Here is the lecture content:

"Last lecture of the semester, we're obviously going to do a
review. We are going to do what we have done in week 4,8 and 13 and
we are, we're actually going to look at what the goals of this class were
and whether or not we have met them. So this is a lecture with a lot of
information on the slides, which means that and I'm going to put all of that
information on Carmen so you can kind of look at the slides. But it might be
best not to-to just kind of hear my words and maybe look at your Carmen
page for better direction. So let's get started. We have watched all of these
films and if you are not somebody who grew up watching South Asian or
Bollywood films, that's a lot of films. It's about 14 to 18 films. If you count
all of the ones that you could have watched. I don't know if this is true for
all of you, but I wonder if some of your Netflix and Amazon suggested lists
have started looking very different now because we have all of these new
and different films added. So if we think that there are about 200 films
made in Bollywood, generally every year. We have watched 14 to 18 films.
And of course I have picked these films and I could have taught this class
without any of these, right? I could have picked entirely different films.
Some of these films are really, really iconic. So for example, I don't know if
teaching this class without Upkar makes a lot of sense, but I could have
picked a different film that has a very similar kind of message from a
similar time period. The same thing is true for Amar Akbar Anthony.
They're very, very iconic films. They're not ones that one can easily miss.
But you know, to be very honest, I could actually say that for Jai Santoshi
Maa as well. It's not a film that a class like this can be taught without. But
I'm sure I could find a equally terrible film that did less well on the box
office. But in general, more or less I would have I could have picked very,
very different films. In fact, every other time I've taught this class, I have
not taught Pardes. We have not talked about, we've talked about Pardes,
but we have not watched it. So the point I'm trying to make here is the
specificities of the films that we watched are really relevant for the
purposes of our class, but the more relevant thing is the messaging around
these films; what these films were trying to tell us, right? These films were
trying to tell us something about family. They were trying to tell us
something about religion. They were trying to tell us something about how
one is supposed to be an Indian and behave like an Indian. And we could
have had that message with a different set of films. We did not need these
exact these exact films. In fact, there is a 19- the Chennai Express. Instead
of Chennai Express, I could have assigned a different film from actually a
very different time period and I could have said almost entirely the same
thing. So the point again being the message is more important than the
exact films we picked. But these were fun films to pick, right? Like How fun
is Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara or Amar Akbar Anthony or Dilwale Dulhania
Le Jayenge. That's actually another film that I don't know if I could have
taught without but you know. So we have done a lot of film watching in
the class. You've watched a film, or for some weeks two films per week
and that's a lot of watching time. And these films have said something
about about the message of Bollywood in general. The message of
Bollywood in general, we have repeatedly said, has something to do with
how the state of India, the nation works and how it imagines itself and
how it imagines its citizens and what those citizens are supposed to do,
who those citizens are supposed to be. Our readings for the semester, and
we have done a decent chunk of readings as well. We have done
anywhere from 300 to 400 pages worth of reading about Bollywood,
right? Our readings have kind of been Some of them in the beginning were
about how Bollywood works, right? What is specific about Bollywood? So
we said Tejaswini Ganti was what is specific about Bollywood. Lutgendorf
and Dudra were specific about what Bollywood does. Wilkerson, Webber,
nijawan. These were all readings that are about exactly how Bollywood
film is made. And how that making of Bollywood film gives it a texture,
gives it its own identity, right? So Bollywood film is its own idea of film and
its own idea of filmmaking. And these readings in the early part of the
semester told us about that. They told us other things too. They told us
how audience interacts with film. They told us how we should look at
dance in the film. How, we should look at dress in the film, and those were
really relevant things to know in terms of how film was working. We also
learned about representation in film. We learned about how men were
represented in Chakraborty. We learned about about slums from Nandi.
We learned about women and their representation in film from Lutgendorf.
We learned about about diaspora from Oberoi. We also learned very
specific things about specific films from some of these readings. So Elison
et. al. for example, was an entire 50 page chapter. It's actually an entire
book about Amar Akbar Anthony. And that reading told us about one
aspect, one character, the character of the mother in the film. So our
readings were kind of spread out in various different ways and they kind of
moved with the films. But sometimes they didn't, right? So, for example,
Jotsna Kapur was not specifically about about the film of the week, which
was Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Jotsna Kapur was about was about
globalization, right? We had very specific films tied to very specific authors
like Philip Lutgendorf taught us about Jai Santoshi Maa and Indian ways of
filmmaking. But we also had authors that told us about broad concepts.
Agarwal and Pal also did the same thing. They told us about boycott
Bollywood, right? So big ideas associated with Bollywood not specifically
associated with the film, although we had readings that were specifically
associated with film as well. And then we had readings towards the
beginning of the term that were about about how to read Bollywood, how
to understand Bollywood, how Bollywood is its own animal, its own thing.
Right. So these readings, where did they come from and why did I pick
them? So when we are taking a class, that's a 3000 level class, actually,
most likely any class that you take at the college level, your readings come
from professors from other universities, right? I don't write about
Bollywood, but had I written about Bollywood, I probably would assign
readings, assign something that I have written. If I write a book about
Bollywood, I'll make it the textbook for this class, although I'm really not
allowed to. I also don't intend on writing a book about Bollywood. The
point being, people who write these things, all of these people, all of these
people that you see here, they're all professors in other universities, and
they are all. They work on either cultural anthropology like Tejaswini ghanti
or or religion, specifically Hinduism like Philip Lutgendorf, or media studies
like Agrawal and Pal who work at the University of Michigan, as I told you
when we read this them this week, that week, Patricia Oberoi who works
on cultural anthropology. These are all experts in their specific field who
use Bollywood. Who either write about Bollywood like I would as an
interest because I teach Bollywood, or who actually kind of engage with
Bollywood as an industry like Tejaswini Ganti does as a cultural
anthropologist. The point here is that these people write either books and
you get to read chapters from those books. Those books are usually from
what are called university presses where they are peer reviewed by a
panel of people who are like them, they get comments on those books and
then they change them and then you see a final product. Or they write for
journals which are again research journals where everything is peer
reviewed, you work within a particular disciplinary framework and things
of that nature. All of that to say, these were all scholarly readings based on
the work of these people. Why did I choose these specific people and not
others, really? Again, I could have picked other people. There are other
books that I could have assigned. There's actually at least one book that I
could have assigned the entire book. I could have actually assigned the
entire Amar Akbar Anthony book, and we could have read it for three
weeks or two weeks and watched another film with it, right. So there are
various ways of reading about Bollywood as well, that I could have chosen
and I chose what you have here, but I could have chosen something else.
The point here again being, within the framework of the class, within what
we are here to do, there are ways of doing this that are slightly different
than how we have done it. That is again not the point. The point is that
we're doing what we're doing and this is the way I have chosen how to do
it. And the last thing about the class or about what these specific films
taught us was, this is a citizenship class. What did these films teach us
about citizenship? What does citizenship mean? And how do we kind of
layer the idea of citizenship through film and specifically through
Bollywood film? And what have our films taught us about that? And what
have our authors taught us about that? So I feel like in every class or in
every week we have, excuse me, we have talked about citizenship in some
way. We have talked about representation, masculinity, femininity, class,
social hierarchy, caste, religion, representation of different religions. We
have talked about the concept of East and West. We have talked about the
diaspora. We have talked about, we have talked about culture, we have
talked about the nation. We've talked about a lot of things. And we can say
that if one is thinking about citizenship, it is not-it is made of several layers
of things and we have tried to figure those layers out for Indian society to
some extent, as much as we can in a 3000 level class. Right. And when I
say Indian society, I use air quotes because it's again, 1.3 billion people. It's
not one society, right? And those also are challenges of citizenship. Those
are challenges of the nation state. How does an extremely diverse country
with so many languages and so many people kind of present itself as as a
unified whole? And does it actually even need to do that? So one of the
important lessons I hope that you have learned from this class is there is of
course the way Bollywood represents things on screen. And it gives us a
model of how one can be a citizen. But the more interesting point about
this is we are not just interested in a model of how to be a citizen or a good
citizen, an ideal citizen. We are actually also interested in what Bollywood
excludes. And what does that exclusion mean? What does it mean when a
person from a particular sexuality is represented in a certain way? What
does it mean when a woman's desires are presented in a certain way?
What does it mean when when dancers go from poor people who are
supporting their families to rich people who are just doing this for fun,
right? What are these statements actually seeing? What do these
statements actually mean? What our readings have done for us is give us
some part of those meanings, right? Tejaswini Ghanti in her-sorry, Jotsna
Kapur, in her article about background dancers, tells us that this is a
statement on globalization. This is a statement on how skin color is
relevant, relevant not in a good way, but relevant in terms of this has
become a way of deciding social hierarchy in India type of way, right? So
we see all of these different layers of representation happening in film. And
happening in the readings and hopefully seeing the connections that the
readings and the films make. So the very, very last thing I want to do for
this lecture is actually tell you something about how the citizenship class is
structured and what our general goals in this class are. So this is the part
where I'm actually going to post these goals on Carmen and we're kind of
trying to see, it's for you to read and see whether or not we have kind of
met the goals of the GE. So this is a theme class, which means that there
are certain goals that are themes goals. So some of these. And there are
two goals, and within those goals there are two expected learning
outcomes each. So one of the expected learning outcomes of goal one is
engage in critical and logical thinking about the topic or idea of the theme,
right? Have we critically and logically engaged with citizenship? Engaged
in an advanced, in-depth scholarly exploration of the topic or the idea of
the theme? So the topic or the idea of our theme is citizenship, and have
we engaged in an advanced, in-depth scholarly exploration of the topic?
So the topic we decided of course, is Bollywood. And advanced in depth
and scholarly. Well, we have watched a lot of films and we have read a lot
of articles that are all scholarly articles. So scholarly is something that is
written by scholars. Written by scholars means written by experts in the
field. So somebody like Tejaswini Ganti who has who is a cultural
anthropologist, or Philip Lutgendorf, who is a professor of religion, you
know these are considered, these are experts in the field. And when we
are reading by them, we are reading scholarly pieces. These are all peer
reviewed pieces. So that's what makes them scholarly. So have we done
that? Then let's look at the second goal. Yes, students are, these are ELO's
again. Identify, describe, and synthesize approaches or experiences as they
apply to the theme. Demonstrate a developed sense as a learner through
reflection, self-assessment, creative work, your two projects building on
prior experiences. Well, maybe we can even say experiences built on
themselves through the class. To respond to new and challenging
contexts, right? So the things that we have learned in this class, and again
if you are not familiar with the context of South Asia, the amount of
information that been given to you through these readings, through these
films is really astounding. So when we think about categories that define
citizenship, when we think about about these content, these categories in
the context of America and then kind of say, you know, this is a very
specific context. Let's go to an entirely new context in an entirely different
part of the world. Let's throw throw film on top and like 300 pages of
reading on top of that and let's then discover what's going on. So that's
kind of what we have done in this class and, and I hope we have done it
well. I think we have done it really well, but yeah. OK, and citizenship itself
has its own ELOs, of course, and there is four of those, too. So describe a
range. And within the citizenship ELOs, you are, as a learner, able to
describe and analyze a range of perspectives on what constitutes
citizenship and how it differs across political, cultural, national, global
and/or historical communities. I mean, I think just by virtue of being about a
very different cultural context and we learned a lot about the political
context of the country as well, right through a lot of film, through a lot of
lectures. We just didn't learn about the political context of India. We
actually learned about the political context of South Asia. We learned
about partition, we learned about colonialism. So again, we've covered
covered a lot of ground that we were we were asked to cover, we were
told to cover. Let's see the second ELO in this category; Identify, reflect on,
and apply the knowledge, skills and dispositions required for intellectual
competence as a global citizen, right? So are you able to reflect on things?
Are you able to apply these things? Are you able to identify things that are
relevant for global citizenship? Now, generally in the framework of a class,
these types of applications are done through writing, right? So you have
written quizzes, you have done midterm exams, you have done two
projects, and it is through these activities one kind of figures out how much
competence a student is developing and what they are learning about
what it means to be a citizen in a different part of the world. And I really do
hope that one also understands, a student in this class also understands,
that being a citizen in a different part of the world is not that different from
being a citizen in this part of the world, because it really is about what is
what are the parameters of citizenship, right. That's kind of what we have
tried to do here. And those parameters are built on hierarchy. What are the
hierarchies and what are those different hierarchies? And how do we treat
people who don't fall within those hierarchies or who fall at certain levels
of those hierarchies? So I hope, well, I think we have been able to do that.
OK, let's look at a few more. These are the last ones. Examine, critique,
evaluate various expressions and implications of diversity, equity, inclusion,
and explore a variety of lived experiences. We really have done that, right?
We have looked at caste, we have looked at religion, we have looked at
different expressions of diversity, right? Caste is a different expression of
diversity than we are used to. Gender, of course, expresses itself differently
in different parts of the world. We have looked at that as well. And we
have looked at a variety of lived experiences. We really have. Analyze and
critique the intersections of concepts of justice, difference, citizenship, and
how these interact with cultural traditions, structures of power and/or
advocacy for social change, right? So we are to look at all of this material
and kind of get out of it. I wanna say Gully boy is a really good capping-off
film because it does all of these things. It kind of makes us aware of all of
the different things that are happening, all of the things that are cultural, all
of the things that are social, all of the things that are problematic, all of the
things that are good. And within it this character kind of finds his own
understanding of justice and social justice, and lots of other characters do
that. I mean I would actually argue that Jai Santoshi Maa does that in some
way, trying to carve a place and space for yourself. Shubh Mangal Zyada
Savdhaan does that in so many different ways, right? So we see a lot of
different ways in which our various characters and various films have
interacted with what we set out to do in this class. So the very last thing I'll
say to you guys is we know a little bit about Bollywood. You have seen 14
films. You have read, let's say 300-400 pages. It's very important to know
what we have learned here. But it's also really important to know that we
don't generalize this knowledge, right? It's a very, if you think about it, 15
weeks of learning about anything is a very, very small amount of learning.
So 10 years from now, when you're standing in a party, don't generalize
what you know about this part of the world, right? You can say something
like, I took a Bollywood class once. It was fun. I learned a lot, and this is
what I learned. You cannot say, oh, in India, religion works in X ways. You
can say that if you have a caveat, such as in India, religion works in X ways
and I learned that in that reading in that class, right? Keep your context
really small because we only know a very small amount of things. That's
actually part of being a scholar, right? I would never claim that I know
everything about sexuality in India. I know a little bit about sexuality of a
particular group of people in a particular town in North India. Right. And
I've spent like 12 years doing this work. So point being, stay humble about
what we know. We learned a lot. We watched a lot of films. We did a lot
of reading. I really think we learned a lot about citizenship and how to be a
citizen in India. But let's be also very, very aware that we learned very, very
little. And there's always a lot more to learn and know. And it's important
to kind of stay within the parameters of what we have done here."

Using only the lecture content, answer all questions in under 250 words:
1. Which ELOs did the class NOT meet well?