Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 2 (2010) 1 “New Horizons: Cognitive and Narrative Approaches to US Ethnic and Postcolonial
Film, Animation, Graphic Novel, and the Arts” Frederick Luis Aldama
In this special issue of Image and Narrative I bring together scholars who use advances in the cognitive and neurosciences as well as narratology to enrich our understanding of how artists (capaciously speaking) create and we consume film, animation, graphic novel, and painting and print arts that gravitates around US ethnic and postcolonial experiences. Alongside scholars who have devoted much of their work to the use of this research and these tools (Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit Hogan, for instance) we have many new voices from as far afield as Israel and China. At the beginning of the special issue, I include a series of essays that directly attend to US ethnic and postcolonial film narratives. Sue J. Kim’s “Anger, Cognition, Ideology: What Crash Can Show Us About Emotion” argues for the need to open doors to the cognitive sciences to further ground in the verifiable and material reality analyses of the particularized cultural expression exhibited in films that gravitate around US race relations. Kim brings to bear such an approach in her nuanced analysis of how Paul Haggis creates an emotion-blueprint of sorts that informs worldview (racialist ideology) in his film Crash (2005). In a move that at once expands and gives specificity to the postcolonial identity category, Patrick Colm Hogan disrupts the Western vs. non-Western grid, as well as the tradition vs. modern template which might otherwise overlay an approach to Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 Late Spring. Hogan’s nuanced analyses of the film’s emotion and ethics systems evince a complex set of attachment relations against a background of colonialism and its aftermath. Focused on empathy, in “Assessing Empathy: A Slumdog Questionnaire” Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski builds on neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese’s research (the “shared manifold” of human experience) to analyze how Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) triggers empathic mechanisms (universal) that are at once constrained by and expressed within specifics of time (history) and place (culture and region). Klarina Priborkin’s “Dancing Across-Cultures in Eitan Anner’s Half Russian Story” articulates just how prototype narratives and filmic emotion cues convey a Russian-Israel émigré experience that engages deeply a Israeli mainstream audience. The closing two essays to this first section focus on adaptation. In “Adapting The Joy Luck Club: Thematic Emphasis through Form” Wanlin Li examines how narrative embedding, framing, and other formal filmic techniques carry themes and allow to formulate a theory of novel-to-film adaptation that resists the erstwhile fidelity argument. Then, thanks to Lalita Pandit Hogan’s study, we are led to appreciate how content (character name, mise-en-scene, event, for instance) as well as form (music, for instance) are inseparable and mutually illuminating in a rich reading of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara (2006)—a Hindi adaptation of Othello.
The three essays that follow deal with animation. Terence DeToy’s “The District! and the Autonomous Story Zone” builds a toolbox for understanding how Hungarian Áron Gauder’s technically distinctive animated film works effectively to carry characters across different diegetic spaces that at once entertain and create a vital and self-reflexive tension with the audience. In a turn to animated documentary film, Nicholas Hetrick
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 2 (2010) 2 explores how Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir doesn’t so much offer up an effective antiwar narrative as much as a creatively imagined odyssey of the recovery of memory. In a like-autobiographical focus, Elizabeth Nixon uses research on cognition and empathy to enrich our understanding of how narrative “focalization” works to cue different forms of audience engagement in Marjane Satrapi’s animation Persepolis
The final essays of the special issue focus on the static visual arts. We discover a lot more than meets the eye when Hye Su Park examines in “Lost in the Gutters” how the visuals and page layout that make up Adrian Tomine's graphic novel Shortcomings present an “unresolved” Asian American experience and identity. In “New Approaches to Chicana/o Art: The Visual and the Political as Cognitive Process” Guisela Latorre offers uses research in the cognitive and neurobiological sciences to explore how Chicana artists Ester Hernández and Alma López cue then trigger a range of emotions directed at growing a political consciousness in their viewers. Yeshayahu Shen’s and Efrat Biberman’s research on how we use narrative schemas to organize figurative isolated pictures offers us tools for use in our further investigations of US ethnic and postcolonial art, film, animation and visual arts generally.
The scholarship represents a productive synergy between work in narrative theory and the cognitive and neurosciences that enrich significantly our understanding of contemporary visual media and arts from around the world.
Each scholar takes as a point of analysis visual media that one way or another re-orientate and make vital the goal-oriented work of the artist’s mind (cognitive and emotive mechanisms) in creating an art object (blueprint or algorithm) to be consumed in specifically directed ways by the viewer’s mind. Some of the scholars choose to focus on the cognitive and emotive mechanisms at play in this making, and others the devices used. To varying degrees, the scholars consider that science can tell us something about how the emotions work, for instance, and why the emotions are such an important ingredient in our engagement with visual media and arts. They consider that while we can break down different mechanisms at work within the cognitive and emotive systems, in the end the brain forms a unity. They also consider in each of their explorations that the visual media and arts are there as a product to be studied as such. Finally, instruments of narratology tools and cognitive and neuroscientific research are used to enrich and as such always considered as ancillary to the making of a systematic study of visual media and arts by and about US ethnic and postcolonial experiences.
The scholars here seek also to identify sets of critical tools that will turn knobs and open access to the respective visual media’s technologies. Like the making of a table, say, the directors, animators, graphic novelists, painters and print artists studied here, imagine their art, then use the material of their chosen media to make something that adds to reality. This deliberate, conscious, conscientious building of blueprint—the new reality—works the same way as any creative activity. It adds to the world, and doesn’t simply reflect the world.
In seeking answers to their questions and solutions to problems, the scholars also shed light on precisely the functioning of actual human being: what us tick and therefore what allows a real actual flesh-and-blood viewer to be moved emotionally and how it allows some of us to understand, analyze, and comment.
I write this brief introduction because several of you might not be persuaded by the utility of such an approach to our understanding of the visual arts by and about the US
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 2 (2010) 3 ethnic and postcolonial experience. Let me end by stating that if we have a scientific explanation of what Chicana print artist Ester Hernandez does or how empathy functions in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, to name but a few of the many examples herein, we have the means to naturalize this art. That is to consider this art as an activity that can be studied from a scientific point of view. Where we can formulate hypotheses and even experiments--as do Yeshayahu Shen and Efrat Biberman in “A Story Told by a Picture”-- to see if hypotheses hold or not. Therefore, the scholars herein develop theories in the strict sense of the term. In an essay collected in my recent Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, Herbert Lindenberger puts it best when he writes, “we may come to know more about how we perceive, process, and enjoy art than we suspected before” (“Arts in the Brain; or, What Might Neuroscience Tell Us?” 34).
Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University where he is also Director of the Latino Studies Program and Latino & Latin American Studies Space for Enrichment and Research (L.A.S.E.R). Born in Mexico City to Guatemalan-Irish and Mexican parents and raised largely in California, he received his PhD from Stanford University. He is the editor of five collections of essays and author of seven books, including Postethnic Narrative Criticism, Brown on Brown, and the MLA-award winning Dancing With Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas, Why the Humanities Matter: A Common Sense Approach, Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez, and A User's Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction. He has published numerous articles, co-edits the series “Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture” (UTexas Press), and sits on the board for the Americas book series ((Texas Tech Press University Press).
