(Moderated by: Jigna Desai) panelists will be participating filmmakers and scholars). There exists a body of recent films by women filmmakers and screenwriters working in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, and representing South Asian communities and subjectivities in the West. It is a culturally hybrid cinema, which actively locates itself between Hollywood and Bollywood. The diasporic South Asians are not merely assimilating to their host cultures but they are also actively reshaping them through their own, new voices bringing new definitions of identity. Diaspora brings to mind various contested ideas and images. It can be a positive site for the affirmation of an identity, or, conversely, a negative site of fears of losing that identity. Diaspora signals an engagement with a matrix of diversity: of cultures, languages, histories, people, places, times. The panel discussion will examine internationally popular cross-cultural films by women filmmakers like Mira Nair’s The Namesake (2007), Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It like Beckham (2002) and Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood (2002).

Moderator:  Dr. Jigna Desai (Moderator — faculty University of Minnesota)

Panelists:    Debjani Roy (Counseling Coordinator, MANAVI of NJ); Sonali Gulati (Faculty, Virginia Commonwealth University, VA); Nandini Sikand (Filmmaker), Geeta Rajan (Faculty NYU)