ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book looks at how aurality was imagined in popular Indian film magazines. It shows how the emergence of talkies in the late 1920s was figured in advertisements, with reference to the recording technologies used and the valorization of stars, often pictured in movie stills. The book deals with close readings of those texts that comprise a publication, and considers the very script that forms an alphabet. It looks at decidedly noncommercial mode of publication, and contests a presumption of the “little magazine”–especially one with only a single issue–as “failure,” for all its lack of capitalist potential. The book offers a reading of a set of mail art magazines that is deeply embedded in a consideration of their materiality. As the magazine becomes an object within the digital archive, those perspectives contained within it are thus propagated further.
