Provincializing Bollywood

Bhojpuri Cinema in the Comparative Media Crucible

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by Akshaya Kumar

Type: Studies
Subject: Countries > India
Keywords: India, regional, Asia
Publishing date: 2021
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Collection: Media Dynamics in South Asia
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 256 pages
5 ¾ x 9 inches (14.5 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-19-013018-3

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Book Presentation:
• Draws upon a host of analytical frameworks and geographical contexts to synthesize the comparative media crucible, refusing to confine the significance of Bhojpuri cinema to the Bhojpuri speaking region
• Reassembles provincial north India as a historical-theoretical formation, whose riparian imaginaries are being overlaid with "concrete" substances
• Analyzes the political ecology in which Indian cinemas have taken shape by invoking a widely shared debt
• Observes Bhojpuri media via the public scandal of overflowing substances that breach the structural barriers which reinforce embankment infrastructures

Provincializing Bollywood argues that Bhojpuri cinema exemplifies the overflow of a provincial derivative form that defies its place in the given scheme of things. Situating it at the intersection of vernacular media production and the infrastructural-political reordering of provincial north India, the book shows that Bhojpuri media's characteristic 'disobedience' is marked by a libidinal excess - simultaneously scandalizing and moralizing - to address the inexact calculi of Bhojpuri speaking region's'underdevelopment'. Bhojpuri media therefore demands that it is assessed not merely for its internal content but within the comparative media crucible, marked by interpenetrating forms and histories as diverse as those of ecological distress, musical traditions, gendered segregation, real estate, urban resettlements, and highway modernities. Foregrounding the libidinal excess, language politics, and curatorial informalities, Provincializing Bollywood synthesizes Bhojpuri media's spectacular public insubordination and its invocation of a shared debt, which is by no means regional in its provenance.

About the Author:
Akshaya Kumar, Assistant Professor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore Akshaya Kumar is assistant professor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore.

Press Reviews:
"This brilliant book, boldly comparative and bristling with ideas on every page, reads the re-emergence of Bhojpuri cinema in the new millennium as symptomatic of an "overflow" of north Indian provinciality. The "scandal" of this new Bhojpuri cinema and media prompts a deep meditation of what it means to be a province. Akshaya Kumar provides critical insights into how "libidinal belligerence and skewed entitlements" find expression in the "comparative media crucible" while negotiating local, regional, provincial, and vernacular imaginaries in popular culture. A deeply rewarding and provocative read." - Francesca Orsini, author of Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India

"Akshaya Kumar's ultimate interest is the political formation of contemporary India. Kumar argues that transformations in capital in contemporary India have found their expression in intensified regional identities. When the subaltern speaks here, they are speaking Bhojpuri. To account for this political identity, Kumar has to rethink the operations of cinema and the broader media ecology in which it operates. The result is an ambitious, relentlessly inventive book, opening up new domains for film and media studies." - Brian Larkin, author of Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria

See the publisher website: Oxford University Press

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