Performing Fear in Television Production

Siao Yuong Fong

Performing Fear in Television Production

Practices of an Illiberal Democracy

What goes into the ideological sustenance of an illiberal capitalist democracy? While much of the critical discussion of the media in authoritarian contexts focus on state power, the emphasis on strong states tend to perpetuate misnomers about the media as mere tools of the state and sustain myths about their absolute power.
Turning to the lived everyday of media producers in Singapore, I pose a series of questions that explore what it takes to perpetuate authoritarian resilience in the mass media. How, in what terms and through what means, does a politically stable illiberal Asian state like Singapore formulate its dominant imaginary of social order? What are the television production practices that perform and instantiate the social imaginary, and who are the audiences that are conjured and performed in the process? What are the roles played by imagined audiences in sustaining authoritarian resilience in the media? If, as I will argue in the book, audiences function as the central problematic that engenders anxieties and self-policing amongst producers, can the audience become a surrogate for the authoritarian state?
Author

Siao Yuong Fong

Siao Yuong Fong joined Lancaster University as Lecturer of Global Media and Inequality in September 2021 and works at the intersections of Media and Cultural Studies, Production Studies and Asian Studies. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.
Title
Performing Fear in Television Production
Subtitle
Practices of an Illiberal Democracy
Author
Price
€ 134,00 excl. VAT
ISBN
9789463724579
Format
Hardback
Number of pages
212
Language
English
Publication date
Dimensions
15.6 x 23.4 cm
Series
Asian Visual Cultures
Categories
Art and Material Cultures
Media Studies
Radio and Television
South East Asia
Discipline
Asian Studies
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Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One: Fear and the fragility of myths
Chapter Two: Playing games with heritage
Chapter Three: Drama writing and audiences as affective superaddressee
Chapter Four: Producing art, producing difference
Chapter Five: Making Reality TV
Reflections