Florian Stadtler

Cultural Connections: Lagaan and its audience responses

Over the past few years, South Asian culture has crossed over into the mainstream as never before with fusion projects across various genres as well as Bollywood films enjoying considerable success at the UK box office. Focusing on the Bollywood hit Lagaan, this article will examine how directors play with the tested Bollywood formula in order to generate a broader appeal not only within India but increasingly across the globe. The film raises serious issues and questions about the nature of a globalised world since, for many years, globalisation has been regarded as a euphemism for Western cultural domination. Indeed, must we not re-examine this in the light of increasing South Asian influences penetrating mainstream culture and argue that globalisation allows these influences to travel backwards and forwards, threatening the perceived pre-eminence of Western popular culture?

Terror, globalization and the individual in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown

This article reads Rushdie’s 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown as an example of how the contemporary postcolonial novel debates terrorism, the neo‐imperialist strategies of post‐war US foreign policy and the Indian state’s military presence in Kashmir. Shalimar the Clown extends his arguments about cultural and economic globalization, resurgent separatist and terrorist movements and its impact on individuals from The Ground Beneath her Feet (1999) and Fury (2001). Like his previous novels, Shalimar the Clown cuts across different time periods and territories, challenging the legacies of empire, nationhood and emergent new empires. Yet the novel’s focus on Kashmir and international terrorism reframes Rushdie’s earlier arguments. Shalimar the Clown engages with the repressions and exclusions that the postcolonial state imposes on its periphery, exemplified in the continuing struggle between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. By discussing “terror” and “terrorism” and how Rushdie subverts these terms in relation to identity, violence and the effects on the individual, this article argues that Shalimar the Clown reroutes postcolonial paradigms by examining transnational terror networks, and their regional and international impact on politics, cultures and identities.

Calling from London, talking to India: South Asian networks at the BBC and the case of G.V. Desani

In the 1940s, the Indian section of the BBC was an important focal point for South Asian writers, intellectuals and their British counterparts.1 As such, it became ‘a complicated network of mutually creative cross- cultural contacts and interfaces’, fostering important creative exchanges, which resulted in many lasting friendships and affiliations.2 More importantly, the collaboration of British and South Asian writers, broadcasting specifically to India for Indian audiences, challenged paradigms of centre and periphery, highlighting the existence of more complex relationships and connections in the imperial metropolis. The background to the career of writer and broadcaster G. V. Desani is a case in point. The variety of his outputs and the ways he sought to carve out a niche in Britain’s literary landscape of the 1940s leads us to consider the nature of his relationship with the BBC in the context of his search for cultural acceptance. By focusing on the Indian Section more broadly, and on Desani in particular, this chapter will explore how the BBC became a hub for cultural encounter and political debate, despite its clearly propagandist brief in wartime.

National representations, national theatres: Aubrey Menen and the experimental theatre company

Abstract This article discusses the Indian-Irish playwright and critic Aubrey Menen’s involvement with London’s theatre scene in the 1930s. Aubrey Menen became heavily involved in student drama activities whilst a philosophy student at University College London. He co-founded the London Student Players as well as the Experimental Theatre Company, a group on London’s theatre fringe which sought to produce plays that were of the moment, politically current, pushing the boundaries of theatrical staging in alternative performance spaces. At the age of 21, Menen also became the dramatic critic for the monthly magazine, The Bookman. Menen used his column to offer a sharp critical dissection of the state of British theatre and to lay out a plan for a theatre that can call itself truly ‘national’ and how this might be achieved financially, artistically and practically. This essay highlights the wider context of Menen’s own pronouncements in The Bookman, exploring these as part of his engagement with London’s alternative theatre scene in the 1930s. It argues that Menen’s ideas were a timely intervention into crucial debates how the nation should be represented in drama and how drama could reach an audience beyond the middle classes, preoccupations that are still hotly debated today.

SRK and global Bollywood

To date, Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) remains at the top of the ‘All Time Male Actor Hit Count’. According to Box Office India, out of his 52 releases, 25 were box office hits – closely on his heels follow...

Bombay dreams and Bombay nightmares: Spatiality and Bollywood gangster film’s urban underworld aesthetics

Abstract The importance of the city in an articulation of Indian modernity has been central to the narratives of Indian popular cinema since the 1950s. Especially since the mid-1970s, in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a State of Emergency, Hindi cinema has explored the structures of power that determine Bombay’s urban city space where the hero of the film encounters exponentially communal, domestic, gang, and state violence. These films put forward textured views of the cityscape and address overtly its potential for corruption and violence. Focussing on Milan Luthria’s Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai (2010), this article explores Hindi cinema’s engagement with urban violence in an age of market liberalisation, accelerated economic growth and planned expansion. By exploring how individuals encounter forms of urban violence as an everyday occurrence, the article argues that in these instances violence becomes the primary determining agent in the city’s urban landscape.

Networking the globe: culture, technologies, globalization

Contemporary events have highlighted important connections between technology, globalization and cultural production. Information technologies in particular have impacted the global commodification of information and have led to the significant erosion of national boundaries – for example, through Internet forums and self-broadcasting. Access to these technologies has influenced local and global identities, especially youth cultures through digital platforms as subcultural expression, creating virtual subjectivities and transnational communities. These technologies have also facilitated a wider global network and interconnection of narrative forms and genres that have led to explorations of alternative modernities in a globalizing postcolonial context. This introduction highlights the need to enrich the intellectual resources being brought to bear upon the development of contemporary information technologies through postcolonial theoretical frameworks. By addressing the rise of new media technologies in postcolonial spaces, it focuses on how the use of such modern technologies has enabled transnational networks of cultural, social and political exchange. Since the new millennium, there has been a succession of crises with catastrophic global ramifications, such as the economic downturn and conflicts across the globe, not only mediated by super-fast digital communication and information networks, but also conditioned by rapidly advancing technologies. From social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook to global satellite news channels including Al-Jazeera and the BBC World Service, digital forms of culture have multiplied in recent years, proliferating conduits and connections across the globe; these shape our lives in multifarious ways. In the light of this, a postcolonial perspective on information and communication technologies is pressing. How far is cyberspace mediated by metropolitan centres of knowledge production, and how might new media entrench existing structures of inequality, by serving corporate capitalist interests or by saturating consumers with hegemonic representations of culture or global events? Conversely, to what extent can technologies operate as tools of empowerment and resistance for marginalized peoples, by bypassing forms of censorship and facilitating access to global arenas of debate and alternative communities? The articles in this special issue stem from the inaugural postgraduate conference of the Postcolonial Studies Association held at the University of Stirling in May 2010, which provided an incisive forum for wide-ranging debates on the issue of new technologies and global networks in postcolonial contexts. This discussion, reflected in this issue, was shaped by contributors’ work in a wide range of different disciplines, including anthropology, film, screen, media and cultural studies, sociology and literature, exploring in exciting ways the impact of postcolonial concerns in other fields. This

Review Essay: World Intifada

‘I write what I like’, South African freedom fighter Steve Biko famously claimed (I Write What I Like, Heinemann, 1979). His defiance was aimed at the censorship practices of the apartheid government that claimed to be a democracy. That said, when your historical fate offers you a script of violent colonisation entailing the denial of your humanity, there is also a sense in which you are not free to write what you like. Such a dilemma is implied in two recent works of Palestinian fiction, Shake Off by Mischa Hiller and Out of It by Selma Dabbagh, that both may be said to grapple with the responsibilities, obligations and blind-spots that come with histories of dispossession. Theirs is a horizon of inheritance which affects not only the dispossessed but their chroniclers who have before them, prior to them and as an expectation, a literary history of resistance writing.

‘Nobody from Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary’: Midnight’s Children and the visual culture of Indian popular cinema

Aboout the book: In Salman Rushdie’s novels, images are invested with the power to manipulate the plotline, to stipulate actions from the characters, to have sway over them, seduce them, or even lead them astray. Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture sheds light on this largely unremarked – even if central – dimension of the work of a major contemporary writer. This collection brings together, for the first time and into a coherent whole, research on the extensive interplay between the visible and the readable in Rushdie’s fiction, from one of the earliest novels – Midnight’s Children (1981) – to his latest – The Enchantress of Florence (2008).