India's Imperial Formations - by Amrita Ghosh & Rohit K Dasgupta & Bhakti Shringarpure (Hardcover)

About the Book

India's Imperial Formations explores the ways in which empire building occurs and consolidates through the Indian and diasporic cultural landscape where a collusion with whiteness, Hindu fundamentalism, casteism, and religious and racial bigotry are rampant, and denies a democratic space of multiple Indias to coexist together.

Book Synopsis

India's Imperial Formations explores the ways in which empire building occurs and consolidates through the Indian and diasporic cultural landscape where a collusion with whiteness, Hindu fundamentalism, casteism, and religious and racial bigotry are rampant, and denies a democratic space of multiple Indias to coexist together.

Review Quotes

India's Imperial Formations is an innovative and very topical intervention in the fields of Indian and Indian diaspora cultural studies. This is necessary given that for too long the racism, casteism, and colorism of the commercial Hindi film industry have been overlooked by both fans and scholars.

Incisive and accessible, India's Imperial Formations, delves into the pervasive anti-Blackness embedded within Indian and diasporic media. By conceptualizing Indian media ecologies as imperial formations rather than merely racist ones, Amrita Ghosh, Rohit K. Dasgupta, and Bhakti Shringarpure highlight the role of Indian media as a formidable global soft power in the twenty-first century. With a bold and ambitious agenda, India's Imperial Formations weaves a compelling narrative that links popular Hindi cinema, social media, Mindy Kaling, and Indian American responses to the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprisings.

About the Author

Amrita Ghosh is assistant professor in South Asian literatures in the Department of English at the University of Central Florida.
Rohit K Dasgupta is associate professor in gender and sexuality at the London School of Economics & Political Science.
Bhakti Shringarpure is author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and recently co-edited the collection Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War.