Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema

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Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema

by Pavitra Sundar

University of Michigan Press, 2023

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-472-13248-5

Paper: 978-0-472-03937-1

eISBN: 978-0-472-90366-5 (OA)

About the Book

Honorable Mention of the 2023 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies

Longlist Finalist of the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Moving Image Book Award

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.

About the Author

Pavitra Sundar is Associate Professor of Literature at Hamilton College.

Reviews

“Pavitra Sundar has made an important contribution to sound studies and film studies with this rigorous and insightful analysis of the singing, listening, and speaking of popular Bombay cinema. Sundar’s clear prose and compelling case studies work to update the historical narrative and help us to listen more deeply, more broadly, and more sensitively to an influential tradition of soundwork.” — Jacob Smith, Northwestern University

“Listening with a Feminist Ear is a tour de force. Using a robust theoretical framework, Sundar carefully illuminates the historical, technological, and ideological factors sustaining paradigms of sonic representation, effects, and modes of listening across seven decades of Hindi cinema. Superbly written and researched, this study foregrounds the importance of gender and sexuality in cinematic and cultural soundwork. Highly recommended.”— Caryl Flinn, University of Michigan

“Listening with a Feminist Ear lives up to the promise of listening to sound differently and not just using sound to register difference. Sundar offers an elegant analysis of the power of listening and the generative potential of soundwork.”— Sujata Moorti, Middlebury College

Honorable Mention of the 2023 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies

— Modern Language Association

Longlist Finalist of the 2024 Moving Image Book Award

— Kraszna-Krausz Foundation

“Sundar brings to the study of Bombay cinema the methods and insights of sound studies and feminism to produce a thoroughly original monograph that provides a model for how sound might be studied in cinema with an eye to historical and industrial specificity.”— Sangita Gopal, University of Oregon