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The present paper discusses questions related to the histories of videogames, more specifically in how we approach videogames in Global South. By using Zeebo, a Brazilian console produced in the late 2000s as an epistemic tool, I discuss the limitations of universalist, mainstream-centric epistemological models for exploring videogames as cultural phenomena. By investigating Zeebo’s discourses about piracy and players in the Global South, I argue that this platform can be seen as a partial decolonial project, destabilising conventional historical narratives about South-North relationships in videogames, but refraining from challenging a mainstream, Global North oriented epistemology. This exploratory work, therefore, elaborates on how a decolonial project of history of videogames, one that is more epistemically just to Global South, could be sought.

In the last decades, digital games have moved from niche to mainstream. As more people play, talk about, and engage with these artifacts, they have become an important part of contemporary cultures, giving rise to game literacy—the set of skills needed to meaningfully engage with video games. While the potentials of game literacy have, to some extent, been already discussed in the literature, we have not adequately discussed the need for a game literacy that problematizes the sociocultural dimensions of gaming, including the hegemonic, exclusionary rationales implicitly disseminated through mainstream gaming. In this chapter, I outline a decolonial model for game literacy, remarking how the reflection about the gaming circuits of production and dissemination should be part of any initiative that aims at dealing with critical and creative competences towards gaming, and how these are crucial for any citizen in contemporary societies.

This chapter examines the ideological and structural foundations of Indianbroadcasting policy as it developed from the 1930s to the 1990s. The chapter argues that the failure of Indian governments to make the most of radioand television for economic and social development stemmed from threesources: (i) the restrictive policies inherited from a colonial state, (ii) thepuritanism of the Gandhian national movement, and (iii) the fear, madevivid by the 1947 partition, of inflaming social conflict. The policies andinstitutions established in the 1940s and 1950s shaped Indian broadcasting for the next 40 years and have been significantly subverted only since 1992as a result of the transformation effected by satellite television.

The construction of a problem, be it a crisis or a moral panic, is an attempt of policing and control, for the maintenance of hegemony and authority (Hall et al. 1978 ). A problem emerges as a problem only when it is out of its proper place, just like dirt becomes dirt only when it is not properly placed in the earth. The elimination of dirt is necessary in maintaining the cleanliness of the social order (Douglas 2002 ). In other words, it is the need for a particular social arrangement that constitutes the existence of a problem. Taiyu, the lingua franca of the Taiwanese, became a problem of dialect (called Minnanyu) to be eliminated when the KMT colonial regime moved to Taiwan, building it as a Chinese nation and instituting Mandarin as the national language. Television is central to the building of the Chinese nation. Taiyu serial dramas were broadcast soon after the fi rst network was established in 1962, but have been constructed as the most problematic and debased genre since the early 1970s when the second TV station, CTV (1969), and the third, CTS (1971), were established and used serial drama to compete for profi t. Accusations directed at the poverty of its quality and the vulgarity of the audiences have characterized mainstream criticisms and constructions of Taiyu serial dramas as problems from the 1970s to the present. This chapter investigates not only the how and what but also the why of this problem-construction, as an attempt to understand the power mechanisms at work in struggling for hegemonic control. It charts two historical moments – the 1970s and from the 1990s to the present – when language has played a signifi cant role in the articulations of serial dramas as problems and explores the changing political, economic and cultural forces that situate them as problems worthy of discussion. I argue that the history of this problem-making demonstrates the centrality of Chinese culture in political domination through cultural means, with ethnic/class politics playing a central role in the maintenance of a hierarchical social order. In the 1970s, Chinese culture was used to create ethnic/class divisions within Taiwan while simultaneously creating the illusion of a symbolic whole under the name of the Republic of China. However, since the 1990s, and intensifying after the 2000s, with the entanglement of democratization and neoliberalization in Taiwan and the rise of China, the ethnic/class tension is not just complicated by confl icted national identifi cations and Chinese culturepromoted by both the KMT Party’s Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China, but also for unifi cation purposes. While democratization, which involved the search for Taiwanese identity, led to the rise of Taiyu-based Hsiangtu drama, the neoliberal defi nition of culture as economic resource, which consecrates Chinese culture through capital investment, facilitates this unifi cation process while creating further ethnic/class/national identity divisions within Taiwan. The result is a disparaging of Taiyu-based culture in general and, in particular, Taiyu serial drama as a problem to be reformed.

This chapter presents a critical analysis of media and change in postcolonial Malaysia, a South-East Asian nation of 29  million multicultural people, with a focus on the role of television in the nation’s transformation following independence from British rule in 1957. Despite having inherited the basic democratic institutions of the British political tradition, Malaysia continues to debate the transition from soft authoritarianism to democracy (Means 1996 :  103). Since 1957, Malaysia has been led by a single political party, the Barisan Nasional (BN). While the BN is a coalition of three major ethnic-based political groups, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), it is, in effect, a symbol of Malay-Muslim supremacy (Ketuanan Melayu). UMNO, the dominant group within the party, has, since its formation, aspired to uphold Malay culture as national culture and Islam as the offi cial religion for the country. From the fi rst general elections in 1959 until the 2008 general elections, the BN held two-thirds of the 222 seats in the Dewan Rakyat (House of Representatives). Malaysian media scholar Karthigesu ( 1987 , 1994 ) contends this was largely due to the role of public television, which was launched and promoted by government itself, broadcasting in its colonial service model. In fact, the arrival of state television in 1963 coincided with the formation of the Federation of Malaysia (Moten and Mokhtar 2013 ). In this chapter I argue that television has been pivotal in shaping and transforming the political and cultural landscape of Malaysia as the medium evolved from a strictly national to a loosely global and then fluidly trans-local orientation. While television fi rst enabled the BN to hold its two-thirds majority and build the nation premised on Malay supremacy policies, it subsequently played a part in weakening the BN’s grip over the multiethnic electorate as the UMNO Ketuanan Melayu ideology, layered deep beneath the powdered face of television, surfaced in the digital media era.

This book proposes contemporary decolonization as an approach to developing cultural economies in the Global South. This book represents the first critical examination and comparison of cultural and creative industries (CCI) and economy concepts in the Caribbean and Africa.

This book examines the representation of blackness on television at the height of the southern civil rights movement and again in the aftermath of the Reagan-Bush years. In the process, it looks carefully at how television's ideological projects with respect to race have supported or conflicted with the industry's incentive to maximize profits or consolidate power. Sasha Torres examines the complex relations between the television industry and the civil rights movement as a knot of overlapping interests. She argues that television coverage of the civil rights movement during 1955-1965 encouraged viewers to identify with black protestors and against white police, including such infamous villains as Birmingham's Bull Connor and Selma's Jim Clark. Torres then argues that television of the 1990s encouraged viewers to identify with police against putatively criminal blacks, even in its dramatizations of police brutality. Torres's pioneering analysis makes distinctive contributions to its fields. It challenges television scholars to consider the historical centrality of race to the constitution of the medium's genres, visual conventions, and industrial structures. And it displaces the analytical focus on stereotypes that has hamstrung assessments of television's depiction of African Americans, concentrating instead on the ways in which African Americans and their political collectives have actively shaped that depiction to advance civil rights causes. This book also challenges African American studies to pay closer and better attention to television's ongoing role in the organization and disorganization of U.S. racial politics.

In the first episode of Black Journal , before the opening credits, comedian Godfrey Cambridge appears dressed in overalls and a painter’s cap with a paint roller in hand and methodically paints the television frame. To the viewer, it appears that his or her television is being painted black from the inside—a potent visual symbol from the first national Black public affairs program. Initially, though, the symbol emphasizes a visual challenge to the absence of Black faces on television—a show that “looks” Black, because of the visibility of its Black hosts and reporters, but where whites still have significant

Established in 2004, Maori Television has had a major impact on the New Zealand broadcasting landscape. But over the past year or so, the politics of Maori Television have been brought to the foreground of public consciousness, with other media outlets tracking Maori Television's search for a new CEO, allegations of editorial intervention and arguments over news reporting approaches to Te Kohanga Reo National Trust.Based on a Marsden Grant and three years of interviews with key stakeholders – staff, the Board, other media, politicians, funders and viewers – this is a deep account of Maori Television in its first ten years. Jo Smith argues that today's arguments must be understood within a broader context shaped by non-Maori interests. Can a Maori broadcaster follow both tikanga and the Broadcasting Standards Authority? Is it simply telling the news in Maori, or broadcasting the news with a Maori perspective? How can it support te reo Maori at the same time as appeal to all New Zealand? How does it function as the voice of its Maori stakeholders?Offering five frameworks to address the challenges of a Maori organisation working within a wider non-Maori context, this is a solidly researched examination of Maori Television's unique contribution to the media cultures of Aotearoa New Zealand.

African television is at the crossroads. This chapter surveys, describes, analyzes and explains the major changes that have taken place in the African television landscape since the 1990s. It focuses on three major developments that have marked the African television landscape: (1) liberalization of the television space to keep abreast of international developments, and the tension between entrenched governmental public broadcasting systems and newly licensed “independent” TV stations, (2) the process and impact of the analogue to digital TV switchover shepherded by the International Telecommunications Union, and (3) the diffusion of Chinese electronic technology, television, and film content on the African television market as part of the Asian giant’s “soft power” diplomacy and State capitalism. African television is constrained by political regimes that restrict freedom of expression, and regulatory agencies that preside over systems in which the law takes precedence over rights.

Television is predisposed to the perception that it is the opposite of art and politics and that it is a time-consuming means for “dumbing down,” placating, disempowering and benumbing the citizenry. Through a discussion of the place of art and that of television, I use, as a conceptual framework, the convergence of the white cube and the black box to interrogate dynamics of postcoloniality, vision and power and how this forged divergent modernisms. Television in Africa did not, as with postwar America, create a sense of collective communities of spectatorship that would be brought closer to art appreciation through television. Rather, television, as the political, social and cultural phenomenon of modernization in various African countries, seemed to corrupt what was regarded as “pristine” cultural practices. However, since it coincided with colonial independence and the emergence of postcolonial nations, it became intertwined with various modes and mediums through which new forms of social consciousness aimed at self-definition and self-representation could be disseminated. The convergence of the white cube spaces of art and the black box of television enables an engagement with the colonial spatio-temporal distanciation of Africa from the global stage.

This essay examines the 2010 NBC situation comedy Outsourced, with special attention to its representation of the racial politics surrounding business process outsourcing to India. Specifically, it discusses how Outsourced participates in what Jodi Melamed calls “neoliberal multiculturalism” to work through, symbolically and narratively, the realities and contradictions of globalized economies as they are experienced. By staging the dilemmas of outsourcing through the specter of the white male middle manager traveling to India to train Indian call center workers, Outsourced minimizes the affective labor necessarily performed by Indian call center workers and dramatizes outsourcing as a crisis of white U.S. masculinity alone. Moreover, it figures our white male protagonist as the global multicultural citizen to be emulated insofar as he models the appropriate attitude toward outsourcing and toward “other” cultures in general. Finally it suggests that the failure of the show has less to do with issues of cultural stereotyping and more to do with the failure of neoliberal multiculturalism to soothe anxieties around changing global economies.

I was about 10 or 11 years old when I, together with my parents, religiously tuned in weekly to the situation comedy ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? While I do not recall the specific year the show aired in Puerto Rico, I do remember that it was broadcast on WIPR-Channel 6, the island’s public television station. Watching one of my favorite sitcoms on what I then considered the boring channel was rather odd. However, I never thought it strange that the Peñas, ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? ’s working-class three-generation Cuban/Cuban-American family, resided in Miami or that some of the characters communicated bilingually in English and Spanish. For me, ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? was a show that resembled other locally produced situation comedies broadcast on commercial television, with the difference that the Peña family were Cuban immigrants who, instead of residing in Puerto Rico (like some of my childhood friends), lived in Miami (like many of my friends’ relatives). Probably as a result of the principal characters’ cultural references and their accents in Spanish, I decoded ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? as a Cuban sitcom. Fast-forward to 2004. I was invited to write a 500-word encyclopedia entry on ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? Without having any information on the show at hand, I immediately accepted. This was an opportunity to revisit a program I loved. After conducting the research I realized the uniqueness of ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? Sponsored by the U.S. Office of Education Emergency School Assistance Act– Television Program (ESAA-TV), ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? —considered the first bilingual situation comedy broadcast on U.S. television— addressed the culturalgenerational misunderstandings and the socio-cultural adjustments endured by the Peñas, a 1960 Cuban exile family.

Knopf samples a variety of Native American filmmaking genres, including documentary, short films, and full-length narrative films, providing a detailed synopsis and content analysis of several films. Since its genesis in the early 19005, film has been an effective colonizing tool, impacting Indigenous peoples around the globe.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, a number of calls were made by scholars to “internationalize” or “dewesternize” the field of media and communication studies. I argue that these approaches have indirectly silenced a much longer disciplinary history outside “the West” that has not only produced empirical knowledge but has also actively challenged Western epistemologies. This article seeks to reinscribe the epistemological and historical foundations of media and communication studies in Africa. By framing the research of African media and communication scholars within the changing nature of knowledge production, shifting power relations between African nations, and the evolving role of African universities, I demonstrate how academic knowledge production is frequently driven and constrained by particular dominant social, political, and economic interests.

Peut-on envisager une autre histoire du jeu vidéo ?

Finalist, 2019 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ StudiesA profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and black freedom.Keeling reads selected works, such as Sun Ra's 1972 film Space is the Place and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar “speculations” of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.

De-Westernizing Film Studies aims to consider what form a challenge to the enduring vision of film as a medium - and film studies as a discipline - modelled on ‘Western’ ideologies, theoretical and historical frameworks, critical perspectives as well as institutional and artistic practices, might take today. The book combines a range of scholarly writing with critical reflection from filmmakers, artists & industry professionals, comprising experience and knowledge from a wide range of geographical areas, film cultures and (trans-)national perspectives. In their own ways, the contributors to this volume problematize a binary mode of thinking that continues to promote an idea of ‘the West and the rest’ in relation to questions of production, distribution, reception and representation within an artistic medium (cinema) that, as part of contemporary moving image culture, is more globalized and diversified than at any time in its history. In so doing, De-Westernizing Film Studies complicates and/or re-thinks how local, national and regional film cultures ‘connect’ globally, seeking polycentric, multi-directional, non-essentialized alternatives to Eurocentric theoretical and historical perspectives found in film as both an artistic medium and an academic field of study. The book combines a series of chapters considering a range of responses to the idea of 'de-westernizing' film studies with a series of in-depth interviews with filmmakers, scholars and critics. Contributors: Nathan Abrams, John Akomfrah, Saër Maty Bâ, Mohammed Bakrim, Olivier Barlet, Yifen Beus, Farida Benlyazid, Kuljit Bhamra, William Brown, Campbell, Jonnie Clementi-Smith, Shahab Esfandiary, Coco Fusco, Patti Gaal-Holmes, Edward George, Will Higbee, Katharina Lindner, Daniel Lindvall, Teddy E. Mattera, Sheila Petty, Anna Piva, Deborah Shaw, Rod Stoneman, Kate E. Taylor-Jones

Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, Patterson turns to erotics to re-invigorate the potential passions and pleasures of play.