Annual Meeting 2022 / Srinivas Aravamudan Memorial Lecture: Akira Lippit

AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT

Vice Dean of Faculty and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California; Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures, USC Dornsife College

Akira Lippit’s interests are in world cinemas, critical theory, Japanese film and culture, experimental film and video, and visual studies. His published work reflects these areas and includes four books, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (California, 2012); Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minnesota, 2005); Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minnesota, 2000); and his most recent book, Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (Minnesota, 2016). At present, Lippit is completing a book on contemporary Japanese cinema, which explores the physical and metaphysical dimensions of the “world,” and another on David Lynch’s baroque alphabetics. Widely translated, his work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is past recipient of the Fulbright-Hays and Japan Foundation awards. Lippit is active in the film community as a programmer, interviewer, and jury member, and has been deeply involved in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Visual History Project. Lippit is Senior Editor of the journal Discourse and serves on the editorial board of Film Quarterly. He regularly teaches, lectures, and publishes in Japan, where he is a founding editor of the visual culture journal Ecce.

“Persona non grata” abstract: This paper resumes a series of inquiries that had begun long before the interruptions of the past several years and asks whether the pandemic has changed in some fundamental ways the nature or premises of questions regarding personhood. The phrase “persona non grata,” deployed primarily as a diplomatic idiom, refers to those individuals, typically foreign, that are no longer welcome by the State. By refusing to acknowledge the legal status of the unwelcome, the State also implies that they are, perhaps, no longer considered persons at all. What transgressions must one commit—ethical or legal, actual or imaginary—to be rendered non grata? And are such transgressions always assumed also to be violations of personhood as such? Are refugees, for example, the exiled and stateless, also persona non grata? This paper seeks to raise preliminary questions about the forms of violence against personhood that have made some unwelcome, no longer personable. Orbiting the various ideas implanted within the term person—from the private (personal) to the public (personae) to matters of character (personality)—are questions of the very conditions of the human and its face, the persona. Presented as a series of observations, “Persona non grata” also explores the other side of personhood, the impersonal, asking what has happened to the state of hospitality in the wake of the pandemic?

To review the 2022 Annual Meeting, see the archived conference page. Join us next year in June 2023 in Santiago, Chile!