{"title":"Book review: Harisur Rahman, Consuming Cultural Hegemony: Bollywood in Bangladesh","authors":"A. Awwal","doi":"10.1177/09749276211045787","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211045787","url":null,"abstract":"Harisur Rahman, Consuming Cultural Hegemony: Bollywood in Bangladesh. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 243 pp., ISBN 978-3-030-31706-5.","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"138 - 142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75675823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Islamicate","authors":"S. Siddique","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026172","url":null,"abstract":"Islamicate is obfuscating and contentious in its usage in South Asian media studies. The term is an invitation for debate, as observed in an exchange between two film historians – one from India where Muslims are the largest minority and the other from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The Pakistani historian conveyed her discomfort at the term used by Indian film scholars, taking the example of the film Mughal-e-Azam (1960): ‘Mughal-e-Azam is “Islamicate” ? I’d say it is Hinduicate’. Made over 19451960, the iconic Indian film carries the burden of a partition-induced alienation from Pakistan.1 Neither capturing the nuance nor the rigour of the polemic around the conceptualisation, yet the instance suggests that Islamicate’s relationship to the Islamic is as constitutive as its relationship with the non-Islamic. It was this spirit that guided Indian film scholars to borrow Marshal Hodgson’s neologism of the Islamicate as a ‘social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims’ (Hodgson, 1974), for what they saw as the Muslim ethos of Hindustani cinema. But one must recognise that Hodgson himself explicated Islamicate consequentially to Islamdom (Hodgson, 1974, p. 56): a complex of social relations where Muslims and their faith are recognised as socially dominant, and where non-Muslims have formed an integral, if subordinate, element. Thus, it is no wonder that the tribulations produced by the concept in Muslim dominant contexts are contrary to those in non-dominant ones. The debate for South Asian screen studies was sparked by the publication of Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema (Bhaskar & Allen, 2009), which pursued the Islamicate culture by ‘focus(ing) on the expressive and social forms associated and identified with Muslim culture and their impact on the Hindustani cinema produced by the Bombay film industry’ (Bhaskar & Allen, 2009, p. 3). However, in the genres identified, Muslim as an adjective became the guiding basis of the taxonomy of Islamicate – the Muslim historical, the Muslim courtesan film, the classic Muslim social and the new wave Muslim social. There have been three interrelated objections to this explication of the Islamicate culture. The first is a matter of usage and knowledge production in that the work essentialises a form as syncretic as the Hindi cinema, by stereotyping and exoticising Muslims (Saeed, 2009; Taneja, 2010). The second was more specifically to do with Islamicate Culture’s insistence on complete genres where arguably any distinction between Islamicate and Islamic collapses thus missing out ‘on the nuances","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"117 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83247022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Installation","authors":"I. Dadi","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026050","url":null,"abstract":"In contemporary art, installation art (sometimes termed ‘environmental artwork’) has emerged as a well-established procedure of assembling diverse mediums to create a space and an experience that has an immersive relationship with the viewer.1 The viewer’s bodily participation with elements of the work is essential to the way the work is conceived, foregrounding its spatial and architectural character, and its scale.2 If time-based mediums, such as performance, biological processes, or screen media, are part of the work, temporal considerations may also be foregrounded.3 An installation may be participatory by design, in which viewers engage with the artist or the work in various ways, including producing their own materials that continue to constitute the work that develops and unfolds continuously or episodically over time. And because the assemblage is often inextricably responsive to its site, the concept of site specificity may be crucial to its realisation—often many art installations are conceived to be site specific and temporal in their duration, disassembled or destroyed afterwards, leaving behind only photographic, aural, video or other materials that document the work or the performance or attest to its presence for the future. Installation art is usually seen to have been consolidated from the later 1960s onwards, drawing from earlier experiments from the interwar era – Soviet avantgarde, Bauhaus, and Surrealism,and further developed in Happenings, Fluxus, Minimalism, Gutai and Neo-Concrete movements during the 1950s and 1960s. Screen imagery also enters installation art during the 1960s. Nam June Paik’s prolific experiments with video recordings and the television screen in sculptural assemblages and performance from the mid-60s provide a benchmark in the incorporation of the screen image into an environmental artwork. In South Asia, at the Visva-Bharti University at Santiniketan (founded 1921) artists created a programme of murals and outdoor sculptures, rendering the campus itself as an immersive aesthetic environment. And the Shaheed Minar monument in Dhaka, first created in 1952 by Hamidur Rahman and Novera Ahmed, and remade in 1963 and 1972, is an important commemorative public sculpture that is an active site for meetings and gatherings, enacting itself as a participatory environmental installation. The projected image has also been deployed in installations for several decades (Iles, 2016). A key difference from cinema in the modality of viewing the moving image in an art installation format is that the spatial conditions for watching from a fixed","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"106 - 112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82319891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stardom","authors":"Rachel Dwyer, Rakesh Sengupta","doi":"10.1177/09749276211027710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211027710","url":null,"abstract":"Film actors retain their hold as the ultimate stars in South Asia, even in the age of multiple mass media, varied audiences and celebrity culture. Film stars are celebrated in the films themselves, and in news media, gossip, fashion and lifestyle, and often seen literally as gods. Theories of stardom which have evolved from studies of Western cinema have been applied, contextualised and refined within the wider cultural context of South Asian cinema, although the biographical study of the star is more popular among non-academic readers. While many topics in film studies seem removed from the experience of ordinary audiences, the study of stardom straddles the everyday viewing of films as well as its academic theorising. Stardom is familiar to all as stars attract us to cinema and are the subject of much discussion beyond the viewing experience. Within film studies, stardom is explored theoretically as a way of finding meaning in films, linking production, text and audience. Richard Dyer’s (1979, 1986) foundational work on stardom offers lucid and convincing studies of how the star becomes a figure of meaning through a range of performances with frequent intertextual references, through images onand off-screen, and through rumours and gossip circulated across a wide range of media. It is useful to distinguish stardom from celebrity, where the focus is on the person’s private and personal life. Stardom has more to do with their professional life since the star has to be a successful performer. Yet the star is more than a performer – a manufactured image, trained, shaped and styled as a commodity who sells cinema. Several studies of stardom in the Indian context, most recently the edited volume by Michael Lawrence (2020), have developed in tandem with scholarship on Western cinema stars. Some distinctive features of South Asian stardom are necessitated and produced by the films themselves, in the widespread use of melodrama, reinforced by an excess of emotions in songs and dialogue, and a preferred non-realist aesthetic. These ingredients produce a heightened stardom enhanced by the two-way scopic regime of darshan where the pleasure lies in looking at the star and the feeling of being looked at, complicating Laura Mulvey’s (1975) theorisation of the visual pleasure where women become passive objects of the male gaze. Studies of the female star in South Asia have highlighted the contradictory nature and inherent instability of gendered stardom, evident from the screen image of the","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"32 1","pages":"185 - 188"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77093822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modernity","authors":"Manishita Dass","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026179","url":null,"abstract":"Writing a short keyword piece on ‘modernity’ can be a foolhardy venture, given the numerous debates and connotations swirling around it. The term can refer to a historical epoch (though there is no consensus on when it began or ended); a condition arising out of processes of modernisation and the workings of global capital; a cluster of institutions and technologies; a set of norms and practices; an orientation of the self; a discourse of self-legitimation; an aspiration or a fantasy; an incomplete social and intellectual project; an intersection of the material changes wrought by processes of modernisation and the subjective experience of such changes; and a dialectic between the explosive energy of the new and forces that seek to contain it. The one thing common to these different notions of modernity is a sense of transformational rupture and disorienting change. Always notoriously imprecise, the conceptual contours of the term ‘modernity’ have become even blurrier under increased critical scrutiny and with the global turn across disciplines since the 1990s. Postcolonial critiques of the Eurocentric teleology and value-laden universalist assumptions embedded in dominant (read western) understandings of the modern have led to methods stressing difference and heterogeneity rather than the homogenising force of modernisation; to a pluralisation of the term into a range of ‘alternative’ or regionally specific ‘modernities’ across the world; and to a proliferation of prefixes pertaining to nation, region, subject positions and cultural politics (e.g., ‘colonial modernity’, ‘liberal modernity’, ‘regional modernity’, ‘subaltern modernity’, ‘the Bengali modern’, etc.). Instead of being taken for granted as a stable analytic category with a set of universally applicable meanings, ‘modernity’ is now widely seen as a contested category, or what anthropologists call a ‘native category’ (Ferguson, 2006, p. 177) – a term shared by heterogeneous groups but prone to changing colour on the ground, as it moves from one socio-cultural context to another and performs different kinds of cultural work in the hands of different social actors. However, as Timothy Mitchell points out, an emphasis on different historical trajectories shaping ‘alternative’ or ‘divergent’ versions of modernity does not necessarily dislodge the idea of an ‘underlying and fundamentally singular modernity’ originating in the imagined space of the west (Mitchell, 2000, p. xii). Nor does it dispel the whiff of belatedness or derivativeness clinging to manifestations of the modern elsewhere. How, then, does one write a post-Eurocentric account of non-western modernity that manages to make sense of its specificity – its distinctiveness, newness and connections with the past – as well as of Europe’s role in its history? Attempts to solve","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"43 1","pages":"129 - 133"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74331837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Diaspora","authors":"Amardeep Singh","doi":"10.1177/09749276211029453","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211029453","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most important social phenomena of the postcolonial era has been the migration and resettlement of peoples around the world, which has led to the creation of new diasporic cultural identities. These diasporic identities are complex formations, wherein groups of expatriates and their descendants undergo cultural and sociopolitical transformations while adapting to new environments. For South Asians, this process has led to the creation of diasporic communities all over the world, with developing diasporic film communities emerging in some areas as a result. Some key filmmakers in the South Asian diaspora include Gurinder Chadha, Mira Nair, Nisha Ganatra, and Deepa Mehta, along with screenplay writers like Hanif Kureishi and Kumail Nanjiani. Since the early 1990s, a rapidly expanding body of scholarship has appeared, focusing on documenting and theorising migration and the emergence of new transnational cultural formations. Scholars associated with theorising diaspora, such as Khachig Tololyan, Avtar Brah, Vijay Mishra and R. Radhakrishnan, have theorised and catalogued a wide array of diasporic communities, both traditional and ‘new’. This scholarship tends to take it as a given that diasporas can form for any number of reasons, and that diasporic status might relate to a broad array of social issues. As Tololyan put it in the inaugural issue of Diaspora, ‘We use “diaspora” provisionally to indicate our belief that the term once described as Jewish, Greek, and Armenian dispersion now shares meanings with a larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile, community, overseas community, ethnic community’ (Tololyan, 1991, pp. 4–5). While there are obviously real differences between refugees and voluntary ethnic/immigrant communities, in diaspora studies their experiences are often understood under a single umbrella. More recently, scholars such as Vijay Mishra have theorised the workings of the South Asian diaspora in particular. Mishra draws an important distinction between what he calls the ‘old’ diaspora of Indian indentured labourers in Fiji, Malaysia, East Africa and the Caribbean (Trinidad, Guyana) and the ‘new’ South Asian diaspora that has emerged with ‘late capital’ (Mishra, 1996, p. 421). Mishra describes the old Indian diaspora as ‘exclusive’, as it tended to simply reproduce ‘little Indias’ – islands of static cultural and relative linguistic homogeneity – while the new diaspora is much more likely to see hybridity, linguistic shifts, acculturation and extensive interaction with host cultures. Scholars such as Gayatri Gopinath have also linked the liberatory possibilities of new configurations of South Asian diasporic life to expanded prospects","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"61 - 63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76532389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Body","authors":"D. S. Mini","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026079","url":null,"abstract":"The body is a contested site that can mobilise an array of historically, culturally and socially specific meanings. While legal regimes conceive of bodies as fixed entities, they are malleable and respond to the social and ideological conditions that shape them. Varying scales of normativity and visibility make the body simultaneously a performative projection of desires and aspirations, and a space where the friction between tradition and modernity plays out. Embodied performances and practices become crucial to understanding the materiality of social arrangements that surround us, particularly those of power, relative privileges and knowledge systems (Foucault, 1978/1990). Here, the body is both a certain kind of biopolitical imaginary (an idea) as well as an ocular surface on which these imaginaries are played out (a form of visuality or representation). Bodily signifiers can also hint at a desiring subject shaped by commodified fantasies (Mazumdar, 2007; Ramamurthy, 2006). The body then can be read as a series of sedimented layers of signification (Schneider, 1997, p. 4) that are ruptured and mediated by varied extraneous factors (Sen & Basu, 2013). In the South Asian context, the body is a forcefield of caste, gender and class relations, as well as histories of colonial oppression which condition how they are represented and narrativised. These hierarchies often determine what kind of bodies are allowed to take up screen space (and time), tying represented bodies to the social worlds from where they emerge. Cinematic conventions of frontality, song and dance sequences (Iyer, 2015; Mukherjee, 2018b), and fight sequences (Vitali, 2008) employ the actor’s body for specific ends. For instance, the display of physical agility and male muscularity has been shown to appeal to a range of transnational as well as nonmetropolitan, local desires (Bose, 2013; Ghosh, 2020), while the normalisation of the aesthetics of whiteness has helped make seemingly ‘foreign’ or ‘exotic’ female bodies palatable for the Indian audience (Basu, 2013; Chatterjee, 2017; Osuri, 2008; Rahman Niazi, 2018). The ideological proclivity to pronounce certain bodies as inadmissible within the realm of pleasurable film viewing creates exceptional figures who deviate from normative expectations. For example, the overweight female body of Tun Tun has been exploited as a repository of humour as such fat bodies can only fit certain imaginations of grotesqueness or ludicrousness in the hegemonic imagination (Sinha, 2017). Or certain bodies – disabled bodies and lower-caste bodies for example – disappear in the","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"28 1","pages":"39 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89923741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Double","authors":"Richard Allen","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026060","url":null,"abstract":"We employ density functional calculated eigenstates as a basis for exact diagonalization studies of semiconductor double quantum dots, with two electrons, through the transition from the symmetric bias regime to the regime where both electrons occupy the same dot. We calculate the singlet-triplet splitting J ( ε ) as a function of bias detuning ε and explain its functional shape with a simple, double anti-crossing model. A voltage noise suppression “sweet spot,” where dJ ( ε ) /dε = 0 with nonzero J ( ε ), is predicted and shown to be tunable with a magnetic field B .","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"95 1","pages":"71 - 74"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73932830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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