Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14746680701208596

1474-6697

Gita Rajan, Vinay Lal,

Chinese history and philosophy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Lal and Nandy Lal, Vinay and Nandy, Ashis, eds. 2006. Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and the Iconic in Indian Cinema, Delhi: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar] xi–xii, xxiii–xxv. 2. The term cultural citizenship is widely used in globalization studies, and often in post‐modern studies to discuss the seismic shifts in notions of community, nation, and belonging. In a general sense, it signals the superficial adoption of another's cultural morés to keep up with global fashion trends and does not at all entail legal rights to belong to a nation's citizenry. Theorized from various perspectives, debates about cultural citizenship figure quite prominently in Zygmunt Badman's oeuvre, and specifically, for example, in Arjun Appadurai's Appadurai, Arjun. 1997. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar] Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization and Manuel Castles's Castles, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society, London: Basil Blackwell. [Google Scholar] The Rise of the Network Society. In Asian and Asian American contexts (largely Sino), it is addressed in Lisa Lowe's Lowe, Lisa. 1999. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences.”. Diaspora, 1: 1–24. [Google Scholar] “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences” and Aihwa Ong's Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham: Duke University Press. [Google Scholar] Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. These are only some works that come to mind from among a rapidly growing body of scholarship. 3. Debord Debord, Guy. 1977. Society of the Spectacle, Detroit: Black and Red Books. [Google Scholar] 1–2, original emphasis, in Society of the Spectacle. 4. See Appadurai Appadurai, Arjun. 1997. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar] 32–33, original emphasis. 5. Michel de Certeau de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. Trans. Steven Rendall [Google Scholar] xi. 6. Maneuvering his idea of ‘tactic’ in ‘everyday’ experiences into South Asians constructions of popular culture permits the selective borrowing and deployment of actions that makes who we are, even as we go about our routine life. It allows room for a degree of autonomy within a prescribed set of norms available in homelands and in the diaspora. In this, it is different from of earlier notions of popular culture, wherein Bollywood dictated terms of engagement, for example, running the gamut from engendering public, nationalist subjects to private reasons behind romantic relations. De Certeau de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. Trans. Steven Rendall [Google Scholar] continues, ‘Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others’ (xii, original emphasis). The idea of ‘poaching’ is semiotically powerful and explains how subjects/people inhabit a global continuum through daily activities such as reading a particular novel like Da Vinci Code, or cooking certain foods we see on TV shows to be part of popular culture. 7. Gladwell Gladwell, Malcolm. 2002. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, New York: Back Bay Books. [Google Scholar] uses this phrase, also the title of his last book, to show how certain phenomena shift the focus or intent of popular culture and public opinion based on new cultural ideas, patterns, and behavioural choices, which gather momentum and coalesce to produce very different readings of the situation. Amongst other loosely connected examples to prove his thesis, he begins with an analysis of an epidemiological event and shows how we create a new vocabulary, and consequently change treatment of the disease when enough disparate details come back to the same issue. Our point in using this phrase is to suggest that we now have numerous different discourses and products emanating from different parts of the South Asian region to lessen our dependence upon Bollywood and make room for other discussions of popular culture. 8. This is, of course, the opening line of Anna Karenina.