National cinema, cultural identity and public sphere : rewriting Bangladesh film history
This study is an attempt to rethink the history of Bangladesh cinema, one of the least discussed Asian national cinemas. Going against the empiricist- teleological histories, here I present an engaged social history of Bangladesh cinema which combines a number of case studies. While these may appear disjointed, at a deeper level, I articulate them to form a history that can make visible the paradoxes inherent in Bangladesh cinema, a national cinema that developed in a postcolonial nation-space within/by a non-westem modernity. I consider Bangladesh cinema primarily as a public sphere. I suggest that cinema works as different 'public spheres' for different 'publics' in different social and political matrices. The conflict among different social groups in colonial Bengal and postcolonial East Pakistan and Bangladesh turned cinema into a site of contesting identities
Thesis, Dissertation, English, 2004