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Ana Elena Puga - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • DREAMer Youth Artist-Activists: Queering Migrant Melodrama
    Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration, 2020
    Co-Authors: Ana Elena Puga, Víctor M. Espinosa
    Abstract:

    This chapter looks at the representation of what has been called undocutime and undocuspace in a one-act devised dance theater work by the Albany Park Theater Project, Nine Digits (2007) and the YouTube video series by Julio Salgado, Undocumented and Awkward (2011–2013). Both works demonstrate how artist-activists can push the limits of Melodrama, and even react against it, while nevertheless still working within some of its conventions. These examples of cultural production exhibit facets that might seem to disqualify them from the category of Melodrama, including humor, satire, defiance, and anger. Yet we argue that rather than reject Melodrama entirely, these works take Melodramatic imagination in non-normative directions, what theorists have called queering. We argue, furthermore, that queering migrant Melodrama, subverting some of its conventions in order to challenge normative ideals, loosens the strictures of Melodramas that would confine undocumented migrants to the role of pitiful victims who deserve respect for their rights on the basis of how much they have suffered.

  • Migrant Melodrama and the political economy of suffering
    Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2016
    Co-Authors: Ana Elena Puga
    Abstract:

    This article deploys the term “migrant Melodrama” to describe contemporary cultural production that trains a Melodramatic imagination on migrants. It argues that migrant Melodrama often reconfigures suffering as a necessary step in the progress toward inclusion and belonging. To interrogate this assumption, the article analyzes three prominent examples of migrant Melodramas that feature children traveling north across national borders without adult caretakers: the 2006 journalistic narrative Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother, by Sonia Nazario; a 2009 HBO documentary film inspired by Nazario’s book, Which Way Home, directed by Rebecca Cammisa; and the 2007 fictional film Under the Same Moon, directed by Patricia Riggen. The article proposes that migrant Melodrama plays a role in the commodification and circulation of undocumented migrant suffering in a global market, a phenomenon that the author terms “the political economy of suffering.” Performances of s...

  • Migrant Melodrama and Elvira Arellano
    Latino Studies, 2012
    Co-Authors: Ana Elena Puga
    Abstract:

    This article trains a theater/performance studies lens on the struggle to control public perception of Elvira Arellano and coins the term “migrant Melodrama” to describe how key media coverage, cultural production and social performance in Arellano's case recycled nineteenth-century Melodramatic tropes. Elements of the nineteenth-century sub-genres known as domestic Melodrama, sensation Melodrama and race Melodrama were recycled and deployed by both supporters and detractors of the single mother who sought sanctuary in a Chicago church together with her US-born son, and even by Arellano herself. The result was a kind of casting competition that sought to impose moral clarity and resolution on a complicated, fraught issue that in fact remains far from resolved. On the one hand, Melodramatic spectacles of suffering insist on a common humanity and make ethical claims for inclusion into an imagined community that may extend across national borders. Yet on the other hand, they can also backfire by unintentionally setting the price of inclusion at an impossibly high level of virtue.

Keehyeung Lee - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Speak Memory! Morae Sigye and the Politics of Social Melodrama in Contemporary South Korea:
    Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 2004
    Co-Authors: Keehyeung Lee
    Abstract:

    This article is composed of two parts. The first part presents a brief survey of cinematic and television Melodramas in South Korea and describes how Melodrama has unevenly reflected a range of socio-cultural transformations. It traces the ways Melodrama has embodied the changing social and gender norms against the backdrop of highly compressed modernization and the persistent patriarchal authority in South Korea. The second part analyzes various textual strategies in Morae Sigye as a social Melodrama by examining the generic specificity and radical differences seen in Morae Sigye versus mainstream television dramas. In particular, this article assesses Morae Sigye’s representation of actual historical events and its pedagogical usefulness as a vehicle of cultural remembering. The article as a whole explores the potential of social Melodrama as a useful televisual subgenre that can articulate Melodramatic pathos with desire to summon popular memory surrounding the traumatic historical events in the past.

Elisabeth Anker - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • orgies of feeling Melodrama and the politics of freedom
    2014
    Co-Authors: Elisabeth Anker
    Abstract:

    Melodrama is not just a film or literary genre but a powerful political discourse that galvanizes national sentiment to legitimate state violence. Finding virtue in national suffering and heroism in sovereign action, Melodramatic political discourses cast war and surveillance as moral imperatives for eradicating villainy and upholding freedom. In Orgies of Feeling , Elisabeth R. Anker boldly reframes political theories of sovereignty, freedom, and power by analyzing the work of Melodrama and affect in contemporary politics. Arguing that Melodrama animates desires for unconstrained power, Anker examines Melodramatic discourses in the War on Terror, neoliberal politics, anticommunist rhetoric, Hollywood film, and post-Marxist critical theory. Building on Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of "orgies of feeling," in which overwhelming emotions displace commonplace experiences of vulnerability and powerlessness onto a dramatic story of injured freedom, Anker contends that the recent upsurge in Melodrama in the United States is an indication of public discontent. Yet the discontent that Melodrama reflects is ultimately an expression of the public's inability to overcome systemic exploitation and inequality rather than an alarmist response to inflated threats to the nation.

  • Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom - Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom
    2014
    Co-Authors: Elisabeth Anker
    Abstract:

    Melodrama is not just a film or literary genre but a powerful political discourse that galvanizes national sentiment to legitimate state violence. Finding virtue in national suffering and heroism in sovereign action, Melodramatic political discourses cast war and surveillance as moral imperatives for eradicating villainy and upholding freedom. In Orgies of Feeling , Elisabeth R. Anker boldly reframes political theories of sovereignty, freedom, and power by analyzing the work of Melodrama and affect in contemporary politics. Arguing that Melodrama animates desires for unconstrained power, Anker examines Melodramatic discourses in the War on Terror, neoliberal politics, anticommunist rhetoric, Hollywood film, and post-Marxist critical theory. Building on Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of "orgies of feeling," in which overwhelming emotions displace commonplace experiences of vulnerability and powerlessness onto a dramatic story of injured freedom, Anker contends that the recent upsurge in Melodrama in the United States is an indication of public discontent. Yet the discontent that Melodrama reflects is ultimately an expression of the public's inability to overcome systemic exploitation and inequality rather than an alarmist response to inflated threats to the nation.

  • Left Melodrama
    Contemporary Political Theory, 2012
    Co-Authors: Elisabeth Anker
    Abstract:

    ‘Left Melodrama’ is a form of contemporary political critique that combines thematic elements and narrative structures of the Melodramatic genre with a political perspective grounded in a left theoretical tradition, fusing them to dramatically interrogate oppressive social structures and unequal relations of power. It is also a new form of what Walter Benjamin called ‘left melancholy’, a critique that deadens what it examines by employing outdated and insufficient analyses to current exploitations. Left Melodrama is melancholic insofar as its use of older leftist critical methods disavows its attachments to the failed promises of left political-theoretical critique: that it could provide direct means to freedom and moral rightness. Left Melodrama is Melodramatic insofar as it incorporates the specific Melodramatic narrative, style and promise of the text that stands in for its disavowed attachments: the Manifesto of the Communist Party . Whereas the Manifesto 's critical power promised radical political transformation, left Melodrama incorporates the Manifesto 's Melodramatic style in an effort to revivify that promise. It thus inhibits the creation of new critical methods appropriate to our current historical moment and occludes Marx and Engels' warning that the possibility of radical transformation is diminished when the past furnishes the vision for the future. Left Melodrama can be found in the texts of Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; their reincorporation of the Manifesto 's Melodrama both contributes to their widespread success and undercuts their critical capacities to examine and challenge the inequalities, injustices and unfreedom that shape the present moment.

Meredith Slifkin - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Modern Women, Modern Egypt: Melodramas of the Nasser Era
    Feminist Media Histories, 2017
    Co-Authors: Meredith Slifkin
    Abstract:

    This article places existing discourses on Egyptian cinema, revolution, and global feminism in conversation with theories of film Melodrama. The text examines the tradition of Egyptian Melodrama as a site for analogizing women9s liberation with national modernization in the wake of the 1952 Revolution—an analogy facilitated by the careful manipulation of Melodramatic vernaculars of emotionality, and the endurance of affective cultural memory. In this context Melodrama functions as a specific critical tool for understanding how popular film culture then and now organizes people politically and affectively, on- and offscreen. The article further investigates the “method of contradictions” that seems necessary to think critically about comparative Melodrama at three levels of discourse: Melodrama in general; the Egyptian Melodramatic tradition specifically; and within Melodramatic scholarship that tends to resemble its object of study.

  • Melodrama, the Americans, and the Global Television Imaginary: The International Language of Espionage
    2014
    Co-Authors: Meredith Slifkin
    Abstract:

    "Genre first and foremost is a boundary phenomenon'" --Christine Gledhill, "Rethinking Genre" "This country is weak. I can feel it" --Elizabeth, The Americans This paper will evaluate the efficacy of Melodrama as a method for realizing the global and local potentials of the mode, and as a critical tool for creating openings of cultural currency and political potential. Existing scholarship on Melodrama relies heavily on rhetorics of bifurcation and categorization, but I am more interested in the question of how Melodrama actually traverses these boundaries. Specifically, what is unique to Melodrama that allows it to exist as a mode that is simultaneously global, in terms of cross-cultural legibility and the perpetuation of particular tropes and aesthetics, and local, existing in very specific regional traditions that are not easily translatable? This paper will look to the idea of "Melodrama as method" as a means to potentially answering these questions of cultural legibility and specificity--to test the idea that to talk about a transnational Melodramatic current is to talk about the work of Melodrama, the potentialities. In other words we are speaking of questions of directionality and flow, between the public and the private, the affective and the political. What is the work of Melodrama and to what degree does Melodramatic scholarship mirror its object? This paper will consider different theoretical frameworks that either circumvent, repurpose, or disprove the traditional evaluation of Melodrama according to Peter Brooks' influential though reductively western The Melodramatic Imagination (1976), looking instead at Melodrama as a critical tool in a global context, focusing on how we use Melodrama to do the active work of knowing objects, thinking about morality, and enabling affective currents. The idea of "Melodrama as method," a phrase used by Anupama Kapse in an eponymous article, in my formulation relies upon a reversal of the Brooks-Elsaesser tendency to map public unrest onto the private family stage, a construction so often touted by melo-dramatists. Rather, I consider the implications of an inverse formulation by which the private and quintessentially Melodramatic realm of emotions and personal experience instead influence or shape the public, political sphere. It is this specific flow reversal that is necessary for thinking about a global Melodramatic current, insofar as we might analogize the global and the local to the public and the private respectively. This is neither a one-to-one relationship nor a categorically imperative claim, but a rhetorical tool for imagining the transnational contexts and possibilities of a global Melodrama, rooted in the search for the active work of Melodrama in producing affective bonds. I will use as a case study the television show The Americans, which aired on the FX network in January 2013, and is currently in the middle of its second season. The show follows two Russian spies, alias Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings, who live undercover as typical American parents in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. during the late Cold War period of the 1980s. This case study is not necessarily a symptomatic reading; rather, I treat it more as a metaphor or an exercise in thinking about Melodrama as method, and Melodrama as doing the work of mediating borders and (national) identities. The spy is an inherently transnational figure, traversing physical and figurative boundaries of the state. The Americans presents a constant scenario in which Melodrama serves as a conduit and as a mediator, linking Phillip and Elizabeth's identities as American suburbanites and highly trained Russian agents--love of country and love (or lack of love) for each other constituting equal parts in dictating the plot and decisions made in the show. It is in this way that the Jennings are a manifestation of the public/private reversal--the personal perpetually dictating the political. …

Travis Workman - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Other scenes: space and counterpoint in Cold War Korean Melodrama
    Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 2015
    Co-Authors: Travis Workman
    Abstract:

    This essay discusses how cinematic counterpoint functions spatially in South Korean film Melodrama, as well as in some North Korean productions. Drawing from canonical studies of Melodrama, including Thomas Elsaesser's work, it argues that focusing on mise-en-scene and sound in readings of film Melodrama can bring to light the ambivalences, or contrapuntal connections, between its moods and its narrative and thematic discourses. It understands film Melodrama as a self-consciously post-psychoanalytic mode that stages psychic conflict in and through spatial configurations. Employing three spatial figures – topos, screen and cosmos – it attempts to understand how such conscious staging of psychic conflicts leads film Melodrama to visualize contrapuntal spaces that include both spatial expressions of the dominant themes of the narrative and undercurrents of invisible and unspoken traumas and desires.

  • Stepping into the Newsreel: Melodrama and Mobilization in Colonial Korean Film
    Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 2014
    Co-Authors: Travis Workman
    Abstract:

    As part of a project on Melodrama in Korean film, this article examines the ways that films from the late colonial period (1937–1945) blurred the traditional boundaries between newsreel documentary and fictional features in an attempt to suture the film spectator into the cinematic representation of what Andre Bazin called, in relation to the newsreel, “total history.” Drawing on theoretical discussions of sentimentality and Melodrama, the article compares the earlier fictional film to the wartime film Korea in order to trace how Melodrama was transformed through its incorporation into political propaganda. It discusses how narrative cinematic techniques such as point of view, shot/reverse shot, and crosscutting allowed Korea Strait to draw the viewer into spectacles of mobilization that were formerly represented through the more anonymous mass medium of the newsreel documentary. The remainder of the article touches on the films and , discussing how the interpretive excess enabled by Melodrama remained visible after the hybridization of fictional film and newsreel, primarily through the disjuncture between the films’ Melodrama narratives and their spectacles of mobilization. In conclusion, the article suggests that the gradual elimination of any narrative excess in 1940s films reflects an apprehension about the multiple codings, identifications, and interpretations enabled through the combination of Melodrama narrative with political propaganda.

  • Stepping into the Newsreel: Melodrama and Mobilization in Colonial Korean Film
    Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 2014
    Co-Authors: Travis Workman
    Abstract:

    As part of a project on Melodrama in Korean film, this article examines the ways that films from the late colonial period (1937–1945) blurred the traditional boundaries between newsreel documentary and fictional features in an attempt to suture the film spectator into the cinematic representation of what André Bazin called, in relation to the newsreel, “total history.” Drawing on theoretical discussions of sentimentality and Melodrama, the article compares the earlier fictional film Sweet Dream (1936) to the wartime film Straits of Chosŏn (1943) in order to trace how Melodrama was transformed through its incorporation into political propaganda. It discusses how narrative cinematic techniques such as point of view, shot/reverse shot, and crosscutting allowed Straits of Chosŏn to draw the viewer into spectacles of mobilization that were formerly represented through the more anonymous mass medium of the newsreel documentary. The remainder of the article touches on the films Volunteer (1941) and Spring of Korean Peninsula (1941), discussing how the interpretive excess enabled by Melodrama remained visible after the hybridization of fictional film and newsreel, primarily through the disjuncture between the films’ Melodrama narratives and their spectacles of mobilization. In conclusion, the article suggests that the gradual elimination of any narrative excess in 1940s films reflects an apprehension about the multiple codings, identifications, and interpretations enabled through the combination of Melodrama narrative with political propaganda