Visibility and Emerging News Publics: An Inquiry into Mediations of Land Struggles

The paper initially tracks the genealogy of news culture in Kerala from late 19th century onwards to locate the major axes along which mediated visibility of various contesting publics was structured in the journalistic field. It can be suggested that one important dimension which framed the contours of cultural logic of news production in Kerala was the social ideology of caste. Attempted here is a symptomatic reading of journalistic pieces from late 19th century and early part of the 20th century to drive home this point. The focus of the second part of the paper is to map the shifting structural contours of mediated visibility and the emergence of new news publics after the proliferation of TV news channels in the first decade of twenty first century in Kerala. This problem is looked at through the prism of visual mediations of DalitAdivasi land struggles in this period and their dynamics with larger socio-political field and its cultural logic.

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