French & Italian Research Seminar Series

Vlad Dima is the second panelist for this seminar and will conduct a short talk about his new book Meaning-Less-Ness in Postcolonial Cinema. 

Abstract: In this presentation I will share selective parts from my third book, under contract with the Michigan State University Press (tentatively fall 2022). In the context of postcolonial cinema, Meaning-Less-Ness looks at the entanglement between time, death, and love, and sees rhythm as the element through which life and death are connected beyond and despite time. The book has three goals: first, to show that the sub-Saharan cinematic image may produce meaning without any attachment to
time; second, to argue that meaning is connected instead to the philosophy of negritude, to the notion of rhythm, and to representations of the undead; third, to introduce a new term, the rhythm-sequence, which may accurately measure how meaning, negritude, and the undead all connect with the African moving image.

Full list of panelists and abstracts