CTF 2016: Politics of Media, Media of Politics

This year’s workshop focuses on the politics of media and the media of politics in contemporary Tamil Nadu. As the literatures on politics and media in south India have shown, forms of semiotic mediation have long been constitutive of modern political action in colonial and post-colonial south India—in particular, scholars have focused on Dravidian parties’ use of theater, stage oratory, print media, cinema, billboards, and television in electoral politics and political mobilization); at the same time, however, the mediatization of populist politics has also shown how media institutions and practices are central objects of political contention construed more generally, be it in the politics of public meetings, cut-outs or flexboards, cable distribution, newspaper reportage, or cinematic representation, among others.

This workshop thinks theoretically about the dialectical link between these two foci in the literature, while at the same time critically reassessing the scope of this linkage, moving beyond the canonical objects of analysis, both in terms of what are considered “media” and what is considered “politics,” and in their nexus in Tamil Nadu (viz. studies of Dravidian parties use of mass media—in particular, cinema—in electoral mobilization).

The workshop, then, continues the Chicago Tamil Forums’s critical reappraisals of Dravidianism from its margins(CTF 2015), while at the same time delineating wider theoretical horizons of the politics of mediation and the mediation of politics.