The death of Princess Diana unleashed an international outpouring of grief, love, and press attention virtually unprecedented in history. Yet the exhaustive effort to link an upper class white ...British woman with "the people" raises questions. What narrative of white femininity transformed Diana into a simultaneous signifier of a national and global popular? What ideologies did the narrative tap into to transform her into an idealized woman of the millennium? Why would a similar idealization not have appeared around a non-white, non-Western, or immigrant woman? Raka Shome investigates the factors that led to this defining cultural/political moment and unravels just what the Diana phenomenon represented for comprehending the relation between white femininity and the nation in postcolonial Britain and its connection to other white female celebrity figures in the millennium. Digging into the media and cultural artifacts that circulated in the wake of Diana's death, Shome investigates a range of salient theoretical issues surrounding motherhood and the production of national masculinities, global humanitarianism, transnational masculinities, the intersection of fashion and white femininity with each other and national modernity. Her analysis explores how images of white femininity in popular culture intersect with issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and transnationality. Moving from ideas on the positioning of privileged white women in global neoliberalism to the emergence of new formations of white femininity in the millennium, Diana and Beyond fearlessly explains the late princess's never-ending renaissance and ongoing cultural relevance.
This essay addresses the difficult politics of 'internationalizing' cultural studies. In an effort to participate in ongoing conversations about, and around, 'internationalizing' cultural studies, ...this essay invites us to attend to the frames of reference that can sometimes underlie our efforts at 'internationalizing' cultural studies. Examining larger issues such as our frequent unexamined points of departure into the 'international', the geo-politics of knowledge production, academic protocols and practices, the gross unevenness in transnational exchange and circulation of knowledge, the continued hegemony of English as a language that secures academic legitimacy, this essay probes some of the obstacles that can often confront attempts at decolonizing cultural studies.
This essay invites us to consider the need to rethink culture and some theoretical/intellectual assumptions in Cultural Studies when we bring up the issue of the "Global South." The essay makes a ...case for "going South" in Cultural Studies. It advances a notion of the South that is based on a frame of dispossession. The first section offers a historical overview of the Global South and considers where the Global South is today. The second section attempts to rethink the notion of 'culture' and some intellectual orientations in Cultural Studies when we move to the Global South.
This essay addresses (1) how postcolonial studies might inform and enrich media studies, especially as the latter is situated in the Communication discipline, and (2) how media studies may ...productively expand the terrain postcolonial studies, that thus far has been dominated by the fields of Literature and Comparative Literature. Focusing on, and challenging, issues such as the North Atlantic temporal logics that inform the received history of media studies, as well as contesting the narrow boundaries of literary studies for engaging in contemporary postcolonial media/ted cultures, this essay attempts to argue for the importance of postcolonial media studies.
This essay focuses on the Indian migrant crisis in the context of the state's handling of the pandemic. It argues that the migrant situation in India pries open 'problem spaces' that, if attended to, ...reveal how many of the now normative solutions for governing and containing the virus are exceeded by bodies - of migrants in particular - that cannot be kept safe by solutions in place to check the contagion. The essay first raises questions about the unequal distribution of 'saveability' in the Indian context (but this can also apply to others). It asks who cannot be included in the frame of 'human life' that underlies the solutions offered for protecting lives in the pandemic. Second, the essay offers a description of the migrant crisis in India that has ensued in the pandemic. Following that description, the essay focuses on three problem-spaces or aporias that the pandemic has pried open and that call for a more politically complex, contextually sensitive, and humane response to the management of the virus: unequal temporalities, the dilemma of im/mobility, and the challenge of recording death.
This article critiques the US/UK centrism in cultural studies work in our field and the larger US academy. It addresses the limits of concepts in Cultural Studies that are popular in the ...Communication discipline when they are taken to the Global South and the Postcolonial Non-West. The article is an invitation to scholars to actively de-parochialize their research and teaching in light of dispossessions in the Global South.
Abstract
This article utilizes a postcolonial theoretical framework to challenge and unsettle the ways in which media has been historicized in media studies where the time of the North Atlantic West ...is taken to be an unspoken normative assumption through which we chart media’s development. Further, this article attempts to move us to the Global South by calling attention to media objects and the mediated lives that function through those objects, that have not received any place in media history. Nor are they recognized as a media object. The basic questions that this article raises are: (a) what happens to our understanding of media’s development when we complicate the temporality (North Atlantic Western) through which we narrate the history of media, and (b) What happens to our understanding of what media is when 24/7 electrification is not taken as a norm in our recognition of a media or technology object. What other media objects and mediated lives might then become visible?
This essay examines white femininity as a transnational phenomenon. Specifially, the essay addresses the representational logics of whiteness through which contemporary white women are positioned as ..."global" mothers in popular culture. The larger goal of this is to illustrate how "intimate" relations of race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism are negotiated and managed in contemporary positionings of white women as "global mothers."
