The “Other” Parallel Cinema: Song and Dance in Indian Cinema

The classification of Indian cinema into Art/Parallel cinema is based on a significant hierarchical distinction which presupposes that judgment about Art films requires an understanding of the western cinematic language, especially its realist filmic grammar, and its shying away from “degraded” techniques of commercial cinema, like song and dance. Thus the “modern” elite class of the urban audience becomes the target of parallel films — even though parallel films have historically been social issue and minority issue films — while commercial cinema and its “implied viewers” are relegated to an antediluvian frame (Gehlawat 55). This theoretical classification of Indian cinema restores an elitist and Eurocentric bias in film history, which defeats decolonial, postcolonial, and subalternist vision of Indian cinema, and leads to a segregation and othering of audiences. To address and correct the complication posed by the limiting dichotomies of art/commercial cinema, I propose a reclassification of Indian films into artivist and commercial films based on their socio political activist potential or commercial intent, rather than genre and style. Implicit in the term artivist film is the potential for transforming not just the hierarchical relations that exist between high and low art, urban and rural classes, or elite and subaltern communities, but an expansion of the role of cinema in India. Furthermore, foregrounding here before neglected artivist film songs that reemphasize local voices and subject matters can destabilize the history of Bollywood cinema that reserves films as the de facto space of dominant class and castes. Reading film songs, in the heavily regulated cinema space of India, as voices from below is especially important at a time when the Hindutva movement has strengthened its efforts to establish Hinduism as the true locus of national identity by ideologically and physically targeting Muslims, Christians, Dalits and women

MTV Europe: An Analysis of the Channel's Attempt to Design a Programming Strategy for a pan-European Youth Audience

This thesis examines the ascendancy of MTV (Music Television) in Europe. It concentrates, above all, on the period between 1987-1996, which represents the phase when the channel was transmitted as a single pan-European network. This thesis is an interdisciplinary study that offers a reading of music television texts in relation to the institutional context in which messages are produced and the different cultural contexts in which they are received. The analysis begins by locating the phenomenon of MTV within the political economy of the music and media industries. The factors which constitute the 'novelty' of MTV as a particular type of TV (i.e. a branded channel) in relation to a particular type of audience (i.e. the 'youth' who were traditionally out of the reach of terrestrial broadcasters) are assessed. The pan­European dimension of MTV is subsequently incorporated by way of a comparative analysis of the relative failure of the EC's initiatives to develop a pan-European broadcasting strategy and the relative success of MTV in this venture. A separate chapter explores the possibility of creating a sense of being European through shared tastes in music. The proposed arguments are then illustrated by case-studies conducted across the contrasting terrain of selected Western and Eastern European countries

Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema

This doctoral work scrutinizes recent popular Indian cinemas (largely Hindi cinema) in the light of three epochal changes in the sub-continental situation since the early nineties: the opening out of the economy, the political rise of the Hindu right, and the inauguration of a new transnational electronic media universe. It is argued here that contemporary Indian films should not be read in terms of a continuing, agonistic conflict between polarities like 'modern' selves and 'traditional' moorings. Instead, the thesis demonstrates how, in popular Indian films of our times, an agrarian paternalistic ideology of Brahminism, or its founding myths can actually enter into assemblages of cinematic spectacle and affect with metropolitan lifestyles, managerial codas of the 'free market', individualism, consumer desire, and neo-liberal imperatives of polity and government. This involves a social transmission of 'cinema effects' across the larger media space, and symbiotic exchanges between long standing epic-mythological attributes of Indian popular cinema and visual idioms of MTV, consumer advertising, the travel film, gadgetry, and images of technology. A discussion of a new age 'cinematic' in the present Indian context thus has to be informed by a general theory of contemporary planetary 'informatics.' The latter however is not a superstructural reflection of economic transformations; it is part of an overall capitalistic production of social life that is happening on a global scale in our times. This dissertation attempts to make two important contributions to the field: it opens out the Eurocentric domain of traditional film studies and suggests ways in which studies of Indian films can enrich a global understanding of the cinematic; it also offers a possible explanation as to how, in the present age, a neo-Hindu patriarchal notion of Dharma (duty, religion) can actually bolster, instead of impeding, a techno-managerial-financial schema of globalization in India

A history of stigma : towards a sociology of mental illness and American psychiatry

Using genealogical discourse analysis, this project examines how American psychiatrists utilized the concept of stigma in The American Journal of Psychiatry as it relates to illness and treatment from 1846-2007. Once historicized, stigma takes the form of four themes, i.e. the stigma of psychiatric practice, euphemistic stigma, the stigma of treatment, and the stigma of mental ilhness. These themes each result in numerous strategies to diminish their effects in the population and the individual patient through national campaigns to combat stigma. This thesis also identifies the role of an emerging medicalization of mental illness' stigma and how this medicalization has specific implications for psychiatric treatment and social inclusion. The alignment of stigma alongside particular diagnostic categories has far reaching consequences as it attempts to circumvent the critical discourse which began with the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s. In this way, this thesis reveals American psychiatry's effort to de-stigmatize itself through campaigns to reduce the stigma of mental illness

Cultivat(ing) modernities : the Society for National Heritage, political propaganda and public architecture in twentieth-century Iran

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 615-632).Beginning in 1922, under the auspices of the Pahlavi dynasty of Iran, the tombs of selected historical figures were systematically destroyed to make way for modern mausoleums erected as metaphors for an "Aryan" nation in its process of modem revival. Initiated during the reign of Reza Shah who ruled the country with an iron fist between 1921 and 1941, most of the projects were implemented under his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, between 1941 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Since the monuments were ideologically inscribed commemorations of the leading modernists and reformists of the 1920s, their impact permeated the definition and function of high culture in Iran's 20th-century sociopolitical history. The dissertation offers a critical analysis of the political underpinnings, pedagogical aims, racial schemas, and aesthetic ends of propaganda architecture as they were conceived and constructed under the aegis of the Society for National Heritage. An in-depth study of the institutional history of the SNH, which included the construction of numerous mausoleums--particularly those belonging to Ferdawsi, Hafez, Ibn Sina, Omar Khayyam, and Arthur Pope, the supervision of over sixty preservation projects, and the creation of an archeological museum as well as a national library, the dissertation demonstrates that in the 20t century, the project of Iran' s "cultural heritage" was not just about a series of public monuments, well-choreographed museums, (in)accurate indexes of historical landmarks, or art exhibitions and congresses. Modern Iran's relationship to its cultural heritage was equated to Iran's equal and rightful place in the network of modern nations; its safest and fastest corridor to a progressive, and at times utopian, modernity; and its essential ideological(cont.) justification for the political, and often despotic, reforms aimed at territorial integrity and national homogeneity. Iran's cultural heritage, it is argued, was modem Iran's political raison d'e'tre.by Talinn Grigor.Ph.D