Download or read book Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas written by Alka Kurian and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book South Asian Filmscapes written by Elora Halim Chowdhury and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Women and Islamic Cultures written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Women and Resistance in Contemporary Bengali Cinema written by Srimati Mukherjee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-13 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Asian Cinema and the Use of Space written by Lilian Chee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Western in the Global South written by MaryEllen Higgins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Ways of Remembering Volume 1 written by Oishik Sircar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Woman s Film of the 1940s written by Alison L. McKee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East written by Joe F. Khalil and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Spectacle in Classical Cinemas written by Tom Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spectacle is not often considered to be a significant part of the style of ‘classical’ cinema. Indeed, some of the most influential accounts of cinematic classicism define it virtually by the supposed absence of spectacle. Spectacle in ‘Classical’ Cinemas: Musicality and Historicity in the 1930s brings a fresh perspective on the role of the spectacular in classical sound cinema by focusing on one decade of cinema (the 1930s), in two ‘modes’ of filmmaking (musical and historical films), and in two national cinemas (the US and France). This not only brings to light the special rhetorical and affective possibilities offered by spectacular images but refines our understanding of what ‘classical’ cinema is and was.
Download or read book Carceral Liberalism written by Shreerekha Pillai and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2023 Carceral liberalism emerges from the confluence of neoliberalism, carcerality, and patriarchy to construct a powerful ruse disguised as freedom. It waves the feminist flag while keeping most women still at the margins. It speaks of a post-race society while one in three Black men remain incarcerated. It sings the praises of capital while the dispossessed remain mired in debt. Shreerekha Pillai edits essays on carceral liberalism that continue the trajectory of the Combahee River Collective and the many people inspired by its vision of feminist solidarity and radical liberation. Academics, activists, writers, and a formerly incarcerated social worker look at feminist resurgence and resistance within, at the threshold of, and outside state violence; observe and record direct and indirect forms of carcerality sponsored by the state and shaped by state structures, traditions, and actors; and critique carcerality. Acclaimed poets like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Solmaz Sharif amplify the volume’s themes in works that bookend each section. Cutting-edge yet historically grounded, Carceral Liberalism examines an American ideological creation that advances imperialism, anti-blackness, capitalism, and patriarchy. Contributors: Maria F. Curtis, Joanna Eleftheriou, Autumn Elizabeth and Zarinah Agnew and D Coulombe, Jeremy Eugene, Demita Frazier, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Alka Kurian, Cassandra D. Little, Beth Matusoff Merfish, Francisco Argüelles Paz y Puente, Shreerekha Pillai, Marta Romero-Delgado, Ravi Shankar, Solmaz Sharif, Shailza Sharma, Tria Blu Wakpa and Jennifer Musial, Javier Zamora
Download or read book Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy written by John Alberti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-11 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the growing obsolescence of traditional constructions of masculine identity in popular romantic comedies by proposing an approach that combines gender and genre theory to examine the ongoing radical reconstruction of gender roles in these films. Alberti creates a unified theory of gender role change in the movies that combines the insights of both poststructuralist gender and narrative genre theory, avoiding binary approaches to the study of gender representation. He establishes the current "crises" in both gender representation and genre development within romantic comedies as examples of experimentation and change towards narratives that feature more egalitarian and less essentialist constructions of gender.
Download or read book Crossover Cinema written by Sukhmani Khorana and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-23 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinematic products in the twenty-first century increasingly emerge from, engage with, and are consumed in cross-cultural settings. While there have been a number of terms used to describe cinematic forms that do not bear allegiance to a single nation in terms of conceptualization, content, finance and/or viewership, this volume contends that "crossover cinema" is the most apt contemporary description for those aspects of contemporary cinema on which it focuses. This contention is provoked by an appreciation of the cross-cultural reality of our post-globalization twenty-first century world. This volume both outlines the history of usage of the term and grounds it theoretically in ways that emphasize the personal/poetic in addition to the political. Each of the three sections of the volume then considers crossover film from one of three perspectives: production, the texts themselves, and distribution and consumption.
Download or read book American and Chinese Language Cinemas written by Lisa Funnell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics frequently describe the influence of "America," through Hollywood and other cultural industries, as a form of cultural imperialism. This unidirectional model of interaction does not address, however, the counter-flows of Chinese-language films into the American film market or the influence of Chinese filmmakers, film stars, and aesthetics in Hollywood. The aim of this collection is to (re)consider the complex dynamics of transnational cultural flows between American and Chinese-language film industries. The goal is to bring a more historical perspective to the subject, focusing as much on the Hollywood influence on early Shanghai or postwar Hong Kong films as on the intensifying flows between American and Chinese-language cinemas in recent decades. Contributors emphasize the processes of appropriation and reception involved in transnational cultural practices, examining film production, distribution, and reception.
Download or read book Moralizing Cinema written by Daniel Biltereyst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is part of the recent interest in the study of religion and popular media culture (cinema in particular), but it strongly differs from most of this work in this maturing discipline. Contrary to most other edited volumes and monographs on film and religion, Moralizing Cinema will not focus upon films (cf. the representation of biblical figures, religious themes in films, the fidelity question in movies), but rather look beyond the film text, content or aesthetics, by concentrating on the cinema-related actions, strategies and policies developed by the Catholic Church and Catholic organizations in order to influence cinema. Whereas the key role of Catholics in cinema has been well studied in the USA (cf. literature on the Legion of Decency and on the Catholic influenced Production Code Administration), the issue remains unexplored for other parts of the world. The book includes case studies on Argentina, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, and the USA.
Download or read book Eco Trauma Cinema written by Anil Narine and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film has taken a powerful position alongside the global environmental movement, from didactic documentaries to the fantasy pleasures of commercial franchises. This book investigates in particular film’s complex role in representing ecological traumas. Eco-trauma cinema represents the harm we, as humans, inflict upon our natural surroundings, or the injuries we sustain from nature in its unforgiving iterations. The term encompasses both circumstances because these seemingly distinct instances of ecological harm are often related, and even symbiotic: the traumas we perpetuate in an ecosystem through pollution and unsustainable resource management inevitably return to harm us. Contributors to this volume engage with eco-trauma cinema in its three general forms: accounts of people who are traumatized by the natural world, narratives that represent people or social processes which traumatize the environment or its species, and stories that depict the aftermath of ecological catastrophe. The films they examine represent a central challenge of our age: to overcome our disavowal of environmental crises, to reflect on the unsavoury forces reshaping the planet's ecosystems, and to restructure the mechanisms responsible for the state of the earth.
Download or read book Cinema as Weather written by Kristi McKim and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do cinematic portrayals of the weather reflect and affect our experience of the world? While weatherly predictability and surprise can impact our daily experience, the history of cinema attests to the stylistic and narrative significance of snow, rain, wind, sunshine, clouds, and skies. Through analysis of films ranging from The Wizard of Oz to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, from Citizen Kane to In the Mood for Love, Kristi McKim calls our attention to the ways that we read our atmospheres both within and beyond the movies. Building upon meteorological definitions of weather's dynamism and volatility, this book shows how film weather can reveal character interiority, accelerate plot development, inspire stylistic innovation, comprise a momentary attraction, convey the passage of time, and idealize the world at its greatest meaning-making capacity (unlike our weather, film weather always happens on time, whether for tumultuous, romantic, violent, suspenseful, or melodramatic ends). Akin to cinema's structuring of ephemera, cinematic weather suggests aesthetic control over what is fleeting, contingent, wildly environmental, and beyond human capacity to tame. This first book-length study of such a meteorological and cinematic affinity casts film weather as a means of artfully and mechanically conquering contingency through contingency, of taming weather through a medium itself ephemeral and enduring. Using film theory, history, formalist/phenomenological analysis, and eco-criticism, this book casts cinema as weather, insofar as our skies and screens become readable through our interpretation of changing phenomena.
