ families, co-workers, friends, and neighbors, Laney’s book demonstrates how the histories of German Nazism and Jim Crow in the American South intertwine in narratives about the past. This is a critical reassessment of a singular time that links the Cold War, the Space Race, and the Civil Rights era while addressing important issues of transnational science and technology, and asking Americans to consider their country’s own history of racism when reflecting on the Nazi past.
Study conducted of Bombay Stock Exchange listed Indian software companies.
Cyberculture and the Subaltern: Weavings of the Virtual and Real, edited by Radhika Gajjala, maps how voice and silence shape online space in relation to offline actualities. Thus, it weaves the virtual and real in relation to so-called old and new technologies using globalization and technology as the frame for examination. Implicit in this investigation is the question of how offline actualities and online cultures are in turn shaped by online hierarchies, as well as different kinds of local access to global contexts. This book reveals the logic of particular global-local directions that emerge within digital, transnational capital and labor flows. To this end, the contributors to this vol...
The argument offered in this book is that new technology, as opposed to traditional media such as television, radio, and newspaper, is working against the national grain to weaken its imagined community. Online activities and communications between people and across borders suggest that digital media has strong implications for different articulations of identity and belongingness, which open new ways of thinking about the imagined community. The findings are based on transnational activities by Kurdish diaspora members across borders that have pushed them to rethink notions of belonging and identity. Through a multidisciplinary and comparative approach, and multifaceted (online-offline) methodologies, the book unveils tensions between new and old media, and how the former is not only changing social relations but also exposing existing ones. Living in two or more cultures, speaking multiple languages, and engaging in transnational practices, diaspora individuals may have created a momentum that discloses how the imagined nation is diminishing in this digital era.