This collection presents cross-disciplinary explorations of the tropes, themes and representational frameworks constellating around the figure of the Goddess in South Asian cinema. It critically approaches the Goddess theme in various genres of South Asian cinema, using analytical tools culled from gender studies, comparative cultural studies, and religious studies, as well as film semiotics. The films discussed here represent variegated thematizations of the Goddess across regions in South Asia, including Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and various geo-cultural locations in India. As the volume highlights the regional and politico-cultural differences and commonalities in representational schemes between South Asian films of different genres through the Goddess motif, it will appeal to scholars of film studies, South Asian studies and comparative religion, and will hold a special appeal for those interested in Goddess cultures and theology.

This collection presents cross-disciplinary explorations of the tropes, themes and representational frameworks constellating around the figure of the Goddess in South Asian cinema. It critically approaches the Goddess theme in various genres of South Asian cinema, using analytical tools culled from gender studies, comparative cultural studies, and religious studies, as well as film semiotics. The films discussed here represent variegated thematizations of the Goddess across regions in South Asia, including Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and various geo-cultural locations in India. As the volume highlights the regional and politico-cultural differences and commonalities in representational schemes between South Asian films of different genres through the Goddess motif, it will appeal to scholars of film studies, South Asian studies and comparative religion, and will hold a special appeal for those interested in Goddess cultures and theology.

This book seeks to explore the complex modes of interface between religion, atheism, and the Goddess in multicultural contexts. While atheism has often been seen as an interrogation of and a battle against God, the gender dimension of this discourse has not been sufficiently negotiated. Is the fight against God also a fight against the Goddess? Or is there something common between the ideological thrust of the battle against God the “Father” in atheism and the interrogation of the Divine Father in thealogy? Can the Goddess be seen as an entity radically different from the imperious transcendental that the atheists find embodied in God the Father? Or, can the Goddess be seen as “transcendental” as well as immanent, and hence subjected to the same atheist denial of transcendence to which God is subjected in non-theistic or anti-theistic arguments? With this volume, Anway Mukhopadhyay embarks on a difficult project of epistemologically, ideologically and even politically renegotiating and reorienting some of the fundamental issues involved in the discussions of and debates over atheism.

This book brings together conversations about the Partition and its haunting residues in the present as represented in literary, visual, oral, and material cultures of the subcontinent and beyond. The seventy-fifth anniversary of Partition confronts scholars with significantly new subjects for reflection. The question of historical memory has now largely transformed to one of its reproductions through mass politics and mass media and, perhaps, professional academic inquiry, while the very meaning or value of Independence is in crisis. This edited volume includes chapters on representations of partition experiences and the re-drawing of the subcontinent’s political map. While the impact of the partition of the Punjab has been the focus of much scholarly studies in the past, and Bengal to a smaller extent, this collection extends the examination of the impact of this political event elsewhere in other communities in the subcontinent, and across other differentials. This book will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers of Indian history, Partition studies, literature, popular culture and performance, postcolonial studies, and South Asian studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Review.

A cross-cultural study that explores and redefines what philosophy, philosophizing, and philosophers are through the lens of literature. The academic discipline of philosophy may tell us, too rigidly, what a philosopher is or should be; but fictional narration often upholds the core conundrums of humankind in which philosophy germinates. This collection of essays explores whether a study of 'philosophers' at a planetary scale, or at least on a broad cross-cultural spectrum, can decouple philosophy from its academic aspect and lend it a more inclusive domain. Contributors to this volume play with three conceptual poles, making them interact with each other and get modified through this interaction: 'fiction', 'narrative' and 'philosopher'. How do these three terms get semantically modified and broadened in scope when we speak of the figures of philosophers in imaginative writing? How do these terms assume different connotations in different cultural contexts, interacting with the multiplicity of not just 'thought', but also the media and tools of 'thought'? Do we always think only rationally? Or do we also think with and through emotively powerful images, symbols and tropes? In the end, Finding Philosophers in Global Fiction insists on the need to 'de-elitize' and democratize the concept of a 'philosopher' by reflecting on the possibility of seeing a philosopher as one who sees things clearly, from any vantage point.

This volume explores the potentials of Goddess spirituality in the field of cultural critique, and strings together innovative readings of already existing literary texts and cultural phenomena from the critical perspective of Goddess spirituality. The chapters explore a colourful array of texts and authors, and focus on issues as diverse as the persistence of the figure of the Magna Mater in the life, writing and thought of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, the inability of Advaita Vedanta to come out of the shadow of the Great Mother, the possibility of pluralizing the Eurocentric notion of the Muse by invoking the figure of Goddess Sarasvati in the field of English Studies, and a reappraisal of Kipling’s Kim from the perspective of the philosophical and spiritual discourses of Prajnaparamita, the Buddhist Goddess of Perfect Wisdom. The book also offers a comparative study of Minoan Goddess Spirituality and tantric philosophy with reference to Aphrodite, Diotima and the Indian Mother Goddesses, the possibility of simultaneously tantricizing notions of modernity and modernizing tantra itself with reference to the works of Lata Mani and William Schindler, and an investigation of the Mother-centric spiritual sensibilities in various religious discourses and devotional literatures, among other discussions. In short, this book investigates the possibilities of inserting the figure of the Great Mother into the critical domain of cultural pluralism, thereby celebrating a multiculturalism that is not based on violence and conflict (antagonism) but grounded in harmony. The Mother is seen by the discourse articulated here mainly as a middle ground between flesh and spirit, knowledge and passion, justice and compassion – and, in the red shadow of the Mother, social epistemologies and academic discourses are radically renegotiated.

A history of images in motion that explores the"special effect" of cinema.

This reference source covers all aspects of the cinema, including film history, production, national cinemas, genre theory and criticism, and cultural contexts.

are far from genetically ? xing what behavioral preferences they may possess. Instead, learning mechanisms offer a ? exible way of attaining locally important cultural knowledge within temporal windows of opportunity as has been convi- ingly shown by research in language and culture attainment. Similar mechanisms are likely to exist for other social capacities, such as mate preferences, for example. It is this role of our biological inheritance that social science must appreciate in order to furnish a more complete understanding of human behavior. Within the natural range of variation of capacities and armed with biologically conditioned learning mechanisms we live out lives of meaning – in which we hold some things to be real, rational, valuable or morally right, and others not. It is this world of meaning in which we ? nd love and hate, struggles for justice, power, and money, and the dramas that lend to life both its depth and passion.

Contemporary debates on “mansplaining” foreground the authority enjoyed by male speech, and highlight the way it projects listening as the responsibility of the dominated, and speech as the privilege of the dominant. What mansplaining denies systematically is the right of women to speak and be heard as much as men. This book excavates numerous instances of the authority of female speech from Indian goddess traditions and relates them to the contemporary gender debates, especially to the issues of mansplaining and womansplaining. These traditions present a paradigm of female speech that compels its male audience to reframe the configurations of “masculinity.” This tradition of authoritative female speech forms a continuum, even though there are many points of disjuncture as well as conjuncture between the Vedic, Upanishadic, puranic, and tantric figurations of the Goddess as an authoritative speaker. The book underlines the Goddess’s role as the spiritual mentor of her devotee, exemplified in the Devi Gitas, and re-situates the female gurus in Hinduism within the traditions that find in Devi’s speech ultimate spiritual authority. Moreover, it explores whether the figure of Devi as Womansplainer can encourage a more dialogic structure of gender relations in today’s world where female voices are still often undervalued.