Women’s Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia. Esha Niyogi De. (University of Illinois Press, 2024). Pp. 284. U.S.$19.95. ISBN: 978-0-252-08828-5.

The intention of Esha Niyogi De's book Women's Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia is to interrogate borders: national, cinematic, thematic, conceptual, and embodied.Examining fictional cinema in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, her focus on women on "both sides of the camera" analyzes cinematic practices from multiple perspectives-ranging from production, directorship, and inter-textual to reception-and complicates simplistic readings and assumptions regarding gender, power, desire, and space. 1 De brings together several theoretical frameworks, including feminism, Marxian political economy, Deleuze's notion of assemblages, genre studies, and textual analysis.The book covers a period from the 1970s into the 2000s, examining domestic, (inter) and (trans)national exigencies, negotiations, and opportunities.It joins a growing body of scholarship on Pakistani cinema and builds on Mushtaq Gazdar's Pakistan Cinema 1947-1997 as well as more recent studies by Ali Nobil, Shehram Mokhtar, Zebunnisa Hamid, and Kamran Asdar Ali, among others. 2One of the book's outstanding features, which it shares with Loose Canons & Dangerous Curves: An Unholy Bible of Pakistani Popular Cinema, is its recognition of popular cinema as a complexly gendered site and practice. 3 De turns to "hidden" and "fugitive" archives to excavate both theory and history.At the very outset of this work, De tells the reader how it was her interview with Samina Peerzada, a Pakistani film producer, director, actress, and TV personality that made her change direction and recognize the need to pivot theoretically and methodologically.This motivated De's "messy" archives, which refuse conventional ordering and established norms of interpreting space, place, and gender; they bring together ethnography, oral history, film journalism, videography (and its smuggling), and scopic analyses of film segments creatively.Ethnography and oral histories are especially important, as these allow De to go beyond masculinist biases in the writing of this film history.De presents a complex reading of feminism, demonstrating how women work across the gender divide to create a space for women that is material and representational; that women's labor, work alongside men, and mass-mediated