Screening Precarity

Screening Precarity integrates a cultural analysis of film texts and history, industry transformations, and the violence and crises of political economy infrastructures, to study post-liberalization shifts in the Hindi film industry in India. The book investigates Bollywood as a media system that has moved away from the glee and gusto of liberalization in the 1990s to an industry contending with the failures and inadequacies of neoliberalism’s promises, and the ascendency of the material-affective redressals offered by religious ethnonationalism. The monograph examines 19 Hindi-language films released post-2010 to study contemporary India’s precarious public sphere which has been characterized by a pervasive sense of professional-personal insecurity experienced by the vast majority. This is a book about the role of cinema, or cultural texts more generally, in a period marked by incredible insecurity, violence, and the absence of collective political alternatives. Screening Precarity is an intervention in the politics of representation, particularly, of how marginal identities are shaped, scripted, and screened in precarious times. It is also a cultural analysis of how the biggest film industry in the world is embedded in global media networks, and marshals state power and star power, national histories and transnational fantasies, structural impossibilities and individual agency.

Megha Anwer is a theorist of literature and visual culture. Her research areas include contemporary postcolonial literature, global cinema, Victorian literature and visual culture. Her co-authored book, Screening Precarity: Hindi Cinema and Neoliberal Crisis in Twenty-first Century India, published by University of Michigan Press just came out in September 2025. She also has a co-edited volume, Bollywood’s New Woman: Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies (Rutgers UP, 2021). Her peer-reviewed publications have appeared in multiple journals and anthologies, including Victorian Studies, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, ARIEL, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Global South, among others.

Anupama Arora is a professor of English and Communication, and Women’s and Gender Studies, at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Her co-authored book, Screening Precarity: Hindi Cinema and Neoliberal Crisis in Twenty-first Century India, was published by the University of Michigan Press in September 2025. She has also co-edited two anthologies: India in the American Imaginary 1780s–1880s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Bollywood’s New Woman: Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies (Rutgers, 2021). Her essays have appeared in many book collections and journals including South Asian Popular Culture, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Writing, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies. She is also co-executive editor of the open-access Journal of Feminist Scholarship, and on the editorial board of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature.

Dr Priyam Sinha is an Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical media industry studies, disability studies, gender studies, affect studies, production culture studies, and anthropology of the body. So far, her articles have been published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; South Asian Diaspora, among others. She is also a regular podcast host at NewBooksNetwork and has been published in public writing forums like the Economic and Political Weekly, FemAsia, Asian Film Archive, among others. More information on her ongoing projects can be found on her website www.priyamsinha.com and you can follow her on https://x.com/PriyamSinha