The intimacies of globalization: Bodies and borders on-screen

Camera Obscura

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 33-73

  Davis, Emily S ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 65849474260     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: 15291510     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-2O06-002     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. "Badlaa" episode of The X-Files, writ. John Shiban, dir. Tony Wharmby, prod. Vince Gilligan, Frank Spotnitz, and Chris Carter, Fox, 21 January 2001
2. For a useful introduction to the most prominent thinkers in this emerging field, see John Beynon and David Dunkerley, eds., Globalization: The Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000)
3. Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? transatrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 11
4. For an example of the argument that globalization will lead to cultural homogenization, see John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism (London: Pinter, 1991)
5. Ahmed Gurnah argues for a greater complexity of different local responses to Western media in his essay "Elvis in Zanzibar," in The Limits of Globalization: Cases and Arguments, ed. Alan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1997), 116-42
6. See, for example, Chris Barker, Global Television (London: Blackwell, 1997)
7. Ann Cvetkovich and Douglas Kellner, eds., Articulating the Global and the Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies (New York: Westview, 1997)
8. and Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Global-Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996)
9. Toby Miller, "The People of the United States Cannot Be Trusted" (paper presented at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference, Urbana-Champaign, IL, 28 June 2004)
10. Miller expresses his frustration with humanities scholarship's lack of engagement with work in the social sciences more convincingly in an earlier essay titled "Cinema Studies Doesn't Matter; or, I Know What You Did Last Semester," in Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, ed. Matthew Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo (New York: Routledge, 2001), 303-11
11. Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 225
12. Hennessy is drawing in this passage from insights in Lauren Berlant's The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997)
13. Christy L. Burns, "Erasure: Alienation, Paranoia, and the Loss of Memory in The X-Files," Camera Obscura, no. 43 (2001): 197
14. Elspeth Kydd, "Differences: The X-Files, Race and the White Norm," Journal of Film and Video 53 (2001-2): 76
15. See the popular Global Episode Opinion Survey (GEOS) Web site's page for the "Badlaa" episode at www.geos.tv/index.php/ episode/txf/171 (accessed 2 December 2004). GEOS carries statistics about viewer ratings of episodes of a variety of different television shows, including The X-Files
16. My thanks to Bishnupriya Ghosh for a stimulating conversation about the tension between concepts of revenge and reparation
17. Here I have in mind the genealogy of science fiction films stretching from The War of the Worlds (dir. Byron Haskin, US, 1953) to Independence Day (dir. Roland Emmerich, US, 1996), in which aliens are simply evil killers out to conquer the planet. They lack subjectivity and often provide no explanation for their decision to attack Earth
18. The Sambhavna Trust, a group of medical workers, writers, and social workers, runs the Sambhavna medical clinic in Bhopal, which cares for many of the survivors and their children. Their casualty and ongoing injury numbers are (not surprisingly) considerably higher than those accepted by Union Carbide and subsequently Dow Chemical. The Sambhavna and Union Carbide statistics I cite here come from the "What Happened in Bhopal?" page of Sambhavna's Web site at www.bhopal.org/ (accessed 4 December 2004). Amnesty International claims that "more than 7,000 people died within a matter of days" and that, "over the last 20 years exposure to the toxins has resulted in the deaths of a further 15,000 people as well as chronic and debilitating illnesses for thousands of others for which treatment is largely ineffective." See Amnesty International, "Clouds of Injustice: Bhopal Disaster Twenty Years On," web.amnesty.org/ pages/ec-bhopal-eng (accessed 4 December 2004)
19. Amnesty International, "Clouds of Injustice," 5
20. Randeep Ramesh, "Bhopal Still Suffering, Twenty Years On," Guardian (London), 29 November 2004. The Sambhavna Trust claims that "for years Mr. Anderson's whereabouts were unknown, and it wasn't until August of 2002 that Greenpeace found him, living a life of luxury in the Hamptons" ("What Happened in Bhopal?")
21. One would imagine that this type of narrative has an especially powerful symbolic impact post-September 11, though it has failed to surface to any great extent in mainstream American TV and film thus far. One example would be the film The Day after Tomorrow (dir. Bryant Low, US, 2002), in which the US government's refusal to recognize the importance of global warming leads to the destruction of much of the country. A richly ironic scene shows hordes of white middle-class Americans fleeing across the border into Mexico, signifying on antiimmigrant paranoia about invading hordes of immigrants from Mexico and dramatizing the infamous traffic sign posted on highways in much of the Southwest depicting a family of illegal immigrants running across the road
22. The figure of the subaltern more generally has been the theoretical focus for the historians of the Subaltern Studies Collective. For the landmark work of Subaltern Studies, see Ranajit Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (Delhi: Oxford, 1983)
23. In his recent Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), Dipesh Chakrabarty takes up the figure of the beggar as an example of the way in which the Marxian historiography of the Subaltern Studies Collective has been unable to account for the role of religion in Indian politics. Chakrabarty argues that "the Buddhist imagination once saw the possibility of the joyful, renunciate bhikshu (monk) in the miserable and deprived image of the bhikshuk (beggar). We have not yet learned to see the spectral doubles that may inhabit our Marxism-inspired images of the subaltern" (36)
24. For an example of the ways in which contemporary South Asian fiction has used the figure of the beggar to work through the failures of Indian nationalism, see Nayantara Sahgal's novel Rich Like Us (New York: New Directions, 1985)
25. For a more detailed summary of the health effects of exposure to methyl isocyanate gas, see the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services, "Hazardous Substance Fact Sheet," www.state.nj.us/health/eoh/rtkweb/ 1270.pdf (accessed 5 December 2004). At the time of the Bhopal disaster, Union Carbide owned a facility in New Jersey similar to that in Bhopal, though it was considerably better prepared for the type of incident that occurred in the Indian factory. The discrepancy in the quality of maintenance between the two facilities has been one of the grounds for the victims' lawsuit against Union Carbide
26. Ramesh, "Bhopal Still Suffering."
27. S. Sriramachari, "The Bhopal Gas Tragedy: An Environmental Disaster," Current Science, April 2004, 905-20
28. quoted in Amnesty International, "Clouds of Injustice," 10
29. Scully's pregnancy itself and the identity and powers of Scully's unborn child become a driving force as the series winds to an end
30. Steve Deng points out (in conversation) the interesting possibility that it might be another mystic stepping forward at the end to take his place, playing on the stereotype that there is an endless supply of immigrants, all of whom look the same
31. Those fears exploded fairly recently in the media in the case at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, in which the Chinese immigrant researcher Wen Ho Lee was accused of attempting to sell US nuclear secrets to his home country. Stich incidents have sharply increased since September 11, targeting a range of Middle East-born Americans whose loyalties might be suspect. As the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II reminds us, this is not a new phenomenon, but rather one that tends to intensify along with nationalist xenophobia at times of perceived vulnerability, such as war
32. In a fascinating metatextual turn, Deep Roy stars as all of the Oompa Loompas - endlessly replicated exotic workers - in Tim Burton's 2005 adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
33. Men's restrooms are an especially overdetermined site of possibilities for gay male desire, as evidenced by the George Michael scandal. For an outstanding essay on the space of the men's restroom and the ways in which homosexuality was linked to communism in a sex scandal during the Cold War, see Lee Edelman's "Tearooms and Sympathy; or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet," in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 148-70
34. On abjection, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)
35. Autumn Tysko, "Autumn Tysko's XF Reviews: Badlaa," www.geocities.com/Area51/Vault/1411/main-rev.html (accessed 7 December 2004). All further references to Tysko's review come from her site. Tysko's site is listed as a link on the GEOS Web site's page for the episode: www.geos.tv/index.php/ episode/txf/171 (accessed 7 December 2004)
36. David Rosiak, "Badlaa," IIth Hour Web Magazine, www.the11thhour.com/archives/022001/tvreviews/xf-badlaa.html (accessed 7 December 2004)
37. Pam, "Badlaa," www.theweeklycynic.com, under "The X-Files Archive" (accessed 6 December 2004)
38. Gayle Rubin put forth the model of the sex/gender system in her classic essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex," in Toward, an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210
39. "Bourgeois patriarchy" is Hennessy's term for a socioeconomic system based on "an organizational split between public wage economy and unpaid domestic production, both regulated by the ideology of possessive individualism" (Profit andleasure, 23). Hennessy argues (drawing on Ann Ferguson) that this mode is being replaced in recent years by what she calls "public or postmodern patriarchy," which "is characterized by the hyperdevelopment of consumption and the joint wage-earner family, the relative transfer of power from husbands to professionals in the welfare state, the rise of single mother-headed and other alternative households, and sexualized consumerism" (23)
40. Andreas Huyssen, "The Vamp and the Machine," in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 70
41. Interestingly, one of the film's publicity images takes these anxieties about sexuality in a direction that has nothing to do with the content of the film itself. In the image, Okwe stands threateningly behind Senay, playing on stereotypes of the hypersexual and predatory black man and completely misrepresenting the film's plot in order to attract viewers
42. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). McClintock traces how anxieties about changes in the class system in Britain brought about by industrialization and imperial expansion get expressed through a racialization and criminalization of working-class women, as well as through an infantilization of the colonized subject in an attempt to stabilize the particular notion of white masculinity thatjustified imperial economics
43. Larry Rohter, "Tracking the Sale of a Kidney on a Path of Poverty and Hope," New York Times, 23 May 2004
44. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Bodies for Sale," in Commodifying Bodies, ed. Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant (London: Sage, 2002), 2
45. My thanks to Andrea Fontenot for drawing my attention to the allusion to fellatio in this scene, and indeed to the broader issue of Okwe as impenetrable hero in the film
46. Stephen Frears, "The Complexities of Cultural Change: An Interview with Stephen Frears," interview by Cynthia Lucia, Cinéaste 28 (2003): 8-16
47. A classic text here is Gayle Rubin's "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality" in Pleasure and Danger, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 267-319
48. One of the most exhilarating and theoretically sophisticated denaturalizations of gender is Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-81
49. John Foran closes his essay "Alternatives to Development: Of Love, Dreams, and Revolution" by evoking the 1960s slogan "Power to the imagination!" Like Foran, I do not want to underestimate that power. See Foran, "Alternatives to Development," in Feminist Futures: Re-imagining Women, Culture, and Development, ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani,John Foran, and Priva A. Kurian (London: Zed, 2003), 274
50. LaMond Tullis, foreword to Political Economy and Illegal Drugs in Colombia, by Francisco E. Thoumi (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995), xi
51. Joshua Marston, audio commentary to Maria Füll of Grace DVD, HBO Video, 2004
52. In an attempt to fill the same gap, the exiled Colombian journalist Alfredo Molano just published a collection of the testimonials of several Colombians involved in the drug trade titled Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom: Tales of Drugs, Mules, and, Gunmen, trans. James Graham (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)
53. Mars ton, audio commentary
54. According to Marston, "Colombia ... is the second-largest producer of roses in the world. They're second only to Holland, Ecuador being a close third" (audio commentary)
55. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual, Difference-in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 47
56. Huyssen, "The Vamp and the Machine."
57. Marston, audio commentary
58. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 66