Reframing Bollywood : Theories of Popular Hindi Cinema

This book combines multiple theoretical approaches to provide a fresh perspective on Bollywood-just as a Bollywood film that transgresses multiple genres-and challenges the homogenizing tendencies in much of the ongoing scholarship in the area. It covers five areas of controversial theorization: the religious frame, the musical frame, the subaltern frame, the (hetero) sexual frame and the â¬Ücrossover' frame. By deconstructing each of these hegemonic paradigms, it reshapes the understanding of a Bollywood film and restructures its relationships with multiple disciplines including film and theatre studies, postcolonial studies, South Asian studies, queer studies, and transnational studies.

Gehlawat (theater and film, Sonoma State U.) combines filmic, theatrical, ethnographic, and postcolonial approaches in order "to destabilize the positioning of Bollywood [film productions of India] within any one sphere of reference and, rather, to illuminate how several spheres of meaning are simultaneously at play in its construction." Building in particular on Baudrillard's "conception of the hyperreal as that which is always already reproduced," he seeks to demonstrate how several realms of meaning operate in the following areas of theorization: the religious frame, the musical frame, the subaltern frame, the (hetero)sexual frame, and the 'crossover' frame. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)