Known for its elaborate spectacle of music, dance, costumes, and
fantastical story lines, Bollywood cinema is a genre that
foregrounds narrative rupture, indeterminacy, and bodily sensation.
In "Untimely Bollywood," Amit S. Rai argues that the fast-paced,
multivalent qualities of contemporary Bollywood cinema are
emblematic of the changing conditions of media consumption in a
globalizing India. Through analyses of contemporary media
practices, Rai shifts the emphasis from a representational and
linear understanding of the effects of audiovisual media to the
multiple, contradictory, and evolving aspects of media events. He
uses the Deleuzian concept of assemblage as a model for
understanding the complex clustering of technological, historical,
and physical processes that give rise to contemporary media
practices. Exploring the ramifications of globalized media, he
sheds light on how cinema and other popular media organize bodies,
populations, and spaces in order to manage the risky excesses of
power and sensation and to reinforce a liberalized postcolonial
economy.
Rai recounts his experience of attending the first showing of a
Bollywood film in a single-screen theater in Bhopal: the sensory
experience of the exhibition space, the sound system, the visual
style of the film, the crush of the crowd. From that event, he
elicits an understanding of cinema as a historically contingent
experience of pleasure, a place where the boundaries of identity
and social spaces are dissolved and redrawn. He considers media as
a form of contagion, endlessly mutating and spreading, connecting
human bodies, organizational structures, and energies, thus
creating an inextricable bond between affect and capital. Expanding
on the notion of media contagion, Rai traces the emerging
correlation between the postcolonial media assemblage and
capitalist practices, such as viral marketing and the development
of multiplexes and malls in India.
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