hss-seminar-50

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Indian Institute of Technology Ropar

HSS Seminar

‘Beyond the Nation and Not Within: A Transnational Travelogue'

by

Dr. Parichay Patra

September 13 , 2018 at  3:00 PM

Venue:  Conference Room 2

Abstract

AMy paper concerns itself with the transnationality/globality of the conceptual/imagined category

known as the New Wave, prevalent as it was in the 1970s. For my doctoral research I investigated into some of the transnational associations between the Indian New Wave of the 1970s and its various Euro-Latino counterparts. These associations included the Bressonian connections of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani and the ideological encounters of Mrinal Sen and John Abraham with third cinema and a number of Latin American auteurs including the Argentine Fernando Solanas. I argued in favour of a transnational approach as opposed to the obsessive nation-state centred methodology of Indian cinema studies. Further investigations reveal the appearance of the transnational as a relatively recent phenomenon in cinema studies, even though the tracing of its roots and routes has proved itself to be an immensely complex, if not futile affair. The transnational can be located back in the prolonged 1960s and ‘70s, in May 1968 and after, what Immanuel Wallerstein addressed as the moment of revolution in the global modernity. An exploration of the transnational in the long ‘60s/‘70s engages with several problematics that include the debates on Marxism, the (un)decidability of the time-frame, concepts such as chemical exile/drug abuse in France and desaparecidos/forced disappearances in Latin America, and an undercurrent of politico-cultural and intercontinental tension between the North and the Global South. My current work on these debates and conceptual complexities and an extensive archival research at NFAI, Pune and ENERC, Buenos Aires, shape and inform this working paper as I strive for a strategy for the reading of the transnational within the Indian arthouse and the world (cinema) system of the time, as such a

strategy will eventually form the crux of my book proposal.

Brief Bio-sketch of the speaker

 

About the speaker: Parichay Patra is an Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, Goa, India. He received his PhD degree from the  Department of Film & Screen Studies at Monash University.  Dr. Patra co-edited Salaam Bollywood: Representations and Interpretations (Routledge, 2016) and Bollywood and Its Other(s): Towards New Configurations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He is co-editing a collection of essays on Lav Diaz and working on his first monograph on cine-cultural transnationalisms in "May ’68 and after" with a special focus on the Indian New wave, for which he has recently worked as a visiting scholar at the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.