Author: Prem Chowdhry
Publisher: Sage Publications
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 294
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8178290626
Description
This book is an empirico-historical enquiry into the empire cinema made in Hollywood and Britain during the turbulent 1930s and 1940s. It shows how empire cinema constructed the colonial world, its rationale for doing so, and the manner in which such constructions were received by the colonized people.
Although empire cinema has been examined by western scholars, such studies have located the films almost wholly within the colonizing country, rather than exploring their reception among the colonized. By shifting the emphasis to the historical reception of imperial popular culture this book seeks to cover a certain terrain between the current Indian writing on national cinema and non-Indian writing.
Combining wide-ranging scholarship based on original documents, film studies and historical and political analysis, this book gives the reader a sense of how ideologies, images and identities are constructed, promoted, contested and resisted in reaction to key film representations of empire. This book offers fresh insights in the field of cultural and film studies from a different and multi-focal perspective. It will be of interest not only to specialist readership of media and cultural studies but also to those studying and interested in social history. sociology, popular culture, colonialism and race, representations of other-ness, the ideology of imperialism, nationalism and gender studies.
MEDIA REVIEW:
This is an important book on an important subject. These films were some of the most popular of their time. One can learn an enormous amount about contemporary attitudes and of the diverse responses that cinema audiences across the world made to such films.
- Times Higher Education Supplement
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
List of abbreviations
INTRODUCTION
Situating audiences in colonial India
British perceptions: conflicting viewpoints
Renegotiating ideological norms: the case of The Relief of Lucknow
Oriental-cum-imperialist discourse: the Hollywood stakes
A shift of policy: Shelving of films
THE DRUM (1938): THE MYTH OF THE MUSLIM MENACE
Creating myths: the North-West Frontier
Masculinity and femininity: positing gender relations
Anti-British propaganda: British apprehensions
Protest and agitations: crystallizing nationalist concerns
Identifying prime actors: audience and agitators
Reaction and action: the Congress ministry
GUNGA DIN (1939): SPECTRRE OF HINDU DOMINATION
Aura of authenticity: conflicting messages
Communalizing nationalism
Mahatma Gandhi: villain and saint
Privileging religion and caste: categorizing society
Loyalists and the army: surfacing contradiction
Reception of the film: national and imperialist
THE RAINS CAME (1941): IMPERIALISM, RACISM and GENDER RELATIONS
Images and accentuations: old and new
Historical complexity: princely states and development
Miscegenation: resolving contradictions
Transgressor as the 'giver': symbolizing relationships
Constructing femininity in a colonial setting: class dimension
Colored masculinity: the emasculated male
Publicity: release of the film
CONCLUSION
Images and concerns: Loyalist and nationalism
Post-colonial cinema: insecurities and justifications
Bibliography
Index