Beyond Bollywood

The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film

Jigna Desai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135887193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Beyond Bollywood is the first comprehensive look at the emergence, development, and significance of contemporary South Asian diasporic cinema. From a feminist and queer perspective, Jigna Desai explores the hybrid cinema of the "Brown Atlantic" through a close look at films in English from and about South Asian diasporas in the United States, Canada, and Britain, including such popular films as My Beautiful Laundrette, Fire, Monsoon Wedding, and Bend it Like Beckham.

1: South Asian Diasporas and Transnational Cultural Studies

Where the political terrain can neither resolve nor suppress inequality, it erupts in culture. Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined.

—Lisa Lowe (1998a, 22)

Only by weaving the analysis of cultural politics and political economy into a single framework can we hope to provide a nuanced delineation of the complex relations between transnational phenomena, national regimes, and cultural practices in late modernity.

—Aihwa Ong (1999, 16)

You may be an avid fan of diasporic films, eagerly awaiting the release of every new trailer and feature, or you may have casually walked by the video store and found the cover of Monsoon Wedding or Fire intriguing and brought it home. This book should be of interest and appropriate for both audiences. This book, like the films discussed below, should have a similar crossover appeal to multiple viewers—from those interested in understanding gender and sexual politics within racialized diasporic communities to those engaged with questions of agency and subjectivity in globalization and late capitalism. Therefore, this book is about film, but not only film. This project is written to be read in three simultaneous and different modalities. At one level, it is the first study of South Asian diasporic cinema and hence it asks questions generally considered of interest to those wanting to understand the emergence of this cinema, including its history, politics, and aesthetics, as well as readings of individual films. At another level, it intervenes in several theoretical debates occurring in queer, postcolonial, diasporic, cultural, feminist, and Asian-American studies, through the lens of transnationality. By focusing on significant topics such as the nation, subjectivity, agency, and embodiment in these areas, the project enriches and reshapes these conversations by suggesting new directions for analysis. Finally, this book expands transnational cultural critique, proposing a particular site of analysis, namely South Asian diasporic cultural studies. It interweaves the disparate conversations in these arenas in analyzing its object of study: South Asian diasporic cinema.

This is the first book-length analysis of South Asian diasporic cinema. The films I discuss here are located in the metropolitan centers of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and India. The book outlines the emergence of South Asian diasporic cinema, paying careful attention to its narrative films and their relationships to various cinemas (e.g., Hollywood, Bollywood, national, art house, and parallel). It further poses questions regarding the production, circulation, and reception of these films. What are the various modes and contexts of production? How do we analyze the aesthetic strategies of these films in relation to their cultural politics? What happens when these films travel? Are they at home only in their place of production or elsewhere as well? What does their migration tell us about transnational communities and interculturalism? How might spectatorship and the gaze be thought within transnational frameworks? How do we understand the feminist and queer politics of these films? How do they negotiate issues of commodification? What role does South Asian and diasporic cinema play in the construction, activation, and deferment of nostalgia? The book further examines the formation and characteristics of diasporic cinema and the development of a diasporic spectatorship and subjectivity that creates a new mode of understanding transnational cultural productions, identities, and experiences. Because cinema and cultural texts are always implicated and located within changing systems and fields of power, we must reformulate and recalibrate our theoretical frameworks and methodologies, and create new conceptual models, to best account for these shifts.

Though this project focuses on a specific cinema within specific contexts, one need not be invested in South Asian diasporic cultural studies to access the analyses occurring in the book. It is the unmarked privilege of Eurocentric logic that treats discussions and analyses of white normative subjects as theoretical and universal while rendering work on ethnic or postcolonial topics as esoteric and particular. Instead, this project must be considered as of interest and import to those working on broad theoretical conversations, such as embodiment, identification, cultural production and reception, and nationalism as it seeks to expose the mutual constitution of the unmarked normative and its marked “other” in Eurocentric logic.

The book also seeks to interrogate more generally questions related to transnational cultural studies around political economy, reception, and production as well as issues of subjectivity and identity. Broad theoretical questions around issues of agency, subjectivity, and embodiment are addressed through the framework of spatiality, transnationality, and migration. In addition, discussions here of how diasporic cinema employs and transforms aesthetic and cultural strategies such as camp and disidentification are clearly linked to a variety of theoretical debates. Finally, the project expands current conversations about our understanding of diaspora, nation, and globalization in the study of transnational migration. My hope is that this study will interrupt certain types of narratives (e.g., national, heteronormative, masculine, bourgeois) as it maps the space of the “Brown Atlantic,” paying particular attention to the contours of global capital, migration, colonialism, and empire in the global cities of New York, London, Toronto, and Bombay.

Studies of South Asian transnational cultures and subjectivities provide an opportunity to think through and interweave a variety of disciplinary approaches. Most important, this study attempts to disrupt and fracture the stability of disciplinary business as we know it—in other words, it does not fit neatly into the categorical disciplinary formations that drive knowledge production, rendering projects such as this at times illegible. Although in the last decade scholars in several key fields have greatly contributed to our understandings of transnational imaginings and practices, the boundaries that define the objects of study for fields such as gender, feminist, or women’s studies; area studies; Asian-American studies; and cultural studies do not generally include the production of the Brown Atlantic that is outlined and performed here in this book. At the same time, paradoxically, it is these very areas of inquiry that enable and inspire this project. This project seeks to reframe disciplinary paradigms as the project places centrally disparate “subjects or objects of study”: gender, sexuality, cinema, diaspora, globalization, Asian-Americans, Bollywood, and postcoloniality to name a few. In doing so, it begins to outline the necessary parameters for the formation and development of transnational cultural studies. This new creature, transnational cultural studies, integrates the fields of cultural studies, postcolonial and globalization studies, and black diasporic and Asian-American studies specifically in a way that challenges notions of culture as not being related to power relations, critiques of modernity and the nation, and political economy. In addition, this particular permutation also formulates the areas of feminist and queer studies as integral to this formation.

One contribution of this project is to locate cultural studies more strongly in relation to globalization processes. Rather than acquiescing an engagement of globalization to social scientists, I seek to understand how contemporary social, political, and economic processes can be understood through cultural production. For scholars of the Frankfurt school, such as Adorno, mass culture was a site of capitulation in contrast to the “cultural negativity” associated with modernist (high) art. In contrast, this project argues it is possible to seek complex and contradictory understandings of culture in relation to dominant institutions, ideologies, and aesthetics as well as global economics. South Asian diasporic cultural production is ideally poised to engage strategically and intellectually the macrological (i.e., capitalism and imperialism) and the micrological (i.e., discourses of everyday life) to enact analyses that examine the mutual constitution of the global and the local.¹ Migrant cultural production “does not metaphorize the experiences of ‘real’ immigrants but finds in the located contradictions of immigration both the critical intervention in the national paradigm at the point of its conjunction with the international and the theoretical nexus that challenges the global economic from the standpoint of the locality” (Lowe 1998a, 35). It is not necessary to seek folk or “traditional” texts as pure forms uncontaminated by capitalism and therefore to dismiss other media such as television, film, and the Internet as elitist. This project suggests that cinema provides a significant site of investigation in these negotiations not only because it is widely accessible but also because of its engagements with globalization during circulation. My suggestion here is that understanding the political economy of cultural production, circulation, and reception will illuminate the multiple and contradictory contestations and negotiations that occur with the South Asian diasporas in this moment of globalization.

Another significant contribution of this project is that it places diaspora and transnationality in the center of feminist and queer studies, pushing these areas to further consider their relationships to globalization and postcoloniality. In doing so, I produce three methods that must be deployed for South Asian diasporic and transnational cultural studies. Although lip service has been paid to asserting the significance of gender and sexuality in relation to race within diaspora studies, seldom has scholarship been able to maintain an analysis that considers all of these simultaneously.² Discourses of diaspora often eschew significant differences such as gender and class in favor of an emphasis on race and nation. The approach here is to explicate the ways complex and contradictory material processes and discourses construct and negotiate subjects of race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and so forth simultaneously. Areas of inquiry such as Asian-American and black British cultural studies have typically paid attention to the relevance of class and gender in racial formations. This study builds on this scholarship but also emphasizes the significance of a critical understanding of sexuality, particularly heteronormativity, to these racial configurations in the context of economic globalization. The integration here of feminist and queer studies with these other areas of inquiry forces an insistence on simultaneous understandings of gender, race, and sexuality in the production of South Asian diasporic subjectivities.

This chapter is divided into four main sections. The first section on South Asian diasporic culture begins with a brief summary of the formation and politics of contemporary South Asian transnationalities and migration. It then turns to the slippery concept of culture, clarifying how it is deployed in and its relevance to this project. The second and third sections are the heart of the chapter. In the second section, I present the critical frameworks, postcolonial critique, theories of globalization, and diasporic studies that provide the modes of understanding and engaging transnationality in this project. In the third section, I elaborate on the other theoretical engagements with transnationality in this project, namely those emerging from feminist and queer theories. Finally, I end with an overview of the remaining chapters of the book, highlighting individual films and significant arguments.

South Asian Diasporas

This book seeks to explore and explicate the cultural, political, and theoretical “cartographies” of South Asian diasporas, transnationalities that are disjointed, heterogeneous, and hybrid rather than stable, unified, or coherent. South Asia refers to the nation-states of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. “South Asia” as a constructed category is often used as a strategic geopolitical or geographical term indicating political alliances, both in Asia and the diasporas, and the term is one that can configure social identities and categories without necessarily alluding to national identities. It is not to be taken as a term designating an object of study, as does area studies, but rather as designating a constructed geopolitical region with interlinked political economies and histories, a subject of study. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize the ambivalent function of the term; although South Asia provides opportunity to analyze the region because of its interconnected history, politics, and economics, it is also imagined as a homogenous community from an “external” (often Western) point of view.

Unfortunately, discussions of India dominate the study and meaning of South Asia in most (inter)disciplinary scholarship and (identity) politics.³ The framework of “South Asian” can reflect a liberal Euro-American discourse that views the region as a homogenous monocultural area in which an Orientalized version of India represents South Asia. Thus, strategically identifying oneself or one’s politics as “South Asian” can create, though does not ensure, meaningful alliances within certain contexts. Nation-states such as Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, and Indian minorities including Muslims and Sikhs, as well as subaltern groups, offer multiple points to deconstruct not only the dominant national but also the Indian normative and multiple points from which to configure South Asia. Historical contexts have produced multiple oppressions and conflicts through the concept of religious difference within and between nations. In other words, the term needs to be unpacked to understand the complex relations of power that operate to consolidate a singular Hindu Indian construction of South Asia.

South Asian diasporas encompass people (and their ancestry) who have emigrated from South Asia. There are approximately 20 million people in the Indian diaspora alone (Sengupta 2003, A1). South Asian migrations are recent to the Middle East, like the guest workers, distant like the indentured servants who settled in the Caribbean during colonialism, or even multiple like the migrants who, evicted from Uganda, settled in Britain.⁴ South Asian diasporas refer to migrations to Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, North America, Fiji, South America, the Middle East, England, and East and South Africa in the nineteenth century and twentieth century. Although there are disjunctural similarities between older and newer diasporas, I focus on the latter in this project. I refer specifically to migration that occurred primarily after World War II and independence (post-1965 in the United States). I am particularly interested in recent South Asian migration to the West, specifically the United States, Britain, and Canada (Australia and New Zealand have increasing populations). The tension between similar and overlapping historical and material conditions of postcoloniality and globalization leading to migration provides the basis for this formulation of the Brown Atlantic. However, this is not to suggest a coherency or uniformity in discussing a singular diaspora but rather heterogeneous and multiple diasporas that can be discussed in relation to the specificities of their local modalities and histories.

South Asian is a useful nomenclature when referring to those who emigrated prior to the independence and partition of the Indian subcontinent. I primarily use the more specific term Indian when I am speaking exclusively or distinctly of India in this project to avoid masking the hegemony of India within the configuration of South Asia. In each case, I have tried to be specific as possible, referring to post-1965 U.S. immigrants as Indians but early century emigrants to Canada as Sikhs, Punjabis, or South Asians depending on the context. South Asian is also a strategic term for racial and ethnic identities, especially in the United States. Desi also has gained popularity to designate a pan-South Asian racial and ethnic migrant identity. In the Canadian and British context, Asian, rather than South Asian, often has been used to designate the similar identities. In these locations, South Asians tend to be the largest groups and therefore are known as Asians. (This is not the case in the United States). South Asians also identify as blacks, most frequently in Britain and Canada. South Asians in these two locations share some similar racialization processes because of a common legacy of racialized colonialism. South Asians in the United States and Canada also may share similar racialization processes because of similar immigration histories and political economies. In this transnational project, I employ South Asian to discuss diasporic locations. I attempt to employ the “local” moniker when possible. I have retained the nomenclatures and identities that are most significant and frequently used in specific locations, thus in the context of Britain and Africa, I employ Asians. Nevertheless, this study requires some fluidity and mobility in understanding shifting identification processes as it moves from South Asian to Indian or Pakistani to desi to British Asian to Asian Canadian and back again.

Public Culture

Many theories posit the homogenization of culture by the global spread of Western, namely American, cultural production, asserting that local cultures are overwritten by the hegemony of Western media. In contrast, Armand Mattelart cautions that transnational centrism is a dangerous colonizing perspective in which local subjects are reframed as “passive receptacles” of the “norms, values, and signs of transnational power” (cited in Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 13). In other words, Mattelart posits that “global” media are locally consumed and received in multiple ways that mitigate the dominance of such cultural production. Responding to such remarks, others comment that we must not be too eager to celebrate the local consumption and subversive reception of transnational products in the South without noting the profitable economic conditions of production and distribution in the North. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1992, 19) argue that

the danger here is the temptation to use scattered examples of the cultural flows dribbling from the “periphery” to the chic centers of the culture industry as a way of dismissing the “grand narrative” of capitalism (especially the totalizing narrative of late capitalism) and thus evading the powerful political issues associated with Western global hegemony.

Thus, studies examining the localized receptions of Hollywood or Bollywood films, solely at the level of reception, often ignore the economics of the production and distribution of such commodities at the level of political economy. Conversely, analyses focusing solely on production often ignore the local consumption of such works. Here, I argue that the study of the role of cultural politics of film in the production of diasporic affiliations, identities, and politics is crucial to an understanding of transnationalism and globalization.

Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (1997) suggest that culture and cultural production, though located within the expansion of global capitalism, act as sites that may contradict and oppose capital and are not subsumed fully under the logic of transnational capitalism. They, among others, offer us an opportunity to see cultural production not as markers of the hegemony of Western imperialism and the total penetration of capital into arenas marked as separate from the economic and political but as sites in which such contestations occur. Cultural production can offer the opportunity to explore not only the relationship between culture and modes of production but also the possible ways to negotiate global processes. In this case, diasporic cinema located in the interstices of these processes promises to be a productive and unique site of inquiry that may assist in “unthinking Eurocentrism” (Shohat and Stam 1994) within the context of global capitalism.

This project analyzes transnational cultural production as described by Lowe and Lloyd (1997, 15):

What we focus on is the intersection of commodification and labor exploitation under postmodern transnational modes of production with the historical emergence of social formations in time with but also in antagonism to modernity; these social formations are not residues of the “premodern” but are differential formations that mediate the processes through which capital profits through the mixing and combination of exploitative modes. What we are concerned with is the multiplicity of significant contradictions rooted in the longer histories of antagonism and adaptation.

Taking these critiques into account, the authors are considering here “the contradictions that emerge between capitalist economic formations and the social and cultural practices they presume but cannot dictate” and that these contradictions “give rise to cross-race and cross-national projects, feminist movements, anticolonial struggles, and politicized cultural practices” (p. 25). The project focuses on how transnational cultural production negotiates the nation-state and capitalism, specifically within the racialized and gendered social and political transnational spaces marked as diasporas. The cultural sphere analyzed here is one that has recently emerged. As Spivak (1999, 357) suggests, “Culture alive is always on the run, always changeful…. I am therefore a student of cultural politics. In what interests are differences defined?”

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