Event Details:

Please join us as Professor Ellen McCallum presents on:

The Lure of the Nonhuman: Syliva Wynter, New Materialism, and Film Theory

This paper draws on Sylvia Wynter's film theory, putting her critique of the human in conversation with queer new materialism and its exploration of nonhuman life forms. These concerns converge vividly in Agnieszka Smoczynska's  2016 Polish mermaid horror musical, The Lure. This feminist rendition of The Little Mermaid gives fishy realness to the hum/animals around whom the plot pivots, while its genre mishmash raises compelling questions about the limits of representation and the challenges for decentering the human in our imagination and cultural processes. 

Discussion and conversation to follow.

Register here: https://msu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_IOQ4nTnhRPOxXjGoODvwNg 

Bio:

Ellen McCallum, Professor of English and Film Studies at Michigan State University, wrote Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism and Unmaking The Making of Americans: Toward an Aesthetic Ontology, and also coedited After Queer Studies: Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century. Recent essays have appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, postmodern culture, Narrative, and camera obscura. This talk comes from a current project that reexamines familiar concepts in classical film theory in light of recent insights from feminist new materialism, with particular attention to the queer aspects of these theories.