Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality
Purnima Mankekar is Professor in the Departments of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India and coeditor of Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia, both also published by Duke University Press.
Moving Images: Reconceptualizing Indianness in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge
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Published:January 2015
This chapter analyzes the place of Bollywood film Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge in the generation and circulation of notions of India and Indianness as portable in a historical and political-economic context marked by the liberalization of the Indian economy. Both addressing and representing certain sections of communities in the Indian diaspora, this film participated in the production of discourses about Nonresident Indians or NRIs as authentic and as predicated on masculinist notions of class and mobility. At the same time, NRI women are represented as embodying the eruptive potentiality of erotics. Ultimately, in representing NRIs as idealized, classed, gendered, and sexualized in specific ways, the film participated in the discursive and affective unyoking of national belonging from territoriality.
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