Spotlight: Lakshmi Padmanabhan

Abstract

Spotlight:Lakshmi Padmanabhan Samantha N. Sheppard and Lakshmi Padmanabhan (bio) Samantha N. Sheppard: Can you explain how your research in experimental cinema and new media intersects with postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and queer feminisms? Lakshmi Padmanabhan: I'm broadly interested in the way images mediate our sense of ourselves and structure our sense of belonging in the world. When I first started writing academically about film, I wrote about mainstream Bollywood cinema and its limited visual vocabulary for addressing queer life in India at a time when there was a growing national LGBTQ movement and ongoing fights for women's rights. But I became tired of writing critiques of films with bad politics and wanted to focus on work by artists and filmmakers who are committed to queer minoritarian life and to exploring the formal possibilities of moving images for building more inhabitable worlds for us. To me, that is a fundamental question posed by postcolonial theory: How do we build livable worlds for ourselves out of the violent structures of coloniality that we have inherited? I find that same Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Lakshmi Padmanabhan. Photograph by Aaron Kovalchik. [End Page 5] question posed by a lot of independent filmmakers and visual artists working in experimental or documentary practices who see film and visual art as modes of worldmaking. Sheppard: What is compelling about how films imagine the end of the world, and how does your work intervene in ecocritical discourses? Padmanabhan: There has been some debate in the humanistic disciplines recently about how to create adequate representations of the climate crisis, an event that seems both too abstract and too far in the future to capture through novels, films, and so on. In film, some scholars have turned to writing about Hollywood's apocalyptic cinema and its figuring of future climate catastrophe. My frustration with this future-oriented understanding of the climate crisis is the actuarial logic that underpins it. The climate crisis is obviously already here and unfolding through existing structures of racial violence, labor exploitation, gendered and sexual discrimination, and so on. The debates about the Anthropocene might be new, but the experiences of environmental racism and the long colonial history of land and labor exploitation that are detrimental to the planet are not. This is the point I take from Christina Sharpe's discussion of "weather" as the stochastic yet inexorable atmosphere of racial violence, which is lived as the attrition of bodily capacity and slow death for certain populations.1 Or, to put it more simply: there is no universal subject of climate change.2 So I'm interested in how postcolonial filmmakers are already utilizing the language of film to capture the disjunctive experience of colonial violence as an ongoing structural relation rather than a unified event. For example, the first five minutes of Xala (Ousmane Sembène, 1975) provide a very clear picture of the relations between the erstwhile colonizer and the newly decolonized, along with a sharp critique of the economic dependence of newly postcolonial countries on their former rulers, all without any dialogue. West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (Med Hondo, 1979) likewise dramatizes centuries of colonialism through the form of a musical, without any conventional focalizing character narratives. These are not new films. Film, particularly Third Cinema and non-Western cinema, has long been inventing a visual language for thinking structural violence. In my current writing, I'm discussing these ideas through the work of Tsai Ming-liang, whose films are all set in intense and difficult urban environments—incessant rain, smog, polluted rivers—where the characters of these films, usually underemployed, homeless drifters, have to make a home. The weather is simply the environment they operate within, which formally works through the kind of banal anxieties and difficulties of survival in the midst of ongoing catastrophe. [End Page 6] Sheppard: How does your research influence or inspire how you approach your role as co-chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies' (SCMS) Caucus Coordinating Committee? Padmanabhan: The most basic yet difficult ethical work we in the humanities have to do is to practice thinking across categories of social difference...