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CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
X-WR-CALNAME:Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and Dreamwork in Contempor
 ary India 
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Eastern Time (US & Canada)
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20261017T185751Z
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_53604314400120
DTSTART:20261102T171500Z
DTEND:20261102T181500Z
DESCRIPTION:Talk by Anaar Desai-Stephens (Music\, CUNY)\n\nIn this talk\, I
  explore how Bollywood songs have become a powerful medium for dreaming\, 
 striving\, and self-making in twenty-first-century India. Once dismissed a
 s escapist fantasy\, Bollywood’s emotionally charged songs now serve as 
 tools for self-transformation in what has been dubbed “Aspirational Indi
 a.” Drawing on more than two years of fieldwork in Mumbai\, I trace how 
 upcoming singers\, amateur students\, teachers\, and Bollywood producers u
 se Bollywood songs to perform what I call “dreamwork”: the musical and
  discursive work of promoting\, imagining\, and striving for desired selve
 s and futures. Across playback singing schools\, reality television shows\
 , and the broader music industry\, filmi singing is a site of both imagina
 tive potential and precarity\, promising social mobility while reinscribin
 g inequalities of caste\, class\, and gender. Rather than dismissing my in
 terlocutors’ aspirational dreams\, however\, I argue that we must take t
 heir musical dream work seriously in order to understand the cultural dyna
 mics of emerging neoliberal economies. Through the lens of dreamwork\, I t
 heorize the efficacy of musical practice as a tool for shaping subjectivit
 y while outlining a political economy of the imagination in relation to mu
 sical practice.\n\nAnaar Desai-Stephens is Assistant Professor of Ethnomus
 icology at the CUNY Graduate Center\, having previously served as a facult
 y member at the Eastman School of Music\, University of Rochester. Her res
 earch focuses on popular\, media economies\, and aspirational subjectivity
  in India and her first monograph\, Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs an
 d Dreamwork in Contemporary India\, will be published with Wesleyan Univer
 sity Press (Fall 2026). Her work has appeared in Twentieth Century Music\;
  Culture\, Theory\, Critique\; and The Routledge Handbook of South Asian C
 inema\, amongst others. Current research projects focus on the intersectio
 n of whiteness\, gender and sexuality in the Bollywood culture industry\, 
 and how doulas and midwives listen in New York state. Anaar is trained as 
 a violinist and vocalist across a range of genres.
GEO:42.447296;-76.482254
LOCATION:Uris Hall\, G08
SUMMARY:Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and Dreamwork in Contemporary I
 ndia 
URL;VALUE=URI:https://events.cornell.edu/event/voicing-aspiration-bollywood
CATEGORIES:Lecture
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