Mainstreaming Islam: The Cultural Production of Islamic Imagery in Indonesian Sinetron

           
Photo credit: U.S. Embassy, Jakarta on flickr

Mainstreaming Islam: The Cultural Production of Islamic Imagery in Indonesian Sinetron  

The Centre for the Study of Communications & Culture (CSCC) presents a seminar titled Mainstreaming Islam: The Cultural Production of Islamic Imagery in Indonesian Sinetron by Dr Inaya Rakhmani from Universitas Indonesia. 

This paper is about the symbiosis between a commercial television system and the increasing emphasis on Islamic expression in urban societies. Increasingly over the past decade, social specificities of each country have brought different cultural manifestations in line with political and economic developments. This is true in the case of Indonesia, in which the notable rise of Islamism in Indonesia’s urban areas since the late 1990s, from practical politics, legal expression, economic manifestations, to everyday piety, has also worked through the commercial system of the country’s television industry.

Since the early 2000s, there is an increasing visibility of Islamic references and content in television programming. It is easy to assume that, as in any other commercial television system around the world, Indonesian television stations have monetised on what they see as rising Islamism. However, by studying the production and content of soap operas or sinetron, the author argues that alongside Islamic commodification, Islamic themes in sinetron also  represent a specific kind of Islamic piety that can be linked with da’wah or the propagation of Islam. The social consequence of this is that there are new modes of accommodation between commercial television and Islamic practices, with the resulting mainstreaming of Islam in television production practice and content.

Details: 
Date: 14 October 2014, Tuesday 
Time: 13:00 to 15:00 
Venue: F3B04 
            The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
            Jalan Broga 43500 Semenyih
            Selangor Darul Ehsan
RSVP: Monday, 13 October 2014 to FASS@nottingham.edu.my  

About the Speaker: 
Dr Inaya Rakhmani is the Head of the Communication Research Centre, Universitas Indonesia and an associate at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Australia. Her research interests include media politics, media and identity, as well as cultural expressions and power. Her work has been published at the International Communication Gazette, the Asian Journal of Social Science, and Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs (RIMA), as well as a forthcoming chapter in Video Games around the World published by MIT Press. She can be contacted at inaya.rakhmani@gmail.com and inaya.r@ui.ac.id.

Free admission. All are welcome.