Public Lecture by Prof. Zygmunt Bauman

On 16 December, Prof. Zygmunt Bauman (Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds) will give a public lecture, entitled 'Between separation and integration: Strategies of cohabitation in the era of diasporization and Internet'. The lecture is a part of the Academy Colloquium Connected migrants: encapsulation or cosmopolitanism?, organised by Dr Koen Leurs and Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi.

Liquid Modernity
Zygmunt Bauman is one of the world's most eminent social theorists writing on a number of common themes, including globalisation, modernity and postmodernity, consumerism, and morality. Well known for his groundbreaking work Liquid Modernity (2000), he is the author of 57 books and over a hundred articles.

Publications in recent years include monographs and co-authored books such as Strangers at our door, Babel, Practices of Selfhood, State of Crisis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity, and Liquid Modernity, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (all published with Polity).

Practical information
Date: 16 December
Location: Trippenhuis Building, Kloveniersburgwal 29, 1011 JV Amsterdam
For more information or to register, please visit the website of the KNAW.

Doing Gender lecture by Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Two days after her films are screened in the PCI Film Series, Frances Négron Muntaner will provide a Doing Gender lecture. Her talk is titled 'What To Do with All This Beauty? The Political Economy of Latina Stardom in the Twenty-first Century'.

The talk explores the political economy of a common stereotype in U.S. media, the Latina beauty, since its emergence in the late nineteenth century to its present incarnations. The presentation will also inquire about how and why this is the only Latino stereotype that produces major stars like Jennifer Lopez, Eva Longoria, and Salma Hayek; and examine the racial, gender, cultural, and market contexts that allow contemporary Latina actresses to leverage their beauty capital into influence inside the entertainment industry, domestic and international politics - to a point.

Practical information
Date: 13 October
Time: 16.00 - 17.30
Location: Drift 21, room 1.05
Please register by sending an email to nog@uu.nl.

PCI Film Series 2016/2017

The Postcolonial Studies Initiative is happy to announce its 7th film series with a selection of films, shown monthly, that draw on a variety of different contexts in our postcolonial world. The series is organized annually and invites all interested in our European postcolonial present and the representation of its political, cultural and aesthetic realities and challenges.

This year the focus will be on the relation between documentary filmmaking and postcolonial theory, and their deep entanglement in the critique of realism and representation of the other. We want to explore, through visual representations and cinematographic narratives, how postcolonial realities are analyzed and re-imagined in contemporary film.

Each film will be introduced briefly by scholars connected to the PCI and international guests and filmmakers. The series will take place every third Tuesday of the month, starting with September until May.

The first four editions

20 September         The Lost Ones. Long Journey Home (2011, USA, 42 min)
Introduced by Prof. Susan Rose (Dickinson College, USA)

11 October               Brincando El Charco. Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, USA, 55 min)
Small City, Big Change (2013, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, USA, 10 min)
Introduced by Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Columbia University, USA)
With a Q&A session

15 November           Lift (2001, Marc Isaacs, UK, 25 min)
Calais, the Last Border (2003, Marc Isaacs, UK, 60 min)
Introduced by Dr Domitilla Olivieri (Gender Studies, UU)

13 December           The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah, Ghana, 2011, 90 min)
Introduced by Jamila Mascat (Gender Studies, UU)

Practical information

Location                    Drift, 21 room 0.32
Time                           19.15-21.30

First edition: The Lost Ones. Long Journey Home 
Introduced by Susan Rose (Dickinson College, USA)

 

The Lost Ones: Long Journey Home is a documentary film that weaves together Native American oral histories and historical, archival research as it pieces together the story of two Lipan Apache children captured along the Texas-Mexican border in 1877.

After the massacre of their village known, as Remolino or the "Day of Screams," the children rode from fort to fort with the U.S. Calvary for three years before being taken to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (CIIS) in Pennsylvania – thousands of miles from their home. Carlisle, established in 1879 at the end of the “Indian wars,” served as the model for off-reservation boarding schools across the United States and Canada. Its goal was to “civilize” and assimilate Indian children to Euro-American culture: “education for extinction.” The children’s ties with their family were completely severed; the only legacy the children left was Kesetta's three-year-old son who became the youngest child ever to be enrolled at CIIS. While the family remembered the Lost Ones every year, they never knew what had happened to the children or where they were buried until two centuries later.

This documentary reveals the mystery of how on the 132th anniversary of Remolino, Lipan Apache descendants from California, Texas, and New Mexico came to Carlisle to offer blessings so the children could be sent home. The film demonstrates the power of collective memory, the impact of intergenerational trauma, and the ways in which photographs can be used as a form of both erasure and reclamation.

Practical information
Date: 20 September
Time: 19.15 - 21.30
Location: Drift 21, room 0.32