Co-sponsored by SAAGA and Performing and Media Arts

In 1934, a U.S. production company released a film set in the southern Philippines called Brides of Sulu, about a pair of star-crossed lovers (one Muslim, one not) risking their lives to elope. In 2011, two Filipino film archivists began investigating whether Brides of Sulu was, in fact, two lost Philippine silent films from 1931, Moro Pirates and Princess Tarhata, edited together “to meet the U.S. demand at the time for movies that showcasted the exotic Orient” (San Diego Jr. 2011) and to justify the U.S.’s colonization of the Philippines. Archivist Teddy Co called Hollywood’s possible appropriation of the Philippine films an act of “piracy.” In this lecture, Professor De Kosnik will explore the multiple forms of piracy at work in and around the extant version of Brides of Sulu – not only the U.S. movie industry’s potential copying of Filipino silent works, but other forms of copying and plundering by Americans of Filipinos and of Filipinos by Americans, and the characterization of each group as piratical by the other, at the time of the U.S. colonization of the Philippines and beyond. 

Abigail De Kosnik is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies. She is also the Director of BCNM, and is the 2020-2025 craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media. She is the author of Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (MIT Press, 2016) and co-editor, with Keith Feldman, of #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (University of Michigan Press, 2019). She has published articles on media fandom, popular digital culture, social media, and performance studies in Third Text, Cinema Journal (now Journal of Cinema and Media Studies), The International Journal of Communication, Modern Drama, Transformative Works and Cultures, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Performance Research, and elsewhere. She co-organizes The Color of New Media, a working group focusing on technology and intersectionality. De Kosnik is Filipina American. 

This Gatty lecture will take place in person at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom. Please register here if you wish to attend via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwqc-isqjwuGNCVr2WzYAqlZLCtuSxAoRNj?fbclid=IwAR3m9N_Px-BVrImYupeBXzbYT1AseNzBWtAS3u6QRRNSk5DJj7_guzCAW8A

For questions, please contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

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