Love across the Global South: Popular Cinema Cultures of India and Senegal explores interconnections between South Asian and African popular cultures through film posters, footage, and memorabilia. Focusing on the circulation of Bombay cinema, South Asia’s largest film industry, in Senegal, West Africa, the exhibition foregrounds the role of transnational film cultures and fan clubs in shaping affinities across the Global South. Highlighting archival material held by UC Berkeley—including a collection of twentieth-century popular film magazines and films housed at the Media Resources Center—the exhibition harnesses library holdings to nuance campus debates on race, globalization, and visual representation while experimenting with new curatorial practices that emphasize Afro-Asian connections in an expanded Indian Ocean imaginary. The exhibition is curated by Sugata Ray (Assistant Professor, History of Art), Ivy Mills (Lecturer, History of Art), Liladhar Pendse (Librarian, Central Asian and Eastern European Studies), and Adnan Malik (Curator for South Asian Collections, South/Southeast Asia Library). The Mellon Curatorial Preparedness Initiative funded Curatorial Assistantships for History of Art Department graduate students Shivani Sud and Randip Bakshi.
The exhibit runs from October 6, 2017–March 1, 2018 in the Bernice L. Brown Gallery, Doe Library.