Jake St Clair L&S Arts & Humanities
Mobilized Forms: Debility & Representational Politics in World Cinema
This project examines the politics of representation within World Cinema. Staging a critical analysis of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and The Blue Caftan (2022), this project explores the intersections between World Cinematic production, narrative, and circulation with forms of cultural imperialism. The formal, narrative, and genre conventions of these films will be read primarily through Jasbir Puar’s work on debility in The Right to Maim (2017) as well as through contemporary scholarship on affective economies and queer diaspora. This study should interrogate the sphere of World Cinema and how its attendant discourse remains invested—often by Western funding bodies, production companies, and consumer audiences—in debilitating and/or exceptionalizing forms of representation. Anchored in a World Cinema studies methodology, I argue these films demonstrate what Minoo Moallem refers to as the production and mediatization of the Nation-State as transnational commodity. Both films demonstrate how World Cinema—especially in Hamid Naficy’s terms ‘Accented Cinema’—does not merely represent the Nation but actively shapes how it is imagined, mobilized, negotiated, and consumed.
Message To Sponsor
Thanks very much to my donors for their generous support. Your support has enabled me to pursue my academic interests and hopefully contribute meaningful scholarship to the field of World Cinema studies and beyond. Continued investment in critical scholarship is both imperative and deeply appreciated; I am committed to making the most of this opportunity.