Poetics of Praise and Image‐Texts of Cinematic Encompassment

Abstract

Developing the concept of image‐text out of Roman Jakobson's notion of aesthetic function and linguistic anthropology's discussion of entextualization, this paper shows how the tropology explored by the late Bernard Bate in twentieth‐century Dravidianist oratory is taken up and recontextualized in the late twentieth‐century Tamil films of the “mass hero” Rajinikanth. I trace a particular image‐text across the two major media of modern Tamil politics—oratory and cinema—showing how it threads an aesthetics of political power and representation in this part of south India. In doing so, the article theorizes what images are and how they circulate.