Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial IndiaDuke University Press, 1999 - 429 pages In Screening Culture, Viewing Politics Purnima Mankekar presents a cutting-edge ethnography of television-viewing in India. With a focus on the responses of upwardly-mobile, yet lower-to-middle class urban women to state-sponsored entertainment serials, Mankekar demonstrates how television in India has profoundly shaped women's place in the family, community, and nation, and the crucial role it has played in the realignment of class, caste, consumption, religion, and politics. Mankekar examines both "entertainment" narratives and advertisements designed to convey particular ideas about the nation. Organizing her study around the recurring themes in these shows--Indian womanhood, family, community, constructions of historical memory, development, integration, and sometimes violence--Mankekar dissects both the messages televised and her New Delhi subjects' perceptions of and reactions to these messages. In the process, her ethnographic analysis reveals the texture of these women's daily lives, social relationships, and everyday practices. Throughout her study, Mankekar remains attentive to the tumultuous historical and political context in the midst of which these programs' integrationalist messages are transmitted, to the cultural diversity of the viewership, and to her own role as ethnographer. In an enlightening epilogue she describes the effect of satellite television and transnational programming to India in the 1990s. Through its ethnographic and theoretical richness, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics forces a reexamination of the relationship between mass media, social life, and identity and nation formation in non-Western contexts. As such, it represents a major contribution to a number of fields, including media and communication studies, feminist studies, anthropology, South Asian studies, and cultural studies. |
Contents
National Television and the Viewing Family | 45 |
WomenOriented Narratives and the New Indian | 104 |
The Ramayan and the Creation | 165 |
Television Tales National Narratives and a Womans | 224 |
Militaristic Nationalism | 259 |
Popular Narrative the Politics of Location | 289 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
activists advertisements analysis Aparna audience Basti bhakti Bombay Buniyaad chapter Choudhry claimed colonial construction context critics critique daughter daughter-in-law Delhi depicted described discussion Doordarshan dowry Draupadi Draupadi's disrobing emotional episode ethnography feminist fieldwork Gandhi hegemonic Hindi film Hindu nationalism Hindu nationalist Hindu viewers Hum Log husband identity ideologies in-laws Indian culture Indian nation Indian Woman Indian Womanhood interpretations Jayanthi Kalyani Kaur lives lower-middle-class Maggi Noodles Mahabharat mass media middle middle-class modernity mother Muslim narratives Nathu neighborhood north Indian Padmini Parmindar Partition political Poonam popular postcolonial production programs Rajani Ram Rajya Ramayan relationship religious Renuka representations role Sahni Sarojini satellite television scene secularism seemed Selapan serial sexuality Shakuntala Sharma Sikh Singh Sita social story struggles subject positions Sukumaran Sushmita Tamas Tamil telecast texts tion tradition transnational satellite Udaan upper-caste Vikas Nagar violence watched wife women women-oriented Zee TV