World Issues Forum Winter 2019
Location
Fairhaven Auditorium
(FA 300)
World Issues Forum Winter 2019
|
Wed 1/16 from 4:00 PM to 5:20 PM  South Korean films have historically adhered to a stringent form of nationalism in their depiction of the colonial past. Consequently, the figure the pro-Japanese collaborator has long been portrayed as the villain who incites collective rage and righteous punishment. A series of recent films, however, takes viewers into a different orbit of comprehension where the psychological depth and complexity of collaborators receive attention. By reading such image both as a sign of experimentation in film narration and as a new marker for postcolonial visuality, this presentation strives to illuminate an evolving area of innovation in contemporary South Korean cinema. Jinsoo An is associate professor at Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultures of UC Berkeley. An completed a doctoral degree at Dept. of Film and TV of UCLA and subsequently taught at Hongik University in Korea before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2012. His recent book, "Parameters of Disavowal" reassesses South Korea's cinematic rendition of the colonial past as a particular type of knowledge production integral to the historic-cultural logic of the Cold War system. |
|
Wed 1/30 from 4:00 PM to 5:20 PM 
“What is a body when it’s lost? In this performance, Mexican poet Sara Uribe and her U.S. translator, poet John Pluecker, will reflect on language, the body, writing, and translation at this time in history. They will read poems from their book Antígona González about one person’s missing body in Tamaulipas, Mexico.”
Born in 1978 in Querétaro, Sara Uribe has lived in Tamaulipas since 1996. She graduated with an undergraduate degree in Philosophy; she received the Carmen Alardín Regional Poetry Prize in 2004, the Tijuana National Poetry Prize in 2005 and the Clemente López Trujillo Poetry Prize in 2005. She has been a grantee of the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (2006-2007) and of the Programa de Estímulos a la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico (2010 & 2013). She has published Lo que no imaginas (2005), Palabras más palabras menos (2006), Nunca quise detener el tiempo (2008), Goliat (2009) and Siam (2012). Her poems have appeared in periodicals and anthologies in Mexico, Peru, Spain, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.
John Pluecker is a writer, interpreter, translator and co-founder of the language justice and literary experimentation collaborative Antena. His work is informed by experimental poetics, radical aesthetics and cross-border cultural production. His texts have appeared in journals in the U.S. and Mexico, including The Volta, Mandorla, Aufgabe, eleven eleven, Third Text, Animal Shelter, HTMLGiant and Fence. He has translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Antígona González (Les Figues Press, Forthcoming), Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border (Duke University Press, 2012) and Feminism: Transmissions and Retransmissions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). His most recent chapbooks are Killing Current (Mouthfeel Press, 2012), Ioyaiene (Fresh Arts, 2014) and An Accompanying Text (She Works Flexible, 2015). His book of poetry and image, Ford Over, is forthcoming in 2016 from Noemi Press. |
|
Wed 2/6 from 4:00 PM to 5:20 PM  As cameras, drones, and mobile devices capture the spectacle of humans migrating en masse, despite insurmountable obstructions, the pictures and recordings that circulate, in real time or later, produce consequences. This lecture will review the role of cultural producers, including artists and journalists, in the production of meaning during refugee migrations and situations of forced detention. Whether making us face an infinite ethical demand, as Levinas described, or making visible and audible the way hostile state policies are experienced in the everyday (Schreiber; Herd and Pincus), a look at how migration is pictured and heard is an ethical inquiry. Lois Klassen is an artist, writer, and researcher based in Vancouver, Canada. In art and texts she has considered the nature of participation and representation. In 2018 she successfully defended the doctoral dissertation, Ethics and Participation in Art: Reading the Migration Library and other methods (Cultural Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada). Klassen holds a Master of Applied Art (Visual Art) from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Besides being a volunteer career mentor for newcomer-Canadians, and an enthusiastic participant in Vancouver’s various art scenes, Klassen serves as the coordinator of the Emily Carr University Research Ethics Board. |
|
Wed 2/20 from 4:00 PM to 5:25 PM  In a globalizing India, the male body has become a signifier of India’s self-confidence on the world stage. Hindu nationalism and a nationalist triumphalism linked to an assertive global middle class form the material context of this signification. Muscular nationalism, defined in my works as an intersection of armed masculinity with the political doctrine of nationalism, enables a theoretical frame to analyze this version of an imagined India. This talk will draw on Bollywood film, which is an important vehicle for disseminating dominant imaginings of nation in India, to demonstrate the popular circulation of this interpretation of nation. Sikata Banerjee is Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her work focuses on gender and nationalism in India. She is the author of Warriors in Politics: Hinduism, Nationalism, Violence, and the Shiv Sena in India (Westview 2000); Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India (SUNY 2005); Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Violence, and Empire in Ireland (NYU 2012); and Globalizing Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Nation and Popular Film in India (Routledge 2016). |
|
Wed 2/27 from 4:00 PM to 5:20 PM  This talk will connect the dots between climate change, the displacement of people, and hardening, militarized borders proliferating across the globe. Todd Miller will report from the flashpoints of climate clashes, chronicling militarized divisions between rich and poor, the environmentally secure and those most exposed. For the past fifteen years Todd Miller has researched, written about, and worked on immigration and border issues from both sides of the U.S. Mexico divide for organizations such as BorderLinks, Witness for Peace, and NACLA. He did the brunt of this work in Tucson, Arizona and Oaxaca, Mexico, with stints in New York City sprinkled in. Between Tucson and the Buffalo/Niagara Falls region of New York state where he grew up, he has spent the majority of his life close to the U.S. international boundary, south and north. He is the author of Border Patrol Nation (City Lights, 2014), his writings about the border have appeared in the New York Times, TomDispatch, Mother Jones, The Nation, Al Jazeera English, and Salon among other places. |
|
Wed 3/6 from 4:00 PM to 5:20 PM  In the 1969s and 1970s politically engaged filmmakers from around the world created documentaries about the Palestinian revolution, including Jean-Luc Godard and Masao Adachi whose works have received considerable critical attention since they first appeared. Less well known are the works of Palestinian and other Arab filmmakers of that time who were committed to making films within the Palestinian revolution. This presentation describes some of their works and their relationship to the more famous Palestinian works of European and Japanese filmmakers. Nadia Yaqub (PhD University of California, Berkeley, 1999), is professor of Arabic language and culture in the department of Asian studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research addresses film, gender, and literature from the Arab world. She is the author of Pens Swords and the Springs of Art: The Oral Poetry Dueling of Weddings in the Galilee (Brill 2006) and Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (University of Texas Press 2018). She also coedited Bad Girls of the World (University of Texas Press 2017) with Rula Quawas. |