Syracuse University live web panel
Date: 10 December 2010.
Time: 9:00 – 10:00am.
Location: Soundings Theatre, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington.
A live web panel presented by Syracuse University including:
(In Syracuse, USA)
Dr Anne T. Demo (Chair)
Professor Amos Kiewe: “Unsolved Civil Rights Murders: A Public Memory Project”
Some fifty years after the last gasp of the Civil Rights struggle culminated in dozens of related murders, scholars and activists began re-opening unsolved related murders. Though the initial purpose in opening these unsolved Civil Rights era murders was to bring culprits to justice, the legal and other difficulties made it clear that solving these cases was not likely but that telling the stories of these murders would be a more productive endeavor. The successful efforts of one individual—Keith Beauchamp—in documenting the murder of Emmett Louis Till would bring the Justice Department to reopen cold Civil Rights cases. Yet, the enormity of the task—researching and documenting more than a hundred cases brought activists and documentarians like Keith Beauchamp to partner with academic institutions. Syracuse University entered this project primarily for realizing this project’s public memory potential. The Public Memory project was already an established entity and faculty-scholars were on hand to shape this project into one that would tell the story of individual Civil Rights murders by turning them into public memory documentation. Over a three year period, some fifty or so cases had been studied and documented, leaving to others a narrative of documentation and visuals that collectively put single murders in the larger context of the Civil Rights movement, the story of individual events, people and turmoil.
Associate Professor Roger Hallas: “Queering Robben Island: Anachronism and Public Memory in PROTEUS”
Robben Island is one of the most politically charged sites in South Africa. Although it has a long history of imprisonment dating back to the 18th century, its contemporary significance stems from the period 1961-1991 when it held apartheid’s most important political prisoners. Today a memorial site, Robben Island bears a dual representational burden as both site of brutal colonial subjugation and liberating political resistance. This paper examines how John Greyson and Jack Lewis’s 2003 film Proteus reframes this historical legacy through the queer optic of an obscure archival record from 1735. Set on the Dutch Cape Colony in the early 18th century and based on an actual trial, Proteus explores the ten-year relationship between two convicts on Robben Island—a Dutch sailor, Rijkhaart Jacobsz, and a Khoi herder, Claas Blank—who are tried, convicted, and executed for “mutually perpetrated” sodomy in 1735. Lewis and Greyson became fascinated by the central question raised by the archival record: what kind of a relationship did the men have and how did they perceive it? This question of how to name structures the film in both formal and thematic ways, including its complex use of historical anachronisms from 1960s South Africa (court stenographers with beehive hairdos, jeeps, radios, wetbag torture). This incongruous narrative strategy emphasizes how history comes to us only through explicit acts of interpretation and translation, and more specifically, urges us to read the 18th century narrative of sexual oppression in relation to the political struggle against apartheid.
And (in Wellington, NZ)
Professor Kendall Phillips
Web Panel
Anne Demo is assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Rhetoric and the School of Art and Design at Syracuse University. Professor Demo’s work explores the relationship between rhetoric, identity, and U.S. cultural politics through two primary research concentrations. Her primary area of research has focused on the visual rhetoric of contemporary immigration policy and politics. A past recipient of the National Communication Association’s Golden Monograph award, Demo is co-editing, Sighting Memory: Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form with Bradford James Vivian. She has published articles in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Environmental History, and Women’s Studies in Communication.
Amos Kiewe is the chair of Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. He is coauthor of a previous publication by Texas A&M University Press, FDR’s Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (2003), as well as three other books and a number of articles and book chapters on presidential rhetoric. His Ph.D is from Ohio University.
Roger Hallas is associate professor of English at Syracuse University. He is the author of Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness and the Queer Moving Image (Duke University Press 2009) and co-editor of The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (Wallflower Press, 2007). He has also published in Camera Obscura, GLQ, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Millennium Film Journal, The Scholar and the Feminist and Afterimage.
Professor Kendall Phillips is Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. His research attends to the intersections between citizenship, rhetoric and culture with particular interest in issues of memory, film and controversy. He has published several books including, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, Framing Public Memory, and Controversial Cinema: The Films that Outraged America and his essays have appeared in such journals as Literature/Film Quarterly, Communication Monographs and Philosophy and Rhetoric. Kendall holds a Ph.D from the Pennsylvania State University and has taught at Syracuse for the past ten years where he has received several awards including the University Scholar/Teacher of the Year (2008) and the Judith Greenberg Seinfeld Distinguished Faculty Fellowship (2009).
See profile on the website
