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Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema
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Book Presentation:
Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema takes a new approach to world cinema through critical theory. Whereas world cinema often refers to non-American films deemed artistic or peripheral, Seung-hoon Jong examines its mapping frames: the territorial 'national frame,' the deterritorializing 'transnational frame,' and the 'global frame.' If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, his global frame highlights two conflicting ethical facets of globalization: the 'soft-ethical' inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their 'hard-ethical' symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. Reflecting both and suggesting their alternatives, global cinema draws attention to new changes in subjectivity and community that Jeong investigates in terms of biopolitical 'abjection' and ethical 'agency.'
In this frame, the book explores a vast net of post-1990 films circulating in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit. Jeong comparatively navigates these films, highlighting less essentialist particularities than compatible localities that perform universal aspects of biopolitical ethics and its alternatives by centering the narrative of 'double death': the abject as symbolically dead struggle for lost subjectivity or new agency until physically dying. This narrative pervades global cinema from Hollywood blockbusters and European art films to Middle Eastern dramas and Asian genre films. Ultimately, the book renews critical discourses on global issues―including multiculturalism, catastrophe, sovereignty, abjection, violence, network, nihilism, and atopia―through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies.
About the Author:
Seung-hoon Jeong is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at California State University Long Beach. He is the author of Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory after New Media, co-translator of the Korean edition of Jacques Derrida's Acts of Literature, and co-editor of The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema and Thomas Elsaesser's The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology.
Press Reviews:
"Finally, a 'Global Cinema' book that has a point of view and a point to make― a powerful point that is driven home through ingenious analyses of films that have been harbingers of our recent dark past. This most intelligent, unblinking exploration of popular as well as art films radiates confidence in the cinema that walks with us, and, better, a belief in the world." -- Dudley Andrew, Yale University
"This is a most fascinating study of what world cinema reveals about our globalized world. This exceptionally comprehensive book provides insightful analysis of a wide variety of the most high-profile films from both Global Hollywood and Global Auteurs. From Skyfall to Jia Zhangke there is something here for anybody curious about how cinema illuminates the global nature of contemporary everyday life. Most crucially, Jeong expertly uncovers how an "abject agency" is revealed on screen which may yet gesture towards a hopeful and inclusive politics even for catastrophic times." -- David Martin-Jones, University of Glasgow
"Jeong deftly interweaves an array of philosophical themes, including the postpolitical, agency, sovereignty, multiculturalism, violence, terrorism, nihilism, catastrophe, revelation, existentialism, and the gift. Moreover, as part of this conceptual heavy lifting, he impressively marshals a near-encyclopedic list of continental thinkers, from Agamben right up to Zizek." -- Martin P. Rossouw, Film Quarterly
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
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