A Research Talk on The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood: Cinema, Popular Culture, and Identity by Dr Namrata Sathe

About the Talk:

Dr Namrata Sathe’s book The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood: Cinema, Popular Culture, and Identity explores the consequences of unbridled expansion of neoliberal values within India through the lens of popular film and culture. The focus of the book is the neoliberal self, which, far from being a stable marker of urban, liberal, millennial Indian identity, has a schizophrenic quality, one that is replete with contradictions and oppositions, unable to sustain the weight of its own need for self-promotion, optimism, and belief in a narrative of progress and prosperity that has marked mainstream cultural discourse in India. The unstable and schizophrenic neoliberal identity that is the concern of this book, however, belies this narrative and lays bare the sense of precarity and inherent inequality that neoliberal regimes confer upon their subjects.

About the Speaker:

Namrata Rele Sathe holds a PhD in Media Studies from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated to the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences at Krea University, Sri City. She is the author of The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood: Cinema, Popular Culture, and Identity (Intellect Books, 2024). Her writing has been published in well-known academic journals such as Jump Cut, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and the New Review of Film and Television Studies. She has also published book chapters focusing on the media/popular culture work of women and queer creators in edited volumes. She is the Assistant Editor of Studies in South Asian Film and Media. Her research interests include feminist media studies, literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, and popular culture.