Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report narrates two interrelated stories. The micro
story concerns a family, a kidnapped son, the ensuing trauma, and the work of mourning that
follows. The macro story concerns criminal justice, social stability, and hermeneutics at the level
of the nation state. The problem for both stories is ontological a…[Read more]

This paper discusses Pacific Rim as a film deeply concerned with birth, in particular the horror of birth, and the process by which birth is assimilated. The film may then be seen as part of an unbroken commentary on nuclear
weapons insofar as it is our technological, capitalistic, and nuclear capability that allows
us to close the “breach” and…[Read more]

This paper discusses Pacific Rim as a film deeply concerned with birth, in particular the horror of birth, and the process by which birth is assimilated. The film may then be seen as part of an unbroken commentary on nuclear
weapons insofar as it is our technological, capitalistic, and nuclear capability that allows
us to close the “breach” and…[Read more]

Just prior to 9/11 the film Code Unknown: An Incomplete Tale of Different Journeys (2000) was released: a series of successive tableaux depicting the random and generally ‘aggressive’ encounters among strangers, neighbours, family members, lovers etc. displays a network of challenging interdependence amongst Parisians. The film was variously cri…[Read more]

This paper examines Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake in relation to environmental justice. The best-selling first novel in Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy, Oryx and Crake was widely hailed for its nightmarish depiction of a post-apocalyptic, bioengineered future. The major themes of the novel mirror key themes of the environmental justice movement tod…[Read more]

This article raises questions about the aesthetics of scale as they appear relative to genetically modified organisms in science fiction and especially in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). Bacigalupi makes the unusual choice of representing GMOs largely through science fictional tropes of automatism rather than the grotesque. Because of t…[Read more]

This essay considers Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) from the standpoint of its influential depiction of African Americans as automata. Through Ellison’s other writings, including his review of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) and his unpublished drafts of Invisible Man, the essay links the political concerns of the novel with…[Read more]

Reading the representation of New York City in J.D. Robb’s/Nora Roberts’s sci-fi detective romance In Death series via Andrew Karmen’s critique of the 1990s’ New York crime wave/crash narrative pushed by Giuiliani and Bratton’s “broken windows” policing.

The vernacular online videos produced by the Arab revolutions constitute an unprecedented (though not unproblematic) historical resource for understanding the subjective experience of the ordinary people who find themselves on the front line of revolutionary struggle. But they also effect a sea-change in the way in which we view and understand…[Read more]

A close reading of a video collaboration by two citizen journalists, one from Libya, the other from the US, as a form of audiovisual solidarity. This article draws in particular on concepts developed by Laura Marks and Hito Steyerl.

When Jackie Chan was introduced to Japanese audiences in the early 1980s, he was promoted as the answer to the void that popular martial arts star Bruce Lee had left upon his death in 1975. The mischievous ‘monkey’ to Lee’s more ferocious ‘dragon’, Chan’s films were aggressively marketed to an audience of male martial arts fans; yet this…[Read more]

Recent years have witnessed the growth of a body of literature concerned with what Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu has termed “Chinese cinemas,”1 sparked by the increased international visibility of films from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and characterized by an emerging interest in the ways that such works negotiate both “the triumphantly…[Read more]

A Bakhtinian Analysis of Language and Multiculturalism in Iwai Shunyi’s Swallowtail Butterfly

Scholarship on representations of East Asian women has honed on the ubiquity of a ‘geisha’ stereotype in Asian-themed Hollywood films: women who willingly acquiesce to the prerogatives of Western men and, in so doing, symbolically affirm the subordination of East Asian political autonomy to a paternalistic United States. Within this context, the…[Read more]

This paper examines two documentary essays focusing on landmark architecture in the transnational Øresund region comprising Copenhagen and Malmö. I argue that the motif of construction and deconstruction is congruous to our understanding of the ways identities are negotiated vis-à-vis spatial experience. In the lms, the multiple trajectories of…[Read more]

What will it take to undomesticate the world—to begin to loosen humanity’s tight grasp on the planet’s spaces, structures, resources, and populations? Marie Darrieussecq’s short story “My Mother Told Me Monsters Do Not Exist” describes the intrusion of an unidentifiable creature into a fastidious woman’s apartment home, a modest but powerful scen…[Read more]