Radhika Parameswaran
Biographic Data
| ID | 161405 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Radhika Parameswaran |
| GIVEN NAMES | Radhika |
| FAMILY NAME | Parameswaran |
| SIGNATURE | PARAMESWARAN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana University Bloomington |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 84 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Locating cultural studies: The limits of translation in knowledge production
This article reflects on translation practices engendered by location, disciplinary constraints, and Western hegemonies in the work of cultural studies scholars from the Global South. Focusing on issues of translation beyond language and text, the article tackles cultural translation practices at the levels of theory and analysis, which scholars engage in to render their research legible within academic contexts that continue to pay lip service t…
Introduction to the Special Issue Forum “Digital Cultures of South Asia: Inequalities, Informatization, Infrastructures”
This short introductory essay first lays out the broader map of the digital media ecosystem in South Asia and then establishes the importance of this region in the global south--with its growing networked population--for understanding the future trajectories of global digital culture. Just as any other part of the world that is gradually getting on board the digital bandwagon, the South Asian digital landscape shows signs of both ingenuity, innov…
Shit talk in shitty terrain: Flushing Indian feminism through YouTube’s comedic conduits
This article examines the ways in which YouTube’s comedy-driven drama, Ladies Room, set in six women-only toilet sanctuaries across Mumbai, mines the semiotics of unruliness to push against the boundaries of upper-caste Indian feminine respectability. Drawing upon comedy studies and feminist theory, we deconstruct the two millennial protagonists Dingo & Khanna’s transgressive behaviors, body politics, and charged conversations about the sexist an…
E-Race-ing Color: Gender and Transnational Visual Economies of Beauty in India
Charting an Itinerary for Postcolonial Communication and Media Studies
This article presents a pathway for forging “postcolonial communication and media studies,” an area of inquiry that emerges from collaborations between communication and media studies and postcolonial theory. We aim to show the affinities between these two fields and explore how our discipline can benefit from postcolonial theory’s commitment to understanding the legacies of colonialism’s vast historical reach. This article’s itinerary has three …
Shaming the Nation on Public Affairs Television: Barkha Dutt tackles colorism on We the People
The commercial discourses of the skin-lightening cosmetics industry in globalizing India have propped up the ideological legitimacy of colorism or skin color discrimination whereby dark-skinned Indians are viewed as inferior to and less valued than light-skinned Indians. Two episodes of NDTV journalist Barkha Dutt’s national public affairs television program We the People (2008 and 2013) tackle the growing problem of commodity colorism in India. …
Animalizing India: Emerging Signs of an Unruly Market
Focusing on recent artistic and photojournalistic portraits of India as an animal – an elephant or tiger – that wanders alone or sometimes with another animal companion – dragon or panda bear – called China, this article analyzes the ways in which India's potential as an emerging market and a rising power is being conjured in the popular aesthetics of magazine and nonfiction book covers. Even as an outpouring of verbal discourse from business and…
Postings on the Rise of the Rest: Tracking Online Reception to The Post-American World
This article analyzes customer reviews of Fareed Zakaria’s best-selling book, The Post-American World posted on Amazon.com . Zakaria’s book explores the emergence of a new world order in which the “rise of the rest,” particularly China and India, threatens the geopolitical dominance of the United States. Drawing on reception studies of print culture, debates over the virtual public sphere, and sponsorship of literacy, our article’s textual analys…
Studying the Elusive Audience: Consumers, Readers, Users, and Viewers in a Changing World
This introductory chapter outlines the recent evolution of audience research, focusing on the ways in which the field has addressed the theoretical, economic, cultural, and technological currents of the moment. I argue that audience studies has not only survived the backlash against its populist tendencies in the late eighties to mid‐nineties, but it has also thrived and expanded to include a range of audiences, media genres, modes of audience en…
Watching Barkha Dutt: Turning on the news in television studies
This essay examines Barkha Dutt, host of the popular NDTV news talk show ‘We the People’, as a symbolic portal into the rise of television news celebrity culture in India's altering mediascape. The essay first situates Dutt's work as a reporter and a talk show host within the context of Indian television journalism's role in the democratic public sphere and then explores the implications of Dutt's class and gender identities for the hierarchies o…
The rise of China and India: Promising new teaching and research directions for global media studies
Immortal Comics, Epidermal Politics: Representations of gender and colorism in India
This article examines representations of skin color and its symbolic affiliations with discourses of gender, class, and caste in the Amar Chitra Katha (immortal pictorial stories) comic series, the first indigenous children's comics to be published in postcolonial India. We draw on the concept of colorism as defined by Black scholars in the United States to explore the lessons on gender and skin color that these comics may communicate to Indian c…
Facing Barack Hussein Obama: Race, Globalization, and Transnational America
Arguing that race does not receive enough attention in studies of globalization, this article examines the implications of Barack Hussein Obama's successful presidential candidacy for both expanding and reducing the meanings of Blackness in relation to transnational America. In contrast to the "Third World" racioscape of Black America that became visible to the world during Hurricane Katrina, Obama's biography produced new tropes of Black identit…
The Other Sides of Globalization: Communication, Culture, and Postcolonial Critique
The launch of the new International Communication Association journal Communication, Culture & Critique heralds the creation of a much needed international forum for critical media scholars—political economists, cultural critics, and ethnographers—from a wide variety of theoretical orientations and perspectives—postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist—to debate the “social, cultural, and political dimensions of our media-saturated world” (from journal…
Military Metaphors, Masculine Modes, and Critical Commentary: Deconstructing Journalists' Inner Tales of September 11
This article analyzes the rhetoric that surrounded September 11 in trade publications that cater to journalism professionals. Approaching journalists as an interpretive community, the author examines the ways in which reporters and editors narrate their experiences of producing news about the events of September 11, 2001. The analysis shows that journalists' public memories of their work relied on masculine metaphors of military and sport, privil…
Journalism and Feminist Cultural Studies: Retrieving the Missing Citizen Lost in the Female Audience
This article explores the relations between journalism and feminist cultural studies to underscore the crucial importance of studying forms of popular knowledge that claim to foster citizenship among audiences. The article begins by examining the history of feminist cultural studies scholars' sustained interest in feminine genres of popular culture rather than journalism. Crossing over to the other side, I then outline some of the reasons for jou…
Global Beauty Queens in Post-Liberalization India
Reading Fictions of Romance: Gender, Sexuality, and Nationalism in Postcolonial India
This ethnographic study explores the implications of romance reading for young Indian women's gender, class, and national identities in one urban setting in South India. The project demonstrates that the practice of reading Western romance fiction is deeply embedded within patriarchal discourses of feminine respectability that exert control over women's sexuality. Young women's fascination for the commodities of Western material culture in import…
Local Culture in Global Media: Excavating Colonial and Material Discourses in National Geographic
This case study of National Geographic's August 1999 “millennium” issue interrogates the representational politics of the magazine's narratives on globalization. The essay's textual analysis, which is based in the insights of semiotic, feminist, and Marxist critiques of consumer culture, accounts for multiple media texts and historical contexts that filter the magazine's imagery. Drawing from postcolonial theories of gender, Orientalism, and nati…
Feminist Media Ethnography in India: Exploring Power, Gender, and Culture in the Field
This article is a self-reflexive account of one postcolonial feminist media scholar's research among young middle-class women in urban India who read Western romance fiction. Urging feminist scholars to pay attention to the politics of representation of audiences in media studies, the article explores power imbalances in the field that arise due to social constructions of gender, ethnic, class, and sexual identities. The article reflects on failu…
Western Romance Fiction as English-Language Media in Postcolonial India
In this study I took an ethnographic approach to examine the reception of imported Mills & Boon romance novels among women in postcolonial urban India. My approach included intensive interviews and participant observation among a group of young, middle- and upper-class women in Hyderabad, a city in South India. My analysis of young women's responses revealed the social construction of these Western romance novels as English-language media. Romanc…
Contesting the Politics of Ethnography: Towards an Alternative Knowledge Production
We were free, but our bellies were empty. The Master had become the Boss-Medouze, in the film Sugar Cane Alley
Colonial Interventions and the Postcolonial Situation in India: The English Language, Mass Media and the Articulation of Class
While there have been numerous analyses of the content of English-language news media in India, very little work has been done on historicizing the media to understand how comtemporary media discourses intersect with social formations such as class. This article interrogates the relationship between the English language, introduced during colonialism, mass media, class formation, and social and economic power in India. The article primarily exami…
Media representations of third world women
In her influential essay, “Under Western Eyes,” Third World feminist Chandra Mohanty critiques the ways in which Western feminist writers have constructed Third World women. She argues that assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality, as well as inadequate consciousness of the domination of the West in global politics, have led to the construction of third world women as homogenous and passive. Many of these criticisms are also applica…
Coverage of "Bride Burning" in the "Dallas Observer: "A Cultural Analysis of the "Other
A partir d'un fait divers relate dans le « Dallas Observer » au sujet de la mort d'une immigree indienne dans un contexte de violence domestique, l'A. analyse la notion d'alterite dans la representation mediatique faite par le monde dit « civilise » de l'oppression patriarcale des femmes du tiers monde. Elle s'efforce de montrer que l'article du Dallas Observer a fait de la defunte une « Autre » en presentant sa mort comme une consequence naturel…
Feminist Media Ethnography in India: Exploring Power, Gender, and Culture in the Field
This article is a self-reflexive account of one postcolonial feminist media scholar's research among young middle-class women in urban India who read Western romance fiction. Urging feminist scholars to pay attention to the politics of representation of audiences in media studies, the article explores power imbalances in the field that arise due to social constructions of gender, ethnic, class, and sexual identities. The article reflects on failu…
Facing Barack Hussein Obama: Race, Globalization, and Transnational America
Arguing that race does not receive enough attention in studies of globalization, this article examines the implications of Barack Hussein Obama's successful presidential candidacy for both expanding and reducing the meanings of Blackness in relation to transnational America. In contrast to the "Third World" racioscape of Black America that became visible to the world during Hurricane Katrina, Obama's biography produced new tropes of Black identit…
The Other Sides of Globalization: Communication, Culture, and Postcolonial Critique
The launch of the new International Communication Association journal Communication, Culture & Critique heralds the creation of a much needed international forum for critical media scholars—political economists, cultural critics, and ethnographers—from a wide variety of theoretical orientations and perspectives—postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist—to debate the “social, cultural, and political dimensions of our media-saturated world” (from journal…
Global Beauty Queens in Post-Liberalization India
Colonial Interventions and the Postcolonial Situation in India: The English Language, Mass Media and the Articulation of Class
While there have been numerous analyses of the content of English-language news media in India, very little work has been done on historicizing the media to understand how comtemporary media discourses intersect with social formations such as class. This article interrogates the relationship between the English language, introduced during colonialism, mass media, class formation, and social and economic power in India. The article primarily exami…
Locating cultural studies: The limits of translation in knowledge production
This article reflects on translation practices engendered by location, disciplinary constraints, and Western hegemonies in the work of cultural studies scholars from the Global South. Focusing on issues of translation beyond language and text, the article tackles cultural translation practices at the levels of theory and analysis, which scholars engage in to render their research legible within academic contexts that continue to pay lip service t…
Shaming the Nation on Public Affairs Television: Barkha Dutt tackles colorism on We the People
The commercial discourses of the skin-lightening cosmetics industry in globalizing India have propped up the ideological legitimacy of colorism or skin color discrimination whereby dark-skinned Indians are viewed as inferior to and less valued than light-skinned Indians. Two episodes of NDTV journalist Barkha Dutt’s national public affairs television program We the People (2008 and 2013) tackle the growing problem of commodity colorism in India. …
Animalizing India: Emerging Signs of an Unruly Market
Focusing on recent artistic and photojournalistic portraits of India as an animal – an elephant or tiger – that wanders alone or sometimes with another animal companion – dragon or panda bear – called China, this article analyzes the ways in which India's potential as an emerging market and a rising power is being conjured in the popular aesthetics of magazine and nonfiction book covers. Even as an outpouring of verbal discourse from business and…
Watching Barkha Dutt: Turning on the news in television studies
This essay examines Barkha Dutt, host of the popular NDTV news talk show ‘We the People’, as a symbolic portal into the rise of television news celebrity culture in India's altering mediascape. The essay first situates Dutt's work as a reporter and a talk show host within the context of Indian television journalism's role in the democratic public sphere and then explores the implications of Dutt's class and gender identities for the hierarchies o…
Military Metaphors, Masculine Modes, and Critical Commentary: Deconstructing Journalists' Inner Tales of September 11
This article analyzes the rhetoric that surrounded September 11 in trade publications that cater to journalism professionals. Approaching journalists as an interpretive community, the author examines the ways in which reporters and editors narrate their experiences of producing news about the events of September 11, 2001. The analysis shows that journalists' public memories of their work relied on masculine metaphors of military and sport, privil…
Contesting the Politics of Ethnography: Towards an Alternative Knowledge Production
We were free, but our bellies were empty. The Master had become the Boss-Medouze, in the film Sugar Cane Alley
Coverage of "Bride Burning" in the "Dallas Observer: "A Cultural Analysis of the "Other
A partir d'un fait divers relate dans le « Dallas Observer » au sujet de la mort d'une immigree indienne dans un contexte de violence domestique, l'A. analyse la notion d'alterite dans la representation mediatique faite par le monde dit « civilise » de l'oppression patriarcale des femmes du tiers monde. Elle s'efforce de montrer que l'article du Dallas Observer a fait de la defunte une « Autre » en presentant sa mort comme une consequence naturel…
Shit talk in shitty terrain: Flushing Indian feminism through YouTube’s comedic conduits
This article examines the ways in which YouTube’s comedy-driven drama, Ladies Room, set in six women-only toilet sanctuaries across Mumbai, mines the semiotics of unruliness to push against the boundaries of upper-caste Indian feminine respectability. Drawing upon comedy studies and feminist theory, we deconstruct the two millennial protagonists Dingo & Khanna’s transgressive behaviors, body politics, and charged conversations about the sexist an…
Journalism and Feminist Cultural Studies: Retrieving the Missing Citizen Lost in the Female Audience
This article explores the relations between journalism and feminist cultural studies to underscore the crucial importance of studying forms of popular knowledge that claim to foster citizenship among audiences. The article begins by examining the history of feminist cultural studies scholars' sustained interest in feminine genres of popular culture rather than journalism. Crossing over to the other side, I then outline some of the reasons for jou…
Media representations of third world women
In her influential essay, “Under Western Eyes,” Third World feminist Chandra Mohanty critiques the ways in which Western feminist writers have constructed Third World women. She argues that assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality, as well as inadequate consciousness of the domination of the West in global politics, have led to the construction of third world women as homogenous and passive. Many of these criticisms are also applica…
Media representations of third world women
In her influential essay, “Under Western Eyes,” Third World feminist Chandra Mohanty critiques the ways in which Western feminist writers have constructed Third World women. She argues that assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality, as well as inadequate consciousness of the domination of the West in global politics, have led to the construction of third world women as homogenous and passive. Many of these criticisms are also applica…
Coverage of "Bride Burning" in the "Dallas Observer: "A Cultural Analysis of the "Other
A partir d'un fait divers relate dans le « Dallas Observer » au sujet de la mort d'une immigree indienne dans un contexte de violence domestique, l'A. analyse la notion d'alterite dans la representation mediatique faite par le monde dit « civilise » de l'oppression patriarcale des femmes du tiers monde. Elle s'efforce de montrer que l'article du Dallas Observer a fait de la defunte une « Autre » en presentant sa mort comme une consequence naturel…
Contesting the Politics of Ethnography: Towards an Alternative Knowledge Production
We were free, but our bellies were empty. The Master had become the Boss-Medouze, in the film Sugar Cane Alley
Colonial Interventions and the Postcolonial Situation in India: The English Language, Mass Media and the Articulation of Class
While there have been numerous analyses of the content of English-language news media in India, very little work has been done on historicizing the media to understand how comtemporary media discourses intersect with social formations such as class. This article interrogates the relationship between the English language, introduced during colonialism, mass media, class formation, and social and economic power in India. The article primarily exami…
Western Romance Fiction as English-Language Media in Postcolonial India
In this study I took an ethnographic approach to examine the reception of imported Mills & Boon romance novels among women in postcolonial urban India. My approach included intensive interviews and participant observation among a group of young, middle- and upper-class women in Hyderabad, a city in South India. My analysis of young women's responses revealed the social construction of these Western romance novels as English-language media. Romanc…
Feminist Media Ethnography in India: Exploring Power, Gender, and Culture in the Field
This article is a self-reflexive account of one postcolonial feminist media scholar's research among young middle-class women in urban India who read Western romance fiction. Urging feminist scholars to pay attention to the politics of representation of audiences in media studies, the article explores power imbalances in the field that arise due to social constructions of gender, ethnic, class, and sexual identities. The article reflects on failu…
Reading Fictions of Romance: Gender, Sexuality, and Nationalism in Postcolonial India
This ethnographic study explores the implications of romance reading for young Indian women's gender, class, and national identities in one urban setting in South India. The project demonstrates that the practice of reading Western romance fiction is deeply embedded within patriarchal discourses of feminine respectability that exert control over women's sexuality. Young women's fascination for the commodities of Western material culture in import…
Local Culture in Global Media: Excavating Colonial and Material Discourses in National Geographic
This case study of National Geographic's August 1999 “millennium” issue interrogates the representational politics of the magazine's narratives on globalization. The essay's textual analysis, which is based in the insights of semiotic, feminist, and Marxist critiques of consumer culture, accounts for multiple media texts and historical contexts that filter the magazine's imagery. Drawing from postcolonial theories of gender, Orientalism, and nati…
Journalism and Feminist Cultural Studies: Retrieving the Missing Citizen Lost in the Female Audience
This article explores the relations between journalism and feminist cultural studies to underscore the crucial importance of studying forms of popular knowledge that claim to foster citizenship among audiences. The article begins by examining the history of feminist cultural studies scholars' sustained interest in feminine genres of popular culture rather than journalism. Crossing over to the other side, I then outline some of the reasons for jou…
Global Beauty Queens in Post-Liberalization India
Military Metaphors, Masculine Modes, and Critical Commentary: Deconstructing Journalists' Inner Tales of September 11
This article analyzes the rhetoric that surrounded September 11 in trade publications that cater to journalism professionals. Approaching journalists as an interpretive community, the author examines the ways in which reporters and editors narrate their experiences of producing news about the events of September 11, 2001. The analysis shows that journalists' public memories of their work relied on masculine metaphors of military and sport, privil…
The Other Sides of Globalization: Communication, Culture, and Postcolonial Critique
The launch of the new International Communication Association journal Communication, Culture & Critique heralds the creation of a much needed international forum for critical media scholars—political economists, cultural critics, and ethnographers—from a wide variety of theoretical orientations and perspectives—postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist—to debate the “social, cultural, and political dimensions of our media-saturated world” (from journal…
Immortal Comics, Epidermal Politics: Representations of gender and colorism in India
This article examines representations of skin color and its symbolic affiliations with discourses of gender, class, and caste in the Amar Chitra Katha (immortal pictorial stories) comic series, the first indigenous children's comics to be published in postcolonial India. We draw on the concept of colorism as defined by Black scholars in the United States to explore the lessons on gender and skin color that these comics may communicate to Indian c…
Facing Barack Hussein Obama: Race, Globalization, and Transnational America
Arguing that race does not receive enough attention in studies of globalization, this article examines the implications of Barack Hussein Obama's successful presidential candidacy for both expanding and reducing the meanings of Blackness in relation to transnational America. In contrast to the "Third World" racioscape of Black America that became visible to the world during Hurricane Katrina, Obama's biography produced new tropes of Black identit…
The rise of China and India: Promising new teaching and research directions for global media studies
Studying the Elusive Audience: Consumers, Readers, Users, and Viewers in a Changing World
This introductory chapter outlines the recent evolution of audience research, focusing on the ways in which the field has addressed the theoretical, economic, cultural, and technological currents of the moment. I argue that audience studies has not only survived the backlash against its populist tendencies in the late eighties to mid‐nineties, but it has also thrived and expanded to include a range of audiences, media genres, modes of audience en…
Watching Barkha Dutt: Turning on the news in television studies
This essay examines Barkha Dutt, host of the popular NDTV news talk show ‘We the People’, as a symbolic portal into the rise of television news celebrity culture in India's altering mediascape. The essay first situates Dutt's work as a reporter and a talk show host within the context of Indian television journalism's role in the democratic public sphere and then explores the implications of Dutt's class and gender identities for the hierarchies o…
Postings on the Rise of the Rest: Tracking Online Reception to The Post-American World
This article analyzes customer reviews of Fareed Zakaria’s best-selling book, The Post-American World posted on Amazon.com . Zakaria’s book explores the emergence of a new world order in which the “rise of the rest,” particularly China and India, threatens the geopolitical dominance of the United States. Drawing on reception studies of print culture, debates over the virtual public sphere, and sponsorship of literacy, our article’s textual analys…
Shaming the Nation on Public Affairs Television: Barkha Dutt tackles colorism on We the People
The commercial discourses of the skin-lightening cosmetics industry in globalizing India have propped up the ideological legitimacy of colorism or skin color discrimination whereby dark-skinned Indians are viewed as inferior to and less valued than light-skinned Indians. Two episodes of NDTV journalist Barkha Dutt’s national public affairs television program We the People (2008 and 2013) tackle the growing problem of commodity colorism in India. …
Animalizing India: Emerging Signs of an Unruly Market
Focusing on recent artistic and photojournalistic portraits of India as an animal – an elephant or tiger – that wanders alone or sometimes with another animal companion – dragon or panda bear – called China, this article analyzes the ways in which India's potential as an emerging market and a rising power is being conjured in the popular aesthetics of magazine and nonfiction book covers. Even as an outpouring of verbal discourse from business and…
Charting an Itinerary for Postcolonial Communication and Media Studies
This article presents a pathway for forging “postcolonial communication and media studies,” an area of inquiry that emerges from collaborations between communication and media studies and postcolonial theory. We aim to show the affinities between these two fields and explore how our discipline can benefit from postcolonial theory’s commitment to understanding the legacies of colonialism’s vast historical reach. This article’s itinerary has three …
E-Race-ing Color: Gender and Transnational Visual Economies of Beauty in India
Introduction to the Special Issue Forum “Digital Cultures of South Asia: Inequalities, Informatization, Infrastructures”
This short introductory essay first lays out the broader map of the digital media ecosystem in South Asia and then establishes the importance of this region in the global south--with its growing networked population--for understanding the future trajectories of global digital culture. Just as any other part of the world that is gradually getting on board the digital bandwagon, the South Asian digital landscape shows signs of both ingenuity, innov…
Shit talk in shitty terrain: Flushing Indian feminism through YouTube’s comedic conduits
This article examines the ways in which YouTube’s comedy-driven drama, Ladies Room, set in six women-only toilet sanctuaries across Mumbai, mines the semiotics of unruliness to push against the boundaries of upper-caste Indian feminine respectability. Drawing upon comedy studies and feminist theory, we deconstruct the two millennial protagonists Dingo & Khanna’s transgressive behaviors, body politics, and charged conversations about the sexist an…
Locating cultural studies: The limits of translation in knowledge production
This article reflects on translation practices engendered by location, disciplinary constraints, and Western hegemonies in the work of cultural studies scholars from the Global South. Focusing on issues of translation beyond language and text, the article tackles cultural translation practices at the levels of theory and analysis, which scholars engage in to render their research legible within academic contexts that continue to pay lip service t…
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (19 works) · Media studies (15 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Art (8 works) · History (8 works) · South Asian Cinema and Culture (8 works)