CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Visual Art and Ethnicity: Lessons from
Methodologies
Organiser: Sara Eigen
Eigen, Sara (Vanderbilt University,
United States) SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATION AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INVENTION OF
"RACE"
This paper investigates the use of portraits and illustrations by natural
scientists who contributed to the establishment of a scientific theory of race
at the end of the eighteenth century. Specifically, it examines critical
instances in which the use of portraits functioned not to illustrate and confirm
visible racial difference, but rather to discourage the transfer of such
perceived difference from the realm of scientific description into the realm of
social signification.
Sojka, Eugenia (University of Silesia,
Poland) ETHNICIZATION AND RACIALIZATION IN CANADIAN VISUAL ARTS DISCOURSES
The paper focuses on the examination of selected Canadian visual arts projects
that show the process of racialization and ethnicization as one of negative
forces shaping the image of Canada. The analysis reveals how visual arts
discourses have been constructed on ethnicized racialized foundations and
aesthetics, how literary and cultural critics shaped research through ethnicized
and racialized frames of enquiry and analysis, how historically and
institutionally the arts benefited from the institution of colonialism, how
methodologies of various disciplines perpetuate the ethnicization
andracialization of knowledges, how Canada's history of conflict and negotiation
between indigenous, French, English, and immigrant cultural groups inflect the
relationship between the concepts of ethnicity, race, and nation.
Neethling, Bertie (University of the
Western Cape, South Africa) CROSSING THE DIVIDE: INTERCULTURAL PERFORMANCES IN
SOUTH AFRICA
Through the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, multilingual and multicultural
South Africa is still a deeply divided country. One of the biggest challenges
that lie ahead is to forge a sense of unity amongst all its people, a sense of
South Africanness. The basic viewpoint of Robert Young (Intercultural
Communication 1996) is subscribed to : one must make a wager on hope that common
ground be found while preserving genuine difference and diversity. The focus in
this contribution will be on attempts within the performing arts to work across
cultural boundaries and thereby enhancing communication across cultures. The
central theoretical problem of intercultural communication, is how to facilitate
understanding amongst cultures without one culture surrendering its integrity to
the other. I argue that collaboration in the performing arts creates a new
intercultural space that succeeds in doing just that. In the long run these
projects will play an important role in normalizing South African society at all
levels.
Dayal, Samir (Bentley College, USA) THE
NEW COSMOPOLITANISM AND IMMIGRANT IDENTITIES IN FILM
In contemporary cultural criticism there is growing call for a new
cosmopolitanism to challenge a narrowly national frame of American Studies. Can
there be a new cosmopolitanism that is not from the outset stigmatized as a
bourgeois or elite perspective--or worse? How do we speak of a cosmopolitanism
that does not privilege Euro American modernity, that is to say, a modernity
privileging only the axis of European and American cultural representations of
progress and achievement? For the sake of limiting the scope of my analysis, in
this paper I will briefly consider developments in theories of cosmopolitanism.
I will also compare films set in England and North America (all representing
South Asian subjects in the context of multicultural European or North American
society), to suggest ways that hegemonic "Euro American" aesthetic and
existential ideas are challenged in theoretical and creative works. There is a
range of theoretical work, for example in Diaspora studies, that argues by way
of a kind of "immanent critique," for an expansion of American and
European studies into a transnational frame. My paper offers a brief overview of
some developments in theories of cosmopolitanism to contextualize my suggestion
that films representing immigrant subjects have made it possible for immigrants
to Britain and North America (for instance) to imagine other ways of being than
what has been scripted for them already in the discourse of Western civil
society, and the films I consider here are fascinating illustrations of this
emergent phenomenon. If we are to take such a new cosmopolitanism seriously, a
prerequisite must be that this it does not forget to be sensitive to effects of
globalization across class divides and ethnic and gender lines. Although arguing
for a transnational perspective, such a cosmopolitanism must be alert to the
fact that it is not only national borders that are transgressed: any account of
the new cosmopolitanism must be alert to the social and cultural border
crossings that occur within the existing boundaries of the nation-state (whether
it be in North America or in Britain).
Seipel, Julia (Carl von
Ossietzky-University Oldenburg, Germany) RE-PRESENTING AND RE-CONSTRUCTING
GENDERED ETHNIC IDENTITY IN AUSTRALIAN FILMS FROM THE 1990S
Since the end of the 1980s migration and the every day life of 'ethnic'
Australians became seriously treated subjects (in the word's double meaning) of
films made in Australia. These films are believed to be even more 'authentic'
when filmmakers who are defined by their ethnicity - i.e. not being from an
Anglo-Celtic background, make them. Even though this can be seen as success of
the official policy of multiculturalism there remains the question to what
extend these 'legitimate' representations encourage the consolidation of
ethnicity as social and cultural category as well as means of differentiation
and discrimination. Using some films from the 1990s as examples I am going to
discuss correlations between the cultural categories of gender and ethnicity and
how representations of ethnic female characters can be used to establish limits
for an ethnic group within a multicultural society.
Tranchini, Elina (University of La
Plata, Argentina) WHEN THE SLAVE SHIP TRANSNATIONALIZES ITS SELF-DESTRUCTION:
PARADOXES OF AMERICAN CINEMA IN THE REPRESENTATION OF BLACK ETHNICITY
Currently, there is a lack of studies about the possibility of visual and film
representation of social theoretical categories. What formal and esthetical
approaches did the U.S. cinema use to construct a narrative model about black
ethnicity? Stigma images and a prototypical rhetoric were globalized by cinema
and television, or recycled by a cinema captured by a desperate search of black
self-affirmation (Spike Lee). In the opposite view, the very criticized La
Amistad by Steven Spielberg, avoids and dissolves the characteristics binaries
of colonialist political logic, focusing on the construction of U.S. black
ethnicity as the large-scale plantation slavery hegemonic strategy to delete and
devastate colonized African and African American subjectivities. This film
represents black ethnicity as the embodiment of a forbidden historicity, and it
situates the fight against racism out of the no way out circle of ethnic
identity, in constitutive full flow of a multiplicity of discursive public
spheres.
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