Transitions: Obliquely: Affect, Partition and a Cinematic Modern

Professor Kumkum Sangari

In Bombay cinema of the late 1940s and 1950s, songs and scenes of parting or separation came to acquire particular meanings both as figurations for the modern interiority of characters as well as for the individual and collective partings of Partition. This talk will discuss an under-theorized affective complex (separation, failed romance, transience) in terms of historical and economic transitions, the antinomial making of nation-states through partition and a gendered configuration of abjection and agency within the social/cinematic modern of the Nehruvian era.

Professor Kumkum Sangari, a Leverhulme Visiting Professor, is one of the foremost feminist thinkers in India, whose contributions to the field of cultural and gender studies and of gender and literature have been seminal and endlessly original. Her edited volumes Recasting Women (1989) and From Myths to Markets (1999), her monograph The Politics of the Possible (2002), and her many essays, whether on the medieval woman poet Mirabai, on gender in nineteenth-century tales, or on widow-immolation in contemporary Rajasthan, have helped define the field of cultural and gender studies in India.

Organiser: Centre for Gender Studies

Contact email: n.s.al-ali@soas.ac.uk