Page 35 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

22 << Introduction

chapter 4 focuses on the dynamic relation between the expansion of capital
into new territories and the work of rendering those new territories more
imaginable. As we will see, what Bollywood got was a very limited “spatial
fix” as dot-com companies interpreted and resolved the problem of space—
of imagining the overseas territory—in terms of overseas audiences’ cul-
tural temporality with the nation. Furthermore, the story of Bollywood’s
relationship with overseas audiences is not only about Bombay-based pro-
fessionals’ imaginations of a multiplex with unlimited seats. Over the past
two decades, Bollywood’s cultural geography has been transformed by the
efforts of diasporic media entrepreneurs in diverse locations worldwide.
The next chapter thus shifts focus to map and analyze the role played by
diasporic media professionals in rearticulating Bollywood’s imagination of
overseas territories.
Outlining the changing dynamics of migration, the politics of multicul-
turalism, and relations between “home” and “diaspora” since the mid-1990s,
chapter 5, “‘It’s Not Your Dad’s Bollywood’: Diasporic Entrepreneurs and the
Allure of Digital Media,” begins by tracing changes in the South Asian Amer-
ican mediascape from grassroots- and community-managed media produc-
tion, particularly the use of public access television, to the entry and domi-
nance of India-based television channels like ZEE and Star TV, and finally
the launch and failure of MTV-Desi, a niche television channel for South
Asian American youth. I relate MTV-Desi in particular to efforts by adver-
tising and marketing professionals to construct South Asian Americans as an
untapped and lucrative consumer demographic over the past decade. While
the intersections of South Asian cultural production and American public
culture can be traced through the work of artists like DJ Rekha and subcul-
tures in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, media companies’
interest in this hitherto marginalized community was sparked in part by the
results of the 2000 U.S. census which revealed that the median household
income for South Asian families was $64,000. In much the same way that
advertisers and marketers worked to commodify Latinos during the 1990s,
companies such as Ethnik PR and Evershine Group took on the task of con-
structing a Desi demographic. In relation to this marketing logic, I examine
television channels’ programming, marketing, and distribution strategies to
illustrate how they remain caught up in a discourse of long-distance nation-
alism, and in the process fail to respond to the particularities of diasporic
youth culture. This analysis of the limits of television as a medium for recon-
figuring Bollywood’s geographic reach, especially as it pertains to a vast,
networked, and diverse youth culture, informs my analysis of digital media
initiatives.