Christopher Holliday is Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London (UK). Alexander Sergeant is a Lecturer in Digital Media Production at the University of Westminster (UK), specialising in the history and theory of fantasy cinema. Each episode, they look in detail at a film or television show, taking listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation.
Episodes
Monday May 11, 2026
Monday May 11, 2026
For Footnote #79, Chris and Alex engage the seminal work of Edward Said and his coining and development of Orientalism as a critical framework for mapping the acceptance of the presence of a distinction between East and West, and the terms under which such a geographical and, crucially, conceptual division has been understood. Topics include the emergence of an Orientalist rhetoric during the 1970s and its alignment with psychoanalysis; the West’s constructed image of the East as the manifestation of what Gerald Sim calls a “European unconscious” and its identity as a repressed, hidden, and mystical Other; the implications for an essentialist attitude towards the Middle East, Asia, North Africa powered by the decorative - rather than in-depth - view of Arab “customs” and traditions; the value of Orientalism to Film Studies and its histories of representation in defining the “foreign”; and the Orient as a “repository” for certain types of colonialist and post-colonialist fantasies.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**
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