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CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
X-WR-CALNAME:Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and Dreamwork in Contempor
 ary India
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Pacific Time (US & Canada)
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20261008T103033Z
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_52252045400323
DTSTART:20260409T190000Z
DTEND:20260409T200000Z
DESCRIPTION:This event is sponsored by the Center for South Asia.\n\nAbout 
 the event\nIn this talk\, I explore how Bollywood songs have become a powe
 rful medium for dreaming\, striving\, and self-making in twenty-first-cent
 ury India. Once dismissed as escapist fantasy\, Bollywood’s emotionally 
 charged songs now serve as tools for self-transformation in what has been 
 dubbed “Aspirational India.” Drawing on more than two years of fieldwo
 rk in Mumbai\, I trace how upcoming singers\, amateur students\, teachers\
 , and Bollywood producers use Bollywood songs to perform what I call “dr
 eamwork”: the musical and discursive work of promoting\, imagining\, and
  striving for desired selves and futures. Across playback singing schools\
 , reality television shows\, and the broader music industry\, filmi singin
 g is a site of both imaginative potential and precarity\, promising social
  mobility while reinscribing inequalities of caste\, class\, and gender. R
 ather than dismissing my interlocutors’ aspirational dreams\, however\, 
 I argue that we must take their musical dreamwork seriously in order to un
 derstand the cultural dynamics of emerging neoliberal economies. Through t
 he lens of dreamwork\, I theorize the efficacy of musical practice as a to
 ol for shaping subjectivity while outlining a political economy of the ima
 gination in relation to musical practice.\n\nAbout the speaker\nAnaar Desa
 i-Stephens is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the CUNY Graduate 
 Center\, having previously served as a faculty member at the Eastman Schoo
 l of Music\, University of Rochester. Her research focuses on popular\, me
 dia economies\, and aspirational subjectivity in India and her first monog
 raph\, Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and Dreamwork in Contemporary I
 ndia\, will be published with Wesleyan University Press (Spring 2026). Her
  work has appeared in Twentieth Century Music\; Culture\, Theory\, Critiqu
 e\; and The Routledge Handbook of South Asian Cinema\, amongst others. Cur
 rent research projects focus on the intersection 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 ac
 ross a range of genres.
GEO:37.426792;-122.164842
LOCATION:Encina Commons\, 123
SUMMARY:Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and Dreamwork in Contemporary I
 ndia
URL;VALUE=URI:https://events.stanford.edu/event/voicing-aspiration-bollywoo
 d-songs-and-dreamwork-in-contemporary-india
CATEGORIES:Lecture/Presentation/Talk
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