SYNOPSIS

This lecture presents how Sri Lanka's plantations feature in three Hollywood films shot on location in the country between 1953 and 1983: Elephant Walk, Tarzan the Ape Man, and Indiana Jones Temple of Doom. Against the backdrop of post-independence majoritarianism, labor struggle, and the escalation of political violence, Sri Lanka's plantations have long fed enduring tropes of conquest, paternalism, and heroism through the plantation novel, colonial travelogues, and contemporary tea tourism. This lecture takes a closer look at how the historical contexts of these three films compel what Tina Campt calls a "lens of stasis" (Campt 2017) - such that the viewer must encounter how films suggest, in their capturings of plantation life - an anticipation of the plantation's future (McKittrick 2013). Using contemporary ethnographic research in Sri Lanka and oral histories and document and media analysis, I present how and unseeing of each film and in relation to the futures that we now know activate the plantation's longstanding labor archives and infrastructures in and beyond Sri Lanka.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mythri Jegathesan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Santa Clara University, California. She has conducted field research with Hill Country Tamil women workers on issues of labor and gender justice and histories of work, migration and home-making in Sri Lanka since 2008. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and she has published her research in Anthropological Quarterly, Dialectical Anthropology, Himal Southasian, Commoning Ethnography, and SAMAJ: South Asian Multidisciplinary Journal. She is the author of Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka (University of Washington Press, 2019) which was awarded the 2020 Diana Forsythe Prize for the best book detailing feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology. She is currently co-editor of Anthropology of Work Review and is Secretary of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you register by clicking the Register button above and we will email you prior to the event for the webinar link.