The volume examines popular sensibilities via textual, visual, performative, spatial, digital frames of inquiry and critical social-political issues in South Asia. It will be an invaluable reference source for scholars, researchers and students in the humanities, liberal arts, cultural studies, and South Asian studies.
The volume examines popular sensibilities via textual, visual, performative, spatial, digital frames of inquiry and critical social-political issues in South Asia. It highlights the interface between cultural studies and its popular-political standpoints, and interrogates the kaleidoscope of popular imaginary as well as its conceptual problematics through distinct case studies from the region. It leads learners towards the unfounded territories of popular culture studies in South Asia. With essays by major scholars in the field, the book uses theoretically comprehensive and empirically varied case studies to re-evaluate the central questions of epistemology, methodology, and approaches to popular culture studies from non- Western cultures perspectives.
Lucid, accessible, and nuanced, the essays in the volume will be an invaluable reference source for scholars, researchers and students in the humanities, liberal arts, cultural studies, and South Asian studies.
Introduction Part I: Performance, Ritual and Folk
1. Secular bhavs of
Remixed Dances: Dance Reality Shows as Soft Resistance
2. The High
Seriousness of Comedy: Stand-up Comedy and the Tradition of Dissent
3. From
Behind the Mask: The Jabulo of the Khasis
4. The Axiology of the Lakhe and
Navdurga Masked Ritual Dances of Nepal
5. Asura, Danava, Rakshasa:
Interpreting Popular Indian Myths from Dalit Perspectives
6. Tales of Love,
Passion, Murder, and History: Poets Songs from Barak Valley
7. Sanjhi: A
Multihued Folk Festive Presence within an Over-arching Feminine Divinity
8.
Can Nauntanki be digital?: A Study of Nautanki Performances in the Post-Covid
Era
9. Caviuntakam and Latin Christians: Becoming and Reviving Identity
10. Musical Culture of Mourning Rituals: Liminality of the Orthodox and the
Popular
11. Only a Joke: Stand-up Comedy and Disability in the Indian Context
Part II: New Media Frames
12. Breaking Stereotypes or Making Stereotypes:
Hiphop Dance in India
13. Mourning, Cult, Fandom and its Tentative
Figurations: A Case Study of Pop-star-turned- cleric Junaid Jamsheds Death
and Mourning on the Internet
14. Cringe is the New binge: Matrimony, Desire
and the Female Body in Netflix's Indian Matchmaking and Fabulous Lives of
Bollywood Wives
15. From Streets to You Tube: Ladisha as an Alternate
(Hi)story-Teller
16. Exploring the Manosphere: Analyzing Masculinities and
the Politics of Red Pill in India across Social Media Platforms Part III:
Cinema and Identity
17. Cultural Studies, Popular Hindi Cinema and the
Question of Aesthetics
18. Zindagi Tamasha to Kamli: Squeezing Space of
Emergent Cinema of Pakistan
19. Framing the Ecology of Fear
20. Subverting
the Popular Gaze in Stree (2018) and Bulbbul (2021)
21. Dalit Sporting
Imaginary and Jhund
22. My Son Wont Play Cricket for England: Cricket,
Patriarchy, and Diasporic Subjectivity in Patiala House
23. Screening
Sainthood: Shifting Paradigms in the films on Vivekananda
24. Surrogate Inc.:
The Commercialization of Bollywoods Surrogacy Narrative in the Neoliberal
Age
25. An Excavation of Identities through Indiana Jones Part IV: Visual
Figurations
26. The Home and the World of Hindi Television Serials
27.
Troubling the Waters: Graphic Advocacy and the Indo-Sri Lankan Fisher Folks
Tale
28. Post-1971: Photographic Ambivalence, Archives, and the Construction
of National Identity of Bangladesh
29. Talking Walls- Muted Femininity
30.
Popular Culture of Cynicism and its Satirical Expressions in Art: Notes from
Contemporary Pakistan
31. Re-viewing the Mythoepic in Indian Popular
Imagination Part V: Spatial Becomings
32. Willkommen (Welcome) Bishan Singh
to the Kit Kat Klub
33. Unpacking Popular Culture from the Lens of Public
Philosophy
34. Popular Culture in Early Nationalist Imagination
35. The World
Ends in South Asia: Dilli Dystopias and the (Post-)Apocalypse
36. Oppositely
Parallels: A Visual Inquiry on Squeezing Female Spaces
Akshaya Kumar is Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India.
Raj Thakur is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Central University of Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir, India.
