popular culture

In his famous study on “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious," Freud argues that jokes, and the laughter they elicit, allow a kind of access to the unconscious. They permit, among other things, the fulfillment of repressed desires, the channeling of aggression into an acceptable social form, and polysemic satisfaction. As the structure of a joke operates similarly to the structure of a dream (by condensation and displacement, metaphor and metonymy), it also enables the revelation of contemporary ideology and its ambiguities. Further, for Lacan, with the child’s “jubilant assumption of his [sic] specular image” in the mirror, laughter coincides with the ego's coming-into-being.

In his classic essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” Robin Wood establishes the basic formula of the horror film as “normality is threatened by the monster.” He subsequently mentions that if one were to “substitute for ‘Monster’ the term ‘Indians’ . . . one has a formula for a large number of classical Westerns.” Wood’s point is to establish the flexibility of his framework but it also points in another direction: the monstrousness of the idea of Indigeneity within the colonial mindset. Today, one of the most exciting growing areas in horror cinema at the moment comes from Indigenous persons.

Call for Papers

The 13th International Conference and Festival on Global Cult Film Traditions

Birmingham City University Presents:

Cine Excess XIII

Independent Visions of Excess

7th- 9th November 2019

Birmingham City University (and related screening venues)

Call for Papers: Special Edition of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). 

The Aesthetics of Drone Warfare

An International, Interdisciplinary Conference

Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield

7-8 February 2020

Keynote speakers:

Debjani Ganguly (University of Virginia)

Derek Gregory (University of British Columbia)