The neo-televisual-image Minoritarian politics of millennial television series

A new and innovative image-type emerged on our television screens around the turn of the twenty-first century. Its storytelling practices and politics differ from previous televisual image-types. In my dissertation I name this emerging image the neo-televisual-image. It is inspired by John Thornton Caldwell’s notion of televisuality, Gilles Deleuze’s movement-image and time-image, and Patricia Pisters’s neuro-image. I propose that this new image-type reacts to contemporary global resistance movements such as the Arab Spring (2010), Occupy Wall Street (2011), Gezi Park Protests (2013), and Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (2014) through its fictional storytelling practices. It not only reflects on actual resistance activities, but it also revolutionises televisual storytelling by provocatively subverting classical television aesthetics. By employing novel storytelling elements, the neo-televisual-image introduces minoritarian politics to viewers while creating a fertile space for political contemplation.
In order to comprehend the social and political interactivities between television series and global uprisings, I conduct a cultural analytic study that combines both aesthetics and politics, and while so doing, I explore the storytelling and political potentials of the neo-televisual-image. My dissertation includes a theoretical introduction and four chapters. In the first three chapters I address the changing televisual storytelling elements of fabulation, seriality, and nomadic mentalscapes respectively. In the fourth chapter I focus on their on-screen political affects and forces in relation to actual contemporary politics.