TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies is pleased to announce the publication of TOPIA 26: Bollywood and the South Asian Diaspora, guest edited by Nandi Bhatia (UWO). Over the last decade, Bollywood—a term that loosely refers to Bombay’s Hindi-Urdu cinema and represents the largest film industry in the world—has attracted tremendous interest as an area of academic inquiry. What links many critical discussions is an attempt to understand Bollywood’s relationship with the diaspora, where this cultural form is increasingly consumed through new communication networks, satellite links, television channels, grocery and online stores, the Internet, Bollyweb, exhibitions, academic courses, and film festivals. The articles assembled in this special theme issue attempt to expand and deepen our understanding of the relationship between Bollywood and the South Asian diaspora, analyzing Bollywood as a complex terrain for the production of multiple and intersecting narratives about “homelands” and imagined communities of diaspora across transnational sites.

The TOPIA 26 Table of Contents is below. To purchase a copy of TOPIA 26, visit the York University Bookstore, or contact Wilfrid Laurier Press at http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/press/Journals/topia/index.shtml.

Number Twenty-six – Fall 2011
Special Issue: Bollywood and the South Asian Diaspora

Nandi Bhatia
Introduction: Bollywood and the South Asian Diaspora

Articles

Chandrima Chakraborty
Shaming the Indian Diaspora, Asking for “Returns:” Swades

Priscilla Boshoff
Bollywood Nights: Indian Youth and the Creation of Diasporic Identity in South Africa

Shahnaz Khan
The Complicated Pleasures of Hindi Cinema in Canada

Madhuja Mukherjee
Remembering Devdas: Travels, Transformations and Persistence of Images Bollywood Style

Anjali Gera Roy
Meanings of Bhangra and Bollywood Dancing in India and the Diaspora

Ajay Gehlawat
The Gori in the Story: The Shifting Dynamics of Whiteness in the Bollywood Film

Fazeela Jiwa
Vamps, Heroines, Otherwise: Diasporic Women Resisting Essentialism

Faiza Hirji
Ranis Making Rotis: Dreams of the Good South Asian Girl

Review Essays

Sonam Singh
The Production and Consumption of the Bollywood Phenomenon

Astrida Neimanis
Theory That Matters: Feminism, Porous Boundaries and the New Materialisms

Christine Mitchell
Does Not Compute: Language Circuits and Translatability

Reviews

Alia Somani
Flexible Identities: Muslim Diasporas and the Bollywood Film Industry

Malreddy Pavan Kumar
Gender and Nation in Bombay Cinema

Suvadip Sinha
Cinematic Mourning: Partition and Indian Cinema

Jon Sufrin
History, Media, Memory

Jaclyn Rohel
Remembering the Small-Town Chinese Restaurant: Diasporic Culture at the Junction of Old and New

Caitlin McKinney
Toward a Queer Canadian Archive

Pauline Wakeham
Re-Centring Indigenous Ideas