All in Cultural Criticism
In a striking image from Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, a chic young woman sits in her white Volkswagen Beetle while parked in a blooming canola field; in the distance looms a series of massive, grey residential high-rises. This juxtaposition astutely captures the sweeping changes and strange contradictions of China’s revolutionary century in which Jia’s film, a tribute to China’s working class, takes place.
Tangerine’s contribution to the cinematic exploration of work lies in its aesthetics and politics of reproductive labour, and, specifically, its exploration of the structural role of Black trans reproductive labour within capitalist economies.
The film commodifies alternative politics for mass consumption and profit while also prying open a representational outside to our current colonial reality. It holds in tension the contradiction of feminist, anti-colonial Wakanda with the narrative form of masculine superhero origin story in a massively profitable franchise, pushing at the potential and limits of what can be imagined as alternative.
Call Me By Your Name celebrates the complexities of queer desire while participating in an earlier tradition of gay culture uninvested in fixed notions of a minority gay identity.
I knew the world could be different from the way it is—not just smoothing the edges, not just less exploitation, more diversity, or solar panels, but radically different. I realized that when I was talking about the different worlds found in science fiction and fantasy I was largely referring to the writing of Ursula K. Le Guin.
Where do community stories of rights and justice fit within the idea of the Canada 150 project? How do we unpack the complexities of commemorating the process of acknowledging historical trauma, seeking redress, and creating avenues for reconciliation in a time of national commemoration?
I am writing in response to Margaret Atwood’s Opinion piece “Am I a bad feminist?” I am the sponsor and co-author of the Counter Letter petition against the UBC Accountable group.
In 2049, climate apocalypse has already happened, its anxieties contained through the fetishization of the image on the level of form and a nostalgic retrenchment into heteronormative white futurity on the level of content. If climate crisis ends cycles of accumulation, then what happens when there is nothing left to accumulate?
When I was a young person, I would watch Star Trek: The Next Generation every day at 5pm after school. I loved the characters and fantastical planets. Like any good science fiction, it made me think about different ways of being, different social configurations; science fiction made me realize that a lot of accepted conventions are merely that, and not natural.
Hulu’s new prestige drama The Handmaid’s Tale is engrossing and immersive, but I would like to dwell here a bit on how the shift from novel to television show changes the text’s racial politics.
