Introduction: The Popular and the Postcolonial

One of the questions that we posed in the call for papers for this issue was whether the nature of the popular itself or its ‘shallowness’ discount itself as a site of analysis. This assumption implies that there is then a popular that is less shallow and more ‘authentic.’ Stuart Hall in his “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’” cautions against the same tendency, while theorizing the popular. While acknowledging the power of cultural industries “to rework and reshape what they represent,” (187) Hall moves towards an understanding of the popular wherein popular culture is situated in “a continuing tension (relationship, influence and antagonism) to the dominant culture.” In this issue of Refractions, we wanted to approach the popular from this standpoint to reveal the possibilities of reading the popular side by side with the postcolonial. The issue responds to questions and gaps identified by scholars in postcolonial studies, who have suggested that postcolonial studies has not sufficiently engaged with the popular. For instance, Simon Featherstone begins his essay “Postcolonialism and Popular Cultures” by drawing our attention to Edward Said’s remark on popular culture, when Said said “popular culture means absolutely nothing to me…” (381). Featherstone notes that anthologies of postcolonial studies have been marked by an inattention to the popular (382). Similarly, in Popular Postcolonialisms: Discourses of Empire and Popular Culture, Nadia Atia and Kate Houlden inquire about “the place of ‘the popular’ in the postcolonial paradigm” (2). This issue of Refractions seeks to situate itself amidst the questions and propositions outlined above. In doing so, we draw from more recent theorizations about popular genres and race. In his 2017 book Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction,  Mark C. Jerng argues that what makes ‘popular’ tick, what is demeaned by critics about genre fiction is precisely the quality that contributes to the popular’s world making characteristics (15). Jerng further argues that genre and race work together: “Genres activate certain ways in which racial meaning will be used in the composition of a world…Genre and race thus are both affordances because they make available certain knowledges about the world and help us interact with it in certain ways” (16).  In putting together this issue of Refractions, we were driven by the possibilities of placing the popular and its genres next to the postcolonial.  Our  inspiration for the issue was driven by the recent turn in television which highlights colonial inequalities and histories of trauma. Television series from different countries have drawn attention to colonial legacies, settler colonialism and imbalances of power. Examples include Bridgerton (2020), Reservation Dogs (2021), Dealoch (2023) and True Detective (2024). Our contributors in this issue address the links between the popular and postcolonial through multiple forms, including television, film, video games and visual art. 

Bhumi Patel turns her eye to a form of popular that has been a major driving force for this issue: television. In her article, Patel analyses the role of dance in the popular Netflix offering: Bridgerton. She studies the utilization of regency era dances coupled with popular music, showing how this portrayal of dance creates a false sense of nostalgia and intimacy, blurring the power dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized. Patel focuses on the affective capacities of dance to signal a utopian post-racial imagination, which obscures the colonial nostalgia at work in the series. 

 Affect and its manifestations return in Hamza Ahmad’s contribution to this issue. Ahmed turns his attention to the historical form of Ghazal, while inquiring about the possibilities of mapping the affect in Ghazal and its queerness using new visual media. Drawing inspiration from the poet and translator, Aga Shahid Ali, Ahmed studies the possibilities of “multimodal translations” and “cross-cultural communications.” He takes the reader through the colonial history of ghazal, in the intersection of race and gender in the colonial imagination of the Ghazal, and the difficulties in translation that arise from the Ghazal being more of a performance rather than a written text. Ahmed’s writing is accompanied by an experimental creation of his own: a combination of Ghazal and a montage of scenes from Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). 

Arpita Biswas focuses on a different type of visual media: popular art. Biswas focuses on the nineteenth century Cow Protection movement in colonial India and its afterlives. Through a close reading of popular art that was produced in association with the movement, Biswas shows how manifestations of popular bazaar art became a site for negotiations about national identity and the citizens belonging to a nation. Biswas shows that art associated with the Cow Protection Movement becomes a medium for “popular” cartography. 

In his study of postcolonial dynamics through sound and media, Gavin Davies turns to video games to consider the power-laden relationship between Britain and Wales. Through Davies’ frame, the use of Welsh accents in video games offers an insightful venue through which to parse the intersections of popular culture, colonial afterlives, and immersive, gamer experience. The proximity, Davies reveals, between Welsh accents and strange, deceitful or malicious characters in videogames and their worlding, animates the correlations between colonial power and popular, cultural hedgemonies. Through the common, recurring use of the Welsh accent to accompany immoral and dark components of videogames, Davies argues, we glimpse the colonial afterlives of Britain’s political marginalization of Wales and Welsh culture. As Davies’ study, hence, simultaneously reveals, video games, while in many ways reiterative of the power-laden cultural hedgemonies, are also vital sites of postcolonial analysis and critique.  

In his examination of theatre and film, Kevin Anzzolin identifies how art centered on gentrification illuminates the nuances, tensions and processes of, as he terms, the recapitulation of capital. Surveying plays such as plays La Carreta (1953) and La Botanica (1972), and the 2021 film, In the Heights, Anzzolin traces how capitalist logics infiltrate work of, ostensibly, anticapitalist critique. While outwardly problematizing the effects of gentrification on marginalized and BIPOC communities in urban spaces, Anzzolin reveals, such cultural productions tacitly, and yet, significantly, encourages protagonists to engage capitalism’s gentrifying forces optimistically. Anzzolin’s analysis hence offers a productive illumination of art’s simultaneous potential to illustrate the realities of economic precarity, and simultaneously, its own inability to imagine otherwise. 

Ambivalence is likewise a significant quality of Payal Nagpal’s dynamic postcolonial examination of hybridity on tiktok, today. Nagpal’s study, which turns to popular influencers on tiktok reveals, ultimately traces the imbrications of anticolonial political messaging with popular forms, modalities, and performativities. As such, Nagpal identifies how, in economies of mass media and viewership, where exposure is contingent on likes and reposts, the crucial axis where hegemonic popular forms and subversive, anticolonial politics and critique intersect, and mutually-benefit one another. 

For Ysabelle Bartolome, the postcolonial and the popular converge in the contemporary rise of “eat the rich narratives.” Surveying a media assemblage, spanning Filipino, to Swedish and American film production, Bartolome interrogates the ideological nature of the spectacle of wealth at the center of such critiques. When we center spectacles of extravagance, Bartoleme asks, whose narratives become central, and whose, peripheral? How do we parse the earnest representational politics of race and class within the ambiguous and fickle category of parody? Despite, ostensibly, levelling a critique of the hoarding of wealth, Bartoleme reveals, these narratives oftentimes reiterate, rather than unsettle, the desiring sightlines for wealth. In the case of media that more self-consciously engages the genre, Bartoleme reveals, there is much to be discovered. 

In this issue, our contributors engage with multiple forms of ‘popular’ media, ranging from television to video games to film. In addition to this conventional understanding of the ‘popular’ the issue is enriched by its attention to other forms of media, such as Indian popular art and the ghazal. These essays and reflections invite a rethinking of the different forms the popular can take in different cultural contexts. We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed bringing it together. 

Works Cited

Atia, Nadia and Kate Houlden. Introduction. Popular Postcolonialisms: Discourses of Empire and Popular Culture, Routledge, 2019, 1-23.

Featherstone, Simon. “Postcolonialism and Popular Cultures.” The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, edited by Graham Huggan, Oxford, 2013, 381-396. 

Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular.’” Cultural Resistance Reader, edited by Stephen Duncombe, Verso, 2002, 185-192.

Jerng, Mark. Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction. Fordham University Press, 2018.