Editorial statement

Grounded in the interdisciplinary educational work of Cultural Studies, this paper examines the pedagogical potentials of narrative and performance for the teaching of writing as a mode of public discourse. Guided to address a wide readership, students engage in critical communication aimed at linking self inquiry and narrative discourse to the contextual analysis of the social. Drawing on research findings derived from the undergraduate teaching of cultural criticism as a genre of public writing at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, we look at how educational drama mediates the work of narrative and performative acts involving the young learner-writers and contributes to the shaping of a dialogic mode of address and communication, thus articulating the process and impact of writing to the public-oriented discourse in Cultural Studies education. In light of such acts in critical discourse and imagination targeted at the potential reader, we show how the young writers' own engagement with critical thinking and communication are opened up by drama-in-education adopted in the class, and argue how, in this sense, both writing and its learning process become effective stages in the making of the kind of cultural criticism we want to help students to learn.     

Editorial statement

This paper is an attempt to understand the representation of the minority community of Kodavas in cinema that is largely produced, controlled, and consumed by people belonging to majoritarian languages/communities, specifically in Kannada cinema. I argue that the of politics of representation, misrepresentation, and non-representation of the minority both conform to and extend the existing relations of power between the Brahmin mind and the Shudra body, the ever-changing minority and ever-concretizing majority. My attempt is to show how the categories of nation and minorities ‘have been put to use through a complex process of the politics of nationalism’. Representations of the Kodava as the exotic servile, as the model minority worker, have only served to construct a homogeneous Hindu majority that has defined the Indian nation thus far. I argue the above by looking at the representation of the Kodava male body in Kannada Cinema where the body gets counted and valorized only to be discounted, to be non-existent.