School of Social and Political Science

Description

In this talk, Dr. Tupur Chattopadhyay will introduce the key themes and arguments from her forthcoming book, Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India (NYU Press, 2025). 

Projecting Desire locates the post-globalization transformation of India’s screen and exhibition industries in a longer arc of ideas about urban planning and architecture, long mired in caste- and class-based gendered anxieties. Since the late 90s, multiplexes in India have almost always been located inside malls, rendering it impossible to inhabit one space without also inhabiting the other. Their prevalence coincides with a shift in the spectatorial imagination of India’s mass audience—spaces that, for several preceding decades, had been designed for the subaltern male, but are now built for the consuming, globalized middle-class woman. By catering to the mutable desires and anxieties of a rapidly expanding and heterogeneous middle class, the mall-multiplex has radically altered the politics of theatrical space and moviegoing. 

The talk will illustrate the story of this historic transition as it played out across media industries, architecture and design, popular cinema, and public culture. It will highlight how the multiplex established a new link between media and architecture in the subcontinent, not only rewriting the relation between gender and urban space but also changing the shapes of Indian cities.