Responsable scientifique : Penny STARFIELD
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Séance organisée dans le cadre du séminaire Après la bataille : la mémoire restituée

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Intervention de Tomáš POSPÍŠIL (Masaryk Universty Brno, Cz)
Modératrice : Penny STARFIELD

Based upon selected case studies, the seminar will examine various representations of trauma as they are traditionally constructed by mainstream American cinema. A thematic focus on the portrayal of the impact of a variety of traumatic events, as well as on the processes of their healing, will be further combined with a focus on the screen representation of blackness, as most of the selected protagonists happen to be African-American. The presentation will map the mutually intersecting elements of trauma and blackness, ranging from the suffering heroes of the coming home movies Home of the Brave (1949, 2006), the representation of the unholy visitations of the ex-slave Sethe in Jonathan Demme’s 1998 adaptation of Beloved, through the portrayal of the problematic healing of Hale Berry’s Leticia Musgrove in the dark Southern drama Monsters’ Ball (Marc Forster, 2001), comment on the typical strategies of their deployment, and their evolution over time.

Tomáš Pospíšil is Associate Professor in the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno. He teaches American literature, American and Canadian film and American cultural studies. He was an ACLS visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993/94 and Fulbright fellow at the University of Southern California in 1999. His current research interests involve African American film representation and Canadian feature film. He is the author of Sambo tu již nebydlí? Obraz Afroameričanů v americkém filmu 20. století (Sambo Does Not Live Here Anymore? The African American Representation in American Film of the 20th Century, 2003). He also co-authored the volume Us-Them-Me, the Search for Identity in Canadian Literature and Film (2009).