Introduction
Introduction
Cinema and Religion—New Genres, New Publics, and New Subjectivities
The introduction outlines a genealogy of how cinema and other media created new cultural contexts and new cultural subjects in the twentieth century India, thereby transforming religion and producing the hybrid figure of the citizen–devotee. The first section presents conceptual debates on secularism, citizenship, religion and media, embodiment and affect that frame this study. The second section is a detailed account of the mythological and devotional genres in Indian cinema and the predominant critical frameworks. The third focuses on the history of Telugu cinema tracing the different performative traditions and oral and printed texts that form a basis for these genres. It argues that both cinema technology and new political contexts mediate existing texts and traditions significantly. The final section describes the historical and ethnographic methods adopted in the study and the range of materials—film texts, publicity material, interviews, memoirs, and biographies of film-makers—used.
Keywords: citizenship, secularism, agency, cinema, Telugu film history, citizen–devotee
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .