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Global Media

Moderator: Henry Jenkins
Aswin Punathambekar SM '03 Carolina Acosta-Alzuru Jonathan Gray Abderrahmane Sissako: April 23, 2009; Running Time: 1:51:50

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Just as digital technology has expanded the means of producing media, so has it increased the geographic range new media may travel. Locally generated content can zip around the world in a heartbeat. But, says moderator Henry Jenkins, “as a society we’re in a contradictory state in terms of having greater access to global content than ever before, but not having developed a conceptual framework to think about it very well.” These panelists attest to an unsettled time for global media.

At a recent Bombay conference celebrating the globalization of Indian film, Aswin Punathambekar saw international heavy-hitters, including Warner, Fox Searchlight, and Disney, all attempting to shape the future of the industry. Part of Indian film is still defined by the families that started the industry in the 1930s, but the last decade or so has seen dramatic changes, including attempts at fusing with Hollywood, and perhaps more dramatic, the explosion of new distribution channels through media piracy and imitation. Bollywood now exists outside of Bombay, says Punathambekar, in Karachi, Dubai, Beirut and Nigeria. The “culture of the copy” has come to define production and circulation of film and TV programs in these outlying hubs.

Two billion people watch Latin America’s telenovelas, long serial dramas featuring outsize villains and heroes. Carolina Acosta-Alzuru provides a tour through a global business that produces 12 thousand hours every year. Different regions feature different flavors. While Mexican telenovelas are “moralistic and melodramatic,” Venezuela’s programs appear suffocated by the censorship of the Chavez regime. Multinational broadcasters compete to distribute their products (distinguishable by differently accented Spanish) all over the world. They also fail to prevent bloggers and YouTube aficionados from placing episodes on the Internet. She laments the missed opportunity of telenovelas to teach and present the world in constructive ways.

Instead of movie theaters, Malawi features “video shows,” where men only watch pirated films on DVD, says Jonathan Gray. This impoverished nation produces neither original films nor TV programs, but people flock to see video copies of 20-year-old American action movies. Village music sellers neglect native musicians to hawk Dolly Parton CDs (she’s “as big as it gets,” says Gray). Country music is huge in Malawi due to American missionaries who passed through in the ‘70s. Gray believes it’s worth studying how media circulates not just spatially, but temporally, throughout the world.

Filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako acknowledges the appetite in Africa for western media. “It is a sad situation for my country, and in a larger way for the continent, because if images are a mirror, imagine you go every night to your home bathroom, and see somebody else in front of you.” He mourns the overwhelming “reculturization” of his countrymen via telenovelas and Bollywood, which prevent an actual appreciation of other cultures, and also obstruct an interest in authentic African life, including his own films. Sissako works out of France, and when he tries getting his native Mauritanian television to show one of his films, “they ask me to pay for it.”

Lecture Details

Location: E25-111

“The situation of “reculturization” is a terrible one, because Mexican telenovelas in particular take a majority of space on African TV. A country like Mauritania for the last 10 years produced three films. Sadly, I’m the director of the three films. ”

Abderrahmane Sissako

About the Speakers

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities
Director of Comparative Media Studies Program

Henry Jenkins' books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. His previous books include "What Made Pistachio Nuts": Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic; Classical Hollywood Comedy; and Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Jenkins has published articles on a diverse range of topics relating to film, television and popular culture. His most recent essays include work on Star Trek, WWF Wrestling, Nintendo Games, and Dr. Seuss.

Jenkins has a Ph.D. in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa.

Aswin Punathambekar SM '03

Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Aswin Punathambekar's research and teaching revolve around globalization, culture industries, new media and media convergence, and public culture. He is currently working on a book that provides a historical and critical account of ongoing changes in the media sector in Bombay and examines the operations of film, television, and dot-com companies as they grapple with the challenges of imagining "Bollywood" as a global cultural industry.

Punathambekar has published articles in Biblio, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Gazette: International Journal for Communication Studies, and has also co-edited an anthology of essays (Global Bollywood, NYU Press, 2008). He blogs about these and other topics at BollySpace 2.0

Carolina Acosta-Alzuru

Associate Professor, University of Georgia

Carolina Acosta-Alzuru teaches public relations, graphic communication and cultural studies. She teaches both an honors seminar (in Spanish) and an undergraduate course (in English) about telenovelas, culture and society. She is the author of the book Venezuela es una Telenovela (Alfa, 2007) and has authored or co-authored articles in Journalism and Mass Communication Monographs, The Journal of Communication, and Critical Studies in Media Communication, among others.

She received a B.S. in Computer Technology from Georgia Institute of Technology, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Georgia.

Jonathan Gray

Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham university

Jonathan Gray is currently working on two books: one involves film and television "paratexts" - all those things that surround film and television, from games to trailers, spinoffs to spoilers, toys to hype, reviews to fan creations - and the other concerns television satire. His other books include: Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008); Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006); Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2007), edited with Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington); and Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008), an encyclopedia of media hot-button issues, edited with Robin Andersen.

Gray has degrees from University of British Columbia (B.A. in English), University of Leeds (M.A. in Literature from Commonwealth Countries), and Goldsmiths College, University of London (M.A. and Ph.D. in Media and Communication Studies).

Abderrahmane Sissako

Filmmaker

Abderrahmane Sissako was born in Mauritania in 1961. studied film at VGIK in Moscow. from 1983 to 1989. He was a member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2003, and a member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. He served as President of the jury at the entrance examination of La Fémis (France's national film school) in 2008. His films include Bamako,Waiting for Happiness, and Life on Earth.