This book is the first of its kind to concentrate significantly on trans-nation and transnationalism, and its dialogue with various nationalisms in South Asia. Transnationalism as a conceptual apparatus has rarely been explored in South Asian academia, despite its prevalence as a research method in the Euro-US domain. Taking this absence/dearth as a crucial juncture as well as a point of intervention, this book intends to push the boundaries further by organizing a dialogue between the nation-state and many nationalisms and the emergent method of transnationalism, going beyond the borders of the Indian state and engaging with Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. It opens itself up for such cross-border movements, formulating the trans-South Asian discursive exchange necessitated by contemporary theoretical upheavals. It looks at such exchanges through the prism(s) of literature and cinema. The book traces the various modes of engagement that exist between some of the globally dominant literary and cinematic forms, trying to locate these engagements and negotiations across three geopolitical formations and locations of culture, namely region, nation and trans-nation. These three locations work as contact zones where cultural interfaces manifest in various forms.

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.

This original collection fills a gap in the literature on Lav Diaz, and more broadly, on slow and durational cinema. The importance of the director in contemporary world cinema is beyond doubt. This collection considers Lav Diaz and his works holistically without being confined to a specific approach or research method. On the contrary, it involves almost all the major contemporary academic approaches to cinema. It focuses on an auteur who has been celebrated immensely in recent times and yet has remained largely unexplored in cinema studies. The book will address this research gap. As such, this book aims to situate Diaz at the crucial juncture of 'new' auteurism, Filipino New Wave and transnational cinema, but it does not neglect the industrial-exhibitional coordinates of his cinema. The rationale behind this project is to raise questions on the oeuvre of a significant auteur, to situate him in and outside of his immediate national context(s), to present a repository of critical approaches on him, to reconsider the existing critical positions on him, to find newer avenues to enter (and exit) his canon that will consciously avoid the time-worn rhetoric of long take and slowness of the proverbial 'slow cinema' camp and to find corridors in him that will lead to informed ways of reaching other movements/auteurs in other times, other places. It explores various other aspects of Diaz and his cinema whose notoriety, the editors believe, should not rely solely on its incredible running time. The collection looks at Diaz from the perspectives of a national and a transnational critic - one of the two editors is from the Philippines, the other from another Asian location. It concentrates both on the spatial and the temporal, to place him within the intricacies of the culture and creative industries and the distribution practices and politics in his native place, to allow space for his 'detractors' who (perhaps rightly) focus on and object to his 'artlessness', and also to read him in the context of his fascination for the epic novel and novelistic cinema, his engagement with Dostoevsky and Jose Rizal, among others. This is the first book-length study on the Filipino auteur Lav Diaz. It looks critically at his career and corpus from various perspectives, with contributions from cinema studies researchers, film critics, festival programmers and artists. It offers a nuanced overview of the filmmaker and the cinematic traditions he belongs to for film enthusiasts, researchers and general readers alike. Primary readership will be researchers, scholars, educators and students in film studies. Also academics and researchers interested and working in cultural studies and Philippine studies.

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 transformatio