Rajinder Dudrah

Priya Jha

Over the past 20 years we have seen critical design studies emerge as a springboard for scholars, activists, and those working in the creative industries. Design studies has enabled critics to link the relationship between constructions of knowledge and the emotional commitments that both practitioners and audiences bring to the making and uses of design work. A critical focus on these practices can reveal issues such as the distribution of power and emotional evocations and experiences in and through different designs. At the same time, the use of design studies has drawn on diverse fields such as art history, architecture, public policy, and Geographic Information Systems. This collected volume, the first of its kind, engages with these fields of critical inquiry with ideas and debates in post-colonial studies, and in media and cultural studies. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship that examines material culture and its relationship between design and its construction of knowledge about multicultural identities in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on South Asia. The chapters pose questions about colonial history, colonial and postcolonial cultural practices, and the aestheticization of South Asian art, design, and media forms as they inform identities in a deterritorialized global culture. The sites of the investigation by the contributors reflect the interdisciplinarity of design studies and share the insistence on emphasizing the vernacular: Indian fashion design, lithographic design in Muslim princely states, and Indian floor drawings live alongside museum exhibitions, shopping malls, and film spaces. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Imagining South Asia

Designing (Post)Colonial Knowledge

Khaleel Malik

It is widely acknowledged that creativity is emerging as one of the most important sources of economic growth. This book investigates the varied forms of the creative and cultural industries including the arts, culture, film, design and other related fields. In this book, the chapters showcase new research insights into the recent growth of the creative and cultural industries, which can be located across the intersection of the arts and humanities, business studies and social science disciplines. The contributors provide rich empirical insights about the creative and cultural industries of, related to and connected with South Asia, both from across its diasporas and from around the world. This includes a variety of illustrative examples of creativity from the Bollywood film industry, to the growth of the creative sector in countries like the UK, India and Bangladesh, making the book an engaging read for anyone who is interested to learn more. Using contemporary and fresh examples from South Asia and its diasporas, South Asian Creative and Cultural Industries offers new research perspectives on a growing and important region of the world. This book was originally published as a special issue of the South Asian Popular Culture journal.

South Asian Creative and Cultural Industries

Priya Joshi

The 1970s was a pivotal decade in the Indian social, cultural, political and economic landscape: the global oil crisis, wars with China and Pakistan in the previous decade, the Bangladesh war of 1971, labour and food shortages, widespread political corruption, and the declaration of the state of Emergency. Amidst this backdrop Indian cinema in both its popular and art/parallel film forms flourished. This exciting new collection brings together original research from across the arts and humanities disciplines that examine the legacies of the 1970s in India’s cinemas, offering an invaluable insight into this important period. The authors argue that the historical processes underway in the 1970s are important even today, and can be deciphered in the aural and visual medium of Indian cinema. The book explores two central themes: first, the popular cinema’s role in helping to construct the decade’s public culture; and second, the powerful and under-studied archive of the decade as present in India’s popular cinemas. This book is based on a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

The 1970s and its Legacies in India's Cinemas

Daniel Burdsey

Stanley Thangaraj

This original collection demonstrates the importance of sporting practices, spaces and leisure affiliations to understanding issues around identity, (post-) migration, diaspora and transnationialism for global South Asian populations. The chapters provide a critical (re-) examination of the roles that sport plays within and in relation to South Asian groups in the diaspora, and raises a series of pertinent questions regarding the multifarious relationships between sport and South Asianness. The chapters range across a wide variety of disciplines, regions, sports and identifications. They are in conversation with each other while showing the particularity of each diasporic context and relationship to sport. The book encompasses a number of global contexts from the "homeland" (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan) to the diaspora (Fiji, Norway, the US, the UK), and addresses a broad range of sporting contexts, including basketball, boxing, cricket, cycling, field hockey, soccer and golf. The chapters combine a range of qualitative methods, including ethnography, auto-ethnography, participant observation, memoir, interview and textual analysis (film, television and print media). This collection comprises the latest cutting edge research in the field, and will be essential reading for scholars and students both of sport and South Asian diasporas. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Playing through Time and Space

Sport and South Asian Diasporas

Using an interdisciplinary framework, this book offers a fresh perspective on the issues of diaspora culture and border crossings in the films, popular cultures, and media and entertainment industries from the popular Hindi cinema of India. It analyses and discusses a range of key contemporary films in detail, such as Veer Zaara, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, and Dostana. The book uses the notion of travel analytically in and through the cinema to comment on films that have dealt with Indo-Pak border crossings, representations of diaspora, and gender and sexuality in new ways. It engages with common sense assumptions about everyday South Asian and diasporic South Asian cultures and representations as expressed in Bollywood cinema in order to look at these issues further. Moving towards an innovative exploration beyond the films, this book charts the circuits and routes of Bollywood as South Asian club cultures in the diaspora, and Hindi cinema entertainment shows around the world, as well as its impact on social media websites. Bollywood Travels is an original and thought provoking contribution to studies on Asian Culture and Society, Sociology, World Cinema, and Film, Media and Cultural Studies.

Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Popular Hindi Cinema

Bollywood Travels

E. Dawson Varughese

Graphic Novels and Visual Cultures in South Asia explores the shifting landscapes of the graphic narratives and related visual cultures scene in South Asia today. This exciting volume explores the ever-developing scene of graphic novels, graphic narratives and related visual cultures in South Asia. Covering topics such as Tamil comics, material memory, the politics of graphic adaptation, the fandom of Ms Marvel as well as watching Pakistani social lives on Indian TV, this collection of essays are testament to how visual cultures across South Asia are responding to a new world order. The collection of work explores how certain visual cultures in South Asia are attempting to re-shape previous modes of visuality by unpacking what it means to be living in South Asia today. Through its inclusion of articles, visual essays and in-conversation pieces, this collection offers insight into the ways in which this narrative is unfolding, the kind of stories which are being told and how, in telling these stories, South Asian society is called upon to engage and crucially, to react to what we see, how and why we see it. This book was originally published as a special issue of the South Asian Popular Culture journal.

Graphic Novels and Visual Cultures in South Asia

Matthew Reynolds

Katrin Kohl

Andrew Gosler

 Suzanne Graham

 Martin Maiden

 Wen-chin Ouyang

Multilingualism is integral to the human condition. Hinging on the concept of Creative Multilingualism – the idea that language diversity and creativity are mutually enriching – this timely and thought-provoking volume shows how the concept provides a matrix for experimentation with ideas, approaches and methods. The book presents four years of joint research on Creative Multilingualism conducted across disciplines, from the humanities through to the social and natural sciences. It is structured as a manifesto, comprising ten major statements which are unpacked and explored through various case studies across ten chapters. They encompass areas including the rich relationship between language diversity and diversity of identity, thought and expression; the interaction between language diversity and biodiversity; the ‘prismatic’ unfolding of meaning in translation; the benefits of linguistic creativity in a classroom-setting; and the ingenuity underpinning ‘conlangs’ (‘constructed languages’) such as Tolkien’s Quenya and Sindarin, designed to give imagined peoples a distinctive medium capable of expressing their cultural identity. Creative Multilingualism: A Manifesto is a welcome contribution to the field of modern languages, highlighting the intricate relationship between multilingualism and creativity, and, crucially, reaching beyond an Anglo-centric view of the world. Intended to spark further research and discussion, this book appeals to young people interested in languages, language learning and cultural exchange. It will be a valuable resource for academics, educators, policy makers and parents of bilingual or multilingual children. Its accessible style also speaks to general readers interested in the role of language diversity in our everyday lives, and the untapped creative potential of multilingualism.

Rajinder Dudrah

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