“No Way Home: Primitive Accumulation in the Field of Vision”

Cassandra Guan (Assistant Professor, Cinema & Media Studies, University of Chicago)

Respondent: Rochona Majumdar (Professor, Cinema & Media Studies, University of Chicago)

April 18, 2025, 11:00–12:30; Cobb 311

 

Please join us on Friday, April 18th, for our first Mass Culture workshop of spring quarter.

Cassandra Guan Mass Culture Paper

The paper password is provided through the Mass Culture Workshop listserv.

 

Presenter bio: Cassandra Guan is an Assistant Professor in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Guan works on the history of animation with a special focus on the co-evolution of modernist aesthetics, new media technologies, and the life sciences. Her research underscores the material entanglements of political modernist cinema and the transnational permutations of a “bioanalytic” paradigm. She is currently finishing a book project entitled Maladaptive Media: The Plasticity of Life in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility.

Respondent bio: Rochona Majumdar is the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in the Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College. Majumdar is a historian of modern India with a focus on Bengal. Her writings span histories of gender and sexuality, Indian cinema especially art cinema and film music, and modern Indian intellectual history. Majumdar also writes on postcolonial history and theory.