fortune and glory

This project examines the presence of Sri Lanka’s plantation histories in film in the context of ethnonationalist violence and global forms of labor exploitation and white supremacy. It explores how Sri Lanka's plantations feature in and alongside the production of Hollywood films—Jaws of the Jungle (1934), The Planter’s Wife (or Outpost in Malaya) (1952), Elephant Walk (1954), Tarzan the Ape Man (1981), and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). Using evidence from the films’ catalogues, archival data, visual analysis, and ethnographic and oral history interviews, I explore how each of these films rely on Sri Lanka's plantation ecologies and systems of knowledge production but also, enduring tropes of paternalism, Otherness, and agro-industrial innovation. The objective of this project is to center the speculative afterlives of the Ceylon tea plantation—afterlives that complicate the plantation's historically dominant logics and account for more expansive re-visionings of dissent and labor justice.