October 16 - 18, 2007 

Imagining India and China on Film: From Hollywood to Bollywood, 'The Painted Veil' to 'House of Flying Dagger'

Payal Banerjee

Department of Sociology

Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs

Syracuse University

& L.H.M. Ling

Graduate Program in International Affairs

The New School

New York

The current popularity of Bollywood and martial arts films suggests an increasing “ownership” of cultural representation of Indians by Indians and of Chinese by Chinese, respectively.  But are these so different from those racialized, sexualized images of the recent past when tales dominated of “the exotic East,” as told from the perspective of the Anglo-American, colonial white male?  In this paper, we juxtapose some contemporary films from Bollywood, like “Life in a…Metro” (2007) or “Nishabd” (2007), and the martial arts genre, like “House of Flying Dagger” (2004) or “Hero” (2002), with Hollywood productions such as, respectively, E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India” (1985) and Somerset Maugham’s “The Painted Veil” (2006, original in 1925).  We place these juxtapositions within an older history of filmic images in Anglo-America that produced characters like “the Raj” or “the guru” for India and Indians, and “Charlie Chan” or “Fu Manchu” for China and Chinese.  Assessing these Bollywood and martial arts filmic images will shed light on debates about capitalism and whether or how it recuperates race, gender, and power, especially for these two fastest-growing economies in the world.  Our presentation will consist of clips and stills from these films.

 

About Payal Banerjee 

Payal Banerjee (ABD: Sociology, Syracuse University).  Banerjee is an Adjunct Faculty in the Graduate Program in Global Affairs (GPIA) at The New School in New York City.  Her research, based on fieldwork in India and the US, looks at the incorporation of Indian information technology (IT) workers as immigrant labor in the U.S. Banerjee’s publications have focused on questions of gender and race/ethnicity, globalization, and US immigration policies. Her recent research focuses on liberalization of trade in services and transnational mobility of labor, as well as on the historical and contemporary exchanges between India and China.  In June 2007, Banerjee was interviewed on KPFA-San Francisco regarding immigration issues in the US.

About L.H.M. Ling

L.H.M. Ling (PhD: Political Science, MIT) is an Associate Professor in the GPIA at The New School.  Her research interests include critical security studies, transcultural politics and postcolonial discourses, modalities of transnationalism, ethnographies of knowledge production and international development practice, and emerging regional economies.  Ling’s geocultural area of interest centers on East, Southeast, and South Asia and its relations with the West.   Her books include Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and From Empire to Multiple Worlds: Violence, Desire, and Complicity in Contemporary World Politics (Routledge, forthcoming), co-authored with Anna M. Agathangelou (York University).  Ling’s publications have appeared in International Feminist Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, Journal of Peace Research, Millennium, positions: east asia cultures critique, Review of International Political Economy, Review of Politics, as well as various edited volumes.

 

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