Hong Kong And Bollywood

This volume examines the transmission, reception, and reproduction of new cinematic styles, meanings, practices, and norms in early twenty-first-century Asia. Hong Kong and Bollywood offers new answers to the field of inter-Asian cultural studies, which has been energized by the trends towards transnationalism and translatability. It brings together a team of international scholars to capture the latest development in the film industries of Hong Kong and Mumbai, and to explore similar cross-cultural, political, and socioeconomic issues. It also explains how Hong Kong and Bollywood filmmakers have gone beyond the traditional focus on nationalism, urbanity and biculturalism to reposition themselves as new cultural forces in the pantheon of global cinema.

The field of Bollywood studies has remained predominantly critical, theoretical and historical in focus. This book brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to tackle empirical questions focusing on the relationship between soft power, hybridity, cinematic texts, and audiences. Adopting a critical-transcultural framework that examines the complex power relations that are manifested through globalized production and consumption practices, the book approaches the study of popular Hindi cinema from three broad perspectives: transcultural production contexts, content trends, and audiences. It firstly outlines the theoretical issues relevant to the spread of popular Indian cinema and emergence of India’s growing soft power. The book goes on to report on a series of quantitative studies that examine the patterns of geographical, cultural, political, infrastructural, and artistic power dynamics at work within the highest-grossing popular Hindi films over a 61-year period since independence. Finally, an additional set of studies are presented that quantitatively examine Indian and North American audience consumption practices. The book illuminates issues related to the actualization and maintenance of cinematic soft power dynamics, highlighting Bollywood’s increasing integration into and subsumption by globalized practices that are fundamentally altering India’s cinematic landscape and, thus, its unique soft power potential. It is of interest to academics working in Film Studies, Globalisation Studies, and International Relations.

Applying postmodern concepts and locating postmodern motifs in key commercial Hindi films, this innovative study reveals how Indian cinema has changed in the 21st century.

Bollywood is India's most popular entertainment and one of its most powerful social forces. Its blockbusters contest ideas about state formation, capture the nation's dispersed anxieties, and fabricate public fantasies of what constitutes "India." Written by an award-winning scholar of popular culture and postcolonial modernity, Bollywood's India analyzes the role of the cinema's most popular blockbusters in making, unmaking, and remaking modern India. With dazzling interpretive virtuosity, Priya Joshi provides an interdisciplinary account of popular cinema as a space that filters politics and modernity for its viewers. Themes such as crime and punishment, family and individuality, vigilante and community capture the diffuse aspirations of an evolving nation. Summoning India's tumultuous 1970s as an interpretive lens, Joshi reveals the cinema's social work across decades that saw the decline of studios, the rise of the multi-starrer genre, and the arrival of corporate capital and new media platforms. In elegantly crafted studies of iconic and less familiar films, including Awara (1951), Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (1957), Deewaar (1975), Sholay (1975), Dil Se (1998), A Wednesday (2008), and 3 Idiots (2009), Joshi powerfully conveys the pleasures and politics of Bollywood blockbusters.

This book traces the journey of popular Hindi cinema from 1913 to contemporary times when Bollywood has evolved as a part of India’s cultural diplomacy. Avoiding a linear, developmental narrative, the book re-examines the developments through the ruptures in the course of cinematic history. The essays in the volume critically consider transformations of the Hindi film industry from its early days to its present self-referential mode, issues of gender, dance and choreography, Bombay cinema’s negotiations with the changing cityscape and urbanisms, and concentrate on its multifarious regional, national and transnational implications in the 21st century. One of the most comprehensive volumes on Bollywood, this work presents an analytical overview of the multiple histories of popular cinema in India and will be useful to scholars and researchers interested in film and media studies, South Asian popular culture and modern India, as well as to cinephiles and general readers alike.

Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cinema has been adopted as a popular cultural institution in Bangladesh. At the same time, this has been the period for the articulation of modern nationhood and cultural identity of Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh. This book analyses the relationship between cinema and modernity in Bangladesh, providing a narrative of the uneven process that produced the idea of "Bangladesh cinema." This book investigates the roles of a non-Western "national" film industry in Asia in constructing nationhood and identity within colonial and postcolonial predicaments. Drawing on the idea of cinema as public sphere and the postcolonial notion of formation of the "Bangladesh" nation, interactions between cinema and middle-class Bengali Muslims in different social and political matrices are analyzed. The author explores how the conflict among different social groups turned Bangladesh cinema into a site of contesting identities. In particular, he illustrates the connections between film production and reception in Bangladesh and a variety of nationalist constructions of Bengali Muslim identity. Questioning and debunking the usual notions of "Bangladesh" and "cinema," this book positions the cinema of Bangladesh within a transnational frame. Starting with how to locate the "beginning" of the second Bengali language cinema in colonial Bengal, the author completes the investigation by identifying a global Bangladeshi cinema in the early twenty-first century. The first major academic study on this large and vibrant national cinema, this book demonstrates that Bangladesh cinema worked as different "public spheres" for different "publics" throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Filling a niche in Global Film and Media Studies and South Asian Studies, it will be of interest to scholars and students of these disciplines.

This book examines India-China relations throughout history as well as in the context of current business cooperation and competition. It also explores geo-political and societal factors, such as religion or class models, that influence and shape bilateral relations, and provides thorough analyses and comparisons of networks between the two countries. This book will appeal to researchers and graduate students interested in India-China relations as well as Chinese and Indian business ties.

Over the past two decades, Singapore has advanced rapidly towards becoming a both a global city-state and a key nodal point in the international economic sphere. These developments have caused us to reassess how we understand this changing nation, including its history, population, and geography, as well as its transregional and transnational experiences with the external world. This collection spans several disciplines in the humanities and social sciences and draws on various theoretical approaches and methodologies in order to produce a more refined understanding of Singapore and to reconceptialize the challenges faced by the country and its peoples.