University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Pages: 148
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-68393-299-4 • Hardback • December 2024 • $100.00 • (£77.00)
978-1-68393-300-7 • eBook • December 2024 • $45.00 • (£35.00) (coming soon)
Amrita Ghosh is assistant professor in South Asian literatures in the Department of English at University of Central Florida.
Rohit K Dasgupta is associate professor in gender and sexuality at the London School of Economics & Political Science.
Bhakti Shringarpure is author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and recently co-edited the collection Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War.
Introduction: India's Imperial Formations: Cultural Perspectives
Chapter 1: The Cultural Industries of India: Imperial & Critical Contexts
Chapter 2: Imperial Cinematic Imaginations: Bollywood’s Race Problem
Chapter 3: “We Love America”: Imperial Indian Diaspora on Television
Chapter 4: Metanarratives of Nation: Race, Caste and Religion
Incisive and accessible, India's Imperial Formations delves into the pervasive anti-Blackness embedded within Indian and diasporic media. By conceptualizing Indian media ecologies as imperial formations rather than merely racist ones, Ghosh, Dasgupta, and Shringarpure highlight the role of Indian media as a formidable global soft power in the 21st century. With a bold and ambitious agenda, India’s Imperial Formations weaves a compelling narrative that links popular Hindi cinema, social media, Mindy Kaling, and Indian American responses to the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprisings.
— Jigna Desai, University of California, Santa Barbara
India’s Imperial Formations: Cultural Perspectives is an innovative and very topical intervention in the fields of Indian and Indian diaspora cultural studies. This is necessary given that for too long the racism, casteism, and colorism of the commercial Hindi film industry have been overlooked by both fans and scholars.
— Amardeep Singh, Lehigh University