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This paper argues that video games expose the presumptions separating “Asian America” and “Asia” in the traditional senses of isolation, origination, and presumed distance. It does so by focusing on the most “Asiatic” genre of video games today, the North American visual novel, which offers a counterdiscourse to normative modes of play and attempts to offer utopic spaces to reflect upon the “real” genres of race and neo–Cold War geopolitics. Using theories of performance from Dorinne Kondo and others, the author shows how queer indie visual novels are primarily aspirational, in that they build queer, utopic, and seemingly anti-racist worlds through the Asiatic space of the visual novel form. In so doing, they also allow players to explore the Asiatic as a means of repairing the traumas and distances of American imperial cultures. The article analyzes four visual novels to make this argument: three by non-racially-identifying North American designers—Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017) by Dan Salvato, Analogue: A Hate Story (2012) by Christine Love, and Heaven Will Be Mine (2018) by Aevee Bee—and Butterfly Soup (2017), a game by the queer Asian/American designer Brianna Lei. If games make the boundaries of Asia and America irrelevant, visual novels explore this irrelevance through Asiatic irreverence.

In this paper, I intend to explore the role played by reflexivity in grounding a more critical perspective when designing, implementing and analysing participatory digital media research. To carry out this methodological reflection, I will present and discuss a recently concluded research project on young people’s game-making in an after-school programme targeting Latin American migrants in London/UK. I will pay special attention to how my subjectivities influenced planning, data generation and analysis of this programme, and to how context, lived experiences, curricular decisions and interpersonal relationships shaped the kinds of knowledge produced through this research. Findings emerging from this experience included relevant dissonances between curricular design/decisions and the use of participatory approaches in game-making, and the limitations of traditional analytical categories within the Social Sciences field (e.g., gender and intersectionality) to understanding subjectivities expressed through game-making. This study offers relevant insights into the place of reflexivity in research on digital media production by young people by highlighting its complexity and by calling for more critical and less homogenising approaches to this type of research.

This paper explores a game-making programme for 14 Latin American migrants aged 13-18 in London/UK, carried out between October/2017-January/2018, where I investigated the relationships between game conventions, platforms and personal preferences in the curation of fluid identities through game production. Participants presented varying levels of affinity with games linked both to access issues and to other specific elements (e.g. perception of games in contemporary culture, gender). Questionnaires, observations, unstructured/semistructured interviews and gaming archives were employed to explore this participatory initiative and data was analysed through Multimodal Sociosemiotics. Findings remarked how shared understandings about digital games can find their way into platforms and act as “cultural-technical gatekeepers”, supporting or hindering the engagement with game-making of those often perceived as outsiders to gaming culture. This gatekeeping happens when there are “creative dissonances” between, for example, personal preferences and platforms aligned to normative/mainstream genres. These dissonances, however, can end up fostering subversive designs, contravening gaming conventions and potentially challenging traditional gaming boundaries. This insight is relevant for understanding “cultural-technical constraints” and subversive/non-mainstream game-making, especially in relation to innovation and appropriation of game-making resources/strategies by non-mainstream groups.

"Les liens entre l'art contemporain et les questions de colonialité, postcolonialité, et décolonialité sont anciens et multiples. Des artistes occidentaux et non-occidentaux, depuis plusieurs décennies déjà, s'en sont emparés pour produire des œuvres qui témoignent de leurs engagements politiques, sociétaux et esthétiques. Des concepts que les études postcoloniales ont approfondies ou inventées – agency (agentivité), mimicry (mimétisme/simulacre), ou essentialisme stratégique –, en autant d'outils utiles à démêler la complexité des relations coloniales et, au-delà, de toutes les relations de domination, sont ainsi revisités par les artistes. D'autre part, des auteurs, relevant de ces champs d'études qui conservent aujourd'hui toute leur actualité politique et leur pertinence théorique, disent à leur tour l'intérêt qu'ils portent à la création contemporaine. Associant vingt historiens de l'art et chercheurs en littérature, philosophie, droit ou psychanalyse, Postcolonial/Décolonial. La preuve par l'art présente des travaux portant sur des démarches artistiques (Betye Saar, Fred Wilson, Sarkis, Lidwien van de Ven, Voluspa Jarpa, des artistes du collectif Mira au Mexique, Iris Kensmil, Jean Renoir, et bien d'autres), mais aussi sur des propositions institutionnelles (notamment initiées par le Centro de Arte y Comunicación de Buenos Aires, la Biennale de Venise ou le Van Abbemuseum d'Eindhoven), associées en de nouveaux réseaux de solidarités. Une place particulière est réservée aux singularités artistiques, théoriques et juridiques en Amérique latine, lieu d'émergence des théories décoloniales. Sous un angle historiographique et épistémologique, on trouvera ici des analyses des fondements historiques, théoriques et idéologiques du postcolonial dont les théorisations, loin de la saturation conceptuelle dont certains veulent les accuser, concernent particulièrement l'histoire de l'art. "

The Latinx Research Center's Revista N'oj hosted a round table discussion on Decolonial Aesthetics titled, "Decolonizing Art & Praxis in the Time of Covid-19." The talk included Jesus Barraza, Dr. Guisela Latorre, Dr. Mauricio Barros de Castro, and Dr. Laura E. Pérez. The panel was moderated by Revista N'oj editor, Abraham Ramirez.

In the last decade or so, cinema has revealed itself to be an ideal medium for the transfer and/or remediation of the spoken word as well as stories coming from oral tradition and Indigenous culture. Indeed, cinema is a place of expression which favours cyclical creativity and contributes to the decolonization of stereotyped images propagated by external voices that do not understand the subtleties of languages (real and symbolic) that are anchored in indigenous peoples’ cultural memory. By exploring indigenous cinema as practised by women of diverse nations, this piece demonstrates how cinema can induce the compression and dilation of time, to bring to the audience the fluidity of a story that has been reconfigured according to a new time and carried by spoken words that have chosen to either emancipate themselves from the image or to materialize themselves in it. Furthermore, this article illustrates how a new generation of Indigenous women use cinema to retrace and/or rewrite their personal narrative with the help of autobiographical or collective stories that travel back in time to fill in the blanks left by a fragile memory and to express their will to make peace with a difficult colonial past. Finally, the writings of Lee Maracle (I Am Woman, 1988) and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine (Manifeste Assi, 2014) are being brought forth to show how films such as Suckerfish (Lisa Jackson, 2004) Bithos (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, 2015) and Four Faces of the Moon (Amanda Strong, 2016) contribute to the individual and community healing of Indigenous peoples of Canada, through an aesthetic of reconciliation. The exploration of these works, therefore allows us to shed light on and better understand the roles/internal mechanisms of visual autobiographies in the larger context of reconciliation with individual and collective stories/memories.

Anthropologists of the senses have long argued that cultures differ in their sensory registers. This groundbreaking volume applies this idea to material culture and the social practices that endow objects with meanings in both colonial and postcolonial relationships. It challenges the privileged position of the sense of vision in the analysis of material culture. Contributors argue that vision can only be understood in relation to the other senses. In this they present another challenge to the assumed western five-sense model, and show how our understanding of material culture in both historical and contemporary contexts might be reconfigured if we consider the role of smell, taste, touch and sound, as well as sight, in making meanings about objects.

Les auteures dressent le portrait tant des défis actuels que des possibilités qui naissent des relations interculturelles se tissant entre commissaires et cinéastes autochtones et non-autochtones dans le cadre du plus grand festival du film autochtone du Brésil, Cine Kurumin. Ce festival annuel, fondé en 2011, se déroule dans des villages ruraux autochtones, de même que dans des métropoles brésiliennes, attirant ainsi des auditoires variés. Le festival est ouvert aux cinéastes autochtones et non-autochtones qui produisent du matériel audiovisuel portant sur des sujets autochtones de partout dans le monde. Divers processus créatifs y sont encouragés grâce à l’organisation d’ateliers de scénarisation, et des partenariats établis avec des chaînes de télévision permettent une plus large diffusion des films sélectionnés. Alors que les productions audiovisuelles autochtones se développent, leurs contenus se diversifient ; elles englobent en effet de plus en plus de thèmes et de styles, de formats et de perspectives variées. En s’appuyant sur un cadre théorique postcolonial et décolonial, les auteures proposent de nouvelles perspectives sur un cinéma en pleine expansion ; les réalisateurs autochtones et leurs films circulent de plus en plus au sein de festivals non thématiques, reçoivent des prix et font rayonner leurs propres voix et points de vue auprès de publics variés, ce qui crée de nombreuses possibilités d’interactions et de dialogues interculturels. En outre, la mise sur pied de Cine Kurumin témoigne du pouvoir des productions audiovisuelles autochtones de générer des relations interculturelles entre cinéastes, commissaires et public.

Esta investigación propone una lectura detallada de una obra de arte de performance creada por el artista ecuatoriano Santiago Reyes, “(REM) Romantic Eyes Movement”. Al examinar la representación de los ojos de Reyes, esta reflexión considera hasta qué punto su pieza puede proveer un espacio de resistencia contra-visual y de curación generacional. Por ende, la obra de Santiago Reyes se interpreta bajo la enmarcación teórica de la “futuridad Latinx” y desde una perspectiva decolonial, mostrando cómo la performance transnacional latinoamericana puede proporcionar un vasto corpus de estudio que reflexiona sobre el alcance y la potencial de la expresión corporal performática.

Avec Alex Wilson, Jeffrey McNeil, Teddy Syrette, May Ela and Ahmed Maswadeh.

Ce travail vise à montrer deux choses. La première, c’est de saisir toute l’importance du tournant postcolonial/afro-décolonial dans la construction d’une contre-épistémologie propre au sujet culturel colonisé africain. En d’autres termes, pour le sujet colonisé, cette contre-épistémologie sert à décoloniser les imaginaires, à partir d’un questionnement de la colonialité de l’épistémologie et du savoir donnés pour universels par l’occident. La deuxième chose, c’est que ̶ à quelques mois de la commémoration du centenaire de la naissance du prolixe et polygraphe auteur africain-colombien Manuel Zapata Olivella (1920-2004) ̶ cet article puisse le situer à sa juste place. Celle d’un sujet culturel colonisé africain des Amériques dont l’abondante production culturelle et la pensée, portées et révolutionnées par le concept de Muntu africain, participent de la décolonisation des imaginaires et de l’épistémologie

Pairing Dominican-born artist Firelei Báez with Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, this article meditates on relational black and brown aesthetic strategies by reading femme gestures performatively across individual works, as well as the exhibition spaces within which the artists draft practices of informed and resistant engagement. Working with both theories of brownness that emerge from Latinx studies as well as scholarship of the black radical tradition, the author follows a sense of shared aesthetic gestures in Báez and Mutu’s work toward an indictment of pervasive Global North racial epistemologies. Focusing on the performative gesture as the basis for relation, this article ultimately hones in on the chimeric figures—amalgamations of flora and fauna—that both artists deploy, arguing that these present a model for imagining an otherwise arrangement of the social.R Poniendo en diálogo a Firelei Báez, una artista nacida en República Dominicana, con Wangechi Mutu, que nació en Kenia, este artículo invita a una meditación sobre las estrategias estéticas relacionales negras y morenas mediante una lectura en clave performativa de gestos femeninos en obras individuales y en aquellos espacios de exposición en que las artistas elaboran prácticas de participación política informada y de resistencia. Trabajando tanto con las teorías de lo moreno (brownness) que emergen de los estudios Latinx como con el trabajo académico de la tradición radical negra, la autora rastrea gestos estéticos presentes tanto en el trabajo de Báez como en el de Mutu para denunciar las omnipresentes epistemologías raciales del norte global. Centrándose en el gesto performativo como la base de la relación, este artículo se enfoca en última instancia en las figuras quiméricas – amalgamaciones de flora y fauna – que ambas artistas despliegan en su trabajo para sostener que estas presentan un modelo para imaginar otra manera de organizar lo social.

When E. Carmen Ramos organized Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art (2013) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, art holdings of Latinx artists at the institution were minimal and unbalanced. The museum lacked works by foundational figures; entire groups like Dominican Americans were missing, as were genres like abstract art; and with a collection dominated by colonial and folk art and work by Mexican Americans, it was impossible to produce any comprehensive exhibition of contemporary Latinx art, much less one that represented the diversity of artists and trends. Ramos was one of the few Latinx curators hired in the aftermath of the infamous 1994 “Willful Neglect” report documenting a historical pattern of discrimination at the Smithsonian Institute and calling for the hiring of Latinx curators to help direct the Smithsonian’s priorities in research, collections, and exhibitions.1 Twenty-five years later, this pattern of exclusion continues apace. In 2018, a study by UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center found that while the Smithsonian’s Latinx workforce grew from 2.5 percent to 10.1 percent, this growth falls short of representing the growth of the Latinx population, which since 1994 has doubled to 17.8 percent of the total population. In sum, the task of putting a dent in a mostly white canonical art history and collection was a daunting one, and whatever Ramos did would be a politically charged intervention. This would be the first major scholarly survey exhibition of Latinx art, a statement to insert it as central to US art history, and the first major show of its type in a major North American museum in decades.

Depuis quelques décennies, certains artistes colombiens cherchent à repenser ce que peut être aujourd’hui l’identité colombienne, et plus concrètement celle de l’artiste. Au-delà du stéréotype de ce qu’est le « Colombien » vu de l’extérieur, au-delà d’une histoire coloniale – et toutes ses problématiques – commune aux pays d’Amérique latine, ainsi que d’une histoire récente plus particulière connue pour son extrême violence, nous pouvons affirmer que l’identité colombienne est le résultat d’identités multiples, diverses et variées. Par ailleurs, il existe un dénominateur commun qui peut la définir car elle s’est construite durant ces deux derniers siècles à partir d’un concept : celui de « l’hybridité ».

In 'Eros Ideologies' Laura E. Perez explores the decolonial through Western and non-Western thought concerning personal and social well-being. Drawing upon Jungian, people-of-color, and spiritual psychology alongside non-Western spiritual philosophies of the interdependence of all life-forms, she writes of the decolonial as an ongoing project rooted in love as an ideology to frame respectful coexistence of social and cultural diversity. In readings of art that includes self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, and Yreina D. Cervantez, the drawings and paintings of Chilean American artist Liliana Wilson, and Favianna Rodriguez's screen-printed images, Perez identifies art as one of the most valuable laboratories for creating, imagining, and experiencing new forms of decolonial thought. Such art expresses what Perez calls eros ideologies: understandings of social and natural reality that foreground the centrality of respect and care of self and others as the basis for a more democratic and responsible present and future. Employing a range of writing styles and voices-from the poetic to the scholarly-Perez shows how art can point to more just and loving ways of being.