Radhika Parameswaran | Indiana University (original) (raw)

Papers by Radhika Parameswaran

Himal South Asia, 2020

, 11:30 pm Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden's nomination of Kamala Devi Harris f... more , 11:30 pm Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden's nomination of Kamala Devi Harris for vice president has brought international attention to a political figure fusing Indian American and African American identities. Harris' unusual Brahmin and Black ethno-racial ancestries have provoked a range of reactions

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022

What and where is Cultural Studies today? What is it becoming? What should or could it become? Wh... more What and where is Cultural Studies today? What is it becoming? What should or could it become? What is its meaning? What is at stake as we assess the ongoing development and maturation of Cultural Studies as field? International Journal of Cultural Studies is soliciting provocative answers to these and related questions, from a range of scholars internationally. We will publish their responses as an ongoing series, across multiple issues (to date, see also responses in 23.3, 23.4, and 23.6).

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2021

This article examines the ways in which YouTube's comedy-driven drama, Ladies Room, set in six wo... more 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 and cutthroat environments of corporate and new media branding careers. In conclusion, while Ladies Room's cultural politics disrupt the agendas of conservative Hindu nationalism and Bollywood's neoliberal feminism, we also point to the show's collusion with caste and class hierarchies.

Digital Cultures of South Asia, 2020

Description: Co-organizers--Sangeet Kumar and Kalyani Chadha ICA's 2020 Digital Cultures of South... more Description: Co-organizers--Sangeet Kumar and Kalyani Chadha
ICA's 2020 Digital Cultures of South Asia virtual pre-conference-with over 25 presenters from five different countries-brings together established and emerging scholars whose innovative work investigates key dimensions of a vibrant digital culture in the South Asian region. As the first ICA pre-conference to spotlight digital media research in South Asia, this day long event seeks to address the yawning gap in the field of digital media and cultural studies on a crucially important region in the global south that is predicted to shape the future of the global Internet. Keeping this goal in mind, our program offers a curated collection of cutting-edge research contributions that touch on a range of salient topics, from creator culture, digital media economies and policies, electoral politics, fake news and misinformation to the gender, caste and class inequalities that continue to structure digital divides. By creating an inclusive and interdisciplinary tent that brings together stakeholders of all hues (scholars, practitioners and media activists), we expect our day-long virtual event to provide a launchpad for future conversations that push the boundaries of research on the digital dimensions of South Asian life.

Indian Journalism in a New Era Changes, Challenges, and Perspectives., 2019

Journal of Communication, 2018

This article presents a pathway for forging "postcolonial communication and media studies," an ar... more 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 stops. At the first stop, we make a case for the insights that a historicized understanding of global "cultural power" can yield. The second stop outlines the contours of a vigilant approach to alterity that can unpack the hegemonic identity politics of Western modernity. At the third and most important stop, we point to a future research trajectory for postcolonial communication and media studies, an agenda that avoids the limitations of existing postcolo-nial theory and fosters a robust conversation with the larger interdisciplinary project of postcolonial studies.

Racism Post-Race/Edited Volume, 2019

Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies

Focusing on recent artistic and photojournalistic portraits of India as an animal – an elephant o... more 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 policy experts has hailed an India that is transitioning from a peripheral Third-World nation to a rising power, a steady stream of visual illustrations, including, those that deploy animal avatars, has sought to illuminate the vicissitudes of India’s newfound economic recognition. Ultimately, my article’s tracking of the visual semiotics of India’s animal imprints
seeks to get inside an economy of appearances in which zoological embodiments arbitrate this non-Western nation’s prospects for entering economic globalization’s newly minted scale of “emerging market.”

The commercial discourses of the skin-lightening cosmetics industry in globalizing India have pro... more 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 darkskinned 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. My textual analysis of these two episodes of We the People examines the ways in which Barkha Dutt takes up and
creates a forum for debate on the incendiary issues of racism and colorism on her show. I consider the agents, institutions, and social structures she holds accountable in these programs, and I
explore the perspectives on anti-colorism and anti-racism that gain visibility or get marginalized in We the People’s televised terrain of democracy and civil society.

This article analyzes customer reviews of Fareed Zakaria’s best-selling book, The Post-American W... more 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 analysis of 281 customer reviews offers a window into audience reactions to this public intellectual’s deliberations on the beginning of a possible decentering of America in certain realms of globalization. Our analysis of consumer citizenship in Amazon.com’s reviewer space identifies three dominant frameworks or “horizons of expectations” that structured interpretations of The Post-American World: readers’ framing of the book as a tool to foster enlightened citizenship, reviewers’ affective rhetoric of nation building, and the impact of Zakaria’s status as an immigrant intellectual on readers’ responses.

This essay examines Barkha Dutt, host of the popular NDTV news talk show ‘We the People’, as a sy... more 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 of celebrity status in commercial television news. In the end, this case study of Barkha Dutt argues that greater attention to India's exploding journalism industry – its star personalities, political economy, critiques of news programmes' and talk shows' representations and audience responses – will revitalize and enrich the evolving trajectories of television studies.

This article examines representations of skin color and its symbolic affiliations with discourses... more 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 children. Our analysis shows that Amar Chitra Katha’s stories of gods, goddesses, kings, demons, and historical events associate light- skinned masculinity with divinity, strength, virtue, compassion, and upper caste status. Comic book illustrations code dark-skinned masculinity through the semiotics of violence, brutality, stupidity, bestiality, and low caste status. Fashioning a similar set of symbolic oppositions, these pictorial stories link light-skinned femininity to beauty, wholesome family life, and happiness, whereas dark-skinned femininity manifests through embodiments of grotesque physical appearance, anger, promiscuity, and deviance.