Megha Anwer | Purdue University (original) (raw)

Publications by Megha Anwer

Feminist Media Studies

In this essay we ask questions about the ideological and diagnostic function that the incest trop... more In this essay we ask questions about the ideological and diagnostic
function that the incest trope serves in post-liberalization India-based
cinema. We examine Monsoon Wedding and Highway to
argue that the incest trope operates as a sign-post of globalized
Bollywood’s altering relationship with the family, as a metonymic
signifier of the discursive shifts in India’s relationship to liberalization,
as well as a filmic mechanism that enables us to envision
the place of women both inside and outside bourgeois families
and fantasies. Through a close study of the cartographic vision and
the forms of masculinity espoused by the two films, we demonstrate
their sharply varied politics. The incest-crisis in Monsoon
Wedding finds resolution within the four walls of the familyhome
and the incest-victims’ relationship with the family is able
to return to a state of pre-crisis “normalcy.” Highway, on the other
hand, regards the family not as bastion-against-the-world, but as
a reflective microcosm of all that is wrong with the world, and as
the cornerstone of social and gender inequality. This is why, the
incest-survivor in Highway comes to terms with childhood trauma
by removing herself from her family, and from bourgeois domesticity,
altogether.

In a cultural moment when professors experience a debilitating hesitancy about initiating difficu... more In a cultural moment when professors experience a debilitating hesitancy about initiating difficult conversations with undergraduate students, and the imperative of trigger warnings sometimes outweighs our will to navigate controversial materials, the fate of "violent films," as worthy of academic study, hangs precariously in the balance. 1 Designing undergraduate film courses that are culturally and politically sensitive to the power structures replicated in cinematic representations, often entails, and understandably so, the excising of explicitly violent cinema. With this essay, however, we contend with ways in which cinematic violence can and, perhaps, should be incorporated into the undergraduate classroom. Our essay, then, might be thought of as a response to the profound question that Zoe Brigley Thompson (2018) asks: "What avenues … are open to the university instructor who seeks to combat oppressive narratives without closing down discussion?" (p. 1). What follows is a detailed illustration of, perhaps even a discursive template for, how to lead a conversation about violent cinema, and an exploration of possible questions that help direct such a conversation. We recognize that this undertaking asks considerably more from our readers than the average film or pedagogy essay might. In a sense, this essay asks readers to endure some of the same things that our class lecture and discussion asks of our students: namely, to dare to not look away from things we would rather not see. Although unpleasant, we believe the discussion to be more than worthwhile given its relevance to large scale conversations about cultural sensitivity and censorship, and innovative film education. Our pedagogical arguments are drawn from our own experience of co-teaching a unit titled "Cinematic

This paper will attempt a ‘kinesic’ analysis of the gestural language of the hands in Natan. It w... more This paper will attempt a ‘kinesic’ analysis of the gestural language of the hands in Natan. It will focus on two scenes in the short film: the opening sequence where Natan’s immediate boss (the unnamed moustachioed man) opens the kebab packet; and second, where Natan finally strokes Kos, the dog. The two sequences, I suggest, articulate not just a contrasting rhetoric of the body but also a divergent understanding of power and relationships.

Critical responses to Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger reveal two conflicting trends: one set of c... more Critical responses to Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger reveal two conflicting trends: one set of critics argues that the novel feeds into an orientalist fantasy of India as an underdeveloped and impoverished third world postcolony. Criticism at the other end
of the spectrum celebrates Adiga’s novel for rupturing the myth of a “New India”. This article explores the multiple underlying anxieties that shape the responses of Adiga’s detractors, and argues that thus far the novel has been critiqued for the wrong reasons. The essay goes onto extricate The White Tiger from this dichotomous framework and assess the text in terms of its internal slippages, to suggest that the real, although subtle, conservatism of the novel lies elsewhere. By presenting a sear-
ingly dystopic vision of individualized subaltern violence, Adiga invokes a fear response, such that the English-speaking bourgeois readership is galvanized into taking corrective measures that will only strengthen an exploitative market-driven society.

This essay interrogates the ways in which contemporary fiction from the subcontinent responds to ... more This essay interrogates the ways in which contemporary fiction from the subcontinent responds to the preoccupation with the spectacular event in Western philosophy, historiography, and popular media discourse. Today, this seemingly unanimous
and all-pervasive fixation with colossal moment—revolutionary,
politically progressive, or apocalyptic, terroristic ones—grips our collective global imaginary like never before. The collapse of the twin towers and the post-9/11 context of the war on terror have produced dominant discourses that accept, willy nilly, the cloying power of event-centric narratives. In this context I study Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist to suggest that contemporary literary experimentation emerging from South Asia proactively resists the catastrophic event’s magnetic power to create an inescapable force field that keeps everything constantly aligned in relation to it.

This paper studies the 2008 graphic novel Incognegro in conjunction with the surviving lynching p... more This paper studies the 2008 graphic novel Incognegro in conjunction with the surviving lynching photographs. It argues that Johnson and Pleece’s work gives us a behind-the-scenes documentation of lynching – an ‘inside view’ that the photographs, despite their claimed reliance on a facticist projection of ‘objective reality’, often fail to do. To the extent that the period’s white-sponsored lynching photographs follow a carefully coded if unwritten convention and aesthetics of representation, they tend in fact to elide and gloss over the ‘whole truth’, or distract from immediate and direct enregisterment of the full and utter horror of the violence being perpetrated; this, despite the presence of the ‘strange fruit’ that grotesquely and ominously hangs from the itinerant scaffolds dotting the lynchtime landscape. In this backdrop of history and representation, Incognegro may be understood as an interventionist text in the long and innovative narrative of America’s visual culture; a first-order intervention that reconfigures a racist visual archive from within, so as to unravel and deconstruct the undergirding matrix of ideological, socio-cultural and aesthetic values upon which the lynching photographic archive stands.

The paucity of criticism on the photographic evidence of Jack the ripper’s murders is striking an... more The paucity of criticism on the photographic evidence of Jack the ripper’s murders is striking and surprising, particularly given that these images amount to one of the first visual documentations of what are now called sex crimes. Even Robert McLaughlin’s pioneering study The First Jack the Ripper Victim Photographs falls short of adequately decoding what’s really going on in the pictures themselves, in part because he seems less interested in the content of the photographs than in the biographical details of the photographers who created them. This essay hopes to address and correct this interpretive gap. Through a close analysis of the few ripper photographs that still survive, i seek to recover the representational codes governing the visual, spatial, and gender politics of these images. in the first section i examine the postmortem portraits of the victims. in the second, i explore the continuities i see between the full-body mortuary photographs of the victims and a broader Victorian art aesthetic. in the third and final section i study closely the single crime-scene photo- graph of the body of Mary Kelly (the ripper’s fifth victim).

This paper is a close study of Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers and Queimada (Burn!) and ... more This paper is a close study of Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers and Queimada (Burn!) and Tomas Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment -- in particular, the ways in which these films explore the colonial and post-colonial experience. By focussing on the engagement with spatial and gender politics, constructions of the hero/villain dichotomy and debates on the political efficacy of violence that emerge from these films, the paper explores the language of Pontecorvo's and Alea's cinema, its thematic priorities and visual methodologies. Even while elucidating the differences in their cinematic aesthetics, it is argued that both the filmmakers share a certain kind of politics and radical/revolutionary sensibility that aligns them to and places them within the continuing traditions of the cinema of resistance.

This essay argues that the overwhelming bourgeoisification of Bollywood’s big budget films, which... more This essay argues that the overwhelming bourgeoisification of Bollywood’s big budget films, which luxuriate in capturing on screen the lives of the rich, does not entail an absolute exclusion of the poor. Rather, these films subtly incorporate and subsume indigent spaces of the city in innovatively insidious ways. Their aim is to neutralize the poor, their sites of residence, and categorically dismiss their rights to the city. In films like Karan Johar’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots the slum (or its substitute) is spatially aestheticized in such a way as to expunge the unsavory smell and ordure of “scenes of poverty.” Or else, poverty is rendered ridiculous; it survives only as comic object, a space and predicament unworthy of our sympathy, and good enough only for our deprecatory laughing dismissal. Poverty is also represented as a relic or holdover from 1950s black and white cinema, which is now mocked as predictable and melodramatic.

Conference Presentations by Megha Anwer

Panel Abstract “The Cinematic City,” Film and History Conference. Organized five panels. Madison,... more Panel Abstract
“The Cinematic City,” Film and History Conference. Organized five panels. Madison, Wisconsin. October 30-November 1.

Panel Abstract: This panel seeks to locate the stillness of photography within the networks and... more Panel Abstract:

This panel seeks to locate the stillness of photography within the networks and flows of colonialism. European and American imperial projects are increasingly being studied for the range of economic, cultural, intellectual and physical mobilities they have engendered: the discovery of trade routes, the movement of capital and resources, coerced journeys undertaken by slaves and indentured laborers, creation of refugees, writing of travelogues, establishing communication systems, building modes of mass transportation, and finally, militaristic ventures that expand/redistribute colonialized geographies. Mobility practices that deracinate people, places and objects are, thus, intimately connected with imperialist enterprises. In this context the panel asks: what role does the stillness of the photographic form play in the movements and fluidities of empire?

“Colonial Mobilities/Photographic Stillness” will build upon the conceptual frameworks initiated by previous scholarship on nineteenth and twentieth century colonial photography. In particular Eleanor Hight and Gary Sampson’s Colonialist Photography (2004), James Ryan’s Picturing Empire (1998), Deborah Poole’s Vision, Race, and Modernity (1997), Christopher Pinney’s Camera Indica (1998), and more recently Zahid Chaudhary’s Afterimage of Empire (2012) have helped assess photography’s function within colonial histories. What is common to this body of scholarship is that it investigates the ways in which photography transformed vision and aesthetic experience for the colonized and the colonizer, introduced new forms of surveillance, and produced a visibility that legitimized colonialist intervention by rendering colonized peoples and their homelands as inferior. Empire’s photographic archive is, therefore, packed with ‘objective’ visual accounts – anthropological portraits taxonomizing racial types, photographs of natural landscapes and ruined buildings – that convert human physiognomies and unfamiliar topographies into picturesque images.

Here the relationship between colonialism and photography is conceptualized in terms of a dialectical interplay between mobility and stillness. One the one hand, colonial photography’s circulation as historical memorabilia, tourist postcards, book illustrations, magazine advertisements, and its deployment as pseudo-scientific ‘evidence’ for anthropological, racial and criminal discourses alerts us to the ways in which the empire building project has appropriated photography as a part of its “constellation of mobilities” (Tim Cresswell). On the other hand, however, photographic stillness can also induce an anchorage that disrupts colonial matrices. Instead of merely perpetuating the dissemination of a colonial visuality, photographs can also decolonize vision by rendering suspicious the mobilities of empire.

Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were particularly fascinated by these tensions inherent in photography. Both writers explored the limits of photographic representation through careful documentation of Haiti’s independence, folk culture, and American occupation. Susan Weeber’s paper traces the ways in which Hughes and Hurston theorized photography’s complicity in empire and ethnography. As Hurston and Hughes tried to counteract Eurocentric, colonial accounts of Haiti and voodoo they had to contend with the dangers of photography. At the very moments when they incorporated or reflected on photography, they also played with anthropological discourse and conventions. Adopting the part of novice and cultural mediator or expert, objective anthropologist and subjective critic, their prose veers from mythical to scientific, skeptical to naïve. In other words, photographs and ethnographic language frequently subvert and undo each other in their work. This is why Hurston and Hughes were wary of photography’s ability to freeze historical subjects. At the same time, however, they were also drawn to what might escape from or speak back out of the photographic frame.

Carla C. Manfredi discusses the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson’s photographs of “blackbirding” – the term for ‘recruiting,’ through coercion and kidnapping, Pacific Islanders as indentured labor. Stevenson’s photography, which has received scant critical attention, ruptures the system of colonial labor in the Pacific. Manfredi draws on Pacific-specific postcolonial theory to address Stevenson’s visual representations of Islander agency, resistance, and disempowerment. By restoring Stevenson’s photographs of labor to the historical archive, she highlights photography’s ability to resist Euro-American narratives of Pacific past and register alternative ways of accessing Islander agency.

In a similar vein, Fazal Sheikh's photographic oeuvre, Zahid Chaudhary argues, takes up documentary notions of truth only to re-function their indexicality and evidentiary value. Through this process Sheikh produces a new aesthetic economy. Chaudhary focuses on Sheikh’s photographs of the Negev desert in Southern Israel, which depict majestic aerial views of the desert’s topography marked by traces of Palestinian villages. In these photographs indexical truth is re-formatted as photographic abstraction. The very abstraction of the photographs, then, productively straddles two truths: the undeniable presence of the villages and the haziness of an erased/forgotten past. The index thus returns in Sheikh's recent project as a form of analogical abstraction, shedding light on an officially erased Palestinian past but also the possibility of politics itself.

Immediately after independence (1947-53) the newly formed, independent states of India and Pakistan made the joint decision to repatriate abducted women on both sides of the border and return them to their original families. Rijuta Mehta’s central concern is to investigate this ‘search and rescue’ operation and articulate what photography tells us about the purported humanitarian impulse behind these repatriation and rehabilitation procedures. It is mandatory, she argues, for us to reconstruct the materiality of how search and rescue photographs came to be taken. Details concerning their production – who made the women pose for these photographs, under what circumstances, whether their permission was obtained, and whether money was exchanged – are crucial diagnostic elements in reconstructing this visual history. Building on testimonial narratives of victims, witnesses, and abductors, Mehta’s paper probes the meaning of portrait photography in the context of postcolonial violence, migration and gendered exchanges of human beings across national borders.

The panel, then, acknowledges the fact that photographs, like souvenirs, can travel as portable memories of a colonial encounter. But they can also operate as material bulwark against the violent mobilities of empire. If imperial projects are attracted to photography because of the ways in which they can ‘fix’ natives while allowing for their controlled circulation, photography’s powers of persuasion, nevertheless, exceed imperial diktats. It is precisely through embracing the endemic stilling of photography that a decolonial politics of the image begins to take shape.

Feminist Media Studies

Panel Abstract: This panel seeks to locate the stillness of photography within the networks and... more Panel Abstract:

Critical South Asian Studies, Aug 30, 2023

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Jan 31, 2017

This project charts an extended representational history of urban violence, focusing in particula... more This project charts an extended representational history of urban violence, focusing in particular on narratives of crime and terror. The study begins in mid-nineteenth century England with the emergence of the sensation novel and concludes with a study of the contemporary moment\u27s embroilment with the War on Terror in the post-9/11 global context. What unifies this capacious and multi-contextual examination is not just a general engagement with forms of violence, but in particular the closely interfaced manner in which modern narratives of violence intersect with ideas of the urban. ^ My dissertation, then, is propelled by two interrelated concerns. First, it undertakes an exploration of some of the significant ways in which literary/visual narratives of crime and terror straddle the urban. Here I ask: how does the encounter between metropolitan topographies and violent texts contribute to new cognitions of urban spatiality? Second, I examine how crime-and-terror ridden urban spaces, as represented in literature, photograph and film, strategically reconfigure mobility for both real and fictional metropolitan subjects. I specifically consider the urban perambulations of two population groups that occupy the end poles of the study\u27s diachronic spread - Victorian women in nineteenth-century London, and Muslim men in the context of the War on Terror.

Ariel-a Review of International English Literature, 2014

This essay interrogates the ways in which contemporary fiction from the subcontinent responds to ... more This essay interrogates the ways in which contemporary fiction from the subcontinent responds to the preoccupation with the spectacular event in Western philosophy, historiography, and popular media discourse. Today, this seemingly unanimous and all-pervasive fixation with colossal moments-revolutionary, politically progressive, or apocalyptic, terroristic ones-grips our collective global imaginary like never before. The collapse of the twin towers and the post-9/11 context of the war on terror have produced dominant discourses that accept, willy-nilly, the cloying power of event-centric narratives. In this context I study Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist to suggest that contemporary literary experimentation emerging from South Asia proactively resists the catastrophic event's magnetic power to create an inescapable force field that keeps everything constantly aligned in relation to it.

... CLOSE-UP ON THE COLONY: INSIDE HISTORY, THROUGH THE CAMERA LENS MEGHA ANWER ... Wide Screen, ... more ... CLOSE-UP ON THE COLONY: INSIDE HISTORY, THROUGH THE CAMERA LENS MEGHA ANWER ... Wide Screen, Vol 1, Issue 1. ISSN: 1757-3920 Published by Subaltern Media, 2009 Page 2. Megha Anwer 2 anxieties and struggles of the entire Third World. ...

Routledge eBooks, Oct 5, 2022

Feminist Media Studies, Sep 9, 2019

In this essay we ask questions about the ideological and diagnostic function that the incest trop... more In this essay we ask questions about the ideological and diagnostic function that the incest trope serves in post-liberalization Indiabased cinema. We examine Monsoon Wedding and Highway to argue that the incest trope operates as a signpost of globalized Bollywood's altering relationship with the family, as a metonymic signifier of the discursive shifts in India's relationship to liberalization, as well as a filmic mechanism that enables us to envision the place of women both inside and outside bourgeois families and fantasies. Through a close study of the cartographic vision and the forms of masculinity espoused by the two films, we demonstrate their sharply varied politics. The incest-crisis in Monsoon Wedding finds resolution within the four walls of the familyhome and the incest-victims' relationship with the family is able to return to a state of pre-crisis "normalcy." Highway, on the other hand, regards the family not as bastion-against-the-world, but as a reflective microcosm of all that is wrong with the world, and as the cornerstone of social and gender inequality. This is why, the incest-survivor in Highway comes to terms with childhood trauma by removing herself from her family, and from bourgeois domesticity, altogether.

Springer eBooks, 2019

The figure of the consuming woman enables us to investigate Bombay cinema’s fissured relationship... more The figure of the consuming woman enables us to investigate Bombay cinema’s fissured relationship with globalization, and especially its anxiety around the ways in which consumer culture causes women to turn “bad.” The anxiety, as explored in this chapter, is, in fact, twofold. On the one hand, the film industry reveals a preoccupation with what liberalization/commodity culture does to women themselves. But accompanying that is another anxiety: how “bad” women sabotage the true/real purpose of liberalization—to produce the ideal male consumer. Two films—Hum Aapke Hain Koun and Zindagi Na Milegi—are studied and it is argued that they present the female consumer as whittled down remnants of the erstwhile filmic vamp, insisting that such bad-women-consumers be tamed-through-punishment. Or, failing that, the women must be forsaken by men for prioritizing self-care and exercising a self-referential commodity consumption, outside/independent of their identity as wives and mothers.

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Aug 7, 2013

Critical responses to Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger reveal two conflicting trends: one set of c... more Critical responses to Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger reveal two conflicting trends: one set of critics argues that the novel feeds into an orientalist fantasy of India as an underdeveloped and impoverished third world postcolony. Criticism at the other end of the spectrum celebrates Adiga’s novel for rupturing the myth of a “New India”. This article explores the multiple underlying anxieties that shape the responses of Adiga’s detractors, and argues that thus far the novel has been critiqued for the wrong reasons. The essay goes onto extricate The White Tiger from this dichotomous framework and assess the text in terms of its internal slippages, to suggest that the real, although subtle, conservatism of the novel lies elsewhere. By presenting a searingly dystopic vision of individualized subaltern violence, Adiga invokes a fear response, such that the English-speaking bourgeois readership is galvanized into taking corrective measures that will only strengthen an exploitative market-driven society.

This roundtable introduces spatial humanities researches at Purdue. Projects include Mapping Vict... more This roundtable introduces spatial humanities researches at Purdue. Projects include Mapping Victorian women\u27s habitation and violence encounter by Dr. Megha Anwer; Animating material agencies with GIS data: an example from the archealogy of the Soviet Union by Dr. Elizabeth Brite; Modeling community interaction in Bronze Age Greece by Dr. Katherine Jarriel; Mapping \u27no place\u27: Eastern and Central Europe\u27s nineteenth and twentieth century phantom, indifferent, and alternative geographies by Amber Nickell

Routledge India eBooks, Oct 5, 2022

Feminist Media Studies, 2019

In this essay we ask questions about the ideological and diagnostic function that the incest trop... more In this essay we ask questions about the ideological and diagnostic function that the incest trope serves in post-liberalization Indiabased cinema. We examine Monsoon Wedding and Highway to argue that the incest trope operates as a signpost of globalized Bollywood's altering relationship with the family, as a metonymic signifier of the discursive shifts in India's relationship to liberalization, as well as a filmic mechanism that enables us to envision the place of women both inside and outside bourgeois families and fantasies. Through a close study of the cartographic vision and the forms of masculinity espoused by the two films, we demonstrate their sharply varied politics. The incest-crisis in Monsoon Wedding finds resolution within the four walls of the familyhome and the incest-victims' relationship with the family is able to return to a state of pre-crisis "normalcy." Highway, on the other hand, regards the family not as bastion-against-the-world, but as a reflective microcosm of all that is wrong with the world, and as the cornerstone of social and gender inequality. This is why, the incest-survivor in Highway comes to terms with childhood trauma by removing herself from her family, and from bourgeois domesticity, altogether.

This paper is a close study of Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers and Queimada (Burn!) ... more This paper is a close study of Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers and Queimada (Burn!) and Tomas Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment -- in particular, the ways in which these films explore the colonial and post-colonial experience. By focussing on the engagement with spatial and gender politics, constructions of the hero/villain dichotomy and debates on the political efficacy of violence that emerge from these films, the paper explores the language of Pontecorvo's and Alea's cinema, its thematic priorities and visual methodologies. Even while elucidating the differences in their cinematic aesthetics, it is argued that both the filmmakers share a certain kind of politics and radical/revolutionary sensibility that aligns them to and places them within the continuing traditions of the cinema of resistance.

Heterosexual love and marriage, with different variations on the “boy-meets-girl” trope, dominate... more Heterosexual love and marriage, with different variations on the “boy-meets-girl” trope, dominate the majority of Indian films. Popular Hindi-language cinema, especially, has variously explored the...

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

Released in 2018, Shashanka Ghosh’s Veere Di Wedding ( VDW; My Friend’s Wedding), dubbed as India... more Released in 2018, Shashanka Ghosh’s Veere Di Wedding ( VDW; My Friend’s Wedding), dubbed as India’s answer to Sex and the City, evoked mixed responses. While many reviews of the film denounced it for its vulgarity and tawdriness, frivolity, flippant vision of women’s liberation and as a threat to Indian values, others, however, celebrated it for its frank depiction of female desires. This article undertakes a close study of the film to argue that while the focus on female desire and sexuality is rare in Hindi cinema, and thus VDW marks an important landmark, the film is not a feminist film, and it does not offer a radical politics of female solidarity. On the contrary, by locating it within its neoliberal and postfeminist politics and aesthetics, we will argue that it haphazardly borrows and superimposes tropes from the ‘bromance’ and ‘the buddy road movie’ genres onto its vision of what feminine choices entail and enable. Its casual evocation of elite lifestyles, denigration of wor...

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2017