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Beyond Bollywood is the first comprehensive look at the emergence, development, and significance of contemporary South Asian diasporic cinema. From a feminist and queer perspective, Jigna Desai explores the hybrid cinema of the 'Brown Atlantic' through a close look at films in English from and about South Asian diasporas in the United States, Canada, and Britain, including such popular films as My Beautiful Laundrette, Fire, Monsoon Wedding, and Bend it Like Beckham.

The Velvet Light Trap 53 (2004) 26-39 On December 2, 2001, HBO began airing Project Greenlight, a twelve-part documentary series chronicling the production of a feature film by novice writer-director Pete Jones. With its spectacle of backroom dealings, unchecked egos, and human frailties, the television series capitalized on the contemporaneous success of like-minded "reality" programs such as Survivor and Temptation Island. Perhaps more closely, Project Greenlight also tapped into the current vogue for the "behind-the-scenes" and the "making-of" genres, represented by straight-to-video titles such as Star Trek-Deep Space Nine: Behind the Scenes (1993), Making of Jurassic Park (1995), and The Matrix Revisited (2001), television programs such as the Sundance Channel's Anatomy of a Scene, HBO's First Look, and MTV's Making the Video, and the proliferation of behind-the-scenes and making-of packaging on DVDs. A reflection of the growth of film-related ancillary products in the 1980s, the ever-expanding Hollywood ego, and the demands of a twenty-four-hour television cable market, the increased appearance of the making-of documentary format no doubt also reflects the renewed interest in amateur filmmaking promulgated by the age of desktop video. Perhaps as a manifestation of this interest, making-of documentaries have become increasingly more detailed in their coverage. Whereas the 1981 television special The Making of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (Phillip Schuman) focuses mostly on the film's stunt work, special effects, location shoots, and set design, the recently released making-of documentary The Matrix Revisited focuses on script development, preproduction, production, postproduction, and exhibition, introducing viewers to costume designers, storyboard artists, and editors along the way. This attention to production detail can also be seen in Sundance's Anatomy of a Scene, which hones in on the construction, from music to costume to camera work, of a single scene. And certainly raising the bar on the level of detail included in the making-of genre is Project Greenlight, which is a "warts-and-all" look at film production, from squabbles over budgets to catering fiascos. Despite the making-of video's increased attention to the minutiae of filmmaking, one of the areas that remains outside the purview of most Hollywood making-of documentaries is the production of sex. Discussions about the cinematic logistics of creating a sex scene—how, when, and with what resources—are usually not featured in making-of documentaries. Of course, given our celebrity-driven culture, the question of sex vis-à-vis film production, particularly a Hollywood film production, is hardly absent from the publicity that surrounds a film. It is not uncommon to hear actresses or actors discussing what it was like to kiss another actor on the set. But these kinds of concerns are usually the province of entertainment magazines and television, not the province of ancillary related products such as the making-of video. While stories of roles requiring nudity or sex scenes abound on television shows such as Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, and E! News Daily,these kinds of topics are less likely to appear in production-generated documentaries. Indeed, while the production of the provocative sex scene between Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (Marc Forster, 2001) generated much discussion on television entertainment programs, talk shows, and newsmagazines, it was the film's prison execution sequence that was featured in the Sundance Channel's making-of special on the film. Given the lack of focus on sex scenes in most making-of documentaries, it is interesting to note that the two existing making-of documentaries for lesbian-made, lesbian-themed feature films—The Making of Bar Girls (1995) and Moments: The Making of Claire of the Moon (1992)—both heavily focus on the production of lesbian sex. Moreover, both lesbian making-of documentaries emphasize the cast's and the crew's sexual titillation over the creation of sexual sequences. In this essay I look at what this strategy reveals about the collective climate and concerns of lesbian feature filmmaking in the United States today.

This article begins with an analysis of the problems of ‘physical repatriation’, as I review the case of the return of a First Nations mask to its community of origin. First Nations struggle to fit their concepts of ownership into western ones, where objects are viewed as alienable. As an alternative, the art of John Powell and Marianne Nicolson depicts a ‘figurative repatriation’ that does not rely on either the courts or museums to recognize legal or moral ownership. I argue that these contemporary artworks are social agents, which bring First Nations cultural objects home by staking out territory within museums. These ‘artist warriors’ forcibly recover (both literally and metaphorically) First Nations objects on display in foreign settings and reinscribe meaning at the level of the personal and the communal. They make objectified assertions of native identity that reclaim the right to self-definition. Moreover, these claims are made all the more powerful through their conscious location within an oppositional discourse framed by the Canadian western art world.

« Tantôt présents ou documents figurés, tantôt considérés comme de la monnaie, les wampums sont des colliers de perles fabriquées de coquillages marins qui étaient utilisés par les Indiens du Nord-Est de l'Amérique et les Européens. Si des milliers de wampums sont cités dans les archives coloniales, peu d'entre eux sont parvenus jusqu'à nous et la tradition de leur échange a depuis longtemps cessé d'être pratiquée. Les wampums du Musée de la civilisation de Québec ont été acquis à la fin du XIXe siècle dans un contexte particulier où collectionneurs et numismates s'arrachaient les objets amérindiens et où ceux-ci, pour diverses raisons, acceptaient de s'en départir. Cette collection n'avait jamais été étudiée, ni par les historiens, ni par les ethnologues ou par les muséologues. Par un raisonnement critique, en avançant toujours avec prudence et sans jamais céder à la simplification, Jonathan C. Lainey soulève les difficultés et les problèmes reliés à leur étude et à leur interprétation. Il reconstitue méticuleusement les différentes étapes de la vie des objets, leur muséification et le sens qu'on peut leur donner aujourd'hui. Plus qu'une simple étude sur les wampums, cet ouvrage a le mérite de porter un regard sur certaines réalités historiques relatives à la culture matérielle d'un groupe amérindien de la région de Québec, les Hurons de Lorette. Ce sont le rapport à l'Autre, les processus d'appropriation et les transferts culturels qui sont abordés par l'étude de la transformation de l'usage des wampums, devenus aujourd'hui objets de musée. Reposant sur une ethnographie et une iconographie riches et détaillées, ce livre constitue une contribution importante aux études ethnohistoriques et aux études amérindiennes de l'Amérique du Nord-Est. »-- Résumé de l'éditeur.

In 1989, three years before the New Queer Wave was even invented or discovered, two very different yet interconnected films were produced on either side of the Atlantic. Both soon became critically successful and both would win a number of prizes at different international film festivals and venues. In retrospect, these two films have come to constitute the very incitement to the Wave. British filmmaker Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston premiered in early 1989 and American filmmaker Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied premiered later that same year, the latter including a still photo from the former so as to pay homage

"By bringing together a provocative selection of essays and images, Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self addresses the issues of nation, race, and selfhood and how they are depicted in ways that are challenging and informative, prompting readers to consider the impact of photography on our everyday lives." "If photographs are chiefly responsible for perpetuating myths of American identity, can a different reading of these representations break down distorting stereotypes? This is the central question posed by Only Skin Deep. The authors in this book forcefully argue that race and nation - and, indeed, photography itself - are fictions, cultural constructions that shape our social interactions. Even as symbols, these photographic depictions of ethnic difference and cultural superiority have very real consequences. This collection of works and essays addresses, for example, the lingering consequences of American colonial expansion; the conflict between public and private visualizations of individuals; the role of commercial imagery in shaping gender roles; the impact of fantasy in ethnic or ethnographic photography; and the uses of science to provide justification for politicized depictions of "race."" "Accompanying a major exhibition of the same name, Only Skin Deep offers a critical rereading of the archive of the history of photography. This applies to the works of famous photographers - such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, and Edward Steichen - as well as lesser-known historical figures, including Charles Eisenmann, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Will Soule, and Toyo Miyatake. A substantial part of the book is devoted to contemporary artists and photographers who have moved beyond the multicultural approach to representations of "race" and have made an investigation of the semiotics of cultural identity a prevalent theme over the past decade. Among the recent photographers included are: Nancy Burson, Nikki S. Lee, Glenn Ligon, Paul Pfeiffer, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, and Andres Serrano."--(BOOK JACKET)

In this essay I examine one particular feature of the films, the song-and-dance sequences, as they draw attention to the fractious nature of the postcolonial nation while simultaneously attempting to construct a space for the articulation of a consolidated national identity.

As the nascent field of computer games research and games studies develops, one rich area of study will be a semiotic analysis of the tropes, conventions, and ideological sub-texts of various games. This article examines the centrality of race and gender in the narrative, character development, and ideologies of platform video games, paying particular attention to the deployment of stereotypes, the connection between pleasure, fantasy and race, and their link to instruments of power. Video games represent a powerful instrument of hegemony, eliciting ideological consent through a spectrum of white supremacist projects.

Samella Lewis has brought African American Art and Artists fully up to date in this revised and expanded edition. The book now looks at the works and lives of artists from the eighteenth century to the present, including new work in traditional media as well as in installation art, mixed media, and digital/computer art. Generously and handsomely illustrated, the book continues to reveal the rich legacy of work by African American artists.

The US Army developed multiplayer online First Person Shooter video game, America's Army, was examined as the first instance of an entirely state-produced and directed enterprise leveraging video game popular culture. Specifically, this study is concerned with the potential of the America's Army gamespace as a US civilian-military public sphere of the Information Age, as assessed through Habermasian theories of democratic communication. Interview fieldwork was carried out in several America's Army game communities including those of real-life military personnel, Christian Evangelicals, and hackers. The political activities of these exceptional game communities are considered for the ways they escape and transcend current critical theories of Internet-based public spheres.

From the 1967 live satellite program "Our World" to MTV music videos in Indonesia, from French television in Senegal to the global syndication of African American sitcoms, and from representations of terrorism on German television to the international Teletubbies phenomenon, TV lies at the nexus of globalization and transnational culture. Planet TV provides an overview of the rapidly changing landscape of global television, combining previously published essays by pioneers of the study of television with new work by cutting-edge television scholars who refine and extend intellectual debates in the field. Organized thematically, the volume explores such issues as cultural imperialism, nationalism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, ethnicity and cultural hybridity. These themes are illuminated by concrete examples and case studies derived from empirical work on global television industries, programs, and audiences in diverse social, historical, and cultural contexts. Developing a new critical framework for exploring the political, economic, sociological and technological dimensions of television cultures, and countering the assumption that global television is merely a result of the current dominance of the West in world affairs, Planet TV demonstrates that the global dimensions of television were imagined into existence very early on in its contentious history. Parks and Kumar have assembled the critical moments in television's past in order to understand its present and future. Contributors include Ien Ang, Arjun Appadurai, Jose B. Capino, Michael Curtin, Jo Ellen Fair, John Fiske, Faye Ginsburg, R. Harindranath, Timothy Havens, Edward S. Herman, Michele Hilmes, Olaf Hoerschelmann, Shanti Kumar, Moya Luckett, Robert McChesney, Divya C. McMillin, Nicholas Mirzoeff, David Morley, Hamid Naficy, Lisa Parks, James Schwoch, John Sinclair, R. Anderson Sutton, Serra Tinic, John Tomlinson, and Mimi White.

According to the 2000 census, Latinos/as have become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. Images of Latinos and Latinas in mainstream news and in popular culture suggest a Latin Explosion at center stage, yet the topic of queer identity in relation to Latino/a America remains under examined. Juana María Rodríguez attempts to rectify this dearth of scholarship in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, by documenting the ways in which identities are transformed by encounters with language, the law, culture, and public policy. She identifies three key areas as the project’s case studies: activism, primarily HIV prevention; immigration law; and cyberspace. In each, Rodríguez theorizes the ways queer Latino/a identities are enabled or constrained, melding several theoretical and methodological approaches to argue that these sites are complex and dynamic social fields. As she moves the reader from one disciplinary location to the other, Rodríguez reveals the seams of her own academic engagement with queer latinidad. This deftly crafted work represents a dynamic and innovative approach to the study of identity formation and representation, making a vital contribution to a new reformulation of gender and sexuality studies.

Ainsi en fut-il de la restitution en août 1999 par le Royal Ontario Museum des ossements des quelque cinq cents ancêtres wendats, illégalement extirpés en 1947 de la fosse commune d'Ossosané par les anthropologues du Musée, ceux-ci ayant retracé le site du dernier grand festin collectif en Huronie en 1636 (alors décrit par le père Brébeuf), ce qui a donné lieu à la résurgence d'une nouvelle grande fête des Morts, célébrée de de manière privée par les quatre nations de la diaspora wendatte, sous les offices d'un chamane iroquois traditionnaliste parlant encore le huron ; - la réactivation de ces types de créations comme manifestation authentiquement artistique autochtone et surtout comme mécanismes culturels de transmission aux jeunes générations. Bien que l'habitation nomade de la tente, sous la forme de tipi, fût celle qui a été la plus diffusée médiatiquement (entendre le cinéma hollywoodien et les séries de télévision des cow-boys et des Indiens des années cinquante et soixante pour identifier ceux qu'on appelle, depuis l'erreur d'identification du continent par Christophe Colomb, les « Indiens »), sa stylisation par une découpe moderne se démarquait des nombreuses reproductions kitsch. La performance An Indian Act Shooting the Indian Act (1997) de l'artiste Lawrence Paul Xuweluptun, dont rendait compte une projection vidéo accompagnant son exposition « Coulour Zone », en avril 2000, au Centre Saydie Bronfman de Montréal, et l'installation multimédia Resig/Nation (1999) de l'artiste saulteux et métis Edward Poitras au Lieu, Centre en art actuel, à Québec à l'hiver 2000, étaient radicales

This essay examines the cultural specificity of the gangster genre. In hip-hop gangsta films, the inclusion of black women as central to the gangster business not only transforms the gangster genre but, more important, adheres to black cultural norms. The films New Jack City, Sugar Hill, and Set It Off serve as case studies.

Coverage of Mexican-American youth gangs has been a staple of local television news in the United States for decades, and its form and content have come to embody many journalistic cliches: the rising tide of violence, the spread of drug addiction, the alienated minority youth. But as this bold new study argues, these stories contain gross exaggerations that lead to the reinforcement of stereotypes about Mexican-American young people and the Mexican-American community in general. Indeed, the police and community leaders greatly influence the content of this coverage by deciding what information to make available to the news media, while reporters select certain sources and ignore others, thus slanting the story even further. Source: Publisher

"This dissertation traces the presence of installation-based practices among artists of Aboriginal ancestry via selected exhibitions across Canada. It begins with a methodological perspective on Canadian art history, federal law, and human science, as a means of establishing a contextual backdrop for the art under consideration. The rise of an Indian empowerment movement during the twentieth century is then shown to take on an international voice which had cultural ramifications at the 1967 Canadian International and Universal Exhibition. Nascent signs of a multi-mediatic aesthetic are distinguished in selected works in Canadian Indian Art '74, as well as through Native-run visual arts programs. First Nations art history is charted via new Canadian art narratives starting in the early 1970s, followed by the development of spatial productions and hybrid discourses in New Work By a New Generation in 1982, and Stardusters in 1986. The final chapter opens with a history of installation art since the Second World War, as related to the pronounced presence of multi-mediactic works in Beyond History in 1989. Post-colonial and postmodern theories are deployed to conclusively situate both the artistic and political concerns featured throughout this study, and lead into the analysis of selected installations at Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives and Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada. These 1992 shows in the national capital region ultimately confirm the maturation of a particular socio-political aesthetic that tested issues of Canadian identity, while signifying Aboriginal sites of difference."--

This book provides a glimpse of thirteenth-century life and death in a southern Ontario Iroquoian community. The renovation of a Toronto soccer field in 1997 resulted in the accidental discovery of an Iroquoian ossuary--a large pit containing the remains of at least 87 people. The pit was excavated and recorded, and the remains reburied in accordance with the wishes of the Six Nations Council of Oshweken. Scientific analyses of the bones resulted in a remarkably detailed demographic profile of the Moatfield people, along with indicators of their health and diet. The book reports these findings and includes a complete database of maps and profiles on an accompanying CD-ROM. Ronald F. Williamson is president of Archaeological Services Inc., Toronto. Susan Pfeiffer is professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. Source: Publisher

The reform of media regulation can be read as part of the wider movement towards democratisation in Thailand in the 1990s. Real progress was made in media reform, yet as the traditional control of the Army has been reduced, the power of commercial media monopolies has grown. The main threat to further media liberalisation is now the growth of private monopolies. This was exemplified by the election of Thaksin Shinawatra in January 2001, as he is a media magnate on an international scale comparable with Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Both men have used their communications business as a path to political power. The first part of this chapter will summarise Thai ideas about civil society, television regulation and the political context of media reform, followed by an analysis of how civil society issues are represented on Thai TV. Broadly, there are urban news and current affairs programmes of an investigative nature, and then there are rural-oriented programmes featuring community participation, notably Lan Ban Lan Muang. Finally, the prospects for media regulation since Thaksin’s election will be considered. The progress towards media reform made in the second half of the 1990s has since stalled under Thaksin’s new government.

This comprehensive anthology places issues of racial representation squarely on the canvas. Within these pages are representations of Nubians in ancient art, the great tradition of Westernmasters such as Manet and Picasso and contemporary work by lesser known artists.