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Independent Videogames investigates the social and cultural implications of contemporary forms of independent video game development. Through a series of case studies and theoretical investigations, it evaluates the significance of such a multi-faceted phenomenon within video game and digital cultures. A diverse team of scholars highlight the specificities of independence within the industry and the culture of digital gaming through case studies and theoretical questions. The chapters focus on labor, gender, distribution models and technologies of production to map the current state of research on independent game development. The authors also identify how the boundaries of independence are becoming opaque in the contemporary game industry – often at the cost of the claims of autonomy, freedom and emancipation that underlie the indie scene. The book ultimately imagines new and better narratives for a less exploitative and more inclusive videogame industry. Systematically mapping the current directions of a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly difficult to define and limit, this book will be a crucial resource for scholars and students of game studies, media history, media industries and independent gaming.

This multidisciplinary collection probes ways in which emerging and established scholars perceive and theorize decolonization and resistance in their own fields of work, from education to political and social studies, to psychology, medicine, and beyond

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.

1. Racism and Mainstream Media / Lori Kido Lopez -- 2. Image Analysis and Televisual Latinos / Mary Beltrán -- 3. Visualizing Mixed Race and Genetics / Meshell Sturgis and Ralina L. Joseph -- 4. Listening to Racial Injustice / Dolores Inés Casillas and Jennifer Lynn Stoever -- 5. Branding Athlete Activism / Jason Kido Lopez -- 6. The Burden of Representation in Asian American Television / Peter X. Feng -- 7. Indigenous Video Games / Jacqueline Land -- 8. Applying Latina/o Critical Communication Theory to Anti-Blackness / Mari Castañeda -- 9. Asian American Independent Media / Jun Okada -- 10. Remediating Trans Visuality / Amy Villarejo -- 11. Intersectional Distribution / Aymar Jean Christian -- 12. Podcasting Blackness / Sarah Florini -- 13. Black Twitter as Semi-Enclave / Raven Maragh-Lloyd -- 14. Arab Americans and Participatory Culture / Sulafa Zidani -- 15. Diaspora and Digital Media / Lia Wolock -- 16. Disrupting News Media / Meredith D. Clark -- 17. Latinx Audiences as Mosaic / Jillian M. Báez -- 18. Media Activism in the Red Power Movement / Miranda J. Brady -- 19. Black Gamers' Resistance / Kishonna L. Gray -- 20. Cosmopolitan Fan Activism / Susan Noh.

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.

As a teenager during my first internship at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a diversity initiative for inner-city youth, the education curator enthusiastically asked, “Who here would like to be an art historian!?” Like all the other Black and Brown inner-city kids, I laughed inside. My response was not due to a lack of art appreciation; I grew up in a family of refugees who were all self-taught artists back home in El Salvador, who taught me to draw before I learned to read. Nor was my response rooted in apathy for creative expression, for I was involved in art and theater from my elementary through my high school years. Art was such a natural part of my life that the idea of studying it seemed wasteful to me. The truth was, the internship was one of two jobs I was working to financially help my family and pay for my first year of community college. Hidden even deeper, though, I believed the museum world was not my world. I was a guanaca (the appellative given to people from El Salvador) whose family fled war and remained invisible in mainstream US Latinx history and culture. I was also from the hood—in my case Compton, California, a city made notorious by gangsta rap and police brutality. I believed that people like me guarded the art on the museum walls, cleaned the floors and bathrooms for visitors, and served the food at the high-priced café. People who looked like me, who came from where I did, did not determine what art could be, nor could we afford to buy it. We certainly did not write the history of art, for if we had, we would see ourselves represented on the walls.

Searching the critical work of post-colonial critics, the author found much writing that bespeaks the continued fascination with the way white minds, particularly the colonial imperialist traveler, perceive blackness, and very little expressed interest in representations of whiteness in the black imagination. Some white people may even imagine there is no representation of whiteness in the black imagination, especially one that is based on concrete observation or mythic conjecture. Stereotypes black folks maintain about white folks are not the only representations of whiteness in the black imagination. Yet it is this representation of whiteness in the black imagination, first learned in the narrow confines of poor black rural community, that is sustained by the author travels to many different locations. Theorizing diverse journeying is crucial to the people understanding of any politics of location.

Redefines games and game culture from south to north, analyzing the social impact of video games, the growth of game development and the vitality of game cultures across Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America, the Indian subcontinent, Oceania and Asia.

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.

"Si tous les groupes humains sont touchés par la violence à grande échelle, les femmes la subissent sous des formes spécifiques, comme en témoignent les assassinats systémiques des femmes et des filles autochtones en Amérique du Nord et en Amérique latine, ou encore les nombreux conflits armés (Syrie, Lybie, Birmanie, entre autres) dans lesquels le viol est érigé en arme de guerre. Les deux phénomènes peuvent d'ailleurs se recouper puisque l'un des tout premiers féminicides à avoir été qualifié et documenté comme tel en Amérique est celui ayant été perpétré contre les femmes mayas durant la guerre civile guatémaltèque au début des années 1980. Cependant, les femmes ne sont pas seulement les victimes de la violence de masse, puisqu'elles sont aussi les premières à témoigner et dénoncer pour faire barrage à cette violence. Ce numéro hors-série regroupe des articles et des projets visuels qui décrivent et analysent la violence de masse liée au genre. Il s'agit de réfléchir sur la manière de représenter cette violence et d'en témoigner, d'autant plus qu'elle est bien souvent rendue invisible et inaudible par le patriarcat, le colonialisme, les intérêts politiques en présence ou l'impéritie de l'État."

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 dissertation centers on the relationship between art and politics in postwar Central America as materialized in the specific issues of racial and gendered violence that derive from the region's geopolitical location and history. It argues that the decade of the 1990s marks a moment of change in the region's cultural infrastructure, both institutionally and conceptually, in which artists seek a new visual language of experimental art practices to articulate and conceptualize a critical understanding of place, experience and knowledge. It posits that visual and conceptual manifestations of violence in Central American performance, conceptual art and installation extend beyond a critique of the state, and beyond the scope of political parties in perpetuating violent circumstances in these countries. It argues that instead artists use experimental practices in art to locate manifestations of racial violence in an historical system of domination and as a legacy of colonialism still witnessed, lived, and learned by multiple subjectivities in the region. In this postwar period artists move beyond the cold-war rhetoric of the previous decades and instead root the current social and political injustices in what Aníbal Quijano calls the `coloniality of power.' Through an engagement of decolonial methodologies, this dissertation challenges the label "political art" in Central America and offers what I call "visual disobedience" as a response to the coloniality of seeing. I posit that visual colonization is yet another aspect of the coloniality of power and indispensable to projects of decolonization. It offers an analysis of various works to show how visual disobedience responds specifically to racial and gender violence and the equally violent colonization of visuality in Mesoamerica. Such geopolitical critiques through art unmask themes specific to life and identity in contemporary Central America, from indigenous genocide, femicide, transnational gangs, to mass imprisonments and a new wave of social cleansing. I propose that Central American artists--beyond an anti-colonial stance--are engaging in visual disobedience so as to construct decolonial epistemologies in art, through art, and as art as decolonial gestures for healing.

Published by SITE Santa Fe on occasion of the inaugural SITElines Biennial, 'Unsettled Landscapes'. Unsettled Landscapes was curated by Janet Dees, Irene Hofmann, Candice Hopkins, and Lucía Sanromán. The exhibition, featuring 47 artists from 14 countries, looks at the urgencies, political conditions and historical narratives that inform the work of contemporary artists across the Americas--from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego. Through three themes--landscape, territory, and trade--this exhibition expresses the interconnections among representations of the land, movement across the land, and economies and resources derived from the land."--Résumé de l'éditeur

"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"--

La idea de elaborar un número sobre las luchas de las mujeres y las feministas en América Latina y el Caribe surgió de un encuentro entre Sabine Masson (Suiza), Jules Falquet (Francia) y Ochy Curiel (República Dominicana), cuyos caminos se cruzaron en el continente latinoamericano por razones personales y políticas. Debatimos y reflexionamos juntas sobre la cuestión de las barreras de "raza" y de clase que nos atraviesan a las feministas de diferentes partes del mundo, y que son en particular el reflejo de las relaciones de dominación entre el Sur y el Norte. Precisamente por estas barreras, las experiencias políticas y el trabajo de construcción colectiva de muchas feministas y mujeres, especialmente de América Latina y el Caribe, siguen siendo desconocidas para la mayoría de las feministas de otras latitudes, y de poco interés para las revistas académicas feministas de los países ricos. Oponerse a esta invisibilización y contribuir, aunque sea a nivel experimental y muy modesto, a la deconstrucción de estas barreras, fue nuestra principal motivación para organizar este número en una revista francófona como Nouvelles Questions Féministes. Sin embargo, el trabajo de coordinación presentó importantes contradicciones: primero, entre nosotros mismos. En primer lugar, tuvimos que reconocer e integrar las diferencias y similitudes de nuestras respectivas posiciones, para llegar a un consenso que nos permitiera desarrollar esta cuestión juntos. En segundo lugar, nos enfrentamos al riesgo de reproducir una vez más el saqueo de los conocimientos de las mujeres indias, afrodescendientes y mestizas latinoamericanas y caribeñas por parte de los "expertos del Norte". Los textos se traducirían al francés, lo que significaría que una ínfima minoría de mujeres latinoamericanas y caribeñas tendría acceso a ellos, mientras circulaban por Europa, enriqueciendo una vez más el conocimiento de las mujeres de los países ricos con el trabajo, las luchas, las historias y los escritos de las mujeres de los países pobres. Ante este problema, decidimos que la publicación de este número fuera acompañada de una versión en español, con el objetivo de hacer circular y compartir esta producción intelectual en América Latina y el Caribe   L’idée de faire un numéro sur les luttes de femmes et les luttes féministes en Amérique latine et aux Caraïbes a surgi de la rencontre entre Sabine Masson (Suisse), Jules Falquet (France) et Ochy Curiel (République Dominicaine), dont les chemins se sont croisés sur le continent latino-américain pour des raisons personnelles autant que politiques. Nous avons débattu et réfléchi ensemble sur la question des barrières de « race » et de classe qui nous traversent, nous les féministes de différentes parties du monde, et qui sont notamment le reflet des rapports de domination entre le Sud et le Nord. Justement à cause de ces barrières, les expériences politiques et le travail de construction collective de beaucoup de féministes et de femmes, notamment latino-américaines et des Caraïbes, demeurent inconnus de la plupart des féministes d’autres latitudes, et intéressent peu les revues féministes académiques des pays riches. S’opposer à cette invisibilisation et contribuer, même si ce n’est qu’à un niveau expérimental et très modeste, à déconstruire ces barrières, a constitué notre principale motivation pour organiser ce numéro dans une revue francophone comme Nouvelles Questions Féministes . Néanmoins, le travail de coordination présentait d’importantes contradictions : d’abord, entre nous. Pour commencer, nous avons dû reconnaître et intégrer les différences et les similitudes de nos positions respectives, afin de parvenir à un consensus qui nous permette d’élaborer ce numéro ensemble. Ensuite, nous nous confrontions au risque de reproduire encore une fois le pillage des connaissances des femmes indiennes, afro-descendantes et métisses latino-américaines et des Caraïbes par les « expertes du Nord ». Les textes allaient être traduits en français, c’est-à-dire qu’une infime minorité de femmes latino-américaines et des Caraïbes pourrait y avoir accès, pendant qu’ils circuleraient en Europe, enrichissant une fois de plus le savoir des femmes des pays riches à partir du travail, des luttes, des histoires et des écrits des femmes des pays pauvres. Face à ce problème, nous avons décidé que la publication de ce numéro allait s’accompagner d’une version en espagnol, dans le but de faire circuler et de partager cette production intellectuelle en Amérique latine et aux Caraïbes

Interview with author, Dr. Laura Pérez, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley on her most recent book, Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Sprituality, & the Decolonial.