'Truth on our lips, India in our hearts': Television news, affective publics, and the production of publicity in Delh

My dissertation addresses the concept of publicity as it is produced through 24/7 Hindi television news channels and the new modes of public and political action that it makes possible in Delhi, India. Since 2000, news channels have become highly visible forms of television culture in the new media ecologies of urban India. As Hindi journalists from small towns enter the news industry they bring narrative and performative genres that are products of local cultures of circulation in the Hindi heartland into national news culture. Specifically, journalists draw on Hindi's cinematic and popular literary genealogies to narrate and present the news. In doing so, they enable the entry of new registers of Hindi and the subjectivities these index to transform the nature of national news culture. The spectacular and sensational address constituted by Hindi news publically performs the politics of language, caste, class, and gender on a national scale with various effects. This publicity is given further circulatory force through the intersection of news with digital media forms such as blogs and social networking sites. I explore the emergence of these new modes of politics and public sociality through the ethnography of the production and circulation of Hindi television news. Through field research in television newsrooms, with journalists and their writings, and by following news stories in the localities where they 'break', the dissertation examines a) the site-specific materiality of television that is nonetheless a global technology of mass communication and b) the material effects of news as it circulates as a performative, affective force in public and political culture.;The dissertation argues that we see television news as a form of mediation that is both constitutive of, and produced by, the discursive and material forms of public culture through which democratic engagement is cultivated. In chapter 1, I lay out the political economy within which Hindi television news has come to national visibility. In chapters 2and 3, I show how television news' address draws on the languages of popular genres - cinema, myth, pulp and detective fiction, and soap opera -- by which journalists reinvent the news form by cultivating new expectations of what news as a public form is, how it circulates, and generates public effects. Through the sensation and spectacle that this address engenders, journalists anchor the viewer as a witness to others' public claims for visibility, assertion, or acknowledgment. These claims might be fleeting and transitory and leave their traces in the public realm, as in the case of crime news stories of domestic violence, traces that may or may not be activated as the grounds for political action or critique.;Not all mediated and publicized claims are necessarily peaceful, inclusive, or democratic; whether and how publics or political communities emerge through the circulation of particular news stories and the affects they generate depends as much on the local conditions of possibility for uptake as on what is publicized. In chapter 4, I discuss the emergence of a political campaign against the state in a Muslim-majority neighborhood after police shot dead two young boys. Here, I show how a political community came to be constituted as a counterpublic to the mainstream media publics on Islamic terrorism by tracking alternative narratives of a breaking news story within the neighborhood and how it was publicized. This chapter shows how the work of televised publicity might both expand the possibilities for democratic and inclusive action and voices or limit and even suppress them.;Chapter 5 explores the fallout of particular stories in the public realm in which the playful intertextuality that characterizes much of Indian public culture can violate or transgress viewers' expectations and presuppositions while simultaneously drawing them in as participants in the spectacle of a media event. Following the news coverage of a marriage reality show I show how the cross-fertilization of popular genres of kinship and marriage in depicting female sexuality, the family, and marriage are experienced as a kind of genrebending by viewers and commentators. This genre-bending can at times appear as the uncanny on television, through which seemingly stable norms of marriage, sexuality, and cohabitation are threatened.;As an ethnography of publicity as the affective force of television news, the dissertation moves away from the conventional sites of 'production' and 'reception' or 'consumption' of mass media, focusing on circulation and mediation as central to the performative work of news, and media forms more generally. The dissertation also seeks to expand the notion of 'public culture' to include genres like television news as the grounds for subjectivity and public action, by tracking how publicity and its effects and affects emerge from the circulation of recognizable media artifacts, while also generating new trajectories of action or leaving unexpected traces in their wake.