Comm 362 Bollywood: Communicating Contemporary South Asia through Cinema

Bollywood is a spectrum of major media industries in India and South Asia that produce entertainment for worldwide consumption. Bollywood is a recent term that highlights the transnational character of the Industry, very much like Hollywood. Specifically we will examine transnational Indian Cinema with the following emphases: 1. globalization and the politics of transnational film production, distribution, and reception; 2. local-regional-global dynamics; 3. the construction and negotiation of gender, family, nation, religion/communalism, and emerging new filmic genres; 4. issues of filmic representation and diasporic identitites.