UCL's School of European Languages, Culture and Society - Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry is hosting two events that will be of interest to BPH readers.
- 22 May 2024 / Stereoscopic Vision in the Plantationocene from Debashree Mukherjee, Associate Professor at Columbia University
This talk draws on my ongoing work towards a monograph titled "Tropical Machines: Extractive Media and Plantation Modernity.” I track 19th century experiments with media technologies in tropical islands that, I argue, served as laboratories for modern regimes of labour, resource extraction, as well as vision. I locate this story in the era of emancipation, in the wake of the abolition of plantation slavery in British colonies in 1834 which created a massive demand for labour to replace the labour of those who were formerly enslaved. This story is therefore plotted along the itineraries of indentured and technically voluntary “coolie” labour from South Asia to sugar colonies such as Mauritius and Fiji. In this talk I focus on the short-lived technology of the stereoscope which was extensively used in the 1860s-1910s to image plantations and their workers. I speculate on the popularity of stereographic “plantation views” to ask if it is time to displace the city and the factory as the founding sites for film history. Building on work that posits the plantation as the precursor to the factory and modern regimes of labour management, I set up a parallel between the stereograph and the plantation as tropical machines that generate new techniques of the body and new regimes of vision.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/european-languages-culture/events/2024/may/stereoscopic-vision-plantationocene - 2 May 2024 / Camera Geologica: Photography and Resource Extraction, from Siobhan Angus, Assistant Professor at Carleton University
Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, this talk focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how mining is a precondition of photography. Photography begins underground and, in photographs of mines and mining, frequently returns there. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, I illustrate histories of colonization, labour, and environmental degradation to explore the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism. Reading materiality alongside representation and visual form reveals a complex picture of photography’s implication within extractive capitalism and, in turn, its potential to resist it.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/european-languages-culture/events/2024/may/camera-geologica-photography-and-resource-extraction
Both events are free to attend and run from 1700-1830 (BST) at:
North-West Wing Lecture Theatre G22
Wilkins Main Building
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT
The event organiser is:
Kirsty Sinclair Dootson – SELCS
kirsty.dootson@ucl.ac.uk
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