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  • This essay examines the 2010 NBC situation comedy Outsourced, with special attention to its representation of the racial politics surrounding business process outsourcing to India. Specifically, it discusses how Outsourced participates in what Jodi Melamed calls “neoliberal multiculturalism” to work through, symbolically and narratively, the realities and contradictions of globalized economies as they are experienced. By staging the dilemmas of outsourcing through the specter of the white male middle manager traveling to India to train Indian call center workers, Outsourced minimizes the affective labor necessarily performed by Indian call center workers and dramatizes outsourcing as a crisis of white U.S. masculinity alone. Moreover, it figures our white male protagonist as the global multicultural citizen to be emulated insofar as he models the appropriate attitude toward outsourcing and toward “other” cultures in general. Finally it suggests that the failure of the show has less to do with issues of cultural stereotyping and more to do with the failure of neoliberal multiculturalism to soothe anxieties around changing global economies.

  • African television is at the crossroads. This chapter surveys, describes, analyzes and explains the major changes that have taken place in the African television landscape since the 1990s. It focuses on three major developments that have marked the African television landscape: (1) liberalization of the television space to keep abreast of international developments, and the tension between entrenched governmental public broadcasting systems and newly licensed “independent” TV stations, (2) the process and impact of the analogue to digital TV switchover shepherded by the International Telecommunications Union, and (3) the diffusion of Chinese electronic technology, television, and film content on the African television market as part of the Asian giant’s “soft power” diplomacy and State capitalism. African television is constrained by political regimes that restrict freedom of expression, and regulatory agencies that preside over systems in which the law takes precedence over rights.

  • This chapter examines the intersection of popular culture and populism in Turkey by focusing on the TV show Payitaht Abdulhamid. Our motivation to analyze the recent TV series Payitaht Abdulhamid stems from our interest in the instrumental mobilization of popular culture for the Turkish government’s dual desire to both establish cultural hegemony and consolidate its populist style of government. Our analysis reveals that television, especially in the Global South, still plays a central role in governments’ desire to reconstruct history and establish cultural hegemony. This is particularly important as Turkey is going through a crisis of hegemony since the public is completely divided in its support for the government. Within the context of this hegemonic crisis, televised popular culture is vital, perhaps more than ever. Specifically, the show reduces a complicated history into easily understandable dichotomies and projects them on to contemporary politics in order to consolidate support for the government. Through televised popular culture, the government mobilizes history for purposes of cultural hegemony and populist politics flavored with nationalist, Islamist, and anti-Western motifs. Ultimately, the TV show presents yet another moment for understanding the mediated nature of 21st-century politics outside Western contexts.

Dernière mise à jour depuis la base de données : 20/07/2025 13:00 (EDT)