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.
 

In this talk, Usha Iyer consider the implications of her use of film ephemera like song booklets—on account of the absence of the films themselves—to write a history of women’s participation in Indian cinema in the 1930s and 1940s, specifically in the area of film dance. Mapping relationships between the artifact and figures like the film historian, the spectator-collector, the flea market scavenger, and the fan blogger illuminates the role of ephemera in producing varied histories of the moving image. Rather than bemoan or fetishize incomplete archives, Iyer proposes that they generate imaginative, self-reflexive methodologies and speculative histories keenly attuned to industrial economies and ecologies.
 

Usha Iyer teaches in the Film and Media Studies program at Stanford University. They are the author of Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (2020). Their current book project, Jammin’: Black and Brown Media Intimacies between India and the Caribbean, examines media traffic and discourses of race, gender, and caste across two locations that are rarely studied alongside each other.

RSVP is encouraged: https://bit.ly/RSVPIndianCinema

Visit the project page for a full symposium schedule.