Women’s Transborder Cinema
Cloth: 12/10/2024
About the Book
Can we write women’s authorial roles into the history of industrial cinema in South Asia? How can we understand women’s creative authority and access to the film business infrastructure in this postcolonial region? Esha Niyogi De draws on rare archival and oral sources to explore these questions from a uniquely comparative perspective, delving into examples of women holding influential positions as stars, directors, and producers across the film industries in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.De uses film tropes to examine the ways women directors and film entrepreneurs claim creative control within the contexts of anti-colonial nationalism and global capitalism. The region’s fictional cinemas have become staging grounds for postcolonialism, with colonial and local hierarchies merged into new imperial formations. De’s analysis shows how the gendered intersections of inequity and opportunity shape women’s fiction filmmaking while illuminating the impact of state and market formations on the process.
Innovative and essential, Women’s Transborder Cinema examines the works of South Asia’s women filmmakers from a regional perspective.
About the Author
Esha Niyogi De is a senior lecturer in the Writings Programs division at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the coeditor of South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters and author of Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman: A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought.Reviews
Blurbs
“This is a pathbreaking book on female authorship and filmic labor. It brings together submerged archives and hidden voices of women producers and directors from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. A unique contribution to scholarship on South Asian aesthetics and cinema.”--Kamran Asdar Ali, coauthor of Gender, Politics, and Performance in South Asia
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