Abstract

The Screen Media Group welcomes Prof. Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Professor of Comparative Film and Cultural Studies at the University of New South Wales, for a seminar on the role of the child in film.

Prof. Donald’s talk will draw on French and Francophone cinema scholar Bill Marshall, following the lead of Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic, has traced the idea of cinema ‘beyond the nation’. Likewise, several theorists have noted the uneven juxtaposition between localism, parochialism and cosmopolitanism for ‘ordinary’ migrants who carve out lives across and between places, identifications, competencies, and affective connections. The argument here is that children are both ordinary and beyond the nation, and in certain ways’ beyond theory’, or at least beyond theoretical premises on childhood that are designed, as Castaneda has noted, to constitute ‘the adult’s pre-subjective other’. The extra-territoriality of the child may then confront the grounds of racism in national formations.

All welcome, no registration required. Followed by a Q&A.