Entertaining the Raj: Cinema and cultural intersections of the United States, Britain, and India in the early twentieth century

"Entertaining the Raj: Cinema and the Cultural Intersections of the United States, Britain, and India in the Early Twentieth Century," argues that empire's civilizing mission and meta-narratives of history and of coherent national identities were constructed in relation not just to ideas of Englishness, as has long been known, but also in relation to destabilizing and competing ideologies of Americanism.; Theorists have discussed how the ideology of empire was transmitted through the "consumer spectacle" of imperial goods. Yet an alternative consumer spectacle of Americanism was also available to consumers in the Raj. It was disseminated most powerfully through the medium of the American cinema, which dominated 90% of the film market there through the early 1930s. "Entertaining the Raj" considers the intersection between the British empire and American globalization in the early twentieth-century Indian colonial context by studying the impact of American cinema. My argument is that the consumer spectacle of the American cinema posited an alternative notion of whiteness and the West, one that represented modernization, social mobility, and democracy in contrast to the traditionalism, hierarchy, and white supremacy of empire. It also clashed with rigid notions of Indian identity posited by some in the nationalist movement.; Using archival materials such as legislation, industry correspondence, government reports, and periodicals of the period in Britain, India, and the United States and analysis of some of the most popular films of the 1910s to the 1930s, I explore the ideologies of the American consumer spectacle and its cultural reception. I examine how Indian filmmakers integrated conventions of American and European filmmaking with Indian theatrical and artistic traditions to articulate an Indian modernity. Finally, I consider the way in which American "empire films" of the 1930s adapted British narratives of empire to represent the United States as a world power.