Read more
The volume examines popular sensibilities via textual, visual, performative, spatial, digital frames of inquiry and critical social-political issues in South Asia. It highlights the interface between cultural studies and its popular-political standpoints and interrogates the kaleidoscope of popular imaginary as well as its conceptual problematics through distinct case studies from the region. It leads learners towards the unfounded territories of popular culture studies in South Asia. With chapters by major scholars in the field, the book uses theoretically comprehensive and empirically varied case studies to re-evaluate the central questions of epistemology, methodology, and approaches to popular culture studies from non-Western cultures' perspectives.
Lucid, accessible, and nuanced, the chapters in the volume will be an invaluable reference source for scholars, researchers, and students in the humanities, liberal arts, cultural studies, and South Asian studies.
List of contents
Introduction
Part I: Performance, Ritual and Folk 1. Secular "bhavs" of Remixed Dances: Dance Reality Shows as Soft Resistance
2. The 'High Seriousness' of Comedy: Stand-up Comedy and the Tradition of Dissent
3. From Behind the Mask: The
Jabulo of the Khasis
4. The Axiology of the
Lakhe and
Navdurga Masked Ritual Dances of Nepal
5. Asura, Danava, Rakshasa: Interpreting Popular Indian Myths from Dalit Perspectives
6. Tales of Love, Passion, Murder, and History: Poet's Songs from Barak Valley
7. Sanjhi: A Multihued Folk Festive Presence within an Over-arching Feminine Divinity
8. Can Nauntanki be digital?: A Study of Nautanki Performances in the Post-Covid Era
9. C¿avi¿¿un¿takam and Latin Christians: Becoming and Reviving Identity
10. Musical Culture of Mourning Rituals: Liminality of the Orthodox and the Popular
11. Only a Joke: Stand-up Comedy and Disability in the Indian Context
Part II: New Media Frames 12. Breaking Stereotypes or Making Stereotypes: Hiphop Dance in India
13. Mourning, Cult, Fandom and its Tentative Figurations: A Case Study of Pop-star-turned- cleric Junaid Jamshed's Death and Mourning on the Internet
14. Cringe is the New binge: Matrimony, Desire and the Female Body in Netflix's Indian Matchmaking and Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives
15. From Streets to You Tube:
Ladisha as an Alternate (Hi)story-Teller
16. Exploring the 'Manosphere': Analyzing Masculinities and the Politics of Red Pill in India across Social Media Platforms
Part III: Cinema and Identity 17. Cultural Studies, Popular Hindi Cinema and the Question of Aesthetics
18. Zindagi Tamasha to
Kamli: Squeezing Space of Emergent Cinema of Pakistan
19. Framing the Ecology of Fear
20. Subverting the Popular Gaze in
Stree (2018) and
Bulbbul (2021)
21. Dalit Sporting Imaginary and
Jhund 22. "My Son Won't Play Cricket for England": Cricket, Patriarchy, and Diasporic Subjectivity in
Patiala House 23. Screening Sainthood: Shifting Paradigms in the films on Vivekananda
24. Surrogate Inc.: The Commercialization of Bollywood's Surrogacy Narrative in the Neoliberal Age
25. An Excavation of Identities through Indiana Jones
Part IV: Visual Figurations 26. The Home and the World of Hindi Television Serials
27. Troubling the Waters: Graphic Advocacy and the Indo-Sri Lankan Fisher Folk's Tale
28. Post-1971: Photographic Ambivalence, Archives, and the Construction of National Identity of Bangladesh
29. Talking Walls- Muted Femininity
30. Popular Culture of Cynicism and its Satirical Expressions in Art: Notes from Contemporary Pakistan
31. Re-viewing the Mythoepic in Indian Popular Imagination
Part V: Spatial Becomings 32. Willkommen ("Welcome") Bishan Singh to the Kit Kat Klub
33. Unpacking Popular Culture from the Lens of Public Philosophy
34. Popular Culture in Early Nationalist Imagination
35. The World Ends in South Asia: Dilli Dystopias and the (Post-)Apocalypse
36. "Oppositely Parallels": A Visual Inquiry on Squeezing Female Spaces
About the author
Akshaya Kumar is Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India.
Raj Thakur is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Central University of Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir, India.
