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Bollywood cinema is known for its elaborate spectacle of music, dance, costumes, and fantastical story lines. In Untimely Bollywood, Amit S. Rai argues that the fast-paced, multivalent qualities of contemporary Bollywood cinema symbolizes the changing conditions of media consumption in a globalizing India.
Rai analyses contemporary media practices and focuses on the multiple, contradictory, and evolving aspects of audiovisual media. He sheds light on how cinema and other popular media organize bodies, populations, and spaces to manage power and sensation and to reinforce a liberalized postcolonial economy.
Rai’s experience of attending the first showing of a Bollywood film in a single-screen theatre in Bhopal––the exhibition space, the sound system, the visual style of the film, the crush of the crowd––is significant. From that event, he elicits an understanding of cinema as a historically contingent experience of pleasure, a place where the boundaries of identity and social spaces are dissolved and redrawn. Rai goes on to trace the emerging correlation between the postcolonial media assemblage and capitalist practices, such as viral marketing and the development of multiplexes and malls in India.
ISBN - 9780198066422
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