The Smile of Mona Lisa: Postcolonial Desires,Nationalist Families,and the Birth of Consumer Television in India |
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| Authors: | Usha Zacharias |
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| Abstract: | This paper examines how the inception of consumer television in India during the late 1980s facilitated both market liberalization and a conservative politics of class, gender, and religio-cultural community. As reflected in the discourses and images in the English press, consumer television made room for novel figures of desire, changing forms of cultural citizenship, and new spaces of governance. Advertised through images of postcolonial whiteness that glamorized capital and technology, television also brought with it anxieties regarding westernization, consumption, and gender reform. These conflicting discourses produced the nationalist TV family as part of a new gender politics and as a new form of cultural governance that sought to forge tighter links between market, state, and conservative notions of community. |
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