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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: As I sit writing in my kitchen while the forces of the U.S. military state are brought to bear on thousands of Standing Rock water stewards and land protectors and their allies in Cannonball, North Dakota, I consider how this sail special issue on digital Indigenous studies not only represents a collection of essays about the critical work Indigenous women are performing in their various digital projects but also illustrates that these online “Indigenous territories” (Hearne), crafted on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, save lives. Every single day since the protectors first gathered to oppose the proposed 1,170-mile Dakota Access pipeline (a project that would potentially contaminate the Missouri watershed and the Ogallala Aquifer and desecrate Dakota sacred sites), digital independent and social media have constantly covered the story. At least 1.3 million Facebook users checked in virtually at Oceti Sakowin and other Indigenous camps and communities to ensure that support presence is recognized, while the world monitors the presence of the military and police force gathering at the construction site to curb further violence. The Standing Rock gathering offers hope to networked Indigenous youth, a demographic between three and ten times as likely to commit suicide than the national average peer rate. The Nodapl action in the Indigenous imaginary is an invitation to stand at the front lines of a global movement to protect water and land resources for all living beings on this planet and to draw attention to and support those whose lives and ways of being are in peril through overt military action and consequential environmental destruction. It is also an occasion, in the words of Jolene Rickard, “to invest in the apparatus of the imagination” (Bernardin). One need only look at the online art, handwritten signs, and logos representing #nodapl, #standingrock, [End Page 172] #waterislife, and #rezpectourwater to see the ways in which Indigenous artists are creatively and powerfully envisioning this movement, most often immersed with work that features strong images of Native women and girls, the community backbone and life force. Or we need only view digital videos like computer animator and artist Joseph Erb’s black-and-red graphic history of Standing Rock, “Mni Wiconi / Water Is Life” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXoy5lzpjiM), and first-person game platforms like Elizabeth LaPensée’s Thunderbird Strike, which extend the conversations at Standing Rock to the struggles over Enbridge’s Alberta tar sands pipeline and fracking practices as players work to undo and prevent further environmental degradation. Following Idle No More’s digital and geospatial (re)articulation of Indigenous territories, we are now living and loving and hoping in this historic moment as new ways of relating to one another and living in deep connection with the land and all its forms of life are being physiologically, intellectually, and spiritually forged at the geospatial confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers. They are being forged as well through the confluences of digital rivers on our electronic devices and in our online conversations about the beauty and devastation of the events that are unfolding in Standing Rock. Susan Bernardin’s essay in this issue on Heid E. Erdrich’s “Pre-Occupied” considers the meaning of rivers to Native peoples and contends that images of waterways, particularly the Mississippi, are mobilized “to make visible the continuing claims of this and other imperiled riverine systems.” In her introduction, Joanna Hearne asks us, “How might such an intersection of digital and Indigenous specificities take place in a way that is ‘native to the device’; that is, how might Indigenous specificity be embedded in shared platforms that are therefore central to all of our digital lives?” The essays in this special issue respond to this question by theorizing digital media in fresh and innovative ways. Many of us teach digital humanities courses or classes with strong digital media content, but we lack the language for critically engaging this new field on its own terms as it intersects, extends, and radically reconceptualizes more familiar research areas such as cinema studies, Indigenous / Native American studies, communication, literature, art, and history.

Migrating the Black Body explores how visual media from painting to photography, from global independent cinema to Hollywood movies, from posters and broadsides to digital media, from public art to graphic novels has shaped diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self. How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? And how do visual technologies structure the way we see African subjects and subjectivity? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora. Examining subjects as wide-ranging as the appearance of blackamoors in Russian and Swedish imperialist paintings, the appropriation of African and African American liberation images for Chinese Communist Party propaganda, and the role of YouTube videos in establishing connections between Ghana and its international diaspora, these essays investigate routes of migration, both voluntary and forced, stretching across space, place, and time.

Pedro Almodóvar is an internationally acclaimed Spanish director. The national and international fascination over Almodóvar's cinema lies in his ability to reflect the problems of contemporary society, his lucidity in combining the urban and the rural, his ability to express the frustrations of modern man, as well as his freshness and spontaneity. Although the vast majority of studies on this Spanish director have focused on women and the gay world, his films are crowded with many types and archetypes of heterosexual men. This groundbreaking edited volume studies the men in the cinema of Almodóvar from a broad yet comprehensive and complementary perspective. Each chapter of All About Almodóvar's Men methodically dissects these male characters—their misery and their greatness, their frustrations and their desires—offering a kaleidoscopic view of man that goes beyond the narrow framework in which many studies have locked the rich cinema of Almodóvar.

Les années 1990 sont une décennie cruciale pour l'avancement et le positionnement de l'art et de l'autonomie autochtones dans les récits dominants des états ayant subi la colonisation. Cet article reprend l'exposé des faits de cette période avec des détails fort nécessaires. Pensé comme une historiographie, il propose d'explorer chronologiquement comment les conservateurs et les artistes autochtones, et leurs alliés, ont répondu et réagi à des moments clés des mesures coloniales et les interventions qu'ellesontsuscitéesdu point de vue politique, artistique, muséologique et du commissariat d'expositions. À la lumière du 150e anniversaire de la Confédération canadienne, et quinze ans après la présentation de la communication originale au colloque, Mondialisation et postcolonialisme: Définitions de la culture visuelle v, du Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, il reste urgent de faire une analyse critique des préoccupations contemporaines plus vastes, relatives à la mise en contexte et à la réconciliation de l'histoire de l'art autochtone sous-représentée.

Le territoire constitue une force déterminante dans la création artistique. Les prairies austères, notamment, exigent des artistes actuels comme de ceux qui les ont précédés une adaptation constante, déterminée par l'accès aux ressources et la nécessité de mobilité. Cet article s'intéresse à l'impact du territoire sur la pratique du perlage telle qu'exercée par les femmes autochtones. Il met en relation des exemples de perlage traditionnel conservés dans les collections muséales de la Saskatchewan avec les œuvres de trois artistes contemporaines autochtones des plaines, soit Ruth Cuthand, Judy Anderson et Katherine Boyer. La comparaison vise à mieux comprendre le processus intergénérationnel de transmission des pratiques ancestrales et ainsi révéler comment s'exprime le territoire dans les objets et œuvres ornés de perles, qui contribuent à façonner le récit des plaines.

The in-depth, diverse, and accessible essays in Queer Game Studies use queerness to challenge the ideas that have dominated gaming discussions. This volume reveals the capacious albeit underappreciated communities that are making, playing, and studying queer games, demonstrating the centrality of LGBTQ issues to the gamer world and establishing an alternative lens for examining this increasingly important culture.

En dépit des déclarations fracassantes sur le « tabou » qui pèserait en France sur l’histoire de la colonisation, celle-ci se porte bien. Les recherches se sont multipliées dans les vingt dernières années et elles sont à l’origine d’une production bien insérée dans les revues et en bonne place sur les tables des librairies. Au fil d’échanges nourris avec les réseaux anglophones, ces recherches se sont postcolonialisées de façon critique et participent de plain pied aux débats de la « nouvelle histoire impériale ». L’histoire de la colonisation est enseignée dans le secondaire et à l’université et là aussi la discordance est flagrante entre des débats publics qui dénoncent sempiternellement sa marginalisation, ou au contraire sa surreprésentation, et une diffusion active reposant notamment sur la traduction de travaux influents comme l’important programme de recherche formulé au cours des années 1990 par Frederick Cooper et Ann Stoler. Dès lors, comment relier ces trois éléments : le discret mais solide épanouissement académique de l’histoire de la colonisation depuis la fin des années 1990, la virulente controverse ouverte à partir de 2005 autour des études postcoloniales et un sens commun qui s’est approprié ce terme séduisant, mais qui peine à lui donner un contenu allant au-delà de la fausse évidence d’une distanciation mécaniquement produite par l’usure du temps ?

Game studies has been an understudied area within the emerging field of digital media and religion. Video games can reflect, reject, or reconfigure traditionally held religious ideas and often serve as sources for the production of religious practices and ideas. This collection of essays presents a broad range of influential methodological approaches that illuminate how and why video games shape the construction of religious beliefs and practices, and also situates such research within the wider discourse on how digital media intersect with the religious worlds of the 21st century. Each chapter discusses a particular method and its theoretical background, summarizes existing research, and provides a practical case study that demonstrates how the method specifically contributes to the wider study of video games and religion. Featuring contributions from leading and emerging scholars of religion and digital gaming, this book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in the areas of digital culture, new media, religious studies, and game studies across a wide range of disciplines.

Homi Bhabha’s pivotal 1994 book,The Location of Culture, begins with an epigraph from Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking”: “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from whichsomething begins its presencing.” Cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative in nature, is produced performatively – not as a reflection of something that is given or set in stone, but as an ongoing process of negotiation.

A non-foundationalist construct for the Feiticeiro/a character that assumes neither an essentialist nature nor a determinist set of activities is possible. This does not prescribe a ‘type’ of ‘pervert’ character, but instead delineates an epistemic framing for a Feiticeiro/a character. This chapter explores an etymologically based semiotic approach to character construction that accounts for a Derridean view that language is constituted by binary reciprocal delimitations and for a view of sex as a dereified expression of materialised instances of engagement by sexual subjects, in terms of which sexuality is rendered as an opened-outward and connected function. The chapter further deals with an approach based in an empathic engagement between audiences and Feiticeiro/a characters, which is apposite for audiences identifying with but not necessarily liking characters. The chapter closes the volume’s argument around how transgressive, sexually focused Feiticeiro/a characters might productively be constructed in terms other than of essences and determinist actions, but in terms of ‘meaning’ found in the points of connection between heterogeneous bodily surfaces.

Conservative discourses remain powerful in contemporary life. These demonise the notion of sexual transgressiveness without helping to give a clear, value neutral definition of what ‘transgressive’ is. Screenwriters attempting to write it into characters are therefore likely to rely on psychiatric epistemologies for sexual ‘perversion’ as framings for subjectivity. Unfortunately, Freudian epistemologies of ‘perversion’ render the psychical subject as invisible through built-in determining comparative reference to heteropatriarchal norms and through distinctions between ‘non-pathological’ and ‘pathological’ definitions. This chapter explores the Freudian constructs that entrench this, together with post-structuralist foundations that might revise the constitution and role of the individual subject (and therefore of filmic characters as facsimiles of real people) as he/she relates to the material world as a physical entity, and as he/she manipulates the discourses to which he/she is subject.

A post-humanist lens is useful as a starting-point to remedy the absenting and invisibilising effects of sexological epistemologies for the purposes of conceiving a constitution of ‘pervert’ filmic characters, since certain strains of existential thinking have a meta-theoretical pliancy that is useful for reflecting the non-binary character of complex people beyond simple identity categories, across a range of types and styles of filmic products. If matched with a semiological approach such as that espoused by Barthes, it thereby becomes possible to manipulate signs in the form of character constructions to represent people as more than the sum of their parts and to contain deeper significations that are built into the fabric of their construction. This requires a deeper understanding of the semiotic notion of ‘semes’ as the foundation for character construction. To this end, this chapter explores how sexual ‘perversion’ as reflected in notion of the ‘feitiço’ might serve as a foundation for a new episteme for ‘perverse’ characters, as the Feiticeiro/a as ‘sorcerer/sorceress’.

The notion of ‘perversity’ suggests inherent transgressiveness. However, a focus on practices does not help identify who filmic characters are in ways that might inform a paradigm for character identity suitable for translation into a visual medium. Failing to achieve this clarity, ‘perverts’ often end up as ‘ambulatory objects’ at once imagined and defined by what is not present. This chapter engages how this manifests in the nineteenth-century sexological discourses that reflected perverse prurience in terms of assumptions that all entities might be empirically identifiable in the same way that material phenomena can be perceived by means of the senses, which is especially visible in the various incarnations of Freudian constructs of ‘fetishism’ that refuse personal agency through reliance on a range of psychodynamic constructs.

If character actions are not to be seen in deterministic ways, then an alternative framing should be considered on which writers might base constructs of complexity of action. This is possible if action itself is seen as an expression of relationality rather than as activity-as-substance. Looking at people in this way enables the behaviour of Feiticeiro/a characters to be seen as activities that are more than the actions of combinations of sexed bodies in physical spaces. This chapter explores a construct for action on this basis as it becomes possible by acknowledging in a construct of ‘doing’ the phenomenological notions of ‘being’ as a Feiticeiro/a form constituted by a hybrid of ‘object-discourse-nature-society’ characterised by networks of confluence. The chapter explores the notion of the Feiticeiro/a character in terms of an internal coherency, taking account of interactions and activities (as exhibited through their material form), ‘naturalness’, linearity of course of action and embodied notions of meaning-creation.

Interesting and challenging Hollywood-style films that centre on sexually transgressive characters are not easy to script. Many writers fail as a result of an over-valuation of image at the expense of psychologically complex and challenging subjectivity. A hook for exploring the nature of this phenomenon lies in the notion of ‘involving and disturbing’, with a focus on how films might represent it and how audiences might perceive it, and with attention paid to how characters might be constructed. The chapter expands on how this notion of audience engagement might engage with screenwriting as a design function, aimed to construct characters in visual terms yet through words rather than pictures. In addressing certain epistemic limitations to writing character complexity, an alternative epistemic framing for ‘perverse’ characters is considered in terms of characterological ‘is-ness’, philosophical constitution and behaviours and actions.

In seeking to find a solid paradigm for the Feiticeiro/a character, it is tempting to approach the established psychiatric categories. Unfortunately, many of these suggest that people are ineffably different from others and that people will behave according to type in a predictable, even inevitable way. This chapter explores the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which merely re-inscribes essentialist and determinist tendencies by means of processes akin to the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence and linguistic fixity. The chapter explores further how this is embedded in the category of ‘fetishism’, ‘fetishistic transvestism’ and ‘transvestic fetishism’, which contain certain problematic vestigial tails of Freudian categories that make the psychiatric definitions of ‘fetishism’ unsuitable as a foundation for the Feiticeiro/a character.

If the Feiticeiro/a character is to be seen as a structure rather than a substance, the nature of such a structure requires elaboration. If this paradigm is to be internally coherent, a relation of intertwined co-existence between characters and audiences should be built into the framing in ways that provide functional epistemic signposts for mechanisms to translate characters’ intrinsic complexity to these audiences. This chapter approaches this by accounting both for the particularly visual nature of the filmic medium and for how screenplays are not a visual medium themselves and are put to different uses than other forms of narrative writing, therefore requiring distinctive attributes. An orientational notion of relationship between medium and audience is suggested as a foundation for the structure of Feiticeiro/a characters in terms of the philosophical distinction between ‘being’ and ‘appearance’, on the basis of which decisions might be made as to which elements of the character’s constitution should be made apparent and which should either remain invisible or intentionally be obfuscated.

The categories for ‘perversion’ in the World Health Organization’s ICD fail to describe people and their practices, thereby obscuring the remarkable singularity of individuals and diversity of groups. Instead, they prescribe heteronormative sexual behaviour, which is unhelpful as a foundation for the Feiticeiro/a character. This chapter explores an alternative epistemic construct, as becomes available in the notion of a focalising character, which reflects a ‘semic’ construct that negates the notion of a ‘pervert’ character as a substance, but instead embraces the notion of a Feiticeiro/a character as a structure. The chapter further explores the philosophical nature of this structure as it relates to the thematic elements of a narrative whilst engaging in believable activities in a material world. The chapter then suggests an approach to structure based in a phenomenological notion of the replacement of ‘substance’ with ‘form’/‘structure’ as the foundation of meaning.