CULTURE, CAPITAL, AND THE MAKING OF THE NEW INDIA
An annual faculty research seminar at Temple University

Convener: Priya Joshi, Department of English
pjoshi@temple.edu

Thursday, April 17, 2008, 11:40am - 1pm
CHAT Lounge, 10th floor Gladfelter Hall

Book discussion of Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (eds.), Global Bollywood: Transnational Travels of the Song-Dance Sequence (Minnesota, 2008)

Bollywood movies and their signature song-and-dance spectacles are an aesthetic familiar the world over, and Bollywood music now provides the rhythm for ads marketing goods such as computers and a beat for remixes and underground bands. These musical numbers have inspired scenes in Hollywood films including Vanity Fair, Inside Man, and Moulin Rouge as well as American hip-hop artists such as Jay-Z and Missy Elliott.

Global Bollywood shows how this currency in popular culture and among diasporic communities marks only the latest phase of the genre's world travels. This interdisciplinary collection of essays describes the many roots and routes of the Bollywood song-and-dance spectacle. Examining the reception of Bollywood music in places as diverse as Indonesia and Israel, Global Bollywood unravels the historical, political and social factors that facilitate these migrations, offering a redefinition of globalization's processes and highlighting the new cultural forms and social practices that Hindi film music has activated around the world.

About the editors:

Sangita Gopal is assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon. Her areas of expertise are postcolonial literature, South Asian cinema, and gender and globalization. She is currently at work on a monograph, “No Place to Hide: Gender, Conjugality and Nationalism in Contemporary Hindi Film," which explores how the disappearance of the romantic duet is linked to the emergence of a privatized domesticity where the female subject is at risk.

Sujata Moorti is professor and chair of Women's and Gender Studies at Middlebury College. She is the author of Color of Rape: Gender, Race, and Television’s Public Spheres (SUNY Press, 2002) and a co-editor of Feminist Media Studies and Genders. Her teaching and research explore the impact of media representational practices on the conduct of democracy.

About the discussants:

Sumita Chakravarty is Associate Professor of Culture and Media at the New School University. She is the author of National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987 (Oxford, 1996), the pioneering volume that frames Hindi cinema around the formation of the Indian nation. She writes on media, globalization, and new technologies.

Pallabi Chakravorty is Assistant Professor of Dance at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women and Modernity in India (Seagull Press, 2008). As scholar, performer, and choreographer, Chakravorty reorients dance scholarship to focus on the lived experiences of dancers and places the history of Kathak from baijis and tawaifs to the global stage. She has co-edited a forthcoming collection, Performing Ecstasy: The Poetics and Politics of Religion in South Asia.