Description
Book SynopsisOffers a study of the cultural politics of sound in Bollywood cinema. Taking as its subject the expansive domain of the aural in cinema, this book identifies singing, listening, and speaking in cinema as key sites in which notions of identity and difference take form.
Trade Review“Sundar brings to the study of Bombay cinema the methods and insights of sound studies and feminism to produce a thoroughly original monograph that provides a model for how sound might be studied in cinema with an eye to historical and industrial specificity.”—Sangita Gopal, University of Oregon
“
Listening with a Feminist Ear is a tour de force. Using a robust theoretical framework, Sundar carefully illuminates the historical, technological, and ideological factors sustaining paradigms of sonic representation, effects, and modes of listening across seven decades of Hindi cinema. Superbly written and researched, this study foregrounds the importance of gender and sexuality in cinematic and cultural soundwork. Highly recommended.”—Caryl Flinn, University of Michigan
“Pavitra Sundar has made an important contribution to sound studies and film studies with this rigorous and insightful analysis of the singing, listening, and speaking of popular Bombay cinema. Sundar’s clear prose and compelling case studies work to update the historical narrative and help us to listen more deeply, more broadly, and more sensitively to an influential tradition of soundwork.”—Jacob Smith, Northwestern University
“
Listening with a Feminist Ear lives up to the promise of listening to sound differently and not just using sound to register difference. Sundar offers an elegant analysis of the power of listening and the generative potential of soundwork.”—Sujata Moorti, Middlebury College
Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Listening With a Feminist Ear
- Listening as Habit and Hermeneutic
- Soundwork
- Inter-Aurality
- Politics of Nation
- Singing, Listening, Speaking
- Chapter One: Singing
- From Singing to Musicking: Women’s Voices, Bodies, and the Audiovisual Contract
- Conjoining Sound and Image
- Playback Singing and the “Old” Audiovisual Contract
- Singing on Television
- The “Ethnic” Voice and the Aural Lag
- Millennial Soundwork
- Women’s Musicking and the Somatic Clause
- Chapter Two: Listening
- Re-Sounding the Islamicate: The Cinematic Qawwali and its Listening Publics
- Qawwalis’ Classic Features
- 5
- Ishq Ishq! Romance in Classic Qawwalis
- World Music and Post-Liberalization
- De-Islamicization and Irrelationality In Sufipop
- Pious Listening in Dargah Qawwalis
- Spectacular Dancing in Item Number-Esque Qawwalis
- Chapter Three: Speaking
- Speaking of the Xenophone: Language as Sound in Satya
- From Cinematic Language to Dialogue-baazi
- Language, Politics, and Cinema
- Hindi Film Languages
- Accenting Bambaiyya
- Language, Violence, and Marginality
- Dhichkiaoon! And Other Cinematic Sounds
- Coda
- Listening, Loving, Longing
- Textual and Aural Pleasures
- Translation and Temporality
- Seditious Touching in Soundwork
- Bibliography
- Index
