"The book’s narrative structure intentionally uses minimal theoretical academic abstractions. Instead, it adopts a pragmatic approach – journalistic to an extent – to speculate what works best for journalists in Asia given the political constraints and resource limitations that many are compel...led to work under, and which journalists in richer developed countries would take for granted. As the title of the book implies, speculative discussions, commentaries and interviews with journalists aim to rediscover “development journalism” as a viable model for working out the recognisable benchmarks of best practice in the Asian context. Case studies and interviews were mainly conducted with English language newspapers – excluding the local language community radio, which is arguably the most influential medium in developing societies – for no other reason than language accessibility." (Prologue, p. xv)
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"Welcome to the world of melodrama—and to the melodramas of the world. This book introduces nearly one hundred cinematic masterpieces from various periods and different cultural contexts—ranging from early Hollywood to emergent and popular Bollywood, from Latin American and New German Cinema to ...contemporary Nollywood, from classic melodrama and commercial blockbusters to arthouse film and meta-melodrama, while also encompassing a number of other local forms and styles in their hybrid or revisionist varieties. Our collection features discussions of seemingly timeless stories of love and loss, demonstrating the possibility and power of melodramatic plots to portray the overcoming of differences and antagonisms. Yet it also reveals how the melodramatic code is time and again used for asserting political claims and articulating critique—and hence for (re)producing powerful dichotomies of good vs. evil, innocence vs. corruption, virtue vs. vice. Melodrama performs and rehearses moral conflict and emotional crisis management on a broad scale, involving intimate relationships and familial relations, on the one hand, and global constellations of oppression, violence, war, and regime changes, on the other. Thus, like no other genre, melodrama indeed makes the political personal and the personal political." (Introduction, p.13)
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