Robert Stam

Robert Stam(born October 29, 1941) is an American film theorist working onfilm semiotics.He is a professor atNew York University,where he teaches about theFrench New Wavefilmmakers.Stam has published widely onFrench literature,comparative literature,and on film topics such as film history andfilm theory.Together withElla Shohat,he co-authoredUnthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.

Early life and education

Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Stam completed his Ph.D. inComparative LiteratureatU.C. Berkeleyin 1977, after which he went directly to New York University, where he has been teaching ever since. Stam's graduate work ranged acrossAnglo-American literature,Frenchand Francophone literature, and Luso-Brazilian literature. His dissertation was published as a book,Reflexivity in Film and Literature(1985).

Career

Stam has authored, co-authored and edited some seventeen books on film andcultural theory,literature and film, national cinema (French and Brazilian), aesthetic and politics, intellectual history, andcomparative race studiesandpostcolonial studies.With work that has ranged across a number of different fields, Stam has participated in a number of post-structuralist and postcolonial “turns” within film and cultural studies. A 1983Screenessay “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation” brought post-structuralist theory to bear on issues of representations of colonial history and racial oppression. Attempting to go beyond the methodological limitations of the then-dominant paradigm of “positive image” and “negative stereotype” analysis, Stam argued for an approach that emphasized not social accuracy or characterological merits but rather issues such as perspective, address, focalization, mediation, and the filmic orchestration of discourses.

Collaborations with Ella Shohat

The concern with issues ofcolonialism,postcolonialism,race, and cultural difference also found expression in a number of seminal texts co-authored withElla Shohat.Their 1985Screenessay “The Cinema After Babel: Language, Difference, Power,” introduced aBakhtinian“translinguistic” and trans-structuralist turn into the study of language difference, translation, andpostsynchronizationin the cinema. TheirUnthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media(Routledge, 1994) formed part of and helped shape the surge of writing about race, colonialism, identity politics, and postcoloniality in the 1990s.Edward SaidUnthinking Eurocentrisma “brilliant” and landmark book ". The book combines two strands of work – an ambitious study of colonialist discourse andEurocentrism– and a comprehensive and transnational study of cinematic texts related to those issues.

One feature, which came to characterize all of the Stam-Shohat collaborations was looking at theses issues within a longue timespan by placing the various "1492s" (i.e. the Inquisition against Jews, the expulsion of the Muslims, the conquest of the Americas, TransAtlantic slavery) at the center of the debates. A related strategy was to stress the centrality of Indigenous peoples for the history of radical thought and resistance in the Atlantic world, which they began in their 2006 bookFlagging Patriotismto call the “Red Atlantic.”Unthinking Eurocentrismaddressed such issues as “Eurocentrism versusPolycentrism,”“Formations of Colonialist Discourse,” “The Imperial Imaginary,” “Tropes of Empire,” the “Esthetics of Resistance,” “postcolonial hybridity,” and “indigenous media.” (A updated, 20th anniversary edition was published in 2014.)

Stam and Shohat continued with an anthology entitledMulticulturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media(Rutgers, 2003); followed by a more political polemic which excoriated the militaristic pseudo-patriotism of theGeorge Bush/Dick Cheneyperiod --Flagging Patriotism: Crises in Narcissism and Anti-Americanism(Routledge, 2006).Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic(NYU, 2012), finally, dealt with the postwar debates about colonialism, postcoloniality, race, multiculture andAffirmative Actionin three cultural zones—the U.S., and Anglophone zone,Franceand theFrancophonezone, andBraziland theLusophonezone. Contesting the monolingual and Anglo-Americano-centric approach to these issues, the book elaborates such concepts as “the seismic shift” provoked by the decolonization of culture, the radicalization of the academic disciplines, the philosophical centrality of indigenous thought, the “left/right” convergence on identity politics, and “inter-colonial narcissism.”

Adaptation studies

Stam has also been a major figure within the “transtextual turn” in adaptation and intertextuality studies. Stam's later work in literature and film formed part of and helped advance the field of adaptation studies, which has been undergoing a boom since the turn of the 21st century. Stam's essay “Beyond Fidelity,” included in the James Naremore 1999 anthologyFilm Adaptation,called for a larger paradigm shift in which authors like Naremore, Dudley Andrews, Kamilla Elliot, Deborah Cartmell, Imelda Whelehan, Thomas Leitch, Jack Boozer, Christine Geraghty, Alessandra Raengo, andLinda Hutcheonmoved from a binary novel-film fidelity approach to a more open transtextual approach.

The interest in film-literature relations culminated in two monographs and two anthologies.Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation(Blackwell, 2005) offered a historicized account of key trends in the history of the novel – the proto-magic realism of a Cervantes, the colonialist realism of aDefoe(and his critics), the parodic reflexivity of aHenry FieldingorMachado de Assis,or proto-cinematic perspectivalism of aFlaubert,the neurotic narrators of aDostoyevskyor aNabokov,the feminist experimentations ofClarice LispectorandMarguerite Duras,and the “marvelous latin-american real” ofMario de AndradeandAlejo Carpentier,all as seen through the many filmic adaptations – both “faithful” and revisionist – of their work.

Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Adaptation(Rutgers, 2006), meanwhile, explored the “transtextual diaspora” generated by a highly literaryménage-a-troisin the 1920s that led to the books and published journals ofHenri-Pierre Roche,Franz Hesseland Helen Hessel, as well as three films by Truffaut based on the life and work of Roche (Jules and Jim,Two Englishwomen,andThe Man Who Loved Women). Two anthologies co-edited with Alessandra Raengo (both published by Blackwell) fleshed out the project:Literature and Film: A Guide to the TheoryandPractice of Adaptation(Blackwell, 2005), andCompanion to Literature and Film(Blackwell, 2004).

Film theory and multiculturalism

Another field of intervention for Stam has been in cultural theory, especially inSubversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film(Johns Hopkins, 1989), the first book-length study to extrapolate for film and cultural studies Bakhtin's conceptual categories, such as “translinguistics” and “dialogism” and the “carnivalesque.” Stam has also been an advocate-exegete ofsemiotics,poststructuralism,and film theory in such books asNew Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Beyond(Routledge, 1992) andFilm Theory: An Introduction(Blackwell, 2000), the first book to recount the history of film theory from its beginnings to the present within atransnationalframework that included Latin America, Africa and Asia alongside Europe and North America.Film Theory: An Introductionwas published in tandem with two Blackwell anthologies co-edited withToby Millerboth from 2000:Film and TheoryandA Companion to Film Theory.

Brazilian cinema,literature, and popular culture form another node in Stam's research. He co-editedBrazilian Cinema(1982) with Randal Johnson.Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture(Duke, 1997) offered the first book-length study in English of racial representation, especially ofAfro-Brazilians,during the century of Brazilian Cinema, within a comparative framework in relation to similar issues in American cinema.

Awards and honors

Stam has won Woodrow Wilson, NDEA, Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Fellowships. In 2009, he was named a Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton, where he presented a paper on "The Red Atlantic". In 2006, he co-taught (with Ella Shohat) a seminar on "The Culture Wars in Translation" at Cornell's Society for Criticism and Theory. In 2003, Stam was honored at the Curitiba Film Festival for his "Noteworthy Service to Brazilian Cinema". In 2002, he was named “University Professor” at New York University, the institutions highest honor. In 1998: Honored by Africana Studies "Evening of Readings from Recently Published Work by Critically Acclaimed Authors" In 1995: a panel was dedicated toUnthinking Eurocentrismas opening for series of book-related events at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media(co-authored with Ella Shohat) won theKatherine Singer Kovács"Best Film Book" Award in 1994. Stam'sSubversive Pleasures; Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Filmwas a Choice "Outstanding Academic Book of the Year" in 1989 and Runner-Up for theKatherine Singer Kovács"Best Film Book" Award in the same year.

Selected publications

Books

• Indigeneity and the Decolonizing Gaze: Transnational Imaginaries, Media Aesthetics, and Social Thought(Bloomsbury, 2023)
• Keywords in Subversive Film / Media Aesthetics(Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)
• Race in Translation: Culture Wars in the Postcolonial Atlantic(Routledge, 2012)coauthored with Ella Shohat
• Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism(Routledge, 2006)coauthored with Ella Shohat
• Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation(Rutgers, 2006)
• Literature through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of Adaptation(Blackwell, 2005)
• Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation(Blackwell, 2005)
• Companion to Literature and Film(Blackwell, 2004)
• Film and Theory: An Anthology(Blackwell, 2000)
• Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media(Rutgers, 2000),coauthored with Ella Shohat
• A Companion to Film Theory(Blackwell, 1999),coedited withToby Miller
• Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture(Duke, 1997)
• Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media(Routledge, 1994),coauthored with Ella Shohat
• Bakhtin(Attica 1992)
• New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond(Routledge, 1992)
• Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film(Johns Hopkins, 1989)
• Reflexivity in Film and Literature(UMI Press, 1985)
• Brazilian Cinema(Associated University Presses, 1982)
• O Espetáculo Interrompido (The Interrupted Spectacle)in Portuguese (Paze e Terra, 1981)

Articles

• "Hitchcock and Buñuel: Authority, Desire and the Absurd,"in Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick, eds.Hitchcock's Rereleased Films(Detroit:Wayne State, 1991).
• "Mobilizing Fictions: The Gulf War, the Media and the Recruitment of the Spectator,"Public CultureVol.4, No.2 (Spring 1992).
• "From Hybridity to the Aesthetics of Garbage,"Social Identities,Vol. 3, No. 2 (1997)
• "Transnationalizing Comparison: The Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy,"co-written with Ella Shohat.New Literary History,Vol. 40, No. 3 (Summer 2009)
• "The Cinema after Babel: Language, Difference and Power,"Screen,Vol. XXVI, Nos. 3-4 (May- Aug 1985).
• "Colonialism, Racism and Representation,"Screen,Vol. XXIV, No. 2(Mar/April 1983).