Hosted by the Asian Studies Center and the Visiting International Professional Program and co-sponsored by MSU Film Studies and the Department of English, this event will explore Shakespearean Film Adaptations from Thailand, Malaysia, and South India. Drawing on theories of the encounter developed in intercultural criticism, philosophy and peace and conflict studies, this talk examines Asian adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays as sites of encounter. It introduces a number of neglected recent cinematic treatments of Shakespeare from different parts of Asia at the same time as it tests the potential of new methodological paradigms. Concentrating on adaptations of Macbeth and Othello, the talk argues that, via the encounter between the play and the director, questions around difference and alterity, the operations of the state and the lures of globality are highlighted, showcasing Shakespeare’s continuing instrumentality and relevancies.

Speaker: Professor Mark Thornton Burnett, Queen's University Belfast

Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. He is also a Fellow of the English Association and Member of the Royal Irish Academy. Widely published, he has made important contributions to the burgeoning field of World Cinema and Shakespeare, with an emphasis on Shakespeare in South and East Asia, as in such authored studies as: Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Palgrave, 2007; 2nd ed. 2013), Shakespeare and World Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and ‘Hamlet’ and World Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Most recently, he co-edited the collection, Women and Indian Shakespeares (Arden Shakespeare/Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

A Discussion with Dr. Thomas Lamarre.

DR. THOMAS LAMARRE teaches in the departments of Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Publications on media, thought, and material history include work on communication networks in 9th century Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan, 2000); silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen, 2005); animation technologies (The Anime Machine, 2009) and infrastructure ecologies (The Anime Ecology, 2018). Major translations include Kawamata Chiaki’s Death Sentences (2012), Muriel Combes’s Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (2012), David Lapoujade’s William James, Empiricism, and Pragmatism (2019), and Isabelle Stengers’s Making Sense in Common (2023).

In studies of platforms, the gap between a cultural studies approach and a media studies approach continues to widen. When culture is in question, critical attention focuses on how users (conceived as subjects) negotiate or interact with the cultural paradigms and contents they encounter. When media are in question, the focus is the ways in which material and technological affordances affect or orientate conduct. The concept of platformativity is intended to work in the gap between these two approaches, while acknowledging the importance of these quite different ways of understanding the subjectivity and agency of platform users. Judith Butler’s account of performativity offers a productive point of departure, for it constructively works across mechanisms of identification and techniques of self, by reference to interaction with a specific interface, looking in the mirror. Here, to work toward a concept of platformativity, I propose to move in two directions, drawing examples primarily from television, streaming, and social media platforms. While the psychoanalytic turn encourages us think of platforms as mirror-like in terms of their consequences for self-formation, a focus on techniques and technologies invites to inquire into the consequences of mediatic affordances. What happens when the mirror is considered as screen, platform, and infrastructure?

DR. NATALIE KOCH, Professor of Geography, Syracuse University | Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

Spectacle has not been extensively theorized by geographers, despite their longstanding interest in its role in political, cultural, and urban geography. Focusing on statist spectacle, this book outlines a geographic approach that treats it as a political technology and asks: who uses it, for whom, and when and where? To move beyond the prevailing “then and there” approach to spectacle, I argue for a grounded approach to asking “when and where” spectacle unfolds that also accounts for the unspectacular spaces, effects, and experiences that represent spectacle’s Others. Doing so effectively entails examining the deeply contextual spatial imaginaries that are required to give spectacle meaning. The trope of synecdoche, I suggest, is key to understanding the logic of spectacular urbanism. Through a cross-regional empirical study of recent capital city development schemes in Central Asia (Astana, Baku, Ashgabat), the Arabian Peninsula (Abu Dhabi, Doha), and East Asia (Naypyidaw, Bandar Seri Begawan), I show how synecdoche, as a spatial metaphor, can divert attention from the multiple ways that spectacle’s unspectacular Others are expressed and scaled in each region.

As a political geographer, Dr. Koch focuses on empire, geopolitics, identity politics, and state power, primarily in the Arabian Peninsula. Building from her recent research on the role of arid lands expertise in U.S. empire-building domestically and overseas, her next project will focus on the wider history of U.S. science diplomacy in the Gulf region. 

Co-sponsors: • Department of Geography, Environment and Spatial Sciences
• Muslim Studies Program
• Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies
• Asian Studies Center

DR. NATALIE KOCH, Professor of Geography, Syracuse University | Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

In colonizing the arid lands of southwestern North America, Anglo-American settlers struggled to make sense of the region’s human and physical geography. Yet explorers, scientists, travel writers, and political leaders quickly learned to interpret these deserts with reference to foreign but nonetheless familiar deserts – reading them as a local version of “Old World” Middle Eastern desert. Empire-builders in early America took these deserts as a key source of inspiration in more than just imagery, though. They actually imported to the U.S. Southwest animals (e.g. camels), plants (e.g. date palms), and ideas about governing people and nature alike. Focusing on this long history of ties between Arizona and the Arabian Peninsula, this presentation outlines the key arguments of my new book, Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (Verso 2023). I show how desert-to-desert material flows as well as environmental imaginaries of the “desert” have been enlisted by many different actors who are, directly and indirectly, involved in the building of U.S. state power domestically and later, in the Middle East. The “desert,” I show, is constantly reinvented by these actors, as they learn to use it in new and unexpected ways. And this is the story of empire itself.

As a political geographer, Dr. Koch focuses on empire, geopolitics, identity politics, and state power, primarily in the Arabian Peninsula. Building from her recent research on the role of arid lands expertise in U.S. empire-building domestically and overseas, her next project will focus on the wider history of U.S. science diplomacy in the Gulf region.

Co-sponsored by: • Department of Geography, Environment and Spatial Sciences
• Muslim Studies Program
• Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies
• Asian Studies Center

Join us for festivities and all things Indian and South Asian once each month Spring semester (Jan. 24/Spring Fest; Feb. 21/film screening; March 14/Holikerang festival (Holi); April 18/Eid Milan).  Sponsored by the Indian and South Asian Languages and Cultures Program. Co-sponsored by the Asian Studies Center, and India Council. 

2023 Muslim Studies Program Student Research Showcase

Wednesday, April 26, 2023, 7pm

Deadline for undergraduate and graduate paper submissions: March 31, 2023

Awards to be announced at the Showcase:

Graduate Student Paper Award ($500)

Published or unpublished papers (roughly 15-25 pages with complete works cited) must have been written between March 1, 2022, and the deadline, March 31, 2023

Undergraduate Student Paper Award ($500)

Published or unpublished papers (roughly 15-25 pages with complete works cited) must have been written between March 1, 2022, and the deadline, March 31, 2023

All submissions should be sent to Mohammad Khalil (khalilmo(at)msu.edu) and Laura Large (largelau(at)msu.edu)

Online viewers register here: https://muslimstudies.isp.msu.edu/about/reg-links/