Film and Media Studies Commons^™

The Evolution Of Palestinian Narrative: ‘Mo' As An Illustration, Ihsan Abualrob, Ayman Talal Yousef

An-Najah University Journal for Research - B (Humanities)

The article aims to explore the present-day challenges facing the Palestinian narrative. It delves into the ways in which the narrative has been shaped by historical events namely the Nakba, the Naksa, and the Oslo Accords, and how these events have left a lasting impact on the Palestinian identity. The article then examines the potential for the development of a new form of cultural resistance utilizing personal stories; as demonstrated by the Netflix show ‘Mo’. The show proffers a novel approach incorporating Palestinain political messages onto comedy and drama, and therefore has the potential to reach a wider audience. In …

Notes Toward A Personal Afrofuturism, Jalen T. Adams

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is penned by a young adult who is generally confused about a lot of things regarding life, but has one singular focus that is perhaps larger than life—trying to find the bridge between a future already lived, and a past yet to happen. These are his findings so far.

Afghan Refugees Engagement Journalism, Angrej Singh

Capstones

My community of focus is Afghan refugees who came to the U.S. after Aug. 15, 2021. Since mid-Aug. of 2021, nearly 76,000 Afghan refugees came to the U.S. after living across eight U.S. military bases for a few months — with the help of resettlement agencies — they have resettled to 48 states in which they are starting to rebuild their lives. During the uncertainty of their legal status, multiple Afghan led organizations have been calling on Congress to pass an Afghan Adjustment Act. This legislation would create a pathway for permanent status to the thousands that were granted entry …

“It's So Normal, And … Meaningful.” Playing With Narrative, Artifacts, And Cultural Difference In Florence, Dheepa Sundaram, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article considers how player interactions with religious and ethnic markers, create

a globalized game space in the mobile game Florence (2018). Florence is a multiaward-

winning interactive novella game with story-integrated minigames that weave

play experiences into the narrative. The game, in part, explores love, loss, and

rejuvenation as relatable experiences. Simultaneously, the game produces a unique

experience for each player, as they can refract the game narrative through their own

cultural, identitarian lens. The game assumes the shared cultural space of the player,

the player-character (PC), and the non-player-character (NPC) while blurring the

boundaries between each of these …

Culture In Disney Films: A Comparative Analysis Of Color, Composition And Rhythm, Megan Paul

Interior Design Undergraduate Honors Theses

As a student of design, I take inspiration from everything around me. The media I consume, the places I visit, and the people I meet.By choice or not, I and my generation are subject to the various forms of pop culture, film is one of them. Film is one of few art forms which combines several methods and elements of design to produce a cohesive result, as opposed to a singular medium. This forms the connection to design thinking and is the foundation for the study.

Another critical component to pop culture is the ability to reach the masses. Due …

Morkovcha [Korean Carrot Salad], Lidiya A. Kan

Theses and Dissertations

Morkovcha, Korean Carrot Salad is a short documentary that tells a story of ethnic Koreans from Russia and the post-Soviet territories making their new home in New York City. The history of the diaspora is told through conversations with my mother, personal stories, fragmented memories, and my family photo archive. This very personal film is my attempt to revisit the 160-year history of the Russian Korean diaspora and to record and preserve our unique fusion of cultures in the melting pot that is the United States. Its purpose is to help to process and accept the tragic past of my …

Mulan: An Exploration Of Culture And Representation In Hollywood, Annie Okuhara, Bernadine Cortina, Hung Le, Ryan Nakahara, Jerry Zou

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

'Mulan: An Exploration of Culture and Representation in Hollywood' is a presentation and detailed analysis of various representational, cultural, and minority-related issues in the context of Hollywood and western media. The presentation will focalize specifically around the recent live-action remake of the 1998 film "Mulan". The remake, premiered in March 2020, received critical backlash from various audiences (mostly from the BIPOC community), bashing the film for its misrepresentation of Ancient China and Ancient Chinese culture. Through this misrepresentation, the Hollywood film ultimately reflects views of cultural appropriation, misogyny, and overall minority underrepresentation in the United States. The research presents the …

Introduction To The Monstrous Global: The Effects Of Globalization On Cultures, Ju Young Jin, Jae Roe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This special issue on “The Monstrous Global: The Effects of Globalization on Cultures” explores representations of the monstrous effects and products of globalization. The monstrous (as in The Monstrous Feminine by Barbara Creed) in this sense alludes to the ways in which local or national displays of fear and anxiety about the Other are embedded in struggles and tensions of global scale; the inability to cognitively map the effect of such global forces on local/national problems produces monstrous representations of the global. Global forces such as neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism, technology, climate change, migration and displacement lead to accelerating instability …

Religion And Culture In Inherit The Wind, Zachary Sheldon

Journal of Religion & Film

Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind (1960) has long been considered a classic for its indictment of McCarthyism as allegorized in a dramatic treatment of the Scopes Monkey Trial. But for all its political messaging, the film is also patently up front in its treatment of religious perspectives on culture. The presence of such material may be read allegorically but may also be read in connection with the period of the film’s production, as a statement piece on religious perspectives of media such as film. This article examines the religious messaging in Inherit the Wind in conjunction with religious perspectives of …

The Portrayal Of Income Inequality As Represented In American And Spanish Film, Chloe Riggs

Political Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this thesis, I will examine the portrayal of wealth in film. Further, I argue that the portrayal of wealth in film has the power to shape the public’s perceptions of income inequality, even going so far as to later impact their actions towards both their own and differing economic classes (Kendall 2011; Kenworthy 2007). With a film’s ability to portray wealth, stressing the importance of an individual’s position on the hierarchal economic ladder, the individual is led to view both success and failure as a personal matter, the latter with a scornful gaze. This belief is then naturally cycled …

Albert Camus' Social, Cultural And Political Migrations, Benaouda Lebdai Pr

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Albert Camus’ social, cultural and political migrations,” Benaouda LEBDAI analyses Albert Camus’ posthumous autofiction The First man, a fascinating self-representation and self -telling. Found after his deadly car accident, the manuscript adds a tragic dimension to the disguised autobiography. This paper demonstrates Camus’ capacity to migrate from one world to another, looks into the reasons behind such attitudes and stresses the significance of an outstanding life account within the on-going debate between France and Algeria about his political stands during colonial Algeria. His vision of the indigenous people, the Algerians, and of the future of colonial Algeria, …

Chinese Government’S Inability To Use Film – One Of The Most Powerful Cultural Tools Of Soft Power Expansion – To Achieve Its Soft Power Expansion Goals: Lessons For China To Tackle Its Soft Power-Deficit Problem, Kyungin Kim

International Political Economy Theses

Many scholars of Chinese soft power commonly believe that despite the fact that China has been working hard to achieve successful soft power expansion, one of the biggest factors that leads to Chinese soft power deficit or failure of the Chinese government to effectively trump “China threat” is its inability to use its cultural industries as a tool to fulfill its soft power expansion goals. This is a major obstacle to China in achieving its goal of successful Chinese soft power expansion, as it is said that culture is the most traditional and powerful source of soft power expansion. This …

East Asian "China Doll" Or "Dragon Lady"?, Joey Lee

Bridges: An Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Connections

This paper argues that the representation of East Asian women in popular media is harmful through its exaggerated portrayal of the ‘China Doll’, and ‘Dragon Lady’, ultimately further exoticizing and dehumanizing East Asian women, ensuring the dominance of the West. I will study these portrayals and their impacts through historical and modern film, modern magazines, and intersectional oppression that the restrictive categorizations place upon women of East Asian descent.

A Reason To Daydream, Corinne Schipull

Honors Theses

Sexism in American culture comes as no surprise. In 2017, the film industry saw an increasing number of powerful men within its ranks exposed and exiled for allegations of sexually predatory behavior. Many see this purging as a sign of changing times, but this view is optimistic: the tides of change ebb in and out, and this problem far exceeds the movie industry. Well before the onslaught of articles on the likes of Harvey Weinstein, my classmates and I resolved to craft our senior thesis film with a crew made up entirely of women: we simply saw the pool of …

Throwing Our Voices: Ventriloquism As New Media Activism, Amber Day

English and Cultural Studies Journal Articles

In the fall of 2010, Chevron released an ad campaign designed to respond to consumer worries about the conduct of oil companies. Each ad depicted “customers” voicing rather nonspecific concerns about oil companies, answered by the “We Agree” slogan and information about something positive the company is doing in particular communities. Just before the campaign’s official roll-out, the anti-corporate activist group known as the Yes Men produced a series of sophisticated parody ads that spoke in more detail about the damage the company has done in specific countries. Designed to be mistaken for the real, the dummy campaign was distributed …

I Am An Author: Performing Authorship In Literary Culture, Justin R. Greene

Theses and Dissertations

Authorship is not merely an act of putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard; it is a social identity performance that includes the use of multiple media. Authors must be hyper- visible to cut through the dearth of information, entertainment options, and personae vying for attention in our supersaturated media environment. As they enter the literary world, writers consciously create characters and narratives around themselves, and through the consistent and believable enactment of these features, authors are born. In this dissertation, I analyze the performance of authorship in U.S. literary culture through an interdisciplinary framework. My work pulls from …

Man/Boy., Nick Hartman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Verisimilitude, or the appearance of being true, is a concept I turn upside down; relating it to a guise I wear as a contemporary male in a society dictated by learned social behavior and gender norms. Cultural iconography and expected gender norms are tropes I confront within my artwork. Drawings of seemingly everyday objects act as meditations or a fetishized repetition of supposed unobtainable objects and ideals that deal with masculine societal norms. Manliness, machismo, masculinity… it is all a culturally learned and expected pose placed on all men. Coming to the realization that I do not necessarily fit …

Animals In Irish Literature And Culture Edited By Kathryn Kirkpatrick And Borbála Faragó, Geneviève Pigeon

The Goose

Review of Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Borbála Faragó's Animals in Irish Literature and Culture.

Mutual Aesthetics, Joseph D. Sherry

Honors Projects

At first glance, it may seem surprising that I’ve paired Murnau and Ford. Murnau is considered a modernist whose style is rooted in Germany’s stylistic heritage and is best remembered for films noted for their artful aestheticism and technical innovation. Ford, on the other hand, is recognized as a classicist, best remembered today for his mastery of Hollywood narrative filmmaking, in particular the genre of the western, a position crystallized in his famous self-description: “My name’s John Ford. I make Westerns.” Yet despite their diametrically opposed positions on the relationship of film to art, both directors were noted for their …

Film Tourism And Expectation: Using The Hallyu Wave To Model How Governments And Media Exports Influence National Image, Aishat O. Bello

Undergraduate Research Posters

Film tourism encompasses the interest, investment and influence that exported media products can contribute to cultural globalization, and subsequent visitation of a nation. The Korean Wave or Hallyu wave has been studied and commended for its rapid spread and growing popularity within Asia and more recently, on a more global scale. By comparing and contrasting the methods used by the Korean government to enhance Hallyu, with several trade deals made by the US government to support Hollywood, we can see how the effects of film tourism were directed towards modifying perspectives on Korean culture. A few consequences of making trade …

Towards Digital Art In Information Society, Montse Arbelo, Joseba Franco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Towards Digital Art in Information Society" Montse Arbelo and Joseba Franco propose the development of the platform of a Network of Experimental Centers be formed by small groups of people who are qualified and who seek optimal operational effectiveness and who dedicate their resources to the production of digital content and we offer artechmedia <http://www.artechmedia.org> as a base point of departure. Such an international network in a collaborative structure based on national networks would make possible to coordinate existing resources to develop social networks, generate and promote content, engage in forums of discussion and creativity workshops, and …

Satire And Dissent: A Theoretical Overview, Amber Day

English and Cultural Studies Journal Articles

In an age when Jon Stewart tops lists of most-trusted newscasters and Michael Moore becomes a focus of political campaign analysis, the satiric register has attained renewed and urgent prominence in political discourse. Day focuses on three central contemporary forms: the parodic news show, the satiric documentary, and ironic activism. She highlights their shared objective of circumventing the standard conduits of political information and the highly stage-managed nature of current political discourse. In so doing, she argues, they provide fans with a sense of community and purpose notably lacking from organized politics in the twenty-first century.

Live From New York, It's The Fake News! Saturday Night Live And The (Non)Politics Of Parody, Amber Day, Ethan Thompson

English and Cultural Studies Journal Articles

Though Saturday Night Live's “Weekend Update” has become one of the most iconic of fake news programs, it is remarkably unfocused on either satiric critique or parody of particular news conventions. Instead, the segment has been shaped by a series of hosts who made a name for themselves by developing distinctive comic personalities. In contrast to more politically invested contemporary programs, the genre of fake news on Saturday Night Live has been largely emptied to serve the needs of the larger show, maintaining its status as just topical, hip, and unthreatening enough to attract celebrities and politicians, as well …

Mr. Stewart And Mr. Colbert Go To Washington: Television Satirists Outside The Box, Amber Day, Jeffrey P. Jones, Geoffrey Baym

English and Cultural Studies Journal Articles

The political satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are largely celebrated for their nightly television programs, which use humor to offer useful political information, provide important forums for deliberation and debate, and serve as sites for alternative interpretations of political reality. Yet, when the two satirists more directly intervene in the field of politics—which they increasingly do—they are often met by a chorus of criticism that suggests they have improperly crossed normative boundaries. This article explores Stewart and Colbert’s “out of the box” political performances, which include, among others, the 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity, Colbert’s testimony before Congress in …