38th Convention

NEMLA

Baltimore,MD March 1- March 4, 2007

“The Postcolonial Youth Film” will investigate the ways in which the emerging media of postcolonial cinema focuses on the notion of the adolescent, and how these depictions of the youthful body, within the genre of the postcolonial film, can be seen as developing a dialogue that runs against the grain of both the American/European youth film and diasporic film in Britain. Films like Mahmoud Zemmouri’s 100% Arabica and Merzah Allouache’s Salut Cousin! emphasize the distinction between what might be seen as the postcolonial youth and the neocolonized adolescent, as seen, perhaps, in Udatan Prasad’s British film, My Son the Fanatic. Diasporic British films, as in the cases of Prasad or Ayub Khan-Din’s East is East, uniquely situate the body of the adolescent to become a site of contestation in terms of political and social upheaval, foregrounded among audiences and spectators through the lens of the cultural and moral intersection with American/European values whi!
 ch are perceived to be embedded in youth culture. Black British and diasporic cinema mediates the adolescent body in fundamentally differing ways from the national cinemas of the Levant, South Asia, and Africa. The main question to be addressed by this panel, therefore, is the way in which the postcolonial adolescent is mediated through film to construct both a subject and an audience, focusing largely on national and global issues of gender, race, and physical transformation, that work against Western notions of “normative” youth. Please email 300-word abstracts by September 15, 2006 to Rebecca Fine Romanow at rebecca.romanow_at_umb.edu.

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Received on Wed Jun 07 2006 - 10:16:18 EDT