This book takes a journey into the new and exciting created by a the wave of Indian comedians today, described affectionately here as the New Indian Nuttahs, and looks at what these tell us about identity, “Indianness”, censorship, feminism, diaspora and millennial India. It provides a unique analysis into the growing phenomenon of internet comedy and into a dimension of Indian popular culture which has long been dominated by the traditional film and television industries. Through a mixture of close textual readings of online comedy videos and interviews with content creators and consumers in India, this book provides a fresh perspective on comedy studies in its approach to a global South context from a sociocultural perspective. As a protean form of new media, this has opened up new avenues of articulation, identification and disidentification and as such, this book makes a further contribution to South Asian, communication, media & cultural studies.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of media and communication studies, scholars face a pressing challenge – understanding the profound and transformative impact of Over-the-Top (OTT) media on global societies. As video content flows directly to viewers over the internet, upending traditional cable and broadcast TV, the complexities of this digital shift pose intricate problems. Enter Exploring the Impact of OTT Media on Global Societies, a comprehensive handbook meticulously crafted to address these challenges and provide solutions. This groundbreaking publication seeks to unravel the intricate layers of OTT media, offering a holistic exploration of business models, technological infrastructure, regulatory issues, and the social and cultural implications that define the dynamic OTT industry. Dive into the evolution of OTT media, exploring the seamless delivery of video content and its disruptive influence on traditional media consumption. Uncover the strategies behind the production and distribution of OTT content, emphasizing the role of personalization and recommendation algorithms in shaping audience engagement. Navigate the complex terrain of regulatory and policy issues surrounding OTT media, addressing critical topics such as net neutrality, data privacy, and intellectual property rights. Witness the competitive dynamics of the OTT market, marked by the emergence of new players and their profound impact on traditional media companies. Beyond the technicalities, our book delves into the social and cultural implications of OTT media, revealing shifts in media consumption patterns, the phenomenon of binge-watching, and the transformative effects on advertising and marketing strategies.

Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism explores inter-disciplinary connections across Cultural Anthropology, Geography, Psychology, and feminist literary criticism to develop a theoretical framework for spatial criticism. Using the spatial gynocritics framework developed in the book, it analyzes selected texts from five different genres–short-story, novel, film, cartoons, and OTT series, created by women. The creators discussed in the book constitute a transnational collectivity of women that shares common concerns about gender, environment, technology, and social hierarchies. They comprise a geographically and linguistically diverse group from India, Uruguay, Spain, Argentina, and the USA. The book offers immense potential for a comparative study on numerous aspects, among which the present work concentrates on the treatment of Space, demonstrating that spatial logic and grammar are essential elements of the feminist praxis. The book reveals the unexamined potential in the women creators’ praxis of destabilizing, decentring, and destroying the ascribed centres around which social arrangements are structured. Moreover, the book offers valuable analytic tools that add to scholarship in literary theory, comparative cultural studies, comparative literature, gender studies, feminist criticism, and interdisciplinary humanities. It is an indispensable aid to students and faculty in these areas of study, enabling them to critique texts from a fresh perspective.

This book develops a model to examine the language of humour, which is multimodal and accounts for the possibility of transmutation of humour as it is performed through editorial cartoons. By transmutation is meant the transition in the language of humour when it crosses its own boundaries to provoke unprecedented reactions resulting in offensiveness, disappointment or hurt sentiment. The transmutability about the language of humour points to its inherently diabolical nature which manifests in the performance of controversial cartoons. The model is built by borrowing theoretical cues from Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. The integrated model, then, is developed to examine the cartoons which were recommended for deletion by the Thorat Committee, following a cartoon controversy in India. Through the cartoon analysis, the model discerns the significance of context and temporality in determining the impact of humour. It also examines how the ethics of humour; the blurred lines of political correctness and incorrectness are dictated by the political atmosphere and the power dynamics.

This book will look at digital popular cultures in the post-millennial Indian context and trace patterns of consumption and forms of agency that it engenders thus offering an interpretative analysis of digital content on different platforms. The book consists of three sections. The first section centres around novel practices such as transnational consumption of digital popular content. The second section deals with influencer marketing and the ways in which mediated personalities get transformed. The third section includes textual analysis of OTT and other digital content in order to understand its effects on refashioning social identities such as class caste and gender.

This book critically examines the role and politics of humour and the performance of power in South Asia. What does humour do and how does it manifest when lived political circumstances experience ruptures or instability? Can humour that emerges in such circumstances be viewed as a specific narrative on the nature of democracy in the region? Drawing upon essays from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, this volume discusses many crucial historical and contemporary themes, including dance-drama performances in northern India; caste and stand-up comedy in India; cartoon narratives of citizens’ anxieties; civic participation through social media memes in Sri Lanka; media, politics and humorous public in Bangladesh; the politics of performance in India; and the influence of humour and satire as political commentaries. The volume explores the impact of humour in South Asian folklore, ritual performances, media and journalism, and online technologies. This topical and interdisciplinary book will be essential for scholars and researchers of cultural studies, political science, sociology and social anthropology, media and communication studies, theatre and performance studies, and South Asian studies.