Moving Pictures Under the Palms

How does tropicality – a concept historically rooted in colonial thought – shape colonial media and society? Thinking cinematically through a framework of tropicality – a constellation of ideas including forest, heat, humidity, miasma, microbes, logistics, labor, infrastructure, extraction, and animism – Nadine Chan demonstrates how colonial cinema created ambient spaces that enabled colonial power to take root and endure – as well as to wear away and break down. Beginning in the 1920s and continuing beyond British Malaya's independence in 1957, colonial filmmakers sought to transform Malaya's tropical landscape – long deemed unruly, excessive, and dangerous – into arenas of modernity and capital. In equatorial rainforests, rubber plantations, tin mines, villages, and more, colonial governments deployed open-air cinemas as ambient infrastructures of power – environ-mental surrounds that were at once elemental, atmospheric, cognitive, and affective. Weaving these cinematic environments within non-technological media landscapes that include architecture and urban design, supply-chain logistics, and more-than-human spirit networks in local animist cosmologies, Chan demonstrates how the colonial tropics calls for expanded understandings of media worlds. Meanwhile, phenomena such as floods and fungi, mountain spirits and mechanical failure, bacterial infections and militant insurgencies emerge as possibilities for counter-colonial attrition. Drawing on multi-modal methodologies including original archival research, film analysis, oral histories, on-site film screenings, and forest hikes as topographic memory-making, Chan develops an innovative theoretical and historiographical framework for thinking about media environments across multiple fields in media studies.