Noir films in India and Latin America and gendered urban space

• Autores: Indrani Mukherjee, Sanguita Sen
• Localización: Visiones multidisciplinares sobre la cultura popular: actas del 5.º Congreso Internacional de SELICUP / coord. por Eduardo de Gregorio Godeo, María del Mar Ramón Torrijos, 2014, ISBN 978-84-617-0400-2, págs. 292-302
• Idioma: español
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This paper proposes to look at comparable tropes of the noir films from India and Mexico to explore how they complemented nation building paradigms in newly formed democratic and �secular� nations.

    Citizenship in new post-war Mexico and post-independent India is imagined and invented through institutions such as the constitution and law, education and discipline, family and secularism and the deployment of police and army. Such citizenship would enable wielding of power through �effective governance� implicating thereby domestication of the nonconforming other within the national narrative; these others included the femme fatale among other marginal characters which populate the nocturnal city. She is intrinsically linked to the nocturnal city as allegorical representation of a gendered space which needs to be cleansed and contained into the Nation; notwithstanding the dynamics of these situations, however, the mass consumer resists any kind of passive manipulation by the culture industry. The mass production of this citizenry, though a result of the culture industry, sensitizes it (i.e. this citizenry) to reckoning with its own potential role in nation building by joining issue with the critique of the social or political culturescapes which it inhabits. This stock-taking of the old movies exposes how today�s noir films have changed gear to highlight the complete lack of the State as also of the mass citizenry given the fragmenting nature of the neo-liberal and transnational economics of nations. Subjecthood and agency are disintegrated micro-narratives begging to be �heard� in anonymous interspaces of the most invisible underbellies of the new noir films