 Welcome to the Pullman Center. My name is Shriya Chatterjee and I'm Head of Research and Learning here at the Center. So now to really get to the meat of today's event and to properly welcome you to what is the second research seminar this term. This event is part of a series called In Conversation, New Directions in Art History. Some of you may have already been to our last session. If not, I'll talk very briefly about what the series is about. So the aim of the series is to really bring new research and ideas into conversation and circulation, but also to think through the approaches and methods we build along the way to how we write into disciplinary and thought-provoking art histories. You'll be hearing from a range of very exciting speakers as a part of the series and the topics that we will explore range from things like indigenous objects in British and European collections, art and artificial intelligence, feminist revisions of Shinoiserie, and of course today's event, which is on cinema and empire. So I'll give you a brief outline of how the event will be run today. The format of the evening will be as follows. So we'll have 15 minutes from each speaker who I'll introduce shortly, and then 15 to 20 minutes for the speakers to be in conversation with each other, which really, and talk about their work, but also to think through methodology and how we really, how we do art history, so it. And then following that, we will have a Q&A session from the audience, both online and in person, so feel free to ask questions, put it in, if you're online, put your questions into the Q&A section of the chat, and raise your hands, and we'll do the old-fashioned way here. And this will be followed by a reception next door, so it'd be lovely if you join us. So today's speakers we have Kersti Sinclair-Dutzen, speaking on Decolonizing in Technicolor, post-war color cinema in Britain and India. And this talk considers the relationship between color and coloniality in post-war cinema, and really thinks about the visual and imaginous of cinema, but foregrounds the material, the technological, and the infrastructural elements of it. So in particular, the talk will focus on how the dyeing technique used at London's Technicolor Film Laboratory helped Britain imagine its sustained global hegemony during an era of decolonization. So the British Technicolor Lab was an international hub for processing color film from the 1930s to the 1960s, dyeing film that was shot all across the world. So we're really looking forward to your talk. Following Kersti's talk, Erica Carter's talk, White Cinema Colonial Pink, is going to be on white cinema going in the British colonial territories after World War II. It draws on her own family history to think through cinema-going practice amongst white British colonials in tropical environments. The talk focuses on color in the urban environment, specifically on the prominence in downtown Nassau of the color known as Colonial Pink, and its association with color and contemporary visual practice, including amateur photography and filmmaking, as well as the movie-going experiences in the city's white-only showfront cinema, The Savoy. Really interesting talks to pair with one another as well. Just to introduce the two speakers to you before I hand over, Kersti Sinclair-Dutzen is a lecturer in Film and Media Studies at UCL. She received a PhD in History of Art with Film and Media Studies from Yale University in 2018. Her work, which interrogates the relationship between materials, technologies, aesthetics, and ideologies from the 19th century to the present, has been published in various venues, including British art studies, screen and film history, and others. Her most recent article, co-authored with Chaurjoux, entitled Did Madame Mao Dream in Technicolor, received both Catherine Singer-Covac's essay award from SCMS and the Screen Biennial Award. Kersti's first book, The Rainbows Gravity, Color, Materiality, and British Modernity, will be published by the Paul Mellon Centre in May this year, and we'll be hearing some elements from the book today. Erika Carter is Professor of German and Film at Kings College London. She has researched and lectured widely for many years across cultural studies, film studies, and German studies. Her co-edited volumes include Space and Place, Theories of Identity and Location, Cultural Remakes, Theories of Politics and the Popular, and the BFI German Cinema Book. Her writings on Weimar and Nazi film aesthetics include Bella Balash, Early Film Theory, and Dietrich Schost's The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film. Her research has turned to colonial cinema and archive practice, and as we will see, her presentation today will build on an essay on whiteness and colonial cinema in her co-authored volume Mapping the Sensible, Distribution, Inscription, Cinematic Thinking. So, first up, we'll have Kersti. Thank you. Well, thank you so much, Shria, for inviting Erika and I to speak today and the rest of the team at the PMC for putting this event together. It's a real honour to be presenting the material here, and I'm really looking forward to the conversation afterwards. In a shameless double plug, I also just wanted to flag that the material I'm presenting today is drawn from my forthcoming book, The Rainbow's Gravity, Color, Materiality, and British Modernity, which the PMC will be publishing in May. The book covers a period between the 1850s and 1960s during which Britain developed a series of new colour media technologies. It asks how these material and technical changes to the way colour was made interlocked with changing social and political understandings of what colour meant. Of particular relevance to today's conversation is that the book considers the relationship between colour media and the British Empire not simply in terms of representational politics, but examining how imperial ideologies and related racial hierarchies were fundamentally bound up with the techno-material processes of producing colour images. While the book covers painting, printing, photography and television, today's talk is drawn from the chapter on film titled Decolonising in Technicolor, which uses the 1953 Indian Technicolor film Jhansi Ki Rani to consider the changing political resonances of making films in colour in post-war Britain and India. And a brief note before I begin, for historical reasons, for historical consistency, excuse me, I'm going to retain colonial era names for Indian cities throughout my talk. So Jhansi Ki Rani was a landmark production. It was the only domestically produced Indian film ever shot in Technicolor, and this is the most prestigious, expensive and dazzling film process available at this time. India had only produced around 10 domestic colour features to date, so the Technicolor brand name was exploited as a mark of distinction by Surab Modi, who directed, produced and acted in the film and also owned Minerva movie tone studios in Bombay, where Jhansi Ki Rani was shot, and you can see him at the top left here. Released six years after India won independence from Britain, Jhansi Ki Rani took as its subject India's first war of independence in 1857, when the Rani or Queen of the Indian state of Jhansi led forces in combat against the British East India Company. Drawing clear parallels between the Rani's attempts to contest British colonialism and India's recent struggle for independence, the film attempted to present a unifying patriotic theme, despite the fact that the character of Indian nationalism and ideas of national cinema were contested due to the multiple religious, ethnic and linguistic groups that comprised the newly formed nation of India. But this was not the first time India had appeared in Technicolor film. Technicolor, an American technology firm, opened its first British wing, sorry, its British wing in 1936, making England the only location outside Hollywood with Technicolor cameras and laboratory facilities. And British Technicolor filmmakers routinely used India as the subject of their films, reflecting the subcontinent's position in the imperial imagination as a colony rich with color that had been exploited by Britain for centuries through the extraction of dye stuffs, pigments and textiles. Yet Jhansi Kirani seemed to reverse this colonial gaze as a Technicolor tale of British imperialism told from the perspective of a newly independent India. But imperialism is not only something depicted on film as images, but something that adheres in film as a material logic. And I contend there is a telling friction between Jhansi Kirani's representational politics as an anti-imperial epic shot in India and its material politics as an object of economic imperialism printed and died at a laboratory in London. And it's important to note that the film was released in two versions, one in Hindi, the other a shorter English version titled The Tiger and the Flame. Sadly, there are no extant color copies of the Hindi version, and the English version only survives as a bad video transfer. But by focusing on the materiality of the film print itself, albeit lost, I want to address what Ramesh Kumar describes as the quote, privileging of content as a carrier in histories of Indian cinema, meaning that precisely because of such archival losses, scholars have tended to deprivilege the film print as their primary object of investigation. So today I want to ask what might be gained by restoring the carrier to our reading of the content, to open up new interpretive possibilities for film history by reading films as both images and as objects whose material and formal strategies are inseparable. And this is obviously an approach that's really familiar to art historians and that's something we could maybe talk about in the conversation afterwards. So to do this we need to understand the mechanics and logistics of how the film was made. To shoot in Technicolor, Modi had to hire a standard package of equipment, services and personnel, including a special Technicolor camera and cameraman, lighting, cabling and generators which were all sourced from Britain. But this movement of people and materials was not unidirectional. Modi's own cameraman flew to London for training and exposed negatives were flown there for processing at Technicolor's London lab. This was because Technicolor films could only be processed at a Technicolor laboratory due to the specialized nature of their printing technique known as dye transfer. To explain this process at its simplest, the Technicolor camera used a prism to split light into three separate colour channels, red, blue, green, with the information for each recorded on three discrete black and white negatives. Each negative was turned into a gelatin printing matrix which was then dyed cyan yellow magenta, then each was pressed against the blank strip of film to transfer the dye onto the celluloid and recombine the colours of the image. While other colour processes involved complex photochemical development, Technicolor simply dyed its prints in a manner akin to textile printing and using dyes initially developed for the textile industry. This was both highly economical and gave unparalleled control over colour because each hue could be adjusted individually. This also invested laboratory with enormous power. As cinematographers were working in black and white, they couldn't see the colour until the lab added it. One cinematographer claimed, and I quote, you really photographed the film blind. Given these limitations, it seems surprising Modi chose to work in Technicolor when rival processes had just become available that would not impose such restrictions on the production. The post-war period marked the first commercial availability of chromogenic stocks, what you might call colour negative. These processes were largely derived from AgfaColor, the German system developed for propaganda cinema during the war, which required no special camera and could be processed by any lab trained in certain photochemical techniques. Although AgfaColor could not compete with Technicolor's saturation, it was cheaper and simpler and involved no external oversight. The AgfaColor patents were therefore a prized spoil of war, and their global dispersal catalyzed an international wave of new chromogenic stocks, which symbolized a range of freedoms, particularly for socialist and post-colonial nations, which were now able to buy colour negative and manage their own colour film productions in a meaningful way for the first time. And Modi's contemporaries certainly viewed chromogenic stocks in this liberatory way. Maybub Khan chose chromogenic stock for his 1952 colour debut on, so that rather than a Technicolor cameraman, he could employ his own cinematographer, Faridun Ahrani, producer Ambalal Patel made Pamposh using Belgian jiva colour in 1953, hailed as a watershed for chromatic self-determination, as Patel processed the feature at film centre in Bombay, which he'd opened as India's first colour lab in 1952. Yet Modi chose to shoot in Technicolor, a process associated with a British colonial gaze and which required the heavy involvement of British personnel. But the timing of Jhansi Ki Rani's production, when Technicolor was negotiating to open a new lab in Bombay, can't be overlooked. As part of a global post-war expansion of its lab network into Asia and South America, Technicolor identified India, the world's second largest film industry, as its top priority, a prospect welcomed by the Indian government, who had identified colour film labs as crucial to a self-sufficient film industry. An Indian Technicolor lab, staffed by local personnel, would save time and money, shipping prints abroad, and thereby retain domestic control over colour processing. This was crucial for self-representation. As Indian cinematographers lamented, Euro-American laboratory processes were calibrated around norms of whiteness and were enabled to accommodate the range of skin tones found in Indian cinema, resulting in numerous workarounds to rebalance the skin colour of performers. For instance, makeup artist Ram Tipnes compensated for the distorting effects of certain colour film stocks with abundant pink blusher. Because chromogenic processes fixed colour on the surface of film at the moment of exposure, the racial biases that were built into their photochemistry rendered darker skin tones a technological problem the lab could not resolve, but merely reproduce. Technicolor's system offered a radical reorientation of this relationship, as British filmmaker John Acumfra has argued. Rather than purporting to record and fix an external reality, an external indexical reality, Technicolor's di-transfer system, which added colour at the laboratory stage, and made each hue adjustable, revealed colour, and with its skin colour and an entire system of racial taxonomy, as a construction produced by not a biological reality documented in the material process of filmmaking. As Alessandro Rihango has suggested, it's telling that in black skin, white masks, Franz Fanon used the metaphor of photochemical development to describe the process by which the white viewer constructed and anchored his racial difference on the surface of his body, and thus in Fanon's terms, and I quote, fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. For Acumfra, it was the very lack of fixity of the dyes in Technicolor, which could be adjusted, modified or removed entirely, that meant it disrupted the links between colour and indexicality, that as Rihango argues, made photographic media such important technologies for situating skin pigmentation as the ultimate index of race itself. So despite these utopian promises, the plans for a Bombay Technicolor lab never came to fruition, and Modi had to rely upon the London lab to print and dye his film. Negatives were flown to London, but the cost of making rushes in colour meant most processed film was returned in black and white, and editing was similarly conducted on a black and white print. So for all the chromatic labour undertaken on set in India, the colours of Jhansi Ki Rani materialised in the London lab, where the dyes manufactured by Imperial chemical industries would bring to life this anti-Imperial tale. And it's worth remarking here that Imperial chemical industries or ICI, in addition to sponsoring Technicolor films and supplying Technicolor with dyes, were also chief suppliers of chemical weaponry for the British government, forging a material link between hard forms of British military power and soft forms of British cultural power, reflecting what Sabina Doran calls the morbid pun on the word dyeing. But this dyeing process is vital to the film's material politics as one of the principal battlegrounds of Indian independence had been British controls over textiles. Since the 19th century when Jhansi Ki Rani is set, British dye works had devastated India's domestic textile industries by extracting Indian cottons to dye cheaply in England and profit from their global export. Textiles were therefore heightened symbols of Indian independence as highlighted by the cotton spinning wheel on the nation's flag. Technicolor's dye transfer process echoed this historical traffic and dyed materials both through its economic logic and its material specificity. While Modi lost 10 million rupees on Jhansi Ki Rani, Technicolor generated substantial profits dyeing its 400 release prints. Moreover, the fact that cotton was a chief ingredient used for manufacturing film stock, which was then dyed by Technicolor using textile dyes, further confederated these links between British colonial processes of dyeing Indian fabrics and neocolonial processes of dyeing Indian films. Technicolor's dye transfer process therefore illuminates what Bruno Latour describes as technology's capacity to carry past acts into the present through the reanimation of these historical skill sets or to use Jogjeet Lali's terms. We could say this dyeing process invites an acknowledgement of the historical entanglement of color with colonialism and its controlling and commodifying logics and the way in which they are reproduced and repackaged. So I hope my reading of Jhansi Ki Rani has illuminated what I mean by interpreting films as both images and objects as surfaces and as substances an approach that might open up new pathways for envisioning the relationship between matter and subject matter particularly in the context of imperial and post-imperial image making revealing the meanings of films to be fixed neither in the contents of their images nor in their material supports but constituted through their dynamic relationship. Thank you. I'm so excited by Kirstie's work and not least because we're talking about a similar period but with from a different perspective but I think there are so many overlaps so thank you, that was brilliant. I'd like also to join Kirstie in thanking Shreya and the team for inviting us to speak tonight and to dialogue with each other it's a fantastic opportunity. I'm going to be presenting some thoughts from the essay that from an essay in the book that Shreya referenced earlier on the recent book on mapping where I have an essay that will later become part of a monograph that I'm calling White Bodies in Motion and it's about the formation of a subjectivity that I want to refer to as post-war colonial whiteness and what you have gathered if you've had time to read the abstract is that that research is in part based on an exercise in family history so I've been using my own family history as one route into a history of cinema going as a practice of white subjectification and community formation amongst a particular group of post-war British white expatriates working in territories within the British colonial service across the British overseas territories after 1945 in 1943 the colonial office started a recruitment drive for what it called in a 1943 pamphlet a new type of white officer demobilized soldiers then in the first instance but also bright young working class men denied a university education by class and economic disadvantage but trained now for careers that would grant them accelerated social mobility across the territories of the former empire one such one such non-university graduate was my father John who you see here meet John who graduated towards the end of the war from a secondary school in south London but his family had no money for university fees so he opted for agricultural college then 12 years of service as a colonial agricultural officer in northern Nigeria and meet secondly my mother Anna born Anastina Zuzana a southern Austrian domestic help turned au pair turned colonial nurse in 1948 whom John encountered while both were on route to East Africa my mother to a new posting from the Bahamas where she'd been working for three years to Ghana my father was off to Nigeria they had a whirlwind romance on board ship they married and they stayed they lived together from 1952 in Nigeria northern Nigeria until independence in 1960 in the research that I'm doing I use my own childhood memories interviews with my father family albums and so on as one starting point but really just one starting point for a circulatory and entangled history of post-war white expatriate experience across three colonial locales where my parents worked the Bahamas Ghana and Nigeria I come to that story from years of writing and researching film and cinema and cultural history and it's through that lens that I consider what my book will argue is the enmeshment of my parents social lives with film as the mid 20th centuries defining mass popular visual medium so I use a composite methodology we're going to talk about that I think later on including oral history archive and library research obviously but also media philosophy and anthropology to investigate cinema going as a practice of white sociality and community belonging and travelling to the movies as a spatial practice in Michel de Sartreau's terms or what the cinema historian Annette Coon calls a geography of actions within the territories of a now emergent post-war commonwealth let me tell you a little bit about how I'm thinking about walking to the movies as a geography of actions in Annette Coon's sense. Coon's study is an oral history of cinema going in 1930s Britain and she talks about how her interlocutors will constantly talk about the walk to the movies and draw a kind of memory map of what they remember. They don't remember the films often but they remember walking to the movies. Walking then figures Coon writes as a pragmatic practice of bodily mobility. It's also the default method of getting around for her 1930s generation of interwar film goers she talks about it also as a way of practicing belonging or non-belonging to place through bodily immersion in the built environment and open space. And it's that part of Coon's work this notion of travelling through urban space that I use in the work that I've recently published on my mother's movie going experiences in colonial Nassau in the Bahamas. Anna travelled to the Bahamas in 1948 she worked in the Bahamas general hospital but she was also incoming from post-war austerity Britain and she enjoyed all sorts of leisure possibilities offered by white life in a tropical colonial capital where she travelled around Nassau as well as the archipelago's incredibly far flung family island groupings she went on holiday to Jamaica at some point and she went to the movies. I've been using Monique Toppins she's a colleague at the University of the Bahamas and she's done a really important oral history of cinema going again around the same period as I'm working on in the post-war Bahamas so I've spent time and you'll see a map in a minute tracing all the local routes for my mother's walks to the movies during the three years of her Nassau sojourn but what I'm showing you is a slightly different map to start off with to illustrate in a way what's at stake in walking through colonial Nassau this is a 1912 map so it's much earlier but many of the contemporary tourist maps of Nassau will tell you the same thing which is they'll present a city which is profoundly racially segregated between the north shore downtown area and the south of the city so you see here a downtown area in the northern part of the map running along the north shore of the island of New Providence on which Nassau is located with the most significant public buildings from the colonial era Parliament House, the law courts behind them the library, the colonial office situated in Parliament Square over to the sort of mid-east of this map just off Bay Street which is the city's premier boulevard and the site that was dominated by a commercial and trading white and brown local so-called Bay Street oligarchy they're referred to as the Bay Street Boys so it's a white space also that is occupied by incoming tourists from ships that are docking at the Prince George Wharf on the north shore contrast now this downtown area with the territory south to the south of the map you have there a blank space that's irrelevant for this white travel guide a space then of horror of acuity that is from the perspective of this map's white tourist addresses simply vacant but in fact housed a network of black suburbs known collectively of the hill, there is a hill and comprising black neighbourhood stating back to periods of settlement of freed slaves and other migrant populations from the late 18th and early 19th centuries so this map I think highlights quite clearly what's at stake in terms of class and racial politics in the practice of walking through urban space in colonial Nassau and there's also all sorts of other other kind of limits and boundaries that within the downtown area that I talk about at greater length in my recent writing in a recent book on what he calls the logic of racial practice the philosopher of race Brock Barla recasts what De Sertel calls spatial practice as a racialized and racializing process the source he writes of embodied habits that become sedimented into our ways of being in the world instilling within us racialized and racist dispositions, positions and bodily comportments and it's with those comments in mind that I think about this is my DIY map of my mother walking to the cinema from the Bahamas General Hospital that's the blue circle with the white square down to the Savoy which was Nassau's whites only segregated cinema that walk would have taken a mere 15 minutes she would I speculate having done this walk many times have walked down one of the city's main thoroughfares, Shirley Street through the elegant tropical gardens and squares surrounding government buildings that's those three sort of red and the castle type things government buildings including the National Assembly and the Colonial Office it's the obvious way to go if you're walking then westwards up Bay Street which as I said was Nassau's kind of premier business district but was also a destination of choice not just for the business elite also for Nassau residents obviously it was a shopping area but also for incoming black and mixed shoppers and traders from the Bahamas scattered family islands it's a massive archipelago many of you will know this was also a space for black laborers market traders and service personnel for downtown business and tourist outlets and for predominantly white and in the majority in this period US American tourists who are decanted on the shore front from cruise liners and luxury yachts so what you have in downtown Nassau is a context that promotes unusually intimate contact it's a really small town Nassau unusually intimate contact between highly differentiated and higher archived social and racial groups so the question how to be white in that context I think is a question of particular significance for somebody like my mother who is coming who is profiling herself as a representative of a colonial presence and now we come to the relationship between white cinema and colonial pink I want to show you some images of the Savoy which was probably the only segregated cinema in the West Indies that at least according to the historian James Burns it was also a prominent landmark on the Nassau waterfront so you see here how the Savoy attracted attention through a glowing pink facade which made it a spectacular focal point for coming tourists or shoppers or just for sort of passing maritime traffic that status as a landmark and focus of attention was reinforced by the Savoy's architectural and chromatic resonances with other urban landmarks so this is the Savoy is painted the Savoy is painted in the colour I'm calling colonial pink although Kersti and I might want to talk about that later as far as I can tell this was a paint colour that was supplied by the Crown Agents and unofficially prescribed during the colonial period for Bahamian government buildings it's still today the standard set by the Bahamian department of public works for courts, administration buildings public health clinics and so on what happens so as you walk through the city what you're walking through is a kind of city-wide pink-hued latticework this is Parliament Square a postcard from 1904 which is a veritable rhapsody in colonial pink so the colour kind of engulfs the Parliament buildings facing Bay Street the law courts and the library the Parliament buildings are said to be modelled on Tyron Palace New Bern which was capital of the North Carolina colonial government until the American Revolution so there's a reference and there is throughout I mean I won't go into this history in great detail but there are all sorts of architectural references to the loyalist populations who came after the war after the American War of Independence who moved to various places all outside the southern states including the Bahamas because they were loyal to the British Crown and the loyalists significantly shaped the sort of the architectural milieu of downtown Nassau so there's a reference a significant reference to colonial heritage in Parliament in Parliament Square just a few more examples I don't want to move the slide on here you go just a few more examples of this what I'm calling this kind of pink latticework so this for example is the Fort Montague Beach Hotel which was constructed in 1926 in spectacular pink with its own private beach which was the site of a vigorously enforced form of Jim Crow segregation this is an undated tourist map which continues that preoccupation with a pink blue colour palette as does this 1950s tourist brochure so this pink-blue relationship the kind of palette of colonial heritage is mapped now onto a landscape and a marine environment whose colouration lends the patina of a natural order to colonial divisions and hierarchies what I do in my the essay that I've written is I talk about the experience of walking through this kind of nostalgia fest of various moments in colonial history I'm not going to talk about that because I want to try out on you finally a few new things that I've been doing with this kind of chromatic story but just one reference to this sort of history of walking or this account of walking to the movies I've been very influenced by work that's going on on what the what the Chinese and our historian Chen Zhuzhou has called atmospheric spectatorship so a form of spectatorship that moves in and out of the cinema and is very much concerned also with the importance of going in moving within and beyond the cinema space but I want to continue the story of pink a little bit in the new chapter that I'm currently working on I use a focus on the colour pink to work intertextually across media forms including the illustrated press so I'm moving away from the urban fabric to the illustrated press fashion film of course painting and artisanal crafts especially straw making to think about how pink provides not just in Anna's Walk to the Cinema but in other context of racialised praxis the chromatic mise-en-scene for performances of colonial whiteness one prime source for my next chapter is the Nassau magazine that you just saw in the previous slide and I can't find the mouse I can't look out how to go back to it the publication launched for a high society tourist readership in the mid 1930s by the Bahamas Development Board by the 1940s it was attracting a new class of moneyed middle class visitors so tourists were rubbing shoulders I am going to try and find that can I perhaps take you about this way tourists were rubbing shoulders in clubs, hotels or as here on private beaches street commercial and political elite as well as with British aristocrats business tycoons and colonial officials they also mingled with glamour figures from post-war fashion sport and film so this is from the inside of the Nassau magazine a memorable photo gallery from a 1949 issue of the Nassau magazine showing Errol Flynn a notorious sexual predator whom my mother remembered luring nurses from her residence to parties on his private yacht or in the bottom right the British star David Farrah who reprises in this glamour shot his role in the Palin Pressburger a drama of late empire Black Narcissus where he plays the horseback riding British agent gone native Mr. Dean so this is an issue this particular issue celebrates a new era in the development of Bahamian white middle class milieu an era that saw the Hollywoodization of social life in downtown Nassau but just finally the front cover of a 1942 Nassau magazine anniversary edition tells a different story where Hollywood glamour is competing for position in island visual culture with colonial references that go back further than the loyalist moment that I was talking about just now in relation to architecture and the urban fabric to an earlier moment of colonial incursion the so-called discovery of the new world with the arrival in the Bahamas of Christopher Columbus on the quote beautiful beach of Guanahini as it does the magazine calls it on the Bahamian island of San Salvador on October the 12th 1492 this cover page from 1942 is a graphic adaptation of the maritime painter and poster artist Norman Wilkinson's fantasy rendering an oil paint of Columbus making landfall in the same place in Graham's base in San Salvador but I think the difference between the two images is interesting in the Nassau magazine Wilkinson's painting is compositionally and chromatically refigured so his lone ship is inserted into a densely populated narrative tableau of colonial conquest Columbus coming onto the beach the dominant blue of the seascape meanwhile is adjusted to give greater prominence to the pastel pink space of the beach stretched now into a wide pink strip and the sands are pink they're coral beaches not all over the Bahamas but on some of the Bahamas islands the glow of the beach is enhanced by a maritime blue that deepens the turquoise hue of Wilkinson's ocean sorry for cursing evoking more centrally the enticement of the 1950s tourist brochure that I showed earlier so there's a process of intertextual relay from an oil paintings majestic scenario of colonial conquest to its touristic refiguring in an image of pink coral sands not the ocean as the site of human agency and colonial agency on the Bahamas islands that intertextual relay is extended on the back page to link pink beaches to a more explicitly touristic fantasy so this is an illustrated advert from the Bahamas Development Board it repeats the contours of the coastline that you get in Wilkinson's painting and then again in the front cover but the illustration performs a kind of temporal and scalar shift so you move in closer and you come up to the present day so that the beach is figured as a contemporary site of tourist frolics in which we participate as we move in closer so the perspective here is somebody else sort of family member taking a holiday snapshot what I want to do in the rest of my work and I'm going to finish now is to follow one of the really influential works for the work that I've been doing in the Bahamas is this fantastic book which I'm sure many of you will know Krista Thompson's An Eye for the Tropics I want to follow Krista Thompson in exploring under her rubric of the tropical picturesque the similar chromatic and compositional re-workings of colonial visual scenarios into touristic fantasy what I'm doing is working across media so I'm looking at the illustrated press advertising fashion film and so on also amateur film and indeed my mother's own photo album to explore how the rose-coloured spaces of post-war Nassau became locations for vernacular performances of whiteness on the streets and beaches of the tropical Bahamas I was really taken by this advert in the Nassau magazine which advertises the streets and hotels of downtown Nassau as creative media for what it calls the art of living where life is a brilliant gesture what I'm doing then is I'm currently trawling my mother's photo album so that's her on the right to explore how she responded to that invitation to experience life in Nassau as a brilliant gesture with performances of self-hood that replicate the tropical Misesen and gestural configurations of glamour, fashion and high society photography in the Nassau magazine as here where she poses against a palm in a straw hat with a pose that kind of evokes this earlier poster in the Nassau magazine or the ubiquitous shot of the triumph fishing I've yet to find an equivalent for this gesture but I rather like it as a final tribute to my otherwise occasionally difficult mother but anyway this is I just wanted to talk about pink as a mise-en-scene for these kinds of performances that I'm now exploring Thanks very much Thank you so much for agreeing to participate in this and it was such an exciting talk and so fabulous to see some extra images that aren't in the chapter as well I suppose one of the questions I'd love to get started with is thinking in the spirit of the name of this event, thinking about methodology one of the things that I think is so interesting that connects our work is thinking about new methods for connecting film and empire beyond representational politics necessarily obviously representation and aesthetics is important to both of our work but thinking about this relationship between the empire and film technology in these kind of different ways whether that's techno-material whether that's techno-material or kind of sensory and effective and I'd love for us to speak a bit more about that about how our work is kind of thinking through different ways of engaging with what in some ways is a conventional set of discursive topics of the empire and film that this seems to be something different from kind of historical legacies of how those things have been thought together yeah I think that's I mean I don't quite know how to I think that part has to do with a huge explosion of a huge explosion of the discipline of whatever we're going to call it screen studies what is it anyway I think that that concern with representation seems to be I mean it's there and the concern with narrative and so on but whether it's central or not that really depends where you are so I think that in that context that's part of what's happening so your work is really kind of a whole new field which is really looking at colour techniques I noticed that one of your slides used an image from Baba Aflukega's work on the historical timeline of historical colours you know there have been big projects that have perhaps you could talk a bit more about that I mean what's enabled my work I think has been a conjunction of it's a funny old conjunction of on the one hand cinema history which I'm not doing I'm not doing what tends to be called the new cinema history in an obvious way because that's often about you okay sorry that's often very it's more in the direction of social science than I want to go but there is a lot of discussion of how you think about the experience of going to the cinema and that's also opened up ways of thinking across from social science paradigms which are looking at transport networks or or you know obviously socio-economic factors that influence cinema going urban studies you know all that kind of thing but on the other hand in media aesthetics and media philosophy that is thinking about experience and yeah so I think there's something that's happening in the discipline that we both move around in that is enabling some of this work yeah I think what's really exciting about this work is as you say it's not just film history but films which is roof of art historians as well so we can talk about the art historical touch but it's not just film history but thinking about an entire kind of an activation of an entire sensory environment with films still at the centre of that still being at the centre of the gravity of that history but I love that idea of the entire kind of topography becoming activated as a sensory environment in which film is contextualised that that kind of sensory and affective history not purely being about this sensory experience of watching the film is such an exciting new dimension to kind of push that in and yes certainly you flag Barbara Flucke's work and there's been and obviously Sarah Streets' work as well there's been phenomenal kind of technomaterial and social histories of colour film that I'm drawing on but what I'm so interested in in my work specifically is kind of drawing these art historical methods into thinking about film that for art historians I think what I'm saying is so conventional to say imagine if we looked at what the actual materials and object was made from and how that informed its social and political resonances for art historians that's art history one and one to bring that work into film studies to draw on that amazing kind of technical history that's been done we're so much more used to thinking about technologies and apparatuses than we are about materiality in some ways so I find that a really exciting way of drawing together these disciplines to kind of produce new readings that might not be possible in more conventional approaches to say there's so much great work on cinema and empire and really important work's been done about issues of representation and historical representation and aesthetics and narrative but what else is there to say and drawing on art historical methods is one way of producing these new readings there's also one of the things that we came up with when we were sort of discussing crossover points in our work we wanted to talk about intermediality I think and what that meant for the two of us because it's sort of in a peculiar sort of way the work that I'm doing has been very much influenced by work on digital media which talks precisely about moving through digital environments and all sorts of terms like navigating for example which are used to think about how we live within media-tized worlds now and I actually think that with this sort of notion that that's new and I find that very puzzling because it seems to me that we've been living in media-tized worlds for a really really long time they haven't been digital worlds necessarily but this whole sort of proliferation of media forms which make sense of everyday life for us and which populate everyday life that's not something that happened with the transition to the digital that's what intermediality means for me it's sort of travelling across media forms and those media forms becoming the reasons for daily life if you like but I wondered what intermediality means for you because your book is not just about film before talking about that I just want to say it was so interesting to see of watching the slides from out there while coughing some of those other media objects as you said then you mentioned fashion magazines press straw making it's so interesting to think about these as not peripheral secondary as not here's the archival object that holds up the film object to think about these as really integrated and dispersal of cinematic experience and how that as you say interlocks ideas about producing whiteness what's really powerful about this is not hierarchizing those objects which I really like for me so yeah it's interesting intermediality because at once the work seems super medium specific right so I'm literally going to drill down to what celluloid is made out of it's very specific about how this film is printed and secondly the book each chapter is about a different medium but what's interesting to me and I was kind of gesturing at this with the Bruno Latour towards the end which I've borrowed from Jennifer Roberts is the way of kind of opening up these objects is to think about Morgan Uncle's these cognate technologies so thinking about film printing being akin to textile dyeing being akin to other historical forms of printing on paper and that's kind of what intermediality means these kind of technological and material overlap so the you know the material overlap of cotton between film stock and textiles for me that's a location of intermediality rather than sort of thinking about the movement of say iconography across different media forms it's really kind of where are the sites of overlap between how these media technologies work and film and print is one that I'm particularly interested in and I've drawn a lot on print scholarship and Jennifer Roberts work, Jennifer Chong's work to think about how do we interpret a film print as a print so it's kind of this strange maneuver of being very medium specific and also thinking about how these medias are in using material and technical networks with other objects as well I wonder whether we should just do one more question and then open up or shall we open up now we have a whole complex of things that we wanted to talk about which was about this moment because we share a moment it is the post war shift into it's the post war moment of decolonisation and cold war and also Britain trying to sort of shift from empire to common wealth and develop different kinds of dependency of new dependencies across the sort of newly liberated territories of former British empire and so on so we're both very interested in that intermediate or transitional moment and I just want one of the things that really struck me listening to you was the way in which every move in that process is contested and ambivalent that actually when you were saying about the struggles to set up or the attempt to set up a colour lab a processing lab in Bombay but in the end it comes back to Britain I was thinking about something rather different which is about the kind of contestation that's going on in the Bahamas is this a territory it belongs nominally to the British empire but they really can't they start prospecting for oil there's not very much they can extract except for images from the Bahamas it's this glorious tropical paradise and so on which means that it's laid open for exploitation by the American tourist industry there's all sorts of things that are going on there where the British are really not doing very well at keeping the Bahamas within their own sphere of influence and a lot of that is around film and all the associated sort of leisure industries so I don't know if that's a question but it's something about not being able to there's no radical break from empire to Commonwealth it's just how you work out this process of the forging of new networks new circuits, new dependencies new interdependencies I don't know if you've got a comment on that Yeah, well two things there I think one of the things that's so nice about pairing these papers together is thinking about how localised and regional of those processes were and as you say the kind of redrawing of lines the reimagination of empire constantly but also in these very different regional contexts I love the idea that the only thing you can extract is images it's just like a really powerful turn of phrase, I know we've talked before about different forms of extraction like what do you extract when you don't extract cotton or sugar I think the American question is a really interesting one for my work as well that this moment in the 50s is the shift of kind of geopolitical power where the empire is waning becoming the Commonwealth American kind of cultural imperialism is moving into fill this gap and those kind of, I think both of the contexts we're looking at are these kind of frontiers in your case in terms of leisure and tourism I also, you know so interesting that the colonial pink has kind of American historical kind of legacies that it comes from America but it sounds like it's some kind of British imposition but it actually comes from southern plantation aesthetics so your context of tourism and then for me obviously post-independence India is the second largest film industry and everyone is looking to move into this market and so it becomes a big Cold War battleground and colour technology is a very heavily ideologically freighted in the Cold War so there's lots of interesting international co-production so there's a Soviet Indian co-production in 57 that's in soft colour which is one of these Russian post-war colour systems Technicolor is looking to move in Britain is also trying to keep a kind of foot in this market and so it's interesting this kind of intersection of, as you're saying kind of decolonisation as well as this kind of rise of the American kind of imperium at the same time that produces these very different kind of nexus of kind of cultural objects as well right, how this transforms the objects that are produced and I love the comparison of the kind of family photographs with these highly mediated posed images that this kind of informs also kind of the aesthetics of the everyday as well I mean this would be the last thing I want to say but you absolutely must not forget that black Bahamian populations for example are absolutely inserting themselves in that contestation around colour for example so there's a whole that's why straw making is in there because it's a local craft that's particularly led by the women that lead out islands and the villages in the interior so you know the poorer you are the further south you live and that new province is not quite right but certainly the wealth is concentrated on the north shore of Nassau but there are market women bringing in straw products which had died locally in the villages or in the outskirts and there's a whole local industry that develops around that which is a tourist industry and which brings in money and then the colonial authorities start to train some of the market women because it's totally unregulated and of course that's not that's frowned upon but then with the thing that I'm chasing at the moment so if anybody knows this please tell me I want to know at what point synthetic rafia comes in as a decoration for the straw because there's now a return to so-called native dye but that starts to die out in the period of the time it died out as it were in the period of the time it came out so there's a huge contestation about those things I'm conscious of sorry Shria I'm conscious of time so should we hand over to you at this point this is on we can sort of questions from the audience thank you very much for both of the very interesting talks and I got at a point or to a question with your talk really because with this DIY card I was just wondering there were two more film pieces so does that mean there were two more cinemas in that place and your mother just went to one of them or did she go? when she first arrived there were four cinemas one was I mean this is where I'm very reliant on whether it was a picture of my mother I'd forgotten that was still up there there was another cinema on Bay Street called The Nassau supposedly non segregated but I'm very reliant on my colleague Monique Toppin here but her oral history tells us that it was very seldom used by white cinema girls and then there were two further cinemas back in over the hill which catered to black populations there was one which was set up by a black they were all owned by a single cinema entrepreneur he had a monopoly on the cinemas and there was an attempt to break into the market by a black cinema entrepreneur but he couldn't get the distribution there was very savage competition around distribution and in the end he was bought out but one thing to say about the segregated cinemas is that of course these things are a fiction so there were people who passed for white who went into the cinema but they were equally there was somebody who I interviewed in one of my oral history interviews who comes from one of the loyalist families from the line in the loyalist family where a white a white planter had come to the Bahamas from one of the southern states had an African wife and he comes from that line he himself his skin tone is tendentially white but his sister had a slightly darker skin tone and never dared to try and I heard that story a lot from people who could have passed for white or came from very privileged elite families but didn't go to the Savoy because they didn't feel that they didn't want to be turned away and then of course the other way around people would pass and that's a common story of segregated public spaces Thank you very much Could I ask a follow up question actually before handing over to further audience questions and this is to Erica as well, I really like the way that you're weaving in think about whiteness and the performance of whiteness but especially in relation to the creation of a tropical picturesque and how that feeds into kind of leisure and tourism with America later and so on and then going back to kind of the pink and plantation pink as well but I think the question that kept knowing at me throughout is the question of what this performance really means for kind of broader racial politics where it is segregated to white and white passing people but what about black Bahamians and their relationship to film and film going and as well as the distinction between sort of the performance of whiteness and the creation of whiteness which is a very specific thing versus the kind of the interactions or this aggregation and really the sort of tools of resistance and what colour is resistance is there resistance and yes I think I was curious about whether that plays a role in your story Absolutely I didn't bring her story into it because I could have gone on about that for a long time but one of the things I'm going to try and do in the book or I will do in the book I am doing in the book is always putting this story into conversation with exactly the story that you're talking about when I talked about an entangled history the entanglements won't just be amongst my white group so there's a very significant figure in the nursing profession in that period called Hilda Bowen who is one of the very first she's one of a cohort of three bohemian nurses who go in the year that my mother arrives in the Bahamas they both come on the Queen Mary my mother travels on the Queen Mary to New York she travels on the Queen Mary back to the UK and Hilda Bowen trained and worked in the UK for a long time but went back to the Bahamas in I can't remember the exact year at the end of the 1950 when she was shuttled backwards and forwards because she kept getting new professional qualifications and she eventually became the first black matron of the hospital where my mother worked one of the things I love about Hilda Bowen is that she was a media star she made her she was a consummate manipulator of monochrome media so she did things like she developed an insignia for the local nursing for the nursing population she was constantly being photographed she was always people talk about how she dressed she was always incredibly well turned out so that was a kind of consummate form of black performance which was absolutely pitted against the things that I'm talking about and I have a cinema story about Hilda Bowen she's one of the doctors who I interviewed wanted to take her to the cinema and she never responded to the invitation he didn't know about segregation but she was absolutely attuned to that and just never took up the invitation Interesting, thank you Terrific presentations, thank you so much Can I ask Kirsty a question about the materiality of the archive I was really struck you said that Yanikirani was printed there were 400 Technicolor prints of it and yet we have no copy of it what does that tell us about the fragility of this very specific archive and how can that possibly be Thank you, yeah I should say and I keep saying this as a way to describe the BFI the color separation negative so the three strips of black and white are actually held at the BFI which is interesting so one of the things about Technicolor is because the camera negatives are black and white they are not as prone to fading as color prints so one of the famous things about these chromogenic stocks is they tend to fade to pink as you probably noticed on the slide there are these incredibly stable camera negatives of the film in the British Film Institute hopefully that will be restored at some point but yeah you raise a really good question that there were an enormous number of copies of this film both in Hindi and in English so what could have happened to them it's a very good question obviously these are in circulation a movement film is incredibly fragile we're out of the era of nitrate at this point they've probably not gone up in flames the question of archiving is interesting though so the Ramesh Kumar piece that I cited about the privileging of content over carrier he's speaking about this in relation to the state of the National Film Archive of India which actually suffered an enormous fire in I think it was 2003 and lost a huge amount of prints largely nitrates from the silent era because of in part a lack of consummate institutional archiving domestically in India but also the question of why do we not have release prints of this film in Britain is a really good question and I kind of defer to Gwadzia Ingravali's recent work and she thinks about this question of she calls Angla Indian film heritage a hyphen this idea that kind of coloniality in tangles or in meshes both coloniser and colonised and so the question of whose film heritage is this is a really interesting question and one that Gwadzia's work is dealing with in incredibly smart ways so also the question of which archive would we go to to look for this object where does it belong to a truly kind of hyphenised Angla Indian film object it's a really interesting one and yeah if anyone knows of a secret stash release technical or di-transfer release prints of Jhansi Kirani it happens it happens it might show up but hopefully the BFI will restore the colour separation legs there's actually a follow up question but a question that relates quite directly to this one from our online audience Rohit Tiwari asks do we know how much a single print of Jhansi Kirani would have cost for developing and shipping back to India and what would be today's equivalent It's a really good question I don't have the numbers to hand I can tell you that Technicolor accounted for a third of the entire budget of the film and it was I think one of if not the most expensive film made in the Hindi film industry at the time so a third of that budget is a huge amount but that's obviously in part yet transporting I think they had a special deal with an airline for shipping prints to give you an example obviously Jhansi Kirani is not Lawrence of Arabia but laboratory technicians who printed Lawrence of Arabia said that a single print of Lawrence of Arabia cost about the same as a three bedroom semi in the 60s that gives you a kind of sense Lawrence of Arabia I think was also a wide screen so it's slightly different but enormously expensive in one sense but then also one of the benefits of Dytransfer printing as I mentioned is that operating at scale is incredibly cheap so basically after the first 25 prints it's pure profit so the question is that the lab are generating enormous profits if you're making 400 prints everything after 25 is pure profit but obviously if you're producing the film you have to pay for all those prints and also to ship them as I mentioned the rushes are in black and white so it's not like they're constantly shipping colour back hopefully that kind of lays out the field of the kind of economics of Dytransfer printing a little bit better yeah definitely we have some more questions there's one Danny just behind you's question Hi thank you both so much for your absolutely fascinating talks and discussion I was interested Erika in your mentioning of the British government encouraging working class men to work in colonial contexts it's seen that there were lots of different classed performances you were looking at with your mother perhaps in terms of aristocracy, celebrity influenced by both press and screen and I just wondered if you could talk a bit more about how class influenced your thinking about colour in that colonial context it's interesting because I was you're asking me a question that I was thinking about on the way here I was actually thinking about the chapter on my father and how I'm going to approach it and I think it will come through in that context I think the answer is I don't yet know I think that one one answer to it is that is again a kind of spatial answer so that I think what happens and it happens I mean one of the things I one of the reasons why I want to travel across these different locations is that I think these processes of white racialisation that I'm talking about occur differently every time you know the production of them as a particular production of whiteness, the production of a particular class position and so on and the production of a relationship to independence in you know it's not not so much an issue in the Bahamas as it is massively in Ghana when my mother arrives there in 1951 it's much more heavily politicised environment so but I think in every context spaces and our sites are absolutely crucial so in the Bahamas Government House was a place where they had fashion shows, cocktail parties you know tea dances all those kinds of things so there was a rubbing shoulders of the British aristocracy this was the period just after the Duke of Windsor had left as Governor of the Bahamas with the local elite that was very very different in Ghana so I think that thank you that's a really helpful question I think that question of class in relation to whiteness will change in every context but I think it is about sites of sociality that's why I'm so interested in the cinema it's just one last point on that that the cinema as a site of sociality in the Bahamas is utterly different from northern Nigeria where the colonial officials are living in very widely sort of far flung areas but they will come together at the club the European club is the place where again the collection of people who meet there is different so it's a different site of production of class relationships class affiliations and whiteness but thank you that's a really important dimension and of course gender is in there too wow thank you so much really fascinating actually we have two questions and colour well specifically the colour pink we have just last connection so give me one second to try to retrieve the questions right so the questions to Erica because it's about pink but also to feel free to chime in could you talk about the valency of pink in terms of gender and sexuality in post-colonial society Julian Forrester says that my understanding is that pink was regarded as a masculine colour until World War II but acquired associations with gay culture and effemency during the war notoriously in the Nazi death camps was the choice to use pink in post-war Nassau simply and as true of its most recently acquired connotations or did it have other valencies I think that depends very much on on the medium that you're talking about I mean if you're talking about architecture then pink has this long historical association with colonial architecture not just I mean I'm very ignorant about the kind of Spanish presence in that region but I'm sure that's also you know Spanish colonial architecture also has similar colour palette so I think you say in your work Kirstie that you can't attaching meanings to colour is really an enterprise that's fraught with danger but certainly what you can trace is sort of relays and circulations I think so there's a much longer colonial association I think when you're talking about architecture if you're talking about fashion it's different if you're talking about film it's different one of the things that I think was another point of connection between your work and mine Kirstie that I read from you you start off with maps which are in a red pink they can't be red because then you can't see the print as far as I understand but the red is of course the colour of empire but on the maps it appears as pink that was actually one of the things that made my mother as an Austrian child growing up in the rural Austria fascinated by empire because so much of the global map was pink you know so I think I think I don't know if that's a very adequate question but I do think the map is different from the building, the building is different from the frock, the frock is different from the advertisement so that's why I'm sort of trying to look at how I think probably what's going to happen as I develop this chapter is that I will be looking at spaces the beach is really important I think the pink beach and you know but I'm not quite sure how that will work I don't know if you have anything to add to that I have absolutely nothing to add about pink because you beautifully summarised it all and hello Jillian but I just wanted to sort of pick up on something you were talking about towards the end about the relationship between blue and pink which is so important that relationality the contingency of colour that there's something about its relationship to the blueness of the sky and the water that also makes it seem pink as kind of complementary colours so that pink will look radically different if it wasn't in the Bahamian sun so I just think there's also this kind of environment or kind of the question of the climate that produces the colour as well which is so interesting and the images that you use there especially the the sort of long one with the very big swathe of blue and pink just really kind of brought that out to me seeing that image that it's a question of kind of activation which again speaks to this question about kind of sensory environments and it's also so interesting for thinking about colour beyond you know Jillian raises these really important kind of associations that pink has had but thinking beyond that kind of colour symbolism of something being kind of activated by a particular climate and environment is such an interesting dimension to thinking about colour that's really important and I think the other thing to say about the Bahamas is the environment is blue and pink you know the sea the sky of tis of course heavenly the beaches are pink there are pink pigs on inaugural one of the one of the which are kind of tourist attraction there are flamingos on I can't remember which of the other islands all of these have also been are also part of the contemporary iconography of I suppose Bahamian national identity so the flamingo is a really really important figure so pink doesn't you know become something very different in different contexts but yes pink and blue absolutely perfect that's really interesting have one more question Mark thanks thanks for two great talks I just I've in relation to the overriding theme of the series about modes of art history and modes of writing I'd really love it if you could reflect a bit more on two both of you on different things in relation to things that were striking about your presentations one I guess obvious thing Eric is about your decision to use a family to talk about your family and about your own and to bring your own personal history into the kind of story you're telling and what your reflections on that and having done that in the process of doing that it would be very interesting to think about that in relation to voice and your voice and the voice of you as an author and then for you Kirsty I'm really interested in something that's very striking about your presentation is about and it's not this is not personal to you at all I think it's very common but about the way in which through constant name checking to those theorists and writers that have been important to you very much you know at one level almost speaking in footnotes constantly or bringing the footnotes into your main text and talking about the kind of community of scholars that you work within what does that do in relation to your how do you how does that shape or structure your own voice as a writer when you're so regularly and strikingly talking about other people's work in relation to your own yeah sure um so I think that's a big question thank you for the question um so I think one of the things that I'm interested in is someone who works across the disciplines of art history and film studies very much and you know I've previously spoken on panels at the PMC about the connection between these disciplines is how you make work legible to people from other disciplines right so very often I'm talking about film with film folks and I'm talking about painting with painting folks and printing with printing folks um so how do you make that work legible to people who aren't necessarily in your field and one of the ways of doing that is saying here's a scholar you're familiar with and care about and here's a way of using them to think through this object another is you know debt acknowledgement and particularly for thinking about an object like Jhansi Ki Rani which as I mentioned has this interesting history as a kind of Anglo Indian object so using other scholars who've both thought about the history of colonial filmmaking in Britain and Technicolor but also about archival issues in India as a way of approaching that object and what I do hope is that this allows this object not to be kind of fall into a media silo if that makes sense that I would hope that this material is of interest to people who work on print um by thinking about the object as a print and citing print scholars and drawing on the work of people who work on print so opening up ways of interpreting and speaking about objects um to people from beyond those kind of disciplinary media silos I suppose that's what I'd say um I'm far more interested to hear about Erica's challenges of biographical work well um it is challenging I do have an answer to why I chose to do this and it's because I've spent so many years not doing it and I think that's part of a whole silence oh you know that's I hate that discourse actually you know nobody's ever spoken about this before that's not what I'm saying but I do think that in the discussion that happens at the moment about um decolonization if that's what we're going to call it a lot of recourse is to earlier moments in the history of the British colonial presence what I know because I grew up with it is that many of the people who I've moved through my life with have very similar experiences which we don't talk about actually I've had many a conversation with white sort of lefty liberal intellectuals, academics over the years who said oh I don't really say this to people very often but you know I grew up in India or my parents were in Africa or and I was I think what energized this I knew that I was going to do this work um anyway but what sort of energized the book was a piece very short piece by Gary Young you'll all know him British sociologist ex-guardian journalist public intellectual who wrote a piece in the Guardian in 2016 or 17 the date is significant and he was talking about he was tracing some of the family histories of some of the figures who've supported um leave for example or leave EU or whatever and all of them had this family history a very recent family history so I think there's a notion that when when decolonization happened when there was a move to independence that somehow somehow people of my generation and later didn't have that entanglement but I think it is very deeply there um so that was the decision really was to try and speak about that as a history the history that has shaped me and my generation um finding a voice for it is incredibly difficult because I find I've read a lot of colonial life writing um and you know there's a way in a way I shouldn't be showing this photograph because there's a way you know it's very quickly it very quickly becomes an interesting tale of colonial adventure and I don't want it to be that so often my parents fade out of the picture and in fact when I go to Ghana um my mother will be displaced by somebody else um who I get my name from actually she was also called Erica um and so it's an intensely personal story um but it's a story where I try to I try to fade out these figures often and talk through them around them but also that's your question Shreya to try and work out you know the people they nearly met but wouldn't have met and I did for example in the Bahamas in interview one of the nurses who was trained by my mother which is an extraordinary experience um so I'm trying to work out sort of intersections so that I'm it's like making almost making my parents a kind of negative space and building the space around them but they are of course also there you know really avoid um thank you um we might have questions still and thoughts that are percolating around the room but um we're sort of getting to time and I think we have um a glass of wine next door so that would be a good moment to sort of say a big thank you to our speakers for today and then join them talk to them in person and keep the conversation