Event

Priya Jaikumar

Coal’s Temporalities, or Some Carboniferous Thoughts from a Film and Media Historian

In August 2022, Gautam Adani (the world’s briefly second and now third richest man) staged a hostile takeover of one of India’s leading news broadcast companies. The acquisition shocked everyone, including the founding owners of Adani’s newly acquired NDTV, a company reputed for resisting the Indian ruling party’s right-wing ideology. For populist governments, media is a necessary frontline for manufacturing consent and controlling the demos. In that sense, it is no surprise that NDTV has fallen victim to the expanding reign of crony capitalism in Narendra Modi’s India. But the Adani Group’s status as owner of the world’s largest coal import terminal and latest entrant into the global renewable energy market also connects these current events in Indian media history to the planet’s environmental future, just as it imprints the path of a growing extractive conglomerate’s network onto prehistoric Continental shifts. Adani’s mining interests extend from the coal-rich seams of India to the quarries of Australia, and the company’s new excavations return carbon taken out of planetary circulation millions of years ago back into the earth’s atmosphere. In this context, what does it mean to accept the challenge of thinking about geological pasts and planetary futures in conjunction with the present precarities of the Global South? What are some ways of writing spatially decentered global media histories that trace our planet’s mutually entangled energy stories? Working through these questions with a few propositions and plenty of help from others who are similarly thinking about such connections, I present tentative outlines of an imagined project on coal and media across time periods, environments and nations.

Priya Jaikumar is Professor of Cinematic Arts and Chair of the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.  She is the author of Cinema at the End of Empire (Duke, 2006) and Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space (Duke, 2019), winner of the 2021 BAFTSS Best Monograph Award. She has written on colonial cinemas, archives, and film policy, on Indian, British and European films, and on spatiality in film historiography, among other things. In 2018, Priya co-edited a dossier for Cinema Journal with Kay Dickinson on “Teaching Cinema and Media Studies Against the Contemporary Global Right.” Forthcoming in 2023, she has co-authored a piece on “Media and Extraction” for The Journal of Environmental Media. The current talk is related to the latter field of inquiry.