Sustainability as Representation (Panel 2)

Critical Studies in Television ConferenceBlythe Stevenson Worthy (The University of Sydney)Sustainable Pedagogy in Mira Nair’s TelevisionDespite the process of deregulation and privatization of national broadcasting rights and intensification of global digital communicative technologies, many television theorists persist in arguing that television is still overwhelmingly defined via national lines (Geraghty, 2024). For these theorists, television has always played a crucial role in publicising “a nation’s private life” (Ellis, 1995, 5) and remains an influential cultural ambassador. The pedagogical politics offered by television as correctives to misconceptions of a country’s citizens have long sustained the work of Indian practitioner Mira Nair. While her more famous feature films also revel in this “cross-cultural social acumen” (Muir, 2006, 9), it is Nair’s overlooked television work that more comprehensively applies the role of television for educational purposes to a transnational setting. Highlighting quotidian Indian life to develop criticisms of the structural roots of postcolonial crises and hegemonic discourses of white supremacy in international feminism, Nair’s television is made in English, or in Hindi with English dubbing and subtitles for a foreign audience. Nair’s early television, including teledocs India Cabaret (1985) and Children of a Desired Sex (1987) investigate the lives of go-go dancers deemed as untouchable in public Indian society, and women who are forced to abort their female foetuses. Providing a stark vision of the private life of Indian women for US television networks, Nair’s teledocs confirm what Chandra Mohanty has determined as the internationalisation of the gendered division of labour (Mohanty, 1988, 76). The Indian subjects of these works are shown by Nair to exist so deeply in the unsustainable “pores of capitalism” that they are inaccessible via the capitalist dynamics that normally allow for channels of cross-cultural communication (Spivak, 2006, 186). In Nair’s 1998 telefilm My Own Country (Showtime Networks), for example, an Indian emigree and infectious disease specialist finds himself and his family ostracised with “AIDs-by-association” in mid-80s southern Tennessee, the Indian diaspora enmeshed with AIDs-era paranoia. Recovering these overlooked television works from history, this presentation analyses the sustainable pedagogy in Nair’s works for television, located within the productive area of transnational