CARGC Lecture: Debashree Mukherjee, Columbia University

Debashree Mukherjee will deliver a lecture, “Symptoms and Submergence: A Media History of Shipwrecks.”

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Photo credit: Marc Coenen / Pexels.

About the Lecture

On July 25, 2020, as the world was hunkering down in various Covid-19 lockdowns, the Japanese bulk carrier, MV Wakashio, ran aground on coral reefs off the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. From the vantage point of a media historian, this shipwreck, and the steady stream of images that ensued in its wake, produced a flash of insight into the entanglements of past, present, and future representations of Mauritius and its geopolitical status. In this talk, Debashree Mukherjee attempts an intimate and immersive story of the meanings of indentured labor, plantation capitalism, and mediated life through a focus on shipwrecks. Shipwrecks, of course, are entangled with histories of ships, islands, and oceans. Each of these entities – be they natural or manmade objects – may be considered mediating technologies in their own right, at once producing and intervening in processes of representation and worldmaking. Mukherjee draws on insights from critical ocean studies, elemental media studies, and Indian Ocean studies, to offer some provocations on the role of modern mass media in histories of racial capitalism. She will look at different forms of media and mediation, including early uses of photography for biometric surveillance in Mauritius, the enduring visual imaginations generated by an 18th-century romance novel, and the imagistic properties of oil spills.

About the Speaker

Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her first book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (2020), approaches film history as an ecology of material practices and practitioners. It has won an Honorable Mention for the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize and was commended for the Richard Wall Memorial Award and the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. Mukherjee has published on feminist film historiography, labor, and cities in various film journals and anthologies. She is Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, and her next book “Mediated Ocean,” develops an ecomedia history of indentured migration and plantation capitalism in the Indian Ocean region.

This event is co-sponsored by the South Asia Center at the University of Pennsylvania.