Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema: Image, Ideology and Identity

This book is an empirico-historical enquiry into the empire cinema made in Hollywood and Britain during the turbulent 1930s and 1940s. It shows how empire cinema constructed the colonial world, its rationale for doing so, and the manner in which such constructions were received by the colonised people. Although empire cinema has been examined by western scholars, such studies have located the films almost wholly within the colonising country, rather than exploring their reception among the colonised. By shifting the emphasis to the historical reception of imperial popular culture this book seeks to cover a certain terrain between the current Indian writing on national cinema and non-Indian writing on empire cinema.Combining wide-ranging scholarship based on original documents, film studies, and historical and political analysis, the book gives the reader a sense of how ideologies, images and identities are constructed, promoted, contested and resisted in reaction to key film representations of empire. This book offers fresh insights in the field of cultural and film studies from a different and multi-focal perspective. It will be of interest not only to specialist readership of media and cultural studies but also to those studying and interested in social history, sociology, popular culture, colonialism and race, representations of other-ness, the ideology of imperialism, nationalism and gender studies.