Mon, Nov 17, 2008, 8:30 pm to 10:30 pm
Location:
Communications 150 (Studio C)
Episodes of anti-state insurgency are marked by an obsession with maps: cartographic narrations of rebel-occupied territories, ruins, and reclaimed land. In 1857, in the north Indian city of Lucknow, colonial, social, and spatial relations were violently reordered by anti-British revolts. This talk discusses tensions between a visual prose of counter-insurgency confronted everywhere by a splintering investment in land for the proliferating public of photography and early cinema. At the heart of this discussion is an effort to theorize the cultural imprint of a shared technology of film upon colonialism's violent onslaughts on a homogeneous sense of place. The paradox is of a splintering sense of time and place coincident with the newly shared visual familiarity of a location.