Associate professor Jigna Desai will present a lecture entitled "Cinema of Exception, Cinema of Insecurity: Race, Terror and Sexuality in Post 9/11 Media" today at 4 p.m. in Leighton Hall, Room 305. Sponsored by the Departments of Religion; Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies; Cinema and Media Studies; and American and Asian Studies, this event is free and open to the public.
Through the lens of films like "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" & "Escape from Guantanamo Bay," professor Desai's presentation will look at how cinema has changed in the last ten years, in a post-9/11 society.
Desai, associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and a founding member and former director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota, focuses her research on Asian American, postcolonial, queer, and diasporic cultural studies. Her book "Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film" (Routledge, 2004) is the first book on media and the South Asian diaspora. It provides a transnational feminist and queer critique of diaspora through the lens of cinema. Desai has also co-edited a collection entitled "Bollywood: A Reader for Open University" (McGraw Hill Press, 2009). She is currently co-editing the first collection on Asian Americans in the South and co-editing a collection on transnational South Asian feminism. Her next project interrogates the globalization and meaning of autism in the twenty first century.