Bollywood is one of the most prolific film industries in the world. Based in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the industry churns out hundreds of films each year—primarily melodramatic films with music and elaborately choreographed dance routines. Bollywood's popularity is quickly spreading across the globe, and, beyond the films themselves, Bollywood has made its way into global popular culture.
Global Bollywood brings together leading scholars to examine the transnational and transmedia terrain of Bollywood. Defining Bollywood as an arena of public culture distinct from Hindi-language Bombay cinema, this volume offers a new critical framework for analyzing the institutional, cultural, and political dimensions of Bollywood films and film music as they begin to constitute an important circuit of global flows in the twenty-first century.
Organized thematically, the book examines contestations surrounding the term “Bollywood,” changing relations between the state and the film industry, convergence with television and new media, online fan culture, film journalism, and the reception and negotiations of gender and sexuality in diverse socio-cultural contexts. Global Bollywood is indispensable for understanding not only Bollywood cinema and culture but also how global media flows are reconfiguring relationships among geography, cultural production, and cultural identity.
