RESEARCH
In my dissertation, Forested Media: Indigenous Lifeworlds in Upland Asia, I write about how communities use media, and other aesthetic practices, to imagine ethical lifeworlds in a forest. And how media remains crucial to experiencing intimate relations to other species.
In my writing I try to center how indigenous communities, despite a persisting colonial violence against them, offer life in the present. That is, a practice of ethically grounded, and intimate, ways of living and knowing in the forest. Amongst other stories, I write on how Karens actively campaign for cultural burning of their forest against state pressure, or Akhas regenerate forests on their empty coffee farms. Or Khasis build living root bridges by weaving together the young aerial roots of the Indian Rubber tree (Ficus Elastica) to cross streams.
My interests in forests and media began a decade or so ago, when I stumbled upon the films of Lav Diaz. What drew me to his films were how colonial and fascist histories were being narrated from forests, swamps, and mountains of the islands, far away from cities and urban spaces where they are often written from. Thinking about the intersection of environments, histories, and aesthetics, I wrote my MPhil on Diaz’s films titled, “A Century of Dying: Anthropocenic Imaginaries and the Cinema of Lav Diaz.”
While I write about the contemporary, I have been interested in the cold war pasts of south and southeast Asia. I have researched on the history of the American war on Vietnam (1955-75), especially in how the American war machinery used media technologies to survey, map and racialize the North Vietnamese Army. While it is quite well known that the Americans used chemical weapons to destroy forests in Vietnam, I draw attention to more sinister and pervasive ways of controlling and surveilling forests through sensing, radiowaves, and early computing technologies.
I also consider artistic research as serious mode of research and inquiry, overlapping my academic and artistic production. For more on that click here.
pujita@ucsb.edu
pujita.guha90@gmail.com