Cinema Studies PhD candidate and Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS) / Northrop Frye Centre (NFC) Doctoral Fellow, Kanika Lawton will deliver a NFC Doctoral Fellow Series talk titled, "Your Emergency is Not My Emergency: The Reinscription of (White Female) Violence in Claudia Rankine and John Lucas' Situation 11" on Thursday, February 26 at 4pm at Victoria College.
Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’ Situation 11 centres the 2020 Central Park birdwatching incident, where Black birder Christian Cooper filmed white dog walker Amy Cooper (no relation) threatening to call the police on him after he asked her to leash her dog. Layering C. Cooper’s film in conjunction with other filmed incidents of white women making racialized threats, Situation 11 intercepts A. Cooper’s threat through auditory and visual repetition, refusing to let the original video play in its entirety. Instead, Situation 11 shutters, slows down, and repeats clips of her threat under Rankine’s own poetic ruminations on white female rage as a violent call to its own “protection” from blackness.
This talk posits that Situation 11 reinscribes the violence depicted on screen instead of managing it through the deployment of its formal choices, arguing that the deliberate drawing out of such filmed incidents provides both time and space for their diffusion without substantial mediation of the filmic image—including for white women such as A. Cooper to insist that encountering Black people constitutes an “emergency.”
This free talk is open to all. Registration is required.