Undergraduate Courses (list)

This broad survey introduces students to the cinemas of much of the Global South: Africa, Middle East, and South Asia. Divided into four categories: Political Cinema, Melodrama, Art/Experimental Cinema and Popular Film, the course contextualizes films within their own social, political, and industrial contexts, but simultaneously maps the transnational exchange between the three regions. From the traffic in radical ideas and tools of Third Cinema in the 60s and 70s, to the massive popularity of Bollywood films in Nigeria and Nollywood films globally, we will pay special attention to how genres, images, ideologies, and fandoms travel and cross-pollinate film-cultures in these regions of the globe. Since the Internet explosion has accelerated these travels and exchanges in unprecedented ways, we will also remain attentive to the ecology of new media.

Course Goals: This course has three basic goals: 1) to familiarize students to the important cinematic cultures of Africa, Middle-East, and South Asia, 2) to ensure that students able to situate these cinemas within histories of colonialism, oppression, war, and globalization, and 3) to ensure that students engage with these cinemas as national as well as transnational meaning-making systems.