"In the past 30 years, the heightened hyperreal architectonics of multiplex cinemas, rather than single screens in Indian malls, radically altered the politics of theatrical space, female consumption, and moviegoing. Chatterjee smartly explores how this moment 'played out across media industries, architecture and design, popular cinema, and public culture,' especially in New Delhi. An ambitious work." (Kirkus Reviews) "Among the finest books yet written on cinema and space. Combining historical and field research with political, social and urban theory, Tupur Chatterjee's analysis is gripping from start to finish. A must-read for anyone interested in the cultural geographies of cinema." (Ramon Lobato, author of Netflix Nations) "By situating the emergence of the multiplex theater in India in a broader history of previous media forms such as television and calling our attention to the material, aesthetic, and gendered dimensions of exhibition infrastructures, Tupur Chatterjee presents a compelling and insightful intermedial approach to understanding the contemporary transformations of India's entertainment cultures." (Tejaswini Ganti, author of Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry) "Intervenes in new cinema history and material cultural studies of film exhibition to assert gender as a critical framework for analyzing built environments and their influence on cinematic spectatorship. Taking New Delhi and the rise of the mall-multiplex as her case study, Tupur Chatterjee argues that the gender politics of cinema architecture and urban planning play a heretofore underappreciated role in viewer experience and the modern media city. Projecting Desire uses rigorous ethnographic and archival research as well as deft discourse and textual analysis to craft a forceful argument that will be of great interest to scholars working in media industry studies, global media studies, feminist media theory, and spectatorship studies." (Caetlin Benson-Allott, Georgetown University)
