Provincializing Bollywood

This book situates Bhojpuri cinema within the long history of vernacular media production, which was kick-started by audio cassettes and spurred on further with VCDs and DVDs. The emergence of multiplex-malls and the evacuation of single-screen theatres all over north India, at a time of massive real estate development, particularly in peninsular Indian cities, which required working class migrants’ ‘manual labour’ also prepared the ground for new linguistic consolidations and cultural forms. Investigating the historical, theoretical and empirical bases of Bhojpuri media production, the book tries to make sense of cinema within the ‘comparative media crucible’, in which film history sits alongside floods, droughts, musical traditions, gendered segregation, real estate boom, libidinal youth cultures, urban resettlements and highway modernities. The book grapples with Bhojpuri media from within Hindi film history, from the vantage point of provincial north India, in the light of the socio-technical upheavals of the last three decades. Foregrounding the libidinal energies, language politics and curatorial informalities, the book argues that Bhojpuri cinema could be conceptualized via the logic of overflow. Animated by libidinal affordances which have breached all formal embankments, it thrives on a curious blend of scandalizing and moralizing overtones.

Language Politics in the Comparative Media Crucible

This chapter recounts the language politics of north India, with particular stress upon the heydays of Hindi nationalism, which wrested control of literary production from Urdu on behalf of the ‘Hindis’ of northern plains. Bhojpuri among other ‘tongues’ were therefore side-lined by the nationalist fervour. Tracing the trajectory of women’s folksongs, popular chapbooks and theatre troupes, the chapter reconstructs the resurgence of the vernaculars via audiocassettes, VCDs/DVDs and microSD cards. Electronic media thus absorbed the energies pushed out of the literate public sphere. The chapter also highlights the role played by a lateral-ness of address to unspool Bhojpuri from its ‘folk’ bearings and mount a mass address upon it. At the end, the chapter places the language politics of north India in relation to the Trojan horse of English, and the attendant struggle for the political existence of the vernacular linguistic communities.

Introduction

This chapter prepares the comparative media crucible – an intensive synthesis of approaches to understand the media, in relation to capital, infrastructure, film form, narration, sovereign voice and geography. The book takes shape inside this analytical dwelling at the intersection of various grids – the recruitment of the province, capital and narrative voice, and the ideological containment of the masses – preparing the grounds for reading the coalitional tendencies before reassembling the role of media within the social order. It also assesses the provincial imperative acting upon ‘Bollywood’, and the attendant translations and purifications of the processes investigated in the book. The book thus grapples with a constellation which, this chapter argues, addresses an overflow of tendencies tethered to an unknowable ‘mass audience’. This search for an abstract mass, which breaches the embankments of region, class, language and culture, forces us to prepare the crucible with robust comparative analytics.

The Cinematic Milieu

To what extent are media technologies autonomous forces that reorganize the environment around them to accommodate their own technological needs? In what ways are these technologies responsive to the milieu they grow within? A central theme of comparative media examines how media enter into reciprocal exchange with the broader cultural, social, and economic formations in which they emerge and which differ from place to place and over time. This article draws on the concept of milieu in order to analyze the evolution of digital cinema infrastructures in contemporary Nigeria.

Social Media and Political Dissent in Russia and Belarus: An Introduction to the Special Issue

The special issue focuses on the roles of socially mediated communication in expressing, aggregating, and shaping political dissent and discontent in Russia and Belarus at the borderline between the 2010s and 2020s. Lately, these post-Soviet countries have demonstrated the growth of restrictive trends in both politics and the public sphere reciprocated by increasing street protest and online polarization. The six papers of the special issue come from the Seventh Annual Conference “Comparative Media Studies in Today’s World” of April 2019. They address the differences between autocracies and democracies in the impact of social media on protest participation, appearance of critical publics, and new media-like gatekeepers on YouTube, Instagram, VKontakte, and other platforms, and cumulative patterns in socially mediated deliberation. The papers demonstrate various manifestations of political disagreement, critique, and moral struggle, including politicization of the mundane, accumulation of self-criticism, and alternation of media consumption habits, thus uncovering the post-Soviet public spheres as vibrant and diverse, even if polarized and constrained.

Expressive Exclamation Constructions in the Position of an Online Newspaper Headline (on the Material of Russian, Chuvash and English Languages)

Ths article is aimed at identifying and comparing the syntactic models of expressive exclamation constructions in the headlines of the online versions of high-quality printed publications: the Vedomosti and the Izvestia (in Russian), the Khypar (in Chuvash), Th Times and Th Guardian (in English). Th research material is online newspaper headlines published in the period from 2017 to 2021. Th relevance of the work is explained by the fact that in the mass consumption of information on the Internet the title has the greatest potential for speech impact on the mass audience, realized by means of expressive syntax and punctuation. Th expressive exclamation structure of the online newspaper headline enhances its expressiveness, translates the author’s intentions, conveys the author’s emotions, forms opinions and encourages readers to act, etc. Depending on the type of speech inflence, the patterns of syntactic design of heading syntactic design in Russian, Chuvash and English are analyzed on the basis of speech influence (social, volitional, informational, explanatory, or emotional-evaluative). For instance, Russian headings of requests, orders and slogans are formed as an elliptical non-verbal construction, a sentence with a verb in the imperative mood and an appeal to a certain person, as well as a construction consisting of homogeneous predicates in the imperative mood. Chuvash headlines of requests, demands and slogans, and the titles that convey various emotions are represented by an exclamation construction with a verb in the imperative mood and a direct address, with a verb in the imperative mood and a negative particle, an indefiite personal sentence, elliptical and parcelled constructions. Expressive exclamation headings in English are based on two-part and segmented syntactic structures. Thse strategies for the design of expressive exclamation constructions in online newspaper headlines reflct the development of syntactic systems of the languages with diffrent structures and make a certain contribution to the development of theoretical foundations of comparative media stylistics.

Review essay: global and comparative perspectives on media and development

This essay reviews the works ‘Television and the Afghan Culture Wars’ (University of Illinois Press) by Wazhmah Osman and ‘Media Imperialism in India and Pakistan’ (Routledge) by Farooq Sulehria as recent contributions to the fields of global and comparative media studies. It considers the overlapping themes in these works through ruberics of media imperialism and development in terms of growth of television industry in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the broad context of globalization and transnational media flows.