Contemporary Global Culture Research Articles

Cinema Frames, Videoscapes, and Cyberspace: Exploring Shu Lea Cheang's Fresh Kill

In his essay “The Ecstasy of Communication,” Jean Baudrillard states that we are in an era of “connections, contact, contiguity, feedback, and generalized interface that goes with the universe of communication.”1 In 1994, video activist and installation artist Shu Lea Cheang produced a feature film and Web site, Fresh Kill, which challenges the viewer to become critically aware of connections that usually go unnoticed because they are buried by the speed and complexity of our contemporary global culture of ecstatic communication. Fresh Kill comments on communication and attempts to teach the viewer new ways to perceive the world. To do this, the film’s elastic and highly eclectic formal structureworks in concert with the depiction of the interconnections among what initially appear to be discrete political events, national crises, environmental catastrophes, and personal trials involving racism, sexism, heterosexism, colonialism, and capitalism. However, just as the shell of

Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India

In Cassette Culture, Peter Manuel tells how a new mass medium--the portable cassette player--caused a major upheaval in popular culture in the world's second-largest country. The advent of cassette technology in the 1980s transformed India's popular music industry from the virtual monopoly of a single multinational LP manufacturer to a free-for-all among hundreds of local cassette producers. The result was a revolution in the quantity, quality, and variety of Indian popular music and its patterns of dissemination and consumption. Manuel shows that the cassette revolution, however, has brought new contradictions and problems to Indian culture. While inexpensive cassettes revitalized local subcultures and community values throughout the subcontinent, they were also a vehicle for regional and political factionalism, new forms of commercial vulgarity, and, disturbingly, the most provocative sorts of hate-mongering and religious chauvinism. Cassette Culture is the first scholarly account of Indian popular music and the first case study of a technological revolution now occurring throughout the world. It will be an essential resource for anyone interested in modern India, communications theory, world popular music, or contemporary global culture.