ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the need to recognise genres as the site for cultural negotiation and exchange. The history of genres can perhaps be summed up as a history of transformation, transgression and cross-overs. Both print and film genres, the instances discussed above, have helped reiterate the inherent nature of genres to transform and transgress. The varied ways in which literatures and cultures feed into each other, travelling circuitous routes, are demonstrative of the performative and the iterability of generic refashionings. The genres in the electronic medium have widened this free play. The digital has become a platform for negotiating socio-cultural and political debates, often using, modifying and transforming earlier genres to the new medium. The digital has been a constant arbiter of genres that contest hierarchical literary demarcations between the elite and the popular, the permanent and the ephemeral.
