Diasporic Audiences Research Articles

Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M., ed. With a Book in Their Hands: Chicano/a Readers and Readerships Across the Centuries. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012. 288 pp. $45.00, cloth. (ISBN 978-0-8263-5476-1).

Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M., ed. <i>With a Book in Their Hands: Chicano/a Readers and Readerships Across the Centuries</i>. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012. 288 pp. $45.00, cloth. (ISBN 978-0-8263-5476-1).

Ladoula Bonkoto Ladoula, Ladoula Bonkoto ye Ngasindindi: Narratives of Female Genital Cutting in Senegal from the Diaspora

Female genital cutting (FGC) or l'excision has recently become subject to large-scale international media attention, and challenges ideas concerning the body, gender, and autonomy. Anti-FGC programs are not relegated to rural areas in distant locations but are increasingly relevant within urban centers both in Africa and the African diaspora. Despite large-scale intervention, FGC continues to be practiced throughout Senegal for varying social, cultural, and religious reasons. In this poster/artifact presentation, I draw attention to varying representations of FGC in Senegal coming from the diaspora. It is in this transnational space where innovative methods of storytelling are told in comic books, popular music, and social media. I present comic books, written stories, and listening examples for exploring how narratives of FGC in Senegal are presented on the international stage. My poster presentation consists of both visual and aural artifacts. Recently, two comic books have been written by NGOs for consumption by diasporic audiences that serve as cautionary tales in a fictionalized Senegal. The symbols, images, and characters representing traditional cultural practices are deserving of further analysis as they are presented in contrast to a modernity where FGC no longer occurs. I also provide an Ipad and headphones for participants to listen to internationally recognized hip-hop artist and advocate, Sister Fa, and her song “L'excision,” where she retells her experience undergoing excision during the Jola gassus ritual. Her narrative recreates a ritual experience out of time and place whose meaning changes depending upon the geographic and social proximity of the listener. Sister Fa's work locates FGC as a site-specific cultural practice that cannot be distanced from its geographic, linguistic, and social context, creating tensions when it is reimagined through song. The two types of artifacts illustrate a transnational discourse centered on storytelling whose meanings fluctuate based upon the location of the audience. The movement to discuss FGC through visual and aural mediums is representative of new strategies implemented by human rights campaigns to focus on young people as important social actors to create sustained cultural change. The local performance of womanhood expressed through FGC changes when discussed outside of local contexts and becomes entangled with political, social, and economic development, making it crucial to recognize how these issues are being discussed both within and outside of Senegal. As an exploratory study of female genital cutting as a contentious globalized issue, this presentation seeks to foster a discussion concerning the issues of power, gaze, and the framing of individual accounts, through popular media channels.

Festival circus, golden gnomes and cultural diplomacy. The Audi Festival of German films in the context of multicultural festivals in Australia

This report discusses the festival, its distinct profile, target groups, mode of operation, selection process, development over the years, and challenges within a wider context. International film festivals can help to broaden the viewers’ horizons, enhance cultural awareness and create public value in a city's social and cultural fabric. The prominent contemporary culture industry challenges traditional aspirations, aims and objectives of cultural diplomacy. As a multicultural festival, the German Film Festival must engage with both these contemporary and traditional objectives. This report examines how the festival has engaged, and continues to engage, with the ongoing demands of cultural diplomacy and offers cultural policy recommendations for international festivals. It will cover how the festival strategically sustains a niche not serviced by usual cinema programming, appeals beyond the German diasporic audience, takes an event-based approach to programming and pursues public–private partnerships to this end.

Connections That Matter: The Relative Importance of Ethnic-Cultural Origin, Age and Generation in Media Uses Among Diasporic Youth in Belgium

Most research on diasporic media use in Flanders (Belgium) focuses on second-generation adolescents belonging to the two largest non-European groups of migrants, Moroccans and Turks. This leads to a limited knowledge of the broader diasporic population and makes it difficult to ascertain how media use is related to age and generation (both in terms of migration and in terms of digital media access), independent of belonging to a specific ethnic-cultural group. To explore these issues, 30 adolescents from 16 national backgrounds and their parents were interviewed. Despite their diverse cultural backgrounds, clear generational differences were found, the younger participants demonstrating shared media uses and preferences (e.g. focusing more on entertainment and less on the country of origin). Although ethnic roots are important, age and generation are primary factors for understanding media uses and preferences among diasporic audiences, which cautions against an exclusive focus on ethnic-cultural identity in research.

Media Consumption amongst First Generation Argentinean-Australians

Media, be it diasporic, transnational, or mainstream, provides diasporas with a communication method and connection via the distribution of information, whilst retaining cultural and social bonds from their country of origin. Recent studies in the USA and Australia have reported significant increases in diasporic media use and audience numbers, as it creates a sense of identity amongst them. In addition to publishing news from the mainstream culture, diasporic media supports its community by being its voice, whilst preserving its culture, language and history (Natolo 2015 in press; Natolo 2014; Carreira 2013; Laleko 2013; Liu 2013; Shin and Lee 2013). As Spanish is one of Australia’s most prevalent community languages, the field of media studies and language maintenance in Australia remains undeveloped. The premise of this paper is to investigate from an interdisciplinary perspective, first generation Argentineans diasporic and transnational media consumption patterns, Spanish language maintenance, and their individual and collective identity via their use of Spanish language media. The study utilized a mixed methods approach collecting data from 50 survey respondents, followed by an interview with 26 interviewees. The findings suggest that respondents preferred to consume media in their native language, and that diasporic and transnational media aided to define and unify first generation Argentineans in the Hispanic-Australian public sphere.

Modes of Engagement Among Diasporic Audiences of Asian New Zealand Film

The formation of a diasporic community within a host society may be signalled through community members’ creative contributions in the realm of cultural production. The ways in which diasporic audiences engage with diasporic cultural texts potentially offers social and cultural trajectories of their understandings of themselves as they negotiate their new environment. This article examines these trajectories, focusing on the ways New Zealand audiences of Asian descent engage with Asian diasporic films. It addresses three key questions: How do audiences’ referential reflections on diasporic films intersect with and contribute to their diasporic journeys and perceptions of themselves in New Zealand society? What kinds of values and beliefs do diasporic audiences feel are important to affirm and negotiate, both within representations of diasporic communities and in their New Zealand-based lives? And what roles do diasporic films play in this ongoing negotiation process?

Media Industries in India: An Emerging Regional Framework

This paper critically evaluates how recent industry reports have explained the rapid growth of regional media in India. In these reports, regionalization is described — often in euphoric terms — as the result of a unique historical conjuncture where the rise of digital technologies of production, distribution, and consumption and the rapid privatization of public infrastructure have created avenues for both big and small media players to expand their reach into regional markets and rural hinterlands. However, a more interesting story is emerging alongside the celebratory narratives of digitization and media conglomeration in India. It is the story of how key players in the industry are turning to regional media to redefine their organizational identities in new ways that are simultaneously national, subnational, and transnational. At the same time, regionalization is also being embraced in the media industries to reimagine audiences in new terms that at once connect national and diasporic audiences with subnational or regional audiences in smaller cities, towns, and villages. In this context, regionalization has emerged as the framework for understanding the globalization of media industries and audiences in India.

Evolving Nollywood Templates for Minor Transnational Film

This work examines the implications of partial embeddedness in dominant global networks for minor transnational media industries like Nollywood. It focuses on two aspects of the relationship between Nollywood and global media: the probable outcomes of continuing attempts to generate higher profits for Nollywood’s relationship with dominant global media; and second, the potential impact of growing connection with global networks on the relative autonomy of this minor transnational media practice. I argue that initiatives undertaken by individual entrepreneurs to ensure reliable delivery of film narratives to diasporic audiences using distribution channels tied to dominant global networks currently represent the most immediate opportunity for extracting greater profits from this industry. Partial incorporation of Nollywood distribution into the official global economy by way of increased connection with dominant global networks and infrastructure also enable interested parties to compensate for the regulatory deficiencies of the nation-state and thus generate much higher revenues from a relatively undercapitalized industry. Despite this growing interface with dominant global media networks, however, minor film industries like Nollywood will probably continue to exhibit a high degree of creative and financial autonomy with respect to dominant global media.

Sita, Surpanakha and Kaikeyi as political bodies: representations of female sexuality in idealised culture

For 40 years, Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comics have been synonymous with the Indian comic book industry, and as such have garnered critical attention, including three books and numerous articles. In contrast, other English comics, especially those published since ACK stopped releasing new books in 1990, are the subjects of significantly less discussion. New publishers are now continuing and expanding the ACK tradition in significant ways. One major contribution to the industry is new comics based on the Ramayana, which has spawned six series/graphic novels in the last 5 years. In this essay, I will focus on Liquid (previously Virgin) Comic’s series, Ramayan 3392 AD, as one of the heirs to the ACK tradition, specifically one which maintains a perspective sympathetic to Rama. I will discuss how 3392 AD perpetuates ACK’s use of the feminine Vedic ideal while expanding into diasporic and non-Indian audiences. This expansion allows the series to capitalise on the fear of cultural loss to proscribe gendered normative behaviour. 3392 AD creates a new female archetype, the prodigal woman, and uses this category along with existing archetypes to embody a strict feminine social code and to proscribe bodily consequences for women who reject or transgress this code.

New media beyond neo-imperialism: Betty Boop and Sita Sings the Blues

This essay argues that theories which frame media globalization as either Disney-style neo-imperial domination or as radical technopolitics fail to account for the complex network of exchange that takes place in animated media. Instead of framing media use in terms of “top-down” versus “bottom-up” activity, this essay demonstrates how animators and audiences in different national and cultural contexts may inhabit multiple positions, entering into fraught, yet often productive, relations of complicity and collaboration through different media technologies. To that end, it highlights two particular historical moments at which emerging media became linked to cross-cultural networks of exchange. The first moment is that of Betty Boop’s birth in 1930, which coincided with Hollywood’s rise to prominence in the global distribution of sound film as far afield as Japan. Betty Boop’s reception in Japan is considered through an examination of 1930s Japanese advertising documents and the parodic short films of animator Ōfuji Noburō. The second moment is the digital shift of the early 21st century, illustrated in Nina Paley’s 2008 online Ramayana-based musical Sita Sings The Blues, and its reception among diasporic and national South Asian audiences. Though produced decades apart, these films are linked by concerns around nationality, ethnicity, gender, and cross-cultural exchange, demonstrated in their repeated use of a single core image: the exoticized and eroticized female singer protagonist. This problematic (yet potentially powerful) figure is analysed in both cases as a focal point for neo-imperial complicity and collaborative reinterpretation among creators and viewers of global media.

Mediating Diasporas and Fandom: Second-Generation Korean American Adolescent Diasporas, Identification, and Transnational Popular Culture

Research on second-generation diasporic reception practices is rare, and it is the goal of this article to continue the nascent inquiry on multiple-generation diasporic audiences. The complicated ways in which diasporic identity is negotiated allows for greater understanding of the border zones that multiple-generation diasporas inhabit. Fully acculturated but not fully included, second-generation diasporas infuse their identities with meanings drawn in part through reception of transnational popular media and the development of fan communities. For Korean Americans, it is a way of identifying with a transnational home identity that allows for counterhegemonic identification. Boundaries of fan communities, however, exclude as well as include. Intraethnic taste hierarchies define what counts as authentically ethnic and who counts as sufficiently Korean.

Exploring Media Use among Migrant Families in Europe: Theoretical Foundations and Reflections

This article advocates the further development of research on media uses in the context of migrant families and reflects critically on the conceptual and theoretical framework for such research. First, the concept of migrant audiences is dissected. Why single out these particular audiences? We discuss the terms "migrants" and "immigrants", "ethnic minorities" and "diasporic audiences", focusing on issues of essentialism and pointing out the complexity of multiple, fluid, intersectional identifications and "super-diversity". Second, we discuss the family as a key context for media uses, both in general and specifically in relation to migrant audiences. Third, we further elaborate on two concepts which help us to theorise and research diasporic media uses. On the one hand, hybridity is often used to describe the transnational identification of (young) diasporic audiences, but there is a need for further empirical research on the various contexts shaping hybrid identity positions in Europe. On the other hand, cosmopolitanism could be a powerful framework for research, provided that we focus on concrete cosmopolitan competences in local, everyday and mediated social contexts. Overall, this paper makes a case for transnational, comparative research aiming to do justice to the diversity of diasporic family constellations and media uses across Europe.

Listening in the Wilderness: The Audience Reception of Oliver Mtukudzi’s Music in the Zimbabwean Diaspora

Abstract Documenting the diasporic audience reception of Zimbabwean popular musician Oliver Mtukudzi, I argue that transnational identities and subjectivities are not only shaped through live performance, but are also negotiated, articulated, and produced through musical listening. Foregrounding intersections between diaspora, kinship, and moral obligation, I suggest that Mtukudzi’s songs enable audiences to symbolically reposition themselves within the social relations of a remembered home. In the process, audiences routinely interpret Mtukudzi’s songs about migration and diaspora, ostensibly directed beyond Zimbabwe’s borders, as reflecting back within the nation, conveying a powerful yet subtle critique of postcolonial domestic politics.

Revisiting the NRI ‘genre’: Indian diasporic engagements with NRI and multiplex films

As a nodal point in the global presence of Indian cinema, films about Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) have become a cherished object of textual analysis. Research on this topic has challenged diasporic representations in the NRI ‘genre’, but at the same time has linked them up with actual diasporas. Based on the results of an audience study conducted through in-depth interviews, this article critically reviews the consumption of NRI films by diasporic audiences. The responses of diasporic Indians to such films in Antwerp (Belgium) revealed that this audience related neither to the implied diasporic spectator nor to the actual audience nor to the diasporic representations in these films in a straightforward way. Therefore, the article equally assesses the diasporic Indian consumption of ‘multiplex films’ and the preference for realism related to the latter.

Diasporas and Audience Studies: A Fruitful Match? Reflections From a Media Ethnographic Study on Turkish and Moroccan Film Audiences

Diasporic communities, especially in urban multicultural settings in the West, have emerged as one of the major sites for innovative audience research. This growing body of research connects media sociological questions with the study of global and transnational media flows. In this contribution, some of the main studies on diasporic audiences are revisited, exploring in which ways diaspora studies and audience studies have turned out to be a fruitful match. This is linked to and further exemplified by the discussion of a media ethnographic study of film reception among the Turkish and Moroccan communities in Antwerp, Belgium. It is demonstrated how the ‘diasporic turn’ reformulates traditional boundaries in audience research, proposing banal yet meaningful engagements with media texts. Finally, it is argued that a focus on diasporic audiences has revealed that ethnicity and nationality intersect with other social and cultural determinants such as gender, generation and religion, putting the diasporic proposition itself into perspective.

Bollywood Nights: Indian Youth and the Creation of Diasporic Identity in South Africa

Bollywood’s popularity as a global cultural form has occurred at the same time as the valorization of “difference” in the South African political landscape. As the youngest members of the 19th-century labour diaspora, South African Indian youths are the inheritors of a conservative—yet adaptable—home culture amidst the marginalized identities of (post-)apartheid South Africa. Their desire to create an identity for themselves that encompasses their self-perception both as “modern” South African subjects and as guardians of their traditional home cultures is achieved through Bollywood, which speaks to its diasporic audiences through images of an idealized “traditional yet modern” India. While India is not a place of return for these youth, their reactivation of a diasporic identity through Bollywood’s representations of a successful Indian diasporic culture and their participation in South African Bollywood concerts and award ceremonies has provided an opportunity for young South African Indians to reimagine their diasporic Indian identity in ways that (re-)connect them to India and to an imagined global diaspora.

Ranis Making Rotis: Dreams of the Good South Asian Girl

The importance of gender in popular Indian cinema has been noted by a number of scholars, and indeed, even a casual observer may find it difficult to overlook. There are, of course, some significant differences between the Indian cinema of yesteryear and today’s popular Indian films, which are often aimed at a diasporic audience. In an effort to capture this audience, Bollywood films represent heroines who are not always as demure and submissive as in older films; many are assertive, educated and successful. A few engage in behaviour that would previously have been seen as taboo, including premarital sex. Yet beneath any veneer of equality, Bollywood films continue to portray gender, particularly femininity, in ways that are regressive. Despite their highly problematic depiction of gender, Bollywood films seem to have a significant effect on the way that some young adults living in diaspora understand femininity, masculinity and relationships, as indicated by findings from a recent study that I conducted on the reception of Bollywood films by young Canadians of South Asian origin. Although gender was not the focus of the study, some of the participants suggested that Bollywood was most significant to them in terms of the views it advanced about women. I argue here that while Bollywood cinema has made limited strides in its portrayal of women, its depictions may have had the unintended and positive effect of igniting feminist debate, however problematic, among some of its diasporic viewers.

The Gori in the Story: The Shifting Dynamics of Whiteness in the Bollywood Film

This paper examines the evolving representations of whiteness in Bollywood film through an exploration of the figure of the gori, or white woman. Coded as both essentially Other and desirable, this figure manifests Bollywood’s ambivalent relationship with whiteness, particularly as the industry attempts to formulate a sense of “Indianness” for diasporic audiences whose growth, in turn, parallels the increasing Westernization of the Indian heroine. This paper analyzes the framing of whiteness in popular Indian cinema from the 1930s to the present and explores how recent renderings of the gori figure are indiciative of Bollywood’s shifting cultural politics.

The Gori in the Story: The Shifting Dynamics of Whiteness in Bollywood Film

This paper examines the evolving representations of whiteness in Bollywood film through an exploration of the figure of the gori, or white woman. Coded as both essentially Other and desirable, this figure manifests Bollywood’s ambivalent relationship with whiteness, particularly as the industry attempts to formulate a sense of “Indianness” for diasporic audiences whose growth, in turn, parallels the increasing Westernization of the Indian heroine. This paper analyzes the framing of whiteness in popular Indian cinema from the 1930s to the present and explores how recent renderings of the gori figure are indiciative of Bollywood’s shifting cultural politics.

Flexible Identities: Muslim Diasporas and the Bollywood Film Industry

In Dreaming in Canadian: South Asian Youth, Bollywood, and Belonging (2010), Faiza Hirji notes that the 1990s marked a notable shift in the history of Indian cinema: whereas earlier films were meant to appeal to local populations from the Indian subcontinent, the films that emerged during this period—such as Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998)—which incorporated diasporic locales, “modern” rather than strictly “traditional” fashions and a mix of Hindi and English were targeting the growing South Asian diasporic audience in the West, and the global community more broadly. From Hirji’s perspective, perhaps even more important than the history of these films is their impact on the formation of South Asian diasporic identity. As these “modern” Bollywood films were being produced, signifiers of a kind of hybridized “Indianness” were becoming increasingly visible in diasporic spaces, so much so that “Indian clothes and jewelry were acquiring a certain cachet, although they continued to be viewed as exotic or unusual” (4). This observation—first made when Hirji was herself just a young scholar—forms the basis of Dreaming in Canadian, a book which sets out in ten chapters to explore the possible links between Bollywood film and South Asian diasporic identity formation.