The book presents a rich collection of critical essays, ethnographic writings, memoirs, and reflections, portraying a well-rounded picture of cinema culture and historical change in Pakistan. The multiplicity of voices and approaches enhances the appeal of this collection, which is the first ever to delineate the diversity in the cinematic and extra-cinematic traditions of Pakistan, as well as in the histories of production, exhibition, and reception.
The work also highlights aesthetic and affective politics in relation to nationalism; Islamization in policy and practice; the biopolitics of morality, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality; and the phenomenology of film exhibition and urban formation. The book incorporates rarely seen nostalgia items, such as pictures of studio shootings, as well as of film actors, film scenes, posters, and lobby cards.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ali Khan
Ali Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Department Chair at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS. His research interests vary from labour issues, particularly child and bonded labour, to popular culture in Pakistan focusing particularly on cinema and sports. He has worked in Washington and Islamabad for the World Bank's South Asia Region and with the International Labour Organization primarily on projects related to child and bonded labour. Ali Khan's book Representing Children: Power, Policy and the Discourse on Child Labour in the Football Manufacturing Industry of Pakistan was published in 2007 by Oxford University Press. He is also the general editor for a series of books on sociology and anthropology in Pakistan of which five volumes have been published. Ali’s latest co-authored book Cricket Cauldron (I.B. Tauris 2013) is a sociological analysis of culture and society as seen through the prism of cricket in Pakistan. Ali Khan has an MPhil and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in England.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ali Nobil Ahmad
Ali Nobil Ahmad is a Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and Assistant Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) where he teaches history at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2014 he was Madeleine Haas Visiting Assistant Professor of South Asian Studies at Brandeis University in Boston. His research interests encompass political ecology, the media, and migration in Pakistan and its diaspora. His monograph Masculinity, Sexuality and Illegal Migration was published in South Asia by Oxford University Press in 2014. In 2009 he was awarded the Scott Trust bursary for journalism. A former editorial board member of the journal Third Text, in 2010 he edited a special issue on ‘Cinema in Muslim Societies’, republished this year in book form by Routledge. In 2011, he was co-curator of ‘Winds of Change’, a festival of films and talks on cinema and the Arab Spring at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
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