Shaoling Ma_"Data, Models, and Cinema in the Rural Differentiation of the Mekong River Basin"

Cold War infrastructural planning of the Mekong River Basin generated volumes of data, computational models, and audio-visual media around hydropower projects, of which many were eventually unbuilt. This legacy helps to diagram the multiplying convergences and divergences that heuristically define our knowledge of science and technology, political economy, the environment, agrarian relations, and culture. From the Shell Film Unit’s industrial-educational film, Mekong (1964) to the Mekong Delta Mathematical Model (1961) and the Isan Film Collective’s fictionalized documentary Tongpan (1977), I show how models and cinema’s formal qualities aid in and are shaped by their mutual historical content, namely, the transformative, material relations between technocrats, engineers, and skilled and unskilled workers; urban and rural inhabitants; and natural and man-made environments. This talk excerpts from my larger book project that examines the computation of rural, environmental transformations in East and Southeast Asia between the late 1950s to the 2010s.

Shaoling Ma is associate professor of Asian Studies at Cornell University working on East and Southeast Asian media cultures and histories, and critical theory. She is the author of The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 (Duke UP, 2021), and several articles related to media studies and computational environments in Verge, positions, Comparative Literature Studies, and Critical Inquiry. Her current book project studies how computational data processing aiding East and Southeast Asian capitalist accumulation and state rationalization transformed rural lives and environments from the late 1950s to the contemporary period.