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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Ostherr, Kirsten. "Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Audiovisual Discourse of World Health," American Civilization, Brown University, May 2001.
This dissertation interrogates the relationship between globalization, cultural production, and identity formation, by examining public health and Hollywood films that represent the spread of contagious disease across national borders. In these films, a concept of “world health” is constructed through a collapse of discourses of globalization and contradictory epistemological formation that is preoccupied with the borders of physical bodies as signifiers of national geographies. The resulting discourse of world health celebrates the ideals of modernization and global sanitation, but simultaneously views any international contact as the site of a breakdown of boundaries that will inevitably result in worldwide contagion. It is my contention that this contradiction is repeated at the level of representation. In my analysis of the films produced by global health surveillance organizations, I argue that the compulsion to visualize invisible contagions founders in the very medium that would seem most fitted to the task. But as my comparison of public health and Hollywood films confirms, instead of forestalling audiovisual articulation of the ideals of world health, the impossibility of producing a concrete indexical image of contagion has resulted in a proliferation of attempts to visualize the invisible, in both scientific and popular cultures, from the rudimentary educational films of the 1940s-50s to the sophisticated digital imaging technologies of the present. Through a formal, historical, and ideological study of the cinema of world health, this dissertation examines a key intersection of the geopolitical and the subjective in postwar cinema and culture. The investigation begins from an analysis of animation and voiceover as nonidexical strategies for “documenting” the spread of contagion, then proceeds to a critique of the audiovisual conflation of “non-normative” sexuality and race with disease. The second part of the project compares public health and science fiction films that represent national and bodily invasions, concluding with an examination of conspiracy films and computer virus imagery in which the human body is the site of convergence between the global flow of information and commerce and the global flow of contagious disease.
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