Abstract
The question of belonging is central to Manish Acharya's satire Loins of Punjab Presents, which, I argue, uses a Hindi film song contest set in a New Jersey hotel and sponsored by a pork company to explore the processes of exclusion that are an essential part in the construction of national and cultural communities. This essay looks at the critical cinephilia in Loins, which positions itself in dialogue with existing films about diasporic South Asian communities – especially Karan Johar's Kabhi Khushi Khabie Gham – implicating cinematic representation in exclusionary practices and revealing the centrality of performance to ideas of belonging. Through its emphasis on representation and performance, the film celebrates the pleasures of film spectacle yet critiques and challenges cinematic constructions of ‘Indian’ and ‘American’. But while the film broadens both categories, it resists uncritical multiculturalism by incorporating a paranoid, post-9/11 US nationalism and white liberal orientalism.
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