Joshua D. Gonsalves
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Research Residency Program
update: 2019.10.24
Joshua D. Gonsalves
| Participating Project | Research Residency Program |
|---|---|
| Activity Based | Lebanon |
| City | Tokyo |
| Period | 2016.1 - 2016.2 |
Purpose of the residency
Building on my work on Hollywood biopolitics (namely--my recent book, Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant: Pressing Race, Class and Ethnicity into Service in "Amerika", Zero Books, 2015), I will engage Japanese points of view: research, discussion and investigations into Japanese Cinema, war-culture, anti-war resistance and their present day after-effects. Encounters with Tokyo's cultural producers, critics and receptors will, however, transform a bird's eye view into a street-level re-envisioning of cross-cultural investments in cinematic Star Wars. My objective is to allow Japanese (and Americanized) viewers to work through a shared image-history via Grant's films alongside inter-related Japanese films. I intend to estrange the cinematic pleasures that obscure the present neoliberal conjuncture, or to re-frame Hollywood Star Wars in a less one-sided way.
Plan during the residency
Research on war-time propaganda in Japanese Cinema: imperial race theory, social coding, (anti-)colonialism. Field work on war-time and its after-effects: MacArthur's liberal promises, the reverse-course, anti-American resistance... Archival research into Japanese cinema as war-culture and anti-war resistance, as well as into Japanese work that critically reframes (anti-)war cultures in relation to Hitchcock, Hollywood and tele-visual Star Power. Lastly, a presentation-performance on the identity-in-difference of Japanese-American (anti-)war culture. The blacklisted scriptwriter (Albert Maltz) and actor (John Garfield) of Destination Tokyo will thereby be enabled to talk back to power from beyond the grave once empowered by like-minded cultural workers in Japan. What are, in other words, the current after-affects of the total (that is, military, cinematic-cultural and social) wars waged by Japanese and American imperial machines and their post-war neo-liberal campaigns?
