Posthuman subjectivities: Bollywood Nollywood film Namaste Wahala and the transnational transferability of post-colonial contemporary urban femininities

abstract

Posthumanism emphasises the greater role technology plays in meaning-making in society today. It also highlights a shift away from the dominance of Eurocentric perspectives in such discursive engagements. Using posthumanism as a theoretical base, this review works to look at the kinds of subjectivities that emerge in a posthuman context. Specifically, it focuses on a film, Namaste Wahala, which released globally on Netflix in February 2021. The film is described as the first joint Bollywood and Nollywood film. Based on the opportunity for global South storytelling and complex meaning-making that such a film offers via online platform Netflix, one could argue that such films may serve to represent posthuman subjectivities. The review thus works to unpack the nuances of such subjectivity as it relates to issues of gender and class in the global South. It is theoretically anchored in work on transnationality as well as contemporary urban Indian femininity in the context of India and Nigeria in a globalised era. The review focuses on a scene in the film where a Nigerian Indian woman is convincing her Indian relative to accept a Nigerian woman as her daughter-in-law. In the scene she explains that Nigerian women and Indian women are the same when it comes to femininity. The paper unpacks how the film achieves the global transfer of contemporary urban femininity in the global South. It engages with Dosekun’s (2015) theorisation of the transferability of postfeminism via the media as a class issue. Conscious of the dangers of homogenising such iterations of femininity, emphasis is placed on the significance of nuance and context thereby noting similarity in practices across similar global South, post-colonial contexts.

keywords:

• posthuman subjectivities
• Bollywood
• Nollywood
• postfeminism
• Netflix

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Viraj Suparsad

VIRAJ SUPARSAD is currently a post-doctoral fellow in African Feminist Imagination at The Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa. He holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was awarded the 2019 William and Ntihila Kupe Prize for Postgraduate Research Excellence, given to the researcher with the top PhD in Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, for his thesis Global femininities: India, Bollywood actresses and Postfeminism. His research interests relate to postfeminism, celebrity culture, and gender in the global South. Email: [email protected]