ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar will explore treatments of the “human” family in visual culture, e.g., theater, cinema, photography, television, performance art, painting, and other visual arts. In what ways are families portrayed as something other than human? Why is performing the drama of human families and/or the human drama of families a site of contested values? How or why is the visual mode particularly suited to the representation of the human family drama? The goal of this seminar is to compare families and their humanity (or lack thereof) from different cultural and national perspectives and across the ages, from ancient times to the present.

Friday, March 24

Gender, Family, and the State

Marta Wilkinson, University of California, Santa Barbara
“‘I’ is for Antigone”
Wendy Nielsen, Montclair State University
“Inhuman Strength: the Daughter in Bourgeois Drama”
Bastian Heinsohn, UC Davis
“Family revised: The state as father figure and the transformation of the traditional family in GDR cinema”
Irune del Rio Gabiola, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“Post/National Families On the Stage: Reterritorializations of Caribeñidad in the Diaspora”

Saturday, March 25

Race and Family

Gail Finney, University of California, Davis
“Family Trauma Cinema as Inflected by Race: The Examples of Monster’s Ball and Antwone Fisher”
Toby Weisslitz, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“Re-defining Family Units: The Portrayal of Gamins in La vendedora de rosas and Pixote”
Yianna Liatsos, University of Oklahoma
“Genealogical Catharsis and the Epidermal Consciousness of the Female Body in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story”
Gustav Arnold, University of North Dakota
“The Phantom Invariably Comes Back: Bert Hellinger’s Systemic Phenomenological Therapy and Ken Wilber’s Transpersonal Stages of Consciousness”

Sunday, March 26

Theoretical Approaches to Family

Brian Martin, Williams College
“From ‘Gay Paris’ to ‘Gay Famille’: Emerging Queer Families in New French Film
Yilin Liao, Purdue University
“From the Falling Down to the Raising Up”
Cheryl-Anne Panlilio, University of Southern California
“A Topsy-Turvy Aesthetic: the Function of the Family in the Work of Mike Leigh”
Donna Souder, Texas Woman’s University
“Images and Metaphor of the Domestic Feminine: Barthes, Buffy, and Re-Humanizing the Mythic Family”