Papers by silpa mukherjee
South Asian Popular Culture , 2022
Editorial introduction to the special issue of the journal South Asian Popular Culture. The edito... more Editorial introduction to the special issue of the journal South Asian Popular Culture. The editorial is a 7000 word essay that takes the question of "regional cinema and media" from merely problematising to situating the category in the intersecting nodes of technology, place and form. Through the thematically curated essays we argue that the region in film and media is a relational concept that are often mobilised through interlaced histories of movement of media technologies and social labour
Aural Sleaze in Urban Mohalla: Loudness and the New Digital Sonotope of Item Numbers
South Asian Popular Culture
The Body and Its Multimedia Sensations: Forging Starry Identities Through Item Numbers
Stardom in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, 2020
The item number is the driving force behind the transformation of cine-dancing in relation to the... more The item number is the driving force behind the transformation of cine-dancing in relation to the star and as a corollary, positioning the star body within the discourse of post-network status of film publicity, marketing culture, branding, and value creation across media templates. I engage with the item number as the explosive interface that mutates the sensation of stardom. The performative charge of item numbers provoke dynamic interface processes that forge a sensational image of the star body through “inherently rhizomatic and hyper-visible sites” beyond cinema in music television, radio, print, live stage, new media as well as other ancillary industries like merchandize endorsements and product branding (Nayar in Seeing stars: Spectacle, society and celebrity culture. Sage, New Delhi, 2009). Extra-filmic stardom proliferates across networked media where every public appearance, statement, “tweet” and sound bite made by the star (or a controversial/leaked/morphed orphan video that floats on Web space) generates a ripple of sensations (Cashmore in Celebrity/Culture. Routledge, NY, 2006). The chapter will locate the new erotics of the star body after globalisation and in a post-network society, a body that “deterritorializes geographical and cultural borders” and conjures the erotic spectacle of the “global celebrity” (Redmond in A Companion to Celebrity. Wiley Blackwell, UK, 2016). This chapter will offer insights on the role of dance in the shifting notions of a star’s screen position. If at one point the item girl was an ‘outsider’ to the narrative, today lead heroines perform these dance spectacles. I do a comparative study of major (Malaika Arora, Aishwarya Rai, and Kareena Kapoor) and minor stars (Sambhavna Seth, Rakhee Sawant, Veena Malik, and Sherlyn Chopra), their performance of item numbers and the discourse generated in the popular press about them. The last two decades have shown how fringe actors acquired short lived stardom owing to their performance of certain item numbers (Rakhi Sawant and Isha Koppikkar). At the other end of the spectrum we have seen how big stars like Madhuri Dixit can add value to aid the publicity and marketing of films (Madhuri Dixit’s number “Ghagra” in Karan Johar’s blockbuster hit film Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani 2013).). The chapter aims to make an intervention in the existing academic discourse on cinematic ‘trash’ and ‘sleaze’ by underlining the obvious but understated edge of technology mediating the sensation of ‘sleaze’ and bringing it in close connection with mainstream stardom in the case of the item number. Sleaze here is an aesthetic mode of the cine-erotic that is widely recognized from Hollywood’s genre of exploitation films (with lesser-known starlets, low budget productions, lurid mise-en-scene, and deliberate investment in trash). While I am immensely indebted to previous studies of stardom especially Neepa Majumdar’s logic of the “split discourse of female stardom in India” which stages a debate about the class position of the performer and the respectability of the medium, I move away from purely socio-cultural connotations of stardom. I acknowledge new media studies and propose a study of the item number as an interface for stardom. I make use of gossip journalism and magazine covers to trace the sensation of the erotic in star bodies. Narratives of cosmetization of the star body (botox, silicone implants, size-zero figure and six-pack abs) further the logic of the fractal nature of the affective body which can mutate in contact with technology. The glamour associated with big male stars and their dance numbers that work as promotionals for big budget films will be discussed in this chapter. The numbers themselves operate as star texts creating value for the film. Male dancing in item numbers, as I show through my case studies, performatively create star narratives: Shahrukh Khan’s global stardom created by his dancing on live stages across continents is cited in his item numbers; Salman Khan performatively addresses his Muslim (often based in the Middle East and Europe) and working-class fans through his item numbers which act as standalone pieces and Ranveer Singh’s item numbers (across media templates of film, video, live show and endorsements) assert his taporiness—a crucial marker of his star narrative. In each of these cases, the item number ascertains the “global citizenship of the Bollywood star” (Nayar 2016). Some of these male dance numbers have not been considered as item numbers. However, they fit my taxonomy of item numbers as hybrid ensembles that not only reframes the logics of sensation around the body of the performing star but also operates as standalone star texts outside the narrative of the films and even the ecology of the song’s lyrics and picturization.
Queer intimacies in the time of new media
The Politics of Belonging in Contemporary India, 2019
BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2018
The term ‘item numbers’ emerged in film journalism sometime in the late 1990s as an industry slan... more The term ‘item numbers’ emerged in film journalism sometime in the late 1990s as an industry slang. It later evolved into a heterogeneous cinematic language with its investment in production design, choreography, special effects and specialised editing. Using interviews with industry professionals, this article will unpack the production ecology of the hypersexualised and hybrid song and dance spectacle.
High-octave soprano to auto-tuned rapper: Item numbers and technologies of sonic eroticism
The Soundtrack, 2016
Fantasy to media-induced hallucination: The journey (or the lack thereof) of science fiction in Bengali cinema
Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 2015
The article delves into the recesses of an almost non-existent genre in Bengali cinema; that of t... more The article delves into the recesses of an almost non-existent genre in Bengali cinema; that of the modern science fiction (SF). It proposes that the SF imagination in Bengali cinema is driven by the mode of fantasy and is an example of an alternative moder-nity which celebrates the technological aspirations of the community along with the indigenous cultural elements of Bengal. The template of fantasy also changes over time from magic to media-induced hallucinations to trace the contemporary techno-media culture, addressing the desires of a media savvy and image-addicted society.
Lovely* Interfaces: The Many Lives of the Item Number in Social and Digital Media
Starlets as Item Girls #OBSCENITYDEBATES
Item Numbers and Loudness
Item Numbers in the Digital Age: From Cinema to a Landscape of Techno-Tactile Sensations
The article delves into the recesses of an almost non-existent genre in Bengali cinema; that of t... more The article delves into the recesses of an almost non-existent genre in Bengali cinema; that of the modern science fiction (SF). It proposes that the SF imagination in Bengali cinema is driven by the mode of fantasy and is an example of an alternative moder-nity which celebrates the technological aspirations of the community along with the indigenous cultural elements of Bengal. The template of fantasy also changes over time from magic to media-induced hallucinations to trace the contemporary techno-media culture, addressing the desires of a media savvy and image-addicted society.
Uploads
Papers by silpa mukherjee