Nadine Chan is Assistant Professor in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She has published in Cinema Journal, Journal of Environmental Media, Periscope for Social Text, Studies in Documentary Film and the anthologies Theorizing Colonial Cinema and Screening Race in Nontheatrical Film. She is current book in progress is titled A Cinema Under the Palms: Colonial Worldmaking in an Unruly Medium.
In colonial British Malaya, mediatic thinking was contiguous with emergent conceptualizations of coloniality in dispersed geographies—imaginaries made possible by the peculiarities of the forested landscapes that they sought to govern. During the Malayan Emergency, a counterinsurgency war from 1948 to 1960 fought between the colonial British administration in Malaya and counter-imperial leftist forces, Malaya’s rainforests and its hinterlands were militarized through the building of communications media networks. Nontheatrical film screenings, mobile film units, and wireless radio were part of a material network of “enmeshed infrastructures” that included the building of new villages, military forts, electrical grids and other networks designed to entangle forest ecologies within expanding technologies of colonial statecraft. While the colonial government filled the air with wireless signals and lit up the night sky with film shows however, what they did not realize was that the forest was already part of other mediatic systems—environmental, Indigenous, and that of other possible Asias. From spirit mediums to root fungi, forests are their own mediatic infrastructures, with messaging systems, feedback loops, and networks of communication that enmesh the human, non-human, and elemental in polymorphic ways. Recent theoretical approaches in media environment studies (e.g. John Durham Peters, Jussi Parikka, Nicole Starosielski, Rafico Ruiz, Melody Jue) have called for expanded definitions of media and mediation beyond our 20th and 21st century understandings of technological communications media (e.g. film, television, Web 2.0, radio) to argue that environment—air, water, soil, and much more—are also media. As John Durham Peters reminds us, “Medium has always meant an element, environment, or vehicle in the middle of things.” My work locates the concept of “intermediality” at the intersection of colonial film/media and that of the forest itself as a mediatic environment. My field research in Indigenous and Chinese resettlement villages in Perak show how intermedial forests were subject to counter-colonial forms of engagement aligned with alternative ways of imagining Asia—a “pluriverse” of Many Asias amidst the infrastructural landscape of late coloniality.