In this episode, our host Mariela Morales Suárez discusses the book Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power (UNC Press, 2022) by Dr. Larisa Kingston Mann. You’ll hear about: Dr. Mann’s intellectual trajectory and how she became interested in the topic of copyright in Jamaican popular music; The concept of “rude citizenship” through the Jamaican music world; What it means to be “original” from the perspective of copyrights, language, and diverse modes of cultural production in Jamaica; Dr. Mann’s writing process as a form of translation from fieldwork notes, archival materials, and music contents into ethnography; How to make the classroom a meaningful pedagogical space by learning from marginal voices and practices; What constitutes the exilic spaces, namely, the reimagining of marginalized spaces as sites of agency and sovereignty through music and cultural production; The transnational networks of the local music production in Jamaica and global flows of sonic resistance, especially during COVID-19. About the book In this deep dive into the Jamaican music world filled with the voices of creators, producers, and consumers, Larisa Kingston Mann—DJ, media law expert, and ethnographer—identifies how a culture of collaboration lies at the heart of Jamaican creative practices and legal personhood. Because many working-class and poor people are cut off from the full benefits of citizenship on the basis of race, class, and geography, Jamaican music spaces are an important site of social commentary and political action in the face of the state’s limited reach and neglect of social services and infrastructure. Music makers organize performance and commerce in ways that defy, though not without danger, state ordinances and intellectual property law and provide poor Jamaicans avenues for self-expression and self-definition that are closed off to them in the wider society. In a world shaped by coloniality, how creators relate to copyright reveals how people will play outside, within, and through the limits of their marginalization. You can find this book on the University of North Carolina Press website. Author: Larisa Kingston Mann is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production at Temple University (PA, USA). Host: Mariela Morales Suárez is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania where she specializes in transnational media flows, technological appropriations, diasporic identity formation, and popular culture. Editor & Producer: Jing Wang. She is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this inaugural episode, our host Aswin Punathambekar speaks with Samhita Sunya, the author of the book Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay (U California Press, 2022). In this episode you’ll hear about: Dr. Sunya’s intellectual trajectory in studying South Asian cinema from Houston to Bangalore, Bombay, and beyond; How the periodization of the “long” 1960s – bookended by the 1955 Bandung Afro-Asian Conference and the 1975 Indian Emergency – comes into view through the author’s interdisciplinary approach; How Dr. Sunya works her way through and out of a popular binary misunderstanding of Indian cinema - a familiar opposition between an auteurist world cinema and song-and-dance driven popular cinema; Why the author chooses what would be considered oddball or off-beat media artifacts, what kinds of sources she gathers in relation to these materials, and where she looks for them in creative ways; Reflection upon the pedagogy of world cinema in the classroom; A discussion of the notion of “excess” and how it is weaved into the three central themes – love, desire, and gender – that emerge throughout the book; How Dr. Sunya’s cross-industry and trans-regional perspective counter the spatial biases that are deeply ingrained into the disciplinary boundaries; A reflection on the nature of academic work through the lens of “love” on topics like world cinema and South Asia. About the Book By the 1960s, Hindi-language films from Bombay were in high demand not only for domestic and diasporic audiences but also for sizable non-diasporic audiences across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean world. Often confounding critics who painted the song-dance films as noisy and nonsensical. if not dangerously seductive and utterly vulgar, Bombay films attracted fervent worldwide viewers precisely for their elements of romance, music, and spectacle. In this richly documented history of Hindi cinema during the long 1960s, Samhita Sunya historicizes the emergence of world cinema as a category of cinematic diplomacy that formed in the crucible of the Cold War. Interwoven with this history is an account of the prolific transnational circuits of popular Hindi films alongside the efflorescence of European art cinema and Cold War–era forays of Hollywood abroad. By following archival leads and threads of argumentation within commercial Hindi films that seem to be odd cases—flops, remakes, low-budget comedies, and prestige productions—this book offers a novel map for excavating the historical and ethical stakes of world cinema and world-making via Bombay. You can find the open access version of Dr. Sunya’s book through Luminosoa.org at the University of California Press website. Author Bio: Samhita Sunya is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Virginia. Host Bio: Aswin Punathambekar is a Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Editor & Producer Bio: Jing Wang. She is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Original Background Music by Mengyang Zoe Zhao. Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices