1st Edition
Cinemas of the Global South Towards a Southern Aesthetics
This book engages with the idea of the Global South through cinema as a concept of resistance; as a space of decolonialisation; and as an arena of virtuality, creativity and change. It opens up a dialogue amongst scholars and filmmakers from the Global South: India, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, and Egypt.
The essays in the volume approach cinema as an intertwined process of both production and perception not divorced from the economic, social, political and cultural. They emphasise film as a visual medium where form, structure and content are not separable. Through a wide array of film-readings, the authors explore the concept of a southern cinematic esthetics, in particular, and the concept of the Global South in general.
The volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of film and media studies, critical theory, cultural studies and Global South studies.
1. Cinemas of the Global South: Towards A Southern Aesthetics
Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha
2. Southern Aesthetics. The Egyptian Way: Shadi Abelsalam’s The Day of Counting the Years (1969)
Amir Taha
3. Constellations of Time: Towards A Cartography of Plundered Memories
Diego Amaral
4. Singing in Saffron Times: Documentary Film and Resistance to Majoritarian Politics in India
Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar
5. Local Realism: Indian Independent Film as a Socio-political Medium
Ashvin Devasundaram
6. Indian gangsters, American noir and Africa’s Drum magazine:
the making of a South African gangster fliek during early apartheid
Damon Heatlie
7. Contagious Aesthetics: Bios, Politics and Cinema in Contemporary Kerala
Veena Hariharan
8. Dealing with The Precarious City: Violence, Memory and Rhythms of Endurance in La sombra del caminante (Ciro Guerra 2005) & La sociedad del semáforo (Ruben Mendoza, 2010)
Luis F. Rosero Amaya
9. Cinematics of Southern Environmentalism
Anthony Obute
Biography
Dilip M Menon is Professor of History and International Relations at the University of Witwatersrand, and Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa. His interests are in knowledge from the Global South, South Asian cultural and intellectual history and oceanic histories. He has edited Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South (2022) and Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought (2023).
Amir Taha gained his PhD in English Literature and Cultures from the University of Tübingen in 2017. He is an Associate Researcher at Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Taha taught Film Studies, Cultural Studies and Global South Studies at the University of Tübingen and at Wits University. He is the author of Film and Counterculture in the 2011 Egyptian Uprising (2021) and is the co-editor of the upcoming Cinemas from the Global South. Towards Southern Aesthetics (Routledge).
