Research Online at MacEwan :: Browsing by Author "Raj, Sony Jalarajan"

Browsing by Author "Raj, Sony Jalarajan"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 56

American frontier myth and black humour: a study of Marsha Norman’s The Holdup
(2017) Jose, Soumya; Raj, Sony Jalarajan
American frontier myth, which can aptly be termed as a relic of the past is intricately woven into the plot of Marsha Norman’s play, The Holdup. This paper attempts to unravel how the playwright has employed black humour to stage the metamorphosis of a naïve teenager to an adult with broader world view. Besides, the paper examines the technique of meta-narration used by the playwright to narrate the events that had happened offstage.
Between the borders of life and art: Roman Polanski’s transgressive negotiations
(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
Roman Polanski’s films are noted for their subversive psychological style that explores themes of sexuality, desire, alienation, and violence. His narratives often reflect a dark sense of humour through which the director perceives the absurdity of the human condition in relation to his own cultural dislocations and artistic eccentricity. This article investigates how different connotations of transgression play a major role in defining Roman Polanski as a filmmaker. It specifically explores how the polysemy of transgression structures Polanski as an artist whose real and cinematic negotiations are often intertwined. Through the constant subversion of moral, cultural, and social discourses, his visual style and narrative ideology maintain a notorious affinity that disturbs the notion of reality and manipulates it with new narrative texts. It is the idea of transgression that changes the way Polanski’s auteur status is perceived, appreciated, and rejected for his actions and creations in the past and their repercussions in the present. Polanski’s works use historical, social, and personal realities to renegotiate his transgressive image in real life by incorporating his contested victim status and persecuted selfhood in narratives that manipulate both the past and present.
Bodies that need queering: the queer hetero-topias in Malayalam cinema
(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
This edited volume offers a comprehensive understanding of the queer space in tandem with the transforming socio-cultural-political relationships in a country that exhibits diversified shades of ideologies and history – that is, India. The featured essays deal with the presence of queerness in visual media, particularly in films and the digital arena, from multilingual and multicultural perspectives, thus creating an exhaustive discourse encompassing argument and analysis. This book aims to depict the plurality and complexity of the Indian scenario, fostering mass acceptance of queerness, a rare scholastic endeavour.
Bollywood self-fashioning: Indian popular culture and representations of girlhood in 1970s Indian cinema
(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
This article investigates how Bollywood cinema represented girlhood experiences in India in the early 1970s. It argues that the films during this time focused on representing girls who displayed a variety of new fashion styles and attitudes, some of which were borrowed from western cultures. This was a sign that there was a new way of representing girls which broke with the submissive, dull and melancholic sari-wearing Indian female stereotype entrapped within domestic settings. The immediate result of this was the emergence of new style leaders and popular icons in Indian popular cinema. This study uses Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning and Guy Mankowski’s idea of self-design to examine how Indian girlhood was renegotiated in the 1970s as an individual-centric idea with more agency and power. Here, self-fashioning refers to the way girls adopt new elements of fashion, styles and attitudes to distinguish their identity from earlier archetypal modes of representation in film and culture. It specifically analyses the emergence of Jaya Bhaduri in Guddi (1971) and Dimple Kapadia in Bobby (1973) as case studies to understand the transformation of girlhood representations in early 1970s Bollywood that opened a new space for girls to redefine their selfhood through the assimilation of consumerism, western culture and fashion styles.
Bollywood, mobility and partition politics: representation of displaced Muslims in films on Indo-Pak partition
(2024) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Sreekumar, Rohini; Trandafoiu, Ruxandra
The ultimate horror of history is not the persistent fear that it is bound to repeat itself but the very unfathomable nature of the temporal and spatial coordinates that constitute its existence as an incomprehensible form of knowledge. The discontinuous and disrupted notion of history is a self-negation of certainty and any opposite activity to place the reality of events in the historical timeline has farreaching consequences. Such a discourse of history is an extension of the violence perpetuated through the fragmented memories of our collective consciousness. India, entwining the webs of its complex and traumatic past, exemplifies this perception of history, not just the narrativization of the past embellished by the ambience of nostalgia but a vortex of uncertainty through which the present finds its meaning. The historical significance of ‘Indianness’ perplexed in the literary and cinematic forms is a product of the ‘historical violence’ that literally erupted from the day when India as a nation came into existence, and is subliminally rerepresented through the spectacles of artistic imaginations. The event known as the Indo-Pak Partition or the independence of India/Pakistan was a ‘seismic political transformation’ conjoining the regional identities into the larger geographical narrative of cinema which mutated the linguistic and cultural elements along the way of emerging migratory patterns (Vasudevan 2010). The epistemological, artistical, ethical, cultural, and political modes of ‘being’ stuck in between the binary border politics emanating from the Partition are precisely historical and this is the vantage point where one must start scrutinizing the inveterate discourses of India.
Can data visualization storytelling in energy communication campaigns ingrain farmers’ intentions to use agrivoltaic system? Evidence from global south
(2025) Raza, Syed Hassan; Ogadimma, Emenyeonu C.; Abdullah, Zulhamri; Khan, Shumaila; Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Jamil, Sadia; Malik, Aqdas; Alkhowaiter, Mohammed; Khan, Sajid Ullah
Purpose Innovative technologies pave the way to address alarming global climate issues. Among these technologies is the expansion of renewable and clean energy in farming, which aims to meet the global cheap energy demand and, at the same time, replace fossil fuels. In pursuant to this, agrivoltaic technology is an innovation that provides sustainable and low-cost production solutions to diminish the adversities associated with climate change and global warming. However, farmers from developing nations remain unacquainted or unenthusiastic about adopting such sustainable technologies. Therefore, in response to these key challenges related to climate change, this study aims to provide the utility of communication resources to inspire climate-friendly behaviors among farmers. Design/methodology/approach This study used a cross-sectional field survey method for data collection from 992 farmers. Findings The results verified that using data visualization storytelling in communication campaigns could significantly enhance farmers’ public understanding of adopting renewable technologies. Research limitations/implications Theoretically, results highlighted the importance of communication strategies in a downward spiral of ongoing challenges of optimal climate protection, counteracting rebound effects and reducing carbon emissions. Practical implications The novel contribution of this research by examining the data visualization storytelling in climate and energy communication campaigns paved the way for social marketers to develop a straightforward and user-friendly platform for implementing innovative renewable technologies. Originality/value This research underpinned a novel approach that remains understudied to understand how data visualization storytelling supports renewable technology adoption. Furthermore, it addressed the timely call for research on how data visualization storytelling can assist in achieving UNSD goals 12 and 13 by promoting renewable technologies among the farmers from the neglected area of the Global South.
Colonial rebels in Indian cinema: narratives, ideology and popular culture
(2014) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Sreekumar, Rohini
Historical films are a widely discussed genre of visual narration as it poses the challenge of a reliable balance between history, myth and truth. Indian history and independence have been one of those themes that have been adapted into filmic narration, not only as a national oration, but from an international lens. Unlike any other historical moment, Indian Independence is the most celebrated and recurring themes of historical movies and still continuous to be a vibrant subject for Indian film makers. Dealing with the narration of a nation, often these films are looked at with a skeptical attitude, mostly because of its colonizer’s view of the colonized. This article addresses Bhabha’s (1994) interstitial perspective and mimicry of ambivalence positing that these films neither dominate nor propagate certain colonial ideologies, nor does it make the colonizer as a virtuous subject, but rather create an ambivalent identity, which is neither colonizer nor colonized, but a hybrid of it. Apart from some English productions on Indian colonial rule and independence, some Indian films are also taken as a case study to elucidate the concept of hybridity in cultural meaning. When the ‘object’ of history or the colonized reacts with their perception, it creates an ambivalence that is far different from the colonizer’s perception.
The commercial misrepresentation of environmental issues: Comparing environmental media coverage in the first world and developing nations
(2011) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Sreekumar, Rohini
Over the past three decades the steady encroachment of business interests into the international media environments and the increasing monopolization of media ownership resulted in the escalation of commercial imperatives in media production which directly paved to a shifting representation of environmental issues. This article offers a critical appraisal of the contemporary global commercial media and its coverage of environmental issues. Influenced by the market values and the ongoing monopolization of media ownership, business interests played a key role, and resulted in a drastic change in the representation of environmental issues by the global media. Concomitant with these developments is a shift in emphasis within news and current affairs media which become distorted by the twin pressures of commercialization and market competition, giving way to an emphasis on entertainment values at the expense of reasoned and informed coverage. However, some third world media practitioners offer environmental news coverage that is informed by sustainable forms of developmentalism, while recognizing environmental issues as being both local and global phenomena. Nowadays environmental movements are purposely confined by the media as geographical and cultural identity. It miserably fails to correlate, equate, and investigate it beyond the boundaries of a nation state or personalized perspectives. This research paper analyses the practice of environmental communication by media, where news is highly influenced, and sometimes biased by policy decision, economic and financial causes, making it limited to a particular geographical and cultural realm. This essay addresses environmental communication first as a global practice transformed by commercialism, before examining more salient and creditable forms of environmental journalism utilized in developing nations that are informed by the 'glocal' nature of these issues. This research paper is based on qualitative textual analysis, interpretation and literature review on news published by the main stream media.
Covenant cog or functional fourth estate: a survey of Malaysian journalists’ attitudes towards their profession
(2012) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Sreekumar, Rohini
In Malaysia, the idealistic notion of the news media as 'watchdog' is largely redundant due to the external and institutional realities associated with its functioning in a heavily regulated, monitored and controlled media system. There has been little analysis of Malaysian journalists' perceptions of their profession. Operating within an authoritarian mediascape, Malaysian journalists have to surrender their journalistic values and principles of practice thereby pervading a culture of self-censorship. This study draws from a survey of Malaysian journalists between January 2010 and January 2011 and reveals about a fourth estate struggling to assert itself within the complex and flawed processes of Malaysian democracy. The study addresses the professional aspirations, restrictions, attitudes, and motivations of Malaysian journalists and utilizes Bourdieu's theories of field and habitus to highlight the relative levels of independence, professionalism experienced by journalists within the structured social spaces of Malaysian newsrooms.
Cultural monsters in Indian cinema: the politics of adaptation, transformation and disfigurement
(2022) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
In India, a popular trope is adapting cultural myths and religious iconographies into visceral images of the monster in literary and visual representations. Cinematic representations of the Indian monster are modelled on existing folklore narratives and religious tales where the idea of the monster emerges from cultural imagination and superstitions of the land. Since it rationalizes several underlying archetypes in which gods are worshipped in their monstrous identities and disposition, the trope of the monster is used in cinema to indicate the transformation from an ordinary human figure to a monstrous human Other. This paper examines cinematic adaptations of monster figures in Malayalam cinema, the South Indian film industry of Kerala. The cultural practice of religious rituals that worship monstrous gods is part of the collective imagination of the land of Kerala through which films represent fearsome images of transformed humans. This article argues that cultural monsters are human subjects that take inspiration from mythical monster stories to perform in a terrifying way. Their monstrous disposition is a persona that is both a powerful revelation of repressed desires and a manifestation of the resistance against certain cultural fears associated with them. The analysis of several Malayalam films, such as Kaliyattam (1997) Manichithrathazhu (1993) and Ananthabhadram (2005), reveals how film performance adapts mythological narrative elements to create new cultural intertexts of human monsters that are psychotically nuanced and cinematically excessive.
Dark days of Indian democracy: a historical study on the portrayal, censorship, and representation of ‘Indian emergency’ in Malayalam cinema
(2024) Raj, Sony Jalarajan
India, the biggest democracy in the world, once experienced the worst oppression in its history when the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency, on 25 June 1975. Civil liberties and personal freedom were curbed, using the constitutional powers under Article 352 of the Indian Constitution. Creativity faced the biggest casualty during the Emergency until it was withdrawn on 21 March 1977. The Southern state of Kerala being the most politically conscious and creatively corrective population, its own cinema in the Malayalam language was ineffective in its immediate response to the event. However, traces of resistance can be found in this crisis, and they are often demonstrated in tactical ways to escape the omnipotence of a censorship system. This article argues that Malayalam cinema categorically avoided representing the historical authenticity of the Emergency, on the contrary, it adopted a strategic disavowal to depoliticize it by manipulating narratives that do not identify themselves as a constructive form of resistance. Such a discourse is a new form of apolitical resistance that continues to be a characteristic of modern states sustained by political order and cultural hegemony. The spatial and temporal dimensionality of this recalcitrance was reflected in the Emergency cinema of Malayalam as ideological, personalized, and allegorical texts of narrative modes. This paper historically explores these modes as well as the role, responsibility, and status of Malayalam cinema during the political crisis of the Emergency.
Diaspora dilemmas and deadlocks: the Indian immigration flux and struggled survival in Canada
(2024) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Rajan, S. Irudaya
The diverse and complex experiences of the Indian diaspora in Canada are defined by a range of social, political, and cultural parameters. This chapter examines how the recent dramatic increase in the rate of Indian immigration to Canada has intensified challenges related to identity crises, acculturation, discrimination, and racism. It argues that the concept of Indianness unites culturally distinct sub-groups to shape the diasporic community’s existence. Pro-immigration policies often serve political agendas, influenced by Eurocentric biases. The reality of Indian life in Canada restructures transnational Indianness and diasporic existence, and the discourse of immigration plays a significant role in the construction of popular beliefs, which are often misconceptions based on falsehood.
Disruptive desires and creative transgressions in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe
(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Hodge, Matthew; Barkman, Adam; Sanna, Antonio
Julie Taymor’s career as a stage director, filmmaker, and costume designer has demonstrated the many possibilities of artistic adaptations that visualize characters, situations, emotions, and reality as a whole in new ways. Her works deconstruct classic texts and creative worlds to bring an altered visual experience through which she challenges the relationship between creation, adaptation, and perception. Taymor’s investigations seek to extract what an artistic work contains and imagine how it can be presented using different mediums. Whether it is adapting dramas for the stage, directing films, or staging operas, she finds her own versions by incorporating elements and art forms that reinvent a fresh way of telling a story.
Dissent and displacement of subalternity in Malayalam cinema: a cultural analysis of Papilio Buddha by Jayan K. Cherian
(2016) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Gopinath, Swapna; Sreekumar, Rohini
The theme of subalternity with its inherent ramifications is yet to find favour among film makers in India. Progressive film makers of the 1960s attempted to address the theme of subaltern and dared to give the subaltern a voice, but they remained singular attempts. Through a case study on a Malayalam film (a regional film industry from the state of Kerala in India) Papilio Buddha this article tries to analyze the representation of Dalit community in Indian cinema. Though Malayalam film industry has tried to address the concern of Dalits, they have been stereotyped in many ways and reduced to being sidekicks to villains or unskilled labourers having no identity. They remained as instruments to idolize the hero, to act as a contrast to the elite protagonist or as the poor helpless victims who offer the protagonist an opportunity to display his heroism. Papilio Buddha grabbed media attention when it was denied clearance by the censor board as it explores the territory of Dalit consciousness by focusing the lens on the land strike by the Dalit communities and creating a counter narrative to the hitherto idealized images created by the state.
Dynamics of ‘terror reporting’ Indian media and the changing perspective on terrorism
(2014) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Sreekumar, Rohini
Today, no country is left untouched by the bitter hands of terrorism, where media plays a very critical role as an informer, forecaster, and at the worst a mediator. India is one of those SAARC countries which are frequently being threatened with terrorist activities. Even though being one of the largest media scenes, Indian media never indulged in going deep into the issues of terrorism. In the competitive run for visual treat, media lose the opportunity to elucidate and investigate the terrorist attacks which is frequenting in the Indian soil. Media being the indispensable part of terrorist and anti-terrorist activities in India, this paper examines what need to be the role, responsibilities, and the nature of treating an issue like terrorist attacks.
Forbidden spectacles of a bygone era: an analysis of Malayalam cinema’s soft-porn noon-show culture
(2024) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
The cultural paradigms of the soft-porn era in Malayalam cinema had an emancipatory quality where the sensationalized body of the ‘bombshell’ starlets captivated the voyeuristic perceptions of regional spectators.* The celebration of these films by a suburban audience constructed a new public space for the realization of carnal desires and taboo fantasies. This article investigates how the soft-porn noon-shows contributed to a unique cultural experience of film-viewing in Kerala in the late 1990s that challenged the cultural elitism associated with regional cinema. It investigates the role of the audience in defining the historical significance of the noon-show theatres, together with their origin, popularity and fall in the larger narrative of the evolutionary metamorphosis of Malayalam cinema. The softcore phenomenon was an organic subversion of the hegemonic ideology of cinema, which has been used by upper-class cultural powers to maintain their moral presuppositions.
From closeness to openness: repositioning of the Indian kitchen and restructuring of the gender system
(2022) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
The concept of the kitchen is an integral part of household interiors that defines a space of interactivity essential to the organic existence of individuals in society. The traditional Indian kitchen is a closed space separated from the living room and other open spaces where members interact regularly. It is conventionally established as a gendered space restricted for women members to partake in activities of food production, serving, and cleaning. The modern idea of the kitchen, especially seen in Western architecture, is articulated through the notion of ‘openness’ which strictly contradicts the ‘closeness’ of the Indian kitchen. This paper examines how the transformation from an Indian spice kitchen (separated structuring of the kitchen in a way to contain the smell of spices from spreading to other parts of the house) to a modern open kitchen redefines the existing gender coordinates of the land. It uses two critically acclaimed Malayalam films—from the south Indian cinema of Kerala— namely Salt N’ Pepper (2011) and The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) to analyze and differentiate the visual representations of the open and closed kitchens in India. It argues that a restructured modern kitchen challenges the traditional gendered kitchen and nourishes a participatory culture that demands open interaction from all participants.
From dissemination to response: in search of new strategies for broadcast media in terms of cyclone warnings for Bangladesh
(2010) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Ullah, Mohammad Sahid; Akhter, Rawshon
Media and communications technologies play a significant role in disaster management procedures in regards to the mobilization of resources in emergency situations. While the dissemination of warning messages relayed via broadcast technologies have had some positive outcomes in terms of reducing casualties in emergency situations in Bangladesh, there remain some specific problems in regards to the manner in which these messages are distributed within this developing nation. These problems are addressed within this paper. Examining the existing cyclonic warning dissemination system and the manner in which warning information is distributed and received, this study addresses citizen responses to mediated warning messages in the vulnerable coastal regions of Bangladesh. The results indicate that attitudes towards mediated warnings held by Bangladeshi citizens in these environs differ depending upon their access to media, type of dwelling and differing levels of literacy. This study also provides recommendations for media professionals and policymakers in regards to disseminating more effective warnings to the inhabitants of Bangladesh's cyclone-prone coastal belt.
Gender construct as a narrative and text: the female protagonist in new-generation Malayalam cinema
(2015) Gopinath, Swapna; Raj, Sony Jalarajan
The film industry in Kerala (popularly known as ‘Mollywood’ in the mediasphere) is an obvious example of the changing face of the regional film industries in India in accordance with the varying socio-cultural values and demands of the audience. These films claim a multifaceted ‘newness’ in their narration, ranging from the themes explored to their techniques of production and narration. This article seeks to analyze whether this ‘newness’ is contemplated in the conceptualization of female characters within films. We conclude that although women are conceptualized as part of a globalized culture in which ‘she’ has an identity, they are nevertheless subject to the familiar gender hierarchy and marginalized identity.
Generational dissension in August Wilson’s Fences
(2014) Jose, Soumya; Raj, Sony Jalarajan
August Wilson, the celebrated author of the Pittsburgh Cycle, has always opposed the assimilation of African Americans into the mainstream American society. Wilson has used his plays as a medium to uphold the African American culture. This article explores his play, Fences, and it unwinds how he employs the father-son conflicts as a strategy to prevent the assimilation of a young black man into the mainstream American society. The play revolves around a father-son conflict which springs from the son’s desire to play football in whites’ team. David Marriot in the book, On Black Men posits on the problematic relationship between fathers and their sons: “[. . .] the mark that the black father leaves,” is “ a mark that is both ineffaceable and irremediable." Marriot observes further: “Typed, in the wider culture as the cause of, and cure for, black men’s ‘failure,’ his father’s apparently lost and untellable, life is the story that the son must find and narrate if he is to begin to understand how, and why, blackness has come to represent an inheritable fault."

Browsing by Author "Raj, Sony Jalarajan"

Results Per Page

Sort Options