This November, I will be presenting at the 2018 Society for Utopian Studies conference in Berkeley, CA. The theme of the conference is “Disruption, Displacement, and Disorder”.
This will be my first foray into the world of academic conferences and I’m glad it will be with a community of idealistic scholars who enjoy imagining the world not as it it, but as it could be. I find this mindset reassuring, as perhaps it will help the audience to imagine, if for some reason my presentation is a disaster, what it could have been had I not been so overwhelmed by nerves.
My presentation is titled “Genocide and Virginity, Dystopia and Utopia: A Reconciliation through Film”. I will be discussing three films from the Third Reich: HitlerJunge Quex (1933), Jud Süß (1940), and Die Große Liebe (1942). I will analyze their content and actors in an effort to understand how the ideals and goals of National Socialism were understood by individuals and how these films acted as a mechanism of controlled education. I argue the films to discuss how the films reconciled the paradoxes in Nazi platitudes and practice, rhetoric and reality, life and liminality to argue the films taught Germans how they ought to behave and limited how citizens could imagine acts of resistance to the regime. Finally, I compare films of the Third Reich to modern dystopian films, like Hunger Games, Black Panther, and Avatar, which provide images of reality and ideas of resistance but have little translation into actual resistance. I ask: What role does film really play in teaching us about our realities? Our possibilities?
I look forward to hearing the great ideas and about the research projects of the other participants and attendees of the conference.
If you would like to learn more about the conference or SUS check out: https://utopian-studies.org/