The Global-Popular: A Frame for Contemporary Cinemas

The Global-Popular:A Frame for Contemporary Cinemas Bishnupriya Ghosh (bio) and Bhaskar Sarkar (bio) That we now inhabit the global-popular has become something of a commonplace. Upsurges from the Arab Spring to right-wing populisms; the number of active Facebook users crossing the billion mark; the popularity of Psy's Gangnam Style and Shah Rukh Khan fan clubs sprouting all over Europe; the dissemination of alternative medical practices (e.g., acupuncture), health regimens (e.g., yoga), and lifestyle orientations (e.g., feng shui); the proliferation of bottom-up low-tech "make-do" modes like gambiarra and jugaad: these popular creativities and mobilizations constitute an experiential realm that appears so ubiquitous and self-evident that cognition and mapping become difficult. If the global and the popular are now everywhere, how does one conceptualize the conjugation global-popular? What specifically does the hyphen between the two seemingly banal and all-encompassing terms do? If the conjunction is not simply additive, how are we to theorize it? The global-popular is primarily experienced in three overlapping realms: the economic, the political, and the cultural. Discourses of globalization focus on top-down economic forces. Economic accounts of the global culture industry, for one, conflate the global-popular with the global-corporate, reducing political and cultural dimensions to epiphenomena. Our understanding of the global-popular includes bottom-up practices that cut across the three realms. The casting of Scarlett Johansson as the lead in the 2017 remake of Ghost in the Shell, a pop cultural event, fueled a pointed debate about global racial politics.1 The global convulsions around #MeToo, a popular political groundswell, are inducing changes in workplace cultures, dating rituals, and representational regimes that have routinely idealized lotharios and stalkers End Page 1 as romantic heroes. Renewed demands for social justice ricocheting across continents in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement spur an impetus to think about the structural congruencies between embedded hierarchies such as caste and race.2 This salience across multiple domains adds to the difficulty of characterization, let alone rigorous definition, of the global-popular. In this issue, we examine cinematic formations within global-popular cultures. Even as we track economic and political entanglements, our focus remains attuned primarily to cultural circulations. Comprising six new articles and an introduction, the issue explores how the concept of the "global-popular" might be productive for cinema studies. This means asking, among other things, what happens to cinema under the sign of the global-popular? "Cinema" here is broadly construed to include its diffuse multimedial manifestations and cultural extensions. Simultaneously, we ask: What does this focus on cinema bring to our understanding of the global-popular? Keeping with the cinematic theme, we begin with a "trailer" for each of the issue's organizing concepts. First, cinema. The last four decades, the era of contemporary globalization, have witnessed the phasing out of celluloid cinema. This gradual demise is related to tremendous developments in digital media technologies and the proliferation of screens. Cinema's "death" has brought about its efflorescence in novel multimedia formats, including its replatformings and remediations.3 Two other modes of proliferation—financial-speculative opportunisms and popular-representational practices—contributed to the explosion of cinema in the postcelluloid era. Writing about the transformation of Bombay cinema into Bollywood, Ashish Rajadhyaksha argues that Bollywoodization has meant the formalization, standardization, and corporatization of the Bombay industry, transforming it from a celluloid-based cinema into a veritable culture industry (Rajadhyaksha 2009). While "films" remain its imputed center, the Bollywood juggernaut now involves a wide array of activities, products, and services from television franchising, music videos, and star concert tours to online fan communities, fashion zines, and gallery art installations. The same is true of J-pop, K-pop, Hong Kong cinema, Hollywood, and Nollywood. The following image featuring a snapshot of Bernie Sanders at the 2021 US presidential inauguration, and rumored to have originated from Cairo, has appeared in a global torrent End Page 2 of memes (Figure 1). Whether or not the rumor is true, anecdotally, we can report on the Cairene passion for aflam hindiya and, in particular, the blockbuster Sholay (1975) that we encountered during a visit in...