Browsing by Subject "visuality"
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Item Open Access The Anti-Iconicity of Blackness: A Theological Reading of the Modern Racial Optic(2015) Wong, Jessica WaiFongRecent focus on the police treatment of dark bodies has brought the visual perception of race to the forefront of national discourse. It has raised the question of why certain people are seen as a greater social threat than others. The current project engages this issue, offering a Christian theological reading of the problem of modern visuality in relation to race and gender as well as a constructive way forward.
Using Byzantine iconophile theology, namely, the concepts of iconic and anti-iconic, as the governing framework, this dissertation teases out the theologically charged nature of visuality deployed by the modern, western racial optic. Beginning with an exploration of the modern optic in the United States (chapter 1), this project applies the analytical framework of Byzantine iconophile visual theology (chapter 2) to the racial optic as it emerges in a modern form during the Colonial Period (chapter 3) and develops during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (chapter 4).
Through this theological study of the deployment of the racial optic upon bodies, it becomes clear that there are structural and procedural similarities that exist between the bodily evaluation, categorization, and conversion that take place within the liturgical practices surrounding the Christian icon of Jesus Christ and those belonging to the cultural liturgy of the racial optic, build around western modernity’s holy icon – the white male. In both cases, people are transformed by the practice of veneration. In both cases, the external body functions as an indication of internal character, revealing one’s state of fitness for inclusion within civilized society. Understanding the visual practice of the modern racial optic through Byzantine iconophile theology’s iconic and anti-iconic sheds light upon why the presence of those considered dark, deformed, and abnormal has been and continues to be treated as a threat to the order and wellbeing of the modern, western social body.
Item Open Access The Gaze of “Chaos”: Temporal-Spatial Migration and Power Dynamics in a Globalizing Post-Socialist China(2020) Zhang, WenxianThe thesis approaches the positionality of visuality within third-world cinema by examining the case of transnational documentary filmmaking. In past decades, China’s post-socialist transformation has altered not only its local conditions but also transcended the national and cultural borders. Such shift can be significantly captured by the perspective of Chinese documentary since the 1990s. Produced outside of the state-owned studios and exhibited on international film festivals and online platforms, Chinese documentary is a transnational cinematic production from the very beginning. Current research illustrates its positionality of “minor cinema” as resistance to China’s mainstream cinema, but this binary term oversimplifies the uneven tensions of the state power, transnational forces, and the shifting aesthetic paradigms that constitute the spectrum of documentary in a globalizing post-socialist China.
This research undertakes a critical reading of Zhou Hao’s documentary practice. Unlike many of his counterparts’ “on-the-spot” realism, Zhou proposes the conception of “hundun”(混沌), literally meaning chaos and disorder, to represent the ambiguous reality of China in his transnational documentary. As hundun replaces the “real” as the aesthetic paradigm of filmmaking, one might further ask about how the conception of hundun appeared and functioned in Zhou’s film, its political and historical implications in both domestic and transnational contexts, as well as its potential of theoretical and practical intervention.
Through discussing Zhou’s three representative works Houjie Township(2002), The Cop Shop(2010), and The Chinese Mayor(2015) , I will argue that Zhou’s documentary practice opens up a space of hundun in terms of ambiguity, heterogeneity, and dynamism, where the dialectics between migration in a temporal sense and power dynamics in a spatial sense reflect both the local circumstance and China’s post-socialist transformation as a whole. Furthermore, regarding the exhibition, distribution, and circulation of documentary as a connective and global media, the representation of hundun prompts us to reflect on Félix Guattari's conception of “Chaosmosis”, which is “at the junction of the finite and infinite, at this point of negotiation between complexity and chaos.” By engaging theories of visuality, cultural anthropology, and migration studies, I will further ask about how the gaze of chaos(hundun) within visuality is productive in challenging the totalizing understandings of China, thus envisioning an alternative approach to reframing locality within globally mediated networks and power order.