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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.

Tamil television lends itself to some interesting initiatives in gender empowerment through its programming in 3 categories – fiction, reality, and talent shows. This chapter provides a glimpse into television programmes on leading Tamil channels over the last decade (2000–10) from a gender perspective. Focusing particularly on women and transgender characters/hosts, emotional and psychological quotients of the shows and their audiences, moments of dramatic intensity, the chapter demonstrates how the vernacular televisual representations were quite different from the stereotypical portrayals of the mainstream ‘national’ television, even though the programmes were produced, televised, and received within the broader patriarchal framework of Tamil cultural and political contexts. The chapter, as a whole, intends to look at the production, representation and identification of Tamil television soaps and reality shows as vehicle for spotlighting gender issues and alternative sexualities in the public domain.

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

Katharina Nötzold explores whether and how mass media can contribute to nation-building after civil war. Drawing on the example of Lebanon’s audiovisual media organisations, which are mostly privately owned by politicians, she demonstrates how political elites use television to transmit their visions of post-war society. Lebanon’s nation-building process from 1990 to 2005 was characterized by Syrian dominance over political life. From an extensive content analysis of Lebanese news and interviews with analysts, journalists and managers from all Lebanese TV stations, it emerges that political information on television focused more on divisive experiences than cohesive ones. This has underpinned continued sectarianism in Lebanon, in the media as in society at large, and has impeded nation-building. Biographische Informationen Katharina Nötzold is a political scientist and RCUK Research Fellow at the University of Westminster's Arab Media Centre, and she completed her PhD in Media and Communications at the University of Erfurt, Germany. She lived in Beirut and Amman and worked previously for the Center for International Peace Operations, Berlin. She is editor of Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture and author of articles on Arab media and media representations of migrants and Islam. Reihe Medien und politische Kommunikation – Naher Osten und islamische Welt - Band 19

By the end of the twentieth century, Mexican multimedia conglomerate Televisa stood as one of the most powerful media companies in the world. Most scholars have concluded that the company’s success was owed in large part to its executives who walked in lockstep with the government and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which ruled for seventy-one years. At the same time, government decisions regulating communications infrastructure aided the development of the television industry. In one of the first books to be published in English on Mexican television, Celeste González de Bustamante argues that despite the cozy relationship between media moguls and the PRI, these connections should not be viewed as static and without friction. Through an examination of early television news programs, this book reveals the tensions that existed between what the PRI and government officials wanted to be reported and what was actually reported and how. Further, despite the increasing influence of television on society, viewers did not always accept or agree with what they saw on the air. Television news programming played an integral role in creating a sense of lo mexicano (that which is Mexican) at a time of tremendous political, social, and cultural change. At its core the book grapples with questions about the limits of cultural hegemony at the height of the PRI and the cold war.

Discursos sobre “raza” y nación en Colombia, 1880-1930 constituye un aporte a la investigación sobre la formación de la nación en Colombia durante los siglos xix al xx. El libro es producto de la investigación de tesis de maestría del autor y se centra en mostrar cómo las elites del país concibieron y, en específico, aplicaron con la legislación y otros recursos políticos y culturales, formas de poder y hegemonía mediante las cuales establecieron su dominio a partir del control social, la higienización -“depuración racial o blanqueamiento de la raza”- y el señalamiento a los grupos que resistieron esas formas arbitrarias de poder desde arriba. La estructura del libro está dividida en una introducción, cuatro capítulos, las conclusiones, la bibliografía y una corta semblanza del autor. El primer capítulo es un análisis metodológico de la “alteridad”, a partir de la perspectiva poscolonial y decolonial; siguiendo a autores de renombre en ese campo, trata de demostrar – lamentablemente de modo uniforme– el carácter cruel y violento del proceso de europeización y de sus valores “irracionales” más recurrentes. Los capítulos del dos al cinco se dedican a sustentar la postura metodológica con un material de fuentes y de análisis sobre el racismo colombiano en los siglos xix y xx.

While sharing fundamental similarities with other colonial and post-colonial experiences, Latin America has a unique history of having been the proving ground for early Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects, of having experienced a relatively long duration of – but also historically early end to – these projects, and of negotiating a particular and complex trajectory of internal and external post-colonial relations. What can the study of this distinct colonial and post-colonial experience contribute to a broader program of postcolonial sociology? Conversely, what can a revitalized postcolonial sociology contribute to the study of Latin America? This article develops provisional answers to these questions by reviewing major currents in South and North American scholarship on the Latin American colonial and post-colonial experience. Some of this scholarship self-consciously identifies with broader movements in postcolonial studies; but much of it – both historical and contemporary – does not. By bringing together diverse strands of thought, this article sheds new light on what postcolonialism means in the Latin American context, while using the comparative leverage that this set of often overlooked cases provides to contribute to a new program of postcolonial sociology.

In this paper I offer a brief overview of the academic debates about post-colonial theories and the concept of coloniality, seeking to map out their Latin American translations, especially from the perspective of feminist theories in relation to the coloniality of gender. By emphasizing an intersectional approach to understand the gendered character of coloniality, decolonial feminists are seeking innovative ways of articulating new epistemologies or “saberes propios”. However, in these debates little attention has been given to the issue of the travels and translations of decolonial feminisms in Latin America. In focusing on the vexed issue of translation, I want to explore some of the challenges Latin American decolonial feminists are facing today.

What does it mean to be white? This remains the question at large in the continued effort to examine how white racial identity is constructed and how systems of white privilege operate in everyday life. White Out brings together the original work of leading scholars across the disciplines of sociology, philosophy, history, and anthropology to give readers an important and cutting-edge study of ""whiteness""

En medio del proceso de construcción de la República, durante el siglo xix, en Venezuela los sectores no blancos de la sociedad intentaron legitimarse a través de la fotografía en las carte-de-visite, con el objetivo de ratificar su posición en esta sociedad ‘café con leche’. El uso de esta tecnología, así como la aparición y aceptación de manuales de urbanidad, fueron parte de un proceso en el que estos sectores intentaron ‘modernizarse’, reflejando las tensiones sociales asociadas, por ejemplo, a la dicotomía campo-ciudad o a la necesidad de ‘blanquearse’ ante los ojos de los coterráneos. El objetivo de este trabajo, es estudiar la manera en que el retrato fotográfico y el manual de urbanidad actúan en una sociedad cuyas diferencias y distancias sociales y económicas han sufrido un gran trastorno luego del proceso independentista. During the process of the construction of the Republic, in the 19th Century, non-white sectors of Venezuelan society attempted to legitimise themselves through photographs in their cart-de-visite, with the object of ratifying their position in this ‘coffee and milk’ society. The use of such technology, as well as the introduction and acceptance of urbanity handbooks, were part of a process in which these sectors tried to ‘modernise’, reflecting related social tensions, for example, the urban-rural dichotomy or the need for ‘whitening’ themselves in the eyes of their fellow citizens. The purpose of this paper is to study the way in which photographic portraits and urbanity handbooks act in a society in which social and economic differences and distances have undergone a great upheaval since the independence process.

Video games are inherently transnational by virtue of their industrial, textual, and player practices. This collection includes essays from scholars from eight countries analyzing game cultures on macro- and micro-levels and investigates the growing transnational nature of digital play

Game Studies is a rapidly growing area of contemporary scholarship, yet volumes in the area have tended to focus on more general issues. With Playing with the Past, game studies is taken to the next level by offering a specific and detailed analysis of one area of digital game play -- the representation of history. The collection focuses on the ways in which gamers engage with, play with, recreate, subvert, reverse and direct the historical past, and what effect this has on the ways in which we go about constructing the present or imagining a future. What can World War Two strategy games teach us about the reality of this complex and multifaceted period? Do the possibilities of playing with the past change the way we understand history? If we embody a colonialist's perspective to conquer 'primitive' tribes in Colonization, does this privilege a distinct way of viewing history as benevolent intervention over imperialist expansion? The fusion of these two fields allows the editors to pose new questions about the ways in which gamers interact with their game worlds. Drawing these threads together, the collection concludes by asking whether digital games - which represent history or historical change - alter the way we, today, understand history itself.

The years following the Cultural Revolution saw the arrival of television as part of China's effort to 'modernize' and open up to the West. Endorsed by the Deng Xiaoping regime as a 'bridge' between government and the people, television became at once the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party and the most popular form of entertainment for Chinese people living in the cities. But the authorities failed to realize the unmatched cultural power of television to inspire resistance to official ideologies, expectations, and lifestyles. The presence of television in the homes of the urban Chinese strikingly broadened the cultural and political awareness of its audience and provoked the people to imagine better ways of living as individuals, families, and as a nation. Originally published in 1991, set within the framework of China's political and economic environment in the modernization period, this insightful analysis is based on ethnographic data collected in China before and after the Tiananmen Square disaster. From interviews with leading Chinese television executives and nearly one hundred families in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Xian, the author outlays how Chinese television fosters opposition to the government through the work routines of media professionals, television imagery, and the role of critical, active audience members.

This book explores crucial moments in the emergence of feminine culture in Colombia hitherto unexamined in English-language criticism through an examination of the work of ground-breaking artist Débora Arango, best-selling novelist Laura Restrepo, and three generations of documentary filmmakers.

The history of videogames has largely been imagined as a patrilineal timeline. Women, when they emerge as participants in the game industry, are typically figured as outliers, exceptions, or early exemplars of “diversity” in the game industry. Yet the common practice of “adding women on” to game history in a gesture of inclusiveness fails to critically inquire into the ways gender is an infrastructure that profoundly affects who has access to what kinds of historical possibilities at a specific moment in time and space. This contribution aims to shift the relevant question from “Where are women in game history?” to “Why are they there in the way that they are?” To do so, the essay strategically deploys Sierra On-Line co-founder and lead designer Roberta Williams as an exceptional case study on the problem of gender in videogame history. Drawing from both media archaeology and feminist cultural studies, this contribution first outlines the function Roberta Williams serves as a gendered subject of game history. The remainder of the essay is organized as three short, non-chronological vignettes about specific objects and practices in the biography of Roberta Williams. Attention to the contextual specificity of Roberta Williams and her historical moment produces an alternative genealogy for gaming centered around relations of intimacy and labor in domestic space. Rather than producing a chronology, the method of this essay illustrates a historical critique by sketching a contour that unsettles the presumptive logic of what we must account for when we write about the objects and subjects of game history.

This remarkable volume, many years in the making, records and scrutinizes definitions of Northwest Coast Native art and its boundaries. A work of critical historiography, it makes accessible for the first time in one place a broad selection of more than 250 years of writing on Northwest Coast "art." Organized thematically, its excerpted texts are from both published and unpublished sources, some not previously available in English. They cover such complex topics as the clash between oral and written knowledge, transcultural entanglement, the influence of surrealist thinking, and the long history of the deployment of Northwest Coast Native art for nationalist purposes. The selections are preceded by thought-provoking introductions that give historical context to the diverse intellectual traditions that have influenced, stimulated, and opposed each othe

Drawing on original research I conducted in the late 1980s, the book argues for a critical approach to the study of children and television. It begins with critical reappraisals of previous empiricist and interpretative studies to set the ground for a different theoretical inquiry which links biography with history. The situated activity of children's television viewing therefore has to be related to the broader historical and cultural formations in post-Mao China. By way of a methodological pluralism of questionnaire survey, in-depth interviews and observation, the book provides the reader with a thorough critical analysis of the rise of the new commercial ethic in Chinese society in general, and in the sector of media and communications in particular, at the very historical turning point of the late 1980s. Soon after that, Deng Xiaoping made his significant tour to south China, reckoning a big step forward towards further liberalization and started to form a brave new world in China ever since.

In Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series, Florian Schneider analyses political discourses in Chinese TV dramas, the most popular entertainment format in China today.

De-Westernizing Film Studies aims to consider what form a challenge to the enduring vision of film as a medium - and film studies as a discipline - modelled on ‘Western’ ideologies, theoretical and historical frameworks, critical perspectives as well as institutional and artistic practices, might take today. The book combines a range of scholarly writing with critical reflection from filmmakers, artists & industry professionals, comprising experience and knowledge from a wide range of geographical areas, film cultures and (trans-)national perspectives. In their own ways, the contributors to this volume problematize a binary mode of thinking that continues to promote an idea of ‘the West and the rest’ in relation to questions of production, distribution, reception and representation within an artistic medium (cinema) that, as part of contemporary moving image culture, is more globalized and diversified than at any time in its history. In so doing, De-Westernizing Film Studies complicates and/or re-thinks how local, national and regional film cultures ‘connect’ globally, seeking polycentric, multi-directional, non-essentialized alternatives to Eurocentric theoretical and historical perspectives found in film as both an artistic medium and an academic field of study. The book combines a series of chapters considering a range of responses to the idea of 'de-westernizing' film studies with a series of in-depth interviews with filmmakers, scholars and critics. Contributors: Nathan Abrams, John Akomfrah, Saër Maty Bâ, Mohammed Bakrim, Olivier Barlet, Yifen Beus, Farida Benlyazid, Kuljit Bhamra, William Brown, Campbell, Jonnie Clementi-Smith, Shahab Esfandiary, Coco Fusco, Patti Gaal-Holmes, Edward George, Will Higbee, Katharina Lindner, Daniel Lindvall, Teddy E. Mattera, Sheila Petty, Anna Piva, Deborah Shaw, Rod Stoneman, Kate E. Taylor-Jones