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This thesis argues that photography is tainted with ingrained racist ideologies that have been present since its earliest inception in 1839. It considers the act of photographing the Other as a site of Western violence, myth, fantasy and disavowal. It examines archival images through the prism of race, representation and human rights with the aim of extracting new meanings that bring the Other into focus. This is done by reading the images both against the politics of the time in which they were made and as contemporary objects at work in the political and cultural present. The thesis makes the case that photography is burdened with ideological fault-lines concerning race and rights. The fault-lines have been forged by cultural and colonial violence resulting in Western scopic regimes that have dominated and fixed the Other within an inescapable set of Western epistemologies that have been used to serve and enhance imperial perspectives on race. I argue that these perspectives are still active within the Western mindset manifest as benign acts of photographic empathy that work to ultimately bolster Western hegemonies and economies. This thesis is based on 25 years of experience as a researcher and curator of international photography exhibitions, direct research into archives in different continental settings, the presentation of papers in a variety of national and international contexts, and interviews withphotographers, curators and academics. My hypothesis is that the history of photography can only be complete if the voice of the subaltern is made critically present within it, so allowing us to engage with important political racial memory work that can help us re-read the past and reconfigure different meanings concerning history, race, rights and human recognition in the present. I argue that photography requires decolonising work to be carried out on its history. I propose that if we do not recognise the historical and political conjunctures of racial politics at work within photography and the effects on those that have been culturally erased, made invisible or less than human by such images, then we remain hemmed within established orthodoxies of colonial thought concerning the racialised body, the subaltern and the politics of human recognition.

Video games have long been seen as the exclusive territory of young, heterosexual white males. In a media landscape dominated by such gamers, players who do not fit this mold, including women, people of color, and LGBT people, are often brutalized in forums and in public channels in online play. Discussion of representation of such groups in games has frequently been limited and cursory. In contrast, Gaming at the Edge builds on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws on qualitative audience research methods to make sense of how representation comes to matter. In Gaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently. She asks: How do players identify with characters? How do they separate identification and interactivity? What is the role of fantasy in representation? What is the importance of understanding market logic? In addressing these questions Shaw reveals how representation comes to matter to participants and offers a perceptive consideration of the high stakes in politics of representation debates. Putting forth a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and the blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis, Shaw finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalized gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.

One may argue that Chinese television has already received more than its fair share of attention in the study of Chinese media. As compared with radio and cinema, which developed in the socialist era (1949-78), television has been seen as the dominant medium in the decades of marketization and economic reforms since the late 1970s (Zhu and Berry 2008 ). Television has been studied as a metonym for the ongoing tension and complicity between the Chinese state and the market (e.g., Zhao 1998 ; 2008a) and as a metaphor for the contradictions between a legacy of socialist rhetoric and ethos and a neoliberal market agenda. It is precisely these contradictions that make up what is often referred to as the ‘Chinese characteristics’ (Zhao 2008a; Sun and Zhao 2009 ) of China’s television culture.

Television dramas, both serials and series, have been a long-term recruiter of large-scale national audiences for television broadcasters as they are potentially able to speak to their audience in affective and imaginative ways (Chan 2011 ; Sun and Gorfi nkel 2014). Usually it is the locally produced drama that resonates most with a national audience, the familiarity of the setting and context often carrying signifi cant implications for social and sometimes political life (Blandford et al. 2011 , Chan 2011 ). These television texts can pick up on popular strands of discourses in the public sphere and succeed in establishing a form of dialogue with audiences; in the instances examined in this chapter, this dialogue is about the formation of national identities or citizenships. There is good reason, then, for broadcasters and governments to attempt to use television drama to educate and persuade, although Sugg and Power ( 2011 : 26-7), long-term drama producers at the BBC World Service Trust, warn that for dramas to succeed in this manner, they first have to be entertaining, otherwise they are unlikely to generate an audience in the fi rst place. Audiences are not easily fooled and can sniff out the difference between being entertained and being preached at in a didactic way. This chapter deals with a period in the history of Singapore where television historical drama played a signifi cant role in creating a national past upon which the promotion of a distinctive national identity might be based. In addition to a consideration of a selection of drama series themselves, the chapter draws upon interviews where viewers are encouraged to share their memories of these dramas, and the part they played in the construction of a Singaporean identity.

The call for the “De-Westernization” (Curran & Park, 2000) of media studies hasattracted much attention in recent years. It is generally associated with the need to giveserious considerations to media systems outside the West. This paper critically reviewsthe meaning of “de-Westernization,” and argues that the main challenge is not simply to broaden the geographic scope by considering cases from the global South. The inclusionof non-Western cases could lead to the consolidation of “area studies”, a balkanizedresearch that may not contribute to a common set of questions and unifying theories.Instead, it is necessary to approach de-Westernization in order to promote cosmopolitanscholarship, an analytical approach that is open to the globalization of problems andacademic production. Rather than being constrained by geographical divisions, de-Westernization should help to expand analytical perspectives and brings theoretical andcomparative questions to the forefront of media studies.

Soul! was where Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire got funky, where Toni Morrison read from her debut novel, where James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni discussed gender and power, and where Amiri Baraka and Stokely Carmichael enjoyed a sympathetic forum for their radical politics. Broadcast on public television between 1968 and 1973, Soul!, helmed by pioneering producer and frequent host Ellis Haizlip, connected an array of black performers and public figures with a black viewing audience. In It's Been Beautiful, Gayle Wald tells the story of Soul!, casting this influential but overlooked program as a bold and innovative use of television to represent and critically explore black identity, culture, and feeling during a transitional period in the black freedom struggle.

This paper looks at five documentaries on activism around ending the practice of female genital cutting (FGC) in Africa. All were made by or in partnership with UK and US producers and are distributed by the New York-based non-profit media arts organization Women Make Movies. By tracing changing political and representational strategies in feminist documentaries on the issue and the varying terms on which the films engage their subjects and address their viewers, the chapter aims to put the specificity of independent documentary formats, practices, and institutions in dialogue with feminist theoretical critiques of the wider discourse on women's human rights. The chapter looks at Kaplan and Grewal's critique of the neo-colonialism of Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar's Warrior Marks, the observational strategies of Kim Longinotto's The Day I Will Never Forget, the diasporic dimensions of Mrs. Goundo's Daughter and Sarabah, and the visual rhetoric of human rights models in Equality Now's Africa Rising. The cultural field of documentary constitutes a public sphere in which activist and theoretical debate, contested reception, and continually renewed cultural production articulate the productively shifting terms of transnational feminism.

Video games have become a global industry, and their history spans dozens of national industries where foreign imports compete with domestic productions, legitimate industry contends with piracy, and national identity faces the global marketplace. This volume describes video game history and culture across every continent, with essays covering areas as disparate and far-flung as Argentina and Thailand, Hungary and Indonesia, Iran and Ireland.

This article analyzes the term ‘citizen journalism’ against the backdrop of the Arab uprisings in order to show how it overlooks the local context of digital media practices. The first part examines videos emanating from Syria to illustrate how they blur the lines between acts of witnessing, reporting, and lobbying, as well as between professional and amateur productions, and civic and violent intentions. The second part highlights the genealogies of citizenship and journalism in an Arab context and cautions against assumptions about their universality. The article argues that the oscillation of Western narratives between hopes about digital media's role in democratization in the Arab World and fears about their use in terrorism circumscribe the theorization of digital media practices.

The chapter argues that Paul Ricouer’s hermeneutics offers a way forward in examining not only the ideological and narrative structures of television, but also particular modalities through which viewers appropriate and interpret televisual texts. To this end, the chapter shall sketch an analytic framework by bringing together Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy, particularly his concepts of narrative identity and temporality, and the notion of social imaginaries developed by postcolonial theory in a productive dialogue. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics presents an understanding of the human subject in terms of an embodied subjectivity that takes us beyond singular conceptions of identity, whether in terms of the abstract Cartesian subject, or various other discourse-centred theorizations of subject. The chapter demonstrates that the notion of embodied subjectivity and social imaginaries enable a better grasp in examining the articulations of class, caste, gender, and religious identities on Indian television.

Globalized communication flows transcend and transform national borders. Transnational media outlets targeting audiences around the globe, issues of global concern are subjected to border-crossing public debates, media events receive transnational attention, and public diplomacy efforts succeed—and fail—in characteristic patterns around the world. In response to these phenomena the article shows how the study of transnational communication can benefit from combining 3 theoretical perspectives that are rarely studied together: communication as deliberation, as ritual, and as strategy. Particularly in explaining the failures of transnational communication, explanatory potential often seems to lie just outside the limited vision of each of the 3 perspectives—and outside the scope of empirical analyses that are limited to Western contexts.

This chapter explores the contradiction between two sets of responses to the so-called K-serials, earlier, largely condemnatory ones, and more recent, largely laudatory ones. The chapter aims to understand this contradiction and resolve it. It does so by showing how K-serials were a definitive break at that specific point in time from the ones that had immediately preceded them, especially in bringing to the fore the bahu (daughter-in-law) of Hindu urban extended families. It traces the complex place of gender in the discourse of the Hindu right and explores the strong debt that the K-serials owe to the ideological constructions of the woman and the family by Hindu nationalism. It argues therefore that the consequences of celebrating agency and empowerment in a right wing milieu-as some recent scholarship has done-ends up advocating for a limited and exclusionary form of female agency.

Este texto analiza la transcendencia de la revolución feminista que se inició en los años 60 a partir del lema «Lo personal es político» y su influencia en la transformación del arte contemporáneo. En este contexto el trabajo desarrollado por las prácticas artísticas y la crítica feminista en relación a la denuncia de la violencia contra la mujer ocupa una posición destacada. A lo largo de estas últimas décadas no sólo ha evidenciado la violencia como un hecho continuado y global hacia la mujer sino que, además, ha iniciado nuevas narraciones que dan respuesta a un drama considerado socialmente como un irremediable «trágico final».

With special reference to the current scenario in West Bengal, this chapter argues that the rise and popularity of Bangla news channels like Star Ananda, 24 Ghanta, Kolkata TV, and Tara News have resulted in the emergence of a vernacular style of news broadcasting which is quite distinct from that of global or national news media. One major point in this chapter is how the vernacular news channels encourage particular forms of address — the emotional, the intimate and the melodramatic — and how close-ups and sound bites create particular kinds of telegenic political leaders who can use these formal characteristics to their advantage. This chapter explores the ways in which a distinctive kind of vernacular is reconfiguring the nature of political participation itself and hence the notion of citizenship and perhaps even the nature and functioning of the nation-state in India.

This chapter looks, in particular, at issues surrounding the trial of Mohammad Afzal Guru in 2006–7, but also with reference to the terrible Mumbai attacks of November 2008. Whilst tragic in multiple ways, these events are also made spectacular, emotive, and divisive, according to interpretation by television. The framing of television news in India could be several, but is often not. Pantomime terrors, extravagant formatting, phone-in trial reports seem to be the order of the day. The station ident, newsreader-presenter and video confession all contest for screen attention in the trial of Mohamed Afzal, and the ground for this was prepared long ago. This short history of a 24 hour news channel ends with ‘The Big Fight’ - a staged and theatrical mode of ‘infotainment’ that sacrifices intelligent reporting for ideological fit.

The culture of television in Indonesia began with its establishment in 1962 as a public broadcasting service. From that time, through the deregulation of television broadcasting in 1990 and the establishment of commercial channels, television can be understood, Philip Kitley argues, as a part of the New Order’s national culture project, designed to legitimate an idealized Indonesian national cultural identity. But Professor Kitley suggests that it also has become a site for the contestation of elements of the New Order’s cultural policies. Based on his studies, he further speculates on the increasingly significant role that television is destined to play as a site of cultural and political struggle.

This chapter critically evaluates changing definitions of ‘public’ in Indian television in relation to discourses of globalization and media privatization. It examines the debate over the nationalist agenda of public broadcasting in India in relation to the demands for alternative models of broadcasting, and the rise of private commercial satellite channels since the 1990s. It also discusses how representations of traditionally private desires of sexuality and intimacy in soap operas, reality TV shows and music television are redefining the public in India. It outlines the ways in which private desire is made visible — and thus made public — through the convergence of the television screen, the cinematic screen, the computer screen, and the mobile screen. It argues that binaries of ‘public’ versus ‘private’ force us into either/or debates even though such category systems are always-already hybrid in postcolonial societies such as India.

This chapter sketches a theoretical framework for analyzing the role of television in the temporal and affective organization of everyday life. Rather than engage an empirical analysis of the “impact” of television, the chapter aims to raise conceptual questions about how satellite television participates in the creation of regimes of affect and temporality. Diverging from theories of transnational media that foreground the ubiquity of spatiality, it proposes that we examine how duree and histoire, historical consciousness and the everyday are co-constructed through the affectivity of television. The chapter begins by examining the work of television news in the production of crisis; it analyses how television enables the formation of historical consciousness; and it points to the ways in which television participates in the creation of a sense of the everyday. It thus outlines some of the ways that we can theorize the centrality of television to the production of temporalities of historicity, contemporaneity, and futurity.

"Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings proposes a theory of sexual politics that works in the interstices between radical queer desires and the urgency of transforming public policy, between utopian longings and everyday failures. Considering the ways in which bodily movement is assigned cultural meaning, Juana Maria Rodriguez takes the stereotypes of the hyperbolically gestural queer Latina femme body as a starting point from which to discuss how gestures and forms of embodiment inform sexual pleasures and practices in the social realm. Centered on the sexuality of racialized queer female subjects, the book's varied archive--which includes burlesque border crossings, daddy play, pornography, sodomy laws, and sovereignty claims--seeks to bring to the fore alternative sexual practices and machinations that exist outside the sightlines of mainstream cosmopolitan gay male culture. Situating articulations of sexual subjectivity between the interpretive poles of law and performance, Rodriguez argues that forms of agency continually mediate among these various structures of legibility--the rigid confines of the law and the imaginative possibilities of the performative. She reads the strategies of Puerto Rican activists working toward self-determination alongside sexual performances on stage, in commercial pornography, in multi-media installations, on the dance floor, and in the bedroom. Rodriguez examines not only how projections of racialized sex erupt onto various discursive mediums but also how the confluence of racial and gendered anxieties seeps into the gestures and utterances of sexual acts, kinship structures, and activist practices. Ultimately, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings reveals--in lyrical style and explicit detail--how sex has been deployed in contemporary queer communities in order to radically reconceptualize sexual politics"--

This chapter locates India, and broadly the post-colonial context, within the larger debates concerning television’s audiovisual form and mode of address. It tries to demonstrate that certain key traits in Indian popular performative traditions, representing an ‘alternative’ negotiation with modernity, are somewhat homologous with what western theorists have tried to specify (though in contradicting terms) as the features of televisual mode of address and ‘flow’. The chapter reads the specific imports of this correspondence in histories of Indian television with special reference to a somewhat novel way television has started imagining the nation after liberalization. The significance of the Indian popular film form as lending a major legacy to tele-viewership in India constitutes a major strand of argument.