Description

A Talk By TINA CHEN

The celebration and promotion of mobile film projection has been central to the multi-media landscape of the PRC at two historical moments: 1950s-1960s and 2010s-present. In each moment, the female film projectionist occupies privileged space, albeit in radically different contexts. This talk explores apparent visual, rhetorical, and experiential continuities framing the female film projectionist from socialist to post-socialist China. Through critical consideration of female film projectionists as conduits of advanced media technology and spatial projects, this talk considers how and why feminism has been a delayed promise in the PRC.

Tina Mai Chen is Professor of History at the University of Manitoba. Her current research considers the intersection of feminism, cultural politics, media landscapes, and subjectivity in the People’s Republic of China. She is co-editor with David Churchill of The Material of World History as well as Film, History, and Cultural Citizenship: Sites of Projection.

ROUNDTABLE: From Socialist Mobile Cinema to Global Media Now

TINA CHEN (University of Manitoba)
YI GU (University of Toronto)
TONG LAM (University of Toronto)
YUROU ZHONG (University of Toronto)

Description

Presented by the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival in partnership with Vtape. Supported by the University of Manitoba, the University of Toronto, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Tong Lam’s series meticulously documents contemporary China’s outdoor film phenomena, where films are sometimes screened next to dancing people and even animals, and where propaganda films have to compete with images of conspicuous consumption. In addition to showing the diversity of people and places in a rapidly changing nation, Lam’s work also invites viewers to consider an increasingly complex global media environment overrun with commercials, misinformation, and media spectacle.

Curated by Tina Chen (Head, Department of History, Unviersity of Manitoba)

Description

While the words travel and tourism are often used interchangeably, there is a difference between the two: a tourist travels for leisure, he dips into a foreign culture but remains largely unchanged while a traveller aims for experience as a means of understanding himself in the context of the foreign. Every Filipino child knows that Rizal travelled a great deal when air travel was but a figment of the imagination, but what is not emphasized is how Rizal was formed by his exposure to other lands, peoples, and cultures. It is not well known that Rizal travelled to America, travelling by land from San Francisco to New York to catch a voyage to London. Looking back on Rizal’s travels helps us understand the hero, ourselves, and the emergence of the Filipino nation.

José Rizal, in full José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda, was born on June 19, 1861 in Calamba, Philippines and died on December 30, 1896 in Manila. Jose Rizal, the Philippine National Hero was a man of gifts: a multilingual writer, poet, artist, scholar, and physician, as well as a leading figure in a movement that called for basic reforms and civil liberties in the Spanish overseas colony.

AMBETH R. OCAMPO is a public historian whose research covers the late 19th century Philippines: its art, culture, and the people who figure in the birth of the nation.

Prof. Ocampo is Associate Professor and former Chairman of the Department of History, Ateneo de Manila University. He served as Chairman, National Commission for Culture and the Arts (2005-2007) and Chairman, National Historical Commission of the Philippines (2002-2011), and President of the Philippine Historical Association.

Prof. Ocampo has published over 30 books, writes a widely read Editorial Page column for the Philippines Daily Inquirer, and moderates a growing Instagram and Facebook Fan Page.

Reception to follow

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There is a widely shared belief that decentralization has the potential to lead to more efficient, responsive and accountable government. In the Indian context, however, the existing literature indicates that state (provincial) governments failed to devolve substantive powers and funds to municipalities. This presentation discusses municipal-state relations through the lens of urban environmental governance and in the case of small cities, which are generally understudied. While our findings based on in-depth research in Gujarat and West Bengal largely confirm the conclusions from the literature, they also point to important differences between the two states and to differing degrees of municipal agency and relative autonomy influenced by institutional frameworks and the flow of funds and personnel.

René Véron is professor of social geography based at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research focuses on urban environmental governance with a regional specialization on India. He is particularly interested in exploring socio-environmental processes related to urban environmental services, waste and pollution using an approach of urban political ecology.