Friday 21 January, 2.00pm, Studio 55, Keyworth Building
Reconfiguring Caribbean Literary History
Suzanne Scafe (Department of Culture, Writing & Performance)
This session will talk through the findings from a research project investigating the relationship between Caribbean literary production during the period 1930-50 and the news media that ‘housed’ it. The research focussed on a body of literature that has never been recognised as such, but which forms the basis for more familiar forms of national/nationalist and anti-colonial literary texts produced from 1950 onwards and published in London and New York. This talk will discuss how this material has formed the basis of an argument (currently being developed for publication) about literary history and nation-formation.
Living Montage: the Subject & the Interval in the Portrait Film
Patrick Tarrant (Department of Arts & Media)
Pedro Costa’s Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001) is a portrait of the filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Daniel Huillét, one that renders an image of the couple living and becoming on screen, while acknowledging that the duration of their lives lies substantially in the intervals between and before shots. Straub claims at one point that psychology in his own films lies ‘in between the shots, in the very montage and in the way the shots are linked to each other, it is extremely subtle psychology.’ And depending on where you look in Costa’s film, one gets a sense that elided duration is the very ground of the film’s performative articulations about presence and about subjects in time. Springing from the author’s own filmmaking, this paper offers an account of how ‘Living Montage’ constitutes both an applied filmmaking methodology and a tool for film analysis, and thereby provides an example of the productivity and dialectical play of practice-led research.
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Wednesday 23 March, 12.00pm, Room L260, London Road Building
Image Warfare: A New War Paradigm For the Twenty-First Century
Nathan Roger (Swansea University)
The September 11, 2001 terror attacks marked a paradigm shift in terms of contemporary terrorism and contemporary war: a shift from Digital War (which dominated the post-Cold War period) to Image Warfare. This paper explores how the image as circulated within society has changed from what is broadly conceived of as a mass media society to that of an information society or a rhizomatic condition and how this has resulted in the weaponization of images. This paper also develops three new conceptual terms: ‘image munitions’, ‘counter-image munitions’ and ‘remediation battles’, which together provide a framework for exploring image warfare.
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Thursday 9 June, Room K205, Keyworth Building
‘Farewell Nathan Barley’? The Rise and Fall of the Freelance Creative
Graham Barnfield (University of East London)
Prior to the so-called credit crunch, it was claimed that the future of employment would involve freelancing, networking and horizontal portfolio projects displacing the vertical career ladder. The creative industries – arts, media, culture, consultancy – were treated as central, and important in New Labour discourse and policy. This paper considers the discourse and infrastructure that gave such (temporary) prestige to this particular aspect of 'creative Britain' and asks whether such 'fictitious variable capital' of working in the cultural industries has a future.
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