Project Details
Abstract
This study is a continuation of the issues that arise in the Canadian Aboriginal
Movies the in the late twentieth century, especially in the 1960s to 1990s. In
retrospect, issues including political (pro-independence movement in Quebec),
racial/ethnic, aboriginal rights, and social (gender relations, equality issues for gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgendered) in the past century (twentieth century) have been
extensively discussed and debated. At the turn of the century, George Melnyk in his
book Radical Regionalism (1983) holds a vision of “radical regionalism” that is
particularly important for Westerners struggling to come to grips with Canadian
distinctiveness. He sees in particular the Métis, the nation born of the intermarriage
between Europeans (mostly French) and Aboriginals (mostly Cree) as being a crucial
metaphor for Western Canada and Canadian identity generally.
Jerry White in The Cinema of Canada (2006) tries to give a sense of the three
distinctive cinematic traditions that have emerged in the nation-state. Whether
Quebec or Aboriginal communities are locations of national identity that can
supersede Canadian identity is a question that he wants to avoid. He has built his
book on two assumptions: that Canada is a nation-state; it provides a reasonable way
to organize a cinematic inquiry; and that Canada has within it three groups whose
cohesiveness go back to its foundation as a nation-state and remain very much part of
its contemporary experience. English-Canadian, French-Canadian/Québécois, and
Aboriginal cultures, like their films, never really existed as monolithic groups, as Saul
acknowledges in his discussion of the “triangle” metaphor. What are the connections
between cultural policies and filmmaking within the context of globalization?
This paper aims to situate its discussions of the Canadian Aboriginal films with
the generation of its unique cultural sphere. This paper considers the ideas brought
about in Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization and concurs that the expression such as “the world is growing smaller”
and witnesses its reality in our lives. Appadurai places these challenges and pleasures
of contemporary life in a broad global perspective and offers a new framework for the
cultural study of globalization. He also shows how the imagination works as a social
force in today’s world, providing new resources for identity and energies for creating
alternatives to the nation-state. Appadurai examines the current era of globalization,
which is characterized by the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation.
He considers the way images of lifestyles, popular culture, and self-representation
circulate internationally through the media and are often borrowed in inventive
fashions. From Appadurai’s view of cultural activity known as the imaginary, or the
social imaginary, this paper further presents the five dimensions of global cultural
flow (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes) in the
contentions of the relationship between filmmaking and cultural policy.
Project IDs
Project ID:PE9807-1744
External Project ID:NSC98-2410-H182-014
External Project ID:NSC98-2410-H182-014
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 01/08/09 → 31/07/10 |
Keywords
- Shakespeare
- the Liberties
- Shoreditch
- Eastcheap
- history plays
- licentiousness
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