The World in South Asia lecture series welcomes Bhaskar Sarkar, associate professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, who will deliver a talk entitled “Cosmoplastics, or Bollywood’s Global Gesture.” The talk will take place Friday, Oct. 11, at 3:30 pm in Curtin Hall 368. Sponsored by the Villas Trust and the Film Studies program, the event is free and open to the public.

Indian cinema, more specifically the Bombay-based Hindi cinema industry, is now widely referred to as Bollywood. What work has this portmanteau term been doing as the industry has “gone global?” Drawing on salient aspects of Bombay cinema’s industrial reorganization and aesthetic modulations, this talk will seek to develop a theory of cosmoplastics as the art of forging worlds from shifting relations and local perspectives. At stake is an understanding of the political domain that is shaped by the sheer plasticity of cinema and the recognition of “the global” as always locally grounded, always multiple.