
'Between Neighborhoods': Film screening and discussion
Event Information
Description
Filmmaker Seth Fein will screen and discuss his new film, Between Neighborhoods, a history of Queens (New York City) as a transnational hub for people and commerce from the 1964 New York World’s Fair until today. The film travels between present and past, art and scholarship, the world in Queens and Queens in New York City. This video diptych contests Queens' location in imperial neighborhoods expressed by Unisphere, the gargantuan stainless-steel globe that was 'theme center' of the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair (NYWF), the event's only planned permanent structure.
Still standing in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Robert Moses's mammoth monument to globalization simultaneously marked the geodemographic center of his metropolitan empire and the ideological center of Washington's global empire, W.W. Rostow's Modernization Theory. The film particularly juxtaposes the intersection of interborough and interamerican imperialisms that crossed roads around Unisphere at the last NYWF with the transnational neighborhood Queens and Latin America co-occupy today, in which peoples from around the world redefine from below the meaning of globalization, and, consequently, Unisphere, imposed by planners from above.
Between Neighborhoods finally insists Queens is not a third-world outerborough awaiting development but NYC's cosmopolitan innerborough, as it insists too that art and scholarship productively co-occupy the same transdisciplinary neighborhood, public humanities.
Attendance is free of charge but registration is required.