ABSTRACT
Examining the impact of media, tourist and local industrial collaborations, the book employs mobile methodologies so as to analyse contemporary phenomena of socio-cultural dis-embeddedness and de-territorialisation (Hannam 2008; Hall 2008). It first reconsiders the epistemological suggestion that the dominant visitor’s gaze and ear that connect media to tourist consumption can be strategically manipulated by all parties, including the subaltern. The statement’s original feminist underpinnings (Mulvey 2006; Spivak 1988) give way in this particular instance to other variables (class, status, race) defining subaltern group performance. We must acknowledge that even local performances are embedded in power structures (in fact, alignments of subaltern Indian communities with dominant cultural systems [English language] can be a liberating choice relative to individual circumstances (Rege 2011)). The global public spheres in which such identities emerge are ‘staged’ with the
help of new media technologies (Tzanelli 2010b:17), but the ways tourist formations emerge through connections between such spheres or sites deserves additional examination (Nederveen Pieterse 1998:79-80). We do indeed deal with multiple spheres and agents, including the media industries, the national centre and the community from which the media draw inspiration. The word ‘local’ or ‘community’ may distract from ‘the intense complexity or micro-politics that all sides are inevitably imbricated within and shaped by’ (Meethan 2001:61). Indeed, it is often easier to focus on the cinematic Juhu slum than on Dharavi’s (the biggest slum in Mumbia) activism when evaluating SM’s impact on tourism and identity. However, there are intersections and disjunctions between the sub-scenes and imaginaries of these sites (virtual, fictional and real) we may explore as discursive tropes – or rather, the ways such discourses are interpreted by various human agents (D’Andrea 2006:114-15). Interpretation becomes here coterminous with social representations that are promoted by global media communities (journalists, leaders and workers in film and digital tourist industries), involved state agents and localities. Consequently, my sources are drawn from multiple actual and virtual sites in
the West and the East. Treating the web as a multi-site in which SM debates
acquire various meanings entails consideration of the ways in which the internet as a medium absorbs and recreates itself through hyperlinked content, breaking this up into ‘searchable chunks’ while also surrounding itself ‘with various other media it has absorbed’ (Carr 2010:91; Anastasiou and Schäler 2010). As SM is my starting point, I consulted reports primarily collected between 2008 and 2013 in multiple Eastern and Western virtual sites of newspapers, digital repositories and tourism websites drawing on the film industry’s narrative. Peculiarly, SM never acquired its own website. For any press materials and information relevant to the film’s making I consulted the extras from its official DVD (Blue-ray) release. Of help have been the welldeveloped Wikipedia entry on the film, which stores Eurasian reports on it and its industrial community, and the relevant Internet Movie Database (IMDB) entry, which links to various individual biographies of directors, producers and actors. The content of such sites is fluid and ephemeral, user (as co-producer) friendly, anonymous and, according to most people, inherently unreliable. But their academic use as information databases with links to various newspapers and online sites and businesses is still valid. When released into multiple socio-cultural sites, these digital narratives may transform into localised perceptions of identity or merge into official national memories. Web sphere analysis is a strategy including the analysis of the relations between producers and users of web materials, as potentiated and mediated by the structural and feature elements of web sites, hypertexts and the links between them (Schneider and Foot 2004, 2005). Hence, though methodologically I do not research through physical sites, I do consider contextual productions of meaning (Büscher and Urry 2009; Büscher et al. 2011). We deal with a multiple, rather than neat ‘double hermeneutics’ (Giddens 1987) of subalterns, artists, tourist business and authorities, to which one must add that propagated by the researcher. SM’s sites (the slum, the Taj Mahal, the brothel, the airport and Mumbai’s
main train station) acquire an excess of market meaning when used by various constituencies to bolster media business or urban tourism. As Part II endeavours to show, the sites provided the industry with iconic and aural referents from a repository of resources that is geographically located in the national periphery. The (however loose) social relationship between SM and these sites suggests that we consider causal connections in media-tourism growth as contingent linkages in global network systems (Schulman 2004:xxiiii) – a phenomenon conducive to the ways the local becomes inserted into the global to produce an often challenging – if at times conflicting – symbiosis (Robertson 1992; Urry 2014:189). Instead of considering ‘glocalisation’ as a phenomenon in which one particular locality interacts with globality in one particular interpretative contingent, it is suggested that many localities can partake in the same interpretative instance (Therborn 1995; Nederveen Pieterse 2009). The different responses that SM’s iconography induced in different sites can only be examined in relation to the economic, political and cultural horizons and possibilities of their respective regions.
