ABSTRACT
Amidst the shifting landscape of media studies, making sense of audiences has become a challenging undertaking (Couldry 2011). It seems particularly complex in cross-cultural research contexts, for instance, when studying diasporic audiences, as Madianou (2011) demonstrates from a theoretical and conceptual perspective. In this chapter, we put forward two case studies, investigating discourses on diasporic cinema audiences for Turkish and Indian screenings in Antwerp. This Belgian city in the northern region of Flanders is home to a large variety of people, from over 160 different countries of origin. The city has a handful of cinema theaters. One of them, Metropolis, a multiplex at the outskirts of the city, screens films with an eye on particular diasporic groups, in particular Turkish and Indian groups. Situated at the crossroads of diaspora and media studies, these screenings and their audiences are the focus of this study. 1 More precisely, this chapter illustrates the density of meanings, ambiguities, and polemics that are part and parcel of discourses on diasporic film audiences. We advance three questions that have hitherto been under-emphasized in the literature regarding diasporic media audiences. First, how do different actors from the industry, exhibitors and distributors, to be more precise, discursively deal with the audiences of diasporic films? Second, how are audience members themselves involved in the discursive construction of the diasporic or ethnic audience? And third, to what extent do these discourses correspond or conflict?
