TRACING the TEMPORAL ASSEMBLAGE of INDIAN MEDIA a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School O
THE AFFECTIVE NATION: TRACING THE TEMPORAL ASSEMBLAGE OF INDIAN MEDIA A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Communication, Culture, and Technology By Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Bachelor of Arts Washington, DC April 28, 2011 Copyright 2011 by Lakshmi Padmanabhan All Rights Reserved ii THE AFFECTIVE NATION: TRACING THE TEMPORAL ASSEMBLAGE OF INDIAN MEDIA Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Bachelor of Arts Thesis Advisor: Jatinder P. Singh, Doctor of Philosophy. ABSTRACT This thesis examines two films – Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle, 2008) and Dostana (Mansukhani, 2008) to explore the circulation of national identities within these films and the circulation of the films themselves within larger discourses of the nation, particularly India. This thesis argues that our current cultural moment require changing understandings of the idea of ‘film’, to include its multiple networks of capital and affect, and a changing understanding of ‘nation’ as materially illustrated in these films. The aim of this thesis is to conceive of a way to understand films as a collection of temporalities, and to map the duration of these temporalities as they reveal the emerging networks of circulation that change the ontology of both film and nation. I also argue that the ‘nation’ is an affective construct, and that ‘nationness’ is the ‘trace’ or ‘residue’ that these films bear. This argument also marks a specific approach to the idea of a ‘nation’ itself that includes more than the boundaries of the state, or the ethnicity of the people, but begins to address the way objects possess certain national traces, particularly within cultural objects such as the arts.
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