Pakistani Anglophone Young Adult Fiction and the Art of Commodification of Culture: An Insight to Sheba Karim’s The Skunk Girl and Rukhsana Khan’s Wanting Mor

This article aims to explore the art of commodification of culture deployed in the Pakistani Anglophone Young Adult (YA) fiction with special reference to Sheba Karim’s The Skunk Girl (2009) and Rukhsana Khan Wanting Mor (2010). It has been contextualized in the postulates of the commodification of culture highlighted by Nederveen Pieterse in his work Globalisation and Culture: The three Paradigms. The term commodification has gained immense popularity in the contemporary era of globalization partly because of free trade and the economy. Culture in principle is one of the essential standpoints of globalization owing to its subtlest but the most penetrating tentacle in general and its capability to commodify in particular. Having a base in the economy, culture has been systematically commodified as a heterogeneous, homogeneous, or hybrid form to be sold either physically in galleries, museums, and tourist spots. The literature by South Asian writers has been altered to present the cultural illustration as hybrid, heterogeneous, or homogenized. Which according to Pieterse is the form of commodification of culture. It is this aspect that the present article intends to explore to assert that the success of YA Fiction is undoubtedly owed to aesthetic and academic merits but mainly due to the successful deployment of the technique of commodification of culture. Keywords: Culture Commodification, Heterogeneous, Homogeneous, Hybrid, YA Fiction

Will the real auteur please stand up!: authorship and product placement in film

This thesis investigates issues of product placement in Hollywood cinema as seen through the lenses of theories of authorship and cultural economy. Feature films, with their captive audiences and finely-tuned marketing machines, may seem like ideal venues for advertisers to present goods to consumers in the form of placed products, yet even here the effects of economic and cultural synergy cannot be guaranteed. The thesis argues that while we live in a commodified environment where the consumer spectacle is woven into the fabric of everyday life, the meanings we derive from mass-produced products is not strictly limited to the interests of corporate capital. By providing a history of product placement in Hollywood cinema and three recent films as case studies, this thesis explores the impact of product placement on the creative agency of writers, directors, designers and audiences. The thesis employs textual analysis to link theoretical issues concerning the commodification of culture and authorial expression.

Will the real auteur please stand up!: authorship and product placement in film

This thesis investigates issues of product placement in Hollywood cinema as seen through the lenses of theories of authorship and cultural economy. Feature films, with their captive audiences and finely-tuned marketing machines, may seem like ideal venues for advertisers to present goods to consumers in the form of placed products, yet even here the effects of economic and cultural synergy cannot be guaranteed. The thesis argues that while we live in a commodified environment where the consumer spectacle is woven into the fabric of everyday life, the meanings we derive from mass-produced products is not strictly limited to the interests of corporate capital. By providing a history of product placement in Hollywood cinema and three recent films as case studies, this thesis explores the impact of product placement on the creative agency of writers, directors, designers and audiences. The thesis employs textual analysis to link theoretical issues concerning the commodification of culture and authorial expression.

From theory to practice: the three principles of community-based design.

One of the challenges in developing tourism in many local communities, particularly in developing countries, is the danger of commodification of culture. Existing models of cultural tourism often see culture as a relatively static product to be 'sold' to tourists. By embracing local identity and intangible cultural assets, and concentrating on local creative processes, creative tourism can emerge as a fundamental tool for combatting such negative impacts of traditional models of cultural tourism. This chapter reflects on an experimental learning journey, a creative tourism pilot project initiated by the Designated Areas for Sustainable Tourism Administration (DASTA) in Thailand. The main objective of this learning journey with DASTA was to develop a Creative Tourism Brain Bank (CTBB), working together in a creative tourism lab which aimed to explore the following questions: (1) What constitutes creative tourism, specific to the Thai context?; (2)What makes creative tourism different from other forms of tourism?; (3) How can we transform community cultural tourism/activities into creative tourism?

K-pop fan labor and an alternative creative industry: A case study of GOT7 Chinese fans

Korean popular music or K-pop has achieved popularity among global audiences. The uniqueness of K-pop fan culture has helped to shape the success of the K-pop industry. Through a case study of Chinese fan labor vis-à-vis K-pop male idol group GOT7, the author notes three types of K-pop fan labor: specialized labor, managerial labor, and unskilled labor. This research argues that fan labor transforms the K-pop industry into an alternative creative industry because fan labor as creative labor is an indispensable part of the K-pop industry. Fan labor is utilized to distinguish fans from non-fans, and to draw boundaries between the grateful, more enthusiastic fans and the casual self-proclaimed fans who do not contribute to fandom or their idols’ success. These Chinese K-pop fans comply with the K-pop industry’s commodification of culture, are exploited by the K-pop industry, and seek empowerment in the K-pop production and distribution process. This paper’s exploration of fan labor, based on the author’s participant observations and in-depth interviews, will thus contribute to studies on the creative industries, creative labor, fandom, and the transnational flows of popular culture.

Secrecy, Community and Counter-History in Arundhati Roy’s 'The God of Small Things' (1997)

This article explores the different types of communities and the role of secrecy and counter-history in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), a novel in which secrecy plays a crucial role and in which the most genuine human relations are characterized by a desire to participate in otherness. This article examines Roy’s subversion of the operative community by considering: (a) the different communitarian organizations in The God of Small Things, from the most organic (the caste system, patriarchy, religious institutions, communism and the commodification of culture) to the least organic (the community of Others and the community of lovers); (b) the connection between alterity, finitude and secrecy as preventing the unworked community from organicist fusion; (c) the link between alterity, finitude, secrecy and counter-history. Although ingrained within a deeply organicist community, the main characters in Roy’s novel prove to have a vigorous capacity to trespass communitarian boundaries and to expose themselves to otherness.

Día de Muertos: de la compartencia a un producto comercial

In this paper we are going to analyze the celebration of the Day of the Dead as a cultural manifestation that has been transforming through time. This analysis will be carried around the phases of heritage culture: codification, institutionalization and commodification of culture.

Festival Air (Songkran): Komodifikasi Budaya di Thailand

<p><em>This research aims to want to see the occurred on the discourse of cultural commodification of Songkran in Thailand. Songkran in Thailand is a religious and cultural festival, which is the celebration of New Year in Thailand. Culture of Songkran festival which then becomes bringing many foreign tourists come to some areas in Thailand like Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Phuket. This great Festival and then give effect to social, cultural as well as the economy on local community. The methods used in this study is a qualitative descriptive based on the experiences both of the author. The data analyzed i.e. secondary data that comes from a variety of scientific journals, then the primary data are analyzed based on the author’s experience when on the Songkran festival in Thailand on April, 2019. Based on the analysis that the commodification of culture happens to Songkran in Thailand is not so much to erode the authenticity of rituals. This means that the core rituals such as bathing the Buddha statues in the temples still do. Commodification is a positive impact on the local community, where on area of the festival they provided tubs for sale in range 5 THB to 15 THB. Then, foreign tourists are pouring in from various countries are also effect on the local community economy.</em></p>