Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

action lawsuit against Facebook, in an Austrian court, filed by the group, “Europe versus Facebook”. An
analysis of this lawsuit highlights the juxtaposition of forces at play in the power struggle and development
of Facebook’s policies. Facebook, on its part, has selectively responded to user criticism by changing some of
its policies. This paper, then, serves as both, a critique and a roadmap for Facebook’s cultural development,
and looks to ascertain the process of Cultural regulation of Facebook.
4R Moving Between the US and the African Diaspora – The Sights and Sites of Blackness in Popular Cultural
Performances (Chair, Sara Tomkins)
This panel takes up Kamari Maxine Clarke & Deborah Thomas’ (eds.) intervention in Globalization and Race:
Transformation in the Cultural Production of Blackness (2006) to explore contemporary and historical global and
local performances of Black identity in media and popular culture. In particular, panelists interrogate the cultural
role of the United States in the hegemonic production of Blackness and Black popular culture. We explore how Black
media texts speak back to controlling notions of identity by interrogating how academics, audiences and publics
come to know Blackness through technologies of the visual. Together the panelists document how performances of
politicized and radical Blackness are enabled and disabled in the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization. Jane
Rhodes examines the cinematic production of black identities in the United States and Britain in the post civil rights
era. From filmmakers like Mario Van Peebles and Gordon Parks in the U.S. to Isaac Julien and the Black Audio Film
Collective in Britain, this paper looks at independent black cinema influenced by black power and the black arts
movements on both sides of the Atlantic. These artists enabled an exploration of resistant black politics, gendered
identities, and shifting forms of “black communities” left out of mainstream mass culture. Films like Sweet
Sweetback’s Badass Song (US 1971) and Daughters of the Dust (1991) to Handsworth Song (UK 1987) and Young Soul
Rebels (UK 1991) generated controversy and debate among black subjects while injecting new aesthetics and
sensibilities into popular culture. They shared numerous tropes of blackness while also presenting the particularities
of the black experience in the United States and British contexts. These and other black cinematic texts crossed the
Atlantic, contributing to each community’s forms and styles of expression. Ralina Joseph looks at the ways in which
the most successful Black female celebrities today, including superstar Beyoncé, actress Kerry Washington, and
showrunner Shonda Rhimes, garner success in mainstream markets by simultaneously courting colorblindness and
also resisting anti-Black ideologies. Joseph questions how their performances of “Black sights” illuminate the need
for a new multiplicity of “Black sites” in popular culture across the diaspora. Isabel Molina-Guzmán examines the
online debate and choice.org petition by Black cultural activists and Afro-Latina Zoë Saldaña’s public response to her
casting in the independently produced Nina Simone biopic. The discourse points to the cultural tensions between
U.S. constructions of African American identity and Blackness as performed through the African Diaspora. Speakers:
Ralina Joseph, Jane Rhodes, Isabel Molina.
4S
Rethinking suicide and social life (Chair, Katrina Jaworski)
Saartje Tack
Suicide, Suffering, and the Insufferable Question of Agency
Accounts of suicide are often framed by narratives of prevention, in which the grounds and consequences of
such framing remain uninterrogated. Suicide prevention relies on the positing of suicide as a consequence of
suffering, which victimises and pathologises the individual who chooses suicide. Suffering as the result of
mental illness is presumed not only to be curable but, importantly, in its curability lies also the requirement
of – or, obligation to – cure. As such, suicide is rendered unchoosable, in that choosing against cure renders
one irrational and, consequently, one’s choice invalid. Furthermore, the consistent presumption that suicide
120