The Labor of Reflection: Feminist Mediawork in India

media release: LECTURE: "The Labor of Reflection: Feminist Mediawork in India"

Thursday, February 15, 2024, 4 PM CDT, Vilas Hall 4070. Due to the technical limitation of the location, we are not able to provide the zoom option for the lecture.

Lecture Abstract:

This paper will explore two recent films - Deepa Dhanraj’s We Have not Come here to Die (2019) and Payal Kapadia’s Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) to reflect further on the many modes of labor entailed in the making of a documentary film where a filmmaker is compelled by events to gather footage without any clear outcome in mind. Dhanraj and Kapadia both say they were forced to make these films to somehow document the student protests that were roiling the length and breadth of India in 2016-17 and the harsh responses to them by authoritarian state actors. Both Dhanraj and Kapadia perform the work of documenting these protests but this work of accumulation – enabled by digital technology – elicits other forms of ethical, aesthetic and political labor that transform these found footage into films that reflects not only on the events but more broadly on the media ecology the film is a part of. I will conclude by suggesting that the labor of reflection is a propensity of feminist mediawork that has distinct genealogies in the epistemological debates that characterized womens’ movements in India.  

WORKSHOP

"Workshop on Inter-Imperiality," Friday, February 16, 2024, 12 PM CDT, University Club Room 212

Workshop Abstract: The concept of Inter-imperiality comes from Laura Doyle's book Inter-Imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor and the Literary Arts of Alliance (Duke, 2020) and while Doyle is a literary historian, the concept provides an interesting opening to think about the work of power, resistance, negotiation and alliance in the past and present and to ask how cultural work is informed by the geopolitics of inter-imperiality at macro and micro levels. If spaces are traversed by multiple imperial formations that are political, economic, social and cultural, how are these vectors scaled at the level of the everyday to position subjects and how, in turn, does relationality and the labor of care entailed therein sustain communities and shield them from the predations of vying empires? How has/does cultural work functionin an inter-imperial world order - what are its horizons and limits, challenges and potentialities? How might this concept generate thinking through concepts such as de-imperialization and decoloniality?

We will read from Doyle and some other writing around this concept.

Biography:

Sangita Gopal is associate professor of English at the University of Oregon. She is coeditor of Global Bollywood: Transnational Travels of Hindi Film Music. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of cinema studies, comparative media studies, postcolonial theory and feminist studies. She has particular expertise in South Asian cinema and literature.