Combined Book Launch: "A Mobile Popular" and "Unlimited"

Aswin Punathambekar, Sriram Mohan, and Rahul Mukherjee will present their books, "A Mobile Popular" and "Unlimited", with discussants Debashree Mukherjee and Hatim El-Hibri. The book talk will be followed by a reception at the Annenberg Forum from 6:30-7:30 p.m.

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This event is co-organized by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies (CIMS) and co-sponsored by the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) and the Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS) at the University of Pennsylvania.

About the Books

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Drawing on extensive fieldwork with content creators, platform executives, and digital activists across southern India, A Mobile Popular explores how popular culture and political expression have become deeply intertwined in India's rapidly evolving digital landscape. Set against the rise of Hindu nationalism, the expansion of platform capitalism, and the emergence of a global right-wing technoculture, this book reveals how memes, parodies, podcasts, and other digital artifacts generate new temporal experiences, publics, and infrastructures whose political valence cannot be contained within frames of freedom and capture. Rather than valorizing digital democracy or lamenting authoritarian capture, the book approaches digital India as a plural, affectively charged arena where mobile publics continually cohere, fragment, and morph into new collectivities.

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Around 2016, buoyed by affordable data plans of telecom companies, an aspirational neo-middle class of users in India accessed internet for the first time on their mobile phones. What kinds of digital infrastructures are emerging for content and money to move and reach such users? And how does their design impact access, exclusion, and surveillance as well as the horizon of social behaviors and expectations in “Digital India”? Unlimited traces the supply chains of content delivery networks enabling streaming video-on-demand services and informal ways of circulating "vernacular" music videos through memory cards. The book does not restrict itself to formal media infrastructures, but also researches online phishing and lending scam assemblages to understand how such scams perform critical boundary work to reveal the cracks in and workings of financial distribution networks.

About the Authors

Aswin Punathambekar is a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC). He has written and co-edited several books, including Planet Digital: A Global Media Cultures Reader, From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry, and Media Industry Studies (with Amanda Lotz and Daniel Herbert).

Sriram Mohan is an independent researcher of digital media platforms and cultures in South Asia, and co-editor of Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia.

Rahul Mukherjee is Associate Professor of TV & New Media in the Cinema & Media Studies department with a secondary appointment in the Department of English. He is the author of Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (DUP 2020) and co-edits the book series Power Currents: Asian Media in the World (University of Pittsburgh Press).

About the Discussants

Hatim El-Hibri is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies. His research and teaching interests focus on global and transnational media studies, visual culture studies, Lebanon and the Middle East, urban studies, television studies, and media theory and history. His first book, Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure (Duke University Press, 2021), was awarded the Jane Jacobs Book Award by the Urban Communication Foundation.

Debashree Mukherjee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), Columbia University, and co-director of the Center for Comparative Media. Her areas of specialization are early visual culture, media materialisms, postcolonial technology studies, feminist film historiography, production & labor, environmental humanities, and critical indenture studies. She is the author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020), which won an Honorable Mention from the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) and was listed for the Richard Wall and Krasna-Krauz book prizes.