October 16 - 18, 2007 

Gendered Empires of Security: Memorializing Self and Other on Film, through Torture, in Malls, and with Food

This panel of four papers examines the relationship between gender, empire, and security in a postcolonial world.  Specifically, it traces how Self and Other are memorialized to serve contemporary power relations through four main venues: (1) films from India and China, (2) torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, (3) mall architecture and design in the US, and (4) the stories elites tell about food produced in Asia for consumption in the West.  Each venue “remembers” and “forgets” the Self and its Other through different configurations of race, gender, class, and culture but all filtered through the lens of global power relations.  

The first paper by Banerjee and Ling compares filmic images of Self produced by Bollywood and the martial arts industry in East Asia with the Othering imaginary of Anglo-American Hollywood, often based on the novels of white, colonial males like E.M. Forster for India and Somerset Maugham for China.  Are the cultural representations that different, they ask, despite differences in time, sentiment, and authors?  Or does elite-controlled capital, rather than the mass market, structure these filmic images such that they end up supporting the same colonial power relations?  And what are the implications of such for a more “global” world politics?  

The second paper looks into “the moment of interrogation” between Occupiers and Occupied, specifically located at contemporary sites of imperial power politics like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.  Hall asks: What are the collective memories of Self and Other invoked and perpetrated by interrogators and detainees alike at that precise moment of interrogation, especially when torture is allowed?  Equally pressing is the question: what are the implications of these collective memories of Self and Other for democratization in the region?   

The third paper examines the mall as global capitalism’s latest space of “gendered empire.”  Yoto looks at a specific mall campaign in the US, “Defining You,” that remakes the shopper into an idealized consumer who can fancy one’s objects of desire in a securitized environment – as long as the credit card is valid.  

The fourth and last paper extends Marx’s observation that imperialism resides in a coffee cup.  Chowdhry and Agathangelou take us to the international political economy of food to ask: What are the racial, gender, and class implications behind current productions of food: how it’s made, who sells, who buys, and who eats?  And what are the security implications of this “eating empire”?

Our panel spans the range from junior to senior scholars in the field.  Hall and Yoto are master’s students in international affairs; Banerjee is a doctoral candidate in Sociology; Agathangelou, an Assistant Professor of Political Science; Ling, an Associate Professor of International Affairs; and Chowdhry, a Professor of Political Science. 

Our race, gender, and nationality composition on the panel is also widely representative.  All the presenters, except for Hall, are women of color.  Agathangelou is originally from Cyprus; Banerjee and Chowdhry, from India, Ling, from Taiwan; and Yoto, from the US and Venezuela.  Hall comes from an Anglo-Scandinavian background and hails from Portland, Oregon.    

Papers:

 

Imagining India and China on Film: From Hollywood to Bollywood, 'The Painted Veil' to 'House of Flying Dagger'

Payal Banerjee

Department of Sociology

Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs

Syracuse University

& L.H.M. Ling

Graduate Program in International Affairs

The New School

New York

 

The Moment of Interrogation: Punishment as Prisoner Emasculation in Iraq

Zachary B. Hall

Graduate Program in International Affairs

The New School

New York

 

Defining You: Self and Other in the Mall

Adriana Valdez Yoto

Graduate Program in International Affairs

The New School

New York

 

Eating Empire: Race, Gender, and Class in Global Food Politics

Geeta Chowdhry
Department of Political Science
Northern Arizona University
& Anna M. Agathangelou
Department of Political Science
York University
Toronto, Canada

 

 

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