Call for papers

Cinema in contemporary India has earned an unassailable importance in the nation’s cultural and political life. Today, the cinemas of India have emerged as spaces of global transnational exchanges, in terms of their popular reach in India and abroad, on different platforms along with proliferations in the realms of the social, economic, cultural, political, ideological, aesthetic, and institutional discourses. Since early years, cinema in India maintained a close tie with the greater world, often incorporating the relevant social problems within their representational dynamics. They co-opted various pre- and extra-filmic performative and other cultures, like folk and proscenium theatre, oral and musical traditions etc., to develop a unique mode of address. In the course of its journey, cinemas of India have also assimilated influence and aesthetic improvisations from world cinema, from Hollywood to European art cinema and even the radical temperament of the radical film culture from the non-Western world. The interplay of gender, sexuality, nationalism, caste, class, religion, ethnicity within specific historical landscape enriched the discursive domain that the cinemas offer here. Nevertheless, cinemas of India ceased to be identified as a unitary cultural practice. Not only the linguistic diversity of the nation, rather the continued existence of cultural multiplicities has made the domain more vivid and spectacular. Moreover, the adoption of the policy of economic liberalization from the 1990sand the digital revolution has opened up new avenues for production, distribution and exhibition of Indian films. Numerous experiments in the recent years by the Indian and Indian-origin filmmakers contributed significantly to this ever expanding domain of the cinemas of India.

On the other hand, scholarly works on Indian cinemas have now been able to surpass disciplinary domains to connect almost every domain of critical studies, from humanities to social sciences to even science and technology. The plethora of works discussing Indian cinemas thus represents a rich theoretical cluster which continues to address various issues and aspects of critical concern – aesthetics, politics, culture, technology, economy and many more. The forthcoming issue will deal with themes /issues related to Indian Cinema.

Timeline for the forthcoming issue :- Submission of papers: 30 April 2020

THE NOVEMBER 2020 ISSUE THEME :- REGIONAL FILMS IN INDIA