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Writing a history of Indian television immediately begs the question, how do we want it read? Exhaustive chronological treatments anchor the field (Kumar 2000 ), ideological examinations reveal a Hindu-centric nation with serious consequences for religious and gender minorities (Rajagopal 1996 ; Mitra 1993 ; Van der Veer 1997 ), development analyses demonstrate the failures of a socialist state (F ü risch and Shrikhande 2007 ), and audience studies reveal complex negotiations among multiple identity positions (Mankekar 1999 ). These critical approaches to the study of television in India rightly expose power differentials that facilitate, through the centuries, the inequities of interwoven structures of imperialism, colonialism, casteism, and capitalist patriarchy. Most importantly, they highlight the chronic condition of distrust in postcolonial societies, making it highly challenging to legitimize profi table connections to global circuits as they modernize under the very conditions that once constrained them.

One may argue that Chinese television has already received more than its fair share of attention in the study of Chinese media. As compared with radio and cinema, which developed in the socialist era (1949-78), television has been seen as the dominant medium in the decades of marketization and economic reforms since the late 1970s (Zhu and Berry 2008 ). Television has been studied as a metonym for the ongoing tension and complicity between the Chinese state and the market (e.g., Zhao 1998 ; 2008a) and as a metaphor for the contradictions between a legacy of socialist rhetoric and ethos and a neoliberal market agenda. It is precisely these contradictions that make up what is often referred to as the ‘Chinese characteristics’ (Zhao 2008a; Sun and Zhao 2009 ) of China’s television culture.

This chapter wants to argue two things: the first part suggests that reality television in Africa – specifically the series Big Brother Africa, which completed its third season in November 2008 – has had profound impacts for identity politics, gender politics, and the politics of class on the continent. In fact, these are the issues most commonly illuminated by reality television and I wrote about these in a previously published article. The second part of the chapter moves into less explored territory. In that previous article, I briefly discussed how specifically Big Brother Africa can illuminate the workings of globalization in Africa and, in particular, South Africa’s hegemonic role in that process. Here, I expand on my earlier argument by exploring that hegemony in the context of the growing Chinese presence in Africa. All economic and political indicators suggest that China’s growing investment in mining and infrastructure and its political clout relative to South Africa mean that it is destined to assume a place of prominence on the continent. But here I want to argue that if we want to understand how globalization plays out in Africa, we need to look beyond China’s military and economic expansion. For me, Big Brother Africa can help us make sense of these dynamic processes. South Africa has consistently remained the highest-ranking country in Africain terms of its “global competitiveness” as measured by the World Economic Forum. South Africa dominates regional markets in Southern Africa as well as remaining competitive in the rest of the continent against business rivals from United States and Europe. As it was under Apartheid, there is a close symbiosis between the continental aspirations and interests of the postapartheid state and that of South African business. The advent of democracy in 1994 has opened up African markets for South African business on an unprecedented scale. The South African state is very active on the African continent and keen to develop a leading role for itself. In fact, successive United States governments have viewed South Africa as a continental leader. For example, former President George W. Bush referred to former South African President Thabo Mbeki as his “point man in Africa.”4The South African government underwrites and actively promotes SouthAfrican business’s continental schemes through its “Proudly South African” campaign coordinated through an International Marketing Council situated in the Office of (the country’s) President since 2002, which links state nationalism with consumption. Separately a statutory Industrial Development Corporation (established in 1940) underwrites the business expansion of South African capital.

In the summer of 2007, media coverage of Indian Idol-3 focused attention on how people in the Northeast Indian state of Meghalaya cast aside decades-old separatist identities to mobilize support for Amit Paul, a finalist from the region. While some fans set up websites and blogs to generate interest and support from the rest of the country and abroad, others formed a fan club and facilitated efforts by a range of groups and organizations to sponsor and manage PCOs (public call offices) in different parts of Meghalaya, distribute pre-paid mobile phone cards, and set up landline voting booths. Recognizing the ways in which these activities were beginning to transcend long-standing ethnic, religious, linguistic, and spatial boundaries, state legislators and other politicians soon joined the effort to garner votes for Amit Paul, with the chief minister D. D. Lapang declaring Amit Paul to be Meghalaya’s “brand Ambassador for peace, communal harmony and excellence.”1 It seemed that this three-month-long campaign around a reality television program could set the stage for a remarkable refashioning of the socio-cultural and political terrain in Meghalaya. As one commentator remarked:When Meghalaya’s history is written, it could well be divided into two distinct phases – one before the third Indian Idol contest and one after it. A deep tribal-non-tribal divide, punctuated by killings, riots, and attempts at ethnic cleansing, would mark the first phase. A return to harmony and to the cosmopolitan ethos of the past would signify the second. The agent of change: Amit Paul, the finalist of the musical talent hunt on a TV channel.

Latin American Television makes English speakers aware of the dimensions, operation, and significance of the globalization of television in the Spanish-speaking world. Second only in scale to the market for English-language programming, the Spanish-language market embraces not just most nations of South and Central America but also Spain, and even the United States--the sixth largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. This intercontinental space is connected physically by satellite communication, and culturally by a common language and heritage which binds it as both a `geolinguistic region' and an `imagined community' which certain media corporations, Latin American and North American, seek to exploit. A similar phenomenon with regard to Brazil and the Portuguese-speaking world is ... Source: Publisher

This book examines the development of television broadcasting in Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea. It explores the policy regimes guiding the development of television broadcasting as a powerful institution and the extent to which new forms of television have become part of each country’s contemporary media mix. It analyses the interests involved in key policy decisions, the institutional dynamics promoting or inhibiting new media markets, and the relative importance in the different countries of cable, satellite, digital broadcasting, and the use of the Internet for purposes associated with television broadcasting. The nature of television regimes in each of the three countries is very different, and the contrasting situations provide great insights into how television is developing, and how it could develop further, both in East Asia and worldwide.

With special reference to the current scenario in West Bengal, this chapter argues that the rise and popularity of Bangla news channels like Star Ananda, 24 Ghanta, Kolkata TV, and Tara News have resulted in the emergence of a vernacular style of news broadcasting which is quite distinct from that of global or national news media. One major point in this chapter is how the vernacular news channels encourage particular forms of address — the emotional, the intimate and the melodramatic — and how close-ups and sound bites create particular kinds of telegenic political leaders who can use these formal characteristics to their advantage. This chapter explores the ways in which a distinctive kind of vernacular is reconfiguring the nature of political participation itself and hence the notion of citizenship and perhaps even the nature and functioning of the nation-state in India.

This chapter looks at one well-known format in reality television– Big Brother (Bigg Boss in India) – in order to shed light on the complicated relationship between the forces of globalization, national and local cultural formations and the dictates of commercially driven entertainment. It analyses the essential features of format television to argue that the very mode of its constitution as an economic and aesthetic object inclines it towards the global. The chapter elucidates the reality behind global cultural formations by discussing the two main theoretical approaches to the question of global culture – cultural imperialism and cultural globalization. It also offers some speculations about how reality television embodies global form and thus functions as a sort of “Bigg Boss” that dictates contemporary modes of meaningful behaviour.

This chapter looks, in particular, at issues surrounding the trial of Mohammad Afzal Guru in 2006–7, but also with reference to the terrible Mumbai attacks of November 2008. Whilst tragic in multiple ways, these events are also made spectacular, emotive, and divisive, according to interpretation by television. The framing of television news in India could be several, but is often not. Pantomime terrors, extravagant formatting, phone-in trial reports seem to be the order of the day. The station ident, newsreader-presenter and video confession all contest for screen attention in the trial of Mohamed Afzal, and the ground for this was prepared long ago. This short history of a 24 hour news channel ends with ‘The Big Fight’ - a staged and theatrical mode of ‘infotainment’ that sacrifices intelligent reporting for ideological fit.

A unique confluence of technological, political and economic factors in the 1990s drove the transformative process that led to the battering down of the government’s monopoly over television. By the end of the 1990s, the growing strength of Indian capitalism after the liberalization of the Indian economy and the forces of what Thomas Friedman has called ‘Globalisation 3.0’ allowed Indian entrepreneurs to level the playing field. The Indian state, having embarked on economic liberalization, was forced to adapt to satellite television as an agent of global capitalism it certainly did not give up control over television easily or voluntarily. Operating at the junction of public culture, capitalism and globalization, satellite news networks have had profound implications for the state, politics, democracy and identity formation. Despite all their shortcomings and sensationalism, the emergence of satellite television news networks has enhanced and strengthened deliberative Indian democracy.

The exponential growth of television news in India – from one state controlled network until 1991 to more than 100 news channels in 2012 – has transformed broadcast journalism in the country. This proliferation of news networks has intensified competition for audience and advertising revenue, leading to excessive marketization of news, which increasingly veers toward infotainment. The chapter examines the challenges faced by Indian television news – focusing on economic and political dimensions of television news - and its implications for the world’s largest democracy.

Beneath many instances of ’sweeping’ change, both structural and representational, in the market-dominant, liberalized and privatized Indian televisual scenario there lies a hidden transcript of continuity insofar as the encoding of development issues, images and messages is concerned. In the periods of Doordarshan and later corporate channels, though with markedly different historical contexts, reference points, contents and styles — the encoding of ’development’ leaves little autonomy to the audiences. In a political slant indicating how the two televisual periods converge in contracting the space for public debate and civic engagement the essay seeks to make a departure from the dominant view which puts them in binary positions.

This chapter critically evaluates changing definitions of ‘public’ in Indian television in relation to discourses of globalization and media privatization. It examines the debate over the nationalist agenda of public broadcasting in India in relation to the demands for alternative models of broadcasting, and the rise of private commercial satellite channels since the 1990s. It also discusses how representations of traditionally private desires of sexuality and intimacy in soap operas, reality TV shows and music television are redefining the public in India. It outlines the ways in which private desire is made visible — and thus made public — through the convergence of the television screen, the cinematic screen, the computer screen, and the mobile screen. It argues that binaries of ‘public’ versus ‘private’ force us into either/or debates even though such category systems are always-already hybrid in postcolonial societies such as India.

Television has been called ‘a Western-originated project’ (Barker 1997: 5) and an institution of Western capitalist modernity. The global circulation of Western-centred, or more specifically, American-centred cultural products, contributes to the formation and dissemination of a global shared culture that reaches across the boundaries of nation-states. In the process American cultural products play a role in the formation of local television cultures.

In March 2001 a Japanese newspaper report entitled ‘Indians are addicted to a quiz show’ drew attention to a phenomenally popular television programme in India – a quiz show that attracts millions of viewers in which challengers strive to win prize money (Asahi Shinbun 2001). What was particularly eye-catching for the journalist was the profligately decorated studio set located in Mumbai (Bombay) and the caring guidance of the MC, a film star famous in India. The name of the show, as you might have already inferred, was Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.

The previous chapter introduced in broad brushstrokes the issues at stake in this study, beginning with a critique of globalization and moving on to sketch in finer detail national television systems, the role of local content, and the economic importance of formats. The chapter concluded with a brief overview of the vagaries of copyright law as it applies to formats. Here, we initiate a discussion of Asian television systems beginning with a much different perspective on the ramifications of cultural borrowing. In this context we note that the format business straddles the divide between creative endeavour and innovation on the one hand, and slavish imitation on the other. This polarization manifests in widespread misunderstanding of the goals of format producers and distributors, and the role that formats play in the shaping of television schedules. We need therefore to flesh out the in-between issues. These are primarily concerned with the relationship between the format and its localization, television consumption within ‘cultural continents’, and changes in media systems. Taking this further we note the relationship between production and reception within Asia, the growth of television industries in the region and the relationship between formatting and new media distribution platforms that use interactive technologies allowing viewers to feedback responses. This exercise enables us to identify an alternative list of conceptual tools to those championed by political economy scholars.

This chapter historicises and contextualises the evolution, production, and development of key Mexican screen melodramas over fifty-two years to understand and mediate Mexico’s ambivalence around socioeconomic background, ranother. Perhaps if Televisa had allowed its various ace and religion, gender and worth, family and duty. The chapter demonstrates the importance of localised scholarly inquiry into Mexican audiovisual media that considers not only narrative discourses, content and textual analyses, but also industrial records and practices, marketing campaigns and press releases, archival research and interviews, multimedia synergy, and comparative analysis. For some time, research on Mexican melodrama has had a strong social focus, with several writings about audience engagement, but it is imperative to have more close readings of the texts themselves to understand their cultural context and industrial histories. This research exposes societal changes within Mexico by utilising one of its most omnipresent forms of popular culture and provides a deeper understanding of Mexico’s primary media productions through the use of genre and remake theory. The representations of young women yield a multitude of tensions and ambiguities placed upon Mexican women, which reveal volumes about wider sociocultural expectations.

Gender and the contemporary audio-visual landscape of Mexico.

This study explores the globalization and liberalization that has occurred in Indian television over the two decades starting from 1990.

This book proposes contemporary decolonization as an approach to developing cultural economies in the Global South. This book represents the first critical examination and comparison of cultural and creative industries (CCI) and economy concepts in the Caribbean and Africa.