The soft power of popular cinema: the case of India

Among BRICS nations, India has the most developed and globalised film industry, and the Indian government as well as corporations are increasingly deploying the power of Bollywood in their international interactions. India’s soft power, arising from its cultural and civilizational influence outside its territorial boundaries, has a long history. Focusing on contemporary India’s thriving Hindi film industry, this article suggests that the globalisation of the country’s popular cinema, aided by a large diaspora, has created possibilities of promoting India’s public diplomacy. It examines the global imprint of this cinema as an instrument of soft power

Is there an app for that? A case study of the potentials and limitations of the participatory turn and networked publics for classical music audience engagement

The participatory turn, fuelled by discourses and rhetoric regarding social media, and in the aftermath of the dot.com crash of the early 2000s, enrols to some extent an idea of being able to deploy networks to achieve institutional aims. The arts and cultural sector in the UK, in the face of funding cuts, has been keen to engage with such ideas in order to demonstrate value for money; by improving the efficiency of their operations, improving their respective audience experience and ultimately increasing audience size and engagement. Drawing on a case study compiled via a collaborative research project with a UK-based symphony orchestra (UKSO) we interrogate the potentials of social media engagement for audience development work through participatory media and networked publics. We argue that the literature related to mobile phones and applications (‘apps’) has focused primarily on marketing for engagement where institutional contexts are concerned. In contrast, our analysis elucidates the broader potentials and limitations of social-media-enabled apps for audience development and engagement beyond a marketing paradigm. In the case of UKSO, it appears that the technologically deterministic discourses often associated with institutional enrolment of participatory media and networked publics may not necessarily apply due to classical music culture. More generally, this work raises the contradictory nature of networked publics and argues for increased critical engagement with the concept

Pride and popcorn: consuming the idea of community at film screenings in the Turkish diaspora

A range of studies have revealed the interrelatedness of identity construction, community formation and media among diasporas, mostly focusing on domestic contexts. Seeking to add further nuance to the understanding of the social lives of diasporas, we concentrate on media culture in the public environment of the film theatre. The significance of diasporic film consumption is investigated through a local audience study of Turkish film screenings in Antwerp. The phenomenon of the screenings was analysed through a multi-method approach, including 536 questionnaires among audiences, 19 in-depth interviews and 3 group interviews, along with previous findings (on distribution and exploitation) of the same project. The results show that Turkish films are almost exclusively attended by people with Turkish roots, creating a Turkish diasporic space within the boundaries of the urban and the public. The audience study shows that the screenings fulfil a major social role but also affect understandings of community

Media audiences, ethnographic practice and the notion of a cultural field

This article will consider in detail the implications of a diffuse social imagination for existing paradigms of ethnographic audience research. The notion of a 'cultural field research model will be offered here as an alternative structure for locating media communities as sites of social practice. This is a theoretical framework that reformulates the conception of media audiences as 'imagined communities by replacing a demographically constituted ethnographic model with an emphasis on surveying the diverse inhabitants of a cultural field constructed around participation in particular instances of media practice. Copyrigh

A Line in the Sand: The India-Pakistan Border in the Films of J.P. Dutta

This article examines the visualisation and narrative construction of the India-Pakistan border, and human interactions across that liminal space, as depicted in two films directed by J.P. Dutta, the high-profile, multiple award-winning war film Border (1997) and his subsequent feature Refugee (2000), which was more loosely described in its publicity literature as 'a human story'. 1 Through these films, Dutta established his reputation as the leading Indian director of the 'war film', a genre marked by its relative absence in the Indian cinema prior to the 1990s. Both Border and Refugee thus constitute part of what has retrospectively been described as Dutta's 'war trilogy' (along with the more recent LOC Kargil of 2003, which focuses on the 1999 Himalayan conflict). 2 In the first two films of the set, which I will consider here, the border in question is not the Line-of-Control (LOC) that divides Kashmir, but rather the southern portion of the long border with Pakistan that runs from the southern bank of the Sutlej River across the Thar Desert to the Arabian Sea. Refugee, moreover, is not a war film in the accepted sense, and I will make the argument that it is not so much the martial posturing which constructs the thematic inter-relation of the two films considered here but rather their attempts to naturalise the abstract barrier created by the Radcliffe Line in the west