Annual SIG Meeting: Review 2022-23, Conference Plans & Looking Ahead

Dear Colleagues!

What a wonderful annual meeting we had with our WMS members! 

We want to update members on the review of the past year and the plans for the upcoming year.

***For the past year & the 2023 Denver conference:

1. Graduate Student Writing Prize Winner: Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Chicago, “Vertical Interference: Video, Drone Witnessing, and the Myth of Precision Targeting”

Abstract: Artists and filmmakers have frequently problematized drone warfare through their creative practices, contesting military surveillance and violence by appropriating, parodying, and turning the drone’s gaze back at itself. Challenging and subverting the myth of “precision targeting”—the military’s claim to perfect accuracy in aiming their weapons only at “bad guys”—is central to artists’ engagement with drone warfare. By looking at recent work by Nicolas Brynolfson, George Barber, and eteam, Ljungbäck argues that these artists pose drone vision—how and what drones see and look at—as a site of compromised looking, where the indexical and objective is rarely just that, but always layered by and interpreted through discourse, ideology, compression, and noise. By performing “drone witnessing,” these artists tease out the connective tissue between state surveillance and remote warfare, raising key questions about sovereignty and autonomy in the age of operational images.

2. Eileen Rositzka Travel Grant Winners

  • Anat Dan, University of Pennsylvania
  • Daria Goncharova, University of Kentucky
  • Yulia Gilich, University of California Santa Cruz

3. Sponsored Panels

F26  Representation and Militarism

Chair: Mary Schmitt, Quinnipiac University

  • Mary Schmitt, Quinnipiac University, “Reading Black Panther Through/With The Spook Who Sat by the Door: Lessons on Black Internationalism and US Militarism”
  • Karina Griffith, University of Toronto, Berlin University of Art (UdK), “G.I. Dreams in Black Authored German Cinema”
  • Samantha Welwood, University of Texas – Dallas, “Disabling Power: The Vilified Fat Body in WWII American Propaganda Animations”
  • Dalina Perdomo Alvarez, Michigan State University, “Intervening Islands: Post-Militarism in Contemporary Puerto Rican Video Art”

I5     Fantasy and Memory: The Cultural Legacies of War Media

Chair: Isaac Blacksin, University of Southern California

  • Isaac Blacksin, University of Southern California, “Cinematic Fantasy and Military Imagination in the War on Terror and Beyond”
  • Tony Grajeda, U. of Central Florida, “Remembering the Iraq War: Reflections on Twenty Years of War”
  • Pierre Folliet, Yale University, “Visualizing the Algerian Civil War: Ideological Warfare and the Control of Images”
  • Navnidhi Sharma, New York University, “Fractious Neighborships: India-China encounters on the Bombay film screen”

K5   Warscapes: Mediating Environments of and at War

Chair: Cortland Rankin, Bowling Green State University

  • Cortland Rankin, Bowling Green State University, “Façades, Firepower, and Film: Military Training Cities and Documentary Critiques of the New Military Urbanism”
  • Anat Dan, University of Pennsylvania, “Wounded Landscapes: Documentary and the Afterlife of War”
  • Yulia Gilich, University of California Santa Cruz, “The War on Ukraine and the Russian Menace in Western Visual Culture”
  • Zenia Kish, The University of Tulsa, “‘Ukrainian Farmer Steals Russian Tank’: Tractors as Viral Wartime Farm Media”

L20  Vietnam Withdrawal: The Persistence of the Vietnam War in American Culture

Chair: Stacy Takacs, Oklahoma State University

  • Stacy Takacs, Oklahoma State University, “Rumors of Peace, Greatly Exaggerated: Six O’Clock Follies and the Cultural War over Vietnam”
  • Clifford Marks, University of Wyoming, “The Wrong and Right of It: Watchmen, Vietnam, and the Tulsa Race Massacre”
  • Kathleen McClancy, Texas State University, “‘I’m just bored of men like you’: Burning Down Nostalgic Masculinity”

Recommended Panels/Roundtables

B14 Revisiting the Cold War Western

Chair: Austin Fisher, Bournemouth University

  • Costanza Salvi, Universidad de Zaragoza, “The Revolutionary Implication of Duel in the Sun (1947): Irrationality and Conformism in the First Phase of the Cold War”
  • Austin Fisher, Bournemouth University, “Un-American Activities: Johnny Guitar and the Blacklist Western”
  • Jenny Barrett, Edge Hill University, “‘They Will Speak in Our Language’: The White Man’s Memory of the Indian in Three Cold War Westerns”
  • Andrew Nelson, The University of Utah, “‘Instant and insensate hatred of anything Indian’: Responding to The Searchers, Then and Now”

D25 Navigating Politics and Conflict in 20th Century Media

Chair: Heather Hendershot, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Julide Etem, University of Virginia, “Becoming White to Win Hearts, Minds and Wars”
  • Heather Hendershot, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “The Whole World Wasn’t Watching: Revisiting the 1972 Democratic National Convention as a Political and Televisual Event”
  • Thamyris Almeida, Dartmouth College, “Vila Sésamo: Cold War Politics and the Brazilian Adaptation of Sesame Street”
  • Hongwei Thorn Chen, Tulane University, “The Logistical Lament: Cinema and the ‘Soft’ Infrastructures of Total Mobilization in China’s Second World War”

L27  ROUNDTABLE Counter/Forensic Violence

Chair: Sasha Crawford-Holland, University of Chicago

  • Toby Lee, New York University
  • Laliv Melamed, University of Groningen
  • Pooja Rangan, Amherst College
  • Patrick Brian Smith, University of Warwick
  • LaCharles Ward, University of Pennsylvania

4. See the Google doc for other conference Presentations of Interest:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10srUe5T6vwALr3UGJbLDj_ObLX7BmFPdEwxOxjc8cR4/edit

5. Recent Member Publications

Robert Burgoyne, “The Afterlife of Stereotype: Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, DJ

Spooky and The Birth of a Nation” in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: Art, Culture and Ethics in Black and White, edited by Jenny Barrett, Douglas Field, and Ian Scott, Manchester University Press, 2022.

Anna Froula, Sheena Eagan, Nicole Kukuchka, Sean Morris, Andrea Kitta,

Zackary Perkinson, and Jonathan Vincent. “Odysseus Goes to University: The Veteran to Scholar Boot Camp at East Carolina University,” Journal of Veteran Studies, vol. 8, issue 3, pp. 37-46, 2022, DOI: https://doi.org/10.21061/jvs.v8i3.344. 

Anna Froula with Sheena Eagan, “‘That’s How We Learn’: Ben Fountain Talks with Student Veterans at East Carolina University, ”North Carolina Literary Review, 2022.

Tony Grajeda, “Stand Your Ground: Neoliberal Horrors, The Purge Franchise, and the Allegorical Moment of U.S. Trauma” in Screening the Crisis: U.S. Cinema and Social Change in the Wake of the 2008 Crash, edited by Juan A. Tarancón and Hilaria Loyo, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, pp. 131-147.

Qui-Ha Hoang Nguyen, “Cinema of Care: The Child Figure, The Collective, and War in The Little Girl of Ha Noi,” Feminist Media Histories, vol. 9, issue 1, 2023, pp. 35-51, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.1.33.

Cortland Rankin, “Forgettable Tales of a Forgotten War: Narrative, Memory, and the Erasure of the Korean War in American Cinema,” Journal of Popular Film & Television, vol. 50, issue 4, 2022, pp. 178-195, https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2022.2145453.

Vivienne Tailor, “Harbingers, Pestilence, and Metaphors: China’s Evolving Perspectives on Locusts from the Shang Dynasty to Mo Yan” in Depictions of Pestilence in Literature, Media, and Art, edited by Kübra Baysal, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023, https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-9355-8/.

***Plans for the upcoming year:

  1. We’ll continue with our monthly newsletters
    1. Please email Vivienne.Tailor@cgu.edu if you want to share a CFP, recent publication, etc.
  2. We’d love for members to share film and book reviews that Vivienne can post on the website for all to enjoy. Please contact her to share a review of a classic or recent work.
  3. This summer, we’d like to have more meetings for members to organize panels/workshops/roundtables/seminars for the 2024 SCMS conference. Stay tuned!
  4. Lastly, after the conference, we’re interested in organizing Book Talks, Reading Rooms, or Workshops for works in progress if SIG members want to take advantage of these. Contact Vivienne if you’re interested!
    1. For the Book Talk, members can all read selections from and discuss their work. 
    2. Reading Rooms can be organized around member publications (which a guest speaker can share and discuss with participants) or these could function as focused reading groups aimed at a particular topic of interest.  
    3. Synchronous or asynchronous workshops could provide opportunities for members to receive feedback on drafts (preferably advanced drafts) of works in progress. 

Overall, we’re so pleased with the work of our members and want to celebrate your accomplishments and support members in networking.

Please contact us with any suggestions for the upcoming year!

Best to all,

Cortland, Nathan, and Vivienne

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