Professor Prageeta Sharma Film 381: Wednesday/Friday 10:40 am-1:00pm JRH 205 Office Hours: Thursday: 10am-12:30pm, LA 211 e-mail:
[email protected] SOUTH ASIAN CINEMA AND TELEVISION: FROM THE APU TRILOGY TO SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE AND THE MINDY PROJECT. “When I Was groWing up in the nineties, no one on my favorite shoWs ever looked like me.” -- Manori Ravindran There's been a recent revolution in mainstream moviemaking and American and Canadian television (although, it has happened much earlier for BBC). Outside of Bollywood’s narrative formulas, more and more South Asians and South Asian descent actors are populating the film and television industry. In addition to acting, they are producing, directing, writing scripts, and creating their own television shoWs. Even so, it is still difficult to unpack the racial stereotypes of Indians from the subcontinent: Are they edgy characters or unsettling, exaggerated portraits inconsistent with reality? What are our narrative discourses around the subcontinent and South Asian immigrant culture? What has it looked like and What does the 21st century South Asian media culture outside of India Want to accomplish? This class Will explore the representations of South Asians in filmmaking and television from mid-twentieth century to the present day. We will Watch Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, several of Satyajit Ray's films and figure out hoW they differ from Merchant Ivory Productions. We Will discuss Peter Sellar’s character in The Party; We Will explore Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette, Jhumpa Lahiri & Mira Nair’s The Namesake, the Harold and Kumar trilogy and phenomenon, Gurinder Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, Salman Rushdie and Deepa Mehta’s Midnight Children, Umesh Shukla's Oh My God, and television shows and series like The Far Pavilions (1984), The Mindy Project, Parks and Recreation, Community, and The Good Wife to figure out the range in characters and over-arching themes for South-Asians today.