On November 20 at 12:30PM in Room 2M70, Dr. Daniel McNeil (Associate Professor, History, Carleton University) is delivering a public talk entitled “An American Film Critic, a British intellectual, and a Peruvian Bear Walk into a Bar…: Civility and Conviviality in the Digital Age.” Dr. McNeil is a prominent historian and cultural theorist specializing in twentieth and twenty-first centuries cultural and intellectual history; Black Atlantic Studies; British Cultural Studies; Critical Race Studies and Sexuality; and Migration and Diaspora Studies.
His talk addresses the public intellectual work of notorious American film critic Armond White and celebrated British intellectual Paul Gilroy. In order to illuminate the idiosyncratic ways in which these writers both engage with intellectual work produced outside of academia, the talk will be interspersed with clips from the popular family film Paddington (2014). In doing so, it argues that the slyly subversive film updates the well-known stories of the beloved bear from “darkest Peru,” which first appeared in print in 1958, in relation to post/colonial ideas about English politeness and Caribbean calypso with the type of political intelligence and irony that has been demonstrated by Gilroy and White throughout their careers as cultural critics. The talk is moderated by Dr. Bruno Cornellier (English, University of Winnipeg). Everyone is welcome.