Your Emergency is Not My Emergency | NFC Doctoral Fellow Kanika Lawton

Your Emergency is Not My Emergency: The Reinscription of (White Female) Violence in Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’ Situation 11

About the talk...

Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’ Situation 11 centres the 2020 Central Park birdwatching incident, where Black birder Christian Cooper filmed white dog walker Amy Cooper (no relation) threatening to call the police on him after he asked her to leash her dog. Layering C. Cooper’s film in conjunction with other filmed incidents of white women making racialized threats, Situation 11 intercepts A. Cooper’s threat through auditory and visual repetition, refusing to let the original video play in its entirety. Instead, Situation 11 shutters, slows down, and repeats clips of her threat under Rankine’s own poetic ruminations on white female rage as a violent call to its own “protection” from blackness.

This talk posits that Situation 11 reinscribes the violence depicted on screen instead of managing it through the deployment of its formal choices, arguing that the deliberate drawing out of such filmed incidents provides both time and space for their diffusion without substantial mediation of the filmic image—including for white women such as A. Cooper to insist that encountering Black people constitutes an “emergency.”

About the speaker...

Kanika Lawton (they/them) is a PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute, where they are also part of the collaborative specialization at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. They hold an MA from the Cinema Studies Institute and a BA in Psychology with a Minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia. Their intellectual interests coalesce around a broader investment in theorizing and historicizing socio-cultural, political, and aesthetic shifts in a post-9/11 United States through close attention to what they term “surveillant media,” as well as an ethical commitment to those most disproportionately impacted by the snowballing effects of U.S. security and surveillance apparatuses. Subsequently, their SSHRC-funded dissertation puts forth a two-pronged claim: neutrality is an affect that expresses itself through violence, and such violence has been dismissed across both surveillance studies and cinema studies with regards to the aesthetic quality of surveillant media. Deeply indebted to Black studies, whiteness studies, affect theory, queer theory, and trans studies, their dissertation intends to make acutely visible the entrenched violences of U.S. surveillance practices without reproducing the violent visibility that structures them. Alongside being a CSUS/NFC Doctoral Fellow, Kanika is the President of the Cinema Studies Graduate Student Union and a Lead of the Queer & Trans Negativity Working Group at the Jackman Humanities Institute. Their work has been published in Spectator and Media Fields.

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