Crossed wires and crooked calls: Imagining the telephone in South Indian comedy films of the 1990s

2020 ◽  
pp. 136787792095074
Author(s):  
Padma Chirumamilla
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
Financial Security ◽  
Telecommunications Policy ◽  
Moral Commitment ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
South Indian

In this article, I argue for the necessity of studying the portrayal of technological infrastructures in popular cinema. Cinema provided a venue within which the potentialities of technological infrastructures could be codified, challenged and (irregularly) absorbed into everyday practice—a process that was especially fraught in postcolonial societies like India. I combine an analysis of the changes in Indian telecommunications policy in the 1990s with close readings of the telephone’s portrayal in two South Indian comedy films, Hello Pakkiram (1990) and Money (1993). These films imagined the telephone as a technology which undergirded a “middle-class” ethos which valued financial security above explicit moral commitment, in contrast to the explicit heroism of the “mass films” that shaped an earlier era of South Indian cinema. I conclude by reaffirming the necessity of thinking through mediations of technological infrastructures to gain more nuanced critical purchase on their place in our everyday lives.

scholarly journals The Shape of Knowledge: Children and the Visual Culture of Literacy and Numeracy

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Daniel Eddy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
Instructional Literature

The ArgumentIn 1787 an anonymous student of the Perth Academy spent countless hours transforming his rough classroom notes into a beautifully inscribed notebook. Though this was an everyday practice for many Enlightenment students, extant notebooks of this nature are extremely rare and we know very little about how middle class children learned to inscribe and visualize knowledge on paper. This essay addresses this lacuna by using recently located student notebooks, drawings, and marginalia alongside textbooks and instructional literature to identify the graphic tools and skills that were taught to Scottish children in early modern classrooms. I show that, in addition to learning the facts of the curriculum, students participated in educational routines that enabled them to learn how to visually package knowledge into accessible figures and patterns of information, thereby making acts of inscription and visualization meaningful tools that benefitted both the self and society.

Temporary Accommodation: Joanna Hogg's Cinema of Dispossession

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-20
Author(s):  
John David Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The Family ◽  
Cinematic Space ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
Temporary Accommodation

Joanna Hogg's cinema is characterized by its formal precision and its unflinching take on upper-middle class privilege, especially in the context of the family. Her first two feature films—Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010)—scrutinize the dynamics of unhappy families on vacation. Exhibition (2015) takes a long hard look at a couple, both of whom are artists, as they go about their everyday lives in their modernist London home. All of these films avail themselves of rigorous framing and frequent long-take cinematography in order to make cinematic space itself a vehicle of emotional and political analysis. Her most recent feature, The Souvenir (2019), converts elements of Hogg's own biography to tell the story of a young filmmaker who learns the hard way that filmmaking and romantic love are the most difficult enterprises.

Consuming wellness, producing difference: The case of a wellness center in India

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 414-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sneha Annavarapu
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Consumer Choice ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Choice Making ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Indian City ◽  
Wellness Center ◽  
Care Regimes

Over the past decade, there has been a discernible rise in the number of wellness centers and fitness studios in urban cities in India. These centers are spatial manifestations of the rise in a particular type of “self-care” regimes and “body projects” in modern social imaginary prevalent in urban India, predominantly enabled by the rise of middle-class consumer culture. While the literature on fitness spaces and wellness clubs in Western contexts is instructive to a very large extent, the local particularities of consumption experiences in non-Western contexts require contextualized empirical research in order to better inform modern theories of consumption. This article is a study of a wellness center in the South Indian city of Chennai. Using ethnographic methods, I attempt to unpack the experience of consuming wellness in a space that ostensibly claims to remedy the ills of modern living while doing so in a culturally traditional and “Indian” manner. I show how the experiences of predominantly middle-class consumers here are dictated not by a sentimental attachment to tradition or locality, but by a vocabulary of speaking that primarily favors a language of consumer choice and rational decision-making. Whether or not that is the case, the way in which consumption of an “Indian” brand of wellness occurs demonstrates the stronghold of the language of consumer choice making the space at the wellness center a performative arena for self-identity formation to occur.

Career and/or Motherhood? Gender and the LDS Church

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 776-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reid J. Leamaster ◽  
Mangala Subramaniam
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Qualitative Interview ◽  
Interview Data ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Cultural Schemas ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Set Up

This article examines the ways in which the gendered religious schemas pertaining to career and motherhood are set up and reinforced by the Latter Day Saints (LDS) Church and how these schemas affect the everyday lives of Mormons. We show how gender, class, and region intersect and impact how religious individuals interpret gendered religious schemas. Analysis of qualitative interview data shows that for very religious men and women, the gendered cultural schemas of work and motherhood are distinct and tend to constrain women. Considering the intersections of class with gender, the analysis shows that some middle-class Mormons reject oppositional cultural schemas and value work and career for women. Further, we find that Mormons outside of the cultural stronghold of Utah are more likely to reject Mormon religious schemas that pit career and motherhood as competing ideologies. In fact, some women participants describe being enabled in their careers by Mormon religious schemas.

The Pleasures and Anxieties of Being in the Middle: Emerging Middle-Class Identities in Urban South India

2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-599 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARA DICKEY
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
The Past ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Urban South ◽  
Indian City ◽  
The Rich

AbstractRecent economic changes in India have coincided with a dramatic change in the concept of a ‘middle class’ in the south Indian city of Madurai. Whereas previous sets of class identities were overwhelmingly dichotomous (for example, the rich and the poor, or the ‘big people’ and ‘those who have nothing’), the middle class has now become a highly elaborated component of local class structures and identities. It is also a contested category; moreover, its indigenous boundaries differ from those most often used by scholars, marketers, or policy-makers. Drawing from research over the past decade, this paper examines local definitions of ‘middleness’ and the moralized meanings ascribed to it. Whilst being ‘in the middle’ is a source of pride and pleasure, connoting both achievement and enhanced self-control, it is simultaneously a source of great tension, bringing anxiety over the critical and damaging scrutiny of onlookers. For each positive aspect of a middle-class identity that emphasizes security and stability, there is a negative ramification or consequence that highlights the precariousness and potential instability of middle-class life. In exploring each of these aspects, I pay attention to the explicitly performative features of class identities. I conclude by considering the epistemological and experiential insights we gain into the construction of emergent class categories by focusing on self-ascribed identities and their performance.

Unruly Cinema

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rini Battacharya Mehta
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
First Century ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hindi Cinema ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Systematic Exposition

Unruly Cinema is a meta-history of Indian cinema’s emergence and growth in correspondence with the colonial, postcolonial, and the neoliberal state. Indian popular cinema has grown steadily from the largest national film industry to a global cultural force. Between 1931 and 2000, Indian cinema overcame Hollywood’s domination of the Indian market, crafted a postcolonial national aesthetic, resisted the high modernist pull of art cinema, and eventually emerged as a seamless extension of India’s neoliberal ambitions. The major agent of these four shifts was a section of the Hindi cinema produced in Bombay, which came to be named and marketed as Bollywood in the twenty-first century. Through a systematic exposition of four historical periods, this book shows how Bollywood’s current dominance is an unlikely result of unruliness, that is, of a disorganized defiance of norms. Perpetually caught between an apathetic and adversarial government and an undefined public, Indian commercial cinema has thrived simply by defying control or normalization. The aesthetic turns of this cinema are guided by counter-effects, often unintended and always unruly.

South Indian Cinema

2020 ◽  
pp. 303-313
Author(s):  
Krishna Sankar Kusuma
Keyword(s):  
Indian Cinema ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
South Indian ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hindi Cinema ◽  
Southern Film

Cinema scholars often refer to Hindi cinema as Indian cinema. India has diverse languages, cultures, and a long history of Cinema of its own. Regional cinema in numbers, as well as quality, competes with any cinema in the world. The study is an attempt to present the case of five film industries in the southern part of India, which includes Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and Tulu language films. The southern film industries is theorized as 'South Indian cinema' as they share similar features, yet each one of them is unique. South Indian cinema has often been looked down upon as it is cheap and vulgar. The research also explores the gender dimensions in both the industry as well as on-screen presentation. This chapter aims to provide a theoretical and philosophical interpretation of South Indian cinema.

Shadow Nationalism

Unruly Cinema ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 61-100
Author(s):  
Rini Bhattacharya Mehta
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Regulatory State ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
The Government

This chapter follows the trajectory of postcolonial Indian cinema and its negotiations with a regulatory state. Apart from exploring the apathy and political antagonism of the government, this chapter will explore how the dominant genres of popular cinema survived the Nehruvian regime of control and regulations by adopting and modulating a nation-statist ideology – in the form of a shadow nation – that could smooth over the contradictions between the progressive stance of the state and the regressive inertia of tradition and patriarchy.

Sibling sociality

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Harness Goodwin
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Peer Group ◽  
Self Care ◽  
Routine Activity ◽  
Language Practices ◽  
School Cultures ◽  
Household Chores ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Embodied Language

This paper examines the embodied language practices through which siblings in two middle-class Los Angeles families structure their participation while apprenticing younger siblings into routine household chores, self-care and during care-taking activities. Siblings make use of a range of directive forms (including requests as well as imperatives) and participant frameworks drawn from their family, peer group and school cultures. Families build accountable actors and family cultures through the ways they choose to choreograph and monitor routine activity in the household, using both hierarchical or more inclusive frameworks. Data are drawn from the video archive of UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families.

The Politics of Adulation: Cinema and the Production of Politicians in South India

1993 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 340-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Dickey
Keyword(s):  
South India ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
The Poor ◽  
South Indian

Popular south Indian cinema is a highly melodramatic entertainment form, plotted around improbable twists of fate and set in exaggerated locales, filled with songs, dances, and fight scenes. Patronized primarily by the poor, it is typically dismissed by critics, who find its vast popularity either bemusing or indicative of viewers moral and intellectual degradation. Even more confounding for many observers has been cinema's critical role in state and national politics.

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