Talk:Usha Iyer

By Sachi Anjunkar

Usha Iyer is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. She is the Annenberg Faculty Fellow, School of the Humanities and Sciences (2022-2024), and serves as affiliate faculty in Stanford's Center for South Asia, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (C.C.S.R.E.), and in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS) program as of September 2022. According to her university profile, her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of cinema, performance, and gender and sexuality studies, with a specific focus on film and performance histories, body cultures, and Global South cultural traffic along the vectors of race, gender, caste, and religion.

As per her bio, she has published no books, papers, or research pertaining to Hindus, the rights of Hindus, the impact or relationship between Islam and Hinduism / Hindutva, India, or the Indian Government in the context of B.J.P. Government.

In 2021, he endorsed the "Dismantling Global Hindutva" conference and made the allegation

"the current government of India [in 2021] has instituted discriminatory policies including beef bans, restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith weddings, and the introduction of religious discrimination into India’s citizenship laws. The result has been a horrifying rise in religious and caste-based violence, including hate crimes, lynchings, and rapes directed against Muslims, non-conforming Dalits, Sikhs, Christians, adivasis and other dissident Hindus. Women of these communities are especially targeted. Meanwhile, the government has used every tool of harassment and intimidation to muzzle dissent. Dozens of student activists and human rights defenders are currently languishing in jail indefinitely without due process under repressive anti-terrorism laws."

Book

1. Iyer, Usha. Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Research Papers

1. Iyer, Usha. "A Pedagogy of Reparations: Notes toward Repairing the Film and Media Studies Curriculum." Feminist Media Histories, 2022.
2. Iyer, Usha. "Smuggling, Infiltrating, Usurping: Why Globalizing the Film and Media Studies Curriculum is Essential to Decolonizing It." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2022.
3. Iyer, Usha. "Song-and-Dance Sequence." Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2021.
4. Iyer, Usha. "Bringing Bharatanatyam to Bombay Cinema: Mapping Tamil-Hindi Film Industry Traffic through Vyjayanthimala’s Dancing Body." In Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India: Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies and Multiplying Media, 2021.
5. Iyer, Usha. "Masterji Choreographer as Moving Archive of Bombay Cinema’s Gestural Histories." Critical Collective, 2020.
6. Iyer, Usha. “Dance Musicalization: Proposing a Choreomusicological Approach to Hindi Film Song-And-Dance Sequences.” South Asian Popular Culture, vol. 15, no. 2-3, Sept. 2017, pp. 123–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2017.1407538.
7. Iyer, Usha. "Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai: Madhuri Dixit, the Production Number, and the Construction of the Female Star Text in 1990s Hindi Cinema." Publication details needed.
8. Iyer, Usha. "Looking for the Past in Pastiche: Intertextuality in Bollywood Song-and-Dance Sequences." In Movies, Moves and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films, edited by Pauline Manley and Mark Evans, Equinox, publication year needed.
9. Iyer, Usha. "Popular Culture in Twentieth Century India." Forthcoming in The Encyclopedia of Asian Design (Volume II: Design in South and Southeast Asia), edited by Soumitri Varadarajan and Anubha Kakroo, Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, publication year needed.