South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters ed. by Elora Halim Chowdhury and Esha Niyogi De

Abstract

Reviewed by: South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters ed. by Elora Halim Chowdhury and Esha Niyogi De Sushmita Chatterjee (bio) South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters edited by Elora Halim Chowdhury and Esha Niyogi De. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020, 330 pp., $99.00 hardcover, $35.00 paper. South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters makes exceptional contributions on varied levels to conversations in film studies, South Asian studies, gender and feminist analyses, and cultural critique. First, the book is a remarkably exemplary edited volume that showcases the magic of collaborative work and its contributions to transregional analyses. The chapters in the volume speak to each other through political borders and violent histories of the region. This shared resonance, attuned to the complexities of remembering histories and working with the complexities of the present moment that frame South Asia, powerfully draws out the significance of filmic archives for telling and re-telling histories. The book is a rare collective event that brings scholarship from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh in conversation as oftentimes these countries are studied in isolation without noting their shared and fractured histories. Second, the book extends the breadth and depth of transnational scholarship through an emphasis on transregional filmscapes. Attentive to the politics of nation formations and attuned to critical entanglements within south-south relations, the book draws out intricate nuances to trajectories of subject formation. In critical distance to a simplistic area studies or comparative approach, the book complicates "transnational" and "South Asia" through nuanced transregional analyses. The third significant contribution of the edited volume is its powerfully evocative turn to politics and poetics that also oftentimes get sidelined in favor of one or the other when studying South Asia from the global north. The editors, Elora Halim Chowdhury and Esha Niyogi De, note, "This edited volume is born out of a collaborative effort to excavate the complex politics and poetics of bordered identity and of crossing" (3). By anchoring "filmic politics" in its involvement with gender, nationality, sexuality, language, religion, and their specific confluences, the volume consistently notes the shifting grounds of identity formation through political turmoil alongside the moving frames of representation (3). In its analysis of political events, the volume does not shy away from the political realities and hierarchies of geographical travel and access to forums and information. The editors and authors share stories about their conference travel obstacles through candid articulations of citizenship status and visa politics. Ironically, these conversations are often missing from transnational analyses even when they seek to grapple with borders and nations. By situating these conversations at the heart of "cinematic archives" through "conflicted landscapes" the book frames cinema in relation to geopolitical reality and discourse formation in an unprecedented unique manner (4, 8). Indeed, [End Page 372] this volume is a much-needed intervention in transnational studies, politics, and its relation to poetics. The edited volume comprises three sections with Part I on "Nations and Regional Margins." In Part I, Fahmidul Haq discusses independent filmmakers in Bangladesh and their negotiation of national identity. Kamran Asdar Ali's chapter discusses Pakistani films from the 1960s and analyzes politics of gender and sexuality. Amit Ranjan's chapter follows with a discussion of Sikh identity in Hindi cinema. Glen Hill and Kabita Chakma discuss cinema in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and the hegemonic impositions placed on Bangladesh's Indigenous people. In Nasreen Rehman's chapter we read about film director Hassan Tariq's film Neend and its gender politics. Part II on "Transregional Crossings" begins with Madhuja Mukherjee's chapter on cinematic confluences in the 1920s, among Bombay, Calcutta, and Lahore. The following chapter by Lotte Hoek discerns the traces of East Pakistani Urdu films in Bangladesh's cinematic history. Considering the complexities of representation, Esha Niyogi De's chapter studies action heroines in specific Pakistani films spanning the late 1970s and 1980s. Hariprasad Athanickal's chapter moves us to South Indian cinema and studies the relation of new wave directors to mainstream cinema in the area. Engaging with the role of diaspora in Pakistani Punjabi film, Gwendolyn S. Kirk's chapter analyzes Pakistani Punjabi films to trace an active framing of Punjabi identity. The next chapter by Zebunnisa Hamid studies post...