Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Topological Tropology Of V.S. Naipaul’S Islamic Travelogues And Daniel Pipes’ Islamic History: Ahistorical Historicism, Md. Habibullah

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s (1932-2018) first Islamic travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) contains his experience of a visit from August 1979 to February 1980 to the four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Similarly, his last Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) has a description of another visit to the same countries for five-month in 1995. Concurrently, Daniel Pipes (1949-), an American historian, published his doctoral dissertation, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981), which represents Islamic culture as the first instigator of …

#Emotional: Exploitation & Burnout In Creator Culture, Sarah Thorne

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In recent years, a growing list of content creators have published videos announcing that they are leaving YouTube, taking a break, or reducing their upload schedule (Alexander). Many of these young creators state that their decision resulted from burnout, caused by a relentless schedule and obsession with YouTube’s algorithm and analytics— tools essential to success on this highly competitive creative platform (Srnicek). Its opaque algorithm, however, induces anxiety; an affect described as that which “arises when the subject is confronted by the desire of the Other and does not know what object he is for that desire” (Evans 12). Here, …

Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis And The Digital Architecture Of Fascism, Anthony Faramelli, Imogen Piper

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Félix Guattari and Franco Berardi have both argued that media ecologies and psychic ecologies are intimately intertwined and as such, any exploration of the collective unconscious must engage with how the mind is formed with and through media. This understanding of networks of interdependence necessitates an exploration of how platformization has impacted users” collective psyche. Drawing from psychosocial theory, psychoanalysis and the work of Félix Guattari, this article analizes the micropolitics of desire of digital platforms, with an explicit focus on how algorithmic structures amplify extreme Right content, allowing fascisms to metastasis throughout digital spaces. It will first examine the …

Lacan And The Algorithm, Clint Burnham

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Exploring the development of algorithms in Lacanian theory, specifically the "R schema" in the 1950s, I argue that psychoanalysis, read through contemporary debates about the "algorithmic cult" of Netflix and other avatars of popular culture, can be said to reveal the inhuman, machinic essence of subjectivity. The etiology of algorithms, mathemes, and other formulae and diagrams in Lacan’s oeuvre has been under-studied, in part because for some readers they are not as attractive as his more bravura flourishes of word play as exegetical excess, and in part because they derive largely from the ‘hard’ structuralist moment of his work in …

“Since When Is Steve Urkel White?” – Vocal Blackface In The German Dubbing Landscape, Patrick Ploschnitzki

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Dubbed (i.e., lip-synchronized audiovisual translation of) movies and television are ubiquitous in German-speaking countries and often consumed without active reflection of their production. Due to this inattention, the domestication / replacement of cultural references in US media translated into German often goes unnoticed. Translational decision-making becomes highly problematic, however, when entire cultures are replaced or disregarded as a result. In 2004, applied linguist Robin Queen demonstrated that Black actors were dubbed by white voice actors with German dialects and sociolects traditionally read as “blue collar.” There has not been any follow-up research to her crucial contribution that remains topical: the …

Not Another Plant-Based Documentary: A Critical Review Of Eating Our Way To Extinction, Melissa Plisic

Animal Studies Journal

Despite mounting evidence that industrial animal agriculture is a formidable force of climate change and mass extinction, many humans remain impervious to this knowledge. Eating Our Way to Extinction is a timely documentary that takes this issue head on. This film review is guided by Alexandra Juhasz’s explanation of media praxis as ‘an enduring, mutual, and building tradition that theorizes and creates the necessary conditions for media to play an integral role in cultural and individual transformation’ (299). Eating Our Way to Extinction attends to some of the most popular strawman arguments against veganism and is widely accessible. That being …

Lia Brozgal. Absent The Archive. Liverpool Up, 2020., Aubrey Gabel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Lia Brozgal. Absent the Archive. Liverpool UP, 2020. 368 pp.

Cooling Down Transmedia Storytelling, Jan Baetens, Domingo Sánchez-Mesa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article we propose a reading of “Dead End Street”, one of the most successful songs of one of the most popular British pop groups of the 60s, The Kinks. However, we will not discuss the song as such, but its remediation as a music video (a practice that did not have to wait for MTV to make its appearance in mass media culture). The analysis will briefly contextualize the group, the song and the clip, but its major objective is to use the Kinks example to open a new question in the larger debate on intermediality and transmediality …

Nationless States And Stateless Beings: The Politics Of Identity And Citizenship In Claudio Mir’S Mondongo Scam And Cheech Marin’S Born In East L.A., Rebecca A. Barnes

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

In the colloquial sense of the term, the word citizen refers to an individual who belongs to a nation, either by birthright or by naturalization. Therefore, citizenship denotes a political and a social belonging, an ideological home, and, in most cases, a strong foundation for the development of one’s personal identity. However, since nations are inherently artificial structures, made only tangible in the present day by a few centuries of recorded history, a philosophical approach to the term citizen complicates this definition. Based off critics including Hannah Arendt, Homi Bhabha, Fernando Ortiz, and Jacques Derrida, this essay seeks to explore …

Greenpeace In Germany And The U.S.: A Case Study In Non-Profit Web Design, Maximilian J. Weirauch

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis draws on Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model, connects it to basic principles of web design, and applies it to a website analysis of the global non-profit organization Greenpeace. This case study of cultural dimensions in web design utilizes Hofstede’s framework from 1974 throughout all its chapters and focuses on the cultural differences between Germany and the U.S. My hypothesis that successful marketing materials such as websites must communicate differently with their U.S.-American and German audiences is partially borne out. But it is important to note that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model cannot fully account for certain intercultural dimensions of …

What Is "Speedrunning?" Industry, Community, Identity, Riley Scott Kelfer

Senior Scholar Papers

What drives interaction in online contexts? How do “internet communities” form, and how do they generate a sense of interpersonal closeness? I address such questions through a cultural analysis of video game “speedrunning,” an emergent online community that some commentators have noted for its remarkable commitment to compassion and mutual advancement. While several game scholars have explored the narrative and temporal implications of the live-streamed and recorded speedrun, few have directed their attention to the ways in which video game speedrunning, as a community of dedicated practitioners and spectators, is informed by historical precedents and contemporary social processes. I place …

Resisting Pacification: Locating Tension In G'Ebinyo Ogbowei's Poetry, Niyi Akingbe, Paul Ayodele Onanuga

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Nationalist Allegories In The Post-Human Era, Siqi Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

As China’s expansion of influence now takes up the spotlight of the world stage, Chinese science fiction, a relatively little known genre, reaches a global audience. In 2015, Liu Cixin received the Hugo Award for Best Novel for his trilogy The Three-Body Problem, as the first Asian science fiction writer to receive the Hugo Award. A year later, Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing was awarded the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. The recent world-wide recognition of Chinese science fiction begins with English translation, U.S. publication and promotion. The New York Times cited The Three-Body Problem as having helped popularize Chinese …

From Franz Kafka To Franz Kafka Award Winner, Yan Lianke: Biopolitics And The Human Dilemma Of Shenshizhuyi In Liven And Dream Of Ding Village, Melinda Pirazzoli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

To date, many studies have exhaustively explained how and why Yan Lianke deals with both the intimate relationship between disease and biopolitics and the relationship between utopia and dystopia. These are certainly the most important themes in Liven (2004) and Dream of Ding Village (2006). However, biopolitical discourses cannot fully account for the complexity, depth and humanity of these novels, which in addition to exploring the complex and protean meaning of life also represent shenshizhuyi, an expression coined by Yan Lianke to describe his human dilemma in representing the complex relationship between shen 神 (soul, spirit, mind and myths) …

The Inappropriate/D Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism, Teresa López-Pellisa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Teresa López-Pellisa’s article “The Inappropriate/d Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism” discusses a type of narration that goes beyond the feminist fantastic. These are fantastic texts permeated not only by a feminist discourse, but by intersectionality, transfeminism, ecofeminism, cyberfeminism, post-humanism, xenofeminism and/or necropolitics as well. Borrowing the term inappropriate/d others from Donna Haraway (The Promises of Monsters), who in turn takes it from the feminist theorist Trinh Minh-ha, we can analyze those fantastic stories that call into question the categories of gender, class, race and sexuality established by Western enlightened humanism. These types of non-mimetic narrations have …

Society Doesn’T Owe You Anything: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas & Video Games As Speculative Fiction, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, popular and scholarly commentators have been looking for speculative and/or dystopic literary works that might provide analogues for the Trump-era. Perhaps the most famous of these was the renewed popularity of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In this regard, though, video games remain an underexplored fictional form. With its exaggerated and parodic satire of an America ruled by the corruption and greed of extreme right-wing populism, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) offers a speculative fiction that players can enact as well as imagine and simulate as well as prepare. Thus, reading the …

Cheenama The Trail Maker: An Indian Idyll Of Old Ontario Indigenous Ethnographic Films Of The 20th Century, Sarah Charette

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

Ethnographic films of the early twentieth century, intended to document and reproduce the cultural practices, living conditions, and identities of Indigenous populations, were often rife with colonial assumptions, staged events, abnormal or uncommon practices, and the active silencing of Indigenous perspectives. Cheenama the Trailmaker: An Indian Idyll of Old Ontario, produced in 1935 by the Canadian Museum of History, attempts to recreate the day-to-day life of an Algonquin family in pre-contact North America.

Beginning with a comparative analysis of the film itself, this essay uses empirical evidence from the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan to paint a picture of the accuracy …

Rethinking The Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, And Space In The Cinematic Storytelling Of Arrival And The Shape Of Water, Edward Chamberlain

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Through comparing the Hollywood films Arrival and The Shape of Water, this article explicates the films’ similar portrayals of gender, social collaboration, and monstrosity. Although the mainstream media in the United States has linked the idea of the monstrous to larger global forces, the two films suggest that “the monster” exists much closer to home. Hence, this article makes the case that monstrosity occurs in a variety of formulations such as the actions of national authorities like governmental officials that oppress and endanger a myriad of American citizens as well as newcomers. Further, this article makes the case that …

Performing The Global: The Mediated Mobility Of Virtual Cosmopolitans, Hye Jean Chung

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines how contemporary media art and popular culture, vernacular cultural practices, and digital technologies express and actualize aspirations for global mobility. This task is propelled by the need to question the limited scope of how we envision globalization. Here I explore how people use forms of visual media to “perform the global” through mediated experiences of mobility. I propose the concept of “virtual cosmopolitans” to describe those who participate in the experience of global citizenship through their use of photography, film, and digital media. Although they do not have access to conventional forms of cosmopolitan mobility, these virtual …

Making The Global Visible: Charting The Uneven Development Of Global Monsters In Bong Joon-Ho’S Okja And Nacho Vigalondo’S Colossal, Ju Young Jin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her essay, “Making the Global Visible: Charting the Uneven Development of Global Monsters in Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal,” Ju Young Jin examines the entanglement of the global and the monstrous in two recent films that position Korea on the cusp between Cold War politics and global capitalism: Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal. The Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho and Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo offer viewers films that challenge conventional notions of monster by fusing it with a coming-of-age plot of the female protagonist that takes place on a global scale, which contests the …

"The Headwaters Of A River Of Failure": Detroit As An Icon Of American Decline, Jae H. Roe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay analyzes films (8 Mile, Gran Torino, It Follows) and television series (Hung, Low Winter Sun) that use the setting of Detroit to depict characters who are dealing with deteriorating socioeconomic conditions and whose choices and relationships reflect their difficulties in, and anxieties about, adjusting to such conditions. While the familiar icons of Detroit's decline appear in all of these texts, the narratives evolve from working class realism to satire and ultimately horror, or from anxieties about white working class displacement to the displacement of such anxieties. The history of Detroit illustrates the complex ways …

Monstrous Accumulation: Topographies Of Fear In An Era Of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The predominance of the horror genre, broadly conceived, in recent years attests to the profound sense of anxiety and dread permeating late capitalist societies. As the processes and effects of globalization become more viscerally experienced, they are also often rendered invisible or unknowable, and individuals and groups find themselves subject to an immense array of forces beyond their control. The contemporary scene is crowded with monsters, from alien invaders to the zombie apocalypse, set against the backdrop of darkly fantastic landscapes and dystopian visions. Drawing upon a variety of Marxist cultural theory, Robert T. Tally Jr. explores the topographies of …

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 …

Domestic Trauma And Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home In Charles Dickens’S Dombey And Son, Katherine E. Ostdiek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Domestic Trauma and Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son,” Katherine Ostdiek discusses Dickens’s representation of violence, grief, and recovery within the Victorian home as a pre-Freudian example of trauma. This comparison not only demonstrates the importance of trauma studies in the nineteenth-century, but more importantly, it thematically focuses empathy for the traumatized on the home. In this novel, Dickens dismisses topics related to the financial and social crises of mid-century Britain in favor of domestic themes that emphasize an idealized structure of the Victorian family. Through her use of trauma theory and …

Suffering And Climate Change Narratives, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Suffering and Climate Change Narratives" Simon C. Estok begins with a brief survey of definitional issues involved with the term “suffering” and argues that there has been a relative lack of theoretical attention to suffering in climate change narratives, whether literary or within mainstream media. Estok shows that suffering, far from being singular, is a multivalent concept that is gendered, classed, raced, and, perhaps above all, pliable. It has social functions. One of the primary reasons for the failure of climate change narratives to effect real changes, Estok argues, is that they often carry the functions of …

The Different Representation Of Suffering In The Two Versions Of The Vegetarian, Young-Hyun Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “The Different Representation of Suffering in the two versions of The Vegetarian” the author examines how different the representation of suffering in the original and translated versions of The Vegetarian and explores the reasons for this difference. The author in particular refers to representative episodes which the translator’s strategy distorts even the central concepts of suffering in the original work. Her translated version results in critical misrepresentation of suffering and violence in the original version.

Enduring The Long Take: Tsai Ming-Liang’S Stray Dogs And The Dialectical Image, Louis Lo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay attempts to show that Tsai’s Stray Dogs (2013) offers a social critique of Taipei as a neoliberal, global, consumer city, and by so doing establishes a cinema of contemplation through such cinematic devices as the sustained long-take and slow, virtually still cinematic images. By developing Walter Benjamin’s formulation of the dialectical image, this essay explores the extent to which Tsai’s cinematic aesthetics reveals an aspect of the city which cannot be shown otherwise. It argues that his slow cinema creates a potentially revolutionary awakening in an audience accustomed to an immersive mode of cinematic experience which turns the …

Retro-Future In Post-Soviet Dystopia, Sergey Toymentsev

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Retro-Future in Post-Soviet Dystopia” Sergey Toymentsev explores the vision of retrospective future in such Russian novels as Tatiana Tolstaya’s The Slynx, Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, and Dmitry Bykov’s Zhd. Unlike Zamyatin’s and Platonov’s anti-Soviet satires, post-Soviet dystopias do not respond to any utopian narrative, but project the historical and ideological reality of Russia’s violent (predominantly Soviet) past into the future. Such a traumatic reenactment of the Soviet past in the dystopian future testifies to the rise of authoritarianism in contemporary Russia as well as its incomplete collective memory …

Okonkwo’S Reincarnation: A Comparison Of Achebe’S Things Fall Apart And No Longer At Ease, Mary J. N. Okolie, Ginikachi C. Uzoma

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Abstract: The reincarnation myth is a global concept, founded basically in religion and tradition. It was especially vibrant in the ancient times in places like Egypt, Greece, and in continents like Asia and Africa, which possess varying understandings of the myth. In Igbo tradition, for example, it is believed that reincarnation occurs within a family. And that some of the marks of reincarnation are usually the possession of the birthmark or certain other physical features and the exhibition of character and behavioral traits of a deceased person by a living member of his/her immediate or extended family. Thus, reincarnation entails …

Art For Animals: Visual Culture And Animal Advocacy, 1870-1914 By J. Keri Cronin, Gina M. Granter

The Goose

Teview of J. Keri Cronin's Art for Animals: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy, 1870-1914