Complex Considerations (Asynchronous - Online Only)
Chinese Road Movies: Constructing Mobility as a New National Character View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jie Lu
This is a study of Chinese road films which emerged at the beginning of twentieth-first century, a period corresponding with significant infrastructural transformation hallmarked by the development of the national highway system and wide ownership of cars. These situations produced a new context of mobility in both spatial and, symbolically, social terms. As a generic hybrid genre, Chinese road films use geographical and cultural displacements as a means to engage in multiple subjects such social and cultural critiques, identity, self-transformation, and home-returning. Like the highway system that connects all peripheral and border regions into a unified national landscape/space, road films remap those remote villages, mid-western and western regions, and mountainous areas into a national story of modernity and unified space of diversities, and film those local folks to represent authentic Chinese experiences. While focusing on individuals on the move, these films map out social mobility in geographic terms; the roads then become a site to construct mobility as a new and dynamic Chinese identity and social/cultural phenomenon. However, as a popular genre that emphasizes entertainment values, these films’ critical cutting edge is often blunted by their eventual confirmation of the mainstream cultural values, ironically leaving some marginalized groups, particularly women, still marginalized, thus reconfirming the road films as a gendered genre.
Flirting with the Just Despot: Reem Bassiouney’s Mamluks Trilogy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hala Ghoneim
In 1899 Muhammad Abdu (1849-1905), who is considered by many to be a pioneer of religious renewal and reform, proposed that the advancement of the East can only be achieved at the hands of a “just despot,” who “imposes his views on the masses by force if they do not choose the pursuit of happiness by their own free will” (‘Abdu 1899, 54–55). The idea of the “just despot,” oxymoronic and undemocratic as it is, has started to gain ground among secular elites in after the January 25, 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Fearing that the post-revolutionary democratic process may facilitate the establishment of an Iran-style religious fascism, Egyptian intelligentsia supported the 2012 uprisings, which ultimately reinstalled the very military dictatorship the January Revolution had ousted. A military dictatorship that maintains stability appeared to be an attractive alternative to religious fascism that targets literature and art. After all, it is more favorable to secularism, or so at least it seemed to the Egyptian intelligentsia at the time. This paper interrogates the concept of the “just despot” and critiques one attempt to embrace and justify it. A close reading of Reem Bassiouney’s historical fiction Mamluks Trilogy (2018) deconstructs the proposition that a “just despot” may be the answer to old and new problems. The concept is especially detrimental to women.
Is Jim Halpert Looking at Me?: The Jim Halpert Gaze and the Insurgent Enlightenment of the American Sitcom View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cooper Casale
It’s entirely possible to watch all nine seasons of The Office without asking the obvious: Is Jim Halpert Looking at Me? The gaze hardly ever breaks the shell of our attention. The covert character of The Jim Halpert Gaze is in many ways the model of neo-liberalism itself. It’s covert, uniform, efficient, and repeatable. It’s a performance of constant, welcomed intrusion, which theatre abstracts into intentional technique: a break in the fourth wall. Something of a practical joke, the break in the fourth wall alerts the audience to the fact that both the actors and the audience are always playing socially determined roles. In The Office, however, that joke isn’t funny anymore. The fetish character of the Jim Halpert Gaze emerges. Jim Halpert is one of us; we are one of him. We care about Jim; he cares about us. We are, by the sentimentality of the American sitcom, reminded of our devotion to brotherhood, to family. By abolishing the individual and reinstalling it as an accident of a much larger phenomenological type—mankind, society, Christianity etc.—the liberal order mutilates interpersonal relationships into universal patterns of exchange. Jim’s gaze becomes a repeated intrusive thought. It repeats its solemn command and instructs us thus: the well-adjusted enlightened subject must become utterly resigned to revile those around it; to dismiss the naïve exertions of others as stupid and embarrassing; to find success in the image of the pitiless scientist, the capitalist boss, and the fascist father.
Cultural Studies in Higher Education: Assessments, Learning Outcomes, and Scope View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rishab Manocha
When teaching students from diverse backgrounds, believe it or not, I am still asked, ‘what is cultural studies?’, ‘is it important?’, ‘what will we learn?’ This is my second year in taking up this Merged Module with students from Mumbai, Jaipur and Delhi Campuses. In this paper I respond to Teaching, Learning and Assessment observations that I have made, by proposing areas that can be improvised for better student engagement and outcomes. The paper is divided into three major divisions. The first one is concerned with the reasons for an interest in culture in the first place: why does it become an object of critical study? In answering this question I approach cultural studies as a particular segment within a wider field of study in the Four Year Fashion Design Program. Further I investigate its positioning to preceding and succeeding Modules, Learning Outcomes, Graduate Profile, and finally National and International Employability. The second and third divisions link the Module with selected Conceptual Frameworks, the former being Biggs ‘Constructive Alignment’ and the latter being ‘Self-Regulated Learning’ within which I also refer to Vygotsky’s ‘Scaffolding Theory’. Cultural studies now exists within a wider field of academic study and investigation and which has taken multi-faceted forms with inter-disciplinary subjects. My research questions come from a larger, often academic concern about the content, delivery, duration and assessment methodology.
The Importance of Art Festivals and Exhibitions in Soviet Public Life During Perestroika: The Art Holiday - Narva 88 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ketevan Tsetskhladze
The purpose of my research is to discuss the role and importance of Art Festivals and Exhibitions in Soviet Public life during Perestroika period, which was an important time for post-Soviet countries. In general, the social-political events which occurred in the 1980s touched all aspects of living, including cultural life. Non-official art was exhibited in private flats, studios and in open public spaces; however, it appeared in state museums and exhibition halls very rarely even in times of perestroika. After the non-official art emerged from the “closed” local context and was presented in international exhibitions it became visible to the general public. The existence of non-official art in daily life propagated the allowance of “different” and indicated the possibilities of the transformation of the existing system. In my study, I focus on one of the most interesting and important events held in Narva, Estonia in 1988. The avant-garde art festival was organized by N. Ziterova, in which avant-garde artists from the former USSR republics of Georgia, Belarus, Estonia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia and others took part. Research is based on documentation which is kept in the Narva art museum and private archives and has never been profoundly researched before by scholars.
