Saturday (April 12)
11:00am - 12:30pm: Talk by Maple Razsa (McGraw 215)

"Riot Porn:" Video, Militant Protest and Political Mimesis
Documentary film, it has long been held, has a unique potential to promote progressive change. But where exactly are we to locate this power? Often, it is assumed to reside in the social critique of documentary realism, i.e. in a film.s ability to make viewers aware of injustices in their historical world. Perhaps, but in this talk I explore what I believe is a largely neglected and more direct aspect of documentary.s political potency. Drawing on evidence from my long-term fieldwork with militant social movements in Southeastern Europe, I attend to the apparent ability of videos of radical protest to incite similar actions. In dialogue with a growing theoretical literature on documentary, I reflect on what this political mimesis may tell us more broadly about the power of nonfiction images.
(Co-sponsors: AGSA, Department of Anthropology)
Funded by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community

Sunday (April 13)
7:00pm - 9:00pm: Film screening & Discussion w/ Diana Allan (Cornell Cinema, WSH)
(Co-sponsors: Department of Anthropology, Near Eastern Studies, Peace Studies)

Chatila "Chatila: Beirut" is a collaborative video project shot in a Palestinian refugee camp in the suburbs of Beirut in 2001. Collectively conceived with of a group of children living in the camp, most of the interviews and many of the representations of everyday life were shot by them. The film explores camp life through their eyes and in particular focuses on the politicization of camp youth and the impact that TV coverage of the Al-Aqsa Intifada had on them and their families at that time. .Chatila. critically examines Palestinian political culture in the diaspora; the ways in which refugees "outside" articulate a sense of belonging to Palestine and how they relate to the current struggle taking place in the Occupied Territories. It also considers the extent to which memories of first generation refugees from 1948 continue to be transmitted to second and third generation Palestinians, and more generally the means by which a cultural heritage is being preserved in exile for generations that have never seen Palestine.

Still Life Still Life is the first panel in a triptych of video portraits with three generations of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon that explores the different ways in which memory is mediated. It considers how a series of photos brought to Sidon, Lebanon by Said Otruk, an elderly refugee from Palestine, now mediate his experience and memory of his life in Acre before 1948. It also reveals how the .reality. represented in these images has in fact become conflated with them.

Excerpts from the Nakba Archive As the ranks of first-generation Palestinian refugees continue to thin and hope of return appears increasingly remote, the symbolic value placed on 1948, as the key date in Palestinian history, continues to rise. This period has come to be known in Arabic as al-Nakba, literally .the catastrophe.. The Nakba Archive, a grassroots oral history collective in Lebanon, has recorded over 450 eyewitness testimonies that reconstruct, through personal memories, the social, cultural, and political life in Palestine prior to 1948 and the events that led to the expulsion. A series of excerpts from this collection will be screened as part of the program.

For more information please contact Chika Watanabe at cw326@cornell.edu

Kathryn S. March - Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies
Tuesdays 11:15 am - 12:15
Risley Dining Hall

Kathryn S. March - Himalayan Topics
Thrusday, 12:15 to 1:15PM
Risley Dining Hall