Moving Pictures Under the Palms: Cinema in the Colonial Tropics (Sensing Media: Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Cultures of Media)

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 with