Edited By: Dev Nath Pathak, Biswajit Das and Ratan Kumar Roy 

Publication: Routledge | Get your copy

About:

This book critically examines the cultural politics of visuals in South Asia. It makes a key contribution to the study of visuals in the social sciences in South Asia by studying the interplay of the seen and unseen, and the visual and nonvisual. The volume explores interrelated themes including the vernacular visual and visuality, ways of seeing in South Asia and the methodology of hermeneutic sensorium, anxiety and politics of the visuals across the region and the trajectory of visual anthropology, significance of visual symbols and representations in contemporary performances and folk art, visual landscapes of loss and recovery and representation of refugees, visual public in South Asia and making of visuals for contemporary consumptions. The chapters unravel the concepts of visual, visibility, visuality while attending to determinant meta-ideas, such as memory and modernity, trajectories of tradition, fluidity and hybridity, and visual performative politics. Based on interdisciplinary resources, the chapters in this volume present a wide array of empirical findings across India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, along with analytical readings of the visual culture of the subcontinent across borders.

The book will be useful to scholars and researchers of visual and cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, sociology, political studies, media and communications studies, performance studies, art history, television and film studies, photography studies, and South Asian studies. It will also interest practitioners including artists, visual artists, photographers, filmmakers and media critics. 

Table of Contents

 1. Introduction – Visuals in South Asia: The Interface of Seen and Unseen

Dev Nath Pathak, Ratan Kumar Roy and Biswajit Das 

Part I: Ways of Seeing and Showing

 2. Vernacular Visual: Seeing in South Asia

Sadan Jha

 3. Hermeneutic Sensorium: Positing a Methodological Dynamics of Seen-Unseen

Dev Nath Pathak

 4. Visual Anthropology in Nepal: A Critical Trajectory of Practices and a Way Forward

Fidel Devkota

Part II: Approaches, Representations and Politics

 5. Myths, and the Visual Imagination: The ‘Duplicitous Maiden’ as a Narrative Theme in Gond Art

Roma Chatterji

 6. Transport Art of Dhaka: Where the Invisible City Becomes Visible

Tabassum Zaman

 7. Visual Inscriptions upon Landscapes of Loss: Memorialising Thileepan in Sri Lanka

Malathi de Alwis

 8. Seeing the Invisible: Anthropological Reflections on the Representation of the Rabari Community in Rajasthan

Urmi Bhattacharyya

Part III: Seeing Public and Mediation

 9. South Asian Ways of Seeing: Towards a Visual Public Sphere

Amrita Ajay

 10. Visual Public in South Asia: Seeing and Showing in the Digital Sphere

Ratan Kumar Roy and Ridhi Kakkar

 11. Visibility of Sindhi Progressive Sufism in the New Media Domain of Pakistan

M. Rafiqe Wassan

 12. Visual, Visibility and Memory: Television in Everyday Life in Rajasthan

Biswajit Das

Part IV: Image-Making and Manufacturing Meanings

 13. Collective Making of Press Photographs: An Ethnographic Enquiry

Siddhi Bhandari

 14. The Vulnerability of Visual Vocabulary on Refugee Representation: The Voyage of Boatwo/men Rohingya

Dilpreet Bhullar

 15. Visual Matters: Unpacking Political Communication and Politics of the Camera

Farhat Basir Khan

Book: Korean Wave in South Asia: Transcultural Flow, Fandom and Identity

Edited By: Ratan Kumar Roy and Biswajit Das

이 책은 2021년도 한국학중앙연구원 해외한국학지원사업의 지원에 의하여 발간되었음(AKS-2021-P-002).”

This publication was supported by the 2021 Korean Studies Grant Program of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2021-P-002).

ABOUT THE BOOK
This book is an exclusive collection of essays based on empirical investigation of Korean cultural wave in South Asia. Scholars from across the borders discover and analyse the dynamics of fandom, mechanism of media industry and growing phenomena of Hallyu or Korean wave from a transcultural communication approach. This edited volume is one of the very first scholarly intervention in South Asia that unravels the cultural practices of fandom, subculture and affective practices of the youth. It provides detailed understanding of transcultural flow in the age of internet, intermediality and interactive practices in the globalized mediascape. Thematically the book is divided into three sections, looking at the (a) interactive dynamic between media, identity and politics, (b) fandom and affective politics and (c) adaptation, cultural effects and co-creation. The book will contribute in the area of media and cultural studies, South Asian studies, global culture and politics, arts and humanities, social sciences and area studies.

CONTENTS 

Foreword by Dal Yong Jin, Distinguished SFU Professor, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University

Chapter 1 Introduction: Transcultural Flow in the Age of Globalization: Fandom, Youth and Internet Culture in South Asia

Ratan Kumar Roy and Biswajit Das

Section 1: K-Phenomenon in South Asia: Media, Identity and Politics

Chapter 2
Hallyu 2.0: Aiming for Mainstream Status in India and South Asia
Steven Kim

Chapter 3
Fandom, Mediated Culture and Re-imagining Identity: Exploring the Hallyu Wave in South Asia
Ratan Kumar Roy

Chapter 4
Youth and popular culture: Korean Wave in India’s North East 
Athikho Kaisii

Section 2: Fandom and Politics of Affection

Chapter 5
Looking at Fan Identity: The Bangladeshi K-pop Fan
Kashfia Arif

Chapter 6
K-Pop and the Politics of Appeal: Understanding the Emotional and Aural Experiences of K-Fans in and around Kolkata
Anakshi Pal and Sourav Saha

Chapter 7
Mediation, Motivations, and Experiences of BTS Fandom in India
Jasdeep Kaur Chandi and Kulveen Trehan

Chapter 8
Korean Dramas and Indian Youngsters: Viewership, Aspirations and Consumerism
Amritha Soman and Ruchi Jaggi

Section 3: Adaptation, Cultural Effects and Co-creation

Chapter 9
From Korean oppas to bibimbap: the socio-cultural dynamics of the Korean Wave in Sri Lanka
Amalini Fernando

Chapter 10
Spinning The ‘K’ yarn: the thriving media cottage entrepreneurship of Mizoram
Rinku Pegu

Chapter 11
Reading K-Pop Memes on Social Media through a Gendered Perspective: The Case of Darjeeling and Kalimpong
Prashant Pradhan

Author: Dev Nath Pathak 
Publication: Bloomsbury | Get Your Copy

About: In Defence of the Ordinary is laced with light humour, soaked in serious sarcasm and powered with poetic polemics. Informed by sources such as psychoanalysis, philosophy, yoga, anthropology, popular cinema, folk songs and everything that is part of an ordinary living, it is a sociologist’s sincere ruminations on the layered ordinariness. The book invites us to rethink the ways of seeing, understanding, enacting, emoting and relating with provocative ideas like why we don’t value ordinariness and how our pursuit of extraordinary is misleading us into mishaps. The key objective of the human existence is that of the book too, namely, awakening the dormant potentials of emancipation every day rather than waiting for an occasional charisma induced by a holy book or a secular gimmick or an orchestrated leadership.