MLA Proseminar: Transnational TV

How are television and nation historically related, and how has television been part of new kinds of nationalization and globalization projects? Television content like telenovelas or BBC news have often transnationally moved and television infrastructures like satellites and optical fiber cables have had a global footprint. We will discuss both the local situatedness of televisual production and reception cultures as well as their ability to impact global issues and discourses. The course is interested in how television schedules historically have been part of everyday lives of people and how more recently, on-demand TV content shapes and is shaped by quotidian rhythms of people’s lives in different countries with specific socio-cultural contexts. The course particularly focuses on how global television cultures have been transformed due to shifts from broadcasting technologies to (Internet) streaming services: In what ways has the television landscape changed and remained the same with the emergence of global subscription TV platforms like Netflix and Prime Video as they commission and develop content in collaboration with local and national artists and practitioners? How are regional streamers competing with and resisting the expansion of Netflix? What explains the growing transnational exports of Turkish dizi and Korean TV dramas? We will attend to both emerging genres of content and trace the new distribution circuits of transnational television.