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How should one think about popular media in the African context? Should we attempt to understand and analyse the increasing proliferation of tabloids, reality television shows, pop music, websites and mobile communications through the analytical frameworks constructed by scholars in the Global North, or does Africa pose unique research questions? Is there a danger of either essentializing Africa by treating her as ‘different’, or by ignoring her specificity by approaching her media via Western theoretical constructs? The scholar wishing to understand the interface between popular media, development and democracy in contemporary African societies is faced with a complex double bind. Elsewhere (Nyamnjoh 2005: 2-3) I have argued that African worldviews and cultural values are doubly excluded from global media discourses, first by the ideology of hierarchies and boundedness of cultures, and second by cultural industries more interested in profits than the promotion of creative diversity and cultural plurality. Little attention is accorded to how Africans negotiate and navigate the various identity margins and cultural influences in their lives, in ways that are not easily reducible to simple options or straightforward choices. The consequence of rigid dichotomies or stubborn prescriptiveness based on externally induced expectations of social transformation is an idea of democracy hardly informed by popular articulations of personhood and agency in Africa, and media whose professional values and content are not in tune with the expectations of those they purport to serve. The predicament of media practitioners in such a situation, as well as those wishing to understand African media practice through media theory, is obvious: to be of real service to liberal democracy and its expectations of modernity, they must ignore alternative ideas of personhood and agency in the cultural communities within which such practices take place and of which such practitioners and, often, scholars form part. Attending to the interests of particular cultural groups as strategically essential entities risks contradicting the principles of liberal democracy and its emphasis on civic citizenship and the autonomous individual, which media practitioners in African societies are being held accountable to.

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 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.

Thérèse Lamartine est bien connue des milieux féministes. Détentrice d’une maîtrise en études cinématographiques, elle a publié Elles, cinéastes... ad lib, en 1985, aux Éditions Remue-ménage, dans lequel elle présentait des réalisatrices de diverses origines, actives entre 1895 et 1981. En 2009, elle publiait Soudoyer Dieu, un roman scrutant la longue et inconsolable douleur d’un groupe de femmes après la tuerie de Polytechnique. Avec Le Féminin au cinéma, une petite plaquette consacrée aux films «de femmes» ou, comme elle le précise, aux films qui «sculptent un art du mieux-vivre la mixité dans nos sociétés ou [qui] débrident les stéréotypes et nous dérident à la fois», Lamartine ouvre les portes d’un monde cinématographique souvent méconnu et rend hommage à des femmes de cinéma, autant derrière que devant la caméra. En sortant ces femmes de l’ombre, elle met au jour un cinéma riche et original, mais méconnu.

The queer women's comedic web series that have flourished in the last decade, serving as launching pads for their creators, coincided with media-industry nichification's segmentation of a consumer population regarded by advertisers and content providers as one monolithic LGBTQ community. The series I examine-from The Slope, which premiered in 2010, to Strangers, released in 2017-voice their creators' and characters' marginalization from and even opposition to such an imagined community, through recourse to what I call a "bad queer" rhetorical practice, which uses ironic metacommentary to critique assimilationist values and tropes alongside queer identity policing. These series emerged, at least initially, as an alternative sphere of queer media production and a queer discursive mode that employs disidentification as a politicized strategy to challenge dominant LGBTQ scripts. Offering an irreverent alternative to mainstream and millennial LGBTQ cultural products, these "bad queer" web series express the plurality of the queer "community" and expose political contestations within its ranks, and in so doing serve as brand differentiation for a new generation of queer media producers.

Allyson Nadia Field recovers the forgotten body of African American filmmaking from the 1910s which she calls uplift cinema. These films were part of the racial uplift project, which emphasized education, respectability, and self-sufficiency, and weren't only responses to racist representations of African Americans in other films.

Most writing on transgender cinema focuses on representations of trans people, rather than works made by trans people. This article surveys the history of trans and gender variant people creating audiovisual media from the beginning of cinema through today. From the professional gender impersonators of the stage who crossed into film during the medium’s first decades to selfidentified transvestite and transsexual filmmakers, like Ed Wood and Christine Jorgensen of the mid-twentieth century, to the enormous upsurge in trans filmmaking of the 1990s, this article explores the rich and complex history of trans and gender variant filmmaking. It also considers the untraceable gender variant filmmakers who worked in film and television without their gender history becoming known and those who made home movies that have been lost to history.

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.

The article offers information related to the incention of digital remix culture by black men and queer women. It mentions about technique of extracting segments from existing recordings and using them to form the musical tracks of hiphop songs; and nonqueer and nonfemale people have participated heavily in fan production, digital sampling and gave rise to culture that has proliferated and thrived on the internet primarily through the creative labor of minority musical and fiction artists.

Examines the soundscapes of Derek Jarman's film "Blue" (1993) and Isaac Julien's video installation 'True north' (2007), and the way they contribute to promoting embodied responses in the viewer. Draws on the writings of Luce Irigaray and Laura U. Marks to explore the relationship between haptic theory and queer spectatorship.

The overlap of marginalised race and sexuality is highlighted in the 1990 documentary "Paris is burning" which depicts the life of New York's black and Latino drag queens. The author offers an analysis of the social circumstances that gave birth to this culture which originated in 1980s Harlem.

Introduction and seven articles looking at the range of present-day queer cinema to be found.

The Internet distribution of lesbian-focused films seen as an example of the ways in which independent producers and distributors are offering their films for sale on the web. Incl. a table comparing costs and number of films available across a range of legal and illegal sites.

Analyses the narrative and formal elements of Kim Kyung-mook's "Stateless things" (2011) to argue how it critiques South Korea’s ethnocentrism and homophobic social structures by delineating a queer use of space. Gives recent examples of homoeroticism in commercial and independent South Korean cinema. Argues that Kim's film expand the definition of queer Korean cinema by deconstructing and reconstructing the heteronormative, progress-driven cityscape of Seoul.

Stresses the crucial importance of LGBT festivals in promoting examples of queer cinema throughout Europe and the USA.

Queer cinema, no matter how rebellious, is the child of straight cinema-its bastard child, perhaps, but its progeny no less. Queer cinema must push against decades of tradition to create itself anew. Borrowed genres and hand-me-down narratives have served their purpose. If the (curated though not novel) propositions and (recent though not unique) examples that follow point anywhere, it is to a still-to-be-imagined future where queer cinema can continue to expand while never ceding its right to be "nice" in order to serve those it portrays.

Betancourt reviews The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema by Nick Davis and Ethereal Queer Television, Historicity, Desire by Amy Villarejo.

On the 'Queer Film Culture: Queer Cinema & Queer Film Festivals International Conference', held at the University of Hamburg, 14-15 October 2014, alongside the Hamburg International Queer Film Festival.

Le lieu de la rupture, ici, se voit déplacé : s'il faut rompre, en cinéma autochtone, ce n'est pas avec ses propres prédécesseurs, comme l'ont fait Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut et Agnes Varda. Des cinéastes tels Barnaby, Freeland et Grace peuvent ainsi s'appuyer sur le travail d'ouvreurs de sentiers tels le réalisateur māori Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, en traduction française, Nous étions guerriers, 1994), le réalisateur cheyenne et arapaho Chris Eyre (Smoke Signals, 1998) , ainsi que des précurseurs incontournables tels Barclay, en Aotearoa, Nouvelle-Zélande, et la documentariste abénaquise Alanis Obomsawin, figure de proue du cinéma autochtone au Canada. Dans un récent document interne sur le cinéma autochtone en son sein, l'Office national du film (ONF), cet important producteur et diffuseur public d'œuvres audiovisuelles au Canada, explique que pour « comprendre la situation actuelle des cinéastes autochtones a l'ONF », il faut l'envisager a partir des « anciennes politiques gouvernementales visant explicitement a éliminer toute culture autochtone de la société canadienne ». Elle est également sous-tendue par le désir de proposer un storytelling, un art de raconter, issu des peuples autochtones, déterminé par ces derniers tant au niveau de la forme et du contenu cinématographique que dans le processus de production, de réalisation et de diffusion de ces œuvres.