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This book examines the effects of audiovisual streaming in the global South, offering a rare vantage point from which to examine the global streaming revolution, which tends to be studied typically with reference to the North. Netflix has become synonymous with the world of streaming, though, in recent years, other streaming giants have emerged in the global North-mostly notably, Amazon and Disney+-that compete tightly within international markets. And yet, despite the vital importance of developing economies of the South as expanding markets, much scholarship on the streaming of film and television frames these economies simply as sites that are dependent on a one-way flow of technology and infrastructure from the North to the South. This volume focuses on the mutual exchange of creative labor and cultural capital between the North and South to provide a textured analysis of the obscured realities of audiovisual streaming within, as well as across, the vast economies of the global South. Exploring an array of genres including feature-length fiction films, art cinema, documentary, and television series-the essays in this volume illuminate the shifting media environments of relatively understudied contexts such as Brazil, Egypt, India, Lebanon, Philippines, and South Korea. The volume argues that the complexities of the global streaming landscape impel us to move beyond a simplistic theory of Western cultural imperialism imposed on the non-Western world and creates an intricate picture of contemporary media globalization, while reflecting on the changing cultural and political equation between the global North and South.
About the author
Shakti Jaising is Professor of English and Director of Film Studies at Drew University, USA. Her writing on literary and cinematic responses to colonialism, neoliberalism, and the War on Terror appears in publications like Modern Fiction Studies, Interventions, Jump Cut, and ARIEL. Jaising is the author of Beyond Alterity: Contemporary Indian Fiction and the Neoliberal Script (2023).Hadi Gharabaghi is Visiting Assistant Professor of Film, Television, and Media at Fairfield University, USA. He has organized panels at the ASA, MESA, and SCMS, and played a key role in forming an international research community devoted to the Cold War film and media archives of the United States Information Agency (USIA). His work appears in prominent venues like The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and in edited collections, including Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice (2020).
