Dr. Esha Niyogi De - New Book and Article Announcement

Dr. Esha Niyogi De has published a new, single-authored monograph, Women's Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia, available on University of Illinois Press' website.

Can we write women’s authorial roles into the history of industrial cinema in South Asia? How can we understand women’s creative authority and access to the film business infrastructure in this postcolonial region? Esha Niyogi De draws on rare archival and oral sources to explore these questions from a uniquely comparative perspective, delving into examples of women holding influential positions as stars, directors, and producers across the film industries in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

De uses film tropes to examine the ways women directors and film entrepreneurs claim creative control within the contexts of anti-colonial nationalism and global capitalism. The region’s fictional cinemas have become staging grounds for postcolonialism, with colonial and local hierarchies merged into new imperial formations. De’s analysis shows how the gendered intersections of inequity and opportunity shape women’s fiction filmmaking while illuminating the impact of state and market formations on the process.

Innovative and essential, Women’s Transborder Cinema examines the works of South Asia’s women filmmakers from a regional perspective.

Dr. De has also published a peer-reviewed article, “Female Collaboration at Regional Junctions: Traveling Pakistani Cinema and Unmoored Militarism in the 1980s.” This article is available in Asian Ethnology. Vol 83, Number 1 (2024): 153-171.  Special Issue on Rethinking Regions:  Locality and Circulation in South Asia. Guest Editors: Anne Murphy and Philipp Zemisch.