The University of Wisconsin-Madison
VISUAL CULTURE CLUSTER
Visiting Speaker Ella Shohat
Ella Shohat is Professor of cultural studies at New York University. She has lectured and published extensively on the intersection of gender, post/colonialism, multiculturalism and transnatioanlism as well as on Zionist discourse, orientalism and the representation of the Middle East, focusing largely on Israel/Palestine and the Arab-Jewish/ Mizrahi question. Her award-winning publications include Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (U. of Texas Press, 1989; a new edition is forthcoming from I.B. Tauris), Unthinking Eurocentrism (co-authored with Robert Stam, Routledge, 1994), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (co-edited, U. of Minnesota Press, 1997), Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (MIT Press & the New Museum, 1998), Forbidden Reminiscences, (Bimat Kedem LeSifrut Publishing, 2001) and Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (co-edited, Rutgers University Press, 2003).) Her book Taboo Memories, Undisciplined Words is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Shohat and Stam are currently in the final stages of writing The Culture Wars: A Debate in Translation (NYU press) and Flagging Patriotism (Routledge). Shohat is also co-editing a book on the Middle Eastern diasporas throughout the Americas (University of Michigan Press.) A recipient of Rockefeller fellowship, she has served on the editorial board of several journals, including Social Text, Critique and Meridians. Her writing has been translated into a number of languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, German, Polish, Italian, and Turkish.
Wednesday, October 19
5:30pm L140 Chazen Museum of Art
Screening of "Forget Baghdad" followed by a discussion with Ella Shohat "Taboo Memories: Diasporic Iraqi Voices"
Thursday, October 20
5:30pm
L140 Chazen Museum of Art
“Sacred Word, Profane Image: Theologies of Adaptation”
When applied to the realm of the visual, the word “taboo” is multiply
evocative, but the taboo is at times quite literal. The lecture will
reflect on the philosophical and historical consequences of the Second
Commandment of the Biblical proscription of “graven images” for the
metaphorical prohibition on translating representation from one medium
to another. As a mode of translation, the adaptation of words into
images has often been seen as an aesthetic challenge involving the
movement across two differing, even clashing, media. Given that the
status of words and images varies widely within and across cultures,
how can we speak of adaptation without addressing the veristic
substratum haunting both novel and film? What happens in the movement
from word to image within aesthetic traditions where verism has not
occupied center stage, and where the very act of visual representation
has been enmeshed in taboos and prohibitions? The lecture will try to
explore both the multifaceted relations between texts and images as
shaped within a Judeo-Islamic space, and the implications of these
relations for film as a medium and adaptation as a practice. Offering a
comparative framework, we will be concerned with the repercussions of
iconophobia and logophilia for the adaptation of the Bible and the
Quran to the screen? How has the notion of "fidelity" to the "Text"
clashed with diverse theologies of the "real?" The lecture will
investigate issues of visual culture, and more specifically the
theologically and philosophically fraught interface of word and image,
the textual and the visual.
Friday, October 21
9-11am
Workshop "The Culture Wars in Translation"
Seating for this workshop is limited and advanced reading is required. Please contact visualculture@education.wisc.edu to register and for further information.
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