The Ethnic Turn: Studies in Political Cinema from Brazil and the United States, 1960-2002

What makes political cinema political? It used to be that the category of political cinema was understood to designate a body of work with a very determinate political orientation. When Comolli and Narboni wrote about political cinema in the late 1960s, they were writing about a cinematic practice defined by its opposition to the capitalist status quo and aiming at the transformation of the social world. But as Marxism has suffered a crisis over the last decades, so has the concept of a political cinema, which has since lost its specificity. I claim that since the late sixties there has been a shift in ideas and practices concerning political cinema: a class-oriented, anti-capitalist conception of politics has given way to a conception of politics that is primarily, though not exclusively, identity-oriented. I call this shift the ethnic turn in political cinema. The ethnic turn has not received much critical scrutiny from film scholars. It tends to be taken for granted as an advance in our thinking about society and a triumph in the fight against racism and Eurocentrism. The aim of my dissertation is to challenge this complacency by asking how ethnicity is constructed—by whom, to the exclusion of what, for what purpose, and why now.Using case studies from Brazil and the United States, I examine the uses of racial and ethnic representation in explicitly political film over the last half century. Both nation-states have inherited a comparable history of African slavery, indigenous genocide, and formidable European immigration. But so far, there has been little comparative work examining the ways in which explicitly political films in these two countries have tried to make sense of racial oppression, how these representations have changed over time, and what those changes indicate about the shifting terms of both national and global debates over increasing social inequality. My dissertation addresses this lacuna

The radical south: Grassroots activism, ethnicity, and literary form, 1960-1980

“The Radical South” examines the art and writings of Civil-Rights-era social movements and locates U.S. based political structures in a hemispheric and global network. I reveal that the Civil Rights Movement, ethnic nationalism, and second-wave feminism were not separate entities; rather, the cultural work of activists was an intersectional effort that defied national strategies, such as non-violent protest and race-based separatism, that were often determined by their urban counterparts. Thus, I argue that new political aesthetics emerged from grassroots activism and set in motion ethnic and racial cultural expressions that embraced multiple, even conflicting, identities. As much as this art was placed within a local context, its political and artistic aesthetics were also inspired by global revolutionary movements in places such as Cuba and the Caribbean, Spain, and Ghana. Whether I am looking at experimental theater, consciousness-raising documents, or novels, I show how this flexible approach to political ideology better represented the pragmatic realities of everyday life, even if it also meant challenging their popular-front vision of solidarity. “The Radical South” moves chronologically through Freedom Summer and the 1960s to early eighties “third world” feminism. In my first chapter, the Free Southern Theater, an integrated theater group established in Mississippi in 1963, emerges as a major innovator of what I call visual jazz, which combined avant-garde theater with civil rights activism. In the second and third chapters, I look at novels by Julian Mayfield and Jose Yglesias, both of which insist on the specificities of local forms of oppression, community memory, and familial bonds against the more abstracting vision of a global Marxist struggle. In the final chapter, I demonstrate how Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 novel The Salt Eaters by embracing the paradox of what I call conflictual solidarity, a process by which dissenting voices collect together to challenge the structures that unite them

Digital scenography in opera in the twenty-first century

This thesis undertakes an extensive analysis of current trends in digital scenography in opera production, including dramaturgical possibilities, historical precedents, and impacts on backstage processes. Drawing on examples of practice and interviews with major practitioners, the work proposes a method for assessing digitally-enhanced productions and reevaluating existing industry standards

The 'War on Terror' metaframe in film and television

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, the government of the United States of America declared a ‘War on Terror’. This was targeted not only at the ostensible culprits – al-Qaeda - but at ‘terror’ itself. The ‘War on Terror’ acted as a rhetorical ‘metaframe’, which was sufficiently flexible to incorporate a broad array of nominally-related policies, events, phenomena and declarations, from the Iraq war to issues of immigration. The War on Terror is strategically limitless, and therefore incorporates not only actual wars, but potential wars. For example, the bellicose rhetoric towards those countries labelled the ‘Axis of Evil’ or ‘Outposts of Tyranny’ is as much a manifestation of the metaframe as the ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing of Baghdad. As a rhetorical frame, it is created through all of its utterances; its narrative may have been initially scripted by the Bush administration, but it is reified and naturalised by the news media and other commentators, who adopt the frame’s language even when critical of its content. Moreover, film and television texts participate in this process, with fiction-based War on Terror narratives sharing and supporting – co-constituting – the War on Terror discourse’s ‘reality’. This thesis argues that the War on Terror metaframe manifests itself in multiple interconnected narrative forms, and these forms both transcode and affect its politics. I propose a congruency between the frame’s expansiveness and its associational interconnections, and a corresponding cinematic plot-structure I term the Global Network Narrative. Elsewhere, an emphasis on the pressures of clock-time is evoked by the real-time sequential-series 24, while the authenticity and authority implied by the embedded ‘witness’ is shown to be codified and performed in multiple film and television fiction texts. Throughout, additional contextual influences – social, historical, and technological – are introduced where appropriate, so as not to adopt the metaframe’s claims of limitlessness and uniqueness, while efforts are made to address film and television not as mutually exclusive areas of study, but as suggestively responsive to one another

Environmental resistance and Aboriginal development : a comparative study of mining ventures in the United States and Canada

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 325-346).Summary: This dissertation asks the question: why do indigenous communities support environmental causes in certain cases of mining development and not in others, when technical indicators of environmental impact may in fact be comparable? The empirical research question I am trying to address is: When does environmental resistance arise in native communities in the United States and Canada that are faced with the prospect of mining development? Native people in the United States and Canada have endured widespread environmental harm at the behest of mining ventures. During the past two decades, the enactment of environmental laws and the recognition of treaty violations by settler governments have collectively led to a politics of retribution in both countries. However, conflicts surrounding mining development and indigenous people continue to challenge policy-makers on both sides of the border. I use qualitative social science research techniques such as deviant case analysis, process tracing, congruence procedures and counterfactual analysis to study four instances of mining development (cases involving both the prevalence and non-prevalence of environmental resistance in each of the two countries). After using a process of elimination procedure in my initial scoping analysis for the case studies, I test process-oriented hypotheses anchored in theories of negotiation involving social movements and linkage politics. My study reveals that contrary to common belief, neither scientific studies (technical impact) and economic considerations nor external influence of civic society adequately explain the emergence or prevalence of resistance. Instead the negotiation process, particularly the way in which issues are linked, strategic alliance formation and the articulation of sovereignty are the key determinants of environmental resistance in Aboriginal communities. I conclude with some lessons for both the US and Canada in terms of public policy and negotiation processes that can be most conducive to environmentally responsible and effective planning of mining ventures on or near Aboriginal land.by Saleem H. Ali.Ph.D