Call for Papers

Journal of South Asian Popular Culture
5th International Conference hosted at
Temple University, Philadelphia
April 14-16, 2011

"The 1970s and its Legacies:
A Workshop on India's Cinemas"

The Journal of South Asian Popular Culture hosts its fifth international conference at Temple University, Philadelphia, on April 14-16, 2011. We invite interdisciplinary contributions that address the 1970s in India and its legacies in popular culture with a particular emphasis on cinema.

The 1970s were a turning point in India. The global oil crisis, the wars with China and Pakistan, the Bangladesh War of 1971 augured a difficult start to the decade. By the time Indira Gandhi announced the country ungovernable and declared a state of Emergency on June 26, 1975, it was evident that Indian democracy had reached a nadir. However, during this period of political turmoil, labor unrest, crippling shortages, and profound civic despair, India's cinemas saw a renaissance. Hindi cinema, for instance, encountered daring new talent in writing, directing, and acting: new scripts, new topoi, and new kinds of engagement with "India" emerged in popular film that, in the estimation of some, have not been matched in any decade since.

Our workshop is an opportunity to explore the many cultural practices that enabled and expanded, but also regulated and confined the self-fashioning of groups during a crucial decade in India's political and social history. Incorporating both the lived practices of individuals and the textual artifacts of those whose ideas and ideologies defined the landscapes of "India," popular culture during this decade had multiple histories and ideologies. It was simultaneously fluid and inert, consensual and contested, produced by those within the nation's boundaries and without, by those opposed to the state and aligned with it, in dialogue with and in diatribe against the structures of power. The workshop welcomes proposals for scholarly papers that highlight any aspect of these issues in relation to the 1970s in India. In keeping with the workshop format, accepted papers will be circulated in advance of the April meeting.

Workshop proceedings will be published in a special issue of the refereed Journal of South Asian Popular Culture (10:1 April 2012) co-edited by Priya Joshi and Rajinder Dudrah. (Final papers will be accepted for publication subject to the journal's peer-review process.)

Suggested topics, by no means restricted to those below, include:

Cinema(s) and the Emergency
Crisis and Collaboration in Popular Film
Popular Literature, Theatre, Music
Television, Radio, and the New Media
Visible and Invisible Emergencies
Religion: Organized, Popular, Mass
Rural and Urban 1970s
Gender, Sexuality, Family
Class, Caste, and Representation
Emergency, Ephemera, and Archives

Abstracts of 300 words including a brief CV should be sent to both organizers by Nov. 1, 2010:
Priya Joshi (pjoshi@temple.edu) and Rajinder Dudrah (Rajinder.Dudrah@manchester.ac.uk).
Abstracts due: November 1, 2010
Acceptance notifications: November 25, 2010
Papers for pre-circulation due: March 15, 2011
Final papers for journal peer review due: June 30, 2011