%0 Journal Article
%T From Villain to Hero: Masculinity and Political Aesthetics in the Films of Bangladeshi Action Star Joshim
%A Arpana Awwal
%J BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies
%@ 0976-352X
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0974927618767277
%X In this article, I trace the growth of the action film genre in Bangladesh in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when new technologies such as video cassette recorder (VCR) were emerging in the market and national politics was wrestling with the competing notions of masculinity, leadership and heroism. I look at the emergence of the Bangladeshi action star Joshim within the context of South Asian trans-regional cinema and its changing tropes of masculinity. I argue that anxiety over new technologies, changes within Bangladesh¡¯s political regime and its leadership, including state censorship, and shifts in the representation of heroic masculinity within national imagery¡ªfrom a socialist model associated with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to the modern, energetic and globally inflected masculinity of Ziaur Rahman¡ªwere intertwined. These changes, I contend, are reflected in the transition in Joshim¡¯s roles from the primarily villainous characters of his early films to an action hero from the 1980s onwards. The article examines Joshim¡¯s role in the film Muhammad Ali (Motaleb Hossain, 1986b), as an example of a glocalised action film. Its sources include articles and letters printed in Purbani and Chitrali, the most widely read Bangladeshi film magazines of the 1970s and 1980s
%K Joshim
%K Bangladeshi cinema
%K masculinity
%K action cinema
%K glocalisation
%K Bangladeshi politics
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0974927618767277