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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.

First Person Encounters is a series of podcasts presented by Games Studies India, about our first experiences with Games while growing up in India. This our second podcast where we interview Satyajit Chakraborty, a game developer, game designer and researcher. He also founded Flying Robots Studios in 2012 and has made various unique games. Here he talks about his first experiences with gaming in India.

First Person Encounters is a series of podcasts presented by Games Studies India, about our first experiences with Games while growing up in India. This our third podcast where we talk with Poornima Seetharaman. She is the first Indian to be inducted in the Women in Games (WIGJ) Hall of Fame and is also the lead game designer at Zynga. Hear as we talk about her foray in the world of gaming.

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.

The term digital “disruption” conjures up negative connotations, with implications of disturbance, interference or interruption. Certainly, virtually every aspect of life has been affected by digitisation, but it has been pointed out that it is detrimental “only for those who chose to ignore it or try to fight it” (“Digital Disruption: What Is It?” 2016, para 2). One case in point is the American company Kodak. Where it once dominated the film and camera market for most of the twentieth century, the company recently filed for bankruptcy. Kodak’s mistake was continually opposing the digitisation of the industry and failing to read the writing on the wall (“Digital Disruption: What Is It?” 2016). Digitisation is as much a reality of life in the newsroom as it is in the boardroom.

"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.

During 2019, various situations once again showed the deep crisis in the country. Audiovisual production continued, albeit with figures that account for a declining industry. Four productions were released: a first was made by the state channel (TVe), a second by a local independent producer (Oduver Cubillán and BGcreativos), the third was produced by the private channel (RCTV) and broadcast by the subscription channel IVC Networks, and the fourth was also produced by RCTV. While the first two productions did not exceed the 35-episode figure, the third and fourth had 73 episodes. On March 7, there was the biggest blackout in the country’s history. For more than a week, 95% of the territory was paralyzed by a lack of electricity. The action was classified by the government as an electric sabotage. The darkness that covered the country also subsumed serial fiction.

A look at the screens of Uruguay’s open television in prime time will give the viewer a very reduced offer: after a television newscast that exceeds two hours long, there are only contest pro- grams, national or imported ones. It is possible that in the afternoon and at night the viewer finds a telenovela, almost always Turkish one. This is a very different panorama from the Uruguayan televi- sion history. Ibero-American fiction is in decline on open television, while its offer on VoD expands. In this chapter we will try to consider the various aspects of this landscape. Melodrama is on both options, open television and streaming, on a broad thematic spectrum, even in productions that are not usually classified as such. In the absence of national fiction in the period, at the end of the chapter we will study the melodrama in prison fiction, particularly in the case of El Marginal.

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.

This chapter examines the intersection of popular culture and populism in Turkey by focusing on the TV show Payitaht Abdulhamid. Our motivation to analyze the recent TV series Payitaht Abdulhamid stems from our interest in the instrumental mobilization of popular culture for the Turkish government’s dual desire to both establish cultural hegemony and consolidate its populist style of government. Our analysis reveals that television, especially in the Global South, still plays a central role in governments’ desire to reconstruct history and establish cultural hegemony. This is particularly important as Turkey is going through a crisis of hegemony since the public is completely divided in its support for the government. Within the context of this hegemonic crisis, televised popular culture is vital, perhaps more than ever. Specifically, the show reduces a complicated history into easily understandable dichotomies and projects them on to contemporary politics in order to consolidate support for the government. Through televised popular culture, the government mobilizes history for purposes of cultural hegemony and populist politics flavored with nationalist, Islamist, and anti-Western motifs. Ultimately, the TV show presents yet another moment for understanding the mediated nature of 21st-century politics outside Western contexts.

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.