Transnational Cultures of Malabar Home Films from South-West Asia

Faith and Frames

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

2 889 kr

Kommande

This book examines the emergence, circulation, and cultural significance of the Malabar Home Film movement, an independent video film culture that developed in northern Kerala in the late 1990s and subsequently expanded across transnational migrant circuits in the Gulf. At its core, the study investigates how a seemingly modest, low-budget video genre becomes a powerful site for negotiating religion, modernity, migration, and media within postcolonial South Asia. The volume offers the first sustained academic account of a Muslim video-film movement in India, moving beyond macro-political narratives of Islamism to examine the everyday aesthetic labour through which religious publics are assembled.By integrating political history, media ethnography, and textual interpretation, it demonstrates how home films operate as a "double mirror," reflecting both intra-community anxieties and wider shifts in national and transnational political life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kerala and the Gulf, interviews with filmmakers and activists, and close readings of over two hundred films, the study situates the genre within the crises of India's postcolonial developmental state, the acceleration of globalization, and the rise of right-wing majoritarian politics.The primary readership includes scholars, researchers, and advanced students in Media Studies, Film Studies, Religious Studies, South Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, and Migration Studies. It will also attract journalists, documentary filmmakers, cultural critics, and policy researchers interested in religion and media, minority politics in India, Gulf migration, and vernacular digital cultures.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-11-04
Mått156 x 234 x undefined mm
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor220
FörlagTaylor & Francis Ltd
ISBN9781041372578

Tillhör följande kategorier

Film inom Kultur
Medievetenskap inom Samhälle och politik
Antropologi inom Samhälle och politik
Islam inom Filosofi och religion

'Transnational Cultures of Malabar Home films expands our understanding of South Asian filmmaking by looking beyond commercial entertainment and state-sponsored documentary, produced for so-called national audiences, and beyond independent filmmaking, produced for elite and international ones, to consider amateur and artisanal modes of filmmaking that function as part of religious and social life. T. T. Sreekumar and Bindu Menon show how Malabar home cinema has been shaped by Kerala’s precolonial and postcolonial histories, which differ from other parts of India through distinct relationships to film, migration, and religion. They bring into focus a transcultural space between South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula that is produced through waves of migration and longstanding cultural exchanges by looking deeper than financial remittances, cases of abuse by sponsors under the kafala (sponsorship) system, and, more frequently, unethical practices by Indian recruitment agencies. The book offers fresh insights into complex and contradictory ideas of "home" and "nation" that are too often overshadowed by volatile political forces, offering a model that contributes to the ongoing collective effort to decolonize South Asian film studies from often unmarked, upper-caste, secular, Indian perspectives—and also a model for migration and religion studies to understand what quantitative data fails to register.'- Dale Hudson, New York University, Abu Dhabi, co-editor of Reorienting the Middle East: Film and Digital Media Where the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean Meet (2024).