Television Ethnicity And Cultural Change

This essay discusses how television and video are being used to recreate cultural traditions within the South Asian diaspora, and how they are also bringing about cultural change in this local community. It explores how young people negotiate between the parental and peer, local and global, national and international contexts and cultures which traverse their lives.

For ethnic minorities in Britain, broadcast TV provides powerful representations of national and Western culture. In Southall - which has the largest population of South Asians outside the Indian sub-continent - Hindi films, sacred soaps such as the Mahabharata, and family videos of rites of passage, as well as mainstream American films are all available on TV or video. This analysis examines how TV and video are being used to recreate cultural traditions within the South Asian diaspora, and how they are also bringing about cultural change in this local community. It explores how young people negotiate between the parental and peer, local and global, national and international contexts and cultures which traverse their lives. It offers a survey of how cultures are shaped and changed through people's reception of the media.