Rights of the Hindusthani Humans: Media and Its Publics in Hindi Films
摘要
This chapter deals not as much with the legal definition of human rights, as with certain “perception” of human rights, or broadly the right to justice that finds public expression. We crucially focus on the “public” here, the reason why human appears in plural in the title. The public is imagined at three levels: networked individuals and homes connected through media infrastructures like television, radio, newspaper, and the internet; people “visible” across media, part of what has come to be known as participatory culture; the crowd on the streets mobilized by the media. In fact, if the first level is taken to be territorialized across a geography of viewers and users, the second operates at the deterritorialized level of media representation, and the third is a reterritorialized manifestation of the viewers and participants where new geographies of mediatized mobilization emerge. The chapter explores some key human rights issues at the intersection of these three levels of mediatized publicness in relation to the inter-constitutive relationship between the reel and the real. Examination of both the collective form and individual embodiment of mediatized publicness in Hindi popular films from around the mid-1990s to early twenty-first century helps us engage with issues in democracy, citizenship, law, sovereignty, governance, public rights, and justice.