Adopted - The Movie Poster

For more details on the movie, see the previous post!

Love is not enough….

Of the 1.5 million adopted children in the United States, international adoptees are the fastest growing segment - and most adopted are Asian girls. First-time director, Barb Lee, goes deep into the intimate lives of two well-meaning families and shows us the subtle challenges they face. One family is just beginning the process of adopting a baby from China and is filled with hope and possibility. The other family's adopted Korean daughter is now 32 years old. Prompted by her adoptive mother's terminal illness, she tries to create the bond they never had. The results are riveting, unpredictable and telling. While the two families are at opposite ends of the journey, their stories converge to show us that love alone isn't enough to make a family work.

ADOPTED

(2008/USA/English/80min/Documentary)

Directed by Barb Lee

LECTURE HALL, HUMANITIES

18TH APRIL 2011, MONDAY

2.30PM

'Identity' Practicals

Let us do an exercise!

Stand on one leg and with the finger tip of the other, draw a few circles on the ground. Now assume an expression of coyness ...

Well, well.

We have read two articles on identity, which talked about anything but identity, and now let us try applying it to a text! Our next reading session is a movie and a discussion that should emerge from it.

Adopted. The movie is a 2008 documentary directed by first time director Barb Lee.

It is an American documentary on inter-racial, international adoptions in the US and the problems that entails.


Read the plot summary below.

Of the 1.5 million adopted children in the United States, international adoptees are the fastest growing segment - and most adopted are Asian girls. While many of their stories are heartwarming and play into our self-image of American compassion and generosity, the realities are much more complex. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, adoptees have significantly more behavioral problems than non-adopted children. 'Adopted' reveals the grit rather than the glamor of trans-racial adoption. First-time director, Barb Lee, goes deep into the intimate lives of two well-meaning families and shows us the subtle challenges they face. One family is just beginning the process of adopting a baby from China and is filled with hope and possibility. The other family's adopted Korean daughter is now 32 years old. Prompted by her adoptive mother's terminal illness, she tries to create the bond they never had. The results are riveting, unpredictable and telling. While the two families are at opposite ends of the journey, their stories converge to show us that love alone isn't enough to make a family work.

 Some movie, eh?
So, now on to the trailer.




The movie screening will be held at
2.30pm on Monday 18th April, 2011 
in the Humanities Lecture Hall.
The movie is in English, and no subs.
 
I think the fun will start after the movie ends! We need volunteers for this theory adventure! Try applying what we have read in the previous two classes to the movie we are going to watch and see what happens. Hopefully, something less tragic than the movie itself! :D 

All are welcome for the movie! You should have read the articles to participate in the ensuing argument/ discussion.

Posters coming up soon.

For the link hungry ones:
Movie Website | IMDB | Random Review

Reading Hall and Brubaker

Thus we channelled a regular class into our good old reading club, without missing a beat! Did anyone knew it happened? But oh yes, it did! ;)

So, yes, we are back in our reading club, and the themes of our reading this time around is 'Identity'
The first reading of Stuart Hall's Who Needs 'Identity?' happened on Thursday 11 am at the Lecture Hall without much fanfare. The next reading is on Monday, 11th April, 2011. The essay is by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper and is titled, Beyond "Identity". More on the essays and the authors below.

Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall is a Jamaican-born, Oxford-educated cultural theorist and one of the founding members of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (now, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies).  Hall's work covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies, taking a post-Gramscian stance. He regards language-use as operating within a framework of power, institutions and politics/economics. This view presents people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time.

Read more on Hall and his works here.

Rogers Brubaker

Rogers Brubaker is a sociologist who taught at UCLA from 1991. Rogers Brubaker has written widely on social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and ethnicity.
You can contact him at brubaker@soc.ucla.edu  (No!)
Read more on Rogers Brubaker here and here.

The essay is co-written by historian Frederick Cooper, who specializes in colonialization, decolonialization and African history. Cooper received his Ph.D from Yale University in 1974 and is currently professor of history at New York University.

Who Needs 'Identity'?

 Though written as an introduction to a book, Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay, the essay began to take a life of its own, anthologized in critical readers of cultural studies as well as identity.

The essay tries to recover Identity from its present day redundancy. Essentialized identities of the Cartesian metaphysics are now looked down upon and advanced theories of postmodernism renders Identity as a superfluous category. So then, he asks, Who Needs Identity?

Hall tries to create a history of this concept through cultural theory. He links Althusser, Lacan, Foucault and finally, Butler to weave a new idiom to speak about identities and its relevance to present day social analysis. On its way, Hall also brilliantly summarises these theoreticians's works, helping the readers adjust to his new history. 

Read the essay (PDF)

Beyond "Identity"

Brubaker's and Cooper's essay features in Rogers Brubaker's book, Ethinicity Without Groups (2004), where he has critically engaged prevailing analytical stances in the study of ethnicity and nationalism and sought to develop alternative analytical resources. 
Brubaker and Cooper also starts from the same premise as Hall, but goes on to radically different conclusions. While, for Hall, there is some hope in salvaging the lost pride of identity, Brubaker and Cooper couldn't be persudaded to think of identity as indispensable. They suggest a new idiom to talk about issues that are usually cloaked under the umbrella term identity, making it a very contradictory concept, deprived of any actual content.
Read the essay (PDF)

So, there we have it, two essays, and yes, please club, read the essays and come to the CCL department at 11 am, on Monday. The Reading Club, is full on!

You might have noticed that we have gone for a image-heavy post this time. Very much inspired by Jananie's (yes!) wonderful photo+painting blog Of kills, quills and pills. 

New Year, New Resolutions!

It's been sometime, ne?

Yeah, I don't even remember when the last post was (figure of speech). But here we are, in a new year. Well, we are one month done, but still a new year!

Let us read! We shall provide online copies of materials for each week and we are going to READ them and post comments on them and meet as well, whenever possible. :)

And for the first session we are reading J. L. Austin's first lecture from How to Do Things with Words

This is one of the essays which are oft-quoted, but seldom read.

But many of us will remember this quote and its performative significance.

'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' as uttered when smashing the bottle against the stem.

And thus,

What are we to call a sentence or an utterance of this type? I propose to call it a performative sentence or a performative utterance, or, for short, 'a performative.'

Now that the context is laid out, let's start with...

J. L. Austin was born in Lancaster and educated at Oxford, where he became a professor of philosophy following several years of service in British intelligence during World War II. Although greatly admired as a teacher, Austin published little of his philosophical work during his brief lifetime. Students gathered his papers and lectures in books that were published posthumously, including Philosophical Papers (1961) and Sense and Sensibilia (1962). Austin

In "A Plea for Excuses" (1956), Austin explained and illustrated his method of approaching philosophical issues by first Austin patiently analyzing the subtleties of ordinary language. In How to Do Things with Words (1961), the transcription of Austin's James lectures at Harvard, application of this method distinguishes between what we say, what we mean when we say it, and what we accomplish by saying it, or between speech acts involving locution, illocution (or "performative utterance"), and perlocution.

So now, on to the essay itself...
Click to View

More?
Read about his Lectures, or, if you are feeling adventurous,read the whole of the lectures.

Notes on the Reading Club
"You changed everything!" Yes, some arbitrary decisions, I hope will provoke some reactions.
A complete re-design is what you least expected, I am sure! But it was much-needed is what I believe. The question remains however: what is the re-design you had in mind? Comments welcome!

We will be showing films as a reading club. We are a reading club which shows movies. Cool enough, right? ;)