Cinema at the End of Empire: a Politics of Transition in Britain and India

Abstract

Priya Jaikumar's Cinema at the End of Empire breaks out of the analytic framework of national cinemas that still dominates the disciplinary imagination of film studies, despite recent attempts to dismantle the rubric. While the nation and its reconstitution remain at the heart of Jaikumar's ‘parallel narration of the intertwined histories’ (p. 1) of British and Indian film cultures in the late colonial period, when the concepts of the nation-state and a national cinema were being constructed in India and reconstructed in Britain, her comparative focus shows how the ‘national’ and the ‘local’ are shaped by, and implicated in, the ‘transnational’ and the ‘global’, and reveals an array of linkages that cannot be clearly viewed through the optic of a self-contained national cinema. The practice of considering the metropole and the colonies in conjunction has, of course, gained a prominent place on the research agenda of a new imperial history influenced by postcolonial theory but is relatively novel in the field of film studies, where scholarship on (post)colonial film cultures still remains segregated from work on European national cinemas; this monograph thus stages a significant critical intervention in that respect as well.