DEBATE
KEYNOTES
FELICITY COLLINS
The Afterlife of Colonial Violence in the ‘Double Life’ of David Gulpilil
If trauma is both a temporality (of afterwardsness) and the foundation of subjectivity (involving an encounter with the strangeness of the other) how might media encounters with the ‘double life’ of David Gulpilil (Australia’s most prominent Indigenous actor) unsettle current thinking about traumatic events and traumatised subjects?
Felicity Collins Keynote Synopsis (pdf format)
Felicity Collins teaches Cinema Studies in the School of Communication and Critical Enquiry at La Trobe University. She is the author of Australian Cinema After Mabo (2004) with Therese Davis, and Chief Investigator of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on Australian Screen Comedy, with Sue Turnbull and Susan Bye. She has written most recently on the iconography of colonial violence (Cultural Studies Review, 2008) and the celebrity interview as a form of ethical violence (Social Semiotics, in press 2008).
SUVENDRINI PERERA
Strange Fruit: Geographies of Trauma and Spaces of Exception
In 2004 aid workers approaching the devastated east coast of Sri Lanka were greeted by the eerie vision of bright-coloured saris and sarongs flapping from the tops of blighted coconut trees. The agonised wearers had hung there for a moment before being swept away by the swirling tsunami waters. A Dutch journalist wrote: ‘Sri Lankan trees bear strange fruit’. In this paper I explore stories and images of the east coast of Lanka as a geography of trauma.
Suvendrini Perera Keynote Synopsis (pdf format)
Suvendrini Perera (Curtin University of Technology) has published widely on topics relating to race, ethnicity, multiculturalism and refugee issues. Her recent keynote invitations include presentations at the World Congress of Sociologists (Central European University, Budapest); Performance and Asylum conference (Royal Holloway College, University of London); Interrogating Terror Conference (University of Brighton, UK); Asian-Australian Research Network Conference (Melbourne) and Postcolonial Politics Conference (University of Otago, NZ). She is currently completing an Australia Research Council-funded project on borders and junctions in the Asia-Pacific region. Her latest book is Australia and the Insular Imagination to be published by Palgrave, New York, in 2009.
SUSANNAH RADSTONE
Getting Over Trauma or What the Past Hides
What are the temporalities of trauma and how do its traces mark the present? This paper will suggest that Laplanchian psychoanalysis holds the potential to unsettle established views of trauma's relations with time and signification. Through a discussion of Michael Haneke's film Hidden, it will speculate on this revised approach to the relations between unsettled pasts, presents and futures.
Susannah Radstone Keynote Synopsis (pdf format)
Susannah Radstone teaches in the School of Social Sciences, Media and
Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Her recent publications
include The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory (2007)
and, with Katharine Hodgkin, eds., The Politics of Memory (2005) and Memory
Cultures (2005). Mapping Memory (co-edited with Bill Schwarz) is forthcoming
with Fordham University Press. Radstone is currently completing a book about
film and trauma studies: ‘Getting Over Trauma’.
JANET WALKER
Moving Testimonies and Geographies of Suffering: Perils and Fantasies of Belonging after Katrina
Documentary testimonies take various forms: from unedited video recordings to documentary films, from one-on-one reminiscence to site-specific public presentations and perambulations. Here we find the faces and voices that emanate from close or distant geographical locations, the sounds and images that animate our ubiquitous screens, the archives that we assemble and the histories we resuscitate. Focusing on the “Katrina diaspora” among other catastrophes, this presentation will explore some of ways that film and video testimonies reshape the geographies of trauma, place, and return.
Janet Walker Keynote Synopsis (pdf format)
Janet Walker is Professor and former chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Women's Studies Program and the Environmental Media Initiative of the Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television, and New Media. Her essays in the areas of film feminism, documentary, historiography, and trauma studies have been published in journals including Screen and Signs and she is the author or editor of Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry (1993), Feminism and Documentary (co-edited with Diane Waldman, 1999), Westerns: Films through History (2001), and Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (University of California Press, 2005). She directs an on-going project, Video Portraits of Survival, to create expressive documentary shorts about local residents who are survivors and refugees of the Holocaust, and is currently co-editing (with Bhaskar Sarkar) a book on documentary testimonies and writing a book about documentaries of evacuation, occupation, and return. |
