Nandini Bhattacharya

A ‘Basement’ Cinephilia. Indian Diaspora women watch Bollywood

This article results from survey‐based research on the actual and situated viewing practices of Indian diaspora women who watch Bollywood. I argue that they thereby construct – and not merely consume – new definitions of national and diasporic identity and motherhood through this mediation. Further, I argue that the personal and communal identities constructed by diaspora female Bollywood‐watchers are not merely nostalgic, but a complex amalgam of their responses to the porosity and ambiguity of the medium of Bollywood film.This article results from survey‐based research on the actual and situated viewing practices of Indian diaspora women who watch Bollywood. I argue that they thereby construct – and not merely consume – new definitions of national and diasporic identity and motherhood through this mediation. Further, I argue that the personal and communal identities constructed by diaspora female Bollywood‐watchers are not merely nostalgic, but a complex amalgam of their responses to the porosity and ambiguity of the medium of Bollywood film.

Slavery, colonialism, and connoisseurship : gender and eighteenth-century literary transnationalism

Introduction Family jewels: George Colmans Inkle and Yarico and connoisseurship James Cobb and colonial cacophony: doing the enlightenment in different voices Sheridans follies: auctioning ancestors in The School for Scandal Transatlantic flight: Phillis Wheatleys copies with a difference Postscript Bibliography Index.

NATION MISPLACED: Film, Time and Space in South Asian Decolonization

Histories and aesthetics of space intersected in South Asian decolonization. The contest for space has continued to be reflected in South Asian cinema from the 1950s to the present. Spatial politics and the aestheticization of spaces both reflect current politics and urban policies and also glance back at colonial and postcolonial histories of national fragmentation and nation-formation. In this essay the relationship of art and politics – of questions of artistic and political truth – is examined by comparing the cinemas of Ritwik Ghatak and Guru Dutt, prominent ‘art’ and ‘commercial’ filmmakers of the 1950s. In their films, I argue, cinematic representations of contested spaces provide the key to deciphering their aesthetic and political beliefs about decolonization and refugee experience. While Ghatak is generally seen as the testier, more radical oppositional chronicler of postcolonial South Asian national fragmentation and individual displacement, a lens such as Guru Dutts commercial cinema offers an alternative reading of the exigencies of respatialization of a torn and decolonizing nation.

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew's Alien: Copy with a Difference

The kind and degree of contradiction that exists between the historical specificities of immigrant displacement and racialization and canonized forms of national culture generates formal deviations whose significances are misread if simply assimilated as modernist or postmodernist aesthetic modes. . . . Asian American work emerges out of very different contradictions of modernity: out of the specific conditions of racialization in relation to modern institutions of state government, bourgeois society’s separate spheres, and the liberal citizen subject. ——Lisa Lowe 1996, 31–32

On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility

tainly not daunting. Given the wide variations in consumer culture the 13 chapters in the book bring out the practice of consumer culture in five locales: the USA, India, Turkey, Czech Republic and Russia representing different histories, ideologies and social and economic trajectories. The emphasis is on people’s definition and explanation of consumer culture, and modernity as they are used to develop and present a sense of the self. In dismissing a discussion on consumer culture in a broad framework, Pathak charges that the chapters in the book ‘do not deliver to myriad utopias of the subaltern in the domain of consumer culture’ (p. 242). This was not the objective of the book in the first place. The critical questions addressed in the book are laid out in the Introduction. No claim is made that the book will deliver to expectation(s) narrowed on the subaltern. An elaborate and disenchanted discussion on the subaltern warrants another forum, may be a full-length book. If that happens, I will remember to acknowledge Pathak for leading me to it.