Robert Stam
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-UT 702 / Class # 14749
4 points
It is impossible to understand contemporary history without an awareness of colonialism, yet the subject is rarely mentioned or taught. This course concerns the racial and cultural debates that have come in the wake of centuries of conquest, colonialism, and postcoloniality as reflected in the cinema, the media, and popular culture generally. The course transnationalizes issues that are too often seen only in a narrow U.S. national frame. All the debates about (the much censured) Critical Race Theory, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, White Supremacy, indigenous genocide and discrimination are transnational debates which go at least as far back as Columbus and the Conquest of the Americas. The course examines how these issues have been apprehended through a number of national histories and traditions, and how all those debates are reflected and refracted in film, media and popular culture.The course will focus especially on the U.S., Latin America (especially Brazil), France (and North Africa), always against a comparative backdrop with the U.S. The course explores the long-range history of white supremacy and the resistance against it, as manifested in the various “ways of seeing” these issues in the media. The through-line of the course is an examination of how genres and grids and discourses also constitute “ways of seeing.”
Our approach to this broad topic will be transdisciplinary, mingling cinema and media studies, literary studies, philosophy, and social studies, while taking examples from a wide variety of media: the fiction feature, documentary, sketch comedy, stand-up, music video, late-night talk shows and the like.History, according to Fredric Jameson, is “that which hurts.” Talking about history sometimes “hurts” as well, causing “discomfort”. For centuries, historical pedagogy has disproportionately hurt one side, the colonized and the marginalized, while flattering the side of the empowered by idealizing national and colonial histories. But if history is that which hurts, it is also “that which inspires,” that which edifies and clears our minds. In this spirit, the course combines critique and celebration, critique of colonialist institutions and the celebration of resistance and activist cultural expression. The point is not guilt – which “curdles” and generates resentment -- but rather lucidity about the dilemmas of history and a sense of responsibility toward the present. If you feel uncomfortable about these issues, this might not be he course for you.
The point is to see both general patterns and national particularities. Apart from the sites “covered” in the course, students are encouraged to bring in other zones of interest, whether connected or not to their own background and experience, as long as they have to do with the larger issues of indigeneity, colonialism, and constructions of race. At the same time, students are encouraged to make the course their own, for example by choosing to explore a topic related to their personal interests and backgrounds (or not), not only those discussed in the course but others as well. How have the societies from which we come been marked by colonialism and racism? How have you/we been changed and transformed by our interaction with people of diverse “identity” different from our own? Why is the theme of racial chameleonism and metamorphosis so ubiquitous in the popular culture of the Atlantic world? How is “race” seen differently in Brazil, the US, France, and India? How do stereotypes vary around the world? The course is not about individual accusations of personal racism, but about historical patterns of power. Nor is about “canceling” anyone, but rather about counterpointing perspectives on the issues.
The course will examine the issues by 1) reading key texts by writers such as Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Audre Lorde, Kimberle Crenshaw, Paul Chaat Smith, and Abdias do Nascimento; 2) by analyzing films and clips that foreground the issues discussed. On the one hand, we will look critically at the stereotyped ways in which race, ethnicity, and national identity have been portrayed in the mass media; on the other, we will celebrate indigenous and diasporic alternatives. Media texts will be presented not as mere illustrations of intellectual trends, but rather as active and productive “way of seeing” with their own specific productivity.
The structure of the course is both historical/chronological and thematic. Each week will have a main theme. But the course is subliminally chronological in that each session, and each section of the course, will move from past to present in historical terms, but also back-and-forth between past and present in contrapuntal terms. The feature films screened in class include Iciar Bolain’s Even the Rain, Rachel Perkin’s Bran Nue Day, Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Bouchareb’s Outside the Law, Kassowitz’ La Haine, Wilmott’s The Confederate States of America, Joel Zito Araujo’s Negation of Brazil, Karim Ainouz’s Madame Satan, Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji at the Beach. And Campos-Torres The Master and the Divine. The students will also see and write one-page response papers to the following six films to be seen outside of class: Raoul Peck’s Exterminate all the Brutes, Isaac Julien’s Black Skin, White Masks, Raoul Peck’s I am not Your Negro. Ava du Vernay’s The 13th, Marlon Rigg’s Color Adjustment. Along with feature films, we will analyze scores of clips that will serve to a) illustrate various related themes -- Columbus and the Conquest of the Americas; comparative slavery, abolition, and liberation; colonialism and anti-colonialism; racial syncretism and transformation; alternative aesthetics -- and b) offer a demonstration of ways and methods of looking closely at films through a postcolonial, anti-racist and intersectional grid as different “ways of seeing.”