In South Asia, massive anticolonial movements in the twentieth century created nation-states and reset national borders, forming the basis for emerging film cultures. Following the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, new national cinemas promoted and reinforced prevailing hierarches of identity and belonging. At the same time, industrial and independent cinemas contributed to porous and hybrid film cultures, reflecting the intertwining of South Asian histories and their reciprocal cultural influences.

South Asian Filmscapes excavates these complex politics and poetics of bordered identity through selected histories of cinema in South Asia. Several essays reveal how fixed notions of national identity have been destabilized by the cross-border mobility of filmed arts and practitioners, while others interrogate how filmic politics intersect with discourses of nationalism, sexuality and gender, religion, and language. Together, they offer a fluid approach to the multiple histories and encounters that conjure ‘South Asia’ as a geographic and political entity through a cinematic imagination.

South Asian Filmscapes will become a standard reference that we will use repeatedly in both graduate and undergraduate classrooms. It is a complete rethinking of the region using cinema and its mobility as the vantage for doing so.

-Sangita Gopal, University of Oregon

Will ignite a much-needed conversation for our times. The essays make a rich tapestry of intersecting as well as tensile lines of memory, affectations, and ideologies.

-Anustup Basu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This volume of incisive and bold essays opens a world of encounters and divisions between the connected and divided people of South Asia-creating new space for rethinking South Asia's past and shining a light for building trusting alliances in the future.

-Yasmin Saikia, Arizona State University

ELORA HALIM CHOWDHURY is professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and author of Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh.

ESHA NIYOGI DE is a lecturer in English at UCLA and author of Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman: A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought.

COVER DESIGN: Katrina Noble

COVER PHOTOGRAPH: Meherjaan (dir, Rubaiyat Hossain, 2011). Image courtesy of Rubalyat Hossain