4 research outputs found
Marginality, Mayhem and Middle Class Anxieties: Imaginaries of Masculinity and Urban Violence in Contemporary Mexican and Brazilian Film
Get PDFMarginality, Mayhem and Middle Class Anxieties: Imaginaries of Masculinity and Urban Violence in Contemporary Mexican and Brazilian Film is a comparative study that explores the confluence of cinematic discourse, violence, masculinity and constructions (or denial) of citizenship in present-day Latin America. My argument is that the thematization of violence and masculinity in contemporary Latin American film intercedes at a symbolic level into social relations that are increasingly mediated through images that depict what is socially permitted. This dissertation considers how film (re)structures perceptions of masculinity and its inter-linkages with cityscapes marked by social and material violence. Violence is at the same time the producer and the product of prevailing mediatic representations of social strife. As such, material and symbolic violence generate a spectacle of otherness (socioeconomic, ethnic, gendered) that purports to demarcate the symbolic limits of so-called legitimate society, often employing the peripheral male subject as the axis around which difference is articulated. On the one hand, films such as Amores perros (Mexico Iñárritu 2001) and Cidade de Deus (Brazil, Meirelles, Lund 2002) utilize paradigms of socio-economic and gender difference to naturalize the perception of the divided city by formulating the body of the peripheral male subject (and the metropolitan zones he inhabits) as a dangerous terrain. On the other hand, other productions, such as La Zona (Mexico, Spain, Plá 2007) and O homem do ano (Brazil, Fonseca 2004), using similar archetypes, call this vision into question by focusing on how middle class and elite anxieties create practices of violence as modes of social definition
Project Borderland: A Multi-Sited Curatorial and Anthropological Probing in Selected Parts of India
Get PDFThis theory-practice PhD project combines multi-sited curatorial and anthropological research in selected north-eastern and eastern borderland sites of India. The borderland is a choice for this research due to its manifoldness. Borders, though manmade and historical, often produce ambiguous lines of divide that are amenable to myths and memories, and related animosities and allegiances in a variety of configurations. The abstract borderland is potentially capable of creating different subject positions like citizens, denizens and non-citizens.
This is the project of a curator-participant who works in alternating nuanced roles as participant observer, complicit observer, ethnographer and the critical entity to tease out the different aspects of the borderland from complex anthropological interactions. The research process involves three phases in each site. The first two are the study of the territorial issues via theoretical grounding and fieldwork. These lead to the curatorial intervention in the form of workshops that emerge as knowledge producing situations.
The idea is to work with a curatorial strategy that emphasises the processual and is interactive and collaborative, with a view to exploring the shared body of knowledge generated at the workshop mise-en-scènes. Hence, the workshops are conceived as interactive and participatory, involving theatre and cartographic activities among others. Also, the ideas, images and concepts culled from hybrid sources during all the phases of research are juxtaposed here to create fields of multiple inflections, bringing different spaces and times together without merging under a singular discipline. The workshops are, thus, events poised at multi-disciplinary crossroads, where the knowledge of the border experiences maximum density.
The project is aimed at studying the relational features of the selected sites; examining the emergence and nature of communities, the role of outsidedness in the implicated cultures and the different temporal registers encountered in the anthropological probing into the physical and metaphorical borderland(s) in their micro-social aspects
