Priya Jaikumar

Lecture Abstract:

How do we write spatially decentered global media histories that trace our planet’s mutually entangled energy stories? Two years ago, I wanted to write about the publicity gambits of the Indian multinational conglomerate, the Adani Group, which is selling green energy in the international market despite owning some of the world’s largest coal mines in Australia, India and Indonesia. Adani has since also bought India’s large independent news channel, NDTV. The premises and visual regimes that permitted a corporation to normalize its duplicities led me to a century-old promotion of electricity as life itself, by the now-defunct U.S.-based General Electric Company (GE). What became clear is that the equation of modern life with electrical life has always been contingent upon a series of instrumentalizations: of land, labor, information and, with mechanizations at scale, of the subatomic electron. Scholars decry our habituated blindness to infrastructures until they break down. This is an invisibility of the quotidian that is racially and geographically particular to communities and environments sheltered from regular disruptions. My presentation is about an equivalent analytic and historiographic invisibility that accompanies electricity. I revisit episodes in GE’s corporate history and Adani’s contemporary energy strategies to counter media history and theory’s tendency to attend to electronics at the expense of electricity and the grid. I ask that we expand our scrutiny at a time when fossil fuels and renewable energy sources are in an accelerating churn to generate more electricity from the electron, harnessing it with desirable, undesirable, and as-yet unknown planetary consequences. 

Workshop Abstract:

In contemporary parlance, “analytics” is a word that typically follows “data” or “computer” to indicate the paradigm used to interpret relational patterns and predict potential results from a mass of particular instances. It connotes broad conceptual frameworks rather than specific methodological tools. Humanists also use and formulate analytics to make meaning of the material they interpret (in ways that are most explicit in the digital humanities, which has an investment in data visualization). Ideally, as humanists, our analytics are not static interpretive paradigms but permeable and responsive to shifting knowledge, events, criticisms, evolutions and revolutions. Examples may include Michel Foucault’s switch from the notion of “archaeology” to “genealogy,” or the adoption of “decolonial” rather than “postcolonial” in critiques of territorial and symbolic imperialisms launched over the past decade. Each of these are revisions aiming to instigate perspectival and methodological adjustments. In this workshop, I will briefly present my encounter with the legacies (despite their theoretical recency) of “energy humanities” and “extraction” as analytics for film and media studies with the help of accompanying readings, to open up the question for participants.

Biography:

Priya Jaikumar is Professor of Cinematic Arts in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.  She is the author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space (Duke, 2019), winner of the BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies) best book of the year award, and of Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Duke, 2006), among other publications on film history, colonialism, spatial film historiographies, film policy, transnational feminisms, European and Indian cinemas. Most recently, she published a coedited special issue titled “On the Extractive Film” in Media + Environment (Nov 2024). She is writing about electricity and the electrical grid as a means of mapping (corporate and popular) media’s unfolding histories in disparate geographical contexts.