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Letter from the Editors

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.8.2.0153

2380-7687

Aleks Wansbrough, Paul Mountfort,

South Asian Cinema and Culture

As we write this letter, we are confronted with the difficulty of narrative, of weaving together seemingly disparate articles with distinct subject matter: Satyajit Ray and John Carpenter, historical biography and Squid Game. Yet thematically, narrative recurs throughout this issue as a configuring principle. Indeed, much of what locates popular culture depends on the idea of mass narrative, of storytelling to the masses. After all, popular culture underwent a revaluation within the context of postmodernity. Although the sidelining of popular culture had been challenged before, the postmodern social condition was one that affirmed the multiplicity of narratives. While much of high modernist culture and the avant-garde aimed to break or efface narrative form, a tendency emerged amid postmodernity that underscored the epistemological and communicative significance of narrative. Popular culture, then, is partially definable by the ease of narrative identification.As alluded to, every article in this issue bears witness to a focus on narrative. In the first article of the issue, Rachel Franks explores narration in biography, and the challenges she faced when narrating the life of New South Wales’s longest-serving hangman, Robert Howard, also known as “Nosey Bob.” Franks describes the difficulties of confronting myths of Nosey Bob from her standpoint as biographer. In a very different way, Binayak Roy and Debanjali Dutta explore a set of challenges to narration, in this instance filmic narration. When one thinks of Satyajit Ray, one doesn’t tend to think of popular culture. Best known for works such as the Apu Trilogy: Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), Aparajito (The Unvanquished), and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu), and the staggering Charulata (The Lonely Wife), it is worth recalling that Ray also experimented with popular genres of cinema. Examining Ray’s fantasy musicals through the notion of dissensus, Roy and Dutta refute charge that Ray is apolitical or merely a filmmaker captured by the social dramas of the bourgeoisie.Speaking, or rather writing of dystopia, one of the more significant works of dystopian fantasy is Netflix’s show Squid Game. Prerna Subramanian’s article explores how capitalism consumes disposable time, concentrating on debt. For Subramanian, “By offering a depiction of indebted people and disposable time, the show highlights the contradictions and struggles inherent in late-stage capitalism, which are not always catastrophically violent but mundanely death-inducing.” Also adopting a political vantage point, Emma Hamilton and Alistair Rolls turn their gazes to the maestro of dystopian cinema John Carpenter. In their two articles on Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, Rolls and Hamilton accentuate the ambiguities of the movie, where it can be “both repressive and liberal,” and employ a textual approach to the movie’s depiction of racial identity, persuasively developing notions of representational equilibrium and intertextual equilibrium.Through these articles we can consider narrative in relation to history and biography; fantasy, dystopia, and politics; contemporary capitalism; and considerations of racial identity and representation. The issue concludes with reviews by Alba Sanz Álvarez and Chang Xu. As editors, we are grateful to our authors for such a strong issue.