Focusing on post-liberalization Bombay cinema's metamorphosis into "Bollywood" during the nineties and noughties, this presentation will theorize cultural globalization as a process of plastic worldmaking. I will track a series of global gestures, comprising entanglements of material and semiotic transformations, that have forged Bollywood performatively. At stake is an understanding of this formation as a plastic emergence, in the sense that it conjures globalities that are mutable, relational, artificial, and often incompossible.
Bhaskar Sarkar teaches in the Department of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara, and works in the areas of Indian cinema, post/de-colonial media, the global South, cultures of uncertainty, and piracy. He is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke, 2009), and the co-editor of Documentary Testimonies (Routledge, 2009), Asian Video Cultures (Duke, 2017), and Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020). Sarkar is currently completing drafts of two monographs, Cosmoplastics: Bollywood's Global Gesture, and Pirate Humanities. To register: click here