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Abstract
This thinkpiece draws attention to a recent trajectory in television studies that wishes to reframe the axiomatic of the discipline for the purpose of locating television as a key player in larger historical processes. Arguing that such a shift could not be imagined without a crisis of the discipline's excessive reliance on Anglo-American experiential spheres, the article examines how scholars of non-Western – particularly South Asian – television can critically engage with this moment to theoretically intervene into the discipline. Surveying disciplinary debates across literature, history, media studies and culture studies, the article problematizes the comparativist approach as well as the tenors of multiculturalism and postmodernism in the recent efforts to revisit television's location in history. The imperative of negotiating two orders of the ‘modern’ (the European modern and the twentieth-century ‘communicative modernity’ of the global north), a creative challenge posed broadly to the non-Western media scholar, has never been significantly addressed by the discipline of television studies. The article proposes that any attempt to locate television in history and envisage a broader interdisciplinary dialogue must address such an imperative and not be content merely with presenting differences.
Notes
1. Brunsdon, ‘Is Television Studies History?’, 134.
2. William Uricchio argues that every phase of theorization of the formal features of television, that of the Flow particularly, can be related to the contingent nature of viewer–television interface in that particular age. ‘As we have seen, generational clusters of television technology and cultural practice have each been bound up in particular power dynamics and discursive strategies’. Uricchio, ‘Television's Next Generation’, 257.
3. Williams, Marxism and Literature.
4. Curran and Park, De-Westernizing Media Studies, 3.
5. Sinclair et al., New Patterns in Global Television.
6. Miller, ‘Turn Off TV Studies!’, 100.
7. Brunsdon, ‘Is Television Studies History?’, 130.
8. Ibid., 131. I don't agree with Brunsdon's views on these two books here. I think they have thoroughly used the relevant contributions of television studies available at the time.
9. Parks, ‘My Media Studies’, 126.
10. Curran and Park, De-Westernizing Media Studies, 15.
11. Spivak, Death of a Discipline.
12. Negt, ‘Mass Media’, 64.
13. Greene, ‘Review of Death of a Discipline’, 154–9.
14. Žižek, ‘Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism’, 44.
15. Ibid., 46.
16. Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History’, 19.
17. Jameson, ‘Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue’, 67.
18. Cited by Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History’, 17. Original citation Morris, ‘Metamorphoses at Sydney Tower’.
19. Rajagopal, Politics after Television, 337.
20. Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History’, 3.
21. Ibid., 4.
22. Ibid., 20–3.
23. Thussu, ‘Mapping Global Media Flow and Contra-Flow’, 26.
24. Hutnyk, ‘Panoramas of Asia and the Electronic Hearth’, 53.
25. Rajagopal, Politics after Television, 75.
26. Vasudevan et al. ‘Vision for Screen Studies in South Asia’, 5.
27. Rajagopal, ‘Notes on Postcolonial Visual Culture’, 11.
28. Ibid., 14.
29. Kumar, ‘Is There Anything Called Global Television Studies?’, 137.
30. Ibid., 147.
31. Ibid., 153.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 150.
36. Marx, Grundrisse.
37. Negri, Marx beyond Marx, 43–4.
