Whose information becomes empirical data and who gets to define evaluative paradigms? Separately, through teaching film and media theory, I found a lot of ink spilt on the ontological significance of time to visual technologies, and not much connecting the growing but disparate body of work on media and space. In addition to questions of spatial justice, I was interested in the relationship between social power and the production of knowledge. I was also reading Edward Soja’s work on the centrality of geography to social inequity. This made me turn to similar colonial precedents and seek modes of writing about photographed and filmed locations that disrupt reductive and objectifying frames. Places with rich histories were becoming visually familiar to a global audience exclusively as targets of war or sites of insurgency. The US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to daily press coverage of bombed sites in the Middle East. Priya Jaikumar: It was 2009 and I was being pulled in different directions. How did you come upon the idea for the book? What got you interested? Yet this intersection would be very productive for all manner of readings across various parts of the world. You explore this intersection with material from the cinemas of India. Sushmita Banerji: In undertaking a spatial film historiography, Where Histories Reside reveals how power relations and their reproduction are institutionalized through state practices, aesthetic lineages, and discursive regimes. Jaikumar is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California and the author of Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Duke University Press, 2006). In this installment of our continuing series of of conversations with authors of new books on cities and urban culture, film scholar Sushmita Banerji interviews Priya Jaikumar on her most recent book Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space (Duke University Press, 2019). In this issue's Mediapolis Q&A, film scholar Sushmita Banerji interviews Priya Jaikumar on her most recent book Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space.
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