Featured Speaker: Debashree Mukherjee (Columbia, MESAAS)
Comment by: Meheli Sen, AMESALL
Academic Building (West), Room 4050, New Brunswick
This talk draws on my ongoing work towards a monograph titled "Tropical Machines: Extraction in the Age of Abolition." I track 19th century experiments with media technologies in tropical islands that, I argue, served as laboratories for modern regimes of labor and resource extraction. I locate this story in the era of emancipation, in the wake of the abolition of plantation slavery in British colonies in 1834 which created a massive demand for labor to replace the labor of those who were formerly enslaved. This story is therefore plotted along the itineraries of indentured and technically voluntary “coolie” labor from South Asia to sugar colonies such as Mauritius and Fiji. In this talk I focus on the short-lived technology of the stereograph which was extensively used in the 1860s-1910s to photograph plantations and their workers. I speculate on the popularity of stereographic “plantation views” to ask if it is time to displace the city and the factory as the founding sites for film history. Building on work that posits the plantation as the precursor to the factory and modern regimes of labor management, I set up a parallel between the stereograph and the plantation as tropical machines that generate new techniques of the body and new regimes of vision.
Bio:
Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. She is author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (2020), which approaches film history as an ecology of material practices and practitioners. Her second book project, Tropical Machines: Extraction in the Age of Emancipation, develops a media history of South Asian indentured migration and plantation capitalism. Debashree edits the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and has published in journals such as Film History, Feminist Media Histories, and Representations. Her latest publication is the edited photo-anthology, Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema, based on an unprecedented photographic archive collated by a German cinematographer who emigrated to India in the 1930s (2023). In a previous life Debashree worked in Mumbai’s film and TV industries as an assistant director, writer, and cameraperson, and remains committed to industry-academy-public interfaces through exhibitions, curation, and digital humanities open-access projects.
Co-Sponsored by: Center for European Studies