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Where Histories Reside
India as Filmed Space
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Book Presentation:
In Where Histories Reside Priya Jaikumar examines eight decades of films shot on location in India to show how attending to filmed space reveals alternative timelines and histories of cinema. In this bold "spatial" film historiography, Jaikumar outlines factors that shape India's filmed space, from state bureaucracies and commercial infrastructures to aesthetic styles and neoliberal policies. Whether discussing how educational shorts from Britain and India transform natural landscapes into instructional lessons or how Jean Renoir's The River (1951) presents a universal human condition through the particularities of place, Jaikumar demonstrates that the history of filming a location has always been a history of competing assumptions, experiences, practices, and representational regimes. In so doing, she reveals that addressing the persistent question of "what is cinema?" must account for an aesthetics and politics of space.
About the Author:
Priya Jaikumar is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California and author of Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India, also published by Duke University Press.
Press Reviews:
"With grace and flair Priya Jaikumar shows how the preproduction practices and industry cultures of cinema—from expedition and nature films to commercial Bollywood cinema—produced and reinforced the spatial notions of territory and empire that dominated geopolitical histories. She looks forward to contemporary Indian geopolitics, as the privatization of economic resources increasingly harms vulnerable populations—even while location-based films exploit these populations and iconic precolonial architecture, now often in ruins, for a cinematic backdrop or ambience. Here is a magnificent study." - Tom Conley, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor, Harvard University
"Where Histories Reside is a superbly written book in which Priya Jaikumar uses the optics of space to recast the discourse of Indian cinema and its pasts. Landscape, territory, and architecture are brought into conversation with geography, cultural theory, cinema studies, and politics. The result is a magnificent and methodologically daring approach that displaces the desire for causality with the spatialization of historical inquiry." - Ranjani Mazumdar, Professor of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi
"Employing a variety of methodologies, the volume is valuable both in itself and as a model for subaltern cinema history and historiography." - K. J. Wetmore Jr., Choice
"Written with style and verve, [Where Histories Reside] is one of those rare academic works that can justifiably claim a readership beyond conventional disciplinary provinces like film history or theory." - Anustup Basu, Critical Quarterly
"Where Histories Reside is a great resource.... It is an authoritative book with meticulous research.... [I] recommend it to those who are interested in how space, history, geography, and people have come to create the cinematic space." - Umme Al-wazedi, Quarterly Review of Film and Video
"Where Histories Reside might be a book of multiple localised legacies concerning regional geography, Empire and globalised networks of capital and film production, but it is also very much a publication brimming with hard-won personal insight and critical reflection." - Alastair Philips, BioScope
"Priya Jaikumar’s Where Histories Reside posits India as cinematic metaphoria that spatializes, orients and transits us into multiple registers of territorial belonging, historical claims and political imaginaries.... [It] catapults from the dense granularity of Calcutta’s bylanes to cinema’s ontological status with a theoretical deftness and verve that keeps an analytical texture alive." - Pujita Guha, Studies in South Asian Film & Media
"Where Histories Reside shows that space is not a thing to be filmed, nor simply a place to film in.... Jaikumar’s book invites us to regard both national and cinematic space as overdetermined and also to consider that seeing filmed space requires multiple overlapping lenses." - Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies
"Beginning with a promise of realizing a spatial critique in film studies, this book contributes to the spatial turn in film studies.... The significant success of the book is in gesturing towards diverse methods which go beyond the textual, enter the world of commerce, labour and interlink the on screen with off screen." - C. Yamini Krishna, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
"Effortlessly transcends the well-worn exceptionalism within which Indian cinema studies has long operated." - Parichay Patra, Discourse
See the publisher website: Duke University Press
> From the same author:
Cinema at the End of Empire (2006)
A Politics of Transition in Britain and India
> On a related topic:
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The Labor of Location
The Screen Traveller's Guide (2023)
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Visitors, Cosmopolitans and Migratory Cinematic Visions of a Superdiverse City
Dir. Keith B. Wagner and Roland-François Lack
The Underwater Eye (2022)
How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy
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