| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Dayan and Katz (1992) powerfully demonstrated how electronic media, particularly television, produce ‘instant histories’ that command the attention of massive audiences all over the world. They argued that in the shared experience of watching events, such as the Olympics and the World Trade Center tragedy, these events may become a part of the audiences’ collective memory, heritage, tradition, and identity.
Aside from these theoretical concepts linking memory and identity, some scholars have conducted empirical studies to explore the connections between the media, memory, and identity. Marie Gillespie’s (1995) study, for example, examines how imported films from India act as a form of collective memory of a “mythic homeland” (Ang, 1993, p. 5) for first-generation south Asian immigrants in England. These films also allow the immigrants to convey a sense of their past in India to their children. Similarly, Keya Ganguly (2001) looked at how nostalgia, in the form of active investments in a bygone era of popular music, replaying of old Hindi films on videotape, or the reinvention of presumed ideals of the past, provides a crucial discursive terrain for reconsolidating ideals of selfhood for displaced south Asian communities in New Jersey. In a point of departure from Gillespie and Ganguly, Purnima Mankekar (1999) went back to her city of birth—New Delhi—to learn how women negotiate their postcolonial national identity through viewing popular narratives.
The link between the creation of national identity, memory, and the media has also been explored by other scholars such as Eric Ma (1998, 1999, 2001) and Emily West (2002) in Hong Kong and Canada, respectively. Ma’s earlier studies (1998, 1999) examine the ways in which popular media shaped collective memories and refigured popular imagination of membership in the Chinese nation-state. His latest work on memory, identity,