Description
Book SynopsisIndia produces more films than any other country and these works are consumed by non-Western cultures in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and by Indian communities across the world. This text focuses on how such a dominant media configures the ""nation"" in post-Independence Hindi cinema.
Trade ReviewThis book makes an important contribution to the field of Asian film criticism, Indian film history, cultural studies, and gender studies.
The Cinematic ImagiNation provides readers with valuable insight into the relationships between nation-building gender, sexuality, the family, and popular cinema, using post-Independence India as a case study. -- Gina Marchetti * author of the Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Film *
Table of ContentsNation and its discontents. The nation, in theory ; The creative ImagiNation ; Theorizing national cinema ; Nation and its embodiments ; Pleasure and terror of the feminine
The idealized woman. Fixing the figure of the woman ; Woman, community, nation ; The "social butterfly."
Heroes and villains: narrating the nation. Masculinity ; Heroes and villains ; Sons and mothers
Heroines, romance, and social history. Reading resistance ; Contesting the Laxman Rekha ; Film/star text: reading social change
The sexed body. Filmic love ; Victims to vigilantes ; Rape and the rape threat ; The sexed body and specular pleasure ; Double-speak about the body ; Unsettled scores
Re-reading romance. Transgressions of "true love" ; Reinstating "family values" ; Romantic love and the culture of consumption ; The end of the Nehruvian Era
