Visual depiction of the quest for Indian independence is the subject of a lecture by
international film scholar Priya Jaikumar. Her presentation, "Insurgent and Location
Shots: Destruction and the Visual Productions of Place with the Indian Rebellion of
1857," will be Friday, March 27, at 3 p.m. in the Killian Room (Room 500) in
Syracuse University's Hall of Languages. The event is presented by the Visual Arts
and Cultures Cluster of the Mellon Central New York Humanities Corridor, an
interdisciplinary collaboration between SU, Cornell University and the University of
Rochester, sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The lecture is free and open to the public. Parking is available in the SU pay lots. For
more information, call SU's Humanities Center at 315-443-7192.
The Indian Rebellion of 1857, which began as a mutiny by Indian soldiers of Great
Britain's East India Co. and led to other revolts throughout British-occupied India, is
generally regarded as a watershed moment in Indian history. Also, the rebellion
coincides with the rise of international photography and film, shot on location. The
intertwining film histories of a declining empire (Great Britain) and a nascent nation
(India) are at the heart of an acclaimed book by Jaikumar, "Cinema at the End of
Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India" (Duke University Press, 2006),
as well as her lecture at SU.
"My discussion will be an effort to theorize film's cosmopolitanism, which paralleled
colonialism's violent onslaughts upon a unified sense of space," says Jaikumar,
associate professor and director of graduate studies at the University of Southern
California's School of Cinematic Arts. "The paradox is of a splintering sense of time
and place coincident with the intimacy and newly shared visual familiarity of a
location." The former SU English professor is widely regarded for her scholarship in
cultural regulation, political change and feminism in film.
During her lecture, Jaikumar will single out the northern Indian city of Lucknow,
whose colonial social and spatial relations were violently reordered by the anti-British
revolts of 1857. "Episodes of anti-state insurgency are marked by an obsession with
visual mappings," adds Jaikumar, drawing comparisons to modern-day Tikrit and
Fallujah in Iraq. "I will talk about the proliferating international public for
photography and film shot, which accommodated variable investments in the land
scarred by insurgent and official violence, alongside a dominant visual prose of
counter-insurgency."
The Mellon Central New York Humanities Corridor is an interdisciplinary
collaboration of three regional AAU (Association of American Universities)
institutions with vigorous humanistic scholarly traditions: SU, Cornell University and
the University of Rochester. The Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor is generously
supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through a four-year, $1 million
award designed to raise public engagement with and visibility of the humanities
throughout Central New York and to enhance the productivity of its key scholars,
students, and community members. More information is available at
http://thecollege.syr.edu/mellon.
The Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor is administered by SU's Humanities Center.
The Humanities Center promotes a broad, collaborative, and interdisciplinary notion
of the humanities, comprising traditional disciplines and new interdisciplinary
inquiry. In promoting scholarly excellence and the visibility of the humanities, the
Humanities Center supports three models of inquiry: traditional, transdisciplinary
and publicly engaged research (or scholarship in action) with communities to create
capacity and to solve increasingly complex human problems.
Gregg Lambert, Dean's Professor of the Humanities, is founding director of the
Humanities Center and co-director of the Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor.
