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The Perils of Belonging: Blood, Ritual, and Subjectivation in Amanda Kernell

In recent years, metaphors of blood have abounded in public media. In the global economy of belonging, blood is often tied to asserting rootedness, localized belonging and eternal presence or is absent altogether. Amanda Kernell’s film Sami Blood (Swedish: Sameblod) released in 2017 in the US stands out for its ambivalent treatment of blood and belonging. In this paper, I take a close look at the ways in which metaphors of blood operate in two cultural practices explored in Kernell’s film. Utilizing Green’s (1988) concept of text work, wherein a text is to be conceived as a dynamic structure of significance rather than as a container of subjective content, I will focus on the dynamics of the compositional process to argue that the film’s elements encourage its imagined viewers to move beyond the seduction of the storyline. To borrow Spivak’s (2012) phraseology, “the work wants”.

Event Sponsor
Internaitonal Cultural Studies Program, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Morsaline Mojid, (808) 745-7575, morsalin@hawaii.edu