Page 24 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Introduction >> 11

research remains focused on film and television in the United States and
where scholars have looked beyond that country, they have been concerned
primarily with issues of media/cultural imperialism, national policy, and
aesthetics. 30
In contrast, this book pays close attention to how exactly Bollywood’s
spatial expansion is being achieved and what business practices and strat-
egies underpin the creation of a new scale of operations. I certainly do
not wish to neglect the importance of audience practices or the role that
state institutions continue to play in shaping the ways in which profes-
sionals associated with Bollywood respond to the challenges and oppor-
tunities of globalization. Rather, the objective is to build on the work of
scholars who have moved past center-periphery models and notions of cul-
tural homogenization to acknowledge the emergence of multiple centers of
media production and increasingly complex patterns of media circulation.
Understanding media industry dynamics calls for a focus on the changing
relations between economy, culture, and space that in turn requires moving
beyond theoretical and methodological frameworks that tend to privilege
the national as the dominant, pregiven, and uniformly imagined framework
and scale of analysis.
In particular, I draw inspiration from Serra Tinic and Michael Curtin who
have brought insights from political economy, cultural studies, and geogra-
31
phy to bear on the spatial dynamics of media production. Examining the
worlds of Canadian television and Chinese film and television, respectively,
Tinic and Curtin have developed detailed analyses of the forces that led
to the emergence of cities like Vancouver and Hong Kong as key nodes or
“switching points” for flows of capital and labor. More broadly, they demon-
strate that the dynamics of media production in these locations are defined
by complex articulations of finance, state policy, technological advances, the
built environment, media policy, the desires and ambitions of media moguls,
migration patterns, and audience practices that cannot be grasped through a
macrolevel political economy approach. Without a doubt, an account of the
structural and regulatory foundations upon which media industries in such
cities rest would be crucial, as would details of media ownership. However,
such an approach would not foreground issues of industrial identity and
work at the level of the everyday or, for that matter, spaces such as indus-
try conventions where various imaginations of the “national,” “global,” and
“diasporic” come into play. The challenge, as Curtin suggests, is to capture
the ways in which media capitals like Bombay are now “bound up in a web
of relations that exist at the local, regional, and global levels, as well as the
national level.” 32