Fandom by Gray Jonathan; Harrington C. Lee; Sandvoss Cornel & Cornel Sandvoss & C. Lee Harrington

Author:Gray, Jonathan; Harrington, C. Lee; Sandvoss, Cornel & Cornel Sandvoss & C. Lee Harrington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2007-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Beyond the Cinema Hall: Reconceptualizing Publicness and the Fan

Sivathamby provided what is perhaps the earliest articulation of cinema and the public sphere in India. He argued that “the cinema hall was the first performance centre in which all Tamils sat under the same roof. The basis of the seating is not on the hierarchic position of the patron but essentially on his purchasing power. If he cannot afford paying the higher rate, he has either to keep away from the performance or be with all and sundry” (1981: 18). As Srinivas notes, this “formulation can be read as pointing to the democratic possibilities of cinema” (forthcoming: 20). While there was a certain mode of policing this “democratic” space (e.g., seating codes, from the “gandhi class” all the way up to “dress circle”), this does “permit us to conceive of the cinema hall as a kind of public institution that had no precedence in India” (Srinivas forthcoming: 20).

Following this early formulation, scholars have approached the problematic of cinema’s publicness by focusing on a range of filmic and extra-filmic sites with varied theoretical lenses: (1) Indian cinema as a “site of ideological production […] as the (re)production of the state form” (Prasad 1998: 9), (2) Indian popular films as social history (Virdi 2003), (3) in terms of spectatorship and democracy (Rajadhyaksha 2000), (4) in terms of censorship (Mehta 2001; Vasudev 1978), and (5) in terms of stardom (Majumdar 2001). While these studies grapple with the idea of how cinema relates in complex ways to the civic and the political, fan practices have not been the focus of systematic research. The two notable exceptions here are Srinivas’s pioneering work on fan associations in Andhra Pradesh (2003) and Dickey’s work in Tamilnadu (1993).

Dickey locates fan activity at the intersection of the formal realm of politics and civil social activity (conducting charity work, organizing blood donation campaigns, and performing other “social services”). Building on scholarship on Tamil cinema that has examined the relationship between the construction of stardom and the politics of mobilization (Pandian 1992), Dickey provides a very useful ethnographic account of this aspect of fan activity in Tamilnadu. She does, however, ignore the possibility of fan activity that might not necessarily be “public” in the sense of there being a neighborhood fan association that meets at street corners, at tea shops, or outside cinema halls. Indeed, her analysis circumscribes fan activity in Tamilnadu as that defined by working-class (often lower-caste) male youth in visible, public spaces.

In his pathbreaking work on the Telugu film industry, and viewing practices in the state of Andhra Pradesh more broadly, Srinivas complicates Dickey’s analysis and theorizes fan activity as being structured by a dialectic of devotion and defiance (2000), as a struggle between fan expectations and the industry’s careful management of the star persona to derive maximum mileage from fan activity. Focusing on one major star, Chiranjeevi, Srinivas situates the formation of fan clubs in Andhra Pradesh in relation to a broader history of subaltern struggles (dalit/untouchable movements,

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