Modern Languages & Literatures Events
[PAST EVENT] [CANCELED] Akira Mizuta Lippit, AMES-APIA Keynote Speaker: "Instead of Disaster"
Access & Features
- Open to the public
Akira Mizuta Lippit is the T. C. Wang Family Endowed Chair in School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.
He is also Vice Dean of School of Cinematic Arts, holding the positions of Professor in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures
His talk “Instead of Disaster” looks at the impact of Japan’s 2011 disaster--which began as an earthquake that caused a tsunami and led ultimately to a nuclear crisis, whose effects are still being felt today—to Japanese cinema. The event has come to be known as “311,” putting it into a complex relationship to “911,” invoking not only natural disaster, but nuclear warfare and the specters of terror cast over both. This presentation explores the ways in which Japanese cinema has responded to a second nuclear crisis, and how the echoes of 1945 have returned to the contemporary moment, or perhaps had never left at all.
Professor Lippit is a world renown scholar and theorist. His interests are in world cinemas, critical theory, Japanese film and culture, experimental film and video, and visual studies. Lippit’s published work reflects these areas and includes four books, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012); Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005); Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000); and his most recent book, Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida's Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (2016).
Contact
Professor Stephen Sheehi, [[spsheehi]]