Beyond the Politics of Identity
A postgraduate conference hosted by the Department of Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen on 19/20th June 2009
The positing of one's identity has become a renewed concern in our world today with its rapidly shifting geopolitical and social boundaries. The anchoring of the self to a specific place and time is key to creating social formations. It is this anchoring of the self within a social fabric which drives not only film practitioners but also the academic study of film and visual culture.
It is no coincidence that film and visual media studies have been inextricably linked to questions of identification and subjectivity. Ever since its institutionalization as an academic discipline in the early 1970s, it has ascribed to the notion that all media interpellates us as subjects. The image dictates its own form of recognition, its own perceptions of identity, and identifying the politics that are involved in that process has become a major concern in academic discourse, not just within the study of visual culture but postcolonial, gender and cultural studies as well. In this context, the politics of identity may be defined not just as the active advancement of the interests of previously marginalized identities but also as the ways in which visual culture creates and manipulates (both at a conscious and a sub-conscious level) images of identity for consumption by the general public.
If non-commercial cinema of the 1960s and 1970s was overtly political and concerned with stylistic representations of cultural and political change, current considerations are propelled by new technologies resulting in the democratization of filmmaking and the ever-increasing recognition that both social and individual identities are unfixed and multiple. Academic critiques of the politics of onscreen identity are accordingly focusing upon contemplation and self-reflexivity, to the point of questioning the very nature of the discourses and frameworks that lie at the nexus of identity and media studies: Why, in our current age of cultural sophistication, does the visual perpetuation of national/ethnic/gender stereotypes persist? What constitutes an 'authentic' representation of identity, given the individual's ability to hold multiple identities simultaneously? The academic community is not longer satisfied with solely engaging with images of identity; instead, it is the tensions of recurring patterns and the representation of multiplicity, history, memory and subjective perspectives which are of concern.
The Department of Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen is hosting a one-day postgraduate conference entitled Beyond the Politics Of Identity. Interdisciplinary in approach, the conference invites papers that address the concept of identity and the politics of identity at both theoretical and applied levels. Themes include, but are not limited to the following:
- Identity as a concept in changing cultures
- The paradox of constructing national identity in the era of a global media
- New media and the democratization of technologies
- The ethics of representation
- Temporal identities and the media as object
- Identity and the construction of spectatorship
- Redefining history: new representations of the past as determined by the self or others.
The key note speaker is Professor Michael Renov (University of Southern California). A prominent film theorist who works on documentary film, Prof. Renov's research interests include documentary theory, autobiography in film and video, video art and activism and representations of the Holocaust. He is the author of Hollywood's Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology and The Subject of Documentary. He edited Theorizing Documentary, a seminal work in the thinking about documentary, and co-edited Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices and Collecting Visible Evidence.
Programme:
Friday 19 June 2009 – Old Senate Room (Elphinstone)
16.00-17:00 Registration
17:00-17:30 Welcome reception
17:30-18:30 Screening: Tongues Untied (Riggs, 1990)
Saturday 20 June 2009 – James Scotland Suite (MacRobert 028)
09:00-09:50 Registration
09:50-10:00 Opening
10:00-11:00 "Civil Rights on the Screen" – Prof. Michael Renov (USC)
11:00-11:20 Coffee
11.20-12:40 1st panel (3 speakers/2 parallel sessions) MacRobert 303&304
12:40-13:50 Lunch (MacRobert)
13:50-15:30 2nd panel (3 speakers/2 parallel sessions) MacRobert 303&304
15:30-15:50 Coffee
15:50-17:30 3rd panel (3 speakers/2 parallel sessions) MacRobert 303&304
17:30-18:00 Last Word - Alan Paterson
19:30- Dinner for Delegates at The Square, Aberdeen
Please note that dinner is optional and not included in the conference fee.
Panels 1: 11:20-12:40
1.A The Individual and Technology – Chair, Dr Kriss Ravetto (MacRobert MR303)
Margot Buchanan, ‘Spectatorship in the New Media Age: Susan Boyle and her Facebook fans’
Heather Morgan, ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’
Tom Smith, ‘Jonas Mekas: Identity on the Internet’
1.B Identity Production – Chair, Dr Alan Marcus (MacRobert MR304)
Antje Bednarak, ‘”Hug a Tory”: Young Tories and Image Creation’
Elizabeth Rader, ‘Unmasking El Güegüence’
Francesca Franco, ‘New Media, Politics and the 1968 Venice Biennale’
Panels 2: 13:50-15:30
2.A Relatively Still Images – Chair, Dr Simon Ward (MacRobert MR303)
Rachele Ceccarelli, ‘Inconsistent Evidence: Willie Doherty’s Images of Northern Ireland’
Emma Grey, ‘Ritualised Re-enactment: The Construction of Identity in the Work of Victor Sloan’
Katherine Tubb, ‘Only when your self is invisible may you be as you are’: the Self-Portraits of Marta Astfalck-Vietz
2.B Emerging Cinemas – Chair, Dr. Kriss Ravetto (MacRobert MR304)
Jacob Patterson-Stein, ‘The Brazilian Metics of Terra Estrangeira’
Nadine Robinson, ‘Indigenising Western Art Forms: Pacific Island Identity and Oceanic Film’
Atit Pongpanit, ‘Be Gay This Way and/or Die: Gendered/Sexual Identies and the Construction of Spectatorship in Thai Cinema’
Natthanai Prasannam, ‘Rediscovering National Glory and History: Counter-Discourse and Politics of Thai Identity in The Siam Renaissance (2004)’
Panels 3: 15:50-17:30
3.A Popular cinema – Chair, Dr Nikolaj Lübecker (MacRobert MR303)
Peter Deakin, ‘Representations of Male Identity in Crisis in Modern Hollywood’
Keith Brown, ‘The Politics of Identity in Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’
Alan Dodd, ‘The War of the “Roses”: Kate Winslet, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the National Identity of the Female Star’
Irene Zavarsky, ‘”Bring Me that Horizon’’ – “Freedom” in Contradiction to Female Identities?’
3.B (Self-)Consciousness – Chair, Dr Alan Marcus (MacRobert MR304)
Tianqi Yu, ‘The Power of Staging Identity in Autoethnographic Filmmaking’
Johannes Sjöberg, ‘“Ethnofiction” and the Politics of Brazilian Transgender Identity’
Imogen Roberts, ‘Reconstructing Difference through an “I”’
Jill Moriarty, ‘I’m Not There: The Multiplicity of Identity and the American Consciousness’
For information about public transport in Scotland the journey planner will help you plan bus trips within Aberdeen as well.
Campus maps, including Hillhead and Old Aberdeen where the MacRobert Building and Elphinstone Hall are situated.
The deadline for abstract submission has now closed. If you would like to attend the conference as a non-presenting delegate please go to ON-LINE REGISTRATION. For more information, please contact cgovaert@abdn.ac.uk.
Beyond The Politics of Identity is funded by a grant from the Arts and Humantities Research Council and the Film and Visual Culture Department.
