CIE Travel Report: Delia Konzett

Delia Konzett, assistant professor of English, received one of the 2004-05 CIE Faculty International Travel Grants, funded by the VPAA, to support travel to England to attend the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) 2005 conference in London from March 31 to April 3. Konzett chaired a panel titled "Post-Orientalism and Multiculturalism."  Below is her report.

Delia Konzett

This year’s conference was special in many ways. SCMS decided to hold the conference abroad for the first time in order to reflect this year’s theme as well as encourage international, transnational, and multicultural perspectives. Next year’s conference will be held in Vancouver, Canada. The various panels and topics reflected this outlook. The opening speakers, for example, discussed media in national/transnational contexts and panels ranged from discussions of early American radio to satellite TV and the role that new digital media plays in the modernizing of Russia. The conference also paid tribute to Stuart Hall, a leading British scholar, director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, and visionary race theorist whose ground-breaking work profoundly influenced the fields of cultural and media studies.

I organized and chaired a panel titled "Post-Orientalism and Multiculturalism," which stressed the complexity of Asian cultures and their representation. The first paper dealt with contemporary television, namely MTV, as a commodity and cultural force in the various Asian urban centers of Hong Kong, Bangkok, and New Delhi. MTV has shown itself to be both an international and regional medium, one that encourages at once a pan-Asian collectivity and local customs. My paper titled “The American Century: War and Orientalism in John Ford’s Films” discussed the director’s articulation of a new type of Orientalism that forms the core of American WWII nationalism. The final paper dealt with a new cinema movement in Germany, often-referred to as “the Young Turks,” a young generation of award winning German Turkish directors. This group received a great deal of attention when Fatih Akin’s film recently won the top prize at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival. Though the papers of the panel were diverse, all were concerned with the difficulty of framing Asia and Asian culture (and its Western Other) in a radically mobile and diasporic world. As the papers demonstrated, cultures are not separate communities with independent histories but exist in and through one another, creating productive tensions via inter- and intra-cultural dialogue. Discussion also centered on the significance of creating meaningful communities and identities, restoring or satisfactory replacing face-to-face dialogue in an increasingly technological world.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Center of International Education for kindly sponsoring my trip abroad.

For more information about CIE grants, visit http://www.unh.edu/cie/.