Hollywood/Bollywood: The Musical Two Ways

A comparative approach to the musical as Hollywood genre and as fundamental mode in Bollywood (where even horror movies have song-and-dance sequences!). The pleasurable interplay among song, dance, and screen directs us to the interplay of cultural identities (regional, racial, gendered, sexual). Through cinematic travels between America and India, we will examine how the utopian, liberatory energies of musical numbers - physical, emotional, aesthetic, and social - illuminate relations of narrative and spectacle, stardom and performance, gender and space, color and sound.