Cine Club Discussion: Gesture, Archive, Repertoire: The Circulation of South Asian Embodied Histories

Cine Club Discussion: Gesture, Archive, Repertoire: The Circulation of South Asian Embodied Histories

Friday, 14 January 2011, 6.30 p.m.
M.L. Bhartia Auditorium

What is embodied history and what can it tell us that other forms of historical record may not be able to? If an ‘embodied’ history is to be contrasted with the ‘disembodied’ textual record, where do the historian and literary scholar look for it? Do the technological ramifications of modernity interfere with or enhance the record and transmission of embodied history- e.g. through photography, film or musical recording? And what might these questions, when directed to South Asian modernity, reveal to us about that modernity? This paper will offer some tentative answers to these questions and—more importantly— point to the broader historical and cultural issues that are opened up by an attempted recovery of South Asian embodied histories from the technologies and spaces of their circulation. Engaging with notions of archive and repertoire, specific song-dance sequences (from films such as Delhi 6, Dev D and Gulaal) will be analysed as a starting point, across linguistic and post-colonial boundaries, for the mobilization of embodied histories.

Guest speaker: Dr. Ananya Kabir (Senior Lecturer, University of Leeds)