Tropical Narratives
During her Faculty Visitorship, Debashree Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, spoke to Keithley Woolward, Associate Director of the Masters in History and Literature program at Reid Hall. They discussed the representation of tropical landscapes in film, unexplored archives, and Paul et Virginie, a novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and the current focus of Debashree’s research.
teaches film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. Her current book manuscript, “Bombay Hustle: Practices of Modernity in a Colonial Cine-Ecology,” presents a practitioner’s eye view of the emergence of the Bombay film industry, bringing material history into dialogue with feminist film historiography and media studies. The book draws inspiration from Debashree’s own experience of working in Mumbai’s film and television industries in the early 2000s. She has published in various academic journals and anthologies and is a core editor with the peer-reviewed journal, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. As a curator, Debashree most recently presented a collection of rare production stills and behind-the-scenes photographs from the 1930s in the exhibition, “A Cinematic Imagination: Josef Wirsching and the Bombay Talkies” at the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2017).
Keithley Woolward is Associate Director of Columbia University’s Masters in History and Literature program at Reid Hall. His scholarship bridges literary history and cultural studies of the anti-colonial and post-independence corpus of Francophone Africa and the Caribbean from the mid 1950s to the present. He also holds a Master of Public Affairs in Culture Policy and Creative Industries from Sciences Po, Paris (2018).
