This paper analyzes interactions between blacks and whites depicted between 1957 and 1961 in Jean Rouch’s I, a Black Man, The Human Pyramide, and Chronicle of a Summer. It concludes with remarks on Shadows, a 1958-59 feature film by John Cassavetes often credited as a breakthrough in U.S. independent filmmaking. In so doing, I mean to explore what Rouch and Cassavetes were trying to accomplish through production practices that bordered on the experimental. Major topics to be raised include: ...

This lecture focuses on Eileen Chang’s Xinjing, The Heart Sutra to map and understand the ways in which the author depicted different types of emotional, erotic, sexual, and psychological flows and exchanges between parents, children, and their partners and spouses. Xinjing will be here read in conversation with a wide array of other sources, first and foremost the mid - and late - Qing literary heritage that so greatly occupied and influenced Eileen Chang’s own literary ...