Drawing Coastlines

Drawing Coastlines reveals the ways that technical images such as weather infographics, sea-level projections, and surveys are fast remaking Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures. They set in place infrastructural interventions, vocabularies of development and conservation, and their lines and dots inscribe material conditions of existence and horizons of loss that entangle life forms.

V. Chitra interlaces graphics and text by redrawing scientific images, the moments of their construction, the choices and consequences of what gets drawn and what does not, and how images are seen, performed, and manifest. These visual reconstructions show how images remake human-nonhuman relationships, arrange urban politics, and materialize landscapes in complex and contradictory ways. The multimodal format of Drawing Coastlines engages in the politics of its context where words and images combine to create coastal worlds, and to find, through a creative anthropology, openings to build new forms of care in the midst of crisis.

V. Chitra is an anthropologist and artist based at the Australian National University. Her work intersects environmental studies, science and technology studies, and visual studies.

Drawing Coastlines is ethnographically and theoretically deep, beautifully written and drawn. It constitutes a major intervention in several fields, including the anthropology of climate change and the Anthropocene, urban studies, visual anthropology, and South Asian studies.

Maura Finkelstein, Muhlenberg College:

Drawing Coastlines is absolutely brilliant, and its approach to theory, form, method, structure, and argument is innovative, imaginative, beautiful, and so smart.