New political realities and shared histories connect film cultures across borders

In South Asia massive anticolonial movements in the twentieth century created nation-states and reset national borders, forming the basis for emerging film cultures. Following the upheaval of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, new national cinemas promoted and reinforced prevailing hierarches of identity and belonging. At the same time, industrial and independent cinemas contributed to remarkably porous and hybrid film cultures, reflecting the intertwining of South Asian histories and their reciprocal cultural influences. This cross-fertilization within South Asian cultural production continues today.

South Asian Filmscapes excavates these complex politics and poetics of bordered identity and crossings through selected histories of cinema in South Asia. Several essays reveal ways in which fixed notions of national identity have been destabilized by the cross-border mobility of filmed arts and practitioners, while others interrogate how filmic politics intersects with discourses of nationalism, sexuality and gender, religion, and language. Together, they offer a fluid approach to the multiple histories and encounters that conjure “South Asia” as a geographic and political entity in the region and globally through a cinematic imagination.

"This volume of incisive and bold essays opens a world of encounters and divisions between the connected and divided people of South Asia—creating new space for rethinking South Asia’s past and shining a light for building trusting alliances in the future."—Yasmin Saikia, Arizona State University

"Will ignite a much-needed conversation for our times. The essays make a rich tapestry of intersecting as well as tensile lines of memory, affectations, and ideologies. It will be useful to scholars across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences."—Anustup Basu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"South Asian Filmscapes will become not only a standard reference but also one that we will use repeatedly in both graduate and undergraduate classrooms. It is, in short, a complete rethinking of the region using cinema and its mobility as the vantage for doing so."—Sangita Gopal, University of Oregon