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A Mobile Popular: Media Entertainment and the Political in Digital India
Hardcover
Series: Critical Cultural Communication, Book 41
AnthropologyGeneral Political ScienceGeneral Sociology
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ISBN10: 147981296X
ISBN13: 9781479812967
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: Oct 27 2026
Pages: 224
Language: English
ISBN13: 9781479812967
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: Oct 27 2026
Pages: 224
Language: English
Explores the entanglement of digital media, popular culture, and political expression in contemporary India.
A Mobile Popular offers a landmark account of how popular culture and political expression have become deeply intertwined in India's rapidly evolving digital landscape. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with content creators, platform executives, and digital activists across southern India, Aswin Punathambekar, Sangeet Kumar, and Sriram Mohan theorize the mobile popular as a dynamic mediascape shaped by data-driven platforms, entrenched representational politics, and everyday vernacular creativity. Exploring the intersection of legacy media industries, global platforms, and multilingual digital practices, they trace how entertainment and political culture now circulate through volatile, algorithmically saturated channels. Set against the rise of Hindu nationalism, the expansion of platform capitalism, and the emergence of a global right-wing technoculture, A Mobile Popular reveals how memes, parodies, podcasts, and other digital artifacts generate new temporal experiences, publics, and infrastructures whose political valence cannot be contained within frames of freedom and capture. Rather than valorizing digital democracy or lamenting authoritarian capture, the authors show that digital India is a plural, affectively charged arena where mobile publics continually cohere, fragment, and morph into new collectivities. Through richly detailed case studies--from Tamil YouTube satire to activist meme cultures to sonic experiments that unsettle the temporal rhythms of Indian television--the book demonstrates how digital media have reshaped cultural belonging and redefined the meanings and performances of citizenship. Essential for students, scholars, and practitioners, A Mobile Popular illuminates the far-reaching implications of digitalization for culture, communication, and politics today.1 different editions
Also available
A Mobile Popular: Media Entertainment and the Political in Digital India
Kumar, Sangeet
Mohan, Sriram
Punathambekar, Aswin
Paperback
$43.50
Also from
Punathambekar, Aswin
A Mobile Popular: Media Entertainment and the Political in Digital India
Kumar, Sangeet
Mohan, Sriram
Punathambekar, Aswin
Paperback
$43.50
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