famst 192ct study guide

Repressive Hypothesis

The hypothesis states that sex is repressed because it is

incompatible with societal goals (i.e. work/productivity).

Foucault rejects this hypothesis, seeing repression as a means of maintaining social order and also as a failure- attempting to repress sexuality inherently furthers

discourse around sex.

Ex. Christian church

Genealogy

Diachronic (over time): it reconstructs the dispersed origins and fragmented, contradictory development of discourses.

revealing the interplay with power.

It contrasts with archaeology post-1968, there is not one,

totalizing history.

Archaelogy

A synchronic (one point in time) analysis of the statements in any discourse, which reveals the "rules of formation" that limit and shape what may be said

Third Cinema

Empowering to the viewer in how it encourages action. It is made in third world countries, it opposes imperialism and class oppression and encourages decolonial thought.

It encourages revolutionary thought and viewing habits.

It bridges the gap between imperialist film and revolutionary viewing habits.

History vs. Memory

Memory is fragmented, polyvocal, and challenges authority.

History is totalizing because it tells one narrative. It is a discourse of power.

Ethics of remembrance who remembers? What is remembered? How are things remembered?

(Sturken) 'Tangled Memories'

*He talks about the cultural vs the individual memory vs historical discourse through the lens of the AIDS epidemic and the Vietnam War

Post-Modernism

Against totalization- there is not one history, rejection of political and aesthetic representation Against teleology- there is no predetermination against utopia- it doesn't exist lol

Biopower

Make live and let die. Who do we want to keep alive and who can die? This idea started with sovereignty and the concept of public executions as "let live and make die." This evolved into ideas of discipline in Foucault's panopticon and idea of self-discipline. Then it evolved into a biopolitical choice, combining issues of racism, xenophobia, homophobia,

classism, etc.

Sergio Giral

Afro-Cuban director of "El Otro Francisco". He based his film off of the novel "Francisco," showing the potential of slave revolution, refusing to depict slaves as passive

Cathexis

The attachment one has to something/someone/somewhere. Decathexis describes the waning attachment to the entity after loss which allows us to accept the loss.

Net neutrality

(week 4) Who controls visibility, circulation, and knowledge online. Internet is not a neutral space of free thought and communication, yet it is controlled by algorithms and platforms that are thoughtful of corporations and political interests

Julio Garcia Espinosa

(week 5) Cuban filmmaker/theorist, founder of ICAIC, calls for political, revolutionary, and "Imperfect cinema", AESTHETICS of film are political,ie rough, low-budget, unpolished etc.

Black Skin, White Masks

(week 5) Frantz Fanon's 1952 text analyzing the psychic effects of colonialism on the colonized subject. Examines how colonized people internalize white supremacist values. Central to understanding decolonization as both political and psychological.

Archaeology (Foucault)

Foucault's early methodological approach to excavating 'epistemes' (the underlying structures of knowledge in a given historical period) without assuming continuity or progress. Preceded his genealogical method.

Friedrich Nietzsche

German philosopher (1844-1900) whose critique of Enlightenment rationalism and universal truth anticipated postmodern anti-foundationalism. Relevant to the genealogical approach (via Foucault) and modernist skepticism about grand narratives of progress.

"Aesthetics of Hunger"

A concept from Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha's 1965 manifesto arguing that Latin American cinema must embrace its poverty as an aesthetic strategy. The refusal of First World polish as an ideological stance.

Octavio Getino

Argentine filmmaker and theorist, co-director of La hora de los hornos (1968) and co-author of 'Towards a Third Cinema.' Theorized Third Cinema as an anti-imperialist tool operating outside mainstream distribution.

ICAIC

Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos,the Cuban film institute founded after the 1959 revolution. A state institution for socialist filmmaking. Represents the intersection of Third Cinema, decolonization, and socialist politics.

Quattrocento perspective

A Renaissance technique of linear perspective developed in 15th-century Italy. Described as 'a mode of focalization that helps shape modern subjectivity and a human-centered view of the universe'. a key marker of the shift from theocratic to humanist worldviews in the arts.

Humanism

'Man as the measure of all things'. a philosophy placing human beings at the center of the universe, displacing theocratic ideas. It underpins Enlightenment thought, science, politics, economics, and art.

Primitive Accumulation

A Marxist concept describing the historical process by which landless laborers were created as a precondition for capitalism. Includes enclosure of commons, slavery, and dispossession of indigenous populations—key to understanding colonialism's economic function.

White Man's Burden

A phrase from Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem rationalizing the Philippine-American War. Used as a label for the ideological disguise of colonialism: presenting genocidal missions of annexation and extraction as a 'civilizing mission.'

Stereotype

Reductive, fixed representations of racial/cultural groups that build on basic differences and amplify them. Their libidinal dimension,colonial fantasy, fear of

miscegenation, covert desire,is emphasized in lectures.

Industrial Revolution

The transformation of production through mechanization beginning in England around 1750. Created conditions for capitalism by producing landless wage laborers (primitive accumulation), urbanization, and new class structures.

Colonial Mimicry

From Homi Bhabha (via Fanon): the colonial subject imitates the colonizer's culture under pressure of the 'civilizing mission.' This mimicry is inherently ambivalent,it affirms colonial power while containing seeds of resistance.

Decolonial Project

Associated with Walter Mignolo, this is the intellectual and political project of dismantling hierarchies of knowledge and power built by European modernity. Argues that modernity 'could not have happened without the objectification, weakening, and exploitation of non-European others.'

"Moral Hazard" in Slums

The application of insurance/economics terminology to justify non-improvement of slum conditions: the argument that improving slums would 'encourage' the poor to remain poor. A colonial/neoliberal ideological move that blames the poor for structural conditions.

Forensic Architecture

An investigative practice using architectural and spatial analysis to document human rights abuses and state violence. Connected to colonial epistemic violence and the politics of evidence,how spatial data can challenge official histories.

Saartjie Baartman

Known as the 'Hottentot Venus' (1789-1815), a South African Khoikhoi woman exhibited in Europe as a freak-show spectacle. Represents the 'exhibitionary complex'-- dehumanizing display of colonized others at museums, world fairs, and salons.

Colonial Epistemic Violence

The destruction of colonized peoples' ways of knowing, belief systems, languages, and cosmologies through the imposition of European knowledge as universal. Denigrate, discount, dismiss, destroy the Other.'

"Angel of History"

Walter Benjamin's image from 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (1940). The angel faces the past, seeing catastrophe piling up, while the storm of progress propels it backward. Critiques linear models of historical progress and how history is written by victors.

Genealogical Approach to History

Foucault's method (derived from Nietzsche) of tracing how power-knowledge formations developed historically, without assuming a teleological endpoint. Maps contingency, ruptures, and power dynamics that produced 'truths.

Trauma

A shocking, debilitating experience the subject cannot fully process at the moment of occurrence. 'A loss that is too much,too intense, too overwhelming,to comprehend.' Creates a gap in experience, a void or discontinuity.

The Temporal Structure of Trauma

the shocking event is not fully experienced at the time but only comprehended later, through 'deferred action.' We speak of pre- and post-9/11 as markers of how trauma restructures temporal understanding retrospectively.

Melancholia

In Freudian theory, the pathological failure of mourning,when one cannot disentangle from the lost object/ideal and thus cannot accept the loss. Symptoms: disinterest, alienation, depression.

The NAMES Project

The AIDS Memorial Quilt project, begun 1987. Each panel commemorates an individual who died of AIDS. Cited as an example of cultural memory and the politics of remembrance: making visible lives that statistics obscure ('not just numbers').

Cultural Memory

Memory mediated by cultural representations,films, literature, memorials, art. As analyzed by Marita Sturken, cultural memory and history are 'entangled, mutually constitutive.' Representations shape how communities remember collective experiences.

Revisionist History

The recovery and restitution of forgotten or suppressed aspects of collective experience, especially those left out of official history. Examples: feminist oral histories of South Asian Partition, memory of Latin American disappeared.

Remembering by Forgetting

The dialectical insight that forgetting is constitutive of remembering,the mind cannot retain everything, so remembering always involves selection and erasure. Used to interrogate what gets left out of History and why.

Screen Memory (Freud)

A Freudian concept: a psychological defense mechanism by which painful memories are blocked and replaced by other, less

threatening memories. Important for understanding how both individuals and collectives manage traumatic pasts.

Mourning Work

The Freudian process of working through loss: digesting the traumatic experience, narrativizing what happened, and gradually decathecting from the lost object/ideal. The 'talking cure.' Collective mourning is far less predictable than individual mourning.

Collective Amnesia

A society's inability or refusal to acknowledge shared traumatic history,due either to the overwhelming nature of the trauma or to political/cultural prohibitions. Examples: Taiwan's February 28 Incident, Germany post-WWII.

Witness

A central ethical and political concept in the politics of remembrance: who bears witness to historical trauma? Raises questions about who gets to speak, who is heard, and how testimony relates to evidence and historical truth.

Nakba

Arabic for 'catastrophe',refers to the 1948 displacement of Palestinians. An example of contested memory and traumatic history whose political stakes are ongoing. Tied to questions of witness and the politics of remembrance.

"Coming to Terms with the Past" (Adorno)

Theodor Adorno's argument that Germany must not simply 'forgive and forget' after fascism, but must overcome the 'objective conditions',the social, economic, political structures,that made the Holocaust possible.

Orientalism

Edward Said's 1978 analysis of how 'the Orient' was discursively produced by European knowledge institutions (categorization, classification, theorization) not to understand but to subjugate it. Built on Foucault's concept of discourse.

Miscegenation

The mixing of racial groups, historically forbidden by colonial powers. Connected to Orientalist romantic fantasy: a covert libidinal desire for the Other simultaneously repressed through racial prohibitions

Anti-Foundationalist Thought

The rejection of any fixed, universal ground for knowledge or ethics. Associated with Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, and postmodern philosophy. Grounds the critique of Enlightenment universalism and grand narratives.

Totalizing Tendencies

The impulse to explain all phenomena through a single master framework. Postmodern thought resists totalization. Dick Hebdige identifies 'anti-totalization' as one of three core postmodern negations.

Universalism

The claim that certain values, truths, or experiences are valid for all humans regardless of context. Postmodern and postcolonial critics argue that 'universalism' typically disguises the particular (Western, bourgeois, male) as the general.

Anti-teleological Thought

The rejection of the idea that history has a direction, goal, or endpoint. Postmodern thought resists teleologies of Progress, Emancipation, and Revolution. One of Hebdige's three postmodern negations.

Modernist Grand Narratives

Jean-François Lyotard's term=the overarching stories modernity told about itself like Progress, Emancipation, Science, Revolution, Development, Human Rights. Postmodern thought is defined by incredulity toward these metanarratives.

Dada

An anti-art movement using absurdism, collage, photomontage, and provocation to challenge institutionalized art and expose social contradictions. The lectures cite Raoul Hausmann's 'The Art Critic' as an example of self-reflexive critique of the culture industry.

Historical Avant Garde of the 1920s

Movements including Dada and Surrealism that challenged the institutional separation of art from life and its complicity with bourgeois values. Unlike later modernisms, the historical avant-garde demanded art be an agent of social change.

Kazimir Malevich

Russian avant-garde painter and founder of Suprematism. The aerial view made possible by modern technology led to his grid paintings, abstract geometric forms as a break from representational realism. Key example of Modernism's celebratory strand.

Defamiliarization/Estrangement

A technique originating in Russian Formalism and adapted by Brecht, of making the familiar strange so it can be seen anew. Disrupts automatic perception and produces critical, active spectatorship rather than passive identification.

Bertolt Brecht

German playwright and theorist who developed the 'alienation effect' to prevent audience identification with characters, creating critical distance. Presentational rather than representational mode. Hugely influential on Third Cinema and politically engaged modernist aesthetics.

Modernist Skepticism

A strain within Modernism that doubted the optimistic promises of Enlightenment progress, science, and technology. Expressed through fragmentation, alienation, and formal experimentation. After WWI, art had to acknowledge its relation to economics, politics, and social hierarchies.

Sergio Giral

Cuban filmmaker known for films critiquing slavery and colonial history in Cuba. Associated with the 'bourgeois abolitionist novel'-- his work addresses how liberal anti-slavery narratives were limited by their class position.

Bourgeois Abolitionist Novel

A genre of 19th-century Cuban/Latin American literature that opposed slavery from a limited liberal bourgeois perspective. Despite progressive politics, such novels were constrained by authors' class positions and could not fully represent enslaved subjectivity.

Second Cinema

European auteur/art cinema, the 'second' tier in the Third Cinema taxonomy. Distinguished from Hollywood by aesthetic ambition, but still

rooted in bourgeois individualism. Third Cinema theorists saw it as insufficient for genuine political liberation.

Third Cinema

A revolutionary film movement theorized by Solanas, Getino, and Espinosa in the late 1960s-70s in Latin America and Cuba. Opposed to Hollywood (First Cinema) and European art cinema (Second Cinema). Aimed to be a weapon of liberation for colonized and oppressed peoples.

Pastiche

Fredric Jameson's term for postmodern imitation of past styles without the satirical bite of parody, 'blank parody.' Unlike modernist quotation with a critical edge, pastiche is surface-level recycling of style

Postmodern Irony

A knowing, detached stance toward cultural conventions - "wink wink, nudge nudge.' Unlike modernist critique, postmodern irony often lacks political teeth; it's a matter of style. Examples: Tarantino films, the TV show Moonlighting.

Intertextuality

The way texts refer to, quote, and transform other texts. In postmodern culture, this becomes systematic: Marvel franchises, Japanese mediamix, Bollywood retellings of Shakespeare.

Postmodern Citation

The postmodern practice of quoting earlier cultural forms without necessarily critiquing them, as stylistic gesture rather than historical argument. Related to intertextuality, recycled culture, and the blurring of high and low culture.

Recycled Culture

The postmodern tendency to recycle, sample, version, and remix existing cultural materials (reggae, dub, rap, hip-hop, 'music video aesthetic.' ) Raises questions about

authenticity, cultural ownership, and creative bricolage.

Anti-Essentialist Thought

The rejection of fixed, natural, or essential identities. Postmodern and postcolonial theory insists identities are constructed, contingent, and relational. Connects to anti-foundationalism and critiques of both colonialism and nationalism.

Simulacrum

Jean Baudrillard's concept: a copy without an original (a simulation that substitutes for reality). Examples: Disneyland, social media filters, Madame Tussaud's. The 'obscenity of the all-too-visible': in hyperreal culture, the image precedes and replaces the real.

Modernity as Rupture

The foundational idea of Modernism: that contemporary conditions represent such a decisive break with the past that new cultural forms and orientations are necessary. Both celebratory and critical modernisms shared this premise.

Affective Intensities

Fredric Jameson's term for the postmodern replacement of deep emotion with surface-level, free-floating feeling,, depthless, disconnected affect. Consumer culture's packaging and 'infotainment' produce affective hits without grounded emotional structures.

Baz Luhrman

Australian filmmaker known for stylistically maximalist, intertextual films (Romeo + Juliet, 1996; Moulin Rouge!). Exemplifies postmodern citation, mixing cultural references across time periods, genres, and registers.

Media Mix

A Japanese media industry strategy where a single IP is simultaneously deployed across multiple platforms like manga, anime, games, merchandise, films. An example of

postmodern intertextuality and the logic of late capitalist cultural production.

Postmodern Schizophrenia

Jameson's term (borrowing from Lacan) for the postmodern temporal experience: the breakdown of continuity between past, present, and future, producing a perpetual fragmented present.

Flexible Accumulation

David Harvey's term for the post-Fordist regime of capital accumulation: replacing fixed mass production with flexible specialization, outsourcing, temp work, and gig economies. The economic base for postmodernity.

Stagflation

The simultaneous occurrence of high inflation and stagnant economic growth, experienced in the 1970s after the 1973 oil crisis. Marked the crisis of Fordism and provided the economic context for the shift to neoliberalism.

1973

The year of the Arab oil embargo and global economic crisis. It was a pivotal moment signaling the transition from Fordist welfare-state capitalism to neoliberal flexible Accumulation. Also the year of Pinochet's coup in Chile (first large-scale neoliberal experiment).

May '68

The student and worker uprisings in France in May 1968, the high-water mark of the revolutionary left in the West. Its failure helped produce both postmodern

disillusionment with grand political projects and the conservative backlash that led to neoliberalism.

Art for Art's Sake

The aesthetic doctrine that art needs no social or political justification, beauty and form are ends in themselves. The lectures argue this became 'no longer possible' after WWI, when the historical avant-garde insisted art must reveal its complicity with power.

Sublime

The experience of overwhelming, terrifying beauty that exceeds rational comprehension. In the lectures, invoked in relation to the Holocaust as a 'negative sublime': an event so overwhelming that representation becomes both necessary and impossible.

Culture Industry/Art Market

Adorno and Horkheimer's Concept=the industrialization of cultural production under capitalism transforms art into commodity, standardizing it for mass consumption. The 'culture industry' produces conformity and undermines art's critical potential.

Geographical Indication (GI)

A legal protection for products that have a specific geographical origin and possess qualities due to that origin (e.g., Champagne, Darjeeling tea). Can be used to protect traditional and indigenous products from appropriation under TRIPs.

TRIPs

Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, a WTO agreement that extended Western IP regimes globally. Connected to biopiracy (patenting indigenous knowledge) and Geographical Indication as a mechanism for protecting traditional products.

Davos

The World Economic Forum held annually in Davos, Switzerland. Symbol of transnational elite class (global capitalists, technocrats, and political leaders who govern the global economy).

Patents

Legal monopolies on inventions or discoveries. In globalization, patents (enforced through TRIPs) become instruments of biopiracy, corporations patenting genetic resources or traditional knowledge from the Global South.

Time-Space Compression

David Harvey's concept: modern capitalism continually collapses the distances between places through transportation, telecommunications, and digital infrastructure. The remote becomes proximate. Produces both exciting opportunities and disorienting loss of familiar frameworks.

Economic Externalities

Costs or benefits generated by economic activity not borne by the producer or consumer, e.g., pollution (negative) or education (positive). Liberal economics recognizes externalities as justifying limited state intervention; neoliberalism tends to externalize these costs onto the public

Public Goods

Goods that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous (e.g., street lighting, clean air, national defense). Even liberal economics recognizes the market cannot efficiently provide them. Neoliberalism's erosion of state responsibility for public goods is a key critique.

Fordism

The system of mass production (assembly line, standardized commodities) combined with mass consumption (high wages allowing workers to buy what they produce),

associated with Henry Ford and the post-WWII welfare state.

"The World is Flat"

Thomas Friedman's 2005 book arguing globalization has leveled competitive playing fields. The lectures critique this as naive: the world is 'neither flat nor borderless'.

globalization produces flows AND frictions, opportunities AND new hierarchies.

Financescapes

One of Arjun Appadurai's 'scapes'-the global flows of capital, currency, stocks, and financial instruments. Characterized by speed, opacity, and the power to destabilize national economies.

Deterritorialization/ Reterritorialization

The double movement of globalization: capital, culture, and people are uprooted from place (deterritorialized) and then reattached elsewhere in new configurations (reterritorialized). Produces hybrid cultures and diaspora communities.