Geography Written in Lightning: Race, Sexuality, and Regulatory Aesthetics in<i>The Birth of a Nation</i>

Olund, Eric

doi:10.1080/00045608.2011.653738

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…“Nowhere, apparently, has there been in the past any disposition to take up the problems for colored troops until similar work for the protection of white soldiers had first been put on a firm basis” (Spingarn, 1918: 340). This neglect was part of a more general erasure by white Progressives of black sexuality as a property of the person forming a basis of social and political subjectivity (Olund, 2013; Wilderson III, 2010: 133–134; 305–306). This erasure wasn’t just discursive.…”

Section: Implementing a Constructive Agendamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Multiple racial futures: Spatio-temporalities of race during World War I

Olund

2017

Environ Plan D

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Abstract:Using the example of the WWI-US Commission on Training Camp Activities, I argue that racialized biopolitical projects entail multiple, specific spatio-temporalities that seek to enact different racial futures within and between racial categories. What I call 'victorious whiteness', 'infinite whiteness' and 'static blackness' assembled by the CTCA, and an 'advancing blackness' pursued by black elites in opposition, interacted in a complex topology of early 20 th -century efforts to protect trainee soldiers from venereal disease, and efforts to prevent racial violence, both of which endangered the war effort and thus the future of the white nation. This counters a tendency in much current literature on racial biopolitics to assert a stark binary between and homogeneity within the facilitation of white futurity and black risk failure within individual biopolitical projects.

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Section: Implementing a Constructive Agendamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This neglect was part of a more general erasure by white Progressives of black sexuality as a property of the person forming a basis of social and political subjectivity (Olund, 2013;Wilderson III, 2010, pages 133-134;305-306). This erasure wasn't just discursive.…”

Section: Implementing a Constructive Agendamentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple racial futures: Spatio-temporalities of race during World War I

Olund

2017

Environ Plan D

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“…Geographers have examined the role of race and geography in constructions of national identity in film (natter 2002;Jansson 2005;olund 2013). Geographers have examined the role of race and geography in constructions of national identity in film (natter 2002;Jansson 2005;olund 2013).…”

Section: Salvage Ethnography and Ethnographic Cinemamentioning

confidence: 99%

Projections of race, nature, and ethnographic childhood in early educational cinema at the national museum of canada

Murnaghan

McCreary

2016

Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography

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In this article, we examine depictions of race, nature, and childhood in Harlan Ingersoll Smith's early ethnographic films at the National Museum of Canada. Created in the 1920s for a children's education programme, Smith's films construct ethnographic portraits of different Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. We demonstrate how museum education appropriated Indigeneity as a discursive resource to immerse viewing children in particular narratives of Canadian national heritage and development. The films worked through a complex double movement, bringing children in the Ottawa museum audience into association with Indigenous children based on shared experience as children while simultaneously differentiating Indigenous peoples as Other. The films inculcated white youth at the museum in a romanticized connection to Canada's prehistory through knowledge of the nation's Indigenous peoples as well as nature. In the films, the position of Indigeneity within the future remained ambiguous (traditional practices sometimes disappearing, sometimes enduring). Yet, despite Smith's uncertainty about colonial beliefs in the disappearance of Indigeneity, his films nonetheless presented the teleological development of the settler nation as certain. Our article highlights how thinking about children, as audience for and thematic focus of these films, extends discussions of the geographies of film, of children, and of settler colonial nationalism.

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“…In geography, Denis Cosgrove's (1984) Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape , which had a narrow focus on class relations, inspired subsequent work on visual culture from postcolonial and feminist perspectives as well as distinct geographical approaches to cinematic landscapes. For work specifically on landscape and cinema, see for example Aitken and Zonn (), Caprotti (), Gandy (), Harper and Rayner (), Lefebvre (), Lukinbeal (), Pidduck () and Rose (), as well as interdisciplinary spatial approaches to cinema such as Corbin (), Doel and Clarke (), Olund (), Rhodes and Gorfinkel (), Shiel () and Andersson and Webb ().…”

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confidence: 99%

Landscape and Gentrification: The Picturesque and Pastoral in 1980s New York Cinema

Andersson

2016

Antipode

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In this article I discuss 1980s New York cinema through the conceptual lens of landscape, drawing in particular on the interconnected but separate traditions of the pastoral and the picturesque. While the former mode of representing landscape is idealizing (the shepherd/nymph-motif), the latter with its origins in the period of the enclosures of the English countryside tends to aestheticize poverty and dispossession. This distinction can productively be deployed in relation to tensions between glamorization and exploitation in 1980s New York cinema, which often dealt with the themes of rent, eviction, and unemployment in postindustrial settings. Focusing in particular on Downtown 81 (Edo Bertoglio, 1981/2000 and Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985), I argue that the current nostalgia for a pre-gentrified and less regulated New York in popular culture is dependent on these idealizing and aestheticizing tendencies insofar that they conceal or prettify some of the darker aspects of the period.

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Geography Written in Lightning: Race, Sexuality, and Regulatory Aesthetics inThe Birth of a Nation

Cited by 3 publications

References 79 publications

Multiple racial futures: Spatio-temporalities of race during World War I

Multiple racial futures: Spatio-temporalities of race during World War I

Projections of race, nature, and ethnographic childhood in early educational cinema at the national museum of canada

Landscape and Gentrification: The Picturesque and Pastoral in 1980s New York Cinema

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