Centered around a private collection of film memorabilia accumulated over five decades of travels through South Asian film festivals, this symposium features invited scholars of South Asian cinema who reflect on the collection's research value for South Asian film history, film archives, and visual culture. The symposium is accompanied by an exhibition of the memorabilia in the Allen Library North Lobby.


Through exploring the vast and eclectic Lyle Pearson collection Navaneetha Mokkil’s aim is two-fold. Firstly, she thinks about how we can assemble figurations of woman, in movement, through ephemeral sites of exhibition and reception. How do film stills, posters, pamphlets, calendar art, catalogues, reports and advertisements from the 1970s and 1980s present before us formations of woman as a contingent category in a time period when this figure was being assembled in multiple domains? How can we trace histories of gender, body and desire through these aesthetic and circulatory practices? Secondly, through navigating this collection, she will reflect on how embodied encounters with material artefacts, now digitally accessed, are filtered through and in turn shape our understanding of gender and cinema. How do fragments of materials of a time past enable us to experience cinema not merely as a site for projecting pre-fabricated images of women but as a moving scene that shapes our imaginations of gender?

Navaneetha Mokkil is faculty at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She is the author of Unruly Figures: Queerness, Sex Work and the Politics of Sexuality in Kerala (2019) and the co-editor of Thinking Women: A Feminist Reader (2019). Her current research is on gender, visual forms and the scenography of protesting bodies in public.

Visit the project page for a full symposium schedule.