Desiring Bollywood

Re-Staging Racism, Exploring Difference

Bibliographic Data

ID2259683
AuthorsE G Dattatreyan (0000-0002-3788-401X, Goldsmiths University of London, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume122
Issue4
Pages961-972
Publication date2020-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Anthropologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/aman.13463
OpenAlexW3018715970
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited36

In this article, I engage with the insights that emerged through the making of Desiring Bollywood, a collaborative ethno-fiction project I produced in 2018. The project recruited academics, amateur actors, novice filmmakers, and enthusiastic university students to narrate the story of Jason, an aspiring actor and filmmaker from Nigeria who I first met in 2013, soon after his release from Tihar Prison in Delhi, India. My goals are two-fold: first, to share a few scenes from the film-embedded in this article as video clips-to broadly theorize the affordances and limits of what I call re-staging, the collaborative, performance-based multimodal method we devised and deployed to produce Desiring Bollywood. Second, and more central to the article, I aim to analyze these very same scenes to show how re-staging, as it offered participants involved in the project the opportunity to reflexively explore how Jason's experiences of discrimination in Delhi and the aspirations and desires that led him there in the first place, creates a rich site of analysis to engage with the nuances of anti-Black racism in India in a moment where "India-Africa" economic relationships are on the rise. [multimodality, collaboration, racism, migration, Africa, India, Nigeria

Affordance · Amateur · Art · Criminology · Film director · Media studies · Movie theater · New delhi · Political science · Prison · Racism · Sociology · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Psychology · South Asian Cinema and Culture · Theatre and Performance Studies

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access