Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Liberalization's Children
Liberalization’s Children explores how youth and gender have become crucial sites for a contested cultural politics of globalization in India. Popular discourses draw a contrast between “midnight’s children,” who were rooted in post-independence Nehruvian developmentalism, and “liberalization’s children,” who are global in outlook and unapologetically consumerist. Moral panics about beauty pageants and the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day reflect ambivalence about the impact of an expanding commodity culture, especially on young women. By simply highlighting the triumph of consumerism, such discourses obscure more than they reveal. Through a careful analysis of “consumer ...
Listening with a Feminist Ear
Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries. Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.
The 1970s and its Legacies in India's Cinemas
The 1970s was a pivotal decade in the Indian social, cultural, political and economic landscape: the global oil crisis, wars with China and Pakistan in the previous decade, the Bangladesh war of 1971, labour and food shortages, widespread political corruption, and the declaration of the state of Emergency. Amidst this backdrop Indian cinema in both its popular and art/parallel film forms flourished. This exciting new collection brings together original research from across the arts and humanities disciplines that examine the legacies of the 1970s in India’s cinemas, offering an invaluable insight into this important period. The authors argue that the historical processes underway in the 1970s are important even today, and can be deciphered in the aural and visual medium of Indian cinema. The book explores two central themes: first, the popular cinema’s role in helping to construct the decade’s public culture; and second, the powerful and under-studied archive of the decade as present in India’s popular cinemas. This book is based on a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.
Dealing in Desire
"This fascinating ethnography examines one segment of Vietnam's diverse sex industry. Between 2006 and 2010, author Kimberly Kay Hoang was employed at four exclusive Saigon hostess bars catering to high-end clientele: wealthy Asian businessmen, Western expatriates and tourists, local Vietnamese men, and Viet Kieus (ethnic Vietnamese living abroad). Using participant observation and in-depth interviews with the sex workers, bar owners, managers, and mostly rich clients at all four locations, Hoang argues that Vietnam's high-end sex industry is much more than a byproduct of globalization--it's an integral component of the country's free-market capitalism, including its emergence as a regional ...
The Aesthetics of Ugliness in Contemporary Malayalam Cinema
Cinema as an aesthetic construct exists in a specific historical and political context, reflecting the society and its aesthetic values. Visual representation of the Ugly, its politics and aestheticization, are deeply rooted in the screen space. Featuring unconventional characters, unembellished visuals, raw and gritty storytelling, the unaesthetic challenges conventional notions of beauty on screen. The physical, psychological, and social manifestations of the ugly are incorporated into the cinematic space through content, theme, physical representations, symbols, setting, dialogue, as well as the camera. Exploring the intricate connection between ugliness and the cinematic medium, the book focuses on identity, gender, and other manifestations of Ugly in contemporary Malayalam cinema. It meticulously analyses the portrayal of ugliness in characters, narratives, and visual aesthetics, thus highlighting societal norms and realities of life. The book is a must-read for film scholars, enthusiasts, and anyone interested in the intersection of aesthetics and storytelling.
Unruly Figures
The vibrant media landscape of Kerala, where kiosks overflow with magazines and colourful film posters line roadside walls, creates a sexually charged public sphere that has a long history of political protests. The 2014 ‘Kiss of Love’ campaign garnered national attention, sparking controversy as images of activists kissing in public and dragged into police vans flooded the media. In Unruly Figures, Navaneetha Mokkil tracks the cultural practices through which sexual figures — particularly the sex worker and the lesbian — are produced in the public imagination. Her analysis includes representations of the prostitute figure in popular media, trajectories of queerness in Malayalam film...
The Cloud of Nothingness
This book explores ‘nothingness’, the negative way found in Buddhist and Christian traditions, with a focused and comparative approach. It examines the works of Nagarjuna (c. 150 CE), a Buddhist monk, philosopher and one of the greatest thinkers of classical India, and those of John of the Cross (1542-1591), a Carmelite monk, outstanding Spanish poet, and one of the greatest mystical theologians. The conception of nothingness in both the thinkers points to a paradox of linguistic transcendence and provides a novel insight into via negativa. This is the first full-length work comparing nothingness (emptiness) in Nagarjuna (Mahayana Buddhism) and John of the Cross (Christianity) in any language. It augments the comparative approach found in Buddhist-Christian comparative philosophy and theology. This book is of especial interest to academics of Buddhist and Christian studies searching for avenues for intellectual dialogue.
From Empire to Anthropocene
"This book is an analysis of the inventiveness of contemporary fiction and of ways in which it engages our understanding of time in relation to globalization and environmental damage. The book convincingly dispels the notion that so-called global novels in English preclude the possibility of historical analysis and social collectivity"--
Marathi Cinema, Cultural Space, and Liminality
This book is a critical history of Marathi cinema, from its formative years in the 1920s till the end of 1990s. It is the first work to explore the industrial and aesthetic dynamics of Marathi cinema, and elaborate on the idea of region as performance using the framework of critical socio-spatial analysis. Against the dominance of Hindi cinema, the Marathi film industry, as a regional film practice in India, has developed within a cultural and spatial liminality. This historical situation of the Marathi film industry is formulated here as the shaping and dispersal of a vernacular cultural space; and is traced over a period of seven decades, across genres like the saint-film, social melodramas, and the tamasha film, as well as in urban and mofussil sites of film circulation. The book aims to be a useful resource for students, researchers, and general readers, while attending to a lack of scholarly inquiries on this important regional film culture.
Outside the Lettered City
This title traces how middle-class Indians responded to the rise of the cinema as a popular form of mass entertainment in early twentieth-century India. It draws on archival research to uncover aspirations and anxieties about the new medium, which opened up tantalising possibilities for nationalist mobilisation on the one hand and troubling challenges to the cultural authority of Indian elites on the other.
