Importance Of Anti-Heritage Cinema

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Usually, when It comes to postcolonial studies, it is the literature of writers from the South Asian Diaspora such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee and Michael Ondaatje, to name a few, that gains academic and popular attention. However, it is cinema with its reach of tens, possibly hundreds, of millions viewers that can be said to have a greater potential in drawing upon experiences of the South Asian Diaspora. A feature role is played by Film in constructions of South Asian diasporic cultures, partly due to its importance in South Asia itself. Indian cinema or to say Bollywood, the Hindi language cinema based in Bombay, also has global presence and popularity in the South Asian region itself and also in the Middle East,
The term ‘Anti-heritage cinema’ came about as this criticism reached height, directed towards movies such as Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1996) and Elizabeth (Shepak Kapur, 1998) by scholars like Higson (2000) and Pamela Church-Gibson (2000), to name a few, to explain departures in narrative, political and editing styles seen in new British cinema’s rendition of British costume dramas. The ‘anti-heritage cinema’ thus went ahead rejecting the narrative constituents of nationhood in the traditional costume drama, replacing it with a hybrid which resonated more to the Twentieth-century melodramas and Gainsborough’s of the 1940’s than the epic landscape movies and biographies made from the start of 1970 to the 1992 Howard’s End. The hybrid constituents were contemporary politics and editing, non-British directors, a focus on individual characters and a pastiche of past. However, this pastiche of past was not about nostalgia but rather a symbolic, postmodernist, imitation of ‘heritage’ making it more active and ironic in these films. The post-national, as part of the anti-heritage cinematic dialectic, consequently aims to make sure of the pastiche of past to raise questions about the present, placing it directly in centre of debates around identity and

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