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How do young women understand and experience intimacy in the age of social media, and are their experiences qualitatively different after the millennial turn and the rapid expansion of digital technologies? What impact do these digital experiences have on how millennial subjects experience, understand, and negotiate social relations in globalising Asia? Here are some preliminary findings from a multi-sited ongoing research project which looks at college-going women in Bangalore, Singapore, Hong Kong and Guangzhou to understand how their lives in these aspiring "smart" cities are being shaped by the phenomenal growth of digital technology use in Asia in the past ten years. Our findings thus far suggest that social institutions such as family and marriage are being redefined through digital mediation, a process that includes boundary-drawing, creating zones of intimacy, and the reconfiguration of relationships in the digital domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tejaswini Niranjana is one of the important Indian cultural theorists. In Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious, she examines the emergence of Hindustani classical music in Mumbai, bringing together the notion of sociality and subjectivity to throw light on an important aspect of how publics are formed in the non-western metropolis. The roundtable joined by Professor Niranjana and the other five scholars touches upon issues such as the metropolitan unconscious, musicophilia, and migratory cultures, while also discussing the question of teacher-student relationship, the importance of inter-referencing and the possibility of creating new spaces of discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like the rest of the world, Asians have been living through extraordinary times in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic is still raging in many parts of the region, disrupting entire economies, families, public as well as private life, and schooling. The inter-Asia cultural studies project fundamentally depended on actual connections between scholars and activists across the region, made possible by easier boundary-crossings under globalisation. In the new contactless world, our knowledge projects have to be re-imagined, our methodologies remade. While we are not yet on the path to doing that, this piece offers some experiential reflections about the pandemic world across Asian time-zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of deewaanapan or madness (as in being crazy about something) is deployed in this essay to make sense of musicophiliac behaviour in twentieth century Mumbai. I argue that new insights into the formation of 'publics' in the non-western metropolis can be gained through a focus on phenomena that embody 'social subjectivity'. A major phenomenon of this kind is the devotion to Hindustani or North Indian classical music which spread through Mumbai starting from the late nineteenth century. The affective response of musicophiliacs is forged not in solitude but in a space of sociality. This idea also encompasses the actual performance of the khayal genre which became prominent in the twentieth century. The khayal represented a sense of intimacy and interiority which also needs to be understood as 'social' and 'public'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hindustani art music in the metropolis of Bombay/Mumbai played a significant role in the fashioning of both selves and public spaces from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. With the fall of Awadh in northern India in 1857 and the dispersal of the court that had inherited Hindustani music from the Mughal empire, the singers, instrumentalists and dancers began to migrate in search of new patrons. Many of them found a foothold in Bombay, which came to occupy a central position in assembling the new structures and spaces of performance, pedagogy, recording and consumption of Hindustani music. I suggest that the passion for Hindustani music was strongly linked to the linguistic diversity of Bombay, and that it was thelingua musicawhich aided the development of the public domain and its cultural vernacular in the twentieth century. Through their musicophilia, the city’s inhabitants engaged in fashioning a subjectivity that emerged through that which they shared. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper gives an overview of the situation of the Indian higher education classroom post-1835 with a special focus on the use of English. It analyses the social and intellectual consequences of the ‘lack of English’, and through engagement with two case studies involving Kannada and Hindi reflects on the problems surrounding higher education resources in Indian languages. The paper concludes by offering a roadmap for a much-needed intervention in the sector, an intervention that—by addressing the Indian-language issue—could well transform the space of higher education itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the criticism of feminism across Asia. It mentions the conferences related to cultural studies where feminist panel discussions were held. Feminism is stated to be one of the most volatile domains in Asia. The article presents the views on feminist scholars on the same issue and focuses on culture in gender theory in India. It further discusses the Pink Chaddi Campaign (PCC).

This essay examines a moment of institutionalization in cultural studies, and argues that questions of gender have a significant place in this interdisciplinary domain. The issue is discussed in a pedagogic context that has almost normalized feminism, seeing its political contributions as belonging to the past. The essay argues that the conceptual conjuncture of culture and gender which has been central to feminist theorizing in India needs to be rethought. This conjuncture arose from thinking about culture in the framework of nationalism and the anti-colonial struggle, and the alignment of women with national culture. I discuss briefly the trajectory of how we have gone about investigating the culture-gender conjuncture, present a reformulation of what I think we're up against, and introduce some new research projects which are trying to take this on board. The focus in these projects is on the question of translation, and how the issue of 'regional' languages poses a challenge to prevalent ideas in the women's movement and in feminist teaching. The larger proposition is that we need to formulate curricula based on new kinds of research if we are to take feminism into the cultural studies classroom of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper marks significant moments in the trajectory of cultural studies in Asia in relation to feminism. It begins by contrasting the relationship of feminism and cultural studies in Western contexts such as Britain, where feminism disrupted a prior field, to feminism's foundational relationship to cultural studies in many Asian contexts, including India. The paper goes on to speculate on the nature of the unique link between culture, the nation and women in Asian historical contexts, which has made for a selective naming of feminism in particular as Western and inauthentic, with consequences for the already difficult relationship between women and modernity. Such shared problematics across countries with different histories and political trajectories extend to questions of translation and contemporary shifts from prior conceptions of feminist politics. The last part of the paper looks at the confluence of cultural studies and women's studies in India, contrasting the rich legacies of women's studies for cultural studies with more recent pedagogical challenges to feminism in the cultural studies classroom. At issue in the paper as whole, therefore, is the debt that cultural studies owes to feminism in non-Western contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces several articles on feminism published in the 'Inter-Asia Cultural Studies' journal. Address of feminism in the age of globalization; Features of women's movement; Notions of citizenship and statehood.

Focuses on feminism in Asia. Global history of modernity; International solidarity of feminism in nineteenth century; Investigation of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies on feminist in Asia.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses reports within the issue on topics including the social and intellectual consequences of the virtual disappearance of Cantonese as a medium of instruction in Hong Kong, China, abolishing English from primary education in West Bengal, India, and how international reform in China's universities is leading to a form of Englicization.

Discusses the impact of the depiction of a lesbian relationship in the motion picture 'Fire,' directed by Canada-born Deepa Mehta. Dominant focus on Shiv Sena attacks; How the reduction of woman to her body is accompanied by the equating of patriarchy with Indian culture and tradition; Mehta's argument that the film is about loneliness, not lesbianism.

Examines the possibility of creating a critical space for ongoing conversations between intellectuals in different third-world locations. Emphasis on the need for such conversations in contemporary historical-political context; Possibilities of different kinds of solidarities.