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Multiple expressions of sovereignty beyond a narrow legal interpretation are discussed through the artwork of contemporary Iroquois artists, G. Peter Jemison (Seneca), Alan Michelson (Mohawk), Samuel Thomas (Cayuga), and Marie Watt (Seneca). Michelson's installation at the Massena homeland security border checkpoint between the United States, Canada, and the Mohawk Nation, titled The Third Bank of the River, draws on the Guswentah or Two Row Wampum underscoring the problematic yet ongoing assertion of Haudenosaunee sovereignty. A link is made between the work of these artists and the 2008 Courtney Hunt film, Frozen River, based on the cultural and political understanding of the Two Row Wampum. The Guswentah is discussed as a demonstration of sovereignty and is historicized through Cayuga chief Deskaheh's call for the recognition of Haudenosaunee sovereignty at the League of Nations in Geneva, in 1923, John Mohawk's 1978 Basic Call to Consciousness, and more recently, Taiaiake Alfred's 1999 Peace, Power, Righteousness. These artists demonstrate the critical role they play in the ongoing formation of sovereignty as a visual or aesthetic issue in conjunction with its historic legal positioning.

From Nausicaa to Sailor Moon, understanding girl heroines of manga and anime within otaku culture.

In the summer of 2007, media coverage of Indian Idol-3 focused attention on how people in the Northeast Indian state of Meghalaya cast aside decades-old separatist identities to mobilize support for Amit Paul, a finalist from the region. While some fans set up websites and blogs to generate interest and support from the rest of the country and abroad, others formed a fan club and facilitated efforts by a range of groups and organizations to sponsor and manage PCOs (public call offices) in different parts of Meghalaya, distribute pre-paid mobile phone cards, and set up landline voting booths. Recognizing the ways in which these activities were beginning to transcend long-standing ethnic, religious, linguistic, and spatial boundaries, state legislators and other politicians soon joined the effort to garner votes for Amit Paul, with the chief minister D. D. Lapang declaring Amit Paul to be Meghalaya’s “brand Ambassador for peace, communal harmony and excellence.”1 It seemed that this three-month-long campaign around a reality television program could set the stage for a remarkable refashioning of the socio-cultural and political terrain in Meghalaya. As one commentator remarked:When Meghalaya’s history is written, it could well be divided into two distinct phases – one before the third Indian Idol contest and one after it. A deep tribal-non-tribal divide, punctuated by killings, riots, and attempts at ethnic cleansing, would mark the first phase. A return to harmony and to the cosmopolitan ethos of the past would signify the second. The agent of change: Amit Paul, the finalist of the musical talent hunt on a TV channel.

This chapter wants to argue two things: the first part suggests that reality television in Africa – specifically the series Big Brother Africa, which completed its third season in November 2008 – has had profound impacts for identity politics, gender politics, and the politics of class on the continent. In fact, these are the issues most commonly illuminated by reality television and I wrote about these in a previously published article. The second part of the chapter moves into less explored territory. In that previous article, I briefly discussed how specifically Big Brother Africa can illuminate the workings of globalization in Africa and, in particular, South Africa’s hegemonic role in that process. Here, I expand on my earlier argument by exploring that hegemony in the context of the growing Chinese presence in Africa. All economic and political indicators suggest that China’s growing investment in mining and infrastructure and its political clout relative to South Africa mean that it is destined to assume a place of prominence on the continent. But here I want to argue that if we want to understand how globalization plays out in Africa, we need to look beyond China’s military and economic expansion. For me, Big Brother Africa can help us make sense of these dynamic processes. South Africa has consistently remained the highest-ranking country in Africain terms of its “global competitiveness” as measured by the World Economic Forum. South Africa dominates regional markets in Southern Africa as well as remaining competitive in the rest of the continent against business rivals from United States and Europe. As it was under Apartheid, there is a close symbiosis between the continental aspirations and interests of the postapartheid state and that of South African business. The advent of democracy in 1994 has opened up African markets for South African business on an unprecedented scale. The South African state is very active on the African continent and keen to develop a leading role for itself. In fact, successive United States governments have viewed South Africa as a continental leader. For example, former President George W. Bush referred to former South African President Thabo Mbeki as his “point man in Africa.”4The South African government underwrites and actively promotes SouthAfrican business’s continental schemes through its “Proudly South African” campaign coordinated through an International Marketing Council situated in the Office of (the country’s) President since 2002, which links state nationalism with consumption. Separately a statutory Industrial Development Corporation (established in 1940) underwrites the business expansion of South African capital.

Many games touch upon issues that are related to the postcolonial culture we live in. Be it in the shape of referring to how it has generated ethnic differences, subscribing to (post) capitalist values of winning and gaining, or by employing militarist strategies that have been partly shaped our colonial histories, cultural notions that are related to our colonial past are often resonant in games. However, one particular strand of strategy games takes the notions of colonialism as its most central focus. Games like Age Of Empires (AOE), Civilization and Rise of Nations, may differ greatly in certain ludological aspects, but all share a strong fascination with colonial history. Through employing colonial techniques of domination like exploring, trading, map-making and military manoeuvring, players create their personal colonial pasts and futures. Even though it is evident that such games share an explicit fascination with colonial history, it remains less clear in what way they may be called postcolonial. In this article I will shed light on why and how such games can be called postcolonial and should even be conceived as one of the most significant arenas to express the tensions and frictions that are part of the postcolonial culture we live in. As postcolonial playgrounds they offer the perfect means to play with and make sense of how colonial spatial practices have shaped contemporary culture. I will argue that the very character of digital games as well as the specific game mechanisms of historical strategy games makes them postcolonial playgrounds par excellence.

How should one think about popular media in the African context? Should we attempt to understand and analyse the increasing proliferation of tabloids, reality television shows, pop music, websites and mobile communications through the analytical frameworks constructed by scholars in the Global North, or does Africa pose unique research questions? Is there a danger of either essentializing Africa by treating her as ‘different’, or by ignoring her specificity by approaching her media via Western theoretical constructs? The scholar wishing to understand the interface between popular media, development and democracy in contemporary African societies is faced with a complex double bind. Elsewhere (Nyamnjoh 2005: 2-3) I have argued that African worldviews and cultural values are doubly excluded from global media discourses, first by the ideology of hierarchies and boundedness of cultures, and second by cultural industries more interested in profits than the promotion of creative diversity and cultural plurality. Little attention is accorded to how Africans negotiate and navigate the various identity margins and cultural influences in their lives, in ways that are not easily reducible to simple options or straightforward choices. The consequence of rigid dichotomies or stubborn prescriptiveness based on externally induced expectations of social transformation is an idea of democracy hardly informed by popular articulations of personhood and agency in Africa, and media whose professional values and content are not in tune with the expectations of those they purport to serve. The predicament of media practitioners in such a situation, as well as those wishing to understand African media practice through media theory, is obvious: to be of real service to liberal democracy and its expectations of modernity, they must ignore alternative ideas of personhood and agency in the cultural communities within which such practices take place and of which such practitioners and, often, scholars form part. Attending to the interests of particular cultural groups as strategically essential entities risks contradicting the principles of liberal democracy and its emphasis on civic citizenship and the autonomous individual, which media practitioners in African societies are being held accountable to.

In recent years, Arab television has undergone a dramatic and profound transformation from terrestrial, government-owned, national channels to satellite, privately owned, transnational networks. The latter is the Arab television that matters today, economically, socially and politically. The resulting pan-Arab industry is vibrant, diverse, and fluid - very different, the authors of this major new study argue, from the prevailing view in the West, which focuses only on the al-Jazeera network. Based on a wealth of primary Arabic language sources, interviews with Arab television executives, and the authors' personal and professional experience with the industry, Arab Television Industries tells the story of that transformation, featuring compelling portraits of major players and institutions, and captures dominant trends in the industry. Readers learn how the transformation of Arab television came to be, the different kinds of channels, how programs are made and promoted, and how they are regulated. Throughout, the analysis focuses on the interaction of the television industry with Arab politics, business, societies and cultures.

This article focuses on questioning and theorizing the visual and discursive disappearance of blackness from virtual fantasy worlds. Using EverQuest, EverQuest II, and World of Warcraft as illustrative of a timeline of character creation design trends, this article argues that the disappearance of blackness is a gradual erasure facilitated by multicultural design strategies and regressive racial logics. Contemporary fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) privilege whiteness and contextualize it as the default selection, rendering any alterations in coloration or racial selection exotic stylistic deviations. Given the Eurocentrism inherent in the fantasy genre and embraced by MMORPGs, in conjunction with commonsense conceptions of Blacks as hyper-masculine and ghettoized in the gamer imaginary, players and designers do not see blackness as appropriate for the discourse of heroic fantasy. As a result, reductive racial stereotypes and representations proliferate while productive and politically disruptive racial differences are ejected or neutralized through fantastical proxies.

This collection explores the relationship between digital gaming and its cultural context by focusing on the burgeoning Asia-Pacific region. Encompassing key locations for global gaming production and consumption such as Japan, China, and South Korea, as well as increasingly significant sites including Australia and Singapore, the region provides divergent examples of the role of gaming as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Drawing from micro ethnographic studies of specific games and gaming locales to macro political economy analyses of techno-nationalisms and trans-cultural flows, this collection provides an interdisciplinary model for thinking through the politics of gaming production, representation, and consumption in the region.

Extending Alexander Galloway’s analysis of the action-image in videogames, this essay explores the concept in relation to its source: the analysis of cinema by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The applicability of the concept to videogames will, therefore, be considered through a comparison between the First Person Shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Andrey Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. This analysis will compellingly explore the nature of videogame-action, its relation to player-perceptions and its loca-tion within the machinic and ludic schema.

This article examines the racialization of informational labor in machinima about Chinese player workers in the massively multiplayer online role playing game World ofWarcraft. Such fan-produced video content extends the representational space of thegame and produces overtly racist narrative space to attach to a narrative that, whilecarefully avoiding explicit references to racism or racial conflict in our world, is premised upon a racial war in an imaginary world*the World of Azeroth. This profiling activityis part of a larger biometric turn initiated by digital culture’s informationalization of thebody and illustrates the problematics of informationalized capitalism. If late capitalism ischaracterized by the requirement for subjects to be possessive individuals, to make claims to citizenship based on ownership of property, then player workers are unnatural subjects in that they are unable to obtain avatarial self-possession. The painful paradox of this dynamic lies in the ways that it mirrors the dispossession of information workers in the Fourth Worlds engendered by ongoing processes of globalization. As long as Asian ‘‘farmers’’ are figured as unwanted guest workers within the culture of MMOs, user-produced extensions of MMO-space like machinima will most likely continue to depict Asian culture as threatening to the beauty and desirability of shared virtual space in the World of Warcraft.

While television in today's world increasingly displays a global character, national television systems are still firmly rooted in a specific locality. But in what ways does this locality actually shape the content and performance of national television? What is the significance of local cultures and local languages in these processes of mediation? And how do the local, the national, and the global intersect in discourses of and discourse on television? Taking a critical discourse analysis perspective, Watching Si Doel investigates these and related questions in the context of contemporary Indonesia. Starting from the nationwide popularity of the local television serial Si Doel Anak Sekolahan ("Educated Doel"), it examines the various ways in which the national government, Indonesian television producers, and local audiences shape, interpret, and struggle over the meaning of the phrase 'national television'. In doing so, the book explores what Indonesian television at the turn of the century sounds and looks like--and, significantly, ought to sound and look like--according to those who create and control television and those who watch and interpret it. While providing insight into the production, nature, and reception of television discourse in general, this book particularly seeks to clarify the relationship between television, language, and power in late New Order and post-Soeharto Indonesia.

An exploration of how issues of race and ethnicity play out in a digital media landscape that includes MySpace, post-9/11 politics, MMOGs, Internet music distribution, and the digital divide.

Growing up in England, it never really occurred to me to wonder why Inever saw cricket from India on television. Indian cricket was always insight; we had Bishen Singh Bedi in his mysterious headgear wheeling in forNorthamptonshire, Srinivas Venkatraghavan wrapped in sweaters at Derby,Madan Lal playing in front of handfuls of old men in the Yorkshire leagues.Yet the Packer ‘circus’ largely left India alone, and in England the touringIndian side became an unglamorous pause between the glorious tours bythe West Indies and Australia. Little was I to guess that once I started working in television, India would become central to the world cricketeconomy and crucial to the technological improvements in the coverage ofthe game.

The changing relationship between cricket and satellite television in thecontext of the Indian sub-continent has been a subject of considerablescholarly inquiry. That one nourishes the other is well known. However,what is relatively little known is the degree to which this interdependence hasgrown in recent times. So much so that cricket tournaments, or ratherdesignated TV tournaments, are being planned with alacrity by the Board ofControl for Cricket in India (BCCI). Television rights for these overseastournaments/matches spread over the next 4 years had initially generated $219.5 million for the BCCI.1 On the other hand, satellite channels too havestarted planning cricket programming around these tournaments, program-ming expected to generate millions in advertising revenue.2 While theorganization of such big-money events well encapsulates the symbiotic rela-tionship between cricket and satellite television within a burgeoning Indianeconomy, other local/regional dimensions of this relationship are often noless fascinating. Tele-visual hype generated on the occasion of a regionalcricket body election in July 2006 in West Bengal, especially by the multiple 24-hour Bengali news channels, drew attention to the local variant of thestory involving big-money television and even bigger-money sport. Thischapter, on the basis of two distinct case studies – the implications of the tri-nation 1-day series played in Malaysia in September 2006 involving Aus-tralia, West Indies and India, and Television coverage of the Cricket Asso-ciation of Bengal Elections in July 2006 – will comment on the complex andever-changing relationship between cricket and television in India. At thesame time it will attempt to question the rationale behind this growing interdependence and probe what this means for the Indian nation at large.

After four decades of state monopoly over television Indian viewers gottheir first taste of private television in the early 1990s. By 1998, the first of India’s private 24-hour news channels was on the airwaves and by 2007more than 300 satellite channels were broadcasting into Indian homes. Ofthese, 106 broadcast news in 14 languages and as many as 54 of these were24-hour news channels in 11 languages.1 These are conservative figures thatdo not include many foreign and local cable networks that also broadcastnews.2 Even so, the numbers are a stark illustration of how the Indian statelost control over television broadcasting despite its best efforts to the con-trary. No other country in the world has such a concentration of private news channels as India. The creation of a television public has significantimplications for democracy and this essay focuses on what 24-hour newsmeans for India. It argues that the emergence of television news networkshas greatly enhanced and strengthened deliberative Indian democracy.Commercial mass media stands at the junction of politics and the economy,enabling the entry of citizens onto the stage of politics, while simultaneouslyseeking to appropriate that energy for its own commercial benefit (Rajago-pal, 1999: 133). This is a claim that needs to be differentiated from the usual journalistic self-image of the fourth estate acting as vigilant defenders ofdemocratic ideals. That notion should not be romanticised too muchbecause news production itself is a cultural process that cannot be separatedfrom its social environment. News producers always function under certaininstitutional constraints that are endemic to the news-gathering process.Leftist and liberal scholars of the media differ in their emphasis but allagree that news production is always circumscribed by institutional filters.3News is ‘more a pawn of shared suppositions than the purveyor of selfconscious messages’ (Schudson, 1995: 15). Yet, the media are important,and while it is difficult to draw direct causal linkages, there is no doubt thatthey initiate and create a new sphere of political action.

This volume is divided into three parts: 'Adaptation and Local Production in East Asia', 'Formats, Clones, and Generic Variations' and 'New Television'.

Considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a unique interpretive framework. This book analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces how the "algorithmic culture" created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde.

This volume presents a series of papers concerned with the interrelations between the postmodern and the present state of art and design education. Spanning a range of thematic concerns, the book reflects upon existing practice and articulates revolutionary prospects potentially viable through a shift in educative thinking.

This book is about the processes of globalization, demonstrated through a comparative study of three television case histories in Asia. Also illustrated are different approaches to providing television services in the world: public service (NHK in Japan), state (CCTV in China) and commercial (STAR TV, based in Hong Kong). Through its focus, Global Media addresses a considerable lacuna in the media studies literature, which tends to have a heavy Western bias. It provides an original addition to the literature on globalization, which is often abstract and anecdotal, in addition to making a major contribution to comparative research in Asia. Finally, it offers a thoughtful causal layered analysis, with a concluding argument in favor of public service television.