Year: 2013
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The award-winning successes of Danny Boyle’s rags to riches movie, Slumdog Millionaire (2008), a story that oscillates between the discrepant spaces of the Mumbai slums and the showroom of the ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ quiz, brought an unprecedented level of exposure to urban slum life, and in the eyes of some, imparted a dubious romantic glamour to poverty and degradation. The slum along with the TV showroom, in their diverse intersections (local and global, fundamentalism and metropolitanism; corruption and romance, agency and abjection), figure in the film as sites of multiple oppositions, contradictions and transformations, as metropolitan spaces in which the forces of caste, subalternity, religious fundamentalism and ethnocentrism can be overturned. The paper asks, in light of hostile criticism that the film promotes ‘poverty pornography’, whether its representations of the oppositional slum and media worlds through the global discourses of cinema point to what Bill Ashcroft calls a ‘transformation of modernity’. It seeks to identify a postcolonial, cosmopolitan ethics, whereby this utopian vision of Bollywood and Western cinemas might be (re)aligned with social, political and economic realities
Author: Janet M Wilson
Institution: University of Northampton
Language: French
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W139042391