Electron, Electric, Electronic: Countering the Invisibilities of Electricity
UW Cinematheque 821 University Ave., UW Vilas Hall, Room 4070, Madison, Wisconsin
media release: UW Center for Visual Cultures lecture.
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*
What’s Your Analytic?
Friday, March 21, 2025, 12 PM, University Club Room 313
*Please contact cvc@mailplus.wisc.edu to register the workshop.
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.