VIRTUAL CSSA: Of Master-copies and Video CDs

Timothy Cooper
Object: Master-copy

The object examined is an audiocassette of popular music from north-western Pakistan whose circuitous routes took it from Afghanistan to the United Arab Emirates. No longer sold to the public, the cassette is now used as a master-copy by an Afghan store-holder in the Emirate of Sharjah who has traded in Pashto-language film and music for the last three decades. A master-copy is a print made in close proximity to a particular carrier– such as a celluloid film, an audiocassette, or a vinyl record – considered to be the earliest or most unblemished recording extant. It plays a central role in the preservation of audio-visual media through its dispersal across platforms and carriers. By building a repertoire of master-copies traders also established successful businesses in the Gulf, selling copied material to the large community of expatriate labourers residing there. I also consider some of its interfaces, from a photocopied cover of a CD, itself a copy of the audiocassette from which it is transferred, to glitch-ridden VCD copies of Pashto films.

Wazhmah Osman
Object: Video CD

Based on my ethnographic research in Afghanistan and its neighboring countries, the object I examine is the Video CD, and more broadly, the circulation of South Asian dramatic serials and female driven B-movies that feature strong villainesses and heroines. During my fieldwork I discovered that women media makers and audiences were challenging the prevailing white savior lexicon by producing and viewing dramatic serials and B-movies produced in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. While the genres of dramatic serials or soap operas and B-movies have been critiqued by some for perpetuating regressive gender and sexuality roles, in this presentation I highlight the ways that new productions of them offer a subversive space.

Part of the Objects Across Borders series, bringing together scholars and creative practitioners working in and on South Asia to reflect on the stories embedded in visual and material artefacts. This series is organised by Vindhya Buthpitiya (UCL) and Mallika Leuzinger (Princeton) and hosted by the UCL Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World, and The Fung Global Fellows Program and Program in South Asian Studies at Princeton University.