Cinema at the End of Empire

How did the imperial logic underlying British and Indian film policy change with the British Empire’s loss of moral authority and political cohesion? Were British and Indian films of the 1930s and 1940s responsive to and responsible for such shifts? Cinema at the End of Empire illuminates this intertwined history of British and Indian cinema in the late colonial period. Challenging the rubric of national cinemas that dominates film studies, Priya Jaikumar contends that film aesthetics and film regulations were linked expressions of radical political transformations in a declining British empire and a nascent Indian nation. As she demonstrates, efforts to entice colonial film markets shaped Britain’s national film policies, and Indian responses to these initiatives altered the limits of colonial power in India

Cinema at the End of Empire

How did the imperial logic underlying British and Indian film policy change with the British Empire’s loss of moral authority and political cohesion? Were British and Indian films of the 1930s and 1940s responsive to and responsible for such shifts? Cinema at the End of Empire illuminates this intertwined history of British and Indian cinema in the late colonial period. Challenging the rubric of national cinemas that dominates film studies, Priya Jaikumar contends that film aesthetics and film regulations were linked expressions of radical political transformations in a declining British empire and a nascent Indian nation. As she demonstrates, efforts to entice colonial film markets shaped Britain’s national film policies, and Indian responses to these initiatives altered the limits of colonial power in India

Media and extraction: A brief research manifesto

This short essay is a polemical exploration of recent scholarship on media and resource extraction, with remarks on the necessary revisions this work entails to the purview and practice of studying cinema and media. Drawing on emergent works that elucidate the significance of media’s embeddedness in extractivist logics, we reflect on the ideas that propel them and the future conversations we hope they will provoke. As old disciplinary configurations no longer fit the task of understanding the technological instrumentalization of life in the face of climate breakdown, we consider the ways in which reckoning with modernity’s dependence on extractive industries and modes of labour reformulate media histories, the disciplinary study of media objects, our horizons of thought and our ways of being