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Final registration for Indian Cinema Circuits: Diasporas, Peripheries and Beyond. To register, please download form: http://www.wmin.ac.uk/mad/page-2104 Programme also online. Thursday 25th and Friday 26th June, The Old Cinema, Regent Campus, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW Keynote speakers: Brian Larkin (Barnard College, Columbia University) Ravi Vasudevan (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi) The Indian film industry’s importance for audiences worldwide has been celebrated by an increasing number of edited collections and papers boasting of Bollywood’s globally expanding territories. However, questions about the nature of Indian cinema circulation remain to be explored: what enables Indian cinema to circulate? How does circulation of the films themselves sit within a broader set of flows – of film technology, personnel, music, posters, stars? What theoretical and methodological tools are appropriate to this multi-sited field? And whilst the South Asian diasporic formations of Britain and North America have been undoubtedly important, much less analyzed are the Indian diasporas associated with nineteenth century plantation capital in the Caribbean, Fiji and South Africa, as well as those non-Indian audiences that consume Indian films in Turkey, Nepal, Austria, Kenya, Russia and elsewhere. These cinema contexts offer additional positions from which to develop analyses of Indian cinema: for example, the plantation diasporas’ historical trajectories are distinctively different from other diasporas. Moreover, exploring Indian cinema within diverse national agendas, whose history and socio-political realities are not overtly Indian-orientated, opens up debate on alternative appropriations of India, as well as questions about the nature of film circulation itself. Organized by SOAS and the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster, Indian Cinema Circuits: Diasporas, Peripheries and Beyond, will focus on questions of circulation, with particular reference to these ‘peripheral’ sites, where, in many cases, Indian films have been watched since the 1930s, and aims to complicate accounts that position Bollywood as a recent global phenomenon. Conference fee: Waged: £75 for two days (£40 one day) Students, unwaged and concessions: £15 Staff and students of SOAS and UOW: free