Debashree Mukherjee

“Tropical Machines” shows how regimes of resource and labor extraction are fundamentally tied up with regimes of vision and mobility. Histories of modern media and colonial racial capitalism are co-constitutive, and it is necessary to therefore expand the spatial limits of media modernities from the city to the plantation, the island, the ship, and the penal settlement. This project tracks nineteenth-century media experiments in penal colonies and sugar islands such as the Andamans, Mauritius, and Fiji, to argue that the machines that are considered emblematic of Western modernity were in fact forged in the “dark” tropics. The massive migration of South Asian “coolies” or indentured workers in the era of abolition is coeval with the birth of photography and the age of cinema, and this is no coincidence.