The history of film students from the Global South who studied in Poland during the Cold War.
 
As Poland’s second-largest city, Łódź was a hub for international students who studied in Poland from the mid-1960s to 1989. The Łódź Film School, a member of CILECT since 1955, was a favored destination, with students from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East accounting for one-third of its international student body. Despite the school’s international reputation, the experience of its filmmakers from the Global South is little known beyond Poland. 
 
Hope Is of a Different Color addresses the history of student exchanges between the Global South and the Polish People’s Republic during the Cold War. It sheds light on the experiences and careers of a generation of young filmmakers at Łódź, many of whom went on to achieve success as artists in their home countries, and provides insight into emerging areas of research and race relations in Central and Eastern Europe. The essays reflect on these issues from multiple perspectives, considering sociology, political science, art, and film history. The book also features previously unpublished photographs and film stills from private archives along with visual and written material collected at the Łódź Film School.
 

In the late 1800s, Indians seemed to be a people left behind by the Industrial Revolution, dismissed as “not a mechanical race.” Today Indians are among the world’s leaders in engineering and technology. In this international history spanning nearly 150 years, Ross Bassett—drawing on a unique database of every Indian to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between its founding and 2000—charts their ascent to the pinnacle of high-tech professions.

As a group of Indians sought a way forward for their country, they saw a future in technology. Bassett examines the tensions and surprising congruences between this technological vision and Mahatma Gandhi’s nonindustrial modernity. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, sought to use MIT-trained engineers to build an India where the government controlled technology for the benefit of the people. In the private sector, Indian business families sent their sons to MIT, while MIT graduates established India’s information technology industry.

By the 1960s, students from the Indian Institutes of Technology (modeled on MIT) were drawn to the United States for graduate training, and many of them stayed, as prominent industrialists, academics, and entrepreneurs. The MIT-educated Indian engineer became an integral part of a global system of technology-based capitalism and focused less on India and its problems—a technological Indian created at the expense of a technological India.