Marcus Breen (Boston College Visiting Scholar): The Struggle for Meaning in Irish Cultural Studies: Kneecap and Sinners

These two recent films illustrate how language and history are utilized by cultural texts to refine and inform the struggle for the meaning of Irishness. Both objects illustrate the significance of popular culture in the study of culture-as-a-way-of life, while operating as political texts to de-center the conceit that contemporary Irish culture is settled. Ideologically located in resistance traditions, these texts illustrate the role of cultural theory in establishing critical frameworks through which activism is mobilized by radical cinema. Both draw upon transnational genres, cinematic styles and symbolic language to assert the unsettled political economy of an imagined Ireland and its people. For Kneecap this involves the rearticulation of language with international, national and class struggle. For Sinners, a reassertion of black American emancipatory claims against the white supremacy of Irish immigrant history in the US.

Marcus Breen is Associate Professor in the Communications Department at Boston College. He was educated at the University of Queensland, ANU and Victoria University, and has worked as a specialist reporter on the Australian music and film industries. He has directed cultural industries programmes in Melbourne and worked as a consultant on telecommunication policy, new media and regulation in Australia and internationally. He has taught in Communication, Media and Cultural Studies programs at the University of Melbourne, UNC Chapel Hill, Northeastern and Bond Universities, before joining Boston College. His books include Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences (2011), and Rock Dogs: Politics and the Australian Music Industry (1999) and he is editor of the International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society.

This seminar will be available in hybrid form, in-person and online via Teams. 

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