Abstract
The sheer number of scholarly monographs, journal essays, and newspaper articles published in the past decade in different parts of the world dealing with Bollywood’s emerging and strengthening ties with “global” or “international” sphere of culture evinces a worldwide shift in focus from Bollywood’s alleged escapist representations to Bollywood as an interface for transnational cultural exchange. For instance, in their introduction to their edited volume, Travels of Bollywood Cinema: From Bombay to LA, Anjali Gera Roy and Chua Beng Huat describe how the essays, taken as a whole, seek to examine “the ways in which transnational discourse of cosmopolitanism or locality might offer more productive conceptual tools in reviewing nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, and language through the examination of the travels of Indian popular cinema” (28). The editors of the collected essays argue for an understanding of how the multiple locations of Bollywood films (their making and receiving) today account for “the multiple imaginings of the nation outside of the geographical nation” (28). One such location for a Bollywood film of late has been the Latin/o Americas.