School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am a media anthropologist and my research is situated at the intersection of anthropology and film studies. I am the author of Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2014), which was awarded the 2016 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize. I am one of the editors of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks and Connected Histories (Bloomsbury, 2021). I co-edit the journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. 

My ongoing ethnographic research explores the social, political and technological lives of the moving image in South Asia. I am particularly interested in the encounter between empirical audiences and the aesthetic and technological aspects of film in the context of political mobilisation and contestation. I explore the technological contours and political efficacy of transgressive media images in South Asia and I combine ethnographic methods with archival work to do so.

I've held an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and an individual fellowship at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

My current research engages the places of the moving image within state practices in eastern Bengal since 1947 and explores the historical transformation of state control of media through a consideration of artistic form and cultural technique in South Asia. I am writing a monograph that explores the nature of film appreciation as a social practice and asks how the art film has been a site for political contestation within Bangladesh.

See short videos from my research work here and here. I share my work as 'De Media Automatiek' here and here.

Courtesy of the Bangladesh National Archive

Selected Publications

Hoek, Lotte. 2024. A Screen in the Crowd: Film Societies and Political Protest in Bangladesh. In Zhang Zhen, Sangjoon Lee, Debashree Mukherjee and Intan Paramaditha (eds), Routledge Companion to Asian Cinema. London: Routledge. Pp. 21-31

Hoek, Lotte. 2023. Contemporary Art and the Living Film Archive in Bangladesh. Third Text Online.

Sanjukta Sunderason and Lotte Hoek (eds). 2022. Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks and Connected Histories. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Hoek, Lotte. 2021. Films in the Diplomatic Bag: Sovereignty, Censorship and the Foreign Mission Film in East Pakistan & Bangladesh. In Ravi Vasudevan (ed.), Media and the Constitution of the Political in South Asia. New Delhi: Sage. Pp. 23-50.

Vasudevan, Ravi, Rosie Thomas, SV Srinivas, Debashree Mukherjee and Lotte Hoek (eds). 2021. The Keywords Issue. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. 12 (1&2): 1-244.

Hoek, Lotte. 2021. “This is Not a Film”: Industrial Expectations and Film Criticism as Censorship at the Bangladesh Film Censor Board. In Ramyar D. Rossoukh and Steven C. Caton (eds), Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity. Durham: Duke University Press. Pp. 109-128.

Hoek, Lotte. 2020. When Celluloid Pornography Went Digital: Class and Race in the Bangladeshi Cut-Piece Online. Porn Studies 7(1): 97-114. https://doi/full/10.1080/23268743.2019.1607539

Hoek, Lotte. 2019. Pictures on paper: Censoring cinematic culture through the Bangladesh Film Club Act. Terrain November. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/terrain/19361 ; DOI : 10.4000/terrain.19361

Hoek, Lotte and Sanjukta Sunderason. 2019. Journeying Through Modernism: Travels and Transits of East Pakistani Artists in Post-Imperial London. British Art Studies. Issue 13, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-13/hoek-sunderason

Hoek, Lotte. 2017. Mirrors of Movement: Aina, Afzal Chowdhury’s cinematography and the interlinked histories of the cinema in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Screen 57(4): 488-495.

Hoek, Lotte. 2017. Film For Good: Can cinema produce social justice? Anthropology News 58(2): 3-4.

Hoek, Lotte. 2016. Urban Wallpaper: Film Posters, City Walls and the Cinematic Public in South Asia. South Asia 39(1): 73-92.

Hoek, Lotte. 2016. Revelations in the Anthropology of Cinema. Anthropology of this Century 15 (May).

Hoek, Lotte. 2015. Cinema and the Melodrama of Nationalism. Himal Southasian 28(3): 66-77.

Hoek, Lotte. 2014. Cross-Wing Filmmaking: East Pakistani Urdu Films and Other Traces from the Bangladesh Film Archive. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 5(2): 99-118.

Hoek, Lotte. 2014. Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hoek, Lotte. 2013. Blood Splattered Bengal: The Spectacular Spurting Blood of the Bangladeshi Action Cinema. Contemporary South Asia 21(3): 214-229.

Hoek, Lotte. 2013. Killer not terrorist: Visual articulations of terror in Bangladeshi action cinema. South Asian Popular Culture 11(2): 121-132.

Hoek, Lotte. 2012. Mofussil Metropolis: Civil sites, uncivil cinema and provinciality in Dhaka City. Ethnography 13(1): 28-42. Special Issue: Crowds and Conviviality: Ethnographies of the South Asian City, edited by Ajay Gandhi & Lotte Hoek

Hoek, Lotte. 2010. Urdu for Image: Understanding Bangladeshi Cinema through its Theatres. In Shakuntala Banaji (ed.). South Asian Media Cultures: Representations, Audiences and Contexts. London & New York: Anthem Press.

Hoek, Lotte. 2010. Cut-Pieces as Stag Film: Bangladeshi Pornography in Action Cinema. Third Text 24(1): 133-146.

Hoek, Lotte. 2010. Unstable Celluloid: Film Projection and the Cinema Audience in Bangladesh. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 1:1.

Hoek, Lotte. 2009. More Sexpression Please! Screening the Female Voice and Body in the Bangladesh Film Industry. In Birgit Meyer (ed.). Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.