Amphibious Media:
Image Infrastructures Across Land & Sea
PANEL 15
Amphibious Media:
Image Infrastructures Across Land & Sea
Wednesday, 6 July 2022
11:45 am - 1:15 pm
Location: University Theater
Panel Speakers:
Debashree Muhkerjee
Lotte Hoek
Bindu Menon
Moderated by: Ermelinda Xheza
Amphibious Media:
Image Infrastructures Across Land & Sea
What might the notion of amphibiousness contribute to our thinking about “the ocean and the relations it has generated”? This panel expands on recent moves that refuse binary approaches to land and sea and offers the notion of the “amphibious” to imagine life forms, cultural imaginaries, and technological adaptations that inhabit those domains where the boundaries between sea and land, human and nonhuman, technology and nature, start to fade. The emerging field of critical ocean studies marks a definite shift away from a focus on mobility and economic history, towards cultural and interdisciplinary studies that take the “sea-ness of the sea” seriously. Much of this work is a response to the epistemic provocation of the Anthropocene and shows that oceans embody a space that confounds many of the dualisms common in studies of nations, colonialism, race, religion, and culture, such as the premodern/modern, East/West, nature/culture, image/word, and human/nonhuman. In the field of media studies, the oceanic has yielded exciting work on undersea communications infrastructures, biological documentaries, and technologies for deep sea filming and scientific exploration. The ocean, therefore, also embodies a place where science, technology, culture and history intersect. Emerging out of our collective engagements with image technologies and media infrastructures in the colonial and postcolonial state in South Asia, we propose to look at regimes of subject formation and their fault lines through mediatic techniques that are born out of the material exigencies of watery places—delta, archipelago, island. We turn to cinema, imaging technology, and publicity to see how such amphibian bio-technical forms are conjured at the water’s edge.
Carceral Distance and Amphibious Continuity:
Imaging Humans, Islands, and Oceans
Debashree Muhkerjee
This paper revisits colonial imaging techniques that produced islands as static places of penal containment, tropical disease, and tribal isolation. I look specifically at the history of the Andaman Islands in the eastern Indian Ocean as an important site of entangled histories of penal servitude, plantation labor, and colonial science. Colonial-modern technologies of measurement, mapping, and imaging that were refined in the Andamans generated new theories of white racial superiority and spatial mastery. At the same time, techniques such as hydrography acknowledged the co-constitution of land and sea, the amphibious liminality of coastlines and beaches. The very logics of “kalapani” (black water) penal transportation depended on the continuity of unfreedoms across ship and jail, binding water with land in a perverse relation of punishment. Based on a visual archive of ethnographic photos, stereograph cards, films, and hydrographic charts, I detect a productive tension between the construction of island-as-prison and the technical recognition of the continuity between land and sea. I argue that this tension allows us to see the faultlines in other colonial-modern binaries such as human/nonhuman, and compels us to rethink ideas of distance and connectivity in 2022 when so many islands seem to teeter on the brink of disconnection and extinction.
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 the author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (2020) which approaches film history as an ecology of material practices and practitioners. Debashree's latest peer-reviewed essay, “Somewhere Between Human, Nonhuman, and Woman: Shanta Apte’s Theory of Exhaustion,” received the 2021 Katherine Singer Kovacs award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Her next book project, Mediated Ocean, develops an ecomedia history of indentured migration and plantation capitalism.
Amphibian Cinema for a Deltaic Audience
Lotte Hoek
How to govern a delta when your state infrastructure is built on dry land? In the early 1950s, newly minted Pakistani bureaucrats from arid western Pakistan were vexed by the watery conditions of its extensive eastern territories. Tasked with publicising a state so newly invented its citizens need repeated reminding of its existence, they relied on the inheritance of a faltering public information infrastructure, complete with iconic colonial ‘publicity vans’ equipped with loudspeakers, gramophones, medicine cabinets and celluloid reels imparting agricultural and political wisdom. But the colonial publicity van would never do in this deltaic landscape, where the distinctions between sea and river, island and sandbank, embankment and river's edge, dissolve in the movements of sediments that characterise the Bengal Delta (Khan 2019). How does public information move through this watery terrain, between river chors and the islands off the Chittagong coast, along flooded fields and dense mangroves? In this paper I trace the boats and floating screens invented by the early East Pakistani state to theorise the possibilities of an amphibian cinema, an infrastructure for public information appropriate to a deltaic landscape, where water and land blur in the meeting of river and ocean. At the same time, I map the inevitable inadequacy of the human-made amphibian as the watery ecology undid the efforts to breach land and sea through an engagement with Tsing et. al.’s notion of ‘feral effects’ (2020).
Lotte Hoek is a media ethnographer whose research is situated at the intersection of anthropology and film studies. Her current book project explores art film and non-theatrical exhibition as grounds for political contestation in Bangladesh since 1948. She is the author of Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks and Connected Histories (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is Senior Lecturer and Head of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Island Media: Ocean infrastructures & Portable Screens
Bindu Menon
Cinema exhibitions till the arrival of video technology in the Lakshadweep archipelago consisted of documentaries by the Films Division of India and public screenings of Malayalam and Hindi language films. Utilising government machinery and mobilising nodes of non-theatrical exhibition circuits, Films Division had joined the Integrated publicity programme of the Indian government in crafting the new citizen since the 1950s. The infrastructure for both production and screening were primarily created through the movement of film spools, projectors, production equipment and screens across the Arabian Sea and between the ports of Mangalore, Beypore, Cochin and Kavaratti. The amphibian life of film material through the waterways of the Arabian Sea is a primordial aspect of film circulation across continents and remained prominent for the Lakshadweep islands till the arrival of airwaves and satellite communication technologies. Excavating documentaries on Lakshadweep, Films Division of India files, records of cargo movement and accounts of island life, I wish to attend to the specificities of archipelagic media, in order to consider its delicate location on the edge of the post-colonial state and ocean infrastructures together, for screen history.
Bindu Menon is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Azim Premji University, Bangalore. Her work lies at the intersection of Media History and Film Theory. Her essays in these areas of research have appeared in peer reviewed journals and edited volumes. She is the co-editor of Film Studies : An Introduction (WorldView Books, 2022) and the co-author of Morality Tales: Malabar Home Films and Transnational Scapes ( Forthcoming , Routledge 2022) Her manuscript tentatively titled A Persistent Cinema: Senses, Publics and Screens ( Travancore 1900-1950) is under review.