Bollywood’s Corporeal Turn

Explores Bollywood cinema’s aesthetic, cultural and corporeal dimensions across foundational genres, iconic performers and diasporic narratives, highlighting the interplay of narrative, poetry, the body and national and transnational identities.

This book, titled Bollywood’s Corporeal Turn: Aesthetic Response and Diasporic Memory, prizes Bollywood cinema out of its local and national context and brings a phenomenological critical awareness of it as cinema qua cinema.

The book offers an original perspective on the reception of Bollywood cinema by opening up new vistas and new sensibilities with visceral or corporeal immediacy. With a firm grasp of the complete filmic archive, the book brings new and original insights into Bollywood’s dominant genres, notably the mythological, the Arabian Nights fantasies, the sentimental, the gothic ‘Uncanny’ and the new avant-garde. The work imbricates aesthetic response with lived experience, the latter always defined by a sense of loss, nostalgia and ‘unbelonging’.