Absent fathers and 'moms', delinquent daughters and mummy's boys: Envisioning the postwar American family in Hitchcock's Notorious

Abstract

This article analyses Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946 USA), paying particular attention to the film's deployment of the figures of the 'absent father' and the 'mom'. The article examines the intertextual relationships that connect these representational figures in the film to a range of other sites within the contemporary culture where anxieties concerning these figures were articulated. The article thus presents a contextualized reading of the film that connects the film to some of the key discourses of its moment and, through this reading, argues for the necessity for film scholars to consider the impact of extrinsic historical influences in shaping the narrative concerns of Hollywood films, and for a shift away from the traditional taxonomic conception of genre toward a more fluid conception that allows genres of discourse to be traced through unlikely groupings of films and other contemporary cultural artefacts.     

Martial arts and the globalization of US and Asian film industries

Abstract

This article investigates how globalization is affecting film industries in the USA and Asia. It argues that these industries are becoming more closely integrated with one another both materially and aesthetically, and that this in turn is leading to the denationalization of individual films and film industries on both sides of the Pacific. The article explores how globalization is experienced differently by different film industries – and by different sectors within individual industries – and how it entails both losses and opportunities for Asian film makers. Taking the contemporary Hollywood and East Asian martial arts film as an exemplary cultural style of globalization, it also looks at how integration involves both cultural homogenization and the production of difference. Specific topics discussed include the growth of Hollywood's Asian markets, Jackie Chan and the flow of Hong Kong talent into Hollywood, Hollywood remakes of South Korean movies, the resurgence of Asian film industries, Hollywood's local-language film production and Zhang Yimou's Hero.     

History,Politics, and the Cartography of Sexed Bodies in Iurii Illienko’s A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa

Abstract

This article explores the “corporeal” dimension of Iurii Illienko’s reconstruction of cultural and historical discourses in the 2002 film Molytva za het'mana Mazepu [A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa], which focuses on the hetman’s drama, his relationship with Peter I, and the defeat of Swedish and Ukrainian joint forces at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 that signified Ukraine’s submergence into a supranational, imperial community. Illienko’s cinematic space, in which plots of history and sexual politics are mapped onto one another, allows for conceptualizing the body as a site of political and cultural construction, contestation, and radical resistance. Demanding an intertextual approach that involves an open exchange between his cinematic domain and a “universe” of intersecting historical, cultural, ideological and political discourses, his multilayered re-memoration strategies expose both the fictionality and the political dogma surrounding the inherited mythologies. As a decentred reflection of the past, the film poses critical questions about competing histories and the dynamics of historical agency in colonial and postcolonial contexts, thus making a contribution to the protracted process of decolonization in Ukraine.     

Fanon on Decolonization and Revolution: Bodies and Dialectics

This article sets up a conversation with Frantz Fanon about his stretching of dialectics. Against a backdrop where multiple dominant epistemologies of political theory and international relations presume and are shaped by a segregation of the world into anarchy and the desire for an ordered global, Fanon's reading of imperialism's effects in the Wretched of the Earth is of utmost relevance. First, Fanon's work allows us to think dialectics along with ‘globality’ and to confronting dominant presumptions about a Manichean world: anarchy, order, and ‘bodies.’ He focuses on colonization and the White–Black relation and the radical dehumanization of the Other (Black, colonial slave, non-European, etc.). Second, his engagement of colonial violence pushes him to stretch dialectics, reactivating the ‘partially neutralized antagonisms.’ In addition, Fanon wants to think revolutionary practice as a kind of internationalism which will reunite into its own humanness in an open-ended-way—a world where no human being will be subject to dehumanization. I conclude with some ideas on what a revolutionary thinking about a revolutionary subjectivity, movement and thought entails for revolutionary struggles and dialectics today.     

'The look of hope or the look of sadness': Robert Frank's dialogical vision

Abstract

This article examines the work of Robert Frank with reference to his seminal photographic work, The Americans, and its relationships to his later post-1970s images. It argues that the 'outside eye' he brought to the US post-war consensus offered him a new comparative critical position and represented a fundamental, counter-cultural shift in the tradition of documentary photography. This vision formed around Frank's multiple 'dialogues', with the US social landscape, with earlier traditions of documentary and 'street' photography in Europe and the USA, and with the Beat generation's radical challenges to dominant post-war values. This 'moment' of overlapping and interconnected relations forms the basis for this discussion of Frank's importance as a 'political' commentator whose work has influenced generations of photographers and shares much with those writers who emerged as the Beats.     

'Europe' within and without Narratives of American cultural belonging in and through My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)

Abstract

This article examines My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), a Hollywood romantic comedy in which Greek-Americanness features for the first time. Three tropes are debated that are linked to American social and national self-narration: the first is concerned with the assertion of Greek difference within American identity. The second examines the WASP cultural norm which is simultaneously valorized and contested. The third trope, which comprises a strategy of idealization of American identity, purifies American self-narration of its contestable aspects and represses cultural insecurities. The article draws mainly on American responses to the film, in order to understand how cinematic narratives are debated by the audience. It will be argued that the film reproduces a dilemma central to American cultural self-narration. This dilemma is concerned with American self-recognition as 'pure', European, ethnic and multiform, all at the same time.     

Truth,lies, and racial consequences in Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Abstract

This article examines Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published novel True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir, by relating the author's vision of the role of Africa in the literary imagination to issues the novel raises for postcolonial cultural and historical criticism. Analyzing the novel's narrative, which draws upon Hemingway's second safari to Kenya in 1953–4, offers insight into Hemingway's 'African American' consciousness, and the new awareness that he was able substantively to arrive at for the first time in this novel, less than 10 years before his death. This awareness inaugurated what might be called a fictional reverse migration, whereby Hemingway reconnects with the black native perspective on Africa that he encountered on his first safari in 1933–4, in order to acquire material insight into what blacks were experiencing in America at the time of his second safari. Identifying this awareness also leads to the possibility of (re)reading Hemingway's racial perspective in his earlier works with African settings.     

Zinovy Zinik's Narratives of Cultural Dislocation

Abstract

The study examines Zinik's use of translation, theatre and misreading as metaphors for the act of border crossing in his novels and short stories. Through close readings of Zinik's novels The Lord and the Gamekeeper, The Mushroom Picker and The Russian Service, it is demonstrated that Zinik integrates these themes into his work with intent to expose novelistic conventions, confuse the boundary between art and life, and blur the roles of the author, reader and literary protagonist. Zinik's invitations to the reader to enter the worlds of his texts and experience cultural dislocation firsthand are continued in his recent short stories, which reflect the social changes and fluid cultural boundaries associated with globalisation. It is argued that, at the same time, Zinik's work reveals the limitations of conventional binary oppositions such as actor/audience and the utopian claims behind translation, interpretation and globalisation. Thus, it asserts the need to affirm new cultural symbols and practices through which individuals will shape transcultural identities as visions of a homogeneous global culture become more prevalent.     

Moses and nation-building Zora Neale Hurston's Moses,Man of the Mountain and Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European

Abstract

This article examines the significance of the representation of Moses as an Egyptian in Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain and Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European. Pairing Hurston and Said continues Said's project of seeing authors 'contrapuntally', so exposing imperialism as a neglected, if submerged, context for Hurston's response to nationalism in Moses. I argue that Hurston's novel cannot be read as a straightforward critique of race-based nationalism. Although Moses is of a different ethnic group to the Hebrews he leads, Hurston's portrayal of his rule is haunted by imperialism, in which one ethnic group exploits another. In this sense, Moses, Man of the Mountain bears the signs and strains of her struggle against racialist thinking.     

Proust's butterfly James McNeill Whistler and painterly writing in In Search of Lost Time

Abstract

This article examines the influence of Whistler's art on Proust and the role it plays in Proust's analysis of involuntary memory in In Search of Lost Time. Whistler (a near anagram of Proust's 'Elstir'), alongside Monet and Paul César Helleu, is generally credited with making up the composite figure of Elstir, the painter who takes his place as one of the central characters in Proust's novel and plays a pivotal role in linking the experiences of Proust's youthful narrator, Marcel, with those of the older Swann, and of reconciling the cultural shift in emphasis from portraits painted in studios to the en plein air style of the Impressionists. Whistler's, though, is an influence that runs deeper than historical or biographical contingency. Whistler, too, saw memory rather than direct observation as central to the creative act; and in the way in which his increasingly strictly pictorial art dramatizes the act of looking, he provides a parallel to Proust's concern with how memory, through the rhetoric of metaphor, is transformed into art.     

'Traveling Barbies' and rolling blackouts Images of mobility in Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding

Abstract

This article proposes to read Mira Nair's film Monsoon Wedding through a critical framework provided by transnational anthropology. Such a framework suggests that approaches celebrating transnational mobility must be balanced against nationally specific forms of constraint. It is argued that Monsoon Wedding bears out precisely such a balance. Nair's film suggests that the mobility of human lives may not be quite as unfettered as that of cultural commodities. Moreover, the filmic narrative insists on a differentiation within the Indian diasporic community. Similarly, some theorists of transnationalism have cautioned that the concept of a 'diasporic community' may serve to obfuscate class distinctions. At the same time, Nair's film is read in conjunction with theories of commodity circulation. Through the image of the 'traveling Barbie', this article explores the ways in which US cultural commodities may be indigenized, while also suggesting that Indians at 'home' may hardly benefit from such indigenization. Rather, Non-Resident Indians may travel from the US to India to buy a token of their own 'Americanness' in Delhi.     

Transgressive Sexualities: Politics of Pleasure and Desire in Kamasutra: A Tale of Love and Fire

Utilizing feminist film theory, critical reviews, and viewer responses, this article examines visual representations of transgressive sexuality in two diasporic Indian women's films: Kamasutra: A Tale of Love by Mira Nair, and Fire by Deepa Mehta. The article draws from research on ancient discourses on sexuality in India to argue that contemporary constructions of women's sexuality in South Asia are not devoid of patriarchal and fundamentalist cultural politics of representation.     

A Cesspool of Intrigue: Les' Kurbas,Oleksandr Dovzhenko,and the Film Industry in 1920s Soviet Ukraine

Abstract

In the 1920s, theatre innovator Oleksandr “Les'” Kurbas (1887–1937) made three short films for the Vseukrains'ke Foto-Kino Upravlinnia [All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration] or VUFKU. His film career was short-lived, however. Lambasting the VUFKU as a “cesspool of intrigue,” Kurbas left film for good to focus exclusively on theatre. His films never gained wide release, and have since been lost. Kurbas’s brief foray into cinema could therefore be considered a non-moment, yet because Kurbas objected not to the medium itself, but to the institutions creating film, his encounter with the VUFKU illuminates the larger process of the formation of the Soviet film industry. Kurbas’s departure from film occurred simultaneously with the arrival of Oleksandr Dovzhenko (1894–1956), and their crossed paths show how the structure of the Soviet film industry shaped artistic possibilities. The institutional transformation of VUFKU into Ukrainfilm, the regional affiliate of the all-Union film monopoly Soiuzkino, signalled a cultural shift: from a film industry in Soviet Ukraine, to a Soviet Ukrainian film industry, one both part of wider Soviet cinema production and slotted specifically into a Ukrainian niche. Ultimately, this article argues that this process of consolidation and centralization in the film industry complicated the development of culture in the Soviet regions.     

Accommodating strangers: British hospitality and the asylum hotel debate

This article examines the accommodation of asylum seekers through Jacques Derrida's ethical writings on hospitality, generosity and parasitism. The differing hospitable spaces of the asylum and the hotel, and of the strange figures of the asylum seeker and the tourist, are discussed with reference to these discourses of “giving” and “taking”, paralleling Derrida's opposition between unconditional hospitality and hospitality‐as‐economy. This “new racism” towards asylum seekers is thus located within the economic sphere, as asylum control is linked to the welfare state and to fears of strangers' parasiting the host nation. However, I argue that it is the nation‐state that parasites asylum seekers both through their defining difference and their contribution to service economies. Ultimately then the asylum hotel does exist, as Stephen Frears' film, Dirty Pretty Things (2002), illustrates.     

Introduction to critical perspectives and emerging models of inter-American studies

Abstract

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) has been the subject of much critical attention, but the original story upon which it was based and its author, Cornell Woolrich, less so. This article examines ‘Rear Window’ (1942) in the context of Woolrich’s writing and his life more broadly, in order to reveal the privileged role of fenestral imagery in his work. Through a process which starts with surveillance through glass, and a creative interpretation of ‘real’ events consumed in terms strikingly similar to mass media entertainments, Woolrich’s marginalized protagonist assumes the role of the detective and, in doing so, his identity is enhanced. The Woolrichian window reifies abstract social boundaries. It serves, simultaneously, as a symbol of urban alienation and a fantasy of social integration. It also becomes a trope of consumption and popular culture. Hitchcock’s film has sometimes been praised for the self-conscious way in which it aligns the image of the window with the cinema screen in order to implicate viewers in the protagonist’s voyeuristic practice. This article extends such an analysis to Woolrich’s story, but also takes it a step further, to reveal the ways in which reading similarly might be regarded as a voyeuristic form of cultural consumption.     

Patriarchy and incest in William Faulkner's 'Absalom! Absalom!' and Juan Rulfo's 'Pedro Páramo'

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of patriarchy and incest in the work of William Faulkner and Juan Rulfo. Focusing primarily on Absalom! Absalom! and Pedro Páramo, I argue that Rulfo adopts and, at the same time, interrogates Faulkner's patriarchal model of the family: the incestuous relationships that characterize Absalom! Absalom! reappear, under different disguises, in the Mexican writer's novel. My analysis also suggests that both Faulkner and Rulfo were intrigued by the symbolic implications of incest, and exploited these implications in order to talk about the collapse of the patriarchal and cultural order in the post-Civil War South and early 20th century Mexico respectively. The conclusion maintains that, despite Rulfo's reluctance to acknowledge Faulkner's impact on his artistic consciousness, the intertextual dialogue between the two writers should be read both as a form of incest, and as a quest for a new social structure.     

Talks and disputes of racism in Colombia after multiculturalism*

ABSTRACT

This article examines the terms that shape the notion of ethnic group for black communities. This notion allows one to understand the singularity of Colombia’s turn to multiculturalism in the 1990s, and how it has impacted the political and theoretical imaginations of cultural otherness. I will argue that this shift to multiculturalism has not meant the disappearance of the talks and disputes of racism and the beginning of a kind of ‘post-racial’ social formation. On the contrary, old and new forms of talk and disputes of racism could be traced after this shift to multiculturalism, not only in relation to the dense legislation for the recognition of black communities as ethnic groups, but also in regard to other realms such as social media, activist struggles and academic paradigms.     

Horace Cayton: Reflections on an unfulfilled sociological career

This article examines the abbreviated sociological career of Horace Cayton, the co-author of Black Metropolis and one of the most talented young black sociologists in the 1930s-1940s. In seeking to explain why Cayton failed to continue his promising sociological career, this article focuses on: his feelings of racial alienation; his inability to locate a theoretical paradigm in mainstream sociology through which he could express his anger about American racism; the narrow range of job opportunities open to blacks in sociology; his desire to become a novelist and, thereby, attain the intellectual freedom not afforded by mainstream sociology to protest American race relations; and, finally, his failure to comprehend the psychological perils of assimilation. He is presently doing research on the role of activist churches in Kenyan politics, attitudes toward skin color among African Americans and Africans, and normative accommodations of deviant survival strategies in Kenyan cities.     

Detecting Two-Spirit erotics: The fiction of Carole laFavor

ABSTRACT

This article examines the life and novels of Carole laFavor, arguing for her importance to and influence in Two-Spirit studies. Along with being a writer, laFavor was a powerful voice for social justice and Indigenous health sovereignty in Minnesota and the nation. Her two novels, Along the Journey River and Evil Dead Center, which both focus on Anishinaabe lesbian detective protagonist Renee LaRoche, are the first lesbian detective fiction published by a Native author. Renee's embrace of a specifically Two-Spirit erotics anchors her to family and brings her tribal community a powerful healing when she employs her skills to protect her people from instances of racism, abuse, and injustice. This article, then, reads these novels as the first of an emerging genre of texts that claim an overtly Two-Spirit erotic as well as vital precursors to the present embrace of sovereign erotics in Indigenous studies.     

Response to Miccio-Fonseca (2015) and Defeo (2015) Concerning Commentary About DSM-5 Sexual Disorders Section

ABSTRACT

Responses by Miccio-Fonseca (2015) and DeFeo (2015) to a commentary by Ross on problems with the sexual disorders sections of DSM-5 are based on a misunderstanding of Ross’s article (2015a). Miccio-Fonseca and DeFeo describe what they consider to be confusion and misunderstanding in Ross’s opinions about gender, sexuality, and related topics. However, Ross offered no personal opinions in his commentary and was focused solely on inconsistencies and contradictions within DSM-III, DSM-IV, and DSM-5.