Postcolonial Popular Culture in India

This anthology is an examination of Indian popular culture through the lens of postcolonial theory. Its essays focus on graphic narratives, chick-lit, Instagram poetry, memes, online games, football fans, talk shows, 24×7 news channels, and films and OTT shows. The essays are marked by a fundamental awareness of the plurality of discourses within which popular cultural representations are manufactured and received and the attendant negotiations of hegemony and counter-hegemonic currents which are inevitably generated. Although the authors remain aware of colonial representational matrices and ongoing machinations of empire, economic or cultural, they also remain equally keenly aware of the fissures within the nation-space, based on considerations of class, caste, sexuality, gender or ethnicity, which popular cultural representations also constantly negotiate with in a variety of ways. Postcolonial Popular Culture in India will help scholars, teachers and students understand the concerns of cultural studies as a discipline and the possible avenues through which future research might progress.