In the words of its curators, the festival envisions an "idiosyncratic movement of cinema concerned with
decontextualizing 'experimental him' by exploring fresh cultural relationships between genre and form, light and motion, physics and grace." (4) The conscious focus of the festival has been to specially reshape the concerns of the traditional avant-garde to include feminine perspectives and desires that have often been occluded from the histories of Indian cinema.
Reappropriating, misappropriating,
decontextualizing, recontextualizing--as all that has become simpler to pull off, the result has been a well-spring of media that let the relatively powerless speak, from Shepard Fairey and Robbie Conal on the left to Sabo on the right, and that's just the street art scene.
Likewise, in "Objects of Desire," 1983-88, Charlesworth placed mass-media photos of religious icons, animals, and the female body against supersaturated backdrops of solid color,
decontextualizing commodity and sexual fetishes without fully divesting them of seductive force.
For his part, Media Officer of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, Anwar Raja, said that the Palestinian Cause is suffering from attempts of
decontextualizing and obliterating its historical and genuine essence throughout generations after over 65 years of sacrifices.
As such, they are particularly useful for introductory courses in which the context of the texts is being established or a graduate seminar in which the basic issues of Latin American Studies are being defined: such courses have become increasingly important, both for the insertion of students into particular academic and ideological frameworks and as an alternative to courses on "critical concepts" or "literary theory," which have always had the problem of
decontextualizing Latin American culture and subsuming it under more important, "internationalist" perspectives (not that there isn't still a lot of this, in the way in which Latin American literature in translation is viewed by the popular press and used in English-language classrooms).
Antagonistic power relations between children and parents are, after all, also part of a specific discursive regime with similar
decontextualizing and naturalizing aspects.
We "regard uncertainty (fate) / as potentially a purveyor of pain," then learn that pain has "enormous
decontextualizing power." Fate is "occurrence," but is also "what has happened to one, not what is going to happen." It is "not all that will happen / except in retrospect." Elsewhere, "Positions are always changing / things for us," which presumably includes "in retrospect." In all instances, "fate" connects to other concepts, either new or recurring, each concept like one color on a giant Rubik's Cube called "The Fatalist" that is forever twisting and recombining before us.
On the whole, social historians are careful to avoid
decontextualizing the life of the mind and culture from the larger structures of which they were a part.
Although progress is shown on the level of the development of knowledge, in that the objects and their relationships become more meaningful, there are still many difficulties in
decontextualizing the activities and in the development of a functional language, necessary for the passage from pragmatic to intellectual tools.
Perhaps the best illustration of its bitterness is Charles Maurras' beginning his life sentence after the war by shouting "C'est la revanche de Dreyfus [This is Dreyfus's revenge]." Finally, interest in what Farmer calls "
decontextualizing" Oradour also sprang in part from wide-spread horror: the more successfully the massacre was explained, the more predictable and therefore the less gratuitously horrifying it seemed.
It also satisfies his penchant for
decontextualizing the texts he teaches and writes about; he admits to being miffed when he had "to contend with helpful teaching assistants who ran off copies of 'On My First Son' for the students" in his introductory classes at Berkeley, "to get ...