Bollywood and Beyond: Cinematic Visions in the Postcolony

Catalog description

Forty years since Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak asked if the subaltern can speak, the way in which such communities imagine and narrate their experiences of alterity has been largely transfigured. By integrating cinema from the postcolonies of both India and Pakistan, this 1-2 unit course intends to examine how the onus of marginality in the Global South has now shifted from the oppressed to the oppressor: the emergence of social media and technocracy has "bestowed" the subaltern with a platform to speak. The more pressing question is: is anybody listening? By integrating weekly screenings with lectures from Stanford faculty and seminar-style discussions initiated by the course director, this class will confront apathy as a postcolonial pandemic, thereby inciting discourse around its horrors - and the enmity that perpetuates them - through the case studies of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. The course will open with an introduction to Bollywood song-and-dance and the foundations of subaltern theory, before moving across transhistorical case studies that examine post-Nehruvian cinema of the '60s, the representation of Pakistani social lives on Indian television, and the emergence of epistemological violence in post-2014 Hindi cinema, among other themes. By the end of this course, students will have a consolidated understanding of the role marginality has played in the cinematic, corporeal, and affective histories of postcolonial cinema. They will also be able to trace the origins of bigotry as it manifests in contemporary Hindi cinema, as well as examine the role dissenting filmmakers have played in politically subverting mainstream Hindutva narratives. This holistic outlook seeks to engage the course's central question by confronting apathy and interrogating the possibilities for resisting it. Course Instructor: Shiven Jain