Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: As Walter Benjamin noted, the production of commercial film and television constitutes a spectacle. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Hollywood and Hong Kong, I examine several visual images that are created and on- and off-screen forms of spectacle. I focus on the audience of media workers who mediate in the immediate site of production: film and television sets. Media workers form a preliminary audience that requires further study. Many media workers are not concerned with educating or enlightening audiences about how to be citizens or consumers; in fact, many of these media workers during filming consider audiences as secondary to themselves as spectators. To provide a historical anchor for my claim, I invoke Tom Gunning’s theorization of “cinema of attractions”. The inspiration for this early period of filmmaking – magic shows, vaudeville, and circuses - continues to permeate the character of film/TV production in Hollywood and Hong Kong. Early film’s key feature of provoking stimulus illustrates my point that forms of interactivity are happening long before paying audiences view the finished product. The immediate “audience” of media workers is a participatory one that “talks back to” the images on the factory floor of production in ways that show that reception is simultaneously occurring amid production. This immediate audience’s capacity to mediate should not be underestimated in the study of how and why media plays a powerful role since decisions about how imagery and performance are created are determined not only by studio executives and corporations but also by individuals “below-the-line” .

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Since 9/11 and the beginning of the war in Iraq, several museums across the country have displayed visions of American “freedoms” that conspicuously celebrate U.S. imperialism and militarism. Consonant—if not complicit—with neoconservative foreign policy, such patriotic displays provide cultural legitimacy to a war now widely discredited as an unnecessary mistake, as well as to the use of unilateral military force to spread American “freedom” transnationally. This paper will explore this recent phenomenon by interrogating the interrelationships between public space and historical memory, conceptions of neoliberal citizenship, and the gendered discourse of imperial subjectivity.

The paper will consider and compare three prominent examples of these post-9/11 politics of display: The Price of Freedom: Americans at War military history exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which opened on Veteran’s Day 2004 during the U.S. attack on Fallujah; the National Museum of American Patriotism in Atlanta, which opened on Independence Day 2004; and the McCormick-Tribune Freedom Museum in Chicago, which will open its doors on Michigan Avenue in the spring of 2006.

Examining how these three prominent museum spaces are marked by their strikingly similar narratives of American heroism, sacrifice and achievement reveals an acute moment of danger in the pubic representations of U.S. history, when a critical pedagogy is desperately needed to counter the hegemonic histories that promote the fulfillment of American style manifest destiny. Furthermore, these particular histories—including the Smithsonian’s—are underwritten by private donors, providing evidence for how post-culture wars neoliberal economic policies—which cut federal funding for cultural institutions—conveniently coalesce with neoconservative visions of the U.S. role on the global stage.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study provides a discursive analysis of the change in representation of images in Pepsi commercials in India. The author analyzes ads that appeared in 1990, 1997 and 2005. The research questions how these images helped to reinterpret cultural globalization, essentialization of hybrid, urban Indian identity, and media spectacle in postcolonial, post liberalized India. The author posits that Pepsi’s hybridized imageries are an attempt to conceal the multinational corporation’s imperialist tendencies and characterize a monolithic, homogenized face of urban India which legitimizes the increasing acceptance and circulation of global brands in the society.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: A globalized industry involving the processing and exhibition of cadavers has emerged since the 1990s. For anatomy exhibitions such as Bodies . . .The Exhibition and BodyWorlds human cadavers are "plastinated," primarily in China, and then distributed to

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Narrowly construed, the purpose of this paper is to use the rhetoric generated by the execution of Saddam Hussein as a point of departure to examine if, and how, it illustrates an emerging European identity, particularly one constructed from a perceived opposition to a barbaric, stagnant, and vigilante American presence. It questions: how does the European response to Saddam Hussein’s execution reflect the belief that the abolition of capital punishment has become a distinctly “European” trait? Moreover, how does the use of such rhetoric reinforce particular cultural convictions about Europe as a civilized entity while simultaneously reaffirming the barbaric quality of an alien other? Ultimately, this paper concludes that what is important about the execution of Saddam Hussein is neither whether the execution was indeed barbaric, nor whether the photographs or videos depicting such an act somehow compromised the European quest for the global elimination of capital punishment. Rather, it determines that what is important are the multiple ways in which hierarchical language is deployed as an element to structure and order individual nations, a practice that attempts to define “Europe” by defining what it is not.