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Podcast: New Books in Sociology
Episode: Tupur Chatterjee, "Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India" (NYU Press, 2025)
Description: Since the late 1990s, the multiplex in India has emerged as a dominant site of media exhibition, almost always embedded within the shopping mall. This spatial pairing has transformed the experience of moviegoing, making it impossible to inhabit one space without also passing through the other. The rise of the mall-multiplex signals a broader shift in the spectatorial imagination: away from cinema halls built for the subaltern male viewer, toward environments curated for the aspiring, mobile, and consuming middle-class woman.
Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India (NYU Press, 2025) tells the story of this infrastructural an...