ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the seldom-studied cultural form of wedding videography, which it argues is being transformed because of the growing imperative to share across architectures of social media; increasingly, wedding videos are thus taking on a more “public” and hyper-visible character. It specifically analyses British-Asian wedding videos, arguing that this new public visibility, coupled with the “convivial” mode of the genre, means that wedding videos might constitute “alternative archives of belonging” whose celebratory images stand in marked contrast to mainstream media representations of British Asians, and most especially of Muslims. At the same time, the mode of conviviality means that histories of colonialism, racism and oppression are obscured in the narratives of the videos which are also bound up in the making of “new hierarchies of belonging” (Back et al. 2012).
