Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-nwzlb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T15:41:58.049Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

“Watch It Again and Again, Watch It a Thousand Times”: Riffing Off Appadurai’s Views on Repeat Viewing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2019

Abstract

This response to Arjun Appadurai’s paradigm piece “The Ready-Made Pleasures of déjà vu” turns on the example of the classic Bollywood song ‘Baar baar dekho’ (“Watch it again and again,” Chinatown, 1962), to elaborate on the pleasures of cinematic repetition captured by Appadurai’s interest in “repeat viewing,” or “watching as if for the second time.” By proffering the template of “call and response,” which derives from Africanist kinesthetic principles, in dialogue with Appadurai’s appeal to an Indic investment in “re-call and re-turn,” I examine how the protocols and structures of “spontaneous” improvisation constitute a shared yet divergent basis for a global, modern politics of pleasure. Through this strategy of placing in percussive play two cultural systems of rhythmic repetition, I posit the redemptive potential of repetition as difference as an answer to political mobilizations of repetition against difference.

Type
Responses to Appadurai Paradigm Piece (Issue 6.1)
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Appadurai, Arjun, “The Ready-Made Pleasures of Déjà Vu: Repeat Viewing of Bollywood Films,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 6.1 (2019): 140–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 “Baar baar dekho,” with lyrics by veteran songwriter Majrooh Sultanpuri, score by prolific music director Ravi, and sung by the memorable playback artist Mohammed Rafi, is from the film Chinatown (director Shakti Samanta, 1962).

3 On scopophilia in Bollywood, see, for instance, Dissanayake, Wimal, “Globalization and Cultural Narcissism: Note on Bollywood Cinema,” Asian Cinema 15.1 (2004): 143–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 On Shammi Kapoor’s theatrical antics, see Mishra, Sudesh, “Yahoo! Shammi Kapoor and the Corporeal Stylistics of Popular Hindi Cinema,” Continuum 26.6 (2012): 815–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Elvis Presley’s influence on him, see Sewlall, Harry, “‘Image, Music, Text’: Elvis Presley as a Postmodern, Semiotic Construct,” JLS/TLW 26.2 (2010): 4457.Google Scholar

5 Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

6 On Jugalbandi as cultural expression modulated by modernity, see for instance, Yousuf Saeed, “Jugalbandi: Divided Scores,” Himal SouthAsian, February 2011. Accessed December 4, 2018. http://old.himalmag.com/component/content/article/3607-divided-scores.html.

7 “Call and response” as an African and African-heritage kinesthetic principle has been much written about. A classic remains the discussion in Thompson’s, Robert Farris Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy ( New York: Vintage, 2010)Google Scholar. For a slightly more sceptical approach to its meaningfulness that balances critique of essentialism with technical rigour, see Agawu, Kofi, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions ( New York: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar.

8 I have discussed this point with reference to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s magnificent rendition of the traditional qawwali phrase “haqq Ali” (Ali is the truth) in Kabir, Ananya J., “The Dhantal’s Irreverence: Off-beat as the In-between Time of Indenture,” in Social and Cultural Dimensions of Indian Indentured Labour and its Diaspora: Past and Present, eds. Hassankhan, Maurits S., Roopnarine, Lomarsh, and Mahase, Radica ( New York: Routledge, 2016), 305–15Google Scholar.

9 “When African and Hindu tangle, their offspring are known as Dougla”: the byline for Geoffrey Holder’s magnificent Dougla (1974), which I saw three performances of during its revival by the Harlem Dance Theater at its New York April 2018 season. The most striking characteristic of Dougla is its driving, repetitive, and convergent rhythm, secured by the percussive line of tassa drums and the melodic line of the Indian flute. Through this rhythmic framework, Holder conveys the idea of a self-enclosed community that draws its identity from the Indic sacred. The word dougla itself, derived from Hindustani dugla, is a common Caribbean term to denote the creolized offspring of parents with African and Indian heritages. In some Caribbean islands, it is more pejorative than others.

10 In Dougla, a grand and earthy mainstay of Dance Theater of Harlem’s repertory for years, repetition is used in abundance as dancers—and their costumes—spin in sync. Gia Kourlas, “Bringing Back ‘Dougla’ is a Family Affair,” New York Times, March 30, 2018. Accessed December 4, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/arts/dance/dougla-dance-theater-of-harlem-geoffrey-holder-carmen-de-lavallade.html/.

11 The articulation of what became oral formulaic theory began with Milman Parry’s work deducing Homeric compositional techniques through analysis of living epic singers in the former Yugoslavia, starting with his “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. I. Homer and Homeric Style,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41 (1930): 73–147. His student Lord, Albert Bates worked further on the “Serbo-Croatian Return Song Tradition,” in Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, eds. Parry, Milman, Lord, Albert Bates, and Bartók, Béla (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954)Google Scholar and passed the baton on to the Germanicist John Miles Foley, who orchestrated its transformation into oral formulaic studies; see his Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research (New York: Garland, 1985). For a still-useful overview of the formula-driven nature of heroic poetry, see Auty, Robert and Hatto, Arthur Thomas, Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry: Characteristics and Techniques, vol. 2 ( London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1989)Google Scholar.

12 Kracauer, Siegfried, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. This edition is a reprint of essays roughly co-terminous with the film Modern Times (director Charlie Chaplin, 1936). On the centrality of the chorus girl’s precision routines within this shared imaginary, see Burt, Ramsay, Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, “Race,” and Nation in Early Modern Dance ( London: Routledge, 1998)Google Scholar.

13 This is an argument I make more fully through the work of Russian dancer, documenter, and theorizer of New York jazz dance Mura Dehn in my monograph in progress, Alegropolitics.