[csaa-forum] Globalization and Culture: Two Public Lectures

Fri Apr 27 13:41:23 CST 2007

Dear Friends,
The Global Cities Institute and the School of Applied
Communication at RMIT are pleased to present back-to-back lectures by Brenda
Weber (Makeover Nation: Constructing the Neo-liberal Citizen) and
Professor Gregory A Waller (Japan-in-America: The Turn of the Twentieth
Century). Full details are enclosed below.
This event is coming up very soon (May 7). Please pass this email 
onto students and colleagues.
Cheers
Deb

Two Public Lectures on Globalization and Culture (free)

Venue: Village Roadshow Theatrette, State Library of Victoria (Entry 
3, La Trobe Street)
Date: Monday May 7
Time:
Makeover Nation: 5.15pm
Japan-in-America: 6.15pm

1. Makeover Nation: Constructing the Neo-Liberal 'American' Citizen

Across the makeover genre, there is a language of exclusion and
inclusion that works to reinforce the gendered and sexed logics of
citizenship.  'Belonging' is the most ardent goal of makeover subjects,
and good looks are the primary means by which one enters into, and has
power within, the democratic fold.  To have self-esteem, happiness, and
confidence, what these shows take as a form of necessary precursors to
personhood, also functions as the gateway to democratic citizenry.  At
the crux of this analysis are the gendered and sexed connotations of
citizenship, including a pervading logic of neo-liberalism that situates
care of the self as an entrepreneurial investment.

Brenda R. Weber is an assistant professor of gender studies at Indiana
University.  She has published recent articles in Feminist Studies,
Genders, Configurations, and The International Journal of Men's Health.
Her current book projects are:  Figuring Fame:  Women, Gender, and the
Body in the Transatlantic Production of Literary Celebrity; and Into the
Makeover Maze:  Before and After Bodies and the (Ill)Logics of Makeover
TV.

2. Japan-in-America: The Turn of the Twentieth Century

Except for the World War II years, at no time has the United States'
interest in Japan been greater than between 1890-1914, a period that
included the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5), the Russo-Japanese War
(1904-5), and the Japanese annexation of Korea, as well as the active
expansion of American imperialism, California-led campaigns directed
against Japanese immigrants, and a wave of war scares that saw the
Pacific as the site for an inevitable East-West confrontation. The
racialized and gendered versions of Japan available in the United States
extended well beyond Madame Butterfly (as book, play, opera, film) and
bushido-inspired samurai. Japan was singled out as the most progressive
and westernized of Asian nations because of its battlefield prowess,
rapid modernization, patriotic nationalism, and geopolitical
aspirations, yet it was also represented as exotic and archaic, natural
and rural, empty of all traces of modernity.  Japan-in-America: The Turn
of the Twentieth Century gathers, organizes, and examines the vast and
sometimes contradictory array of images, stories, performances, and
accounts of Japan that publicly circulated in the United States between
1890-1914 across a host of media and cultural channels.  What interests
me in this project are not snapshots, private memoirs, high modernist
literature, or Japonisme in the fine arts, but instead ephemeral
products designed for the commercial marketplace: postcards, sheet
music, magazine, stereoviews, moving pictures, lantern slides, editorial
cartoons, children's books, photojournalism, travel narratives, and
advertisements. What can we make of this archive as a historically
specific example of cross-cultural representation?

Gregory A. Waller is Professor and Chair of the Department of
Communication and Culture at Indiana University (Bloomington, Indiana,
USA).  He has written on New Zealand cinema and popular American film
genres, and his publications on American film history include Moviegoing
in America and Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial
Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896-1900, which won the Katherine
Singer Kovacs Award from the Society for Cinema Studies and the Theatre
Library Association award. In addition to Japan-in-America: The Turn of
the Twentieth Century (http://www.indiana.edu/~jia1915/), he is
currently working on traveling film exhibition, non-theatrical cinema,
and the role of 16mm in the 1930s and 1940s.
-- 

Deb Verhoeven
Associate Professor of Screen Studies
_______________________________________________

t: School Research Coordinator &
    Manager, AFI Research Collection
    School of Applied Communication
    RMIT University
p: + 613 9925 2908
e: deb.verhoeven at rmit.edu.au

Film Critic
The Deep End, Radio National

AFI Research Collection
www.afiresearch.rmit.edu.au

Archive Forum
www.afiresearch.rmit.edu.au/archiveforum

Sheep and the Australian Cinema (MUP, 2006)
www.mup.unimelb.edu.au/ebooks/0-522-85240-8/index.html

_______________________________________________

-- 

Deb Verhoeven
Associate Professor of Screen Studies
_______________________________________________

t: School Research Coordinator &
    Manager, AFI Research Collection
    School of Applied Communication
    RMIT University
p: + 613 9925 2908
e: deb.verhoeven at rmit.edu.au

Film Critic
The Deep End, Radio National

AFI Research Collection
www.afiresearch.rmit.edu.au

Archive Forum
www.afiresearch.rmit.edu.au/archiveforum

Sheep and the Australian Cinema (MUP, 2006)
www.mup.unimelb.edu.au/ebooks/0-522-85240-8/index.html

_______________________________________________
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