Global South Asia on Screen

Review

"Hutnyk has written a book that keeps faith with the project of radical critique. Paying careful attention to relations between semiotic detail and socio-political context, he traverses a complex body of cultural production and cultural theory too often consigned to the margins. Global South Asia on Screen tests every term in its title, working through an array of films, TV series and other media with a forensic eye that disconcerts and excites. Hutnyk’s book challenges us to understand the reverb of colonial pasts and postcolonial critiques in networked, politically-narrowed presents" ―Scott McQuire, Professor of Media and Communications, University of Melbourne, Australia

Product Description

With importance for geopolitical cultural economy, anthropology, and media studies, John Hutnyk brings South Asian circuits of scholarship to attention where, alongside critical Marxist and poststructuralist authors, a new take on film and television is on offer.

The book presents Raj-era costume dramas as a commentary on contemporary anti-Muslim racism, a new political compact in film and television studies, and the President watching a snuff film from Pakistan. Hanif Kureishi's postcolonial 'fuck Sandwich' sits alongside Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, updated for the war on terror with low-brow, high-brow versions of Asia that carry us up the Himalayas with magic carpet TV nostalgia. Maoists rage below and books go up in flames while News network phone-ins end with executions on the Hanging Channel and arms trade and immigration paranoia thrives. Multiplying filmi versions of Mela are measured against a transnational realignment towards Global South Asia in a contested and testing political future.

Each chapter offers a slice of historical study and assessment of media theory appropriate for viewers of Global South Asia seeking to understand why lurid exoticism and paralysing terror go hand-in-hand. The answers are in the images always open to interpretation, but Global South Asia on Screen examines the ways film and TV trade on stereotype and fear, nationalism and desire, politics and context, and with this the book calls for wider reading than media theory has hitherto entertained.

About the Author

John Hutnyk is currently Associate Professor in Sociology at Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam. In 2016 he was a Government of India GAIN scholar at Jadavpur University. Before that he was Visiting Professor at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. In 2015 he was in InterCultural Studies at Nagoya City University Japan, and since 2014 was Visiting Researcher at RMIT University in Australia, and also in 2014 at Mimar Sinan University in Turkey. He has held visiting scholar posts in Germany at the South Asia Institute and Institute fur Ethnologie at Heidelberg University, and Visiting Professor posts at Zeppelin University and Hamburg University, Germany. For fourteen years he was at Goldsmiths University of London in Anthropology and since 2008 as Professor of Cultural Studies. Hutnyk is the author of The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation (1996), Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industry (2000); Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies (2004); Pantomime Terror: Music and Politics (2014); and co-authored with Virinder Kalra and Raminder Kaur: Diaspora and Hybridity (2005). Contact at: [email protected]).