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For 'ethnic minorities' in Britain, broadcast TV provides powerful representations of national and 'western' culture. In Southall - which has the largest population of 'South Asians' outside the Indian sub-continent - the VCR furnishes Hindi films, 'sacred soaps' such as the Mahabharata, and family videos of rites of passage, as well as mainstream American films. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change examines how TV and video are being used to recreate cultural traditions within the 'South Asian' diaspora, and how they are also catalysing cultural change in this local community.
Marie Gillespie explores how young people negotiate between the parental and peer, local and global, national and international contexts and culturess which traverse their lives. Articulating their own preoccupations with television narratives, they both reaffirm and challenge parental traditions, formulating their own aspirations towards cultural change.
Marie Gillespie's in-depth study offers an invaluable survey of how cultures are shaped and changed through people's recreative reception of the media.
List of contents
Introduction Cultural change: British, Asian and black identities, Remaking ethnicity, About this book 1 Southall: Chota Punjab, west London 2 Living fieldwork – writing ethnography 3 Local uses of the media: Negotiating culture and identity 4 Coming of age in Southall: TV news talk 5 Neighbours and gossip: Kinship, courtship and community 6 Cool bodies: TV ad talk
About the author
Marie Gillespie is Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wales, Swansea. She is the Diaspora Literary and Media Cultures project co-ordinator for the ESRC Transnational Communities Programme at the University of Oxford.
Summary
With a case study of the Asian community in Southall, Marie Gillespie examines how television and video are being used to recreate cultural traditions and catalyse cultural change in such communities.
