We’re happy to announce the publication of BioScope vol. 11. no. 2.
‘Can I share my screen?’ asks someone in a meeting. They fumble with the buttons. We move from a close shot of their face, inside the contours of their domestic background, and arrive jerkily onto their desktop. In the foreground is their presentation, hastily expanded to fill our screens. ‘Can you see that?’ Thumbs go up in the small frames around the screen, heads nodding and someone mouthing a monologue while on mute. We now share the screen. Who and what do we find when we share the screen in this manner? Many readers of BioScope will have had the opportunity to engage with one another in new ways, as seminars in Dhaka, New York or Singapore became accessible to vastly distributed participants in ways always already possible but previously rarely realised. While we have withdrawn physically, we have connected virtually in new ways. Across border and visa regimes, in different time zones, we are newly reconnected. We share a screen.
For a journal and community dedicated to exploring the screen in its multiple ways, the current moment presents plentiful avenues for reflection. How might we explore the plural mise-en-scène of the shared screen? What mode of spectatorship emerges when you continually see yourself somewhere inside the frame and where you spend a lot of time watching others watching their screen? What processes and practices of the personal screen have been hastened or diverted by pandemic life in all its forms, whether epidemiological (live graphs, stats), social (Bluetooth to register who nearby will prove to be infected), or political (antivaxx WhatsApp’s, stay at home directives)? And in what ways may the anomie of our progressive move to personal screens be attenuated to some extent by ‘sharing our screens’? Is the watchparty here to stay? With the personal screen a scholarly frontier and new screen-based social lives enveloping many, we draw on our collective knowledge and research practice to parse the contemporary moment.
In this issue of BioScope, we focus on forms of adaptation, transnational connectivity and changing social and political landscapes.
Editorial
Share your screen
Ravi Vasudevan, Rosie Thomas, S.V. Srinivas, Kartik Nair, Debashree Mukherjee, Lotte Hoek
Articles
At Home in the World: Co-productions and Indian Alternative Cinema
Harmanpreet Kaur
#ImNotAChickFlick: Neoliberalism and Post-Feminism in Veere Di Wedding (My Friend’s Wedding, 2018)
Megha Anwer, Anupama Arora
Author-Screenwriter-Director (1930s-1950s): Articulating Authorship through Self-Adaptations and Film Novelisations in Bengal
Priyanjali Sen
Fieldwork
Nigar Hai Toh Industry Hai: Notes on the Morale and Morality of Pakistani Film
Salma Siddique
Book Reviews
Book Review: Rahul Mukherjee, Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty
Nusrat S. Chowdhury
Book Review: Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury, Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh
Rahul Mukherjee
Book Review: Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury and Rahul Mukherjee in Conversation
Rahul Mukherjee, Nusrat Chowdhury
Book Review: Elora Halim Chowdhury & Esha Niyogi De, eds, South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters
Chinmay Sharma