On April 22 at 3:30 p.m., Assistant Professor Swapnil Rai prensented a talk via zoom as part of the Global Media Industries Speaker Series.
China’s love affair with Bollywood is not completely new. It is said that after the first Indian film festival in China in the late fifties, Mao Zedong declared Raj Kapoor’s Awara his favorite film. The romance, however, was cut short by Indo-Chinese political hostility and the subsequent Sino-Indian war in 1962. The resurgence of Bollywood in China started in 2010 with Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan. Focusing on Chinese film and social media platforms such as Douban, M-Time and Weibo, this talk offers a discursive analysis of Khan’s fandom in China. It hones in on the affective terms of engagement of the Chinese users and their fandom’s intersections with India’s intangible, affective soft power and the circulation of Bollywood as a malleable cultural form.
