Journal of Creative Communications

This article calls for an understanding of Indian television as a transnationally mediated apparatus, rather than examining it as a national enterprise. At the production, distribution and reception levels, contemporary Indian television is enmeshed in an interconnected network of ‘contact zones’; its storylines and rhetorical strategies are shaped by the transnational traffic of programming and peoples, and the national–cultural identity it articulates is transnational in character. Consequently, its programming is, at least, double–sited and offers a double–vision, simultaneously referencing the transnational and the local to produce a global–parochial sensibility. Using the concept of the transnational optic, I analyse prime–time melodramas produced in India as well as in the diaspora to highlight the central role women have come to occupy in narratives about the Indian nation. Although the national and diasporic melodramas offer different definitions of ‘Indian tradition’, it is the figure of the woman who is presented consistently as the ‘bearer of tradition’. Paradoxically, in the melodramas I examine, this ‘traditional’ woman, who is located firmly in the domestic realm, is the primary figure through which the shows stage anxieties concerning national and global issues.

This article explores the commodification of difference in relation to the corporate sponsorship of the photography exhibition, Changing Faces. At first the article considers how the exhibition's collection of images of British Asian youth challenged stereotypical representations of Asian youth cultures, but then argues that this counter–hegemonic potential was undermined by the corporate sponsorship of telecommunications company 02. Yet that is not to say that the ethics of such explicit commerciality are immediately guaranteed; instead, there is the suggestion that the epistemological outcomes were much more complex. Indeed, the article adopts a cultural economy approach that shifts from dialectical political economy models of the culture industry and stresses the elaborate and entangled relations through which the production of culture is mediated. This article argues that it is only when these micro–processes are identified and then situated within the wider logic of global capitalism that the ethical implications of the corporate intervention in the culturally diverse arts can be more effectively ascertained.

This article discusses two very different South Asian diasporic films that both promise an identity politics congruent with the objectives of postcolonial feminism alongside a distinctive ‘feel good’ factor: Deepa Mehta's Fire (1997) and Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham (2002). Both films explore the pressure that certain ideas of India exert on female subjectivities in the diaspora a.nd at home, and their success as feel good films depends on the viewer's ability to understand and ally themselves with the liberation of the central characters from these pressures. By reading the limits as well as the triumphs invoked by the emotional crescendos of these films and the politics of liberation that they endorse, this article also considers other points of continued silence and struggle (specifically queer diasporic subjects and sex workers), not foregrounded by the visual or narrative persuasions of the films themselves.

This article examines negative attitudes around Indian films generated in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, to engage in the changing politics of Indian marginality, media representation and political relations towards Indians. By juxtaposing a series of ethnically charged speaking positions ignited by Indian cinema I highlight how the capital is seen as, essentially an Afrocentric space, contested by the shift in political power towards a ‘perceived’ Indian government. These various positions present how Indian films are made synonymous with Indian culture and how that culture is performed, celebrated and disavowed in this urban space.

This article attempts to understand the representations of American exceptionalism in Indian diasporic popular film through an analysis of reconfiguration of model minority racialization in Gurinder Chadha's films Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice. The films underscore that the model minority racialization of Indians in the United States is being constructed in transnational South Asian diasporic framework through an engagement with British imperial history and the British colonial subject, and with Indian nationalism. While United States’ imperialist structures invoke model minority racialization in form, they simultaneously evacuate its content through racialization of Indians as potential terrorists. Thus, in a post–9/11 world marked by convergences between racialization processes of Britain and United States, the Indian diaspora is characterized by a project of transnational racial management. The diaspora is, thus, structured by management of anxieties generated by Indian gendered and racialized bodies: anxieties of economic success gendered male are diffused through fear of potential terrorists; anxieties of sexual and cultural purity are managed by racialization of women as native informants, who come to embody continuities between the national and the global.

British Asian subjects articulate their emotional and embodied engagement with Bombay cinema,1 making visible glimpses of their social life. This article scrutinizes the Bombay cinema experience through a sociological, empirical and ethnographic analysis of 24 semi–structured interviews undertaken in London, Manchester and Oldham. I employ the ‘circuit of culture model’ (du Gay et al. 1997; Johnson 1986) to explore the relations between the processes of production, representation, reception and regulation in the diasporic circulation of Bombay cinema. The ambiguous and ambivalent, but clear polarities that define the respondents’ relations with the cinema articulate a dialectical dynamism of affect and criticism. Combining the ‘keeping in touch with back home’ discourses of earlier South Asian generations with other desires of ‘recognition’, ‘visibility’, ‘consumption’ and ‘drudgery of culture’, they convey their understanding of themselves and their world. Some respondents were reflexive about their complicity in the dominant ideologies, and the holding together of the contradictions enabled discussion and debates. The desire for ‘glimpses of ourselves’ is full of contradictions in a neo–liberal global culture, and Bombay cinema practice becomes a site for the postcolonial diasporic imagining of identity. I argue that the contradictory and ambivalent identifications in Bombay cinema experiences are reconfigured to desire a decolonized subjectivity where an inter–subjective sensibility is valued through a prioritizing of an emotional connection and relationality. This, I propose is a critique of Western liberal notions of ‘individual self formation.’

I find it increasingly problematic to write analytically about ‘diaspora and music’ at a time of war. It seems inconsequential; the culture industry is not much more than a distraction; a fairytale diversion to make us forget a more sinister amnesia behind the stories we tell. This article nonetheless takes up debates about cultural expression in the field of diasporic musics in Britain. It examines instances of creative engagement with, and destabilization of, music genres by Fundamental and Asian Dub Foundation, and it takes a broadly culture critique perspective on diasporic creativity as a guide to thinking about the politics of hip-hop in a time of war. Examples from music industry and media reportage of the work of these two bands pose both political provocation and a challenge to the seemingly unruffled facade of British civil society, particularly insofar as musical work might still be relevant to struggles around race and war. Here, at a time of what conservative critics call a ‘clash of civilizations’, I examine how music and authenticity become the core parameters for a limited and largely one-sided argument that seems to side-step political context in favour of sensationalized—entrenched—identities and a mythic, perhaps unworkable, ideal of cultural harmony that praises the most asinine versions of multiculturalism while demonizing those most able to bring it about. Here the idea that musical cultures are variously authentic, possessive or coherent must be questioned when issues of death and destruction are central, but ignored.

Indian cities are experiencing significant processes of social, economic and political change, bringing together new configurations of urban identities. This is hardly a new phenomenon. During Imperial rule, nineteenth and twentieth century Bombay, for example, experienced considerably rapid metropolitan reconfigurations (Morris 1991: 235–37). Indian partition is, of course, the most glaring example in contemporary Indian history. However, what is distinct about recent changes in urban India is how they have been shaped by the wide-ranging economic liberalization policies of the early 1990s spearheaded by P.V. Narasimha Rao's Congress Party coalition. The previously socialist sheltered economy was ‘structurally reformed’ as the selected means to avert a near currency collapse.1 Over the last decade, Indian urban centres have seen enormous growth in the forms of upmarket housing (Appadurai 2004: 263), stylish coffee bars such as Baristas and Café Coffee Days, the building of high-tech private hospitals (Ray 2003) and other developments targeting the burgeoning middle to upper classes. Indian metropolises have been experiencing massive inflows of national, international and diasporic capital that have transformed the cities at an astonishing pace. New Delhi is no exception to this trend; its society has been the site of deep shifts ranging from kinship to consumption over the last decade (Mathur and Parameswaran 2004). Some very striking shifts have arisen from cultural, political and economic interactions with the diaspora. As India's capital, Delhi has also experienced unique political interactions with the diaspora. The lobbying by first-generation diasporic ‘non-resident’ Indians (NRIs) for dual citizenship is one example.2

Addressing present day art making in the southern Caribbean island of Trinidad, with specific attention to the notion of a diasporic ‘Indian art’, this article offers a genealogy of some relationships between ethnicity, nationhood and visual imaging. Focusing on the painter and sculptor Shastri Maharaj (b. 1953), who is descended from South Asian indentured migrants to Trinidad, it shows how artists in the Caribbean have negotiated the region's period of strident anti-colonialism to the present. Examples of Maharaj's art comprise works of figuration and landscape, including depictions of local architectural styles and Hindu ritual, as well as more ambiguous and abstract forms, also presented as gallery installations. Paying attention to these the discussion highlights the problematic relations between the exegetical tendency for ‘reading’ such visual materials, and the ambitions of artists seeking to transcend the limits of expectations about ethnicity and cultural difference. In place of those limits it recommends an alternative historiography able to enjoin the critical search among contemporary artists for perceptual and aesthetic agency.

In this article I want to investigate the strategic values of ethnicity, class, religion, global, local and transnational processes as resources for political mobilization, struggle and resistance in the global city. Though some of my argument can be applied to many global cities, I will do this by exploring it in the context of the Islamisization of Bangladeshi communities in the global city par excellance, London. This will be an attempt to analytically link actual state policies, capitalism, transnational and global networks to forms of cultural reproduction, inventiveness and possibilities. This analysis can in turn provide us with an understanding of the role played by migrant communities in the context of a contemporary multicultural Britain. This study is timely. Not only due to the subject matter of the global rise of religious movements, but also because local case studies—not local in the sense of fixed and bounded communities, but as sites from which mobility as well as fixity can be empirically observed—are vitally necessary for elaborating the nature of the contemporary world. This article is aiming to contribute to a conversation, partly public and partly taking place within the political sciences.

On a global scale, new images are chasing out the old. Contemporary cultural experiences have new international inflections and connections: ‘households’ cross continents, teenagers in the Philippines don sequinned flares with nostalgia for the days of Elvis, white English city kids use Jamaican Creole and African American slang to articulate their experiences, and British-born second-generation West Indians identify with bhangra music and pan-Africanism. As ‘insights into other cultures… are brought into one's living room’ (McGrane 1989: 115), the ‘scapes’ (Appadurai 1994) that comprise our social and cultural worlds show us that there are multiple ways of knowing, doing and being. As members of families, neighbourhoods, institutions, academies, cities, classes and so on, we are all living in, and engaged in making, an ‘all change world’ (Prescod 1997). In a context of the daily reworking and reconstruction of meaning-making processes, the question becomes ‘how are we to live in the world?’ (Rushdie 1981[1991]: 17). The following discussion looks at how ideas about culture and cultural diversity have changed since Boas’ time; how societies have themselves changed; and how contemporary social research, and the subjects of study, are continually developing ways to understand and represent ‘the diversity of ideologies and discourses that they both consume and engage with’ (Back 1996: 53).

There are three parts to the article. First, it addresses the figure of the Asian in British cultural formation, charting the major changes in its configuration since World War II. Second, it considers negotiations through the terrain of feminism, with particular reference to the debate between ‘black’ and ‘white’ feminism. And third, it addresses certain debates and issues across the field of difference and identity.