The Bad Object: Television in the American Academy

Hilmes, Michele

doi:10.1353/cj.2006.0008

Cited by 21 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…If seeking new historical and conceptual coordinates for the study of television in South Asia is one challenge, another is placing television in relation to powerful disciplinary formations. Here, Hilmes (2005) reflections on the decades-long struggle to establish television as a legitimate object of study in the humanities in the United States are instructive. Hilmes begins by pointing to the serious deficit in film scholars’ understanding of broadcasting history, institutions, and aesthetics, and goes on to outline how television’s status as the “low other” helped shore up film studies’ position in the American academy.…”

Section: Television Television Studies and The Primacy Of Filmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first major shift was sparked by the expansion of cultural studies, as worked out in relation to television by a cohort of scholars in the U.K. and soon thereafter, in the U.S. As Hilmes (2005, 114) summarizes it, “feminist-inflected cultural studies placed an emphasis on the negotiations of cultural power along racial, ethnic, sexual and postcolonial lines and on commercial popular media,” with television emerging as the key site for such investigations. In the South Asian context, this phase was defined by a generation of scholars who moved away from modernization theory and development communication toward crafting rich, interdisciplinary studies of television entertainment, understood as a distinct form of postcolonial popular culture.…”

Section: Turning Points In Television Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Televisual Drag: Reimagining South Asian Film and Media Studies

Punathambekar

Chirumamilla

2022

Television & New Media

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This article engages with the history of television and television studies in South Asia to reflect on how “media” can be re-imagined as an object of analysis and critique. Questioning the analytic primacy accorded to film, we develop the concept of televisual drag and argue that bringing television to the fore can reveal different temporalities, modalities, and logics for the evolution of South Asian screen media, both in their past forms and current constitution. We critically engage with recent studies—of Indian women filmmakers, Pakistani comic shows and YouTube videos, and small-town video circulation in India—to illuminate the currents of televisual drag at work in contemporary media scholarship. We conclude by reflecting how how televisual drag might be a critical method for drawing insights from media histories, practices, and environments that do not or will not follow an easily comprehensible path toward a seemingly inevitable digital horizon.

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Section: Television Television Studies and The Primacy Of Filmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Turning Points In Television Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Televisual Drag: Reimagining South Asian Film and Media Studies

Punathambekar

Chirumamilla

2022

Television & New Media

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“…Desde o final dos anos 1990, e particularmente até meados dos anos 2000, os reality shows se tornaram um importante fenômeno cultural. Com espaço na televisão aberta e paga, programas dos mais variados modelos exibiam conteúdos que embaralham as noções de ficção e realidade e é difícil até mesmo buscar uma definição instrumental que dê conta de agrupá-los sob um mesmo rótulo, dada a variedade de temáticas que podem apresentar (Andrejevic, 2004;Hill, 2004). Em comum, a capacidade de se adaptarem a um contexto que já naquele momento era marcado pela integração entre diferentes plataformas e pela importância da internet (Campanella, 2012;Fechine, 2009).…”

Section: Netflix E O Ocaso Da Era De Ourounclassified

A “televisão do futuro”? Netflix, qualidade e neofilia no debate sobre TV

Castellano

Meimaridis

2021

Matrizes

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Neste artigo, investigamos a Netflix, colocando em questão as expectativas do público e da crítica a respeito de mudanças advindas com a introdução do serviço. A partir da análise de matérias jornalísticas, dados de acesso e tendências de investimento da empresa, averiguamos que tipos de experiência sobre o consumo de TV estão em jogo no discurso propalado por analistas e entusiastas do novo. Debatemos, também, como as avaliações sobre as plataformas de streaming renovam as permanentes controvérsias sobre a qualidade televisiva. A despeito do tipo de elucubração despertada pela sensação de ubiquidade e de revoluções estilísticas, defendemos que as práticas relacionadas ao streaming funcionam, na verdade, como atualizações de modelos consagrados na TV linear.

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“…Cultural institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art regularly hold film exhibitions and retrospectives, yet television normally only appears as a part of installations, usually featuring television sets as opposed to individual programs. Michele Hilmes once called television the “bad object,” lamenting the “information and awareness deficit in the community of film scholars… with respect to radio and television” (111–12); teaching at a renowned media studies institution, Timothy Havens noted that he was the only television scholar on the faculty (“Teaching the Lone” 173). Cinema Journal , one of media studies’ most prestigious publications, only moved to rename itself as The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies in 2018 and this title still obfuscates the role of television specifically.…”

Section: Canonizing Televisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reproducing Television Canons: Streaming Services and the Legacy of Linear TV

Esler¹

2020

The J of Popular Culture

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Rosenbaum describes his experience defending Citizen Kane (1942) as an important cinematic work while a film student at New York University in the early 1960s, noting the pushback he received from a professor (xi). Today, most film programs touch on the historical and artistic importance of Citizen Kane at some point in introductory or film history courses. However, as Rosenbaum's anecdote indicates, which media texts are valued as "important" is highly fluid, and oftentimes works previously judged as unremarkable will be rediscovered and reevaluated by contemporary audiences (e.g., many science fiction B-films of the 1950s). Moreover, Rosenbaum remembers how film criticism publications were much more "consequential" (xii) in cultivating his taste in film than were his courses within the academy. Rosenbaum writes about film canons in order to counteract the marketing campaigns of film studios, which he believes set the agenda for which films are considered "canonical" in contemporary culture (xvii). Writing in 2010, Rosenbaum's perspective comes from a time when streaming services like Netflix and Hulu were in their infancies and neither had begun creating original content. For Rosenbaum, media canonization was dominated by traditional marketing campaigns from studios and the writings of film and television critics. Lucas Hilderbrand nuances this view, suggesting video-ondemand (VOD) services, each of which is supported by a multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD), are central components of distribution strategies for major and independent film studios, as

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The Bad Object: Television in the American Academy

Cited by 21 publications

References 5 publications

Televisual Drag: Reimagining South Asian Film and Media Studies

Televisual Drag: Reimagining South Asian Film and Media Studies

A “televisão do futuro”? Netflix, qualidade e neofilia no debate sobre TV

Reproducing Television Canons: Streaming Services and the Legacy of Linear TV

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