[csaa-forum] seminar by Anand Pandian 20th June Friday 6 pm

[Devleena Ghosh]

Dear friends
Please come to this presentation by Dr Anand Pandian from Johns  
Hopkins University hosted by the Sydney South Asia Seminar Group/ 
Trans/forming Cultures Research Centre.

I would also be grateful if you could pass it along through your  
networks

Thanks
Devleena

Day Friday
Date 20th June
Time 6 pm
Venue UTS Bldg3, rm210, enter via 755 Harris St

Framing Feelings: Landscapes of Affect in South Indian Cinema

Cinema is one of the most influential cultural technologies of  
displacement in the contemporary world, readily transporting its  
viewers to imagined places other than their own.  This paper explores  
the affective resonances of such imaginative displacement in the  
Tamil commercial film industry of south India.  Insistent projections  
of Tamil cultural identity as an artifact of regional custom and  
local environments in this film industry have given way in recent  
years to a globalization of filmic production and shooting locale.   
This paper relies upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted on location  
with three different Tamil film crews working to shoot both song and  
scene sequences in Malaysia, Singapore, and Dubai.  I focus on the  
cinematic techniques through which directors, cinematographers, and  
art, music, and dance directors work to produce moving and powerful  
frames and shots.  Of particular concern is their manipulation of the  
tangible qualities of filmic landscape, setting, or mise-en-scene as  
a means of intensifying feeling among their projected audiences.  
Focusing on the production and circulation of feelings such as  
anticipation, joy, and desire through material cinematic practices,  
the paper suggests that Indian filmmakers now traverse the globe in  
pursuit of purified environments for affective expression.


Anand Pandian is an Assistant Professor in the Department of  
Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He completed his PhD in  
socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley  
in 2004. His research work concerns questions of modernity, ethics,  
and aesthetics in south India. His Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue  
in South India (forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2009)  
examines the moral and ethical stakes of agrarian development in  
postcolonial India. A second research project now underway concerns  
imaginations of locality, practices of cinematic setting, and the  
production of affect in the Tamil-language commercial cinema of south  
India. He has published articles in American Ethnologist, Cultural  
Anthropology, Anthropological Theory, the Indian Economic and Social  
History Review, and several other scholarly journals and edited  
collections, and has co-edited Race, Nature, and the Politics of  
Difference (Duke University Press, 2003).




(Dr) Devleena Ghosh
Associate Professor, Social Inquiry Program
Bon Marche (Bldg 3), room 550 (enter via Harris St)

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Technology, Sydney
Australia

Postal address: PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia
Phone and Voice Mail: +61-2-95141963
Fax: +61-2-95142332
www.transforming.cultures.uts.edu.au
http://research.hss.uts.edu.au/IndianOcean/

"A few hours’ mountain climbing turns a rogue and a saint into two  
roughly equal creatures. Weariness is the shortest path to equality  
and fraternity — and liberty is finally added by sleep." (Nietzsche)





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