Voices After Disaster

This document is an output from the “Voices After Disaster: narratives and representation following the Kerala floods of August 2018” project supported by the University of East Anglia (UEA)’s GCRF QR funds. The project is carried out by researchers at UEA, the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, and Canalpy, Kerala. In this briefing, we provide an overview of some of the emerging narratives of recovery in Kerala and discuss their significance for post-disaster recovery policy and practice. A key part of the work was a review of reported recovery activities by government and NGOs, as well as accounts and reports of the disaster and subsequent activities in the media and other information sources. This was complemented by fieldwork on the ground in two districts, in which the teams conducted a total of 105 interviews and group discussions with a range of community members and other local stakeholders. We worked in Alleppey district, in the low-lying Kuttanad region, where extreme accumulation of floodwaters had been far in excess of the normal seasonal levels, and in Wayanad district, in the Western Ghats, where there had been a concentration of severe flash floods and landslides.

Narrating Disaster

This chapter charts the evolution of published disaster narratives through the first four decades of the eighteenth century, exploring connections between disaster stories, maritime trade, and an emerging culture of sensibility. It focuses particularly on shipwrecks, which exposed both people and property to unusual levels of vulnerability and risk on a fairly regular basis. For that reason, and also because ships’ captains were crucial sources of information for printers, shipwreck stories were the most common early disaster narratives. Although newspapers initially printed only perfunctory reports of specific incidents, by the 1730s they increasingly published human-interest stories about victims of shipwrecks and other catastrophes. Some versions of these stories—especially those told by the clergy—continued to interpret calamity as divine judgment, but narratives published in newspapers were overwhelmingly secular and more descriptive than explanatory. Like novels, these disaster stories served to engage readers’ emotions to evoke benevolence not repentance, sympathy not horror.

The imagination of eco-disaster: Post-disaster rebuilding in Asian cinema

Commercial films today often reduce representations of natural catastrophes to commodified spectacles that de-contextualize the subject matter. To contemporary film viewers, the ‘psychic numbing’ effect is apparent, and it does not apply merely to our perception of numbers, statistics, the big data. It can also be seen when we are bombarded with similar kinds of images over and over again; in this case, the large-scale tsunami, the hurricanes, the earthquake and all the exaggerated destruction scenes in recent disaster movies have become clichés no matter how realistic and intense the shots are made. By focusing on a range of eco-disaster films, this article highlights the importance of cultural sensitivity in the study of eco-disaster films, by exploring several questions: how are eco-disasters culturally shaped and defined, via cinematic means? How are human responses to disasters, as reflected in cinematic representations, shaped by specific sociopolitical, cultural or economic conditions? How does cinema as a media form represent ecological concepts that are shared globally or universally, while at the same time reflecting specific cultural characteristics? Juxtaposing examples from China, Thailand and the Phillippines, particularly with three films: Wonderful Town (Thailand, 2007), Aftershock (China, 2010) and Taklub (Phillippines, 2015), this article demonstrates how Asian eco-disaster films in the Anthropocene epoch reflect specific cultural imaginations of nation and identity rebuilding, which in turn provide a ground to reposition, redefine and reinvent the changing cultural identities in contemporary Asia. Eventually, it argues that eco-disaster narratives in Asia reflect the identity crisis of Asian nations in a global capitalist world, just as much as they are about ecological crises.