Abstract
This chapter proposes to engage with the cinematic oeuvre of Mira Nair by placing her films within a framework derived from Guy Debord’s argument regarding the history of social life as “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing”. In 1988, Salaam Bombay! arrived at the cusp of globalisation, as India was in the process of opening its skies and market to the world, even as satellite television and a global market economy was to effect paradigm shifts in its socio-cultural habitats. Within this new habitus and fields of culture, attempting to be in sync with transnational and transborder entertainment and capital, it was easier to transact social relations through images which in effect is the Debordian idea behind spectacle. This desire for spectacle, afforded by cinema, facilitated on the one hand an easier and more seamless conversation between diasporic subjects and the Indian metropolitan elite, and on the other mediated a space for the performance of the postcolonial nation, even as cultural otherness accrues an eminently saleable commodity value in the global market. This chapter seeks to frame Mira Nair’s films in the context of shifting cultural economies of cinema in the last three decades and how the staging of postcoloniality through the scaffolding of Indian festivals, rituals, courtship or marriage, creates new ‘regimes of value’ in the global marketplace.
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Benjamin, B.A., Pillai, M.T. (2023). Mira Nair and the Cinema of Postcolonial Spectacle. In: Iqbal Viswamohan, A. (eds) Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_10
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