This dissertation analyzes the post-conflict cinema in the region of the former Yugoslavia, and the way that this particular form of cultural production establishes affective regimes within which bearing witness to trauma becomes variously articulated to national identity, history, politics, and memory. Using affect and trauma theories as organizing frameworks, my project looks at the way in which post-Yugoslav cinema has become a pivotal outlet for the process of working through the trauma of recent violent history in the region. I examine this process through its various iterations, from its applications to identity - be it ethnic, national, class, age, gender or sexuality-based - to its influence on normativizing some narratives as history while concealing others. One of the key arguments of this dissertation is that certain trauma narratives represented through cinema have the potential of destabilizing the essentialist locating of trauma within singular (here predominantly ethno-national and heterosexual) identity, by offering a pathway towards affective attachments of empathy towards the Other instead.

<p> The themes of crime and justice have captured the attention of Americans for decades. These themes are frequently portrayed in Hollywood films. While these stories capture the attention of Americans, both young and old, they propagate messages about what justice is, how it should be accomplished, who should serve it, and who is worthy to receive it. These messages have important implications for how Americans come to understand the American criminal justice system and its procedures. Reflective of lived experience, films about crime and justice have often drawn upon the victimization of women as an exigency for telling tales about justice as related to females. <i>The Bounty Hunter</i> (2010), <i>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</i> (2011), <i> Les Mis&eacute;rables</i> (2012), and <i>Safe Haven</i> (2013) are analyzed using ideological criticism to reveal their ideological constructions of justice for women, what subject positions these films interpellate female audience members into, and how women, as interpellated by these ideologies, should engage in the criminal justice system.</p>

In an attempt to facilitate the task of charting a path toward a radically different future, a future without the bourgeois intellectual property regime (IPR), this dissertation searches back in history by examining China's loss of socialism. The guiding question can be formulated thus: Why did the People's Republic of China give up its socialist mode of intellectual production only to embrace the bourgeois intellectual property regime (IPR), which had been subjected to devastating criticism by progressive scholars in the West since mid-1990s? Situating this rupture of China's approach to intellectual production within the ongoing process of postsocialist structuration in the wake of the waning Chinese socialism, this dissertation focuses on Chinese intellectuals as social mediators and locates the traces of the loss of socialism in various cultural productions during the postsocialist era.