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Special Topics in Film – Racialization in Asian Diasporic Media
170 004 | CCN: 32817
Location: Dwinelle 142
Date and Time: M, W 9:30am - 10:59am
4 Units
This course interrogates the mutual articulation of race and the development of modern technologies including cinema, television, and other modes of modern media. Moving across different periods and media formations, we will address how race as a social category and cultural fantasy has been materialized through specific film technologies, representational norms, and institutional networks. At the same time, we will also look at a range of films and television shows that challenge protocols for constituting race as an object of knowledge and control. Focusing primarily on Asiatic racial formations, this course will include films by Lulu Wang, Mira Nair, and Josef von Sternberg among others; consider stars like Sessue Hayakawa, Anna May Wong, BTS, and Ali Wong; and will explore issues ranging from techno-orientalism, the history of the senses, racial melancholia, comparative frameworks for racialization, and the role of media technologies in organizing resistance movements and romantic or sexual desire. Throughout the course, we will situate the imbrication of race and audiovisual culture in its wider cultural contexts, such as the histories of capitalism, globalization, and questions of gender and sexuality.