Presented by the Centre for Cinema Studies and Cinema Thinks the World\, the Critical Thinkers Series features researc h talks by notable and emerging scholars in Cinema and Media Studies. Join us for the second talk in the Spring 2026 Series by Dr. Sunera Thobani\, Pr ofessor in the Department of Asian Studies at UBC.
Muslims were indispen sable to the founding and development of the pre-Partition popular film ind ustry (Masud\, 2008\; Roy\, 2015 )\; this was also the case in the industry ’s post-liberalization transformation into Bollywood\, a global cultural be hemoth (Raghavendra\, 2016\; Mishra\, 2002). Studies of this cinema have\, for the main\, used the concept of the ‘Islamicate’ (Hodgson\, 1974) to cl assify the representation of Indian-Muslims into the ‘period-historical’\, ‘the courtesan’\, and ‘the social-reform’ genres (Bhaskar and Allen\, 2021) \, with the post-1990s religio-national conflicts giving rise to the ‘terro rist’ film (Murty\, 2009).
Critiquing the conc ept of the ‘Islamicate’ as well as the tendency to confine the cinematic Mu slim to the genres delineated above\, this paper presents a study of the re presentation of Islam and Indian-Muslims in a number of Bollywood box-offic e hits. Reading the cultural politics of these films by situating t hem in their particular socio-political and geographical contexts\, I analy se where\, when and how Islam and the figure of the Muslim are featured in their depictions of the nation\, state\, religion\, gender\, caste and clas s. My paper argues these films are contested sites and implicitly counter t he homogenization of the figure of the Muslim by depicting the heterogeneit y that exists within Islam and in the everyday lives of Indian-Muslim commu nities. Moreover\, as I demonstrate in my paper\, trenchant critiques of he gemonic nationhood emerge from the particular perspectives of the Muslim ch aracters featured in these films.
< strong>This event is free and there is no need to RSVP.
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