Popular Culture and Political Lives : Experiences from Bangladesh

This book is an anthology of essays that explore cultural products and their reception and readings in a given location. Taking the Bangladeshi scenario into consideration, this book engages with, and relates to, much wider conceptual and theoretical debates that are prevalent in the academic and polemic world. The concept of ‘popular’ is contested among cultural-political spheres and is manifested across genres and formats. Conventional modalities are often referred to as music, film, creative literature and paintings, with little doubt about its more assured place in the ‘elite’ space, and for not being an easy pick for the culture industry. With the advent of ‘new media’ and the internet, cyberspace provides entirely new meanings of the culture industry and cultural products where identities are endlessly in construction as well as in question. This volume explores cultures and cultural products that have gone through crucial phases during and after the colonial period, through modernity and capitalism, within the compulsory flow of cultural globalization, and it will be of interest to readers with a background in sociocultural anthropology, colonial and post-colonial studies, and the culture and history of Asia.