78905 - SEMIOTICS OF CONFLICT (1) (LM)

Conoscenze e abilità da conseguire

At the end of the course the student will have achieved the necessary tools to critically elaborate the main themes and aspects relating to conflict and post-conflict cultures in a semiotic perspective.

Contenuti

From the thawing of the Cold War to 9/11, up to nowadays post-Al Queida- now Islamic (Isis) threats, the very definition and imagining of war and conflict has dramatically changed. However, while scholarship in such areas as strategic studies, international relations, international law, peace studies, psychology and psychiatry is still addressing conflicts in terms of ‘conflict resolution’, ‘post-conflict reconstruction’, ‘post-conflict justice’, and the treatment of post-conflict trauma, little or no attention has been given to the reciprocal play between conflict, culture and memories as semiotic mechanisms.

The course aims at addressing this very play and tensions, focussing on how a conflict as an “event”, along with its representations, is a semiotic and cultural phenomenon. In other words, it is also a conflict on the significance to be attributed to events and to the actors participating in it as, for example, when mediated discourse labels or sanctions one of the concerned parties as “the barbarian”, “the oppressed” or “the oppressor”, “the victim”, or “the perpetrator”, thus influencing the effects and the affects that international public opinion lives and feels in confronting and interpreting the conflict itself.

The course will focus on to how conflicts – their regulation, repression and particularly their representations – constitute privileged loci for a semiotic analysis, arguing how conflicts challenge and rearrange pre-existing systems of cultural control, not only in the first explosive moments of violence or spontaneous civil disobedience but also, subsequently, when they encounter modes of historicisation linked closely to unifying discourses of national identity.

Particular focus will be given to the relationship between still and moving images (photograph, cinema) and conflict; on how and to what extent images and icons inspired by the examination of issues of memory and oblivion experienced in the last century respond to the challenges imposed by 21st-century conflicts.

With a view to discussing the semiotic process of conflict and post-conflict situations, the course will concentrate on the ways in which 20th and 21st-century (post-)conflict images address and (re)mediate memory and post-memory; along with cultural identities in post-conflict contexts.

Testi/Bibliografia

Demaria, C., Wright, C., 2006, Postconflict Cultures: Rituals of Representations, Nottingham, CCCP Press.

Doane, M. A (2007), “Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction”,differences, vol.18, n. 1, pp. 1-6.

Elsaesser, T. (1996), “Subject positions: from Holocaust, Our Hitler and Heimat, to Shoah and Schindler's list”, in V. Sobchack (ed.) (1996), The Persistence of History, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 145-186.

Frosh, P. (2011), “Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass Media, and the Imagined Lives of Strangers”, in P. Frosh e A. Pinchevski (ed.), 2011, pp. 49-72.

Hirsh, J. (2004), After Image. Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust, Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Temple University Press.

Hoskins, A. (2011), “7/7 and Connective Memory: Interactional Trajectories of Remembering in Post-scarcity Culture”, Memory Studies, 4, 3, pp. 269-280

Kaes, A. (1989), From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press.

Kennedy, L.; Caitlin, P., 2014, The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict, London, Taurus (depending on their research interests, students can choose one of the essay of the book; also the introduction is recommended).

Landsberg, A. (2004), Prosthetic Memory. The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York, Columbia University Press.

Radstone, S. (2001a), « Trauma and Screen Studies. Opening the Debate », Screen, 42, 2, pp. 188-193.

Metodi didattici

The classes are meant to engage the students in participating actively to the discussion on the topics of the course. After the first introductory week, students will be asked to give either individual or group (maximum of 4 people) presentations. The presentations can be both on theoretical stances or methodological positions within the debates addressed during the classes (further reading, in this case, will be provided), or on a specific case-study that will have to be selected and analyzed.

Orario di ricevimento

Consulta il sito web di Cristina Demaria