The Politics of Emotion in British Asian Experiences of Bombay Cinema

Abstract

British Asian subjects articulate their emotional and embodied engagement with Bombay cinema,1 making visible glimpses of their social life. This article scrutinizes the Bombay cinema experience through a sociological, empirical and ethnographic analysis of 24 semi–structured interviews undertaken in London, Manchester and Oldham. I employ the ‘circuit of culture model’ (du Gay et al. 1997; Johnson 1986) to explore the relations between the processes of production, representation, reception and regulation in the diasporic circulation of Bombay cinema. The ambiguous and ambivalent, but clear polarities that define the respondents’ relations with the cinema articulate a dialectical dynamism of affect and criticism. Combining the ‘keeping in touch with back home’ discourses of earlier South Asian generations with other desires of ‘recognition’, ‘visibility’, ‘consumption’ and ‘drudgery of culture’, they convey their understanding of themselves and their world. Some respondents were reflexive about their complicity in the dominant ideologies, and the holding together of the contradictions enabled discussion and debates. The desire for ‘glimpses of ourselves’ is full of contradictions in a neo–liberal global culture, and Bombay cinema practice becomes a site for the postcolonial diasporic imagining of identity. I argue that the contradictory and ambivalent identifications in Bombay cinema experiences are reconfigured to desire a decolonized subjectivity where an inter–subjective sensibility is valued through a prioritizing of an emotional connection and relationality. This, I propose is a critique of Western liberal notions of ‘individual self formation.’