EN 617

Identity Politics in Film

This course focuses on the various impacts of the advent and development of film as technology, art and politics. Our main goal will be to examine filmgoing as a modernizing yet colonizing social practice and films as cultural documents that mobilized imagination in the processes of nation-building. Informed by issues and problems tackled by such scholars as Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha and Ella Shohat among others, we will engage in in-depth analytic discussions of primarily non-Western national films in light of tradition and modernity, the urban and rural, women and family, body and sexuality, and colonialism and postcolonialism. Exclusion: EN692h.