About

(B)orders of Empire emerges from a UCHRI-funded graduate working group titled The Global Middle East / Transnational Media, History and Theory.

CONTACT: ucibordersofempire@gmail.com

SYMPOSIUM ORGANIZERS:

Michael Moshe Dahan (PhD Candidate, Department of Drama, UC Irvine)
Michael is a scholar, filmmaker and artist who earned his MFA in Studio Art with a Critical Theory Emphasis from UC Irvine in 2012. His current work interrogates the intersection of psychoanalysis, political economy, post-colonial theory and aesthetic production emerging from Israel/Palestine. Specifically, his research deploys performative economic theories, psychoanalysis, and epigenetic approaches to historical trauma to examining disproportionate prisoner exchanges between Israel and Palestine. By assessing the performative capacity of exchange, his work proposes that these prisoner-swaps emerge as a form of differential judgment—a political valuation and overall depreciation of human life—that unleash a leakage of the unconscious, a drive towards what Bataille names an ‘expenditure without reserve,’ and one that turns the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian state out on itself, ejecting it outside the frame of its own ethical inside.  His experimental film, Two Points of Failure, was screened at the Rotterdam, Edinburgh, Jihlava, Bucharest, and Melbourne International Film Festivals, as well as the Tribeca Film Festival and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles.  Before receiving his MFA, he spent nearly a decade working as a film executive.

Eszter Zimanyi (PhD Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies, USC)
Eszter is a PhD student and Annenberg Fellow in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her work has been published in Transnational Cinemas, Media Fields Journal, Jadaliyya, and Enclave Review. She served as the lead research assistant for the book Fifty Years of the Battle of Algiers: Past as Prologue, authored by Sohail Daulatzai, as well as the editorial assistant for Return of The Mecca: The Art of Islam and Hip-Hop. Eszter also acted as a curatorial assistant for Histories Absolved: Revolutionary Cuban Poster Art and the Muslim International, which showcased rare posters from Cuba’s OSPAAAL collective. Most recently, Eszter co-edited an issue of the media studies journal Spectator. Her current research considers the historical and ideological connections between the Cold War and the War on Terror through examining narratives of displacement and exile between Eastern Europe and the greater Middle East, with a particular focus on Europe’s contemporary migrant/refugee crisis. Eszter‘s research interests include migration, diaspora, and refugee studies, global and transnational media, postcolonial and postsocialist studies, documentary, and digital media.

Harry Hvdson (MA Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies, USC)
Harry is a Masters student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Their projects think the work of abolition, rhetorics of porosity, and the body. They will begin their PhD studies at USC in the Fall. 

Leticia C. Garcia (PhD Candidate, Department of Drama, UC Irvine) 
Leticia received her MA in Shakespeare Studies from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. Her research critically examines the implications of cultural, artistic exchange between Mexico and Shakespeare. Leticia’s dissertation strongly entails an engagement with the question of what Shakespeare does in Mexican culture and a Mexican theatrical history and tradition and whether or not it has a limit. The figure of Shakespeare is more than just an aggregate, but an aggregation folding into an affective and real presence—and the ways in which these exchanges have overreached themselves as cultural differences to form a sociopolitical consciousness and norm which presents Shakespeare as the unifying universal icon. The project looks at how Shakespearean systems derive from “foundational” genres such as the cultural politics of nation-making in Mexico. And as such, using Shakespeare as a diagnostic of power and struggle.

Sohail Daulatzai (Associate Professor, Film and Media Studies, UC Irvine)
Born at the Af-Pak border, Sohail Daulatzai is a writer, curator and professor, and is the founder of Razor Step, an L.A. based media lab. He is the author of Fifty Years of “The Battle of Algiers”: Past as Prologue, as well as Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America and co-editor of Born to Use Mics, a literary remix of Nas’s album Illmatic. He is the curator of the celebrated exhibit Return of the Mecca: The Art of Islam and Hip-Hop, and editor of the limited edition, companion commemorative book of the same name, which includes an interview with Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) and an essay by Chuck D, the work of Jamel Shabazz, Ernie Paniccioli, and others, as well as album cover art, photography, flyers and other ephemera. He has written liner notes for the Sony Legacy Recordings Release of the 20th Anniversary Deluxe Box Set of Rage Against the Machine’s self titled debut album, the liner notes for the DVD release of Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme and the centerpiece in the museum catalog Movement: Hip-Hop in L.A., 1980’s – Now, and his other writings have appeared in The Nation, Counterpunch, Al Jazeera, Souls, Wax Poetics, and Artbound, amongst others.

He also curated the exhibit Histories Absolved: Revolutionary Cuban Poster Art and the Muslim International, which showcased the work of the Havana-based OSPAAAL (Organization of Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America) and their political graphic art of the 1960’s, ‘70’s and ‘80’s with Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan and other Muslim majority countries. He is the founder of Groundings, a conversation series that has included Yasiin Bey, Immortal Technique, Chuck D, Rosa Clemente, dream hampton, Brother Ali, Robin D.G. Kelley and Jasiri X.

He has been awarded and received funding from the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media, the University of California “Public Partnership in the Humanities,” the Doris Duke Fund, and the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, amongst others. He has been invited to present his work throughout the world at academic conferences, universities, art institutions, galleries, and literary festivals, including at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Georgetown, Duke, Columbia, University of Chicago, Berkeley, Stanford, Oxford University, SOAS (in London), EHESS (in Paris), American University Beirut, the Paris Hip-Hop Festival, the William Grant Still Art Center, the Asian American Writers Workshop, the Muslim Protagonist Festival, the Grammy Museum, and elsewhere. He teaches in the Department of Film and Media Studies, the Department in African American Studies, and the Program in Global Middle East Studies at the University of California, Irvine.