Wednesday seminar: Between Colonisation and Encounter: Cinema, Mission, and Exhibition

This seminar is part of the Wednesday seminar series this autumn, where we explore ways of sharing. Here you can learn more about the series and discover upcoming seminars!

During the seminar, Nadi Tofighian will present his research on the colonial history of Southeast Asia through the emergence of cinema.

– I argue that cinema functioned both as a colonising technology that disseminated Eurocentric worldviews and as a new visual language capable of destabilising ethnic and cultural boundaries. I focus particularly on early movie houses as liminal public spaces where coloniser and colonised met, even as these encounters were sometimes structured by racially differentiated seating arrangements. I will also introduce my forthcoming project, “The Camera in the Service of the Mission”: Film and Swedish Missionaries in Colonial Congo, and discuss possible artistic outputs emerging from the research.

The project investigates how film and other media practices shaped and legitimised missionary activities, how these materials circulated and were exhibited in both Sweden and Congo, and how missionary filmmaking influenced Swedish perceptions of Africa.

Host: Petra Bauer

Nadi Tofighian is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the Department of Film and Literature at Linnaeus University. He is also teaching film history and film theory at Stockholm University of the Arts. He has previously been a lecturer at Stockholm University, De La Salle University Manila, and a postdoctoral research fellow at Yale University. His research is concerned with early cinema, colonial history, and film historiography primarily in Southeast Asia, and most recently with Nordic colonialism and missionary media.