Books by Pavitra Sundar
University of California Press, 2023
Everyone speaks with an accent, but what is an accent? Thinking with an Accent introduces accent ... more Everyone speaks with an accent, but what is an accent? Thinking with an Accent introduces accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception that includes looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. This volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice. Accent does more than just denote identity: from algorithmic bias and corporate pedagogy to migratory poetics and the politics of comparison, accent mediates global economies of discrimination and desire. Accents happen between bodies and media. They negotiate power and invite attunement. These essays invite the reader to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical and multimodal inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care.
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University of Michigan Press, 2023
Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in c... more Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries.
Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.
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Articles & Essays by Pavitra Sundar
Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice, 2023
Feminist Media Histories, 2022
Editors' Introduction to special issue of Feminist Media Histories vol. 8, no. 1, co-edited with ... more Editors' Introduction to special issue of Feminist Media Histories vol. 8, no. 1, co-edited with Debashree Mukherjee
BioScope, 2021
Entry for keywords special issue of BioScope!
South Asian Popular Culture , 2020
Introduction to special issue on Masculinities, co-edited with Praseeda Gopinath
Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship, 2020
For a vastly updated version of this argument, see chapter 2 of my book Listening with a Feminist... more For a vastly updated version of this argument, see chapter 2 of my book Listening with a Feminist Ear (University of Michigan Press, 2023), which is available open access on the Press' site.
Sounding Out blog, 2017
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LOCATING THE VOICE IN FILM: Critical Approaches and Global Practices, 2016
This article develops a temporal framework for analyzing television's role in shaping the formati... more This article develops a temporal framework for analyzing television's role in shaping the formation of a new and powerful urban middle class in 1980s India. Focusing on the first sitcom produced in India, Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi [Such Is Life], we argue that the unique temporal affordances of broadcast television facilitated a broader shift in the national imaginary. Not only did broadcast television, via the vehicle of such neglected genres as sitcoms, synchronize the rhythms of daily life to its schedules, but sitcoms also recast the daily lives and experiences of the middle classes as ordinary, relatable, and achievable. Casting the 1980s as the time of television illuminates a critical period and medium of communication in Indian cultural history.
Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 2016
Language articulates cultural distinction and difference in a variety of ways in India's diverse ... more Language articulates cultural distinction and difference in a variety of ways in India's diverse cinematic traditions. In mainstream Bombay cinema, language has been deployed to assert the hegemony of Hindi and to cast Hindi-speaking North Indian subjects as quintessential national subjects. This assertion of linguistic and cultural privilege runs counter to the fact that film-making in India has always entailed a host of multilingual and cross-regional exchanges, from producing remakes and double versions to dubbing film dialogues. This article uses G. N. Devy's concept of 'translation consciousness' to demonstrate how Ek Duuje Ke Liye/For Each Other, a Hindi film produced by South Indian film-makers, challenges the hegemony of both Hindi and Bombay cinema as an industry. In moving deftly across multiple tongues and cultural forms -from various iterations of Hindi to Bharatanatyam to classic film titles -EDKL urges us to embrace a more playful attitude towards linguistic and regional identity. Attending to the politics of language and sound in this particular film, and in Indian film history more broadly, also allows us to rethink the relationship between the 'national' and the 'regional' in film studies as a discipline.
Jump Cut 56 (winter 2014-2015)
South Asian Popular Culture, 2010
This essay analyzes the soundtrack of Sabiha Sumar's Punjabi film Khamosh Pani (2003). Lauded for... more This essay analyzes the soundtrack of Sabiha Sumar's Punjabi film Khamosh Pani (2003). Lauded for its trenchant critique of religious fundamentalism and its sensitive portrayal of women's experiences of social and political violence, Khamosh Pani offers a feminist intervention into the historiography of Partition and the discourse on trauma and testimony, both fields that have historically disregarded the particularities of women's lives in South Asia. This essay argues that sound and music are key to the film's critical project. Khamosh Pani articulates the dangers of censorship and the power of women's silence as a mode of protest using a range of formal devices (musical, verbal, visual, narrative, and figurative). The film also evokes the violence and trauma of Partition through its use of 'distanciated sound.' This Brechtian strategy produces a visceral experience of the uncanny that forcefully challenges extant accounts of time, history, and communalism in South Asia.
Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 2008
... Contemporary playback artists such as Alka Yagnik and Kavita Krishnamurthy follow in the foot... more ... Contemporary playback artists such as Alka Yagnik and Kavita Krishnamurthy follow in the footsteps of "Lata didi" (big sister Lata), emulating ... Like Ila Arun's voice described earlier in this essay, the voices of playback singers Sukhwinder Singh and Sapna Awasthi in "Chaiyya ...
Reviews by Pavitra Sundar
Popular Communication, 2009
Fewer than 20 years ago, very little of scholarly sub-stance had been published on the Bombay Hin... more Fewer than 20 years ago, very little of scholarly sub-stance had been published on the Bombay Hindi cinema, popularly known as Bollywood. Today, it seems as if entire sections of bookshops are devoted to analyses of its products. Ranjani Mazumdar makes an eloquently ...
South Asian Popular Culture, 2010
Page 1. Page 2. Page 3. Global Bollywood Page 4. This page intentionally left blank Page 5. Globa... more Page 1. Page 2. Page 3. Global Bollywood Page 4. This page intentionally left blank Page 5. Global Bollywood Travels of Hindi Song and Dance Sangita Gopal Sujata Moorti Editors University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Page 6. ...
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Books by Pavitra Sundar
**Open Access: https://luminosoa.org/site/books/e/10.1525/luminos.148/
Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.
**Open Access: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/9w032565q
Articles & Essays by Pavitra Sundar
To access an open-access version of the entire anthology, click here: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.148
Reviews by Pavitra Sundar
**Open Access: https://luminosoa.org/site/books/e/10.1525/luminos.148/
Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.
**Open Access: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/9w032565q
To access an open-access version of the entire anthology, click here: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.148