"The Gospel According to Spielberg in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial"

This essay makes direct comparisons and correlations between Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and the New Testament story of Jesus of Nazareth. In addition, the article situates the film (the highest-grossing movie ever, at that point) in its political and historical moment, the Age of Reagan

Persephone's Descent

This essay argues that The Skin Between Us (2006), Kym Ragusa's memoir of her upbringing as the daughter of an African-American fashion model and a working-class southern Italian father, writes beyond a patchwork heritage account of multiracial, multicultural identity. The book's cover, which features white hands folded into and over black hands, is misleading, as the memoir underscores how racial difference complicates ethnic affiliations. Tensions between Ragusa's two families are never resolved, nor is Kym ever fully accepted by her Italian-American grandmother, from whom her birth had been kept a secret by her father for years. The Skin Between Us is less the narration of an identity quest than it is a reflection on its transformation through writing: the hybridity Ragusa celebrates, the cross-cultural connections she makes between her Italian-American and her African-American female ancestors, are products of a journey of memory that is associated with Persephone’s descent at the end of the book.  Since place plays a crucial role in Ragusa’s project of self-fashioning, I use Kandiyoti’s notion of “migrant sites,” as well as Homi Bhabha’s notion of a Third Space, to explain how Ragusa creates diasporic alternatives to the patchwork heritage narrative. Arguing for the centrality of place in diaspora narratives, Kandiyoti uses the term “migrant sites” to refer to an irreconcilable tension between enclosure, “the confinement and containment of ethnoracialized diaspora populations in bordered areas” and translocality, “a sense of place produced by the imagining of overlapping locales.” While Harlem functions as a migrant site in Ragusa’s memoir, Sicily is represented as a third space of hybridity, one that permits the autobiographer to map affinities between Italian and African diasporas and reconstitute her relationship with each. Ragusa mobilizes cross-cultural identifications through gender, linking women on both sides of her family through their experience of patriarchal violence as well as through the myth of Demeter and Persephone, whose separation and reunion resonates with the experience of migration and resettlement of women across various diasporas. Displacement and the desire to recuperate losses incurred by migration through storytelling constitute the "shared skin" or common heritage of African-American and Italian-American women.&nbsp

1976: Movies and Cultural Contradictions

This chapter traces the social and aesthetic implications of the five Academy Award contenders for Best Picture in America's Bicentennial year, 1976

IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN

This is a review/analysis of the Antonioni film IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN (1982), occasioned by its DVD release by the Criterion Collection

The Gospel According to Spielberg in "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial"

This article examines the parallels between the space alien in Spielberg's "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" and the New Testament account of the life of Jesus Christ

The Politics of Ambivalence: APOCALYPSE NOW as Pro-War and Anti-War Film

This essay investigates the possibility that APOCALYPSE NOW presents "mixed messages" about the Vietnam War to a divided U.S. audience

Narrate AND Describe?: Point of View and Narrative Voice in CITIZEN KANE's Thatcher Sequence

This article examines the theoretical aspects of point of view and narrative voice in CITIZEN KANE's Thatcher Sequence, with an eye to untangling the thorny aspects of subjectivity in that reticular film. In addition, there are larger implications that pertain to ALL narrative cinema in terms of who or what generates film images and sounds

Empire of the Gun: Steven Spielberg's SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and American Chauvinism

This book chapter analyzes Steven Spielberg's supposedly anti-war SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1992) as a pro-war, pro-military, and pro-America movie