This edited volume is a collection of scholarly research on filmmaker Gurinder Chadha’s work representing Indian culture in foreign lands. Contributors discuss the implications of such admixtures on acculturation processes, diasporic formations, and specific cultural experiences.

Diaspora and Cultural Negotiations: The Films of Gurinder Chadha explores critical and theoretical conceptualizations of identity, globalization, intersectionality, and diaspora, among other topics, in the films of Gurinder Chadha. This book argues that Chadha’s work offers relevant and sensitive portrayals of the members of the diaspora community that make these films of contemporary and enduring value, highlighting their challenges in hybridization and acculturation in the societies they migrate to and the historical and political exigencies that influence their everyday existence. Contributors analyze Chadha’s films in the context of cultural milieus including multiculturalism, narration and representation, ethnicity, literary adaptation, and intercultural negotiations, while also exploring Chadha’s own role as an auteur. Scholars of film studies, Indian cinema, diaspora studies, sociology, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Shilpa Daithota Bhat

Part 1: Transnational Culture and Contexts

Chapter 1:Gurinder Chadha as a Scriptwriter: the Auteur in Dialogue with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices

Cristina M. Gámez Fernández

Chapter 2: Gurinder Chadha: BrAsian Inroads into Planetarity

Alejandra Moreno Álvarez and Jorge Diego Sanchez

Chapter 3: Diasporic Crosscurrents: Gurinder Chadha and Mira Nair's Early Documentaries

Amardeep Singh

Part 2: Power, Perspectives and Cultural Representations

Chapter 4: ‘You may as well please yourself’: Resistance and Narrative Hegemony in the Films of Gurinder Chadha

Setara Pracha

Chapter 5: The Politics of the Possible in Gurinder Chadha’s “Quais de Seine”

Lara V. Kattekola

Chapter 6: Generation Matters: Diasporic Reality and Myth-Making in Gurinder Chadha’s Acting Our Age and What’s Cooking?

Izabella Kimak

Part 3: Socio-Cultural Spaces and Multicultural Negotiations

Chapter 7: Salad or Soup?: Feasts of Feminism and Multiculturalism in Gurinder Chadha’s What’s Cooking?

Reshmi Hebbar

Chapter 8: Negotiating Belonging: Multicultural education in the films of Gurinder Chadha

Susan Flynn

Chapter 9: Darkness on the Edge of Town: Growing up in the Suburbs in Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging, It’s a Wonderful Afterlife and Blinded by the Light

Lauren Bettridge

Chapter 10: A Negotiation of ‘home’ in Gurinder Chadha’s film Bend It Like Beckham

J. Sunita Peacock

About the Contributors