Description
Book SynopsisTania Lewis, Fran Martin, and Wanning Sun analyze the complex social and cultural significance of lifestyle television programming in China, India, Taiwan, and Singapore, showing how it adds insight into late Asian modernity, media cultures, and broad shifts in the nature of private life, identity, citizenship, and social engagement.
Trade Review"
Telemodernities is a valuable addition to a growing body of scholarship.... A fascinatingly detailed comparative study of lifestyle television in China, India, and Taiwan, the book seeks to decenter the normative modernity of the West, interrogating instead the role television plays in constituting and interpreting multiple 'modernities.'" -- Tilottama Karlekar * Feminist Media Studies *
"The scope of the book is expansive, covering all three aspects of media studies: production, content, and audience analysis. The thick description helps immensely with the goal of showing how modernities are interpreted, negotiated, and confronted in nuanced ways...." -- Yang Bai * International Journal of Communication *
"[
Telemodernities] provides a convincing comparative and nuanced analysis of how lifestyle TV filters conflicting ideologies. . . . This book offers groundbreaking comparative work on South Asian television." -- Daniel Keyes * Critical Studies in Television *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction: Telemodernities 1
1. Lifestyle Television in Context: Media Industries, Cultural Economies, and Genre Flows 25
2. Local versus Metropolitan Television in China: Stratification of Needs, Taste, and Spatial Imagination 52
3. Here, There, and Everywhere: Mediascapes, Geographic Imaginaries, and Indian Television 82
4. Imagining Global Mobility: TLC Taiwan 106
5. Gurus, Babas, and Daren: Popular Experts on Chinese and Indian Advice TV 126
6. Magical Modernities: Spiritual Advice TV in India and Taiwan 157
7. Risky Romance: Navigating Late Modern Identities and Relationships on Chinese and Indian Lifestyle TV 196
8. A Self to Believe In: Negotiating Femininities in Sinophone Lifestyle Advice TV 222
Conclusion: Negotiating Modernities through Lifestyle Television 254
Notes 271
Works Cited 281
Index 305
