Beyond Bollywood


Book Description

Table of contents




Beyond Bollywood


Book Description

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.




Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood


Book Description

This is the first edited volume on new independent Indian cinema. It aims to be a comprehensive compendium of diverse theoretical, philosophical, epistemological and practice-based perspectives, featuring contributions from multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners across the world. This edited collection features analyses of cutting-edge new independent films and is conceived to serve as a beacon to guide future explorations into the burgeoning field of new Indian Cinema studies.




Beyond Bollywood and Broadway


Book Description

This collection of 11 plays, from North America, the U.K., and South Africa—many published here for the first time—delves into the vibrant, cosmopolitan theatre of the South Asian diaspora. These original and provocative works explore the experience of diaspora by drawing on cultural references as diverse as classical Indian texts, adaptations of Shakespeare and Homer, current events, and world music, film, and dance. Neilesh Bose provides historical background on South Asian migration and performance traditions in each region, along with critical introductions and biographical background on each playwright. Includes works by Anuvab Pal, Aasif Mandvi, Shishir Kurup, Rahul Varma, Rana Bose, Rukhsana Ahmad, Jatinder Verma, Sudha Bhuchar and Kristine Landon-Smith, Ronnie Govender, Kessie Govender, and Kriben Pillay.




Beyond Bollywood


Book Description

While 'Indian popular cinema', as if by default, has come to mean Bollywood, there are other cinemas in India which are at least as rewarding to study, the largest and perhaps most intriguing among them coming from South India. Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada cinemas have their own colourful histories, megastars and political trajectories. This anthology is an attempt to do justice to the bewildering variety there is in the body as a whole and addresses this diversity in the only way deemed possible, which is to open out the study to different approaches, at the same time to get a comprehensive look at South Indian cinema as never before undertaken.




Unseeing Empire


Book Description

In Unseeing Empire Bakirathi Mani examines how empire continues to haunt South Asian American visual cultures. Weaving close readings of fine art together with archival research and ethnographic fieldwork at museums and galleries across South Asia and North America, Mani outlines the visual and affective relationships between South Asian diasporic artists, their photographic work, and their viewers. She notes that the desire for South Asian Americans to see visual representations of themselves is rooted in the use of photography as a form of colonial documentation and surveillance. She examines fine art photography by South Asian diasporic artists who employ aesthetic strategies such as duplication and alteration that run counter to viewers' demands for greater visibility. These works fail to deliver on viewers' desires to see themselves, producing instead feelings of alienation, estrangement, and loss. These feelings, Mani contends, allow viewers to question their own visibility as South Asian Americans in U.S. public culture and to reflect on their desires to be represented.




Linguistics, Literature and Culture


Book Description

This book documents the changing realities in the fields of linguistics, literature and culture in Asia, resulting from globalization, modernisation and rapid technological development. It consists of sixteen essays by academics and researchers around the world, reflecting on the interface between the global and the local, and its impact on the local and regional languages, literatures and cultures of Asia. This scenario, which exemplifies language contact in action, is captured by the book mainly to demonstrate that linguistic negotiations, appropriations and indeed changes are not one-way. As such, their implications on language use, language choice, language policy and planning, literacy and pedagogy, identity, subjectivity and culture need to be closely examined. The uniqueness of this book lies in its attempt to showcase original research in a variety of multicultural settings. Its multi- and cross-disciplinary approach will appeal to a wide spectrum of readers from diverse backgrounds. This book will serve as a useful reference that is both scholarly and informative for researchers as well as academics in the fields of linguistics, literature and culture.




Unruly Cinema


Book Description

Between 1931 and 2000, India's popular cinema steadily overcame Hollywood domination. Bollywood, the film industry centered in Mumbai, became nothing less than a global cultural juggernaut. But Bollywood is merely one part of the country's prolific, multilingual cinema. Unruly Cinema looks at the complex series of events that allowed the entire Indian film industry to defy attempts to control, reform, and refine it in the twentieth century and beyond. Rini Bhattacharya Mehta considers four aspects of Indian cinema's complicated history. She begins with the industry's surprising, market-driven triumph over imports from Hollywood and elsewhere in the 1930s. From there she explores how the nationalist social melodrama outwitted the government with its 1950s cinematic lyrical manifestoes. In the 1970s, an action cinema centered on the angry young male co-opted the voice of the oppressed. Finally, Mehta examines Indian film's discovery of the global neoliberal aesthetic that encouraged the emergence of Bollywood.




Flashback


Book Description

Robert John Christo; popularly known as Bob Christo; was born in 1938 in Sydney; Australia. After completing his civil engineering in Sydney; he took on projects which involved supporting the military supply lines of the South Vietnamese army and working as construction supervisor on the film sets of Apocalypse Now. Led by his instincts; Christo zealously followed one aspiration after another: chasing after a lost spy ship; running an escort service; modelling for African beer; singing in rock concerts; and so on. Bob Christo landed his first film role at the age of sixteen in a German movie; after working as an extra in the Düsseldorf National Theatre; Germany. Hoping to meet Parveen Babi in India; he chanced upon a part in Sanjay Khan’s Abdullah (1980) and then went on to act in hundreds of Hindi; Telugu; Tamil; Malayalam and Kannada films. In the year 2000 he became a yoga instructor after shifting base from Mumbai to Bangalore; where he passed away on 20 March 2011.




Beyond Apu - 20 Favourite Film Roles of Soumitra Chatterjee


Book Description

One of India's Finest Actors Talks His Most Iconic Roles Soumitra Chatterjee became internationally famous with his debut in Satyajit Ray's Apur Sansar. In an era when Uttam Kumar ruled the minds and hearts of Bengali film audiences, Chatterjee carved a niche for himself, emerging as one of the finest actors, not only in India, but also in the world. Beyond Apu - 20 Favourite Film Roles of Soumitra Chatterjee looks at the cinematic life of this thespian through twenty of the most iconic characters he has essayed. Handpicked by the star himself, and brimming over with vintage anecdotes, this is a fascinating read on the art and craft of a master at work. Including insightful essays on his theatre and other artistic achievements, this book not only introduces the reader to an icon of Indian cinema but also offers a unique insight into the mind of a genius.