South Asian Filmscapes

South Asian Filmscapes
Author: Elora Halim Chowdhury
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2020-11-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0295747862

In South Asia massive anticolonial movements in the twentieth century created nation-states and reset national borders, forming the basis for emerging film cultures. Following the upheaval of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, new national cinemas promoted and reinforced prevailing hierarches of identity and belonging. At the same time, industrial and independent cinemas contributed to remarkably porous and hybrid film cultures, reflecting the intertwining of South Asian histories and their reciprocal cultural influences. This cross-fertilization within South Asian cultural production continues today. South Asian Filmscapes excavates these complex politics and poetics of bordered identity and crossings through selected histories of cinema in South Asia. Several essays reveal ways in which fixed notions of national identity have been destabilized by the cross-border mobility of filmed arts and practitioners, while others interrogate how filmic politics intersects with discourses of nationalism, sexuality and gender, religion, and language. Together, they offer a fluid approach to the multiple histories and encounters that conjure “South Asia” as a geographic and political entity in the region and globally through a cinematic imagination.

Beyond Bollywood

Beyond Bollywood
Author: Jigna Desai
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2004-08-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1135887195

Beyond Bollywood is the first comprehensive look at the emergence, development, and significance of contemporary South Asian diasporic cinema. From a feminist and queer perspective, Jigna Desai explores the hybrid cinema of the "Brown Atlantic" through a close look at films in English from and about South Asian diasporas in the United States, Canada, and Britain, including such popular films as My Beautiful Laundrette, Fire, MonsoonWedding, and Bend it Like Beckham.

South Asian Film Guide

South Asian Film Guide
Author: University of California, Berkeley. Center for South Asia Studies
Publisher:
Total Pages: 14
Release: 1996*
Genre: Motion pictures
ISBN:

Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas

Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas
Author: Alka Kurian
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2012-08-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1136466703

This book conducts a post-colonial, gendered investigation of women-centred South Asian films. In these films, the narrative becomes an act of political engagement and a site of feminist struggle: a map that weaves together multiple strands of subjectivity—gender, caste, race, class, religion, and colonialism. The book explores the cinematic construction of an oppositional narrative of feminist dissent with a view to elaborate a historical understanding and theorisation of the ‘materiality and politics’ of the everyday struggle of Indian women. The book analyzes the ways that ‘cultural workers’ have tended to use subversive narratives as a tool of resistance. Narratives that are political, ideological, classed, raced and gendered offer the focus of this exploration. Through strategies of disclosure and documentation of memory, personal experiences, and imaginary events shaped by the larger historical, political, and cultural contexts, these discursive texts engage in the processes of struggle against a plethora of oppression: caste, class, religion, patriarchal, sexual, and (neo)colonial. The study looks at the manner in which, through their creative and aesthetic interventions, South Asian film makers enable the articulation of an alternative gendered subjectivity as well as constitute the ground for personal and collective empowerment. Films discussed include Shyam Benegal’s Nishaant, Nandita Das’ Firaaq, Beate Arnestad’s My Daughter the Terrorist, and Sarah Gavron’s Brick Lane.

South Asian Cinemas

South Asian Cinemas
Author: Sara Dickey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2018-10-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317977297

This path-breaking collection explores the breadth and depth of South Asia’s many vibrant cinemas. It extends well beyond Bollywood to Nepali, Sri Lankan, Pakistani Panjabi, Bhojpuri, Bengali, Kannada, and early Tamil cinemas, while unpacking the category of 'Bollywood' itself. The coverage of cinematic features is equally far-ranging, exploring music, dance, audiences, filmmakers, industries, and the mutual influences among South Asia’s cinemas. With a mix of ethnographic, historical, auteur, and textual approaches, this exciting collection presents the first wide-reaching analysis of South Asian cinemas. The nine chapters include a new theoretical and historical engagement by the co-editors about the burgeoning area of South Asian cinemas in the academy, as well as original research by young and established scholars. From historical to contemporary considerations, to close analyses and empirical material from fieldwork, to a rich and revealing photographic essay, this collection will be novel reading for a new generation of work into an important global cinematic region. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Thematizations of the Goddess in South Asian Cinema

Thematizations of the Goddess in South Asian Cinema
Author: Anway Mukhopadhyay
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2022-11-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1527591239

This collection presents cross-disciplinary explorations of the tropes, themes and representational frameworks constellating around the figure of the Goddess in South Asian cinema. It critically approaches the Goddess theme in various genres of South Asian cinema, using analytical tools culled from gender studies, comparative cultural studies, and religious studies, as well as film semiotics. The films discussed here represent variegated thematizations of the Goddess across regions in South Asia, including Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and various geo-cultural locations in India. As the volume highlights the regional and politico-cultural differences and commonalities in representational schemes between South Asian films of different genres through the Goddess motif, it will appeal to scholars of film studies, South Asian studies and comparative religion, and will hold a special appeal for those interested in Goddess cultures and theology.

South Asian Filmscapes

South Asian Filmscapes
Author: Elora Halim Chowdhury
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Motion picture industry
ISBN: 9780295747859

"According Esha De and Elora Chowdhury, the legacies of industrial and independent cinemas in the subcontinent of South Asia reveal an intertwining of South Asian histories that show geopolitical and social boundaries to be both porous and hybrid. On the one hand, cinematic portrayals encode the effects of the massive geopolitical rifts born in postcolonial south Asia of religious, linguistic, and ethnic conflicts--the primary being the India-Pakistan Partition (1947) and the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971). Practices and policies of cinema in the nation-states (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) likewise reinforce prevailing hierarches of identity and belonging. On the other hand, the combined histories of cinema and sociality in the South Asian region are replete with cross fertilization the effects of which lingered on well past the Partition of India and Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh. The essays in this volume reveal ways in which fixed notions of national identity have been destabilized by the cross-border mobility of filmed arts and practitioners across South Asia and interrogate how filmic politics intersect with discourses around nationalism, sexuality and gender, religion, and language"--

South Asia Film Guide

South Asia Film Guide
Author: University of California, Berkeley. Center for South Asia Studies
Publisher:
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2001
Genre: Motion pictures
ISBN:

Synopses of the Center's video collection of South Asia-related films.