Photo by Nadine Beyrouti for Al Jazeera
The Dis/Appearance of Mei and Fusako Shigenobu
A Dialog with Mei Shigenobu About 27 Years Without Images
February 28, 2022
11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. PST
Register Here
Professors Setsu Shigematsu and Anne McKnight of UC Riverside lead a dialog with journalist, author, political analyst, TV news anchor, and media producer Mei Shigenobu, PhD, Visiting Scholar in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, about the politics of images, dis/appearance, transnational media politics, liberation movements, and the film The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images (Eric Baudelaire, 2011). Watch the film as a guest of the UC San Diego Library, Feb. 24 - Mar. 2, through event registration. The dialog will be introduced and moderated by Daisuke Miyao (Director, Film Studies, UCSD), Judith Rodenbeck (Chair, Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside), and Lisa Cartwright (Director, Art Practice PhD, UCSD).
Sponsored by UC San Diego Department of Visual Arts, Film Studies, Japanese Studies, the Department of Communication Democracy Lab Initiative, UC San Diego Library, and the Dean's Office, School of Arts & Humanities.
Mei Shigenobu is a journalist, author, political analyst, TV news anchor, and media producer with particular expertise in the Middle East. Dr. Shigenobu holds a doctorate in Media Studies from Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan). Dr. Shigenobu has written extensively about media in the Middle East for both scholarly and journalistic publication, and she has published three books, including a monograph on the role of the media in the Arab Spring, 「アラブの春」の正体 欧米とメディアに踊らされた民主化革命 / Unveiling the 'Arab Spring'; democratic revolutions orchestrated by the West and the Media (Tokyo: Kadokawashoten, 2012) and 秘密―パレスチナから桜の国へ 母と私の28年 [Secrets - from Palestine to the Country of Cherry Blossoms, 28 years with my mother], Kōdansha; 中東のゲットーから (From the Ghettos of the Middle East).Twitter @MayShigenobu
Setsu Shigematsu is an author and abolitionist filmmaker engaged in public-facing feminist media making. She is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside. Her research and intellectual concerns include the historical relationship between U.S. and Japanese imperialisms, transnational liberation movements, and comparative feminist and critical theory. She is the author of Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan, and the co-editor of Militarized Currents: Towards a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific. She directed and co-produced Visions of Abolition, a feature-length documentary about the prison industrial complex and the prison abolition movement updated in 2021 as Re-Visions of Abolition. She is currently finishing a new documentary, #AbolishICE: Abolish Adelanto and All Border-Prisons.
Anne McKnight is a professor in the Comparative Literature department at UCR, specializing in post-1945 American and Japanese literatures. Her publications include a book on the writer Nakagami Kenji, Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity, as well as articles on Japanese pink film, feminism and obscenity in Japan, and Japanese science film. She is also a sometime translator and the owner of a small press, Expanded Editions, that publishes translations of early works of Japanese subculture.