1,945 research outputs found

    Choreographing tragedy into the twenty-first century

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    What makes a tragedy? In the fifth century BCE this question found an answer through the conjoined forms of song and dance. Since the mid-twentieth century, and the work of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, tragedy has been variously articulated as form coming apart at the seams. This thesis approaches tragedy through the work of five major choreographers and a director who each, in some way, turn back to Bausch. After exploring the Tanztheater Wuppertal’s techniques for choreographing tragedy in chapter one, I dedicate a chapter each to Dimitris Papaioannou, Akram Khan, Trajal Harrell, Ivo van Hove with Wim Vandekeybus, and Gisùle Vienne. Bringing together work in Queer and Trans* studies, Performance studies, Classics, Dance, and Classical Reception studies I work towards an understanding of the ways in which these choreographers articulate tragedy through embodiment and relation. I consider how tragedy transforms into the twenty-first century, how it shapes what it might mean to live and die with(out) one another. This includes tragic acts of mythic construction, attempts to describe a sense of the world as it collapses, colonial claims to ownership over the earth, and decolonial moves to enact new ways of being human. By developing an expanded sense of both choreography and the tragic one of my main contributions is a re-theorisation of tragedy that brings together two major pre-existing schools, to understand tragedy not as an event, but as a process. Under these conditions, and the shifting conditions of the world around us, I argue that the choreography of tragedy has and might continue to allow us to think about, name, and embody ourselves outside of the ongoing catastrophes we face

    Second-Person Surveillance: Politics of User Implication in Digital Documentaries

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    This dissertation analyzes digital documentaries that utilize second-person address and roleplay to make users feel implicated in contemporary refugee crises, mass incarceration in the U.S., and state and corporate surveillances. Digital documentaries are seemingly more interactive and participatory than linear film and video documentary as they are comprised of a variety of auditory, visual, and written media, utilize networked technologies, and turn the documentary audience into a documentary user. I draw on scholarship from documentary, game, new media, and surveillance studies to analyze how second-person address in digital documentaries is configured through user positioning and direct address within the works themselves, in how organizations and creators frame their productions, and in how users and players respond in reviews, discussion forums, and Let’s Plays. I build on Michael Rothberg’s theorization of the implicated subject to explore how these digital documentaries bring the user into complicated relationality with national and international crises. Visually and experientially implying that users bear responsibility to the subjects and subject matter, these works can, on the one hand, replicate modes of liberal empathy for suffering, distant “others” and, on the other, simulate one’s own surveillant modes of observation or behavior to mirror it back to users and open up one’s offline thoughts and actions as a site of critique. This dissertation charts how second-person address shapes and limits the political potentialities of documentary projects and connects them to a lineage of direct address from educational and propaganda films, museum exhibits, and serious games. By centralizing the user’s individual experience, the interventions that second-person digital documentaries can make into social discourse change from public, institution-based education to more privatized forms of sentimental education geared toward personal edification and self-realization. Unless tied to larger initiatives or movements, I argue that digital documentaries reaffirm a neoliberal politics of individual self-regulation and governance instead of public education or collective, social intervention. Chapter one focuses on 360-degree virtual reality (VR) documentaries that utilize the feeling of presence to position users as if among refugees and as witnesses to refugee experiences in camps outside of Europe and various dwellings in European cities. My analysis of Clouds Over Sidra (Gabo Arora and Chris Milk 2015) and The Displaced (Imraan Ismail and Ben C. Solomon 2015) shows how these VR documentaries utilize observational realism to make believable and immersive their representations of already empathetic refugees. The empathetic refugee is often young, vulnerable, depoliticized and dehistoricized and is a well-known trope in other forms of humanitarian media that continues into VR documentaries. Forced to Flee (Zahra Rasool 2017), I am Rohingya (Zahra Rasool 2017), So Leben FlĂŒchtlinge in Berlin (Berliner Morgenpost 2017), and Limbo: A Virtual Experience of Waiting for Asylum (Shehani Fernando 2017) disrupt easy immersions into realistic-looking VR experiences of stereotyped representations and user identifications and, instead, can reflect back the user’s political inaction and surveillant modes of looking. Chapter two analyzes web- and social media messenger-based documentaries that position users as outsiders to U.S. mass incarceration. Users are noir-style co-investigators into the crime of the prison-industrial complex in Fremont County, Colorado in Prison Valley: The Prison Industry (David Dufresne and Philippe Brault 2009) and co-riders on a bus transporting prison inmates’ loved ones for visitations to correctional facilities in Upstate New York in A Temporary Contact (Nirit Peled and Sara Kolster 2017). Both projects construct an experience of carceral constraint for users to reinscribe seeming “outside” places, people, and experiences as within the continuation of the racialized and classed politics of state control through mass incarceration. These projects utilize interfaces that create a tension between replicating an exploitative hierarchy between non-incarcerated users and those subject to mass incarceration while also de-immersing users in these experiences to mirror back the user’s supposed distance from this mode of state regulation. Chapter three investigates a type of digital game I term dataveillance simulation games, which position users as surveillance agents in ambiguously dystopian nation-states and force users to use their own critical thinking and judgment to construct the criminality of state-sanctioned surveillance targets. Project Perfect Citizen (Bad Cop Studios 2016), Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You (Osmotic Studios 2016), and Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013) all create a dual empathy: players empathize with bureaucratic surveillance agents while empathizing with surveillance targets whose emails, text messages, documents, and social media profiles reveal them to be “normal” people. I argue that while these games show criminality to be a construct, they also utilize a racialized fear of the loss of one’s individual privacy to make players feel like they too could be surveillance targets. Chapter four examines personalized digital documentaries that turn users and their data into the subject matter. Do Not Track (Brett Gaylor 2015), A Week with Wanda (Joe Derry Hall 2019), Stealing Ur Feelings (Noah Levenson 2019), Alfred Premium (JoĂ«l Ronez, Pierre Corbinais, and Émilie F. Grenier 2019), How They Watch You (Nick Briz 2021), and Fairly Intelligentℱ (A.M. Darke 2021) track, monitor, and confront users with their own online behavior to reflect back a corporate surveillance that collects, analyzes, and exploits user data for profit. These digital documentaries utilize emotional fear- and humor-based appeals to persuade users that these technologies are controlling them, shaping their desires and needs, and dehumanizing them through algorithmic surveillance

    2007 GREAT Day Program

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    SUNY Geneseo’s First Annual G.R.E.A.T. Day.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1001/thumbnail.jp

    2017 GREAT Day Program

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    SUNY Geneseo’s Eleventh Annual GREAT Day.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1011/thumbnail.jp

    Subtitling Francophone World Cinema: Narratives of Identity, Alterity and Power in Audiovisual Translation

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    Cinematic representations of multilingualism raise questions about communication and mutual understanding not only between characters in films but also between films and their audiences, for whom it is typically necessary to facilitate access to foreign dialogues through different forms of translation. Where languages are pitted against one another, however, or juxtaposed in ways that serve to reveal and explore tensions and hierarchies between different linguistic, cultural and social groups, translation becomes entangled in issues of identity, alterity and power. This thesis untangles and explores these complex interactions between languages and translation as they arise in the practice of subtitling. Specifically, it asks questions about how subtitling can play an active part in the shaping of identity by mediating differences between the local, the national and the global, and how subtitles intersect with the relations of power that exist between different cultures. In turn, the thesis exposes the semiotic and narrative dynamics that subtitles add to films and considers the implications of these findings for the ways we think of audiovisual translation and of its relationship with creative processes and accessibility practices. These questions are considered in the context of multilingualism, not only because issues of language, identity and power relations are inextricably involved in discussions thereof, but because multilingualism is an increasingly common experience for many subtitlers and film audiences alike. This is particularly true of francophone world cinema, from whose corpus the thesis analyses six films across three case studies: Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (Dany Boon 2008), L’esquive (Abdellatif Kechiche 2003), Inch’Allah dimanche (Yamina Benguigui 2001), Dheepan (Jacques Audiard 2015), Le grand voyage (IsmaĂ«l Ferroukhi 2004) and Exils (Tony Gatlif 2004). Methodologically, the thesis combines semiotic, narrative, and linguistic analysis of the subtitled audiovisual texts, drawing on a range of perspectives within Audiovisual Translation Studies, Postcolonial Translation Studies, Film Studies, French and Francophone Studies and Cultural Studies

    Dionysus against the Crucified: Nietzsche, Sovereignty, and the Power of Nihilism

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    Is international law nihilistic? Being produced from nihilism and driven by it? And are even we nihilistic – we Critical scholars who stand beyond the end of history? Not a break from the past but a continuation? That is the gambit of this thesis: to explore the nihilistic inner life of international law, through the root and stem of its creation and development, right up until the contemporary movement towards Critical approaches to the discipline. Through the embracing scope of nihilism, I argue that each of these turns and evolutions can be tracked back to a single logic. The first Volume of this thesis is dedicated to the theorisation of nihilism and how it could be existentially connected to international law. Using the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, I link nihilism to what I term the ‘civilising psychosis’: a process (or sickness) by which the production of the human and the state is co-constitutive. Through this bond, it becomes possible to argue that the structures of nihilism, and the civilising psychosis, frame and condition the development of legal concepts. In Volume II, I take the civilising psychosis and apply it to the creation of the European global order of sovereign states. Here I suggest that transformations within sovereignty doctrine have been devices of managing and rearticulating the civilising psychosis. Applying literary techniques, this Volume takes the form of a ‘A play in three acts’. Within it, I follow the civilising psychosis, first, in the domestic generation of sovereignty, through to the use of sovereignty in 19th century imperialism, before bringing the civilising excesses of this latter period into confrontation with Critical scholarship. Through the violence of this encounter, I intend to begat recognition and disorientation. Rather than marking a departure from the civilising psychosis, such scholarships could be its most visceral manifestation

    Connected World:Insights from 100 academics on how to build better connections

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