Monika Mehta

Cutting, Classifying and Certifying in Bombay Cinema

Selections

Qamrul Hasan Ansari

C. S. Lalitha

Until now, no book addressed convexity, monotonicity, and variational inequalities together. Generalized Convexity, Nonsmooth Variational Inequalities, and Nonsmooth Optimization covers all three topics, including new variational inequality problems defined by a bifunction. The first part of the book focuses on generalized convexity and generalized monotonicity. The authors investigate convexity and generalized convexity for both the differentiable and nondifferentiable case. For the nondifferentiable case, they introduce the concepts in terms of a bifunction and the Clarke subdifferential. The second part offers insight into variational inequalities and optimization problems in smooth as well as nonsmooth settings. The book discusses existence and uniqueness criteria for a variational inequality, the gap function associated with it, and numerical methods to solve it. It also examines characterizations of a solution set of an optimization problem and explores variational inequalities defined by a bifunction and set-valued version given in terms of the Clarke subdifferential. Integrating results on convexity, monotonicity, and variational inequalities into one unified source, this book deepens your understanding of various classes of problems, such as systems of nonlinear equations, optimization problems, complementarity problems, and fixed-point problems. The book shows how variational inequality theory not only serves as a tool for formulating a variety of equilibrium problems, but also provides algorithms for computational purposes.

Generalized Convexity, Nonsmooth Variational Inequalities, and Nonsmooth Optimization

India produces an impressive number of films each year in a variety of languages. Here, Monika Mehta breaks new ground by analyzing Hindi films and exploring the censorship of gender and heterosexuality in Bombay cinema. She studies how film censorship on various levels makes the female body and female sexuality pivotal in constructing national identity, not just through the films themselves but also through the heated debates that occur in newspapers and other periodicals. The standard claim is that the state dictates censorship and various prohibitions, but Mehta explores how relationships among the state, the film industry, and the public illuminate censorship’s role in identity formation, while also examining how desire, profits, and corruption are generated through the act of censoring. Committed to extending a feminist critique of mass culture in the global south, Mehta situates the story of censorship in a broad social context and traces the intriguing ways in which the heated debates on sexuality in Bombay cinema actually produce the very forms of sexuality they claim to regulate. She imagines afresh the theoretical field of censorship by combining textual analysis, archival research, and qualitative fieldwork. Her analysis reveals how central concepts of film studies, such as stardom, spectacle, genre, and sound, are employed and (re)configured within the ambit of state censorship, thereby expanding the scope of their application and impact.

Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema

Madhuja Mukherjee

This volume points to the limits of models such as regional, national, and transnational, and develops ‘network’ as a conceptual category to study cinemas of India. Through grounded and interdisciplinary research, it shows how film industries located in disparate territories have not functioned as isolated units and draws attention to the industrial traffic – of filmic material, actors, performers, authors, technicians, genres, styles, sounds, expertise, languages, and capital, across trans-regional contexts -- since the inception of cinema. It excavates histories of film production, distribution and exhibition, and their connections beyond regional and national boundaries, and between places, industrial practices, and multiple media. The chapters in this volume address a range of themes such as transgressive female figures; networks of authors and technicians; trans-regional production links and changing technologies, and new media geographies. By tracking manifold changes in the contexts of transforming media, and inter-connections between diverse industrial nodal points, this book expands the critical vocabulary in media and production studies and foregrounds new methods for examining cinema. A generative account of industrial networks, this volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of film studies, cinema studies, media studies, production studies, media sociology, gender studies, South Asian studies, and cultural studies.

Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies and Multiplying Media

Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India

Robert Ji-Song Ku

S. Heijin Lee

At the start of the twenty-first century challenges to the global hegemony of U.S. culture are more apparent than ever. Two of the contenders vying for the hearts, minds, bandwidths, and pocketbooks of the world’s consumers of culture (principally, popular culture) are India and South Korea. “Bollywood” and “Hallyu” are increasingly competing with “Hollywood”—either replacing it or filling a void in places where it never held sway. This critical multidisciplinary anthology places the mediascapes of India (the site of Bollywood), South Korea (fountainhead of Hallyu, aka the Korean Wave), and the United States (the site of Hollywood) in comparative dialogue to explore the transnational flows of technology, capital, and labor. It asks what sorts of political and economic shifts have occurred to make India and South Korea important alternative nodes of techno-cultural production, consumption, and contestation. By adopting comparative perspectives and mobile methodologies and linking popular culture to the industries that produce it as well as the industries it supports, Pop Empires connects films, music, television serials, stardom, and fandom to nation-building, diasporic identity formation, and transnational capital and labor. Additionally, via the juxtaposition of Bollywood and Hallyu, as not only synecdoches of national affiliation but also discursive case studies, the contributors examine how popular culture intersects with race, gender, and empire in relation to the global movement of peoples, goods, and ideas.

Monika Mehta

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