This panel explores the sense of place as part of the indigenous language of American artistic production of Modernism in the context of the European avant-garde. Though U.S. poets and artists were influenced by the formal techniques of Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism, they were also determined to search for the essence of an expressive language that defined its authenticity as opposed to European foreignness. One of their avenues of research was the exploration of the distinctive features of the American soil as a means of contributing novel aspects to modern aesthetics. The genuine character of the environment is closely linked to the strong attachment to rural or urban spaces and the value they acquire for the observer.

A return to the feminisms of the 1970s is one of the most salient dimensions of feminist studies to emerge over the last decade. This proposed volume seeks essays that reflect on this return—evident not only in academia, but in emergent activist feminisms of the 21st century—and speculate on what it means for feminist scholarship, politics, and cultural production.

http://expansivereflections70s.weebly.com

This interdisciplinary anthology invites work by scholars in fields such as Film Studies, Philosophy, Art History, Cultural Studies, Visual and Cultural Anthropology, Literary and Historical studies, Media Studies, Women’s Studies, and beyond.

In Simone Weil’s “First and Last Notebooks” we find a note that describes the sea as “a movement within immobility,” the “Image of primal matter”, which leads this Christian philosopher to see music also as a movement that “takes possession of all our soul—and this movement is nothing but immobility”. Perhaps this is an even more fitting description of film, with its images in motion. Its movements can reconnect us with the movements of the world, those motions in which a mysterious sense of order, what Weil calls immobility, arises.