narrative

The Cinematic Life of the Gene

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 01:00:00 +0000

The Cinematic Life of the Gene is a challenging and complex collection of essays that uses cinematic representations of genetics and cloning to consider the cultural impact of genetic breakthroughs. Jackie Stacey draws on some of the most well known theoretical works regarding cinema, art, and the body to consider the fascinating link between cinema and genomics. Her essays cite everything from feminist and psychoanalytic theory to theories of passing and reassemblage. It is the text's interdisciplinary nature that makes it both challenging and significant; cinema scholars, scientists, and feminists alike will find this work compelling. Still, The Cinematic Life of the Gene roots its examinations in the moving image, and serious scholars of the cinema (and particularly of science fiction cinema) will benefit from this “cultural study of film.”

Stacey’s work centers on an interesting premise: that cinema is uniquely tied to the science of cloning, since both are “technologies of imitation” which illustrate “a fascination with the boundary between life and death, and with the technical possibilities of animating the human body.” More than their fascinations with life and death, however, Stacey is interested in how scientific conceptions of cloning and genomics work concurrently with cinematic representations in creating “aestheticized forms of envisioning the human body.” In other words, scientists and filmmakers alike have visually codified genetic manipulation as a means of understanding and coping with its cultural and social ramifications. Stacey examines these attendant fears and desires surrounding genetic manipulation, referring to them as “the genetic imaginary,” a theoretical and cultural space in which “the fears and desires” around cloning and genomics are expressed and explored. She utilizes analyses of films from multiple genres (science fiction, the art-house thriller, feminist independent film, and body horror) to examine how fears surrounding genomics are expressed through both narrative and visual structure.

Stacey's explorations of the cultural impact of genomics on the psyche are fascinating but rather overwhelming, particularly because of her heavy dependence on prior theoretical works by the likes of Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin. Unfortunately, Stacey focuses so heavily on explicating her predecessors’ works that she tends to obscure her own thoughts; her contributions to these theories get lost amongst the jargon of her theoretical ancestors. Stacey serves her reader well by anchoring her arguments in popular works like Gattaca and Alien: Resurrection, making her work more approachable and comprehensible. She succeeds when she pares down her writing and engages with fewer theoretical texts in an essay; for example, she provides an inspired and fascinating examination of feminine masquerade in the science fiction film, applying the theories of well-known feminists Luce Irigaray and Mary Ann Doane to constructions of men in narratives of cloning.

The Cinematic Life of the Gene is not for the novice cinema or science fiction scholar, but those seriously engaged in a cultural study of the moving image or genetics would serve themselves well to tackle it. Scholars aligned with feminist and queer theories will also find rich fodder for thought in Stacey’s attentions to feminism, gender, and sexuality on screen.

Written by: Joanna Chlebus, August 12th 2010

Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives

admin — Tue, 18 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Eleanor Ty

University Of Minnesota Press

In a similar vein as Caroline Rody’s The Interethnic Imagination and Rocío Davis' Begin Here, the monograph Unfastened has been a treat to read for the simple fact that author Eleanor Ty forefronts a wide range of readings that demonstrate the continued evidence of the heterogeneity that embodies the field of Asian North American literature. Ty’s book is called unfastened, precisely because it is a descriptive that designates the continuing complexity that has been emerging with the textual terrains around concepts of mobility, displacement, and diaspora that make fastening Asian North American literature to any one place practically impossible.

In the primary texts that Ty so elegantly analyzes, multiple nations, multiple local spaces, and multiple subjectivities are always imagined, such that her readings flow contextually, specific to particular aesthetic forms and contexts, but always linked by the notion of “globality.” Ty is careful about her terminology. She purposefully does not use the term Asian American precisely because she carves out a specific place for Asian Canadian cultural production in her work, which has had a long history of being too reductively classified within Asian American more broadly.

She also distinguishes globality from the globalization, rendering globality the more salient feature of her critical reading practice precisely because it is more connected to issues of economic differentials and power inequities that arise as bodies, cultures, ideas, technologies, etc. migrate to new locations and establish new spatial configurations. As Ty clarifies, “Issues of globality include concern for earth and our environment, health and the spread of disease across national borders, the globalization of markets, and the production of goods.”

The wide range of primary text readings are truly astonishing and we see what a fan of Asian North American narrative Ty is as she meticulously crafts her analyses to continually point to the ways that Asian North American writers are thinking about globality and routing that issue directly within their textual terrains. Taken together, Ty concentrates on Brian Roley’s American Son, Han Ong’s Fixer Chao, Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child, Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, Sunil Kuruvilla’s Rice Boy, and Lydia Kwa’s This Place Called Absence, among others. Many of these authors are ones that have received very little critical attention, even though their works present such rich terrains upon which to consider the complexities of globalization.

While all the chapters provide sprightly interpretative readings in which texts cannot be fastened within one context or sociocultural moment, some standouts include chapter two’s “Recuperating Wretched Lives: Asian Sex Workers and the Underside of Nation Building” and chapter five’s “Shape-shifters and Disciplined Bodies: Feminist Tactics, Science Fiction, and Fantasy.” Given the astonishing range of writings being produced, Ty’s conclusion offers a corrective to the concept of Asian American literature, offering that the rubric of “global novelist and global writing are more accurate for terms and for works,” especially with respect to the increasingly non-domestic contexts of many narratives.

Ty leaves us then with the concept of the “Asian global,” conceptualized in part because such narratives “arise out of and are contingent upon globalization—the movement of people, capital, and production across the north and south—and because they are no longer located just in North America or Britain.” In ending this brief review, it would seem the possibility that Ty is pushing for a potentially new field rubric in which Asian global texts written in English appear front and center. In this way, the move to diasporic and transnational critiques which typically and traditionally have not shifted beyond a two-country paradigm can be supplanted with this Asian global literary studies model that pushes scholars to contextualize texts from multi-focal spatial axes.

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

Written by: Stephen Hong Sohn, May 17th 2010

Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region

admin — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:03:00 +0000

Edited by Fatima Sadiqi, Amira Nowaira, Azza El Kholy, Mona Ennaji

The Feminist Press

Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region is the fourth in a series of volumes, following The Southern Region, The Eastern Region, and West Africa and the Sahel. It provides a thorough documentation of women's lives from the fifteenth century BCE to the present in nations from the nations of Algeria, Egypt, Mauretania, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia. Subjects addressed include cooking and colonialism, torts and torture, polygamy and the veil, love songs, and repeated calls for women's education. Forms in the anthology include prose, poetry, lyric, legal documents, petitions, folktales, and transcriptions of tellings by illiterates.

The poet I'timad Arrummaikiyya could be construed an eleventh century Lil' Kim—“I urge you to come faster than the wind to mount my breast and firmly dig and plough my body, and don't let go until you've flushed me thrice.”—and there are equally passionate protestations of faith from Christian and Islamic perspectives. Sara, daughter of Abboud Al-Nahid, filed for a no-fault divorce in 1069 due to “feelings of aversion for (her husband's) person”—a reassuring glimpse at the consistency of intimate dramas (no support, she takes custody of a five year-old son).

A general reader, I found the collection a varied and thorough introduction to the history of the area, my previous exposure having been restricted, unfortunately, to the Tutankhamen exhibit at Seattle's Art Museum in 1978 and the movie The Battle of Algiers. The necessity of education is a persistent theme—Nabaweya Moussa refers to the Egyptian proverb: “Teach girls to spin, but don't teach them to write.” Personal narratives include girls learning through eavesdropping on brothers' lessons, young women applying to school in secret and paying the tuition themselves, and illiterate mothers sneaking their daughters into academies (one girl goes on to earn a doctorate becomes a physicist). Faiza W. Shereen's previously unpublished short story “The Gifts of Time” spans decades and continents to narrate family and history. We can only hope that the call at the close of Mona Nawal Helmi's “From this Day Forward I Will Carry My Mother's Name” is right: “We've had enough futile, ineffectual babbling!”

Written by: Erika Mikkalo, May 28th 2009

Fix

admin — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:36:00 +0000

Directed by Tao Ruspoli

LAFCO/Mangusta Productions

How much of filmmaking is documentary? Even when an actor is performing onscreen, we can sometimes still see traces of the real person underneath the character. And when a camera is turned on us—at a wedding reception or for a home video—we instantly become performers ourselves. If a small city is constructed for a film set, does that make it any less real than a city that already exists?

Though most certainly a narrative film, Tao Ruspoli’s Fix blends fiction with reality to such a degree that at the end, I was left wondering what I had just seen. The story follows Bella (House's Olivia Wilde) and Milo (Ruspoli), a young couple on a road trip to bring Milo’s brother Leo (Shawn Andrews) to a rehab center in L.A. to kick his heroin addiction. An aspiring documentarian, Milo brings his camera along for the ride, capturing their whirlwind tour of southern California with gritty spontaneity.

When the director is also a character, and the film itself a plot point, the line between what’s real and what’s being performed begins to blur. Milo’s camera provides us with rare insight into the facades the three characters put on for each other; for all that Milo lauds his brother in front of Bella, we see him immediately turn resentful whenever she leaves the two of them alone. And some of the most interesting moments of the film occur when a character asks Milo to turn off the camera and he agrees but doesn’t actually comply. Although this often means we can no longer see the character’s face, we can hear them dispel all pretenses just from the sound of their voice.

A great deal of credit must go to the actors for their layered but understated performances. Wilde is particularly effective as the doting but still very independent girlfriend, who starts the film wary of Leo and quickly ends up enchanted by him. It is wonderful to watch her let down her guard and allow herself to be wooed by his recklessness, all in the course of a single day.

Unfortunately, some of the editing ends up detracting from these subtly complex performances. Between the jump cuts and often intentionally nauseating camerawork, Ruspoli’s style is not only distracting but also unoriginal (see The Blair Witch Project and basically any film made with a handheld thereafter). Fix would have been much more compelling if Ruspoli had kept with the style of a true home video and allowed all of the scenes to play out continuously in simple straight-on shots. Instead, the film can sometimes feel over-produced. Still, Fix maintains the meandering, impulsive quality of certain road movies of the seventies, while also managing to keep a brisk pace.

Written by: Caitlin Graham, April 3rd 2009

Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art

admin — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:04:00 +0000

By Debra J. Blake

Duke University Press

Debra J. Blake, a professor in the department of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota, revisits an old topic in her book Chicana Sexuality and Gender. Many Chicana feminists and writers have wondered, analyzed, and interpreted the roles of archetypal figures like La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Malinche, La Llorona, and the mother earth goddesses in their own ways—that is, to decipher the symbols of each iconic representation; however Blake has gone in another direction altogether by introducing the relationship between these important characters and those of regular working class and semi-professional Mexican American women. She uses oral histories and personal interviews to weave together the influence and existence of Mexican female iconography on the lives of these particular women.

Blake brings a new perspective to Chicana Studies through these oral histories and her own analysis of the meanings of these figures on the lives of these women. Through various cultural expressions, Blake's book reveals both Chicana feminist thought and the reflections of women who are not necessarily feminists. She balances both viewpoints and never tries to be forceful or overly aggressive with her own opinions. Instead, she relies heavily on anecdotal evidence from her different subjects, allowing them to tell their stories; Blake simply fills in the details and offers explanations and backstory to each figure. Chicana Sexuality and Gender is a much welcome addition to the canon of Chicana feminist theory.

Written by: Mónica Teresa Ortiz, February 15th 2009