In God’s Land: Cinematic Affect, Animation and the Perceptual Dilemmas of Slow Violence

Authors

Salma Monani, Gettysburg CollegeFollow

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2016

Department 1

Environmental Studies

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that Indian independent filmmaker Pankaj Rishi Kumar's documentary In God’s Land (2012) blends animation and live-action to illuminate the destructive nuances of postcolonial literary scholar, Rob Nixon's notion of slow violence. In turning to cinema, I also suggest that In God’s Land’s “aesthetic strategies” further eco-film scholarship’s recent interests in animation, which have tended to highlight the mode's "feel good affect." I draw attention to In God's Land's hybrid of dark, discordant animation spectacle interspliced in the documentary live-action to articulate the potential of eco-animation outside of this affect. Ultimately, the film not only draws attention to animation’s non-playful affect—its potentials and dilemmas, but I also suggest that reading such a film adds postcolonial understandings of cinema beyond the Western/Japanese center on with eco-animation scholars have so far focused.

Comments

Original version available from the publisher at: http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137562234

Copyright Note

This is the author's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.

Recommended Citation

Monani, Salma. "In God's Land: Cinematic Affect, Animation, and the Perceptual Dilemmas of Slow Violence." Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays. Rayson K. Alex and S. Susan Deborah, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. pp. 11-31.