Displacing difference, interrupting Indianness: Song sequences in digitally-released Indian-American films

In their capacity to directly address audiences of varied nationalities, American-Indian films are important sites of cinema's negotiations with the idea of Indianness. When released on digital platforms, such films have the capacity to turn the idea of a national identity and, by extension, hyphenated identities, into modular and scalable constructs; bracketing, scaling down and slipping in various blocks of Indianness into its song-and-dance sequences to alleviate the lived realities of cultural difference. Identification of these kinds of identity, narrowly defined as Indian, alongside the dominant Bollywood structures makes relevant the analysis of how cinemas transmit national identity. This examines the routes by which American-Indian films, especially those released on digital platforms, mobilize digital logics to modulate their connections with a hegemonic idea of Indianness, often via their association with Bollywood, by examining the song picturizations in the films Spin (2021) and Wedding Season (2022).