February 24, 2016

Becker Library, Lyman Hall

Human Traffic, Seascapes, and Theatricality

In 2004, nearly two dozen Chinese cockle pickers perished in the mudflats of Morecambe Bay. Both Isaac Julien’s screen installation, Ten Thousand Waves, and Nick Broomfield’s film, Ghosts, work to reimagine trajectories of human labor in relation to this event and both employ strategies that would restore subjectivity to those who perished. This talk argued that this case of human traffic and the discourse more generally depended on particular modes of theatricality. Although Broomfield and Julien engage theatricality from different perspectives, they converge in asserting the seascape as a particular useful vehicle to express the contradictions inherent in representing transnational labor and the questions about human agency that surface in its wake.

Sean Metzger, Associate Professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, works at the intersections of Asian American, Caribbean, Chinese, film, performance and sexuality studies. His first book, Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race, was published by Indiana University Press in 2014. From yellow-face performance in the 19th century to Jackie Chan in the 21st century, Chinese Looks examines articles of clothing and modes of adornment as a window on how American views of China have changed in the past 150 years.

Metzger shows how aesthetics, gender, politics, economics and race are interwoven and argues that close examination of particular forms of dress can help us think anew about gender and modernity. Metzger has also co-edited three collections of essays: Embodying Asian/American Sexualities with Gina Masequesmay (Lexington, 2009); Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures with Olivia Khoo (Intellect, 2009); Race, Space, Place: The Making and Unmaking of Freedoms in the Atlantic World with Michaeline Crichlow (a special issue of Cultural Dynamics, Nov. 2009). A fourth volume of essays entitled Islands, Images, Imaginaries co-edited with Francisco J. Hernández Adrián and Michaeline Crichlow, was published as a special issue of the journal Third Text in 2014.