Globalization and the cultural imaginary: Constructions of subjectivity, freedom & enjoyment in popular Indian Cinema

This paper seeks to problematize the construction of desire, subjectivity, and enjoyment in three recent Indian (Bollywood) films in relation to the spread of globalization in the subcontinent. Hegemonic expansion of globalization requires and is dependent on ideologically defining new sensibilities and cultures of living within a globalized universe. The fact that popular culture is complicit with this process is also well known. In what follows, I adumbrate this function and agency by focusing on the way this agenda is carried out within the domain of popular cinema in India. I argue that, Bollywood participates in the ideological construction of a globalized cultural subjectivity through the construction and privileging of a new ethics of globalized living; an ethics which is in opposition to established pre-global notions of cultural subjectivity. In considering the ideological dynamics of Bollywood as a discursive site for engaging with pre-globalized cultural mores, and for the production and dissemination of a new cultural ethics, I look at how the conflict between cultural discourses of pre- and present condition of globalization are staged, charted, and delineated for the purposes of reconstituting and popularizing socio-cultural and subjective sensibilities conducive to globalized living. Jacques Lacan, in Seminar XVII (2007), defines discourse as 'social link' founded on language.