Reframing Suicide

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-602
Author(s):  
Beenash Jafri

Abstract What can narratives of suicide tell us about diasporic and Indigenous relationships to the white settler state? This article engages relational critique to examine trans/femme/bisexual South Asian Canadian filmmaker Vivek Shraya's short film I want to kill myself (2017) and queer Cree/Métis filmmaker Adam Garnet Jones's feature film Fire Song (2015). Both films challenge the spectacularity of suicide, effectively situating suicide on a continuum of “slow death.” However, the films also stage distinct relationships between suicide, community, and the state that emerge from diasporic and Native positionalities within a white settler society. Whereas Shraya's diasporic struggle with suicide is alleviated by forging community within settler spaces, Fire Song counters pathologizing depictions of reserve communities by emphasizing resurgent Indigenous practices and their refusal of settler logics.

Somatechnics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-83
Author(s):  
Akkadia Ford

Cinema provides ‘privileged access’ ( Zubrycki 2011 ) into trans lives, recording and revealing private life experiences and moments that might never be seen, nor heard and after the time had passed, only present in memory and body for the individuals involved. Film, a temporal medium, creates theoretical issues, both in the presentation and representation of the trans body and for audiences in viewing the images. Specific narrative, stylistic and editing techniques including temporal disjunctions, may also give audiences a distorted view of trans bodily narratives that encompass a lifetime. Twenty first century cinema is simultaneously creating and erasing the somatechnical potentialities of trans. This article will explore temporal techniques in relation to recent trans cinema, comparing how three different filmmakers handle trans narratives. Drawing upon recent films including the Trans New Wave ( Ford 2014 , 2016a , 2016b ), such as the experimental animated autoethnographic short film Change Over Time (Ewan Duarte, United States, 2013), in tandem with the feature film 52 Tuesdays (Sophia Hyde, Australia, 2013), I will analyse the films as texts which show how filmmakers utilise temporality as a narrative and stylistic technique in cinematic trans narratives. These are texts where cinematic technologies converge with trans embodiment in ways that are constitutive of participants and audiences' understanding of trans lives. This analysis will be contrasted with the use of temporal displacement as a cinematic trope of negative affect, disembodiment and societal disjunction in the feature film Predestination (The Spierig Brothers, Australia, 2014), providing a further basis for scholarly critique of cinematic somatechnics in relation to the trans body.


Author(s):  
Stéphane A. Dudoignon

Since 2002, Sunni jihadi groups have been active in Iranian Baluchistan without managing to plunge the region into chaos. This book suggests that a reason for this, besides Tehran’s military responses, has been the quality of Khomeini and Khamenei’s relationship with a network of South-Asia-educated Sunni ulama (mawlawis) originating from the Sarbaz oasis area, in the south of Baluchistan. Educated in the religiously reformist, socially conservative South Asian Deoband School, which puts the madrasa at the centre of social life, the Sarbazi ulama had taken advantage, in Iranian territory, of the eclipse of Baluch tribal might under the Pahlavi monarchy (1925-79). They emerged then as a bulwark against Soviet influence and progressive ideologies, before rallying to Khomeini in 1979. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, they have been playing the role of a rampart against Salafi propaganda and Saudi intrigues. The book shows that, through their alliance with an Iranian Kurdish-born Muslim-Brother movement and through the promotion of a distinct ‘Sunni vote’, they have since the early 2000s contributed towards – and benefitted from – the defence by the Reformist presidents Khatami (1997-2005) and Ruhani (since 2013) of local democracy and of the minorities’ rights. They endeavoured to help, at the same time, preventing the propagation of jihadism and Sunni radicalisation to Iran – at least until the ISIS/Daesh-claimed attacks of June 2017, in Tehran, shed light on the limits of the Islamic Republic’s strategy of reliance on Deobandi ulama and Muslim-Brother preachers in the country’s Sunni-peopled peripheries.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
The Editors ◽  
Dipesh Chakrabarty

Abstract Dipesh Chakrabarty is Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including The Crises of Civilization (2018) and Provincializing Europe (2000); and was one of the principal founders of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies. In this discussion he ruminates upon the state of globality; its relationship to the planet Earth; the scope and possible duration of the Anthropocene; and some of globalization's consequences for humanity and human understanding. The interview was conducted by managing editor, Kenneth Weisbrode.


Author(s):  
Manisha Mishra

Indian films are gradually coming of age: becoming more realistic, bold, and daring. Indian short films are getting candid: talking openly about issues rather than brushing them under the carpet. The digital media boom and the advent of social media have made the short film genre popular. In the fast-paced age where people, caught up in the humdrum and rat race of everyday life, are generally becoming impatient about everything, the short film has come to the rescue of filmmakers and film lovers. Gone are the days where everyone had ample time and patience to watch a three hour feature film or a two hour saga. In case of a short film, the message gets conveyed in a quick, crisp, and focused manner, without beating about the bush. Women-oriented short films like Her First Time, Juice, The Day After Every Day, Mama's Boy, Going Dutch, Pressure Cooker, The Girl Story, Ek Dopahar, Khaney Mein Kya Hai, White Shirt, Naked, etc. are breaking stereotypes of the patriarchal notions about women. The chapter probes the portrayals of women characters in Indian short films.


2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Cairns

Abstract. Canada’s rural idyll is embedded within the colonial legacy of a white settler society; however, little research has examined how class and gender uphold this articulation of rurality and whiteness. This article draws on ethnographic research with white, working-class rural youth to develop an intersectional analysis of rural imaginaries. The analysis shows how youth construct their own rural identities through racialized representations of urban and global “others.” I argue that these racist place-narratives must be understood in the context of competing discourses of rurality in Canada: the romanticized pure white rural of colonial history, and the pathologized poor white rural of a cosmopolitan future. Even as youth locate their gendered performances within the rural idyll, they are marked as “dirts” by their classed, rural status. By inscribing racist discourses onto others, youth resist the classist imagery projected onto their community and thereby re- claim a pure white rural idyll.


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