UCSB Department of FilmUCSB Department of Film and Media Studies1720 Ellison Hall, Santa Barbara, ca 93106 Tel (805) 893 2347 (fax) 805 893 8630 admin@filmandmedia.ucsb.edu
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People - Faculty - Bhaskar Sarkar

Bhaskar Sarkar
Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies

Curriculum Vitae

1999 Ph.D. in Film Criticism and Theory University of Southern California

OFFICE: Ellison1804
OFFICE HOURS: W 2-4 pm
PHONE: 893-4238
E-MAIL: sarkar@filmandmedia.ucsb.edu

FIELD:
Post-Colonial Media Theory, Cultural Theory, Asian Cinemas

Bhaskar Sarkar
BRIEF BIO:
Bhaskar Sarkar’s primary research interests include post-colonial media theory, political economy of global media, and history and memory. Broadly speaking, his work addresses questions of modernity and nationhood, paying close attention to the institutions, circuits, and practices constituting global media assemblages.

Sarkar is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2009), a critical exploration of the cinematic traces of a particular historical trauma. He has published essays on philosophies of visuality, and Indian and Chinese popular cinemas in anthologies and journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Rethinking History: Theory and Practice, and New Review of Film and Television Studies. At present, he is working on a comparative study of India and China's repositioning within the global cultural economy, as a way of tracking “plastic nationalisms” within a world-historical frame.

Sarkar has also co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Postcolonial Studies on “The Subaltern and the Popular,” anthologizing the proceedings from a 2004 conference. That conference provided the impetus for a multi-year research project involving scholars from multiple UC campuses and other research institutions (visit website). Recently, he has initiated another collaborative research project, “Speculative Globalities,” which will explore uncertainty as both a productive and a critical logic informing globalization. Sarkar also serves on the advisory boards of two research centers at UCSB: Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music, and the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies.
Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition
Bhaskar Sarkar
Duke University Press
384 pages (May 2009)
63 illustrations

What remains of the “national” when the nation unravels at the birth of the independent state? The political truncation of India at the end of British colonial rule in 1947 led to a social cataclysm in which roughly one million people died and ten to twelve million were displaced. Combining film studies, trauma theory, and South Asian cultural history, Bhaskar Sarkar follows the shifting traces of this event in Indian cinema over the next six decades. He argues that Partition remains a wound in the collective psyche of South Asia and that its representation on screen enables forms of historical engagement that are largely opaque to standard historiography.

 

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