Public talk w/ Debashree Mukherjee
//February 20th, 2025
//5:30 PM
//GEM Lab, FB 630.15
//1250 rue Guy
It is a truism in film studies that cinema and modernity are twinned phenomena. A central assumption here is that the modern is a specific kind of place, and that place is the city. Little wonder, then, that the Lumiere Brothers’ Workers Leaving the Factory (1895) has become a touchstone for the naturalized connection between cinema and the techno-modern. In this talk I consider a range of filmic and para-filmic artefacts shot with cameras on colonial plantations in Mauritius, Reunion, Martinique, and Fiji from the 1860s to the 1930s to ask if it is time to decenter the city and the factory as the founding sites for film (media) 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 early imaging technologies and the plantation as tropical machines that generate new techniques of the body, new regimes of vision, and the disorienting shocks of modern subjectivity. Along the way, I will explore how modernization theory and its core assumptions about development and underdevelopment continue to inform film studies today.
This event will be accompanied by a graduate workshop and discussion with Dr. Mukherjee on Friday, February 21st at 2pm. This workshop is intended for graduate students and is an opportunity to talk with Dr. Mukherjee about her research experience, archival and fieldwork, dissertation writing, publishing, current book project, etc.
To register for the workshop please email teagan.lance@concordia.ca (w/ subject line Mukherjee workshop).
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 current book project, Tropical Machines: A Decentered History of Modern Media, develops a media history of South Asian indentured migration and plantation modernity from the 1830s onwards. Debashree edits the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and has published in journals such as Film History, Film Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories, Representations, MUBI Notebook, and Modern Asian Studies. Her latest publication is the co-edited anthology The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (2024).
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