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Feature

BioScope Volume 12 Issue 1-2, June & December 2021

We’re happy to announce the publication of BioScope vol. 12. no. 1-2.

The Keywords Issue marks 10 years of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. We first conceived of this special issue in 2018 when we were nearing our 10th anniversary. At the time, the editorial group sought a celebratory stock-taking – a means of noting the dynamism of the field of screen studies from and about South Asia – and signalling emerging directions for the future. A lot has happened since 2018. Most dramatically, we are living through a global pandemic with devastating and differential impacts across South Asia. Stark inequalities within this region have tragically come to the fore, as have the geopolitics of vaccine patents, aid infrastructures and news reportage that exacerbate and consolidate the difference between the West and the rest. The current moment underscores the necessity to view the field of intellectual production itself with a diachronic and spatially comparative lens, one that is attuned to the past constructions of a place and its media and the ongoing ramifications of these constructions.

At its most polemical, the ambition of this issue is to confront the geopolitics of knowledge production and disciplinary norms. A keywords approach allows us to ask what some of the central epistemes currently at play in film and media studies are. Each keyword in this collection aims to present concise accounts of core themes and debates, thereby illustrating the conceptual underpinnings upon which the field has been built. As such, the issue serves to highlight important areas of media scholarship pertaining to South Asia and serves as a ready reference for those unfamiliar with this thriving field of study. More significantly, this special issue also allows us to interrogate these central epistemes, illuminating both the promises and the challenges of South Asian screen studies. In a field dominated by Anglophone scholars trained in Euro–American paradigms of film and media studies, our work fundamentally operates with a double consciousness. At one level, we find great value in critical frameworks generated in French, American, or German contexts that help us approach and analyse South Asian media cultures. At another level, we often find that categories of analysis are contingent on the grounds (and languages) from which they have emerged.

Editorial

The Keywords Issue

Keyword

Analogue and Digital
Ravi Sundaram

Archive
Ashish Rajadhyakhsha

Art Cinema
Aparna Frank

Audience
Stephen Putnam Hughes

B & C Circuit
Valentina Vitali

Bazaar
Kajri Jain

Body
Darshana Sreedhar Mini

Bollywood
Lotte Hoek

Censorship
Monika Mehta

Darshan(a)
M. Madhava Prasad

Design
Ranjani Mazumdar

Diaspora
Amardeep Singh

DIY Media in South Asia
Amit S. Rai

Documentary in Contemporary India
Veena Hariharan

Double
Richard Allen

Dubbing
Tejawsini Ganti

Environment
Bishnupriya Ghosh

Fan
S.V.Srinivas

Fantasy
Uma Maheshwari Bhrugubanda

Film Music
Shikha Jhingan

Genre
Kartik Nair

Hollywood
Nitin Govil

Infrastructure
Rahul Mukherjee

Installation
Iftikhar Dadi

Intermediality
Vebhuti Duggal

Islamicate
Salma Siddique

Language
Ravikant

Melodrama
Ravi S. Vasudevan

Modernity
Manishita Dass

Obsolescence
Sudhir Mahadevan

Photography
Sabeena Gadihoke

Piracy
Lawrence Liang

The Popular
Anustup Basu

The Public
Anupama Prabhala

Queer
Shohini Ghosh

Realism
Moinak Biswas

Region/Regional Cinema
Ratheesh Radhakrishnan

Remix
Kuhu Tanvir, Ramna Walia

Social Media Platform
Aswin Punathambekar, Sriram Mohan

Song-and-dance sequence
Usha Iyer

Sound
Indranil Bhattacharya

Space
Priya Jaikumar

Stardom
Rachel Dwyer, Rakesh Sengupta

Television
Shanti Kumar

Voice
Pavitra Sundar

Author Biographies

Bibliography

Filmography