Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change

For ethnic minorities’ in Britain, broadcast TV provides powerful representations of national and western’ culture. In Southall – which has the largest population of South Asians’ outside the Indian sub-continent – the VCR furnishes Hindi films, sacred soaps’ such as the Mahabharata, and family videos of rites of passage, as well as mainstream American films. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change examines how TV and video are being used to recreate cultural traditions within the South Asian’ diaspora, and how they are also catalysing cultural change in this local community. Marie Gillespie explores how young people negotiate between the local and global, national and international contexts and cultures which traverse their lives. Articulating their preoccupations with television narratives, they both reaffirm and challenge parental traditions, at the same time formulating their own aspirations towards cultural change. Marie Gillespie’s in-depth study offers an invaluable survey of how cultures are shaped and changed through people’s recreative reception of the media.

Author Biography

Marie Gillespie is Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wales, Swansea. She is the Diaspora Literary and Media Cultures project co-ordinator for the ESRC Transnational Communities Programme at the University of Oxford.