ABSTRACT

This volume brings together new studies and interdisciplinary research on the changing mediascapes in South Asia. Focusing on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, it explores the transformations in the sphere of cinema, television, performing arts, visual cultures, cyber space and digital media, beyond the traumas of the partitions of 1947 and 1971.

Through wide-ranging essays on soft power, performance, film, and television; art and visual culture; and cyber space, social media, and digital texts, the book bridges the gap in the study of the postcolonial and post-Partition developments to reimagine South Asia through a critical understanding of popular culture and media. The volume includes scholars and practitioners from the subcontinent to foster dialogue across the borders, and presents diverse and in-depth studies on film, media and representation in the region.

This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of media and film studies, postcolonial studies, visual cultures, political studies, partition history, cultural studies, mass media, popular culture, history, sociology and South Asian studies, as well as to media practitioners, journalists, writers, and activists.

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

Moving beyond partitions: Theorising the academic dialogue

part I|66 pages

Soft power: performance, film, and television

chapter 1|12 pages

Trouble in paradise

The Portrayal of the Kashmir Insurgency in Hindi cinema

chapter 2|15 pages

The vale of desire

Framing Kashmir in Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider

chapter 4|15 pages

The rise of the celebrity anchor in Pakistan's private TV network

The one voice that kills other voices

part II|80 pages

Art and visual culture

chapter 6|21 pages

Post-71

Photographic ambivalences, archives, and the construction of a national identity of Bangladesh

chapter 7|36 pages

Speaking soon after catastrophe

The Partition art of Satish Gujral and S. L. Parasher as record, testimony, trauma

part III|53 pages

Cyber space, social media, and digital texts

chapter 8|17 pages

Politicising the body of the ‘other’

India's gaze at Pakistan

chapter 9|12 pages

Keyboard nations

Cyberhate and Partition anxiety on social media

chapter 10|13 pages

Pakistani literary digitalisation

‘Mediascaping' Mohsin Hamid's ‘The (Former) General in His Labyrinth'

chapter |5 pages

Conclusion: Reflections

Building bridges