Multiplicities: World Cinema, Globalised Media and Cosmopolitan Cultures
Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures (RICC)
Manchester University
June 16th and 17th 2008 , Whitworth Art Gallery, Oxford Rd Manchester
The philosophical, cultural and political effects of contemporary cosmopolitanism have never been more contested. Its position within academic disciplines, from international relations to film studies and across an increasingly interdisciplinary network, calls for a consideration of its significance in understanding globalised media cultures. A justification for cosmopolitanism's polysemic perspective is that it challenges the hegemonic and ethnocentric world-view reproduced through contemporary mainstream media and cinema. Yet the question of cosmopolitanism's global situatedness, so relevant in the work of Craig Calhoun and David Held, generates new areas of scholarship concerning the positioning of cosmopolitan theory in relation to ubiquitous forms of film and media. Ulrich Beck argues against the idea that 'cosmopolitanization [is] simply a new word for what used to be called globalization?' but what how might we understand such a distinction in the context of film and media cultures? How might the changing meaning of world cinema connect to a growing concern with cosmopolitan cultures? This conference will interrogate the intersection of cosmopolitanism, global media cultures and world cinema, prompting a forum for interdisciplinary exchange and debate.
Anchored in these discursive terms, Multiplicities addresses the following questions:
- How is contemporary cosmopolitanism relevant to media and film studies today?
- To what extent does world cinema operate as a cosmopolitan category?
- How are public communication and moving image practices re-created within cosmopolitan cultures?
- How are new relations of sameness and difference configured in the production, circulation and regulation of cosmopolitan cultures?
- Can cosmopolitanism transform the mediation of human rights and through what cultural forms?
- How has the category of 'world cinema' entered global relations of production and consumption and what is the place of cosmopolitism in such transformations?
- What is the place of migration and diaspora in the circulation of transnational forms of cultural production?
- What modes of belonging or displacement are produced through the notion of cosmopolitan cultures?
Conference Programme
Monday 16th June (NB: lunch not provided)
12pm: Registration
1.15pm – 3.30pm: Opening Plenary
Craig Calhoun (Sociology, New York University), 'The Emergency Imaginary: Global Media, Cosmopolitan Cultures, and Humanitarian Action'
Pheng Cheah (Rhetoric Department, University of California, Berkeley), 'What is a World? On World Literature/Cinema as Cosmopolitanism in a
Postcolonial Frame'
3.30pm – 4.15pm Tea/Coffee
4.15pm – 5.30pm: Panel I
Shohini Chaudhuri (Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex), 'The Network Dynamics of World Cinema'
Felicia Chan (RCUK postdoctoral fellow in RICC, University of Manchester), 'No One Laughs at Accents Anymore: Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, or Cosmopolitanism in Chinese Clothes'
5.45 – 6.45: Reception at the Whitworth Gallery
7.00: Dinner
Tuesday 17th June
9.00 – 10.15: Panel II
John Leo (Film Media, University of Rhode Island), 'Homeland, Heimat, Cosmopolitan Biopolitics: Notes on Two Films in 1989'
Stephen Hutchings and Galina Miazhevich (SLLC, University of Manchester), 'Glocalising Al Quaeda: European Television New Mediations of the International Terror Threat'
10.15 move to Cornerhouse for 10.45 (no tea/coffee provided, please collect en route).
11.00 – 1.00: Screening at Cinema 2, Cornerhouse, Oxford Rd.
Still Life/Sanxia Haoren (Jia Zhangke, China/Hong Kong, 2006, 108 mins)
1.15 – 2.30: Lunch, back at the Whitworth Gallery
2.30 – 4.15: Panel III
Jeremy Tambling (English and American Studies, University of Manchester), 'Repression and Post-colonial Cities: City of Sadness and Happy Together
Gyan Prakash (Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University and RICC, University of Manchester) in conversation with Ranjani Mazumdar (School of Art and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi), 'Bombay Cinema's Dancing Queen: The Case of Helen'
4.15 – 4.45: Tea/Coffee
4.45 – 5.45: Closing Plenary
Lucia Nagib (Centenary Professor of World Cinemas and Director of the Centre for World Cinemas, University of Leeds), 'World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism'
Co-organised by:
- Jackie Stacey, Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures (RICC) University of Manchester
- Keith Wagner, Film Media, University of Rhode Island
Co-sponsored by:
- Screen
- The Cultural Theory Institute, Manchester University
- The Centre for Screen Studies at Manchester University
- CIDRA (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts)