Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas
Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas

Author: Alka Kurian

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-08-21

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1136466711

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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.

Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas
Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas

Author: Alka Kurian

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-08-21

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1136466703

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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 Filmscapes
South Asian Filmscapes

Author: Elora Halim Chowdhury

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2020-11-30

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0295747862

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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.

Women and Islamic Cultures
Women and Islamic Cultures

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2013-10-31

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9004264736

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The first decade of the 21st century witnessed an explosion in scholarly and public interest in women and Islamic cultures, globally. From misguided media representations, to politically motivated state manipulations, to agenda-driven Islamist movements, to feminist and international NGO projects – the subject and image of Muslim women has become iconic and riveting. This volume unpacks the representations, motivations, agendas, and projects by focusing on the advances in scholarly research on women and Islamic cultures in the first decade of the 21st century. The editors of the pioneering Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures bring together leading scholars, discipline by discipline, to critically analyze state of the art research on women and Islamic cultures from 2003-2013. Editors for this volume include Suad Joseph, Marilyn Booth, Bahar Davary, Hoda Elsadda, Sarah Gualtieri, Virginia Hooker, Amira Jarmakani, Therese Saliba, and Elora Shehabuddin. Contributors include Suad Joseph, Azza Basarudin, Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, Amira Jarmakani, Sajeda Amin, Kamran Rastegar, Robina Mohammad, Annika Rabo, Ahmed Ragab, Vannessa Hearman, Bahar Davary, Michelle Hartman, Hoda Elsadda, Nerina Rustomji, Amaney Jamal, Vickie Langohr, Hania Sholkamy, Zayn Kassam, Rachel Rinaldo, Samar Habib.

Women and Resistance in Contemporary Bengali Cinema
Women and Resistance in Contemporary Bengali Cinema

Author: Srimati Mukherjee

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-01-13

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 131730991X

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Historically, Indian cinema has positioned women at the intersection of tradition and a more evolving culture, portraying contradictory attitudes which affect women’s roles in public and private spheres. Examining the work of three directors from West Bengal, this book addresses the juxtaposition of tradition and culture regarding women in Bengali cinema. It argues the antithesis of women’s roles, particularly in terms of ideas of resistance, revolution, change, and autonomy, by suggesting they convey resistance to hegemonic structures, encouraging a re-envisioning of women’s positions within the familial-social matrix. Along with presenting a perception of culture as dynamic and evolving, the book discusses how some directors show that with this rupturing of the traditionally prohibitive, and a notion of unmaking and making in women, a traditional inclination is exposed to align women with ideas of absence, substitution, and disposability. The author goes on to show how selected auteurs in contemporary Bengali cinema break with certain traditional representations of women, gesturing towards a culture that is more liberating for women. Presenting the first full-length study of women’s changing roles over the last twenty years of Bengali cinema, this book will be a useful contribution for students and scholars of South Asian Culture, Film Studies and Gender Studies.

Asian Cinema and the Use of Space
Asian Cinema and the Use of Space

Author: Lilian Chee

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-24

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1134629532

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Asian cinemas are connected to global networks and participate in producing international film history while at the same time influenced and engaged by spatial, cultural, social and political transformations. This interdisciplinary study forwards a productive pairing of Asian cinemas and space, where space is used as a discursive tool to understand cinemas of Asia. Concentrating on the performative potential of cinematic space in Asian films, the contributors discuss how space (re)constructs forms of identities and meanings across a range of cinematic practices. Cities, landscapes, buildings and interiors actively shape cinematic performances of such identities and their significances. The essays are structured around the spatial themes of ephemeral, imagined and contested spaces. They deal with struggles for identity, belonging, autonomy and mobility within different national and transnational contexts across East, Southeast and parts of South Asia in particular, which are complicated by micropolitics and subcultures, and by the interventions and interests of global lobbies.

The Western in the Global South
The Western in the Global South

Author: MaryEllen Higgins

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-24

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1317551079

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The Western in the Global South investigates the Western film genre's impact, migrations, and reconfigurations in the Global South. Contributors explore how cosmopolitan directors have engaged with, appropriated, and subverted the tropes and conventions of Hollywood and Italian Westerns, and how Global South Westerns and Post-Westerns in particular address the inequities brought about by postcolonial patriarchy, globalization and neoliberalism. The book offers a wide range of historical engagements with the genre, from African, Caribbean, South and Southeast Asian, Central and South American, and transnational directors. The contributors employ interdisciplinary cultural studies approaches to cinema, integrating aesthetic considerations with historical, political, and gender studies readings of the international appropriations and U.S. re-appropriations of the Western genre.

Ways of Remembering: Volume 1
Ways of Remembering: Volume 1

Author: Oishik Sircar

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-05-31

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 1009281925

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Ways of Remembering tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom—postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law offers a resolution to the irrationality of religious violence. In the public's collective memory, the force of this rationality simultaneously condemns and normalises violence against Muslims while exonerating secular law from its role in enabling the pogrom, thus keeping the violent (legal) order against India's Muslim citizens intact. The book contends that in foregrounding law's aesthetic dimensions we see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence and presents itself as the panacea for that very violence.

The Woman's Film of the 1940s
The Woman's Film of the 1940s

Author: Alison L. McKee

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-03

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1135053707

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This book explores the relationship among gender, desire, and narrative in 1940s woman’s films which negotiate the terrain between public history and private experience. The woman’s film and other form of cinematic melodrama have often been understood as positioning themselves outside history, and this book challenges and modifies that understanding, contextualizing the films it considers against the backdrop of World War II. In addition, in paying tribute to and departing from earlier feminist formulations about gendered spectatorship in cinema, McKee argues that such models emphasized a masculine-centered gaze at the inadvertent expense of understanding other possible modes of identification and gender expression in classical narrative cinema. She proposes ways of understanding gender and narrative based in part on literary narrative theory and ultimately works toward a notion of an androgynous spectatorship and mode of interpretation in the 1940s woman’s film.

The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East
The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East

Author: Joe F. Khalil

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2023-06-27

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 1119637066

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The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to understand the profound and complex changes shaping the 21st century. With trans-regional contributions from established and emerging scholars, this ground-breaking volume offers conceptual essays and in-depth chapters that present rich analyses grounded in historical and geopolitical contexts, as well as key theory and empirical research. Rather than viewing the Middle East as a monolithic culture, this Handbook examines the diverse and multi-local characteristics of the region’s knowledge production, dynamic media, and rich cultures. It addresses a wide range of topics, including the evolving mainstream and alternative media, competing histories in the region, and pressing socio-economic and media debates. Additionally, the Handbook explores the impact of regional and international politics on Middle Eastern cultures and media. Designed to serve as a foundation for the next era of research in the field, The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East is essential reading for all academics, scholars, and media practitioners. Its comprehensive scope makes it an excellent primary or supplementary textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses in global studies, media and communication, journalism, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, and history.