Friday, September 25, 2 – 4 PM, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities
Debashree Mukherjee (Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University) “Contract and Conjuring: Indian Film Exhibition in Colonial Fiji”
Abstract: In 1933, three Indian gentlemen sued the owners of Lilac Theatre, one of Fiji’s best-known movie palaces, after being evicted from the dress circle. The court ruled in their favor, upholding the movie ticket as a binding contractual agreement, while leaving the racial dimension of their exclusion largely unexamined. The ruling carries a deeper colonial irony: Indian presence in Fiji had itself been consolidated through another contractual form—the indenture agreement, or girmit—rhetorically defended as modern form of consensual migration even as it enabled coercive, racialized labor extraction. Indian talkie films entered this fraught arena as a form of conjuring, summoning visions of transformation and magic that bypassed the contractual grammar of the colonial-bureaucratic episteme altogether. In this talk, I trace the work of cinema between contract and conjuring, as it mediated liberal aspirations for equality alongside more unruly visions of diasporic longing.
Bio: Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. She is co-director of the Center for Comparative Media and edits the journal Screen. Author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020), Debashree has several peer-reviewed publications on topics in feminist decolonial film historiography, eco-media, and critical visual theory. Her current research project, Tropical Machines, develops a media history of South Asian indentured migration from the 1830s onwards. Since 2022 Debashree has been running a collaborative project on Extractive Media, that considers the entanglements of media technologies with colonial and environmental extractivism.