Global South Asia on Screen

With importance for geopolitical cultural economy, anthropology, and media studies, John Hutnyk brings a new circuit of scholarship to attention where the color of film and television is offered as a stark challenge to political realities rendered in black and white. The snuffing of Osama bin Laden and the romantic embrace of Omar and Johnny are two poles of a global image machine that renders South Asia in full color; yet as Eric Idle's Indian dancing at the London Olympics showed, misrepresentation and stereotyping prevail. Current South Asian media scholars, alongside critical Marxist and poststructuralist authors, offer other takes on film and television in South Asia and across its many diasporas. But here, the exoticist image and the terror image are displaced in nuanced readings of Global South Asia on screen near you.

Each chapter offers a slice of historical study and assessment of media theory approaches appropriate to a political and cultural appreciation of changes in South Asia. Global South Asia is about the politics of exoticism and terror imagery, the ways film and TV trade on stereotype and fears, and national longing and desire.