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

clothes, the family, the “lifestyle”, all superficial freedoms offered in virtual worlds. This creative nonfiction
paper looks at this image logic and how it “thinks”.
Siobhan Lyons Resisting Media: The “Unfilmable Novel” and the Limits of the Image
In 2012, Frank Kermode of “Kermode Uncut” provided a discussion on books that have never and
presumably could never be filmed, owing either to their content or political and/or religious associations,
including The Catcher in the Rye, Gravity’s Rainbow, Blood Meridian, and The Satanic Verses. While attempts
have been made to film seemingly “unfilmable” books, notably with William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, a
number of directors have either admitted defeat or have simply decided that the book alone will suffice. In
an era of rampant adaptation, reboots and remakes, the “unfilmed novel” retains a significant degree of
importance precisely through its visual untranslatability. In resisting mediatization, the unfilmable novel
becomes a notorious but powerful cultural artefact. This paper analyses the cultural potency of the
“unfilmable novel”, arguing how such a phenomenon informs the complex relationship between the visual
and the written, and how, moreover, this influences the power ratio between literature and the media.
Felicity Ford
A Different Time: Disruptive Temporality in Stephen Page’s Spear
While time is a structuring presence in our everyday lives that anchors and assigns each moment a fixed and
fixable past, present and future, the cinematic space frequently problematizes the notion of temporality
through multiplicity, repetition and loss. Discussing contemporary atemporal cinema, Todd McGowan refers
to films that distort and disrupt time as being “the cinema of the drive, in which narrative is oriented around
a foundational moment of traumatic loss.” In this paper, I consider how the compression of temporality in
Stephen Page’s recent dance film, Spear (2016) creates a liminal space that allows for social and political
trauma from Australia’s troubled history to be re-worked and negotiated. The film was released earlier this
year to wide critical acclaim and follows Djali, a young Indigenous man, as he struggles to reconcile the
traditions of his community with modern Australian life. It features almost no dialogue and refuses to adhere
to a conventional narrative trajectory. Instead, the dance sequences seem to be born out of memory and
rumination: echoing the past and conjuring the future. “Temporal” is commonly understood as relating to
time but it also refers to worldly rather than spiritual affairs. This second meaning returns time to the earthly
secular and reinforces it as something concrete, something fixed – not to be associated with the imprecise
and fluctuating spiritual realm. I argue that Page’s revision of cinematic time allows for an alternative
narrative space that prioritizes the importance of memory and feeling over structure and order. This
disruption of time and place directly challenges the authority of temporality in order to prioritize the felt
imaginary of a very real and traumatic history of systemic abuse on a social, political and economic level. By
displacing cinematic time, the film aligns temporal disruption with an alternative, and specifically Indigenous,
narrative.
2U
Charisma and connective mobilization (Chair, Martha Michailidou)
The panel aims at investigating new forms of charismatic connective mobilization emerging in movements and
initiatives outside of traditional institutional centres of politics. Common for these is that their cohesion and
constitution seem to proceed more from affective bonds and investments, rather than from an adherence to a strict
ideological doctrine or organizational structure. The often marginal and amorphous character of these movements,
means that the form of their charismatic affectivity is not simply that of adherence to a politico-organizational
leadership. We must thus move beyond the thinking of charisma as a property or a rhetorical product of an
“extraordinary person/leader”. By drawing on post-human theories, we can understand how the charismatic site of
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