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This article discusses two recent works by emerging documentary auteur Zhao Liang, Crime and Punishment(2007) and Petition(2009). These penetrating observations of state-society relations in contemporary China render visible those who are un(der)represented, critique the deception of mass media images, and show the various complex ways in which power is connected to surveillance and visibility. Thus the filmmaker, his camera, and the spectators are implicated in power relationships as we cast voyeuristic, panoptic, activist, empathetic, or critical gazes upon the representatives of state power and upon the disenfranchised.

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.

La producción visual de América Latina del siglo XX condensa una variable de emergentes artísticos diversosno solo por la complejidad histórica que caracteriza al continente sino por la pluralidad de comunidades nativas que conformaron su territorio geográfico. Así como la crítica cultural ha abonado fuertemente el terreno de las artes también han surgido otras vías de estudio enlazadas con dimensiones sociales, económicas y políticas. Cabe mencionar los aportes al ámbito de las producciones visualesde una perspectiva analítica que en el escenario latinoamericano se inscribe en el llamado ‘giro decolonial’. América Latina posee una tradición franqueada por luchas contra el colonialismo y el eurocentrismo. En la actualidad, la esfera artística contemporánea manifiesta sus posicionamientos colectivos frente a una sociedad globalizada. En este aspecto, las contribuciones de la inflexión decolonial permiten pensar otros sentidos inherentes a las formulaciones estéticas surgidas en estas regiones. Se analizarán las obras de Alfredo Jaar, Tania Bruguera y Milagros de la Torre.

Compuesta por 355 obras de arte de naturaleza muy variada, la exposición en sala y ahora impresa busca visibilizar, dignificar, valorar y difundir los legados civilizatorios, reativos, culturales, económicos, sociales, políticos, tecnológicos, ambientales e históricos de los pueblos del África occidental y de sus descendientes en la construcción de Antioquia. Además, este catálogo pretende ubicar en las manos del público, y de los especialistas en museos y en estética, el de-bate sobre las encrucijadas que encierra la representación museal de las obras artísticas y de las culturas de los pueblos afroamericanos fraguados en el seno de las dinámicas esclavistas, imperiales y coloniales.

Les ossements animaux occupent des fonctions pratiques et rituelles extrêmement variées et complexes au sein des cultures ancestrales atikamekw et innue, que ce soit sur le plan spirituel, alimentaire, artistique ou autre. Encore aujourd’hui, en plus d’évoquer le trépas, les ossements font référence aux pratiques de communication avec les esprits animaux - comme la scapulomancie - et à la vision holistique du monde chez les peuples algonquiens. En intégrant des peaux et des fragments de squelettes animaux à leurs oeuvres portant sur des réalités contemporaines de pertes et de négociations intimes et collectives d’ordre culturel et territorial, les artistes Sonia Robertson et Eruoma Awashish parviennent à réactualiser le pouvoir de guérison et de résurgence traditionnellement associé aux ossements. Ainsi, la mise en scène d’os permet à ces créatrices de réécrire l’histoire de lieux chargés de sens et de réaffirmer l’importance actuelle de notions spirituelles, identitaires et culturelles autochtones ancestrales dans un contexte de réaffirmation collective et individuelle

The land we are' is a stunning collection of writing and art that interrogates the current era of reconciliation in Canada. Using visual, poetic, and theoretical language, the contributorsn approach reconciliation as a problematic narrative about Indigenous-settler relations, but also as a site where converseations about a just future must occur. The result of a four-year collaboration between artists and scholars engaged in resurgence and decolonization, 'The land we are' is a moving dialogue that blurs the boundaries between activism, research, and the arts

Writing a history of Indian television immediately begs the question, how do we want it read? Exhaustive chronological treatments anchor the field (Kumar 2000 ), ideological examinations reveal a Hindu-centric nation with serious consequences for religious and gender minorities (Rajagopal 1996 ; Mitra 1993 ; Van der Veer 1997 ), development analyses demonstrate the failures of a socialist state (F ü risch and Shrikhande 2007 ), and audience studies reveal complex negotiations among multiple identity positions (Mankekar 1999 ). These critical approaches to the study of television in India rightly expose power differentials that facilitate, through the centuries, the inequities of interwoven structures of imperialism, colonialism, casteism, and capitalist patriarchy. Most importantly, they highlight the chronic condition of distrust in postcolonial societies, making it highly challenging to legitimize profi table connections to global circuits as they modernize under the very conditions that once constrained them.

As in historical accounts, empire in video games too is concerned with the acquisition of geographical space. Like the splash of red marking the stretch of the British Empire on Victorian world maps, video games that let one play at empire are also obsessed with stamping the imperialist authority of ‘your’ nation on their in-game maps. Video game empires too work on the necessary logic of spatial expansion connected with which is the necessity to remove the ‘fog’ which prevents the player’s ‘line of sight’ from accessing information about surrounding areas. The focus on cartography and surveying in British Raj India is a useful comparison. Although much scholarship exists around the representations of the spatiality of Empire in more traditional media, there is little that addresses the video game representations of Empire. This article is about the representation and experience of space in conceptions of Empire vis-à-vis in empire-building video games, as understood in terms of both cartography and the lived experience of space. It argues that although empire-building video games are largely framed within the western imperialist discourses, the very nature of gameplay itself challenges these set notions – in a way remediating the ambiguity and anxieties of the representations of empire and its spatial constructs in earlier media.

This chapter contemplates the ethical dimensions of the specific brand of observational cinema found in China. Because there is no popular understanding of independent documentary—and also because filmmakers almost invariably use amateur video cameras and shoot alone—many subjects are oblivious to the fact that their images are being captured for films being screened around the world. It is in this sense that, while their cameras are perfectly visible, they are also hidden. This enables directors to capture “life unawares,” as if people were being shot by a hidden camera. In this context, directors make the films they want, ignoring the ethical implications of shooting people without being upfront about their intentions or asking for consent. The chapter closely examines a set of films to explore the axiographics of the documentary, in other words how ethics is rendered in the time and space of the moving image.

This essay performs a critical comparison of two documentary films about queer and trans people of color, Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning (1991) and Wu Tsang's Wildness (2012) and examines how the two films negotiate of the politics of representing reality and “realness.” The comparison illuminates two entwined problematics: the ways in which the challenges faced by each film are emblematic of the larger historical context in which they were made, specifically notions of queer community and its subjects; and the ways in which the negotiation of these challenges occurs in relation to a broader field of ethical and formal questions relating to documentary itself.

Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring more than 125 color images, Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960.

En Afrique en général et au Cameroun en particulier, posséder une console de jeux vidéo n’est pas à la portée de tout le monde. Les jeunes puisque ce sont eux qui les affectionnent particulièrement, qui en possèdent une, font donc souvent appel à leurs pairs afin qu’ensemble, ils puissent s’amuser. L’espace où les jeunes jouent aux jeux vidéo devient de ce fait un espace où ces derniers s’affirment en tant que groupe à part entière. C’est un espace qui leur permet de se démarquer des adultes qui, le plus souvent dénigrent, voire méprisent cette activité ludique. Les jeunes y créent ainsi des « ethnométhodes » et développent une solidarité mécanique. Jouer aux jeux vidéo dans ce contexte n’est plus simplement une activité de loisir. L’espace de jeu devient un espace où se créent de nouvelles relations et où se raffermissent les anciennes. Mais également, un espace où se développent l ’esprit de compétition et corrélativement même des conflits. Celui avec qui on s’amuse aux jeux vidéo devient celui à qui on se confie, avec qui on partage ses joies et ses peines. La console de jeux n’ « appartient » plus à celui qui l ’a achetée, mais à tous ceux qui la jouent. Il n’est donc pas rare qu’elle s’exporte du domicile de son propriétaire pour le domicile d ’un autre adolescent. Il faut également préciser que le jeu vidéo reste en négroculture une activité essentiellement masculine ; l ’espace de jeu est donc le fief du garçon et les filles n’ont rien à y faire. Le jeu vidéo développe ainsi un certain machisme, une fierté d ’être homme plutôt que femme. Dans ce contexte, on peut noter une sorte de détribalisation. L’obédience ethnique de tout un chacun s’estompe pour laisser place à une société des jeunes tout court. Le jeu vidéo fait donc tomber les barrières raciales, tribales, ethniques. Et même si on peut y noter des effets pervers, ce qui est normal, puisque aucun système culturel n’est parfait, les jeux vidéo en contexte camerounais développent chez les adolescents le sentiment d ’appartenance à une même classe d ’âge.

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.

Taking Hao Jie’s Single Man as a case study, this chapter discusses the effect of globalization on independent DV production—a home-grown phenomenon born out of the availability of DV cameras and computer editing software and the spreading of the internet. Starting as a marginalized practice without access to the domestic market, and expressing a desire to saturate the visual field with obfuscated images and to create a counter-archive (a counter-memory of the Chinese people), it attracted international attention, which in turn allowed it to have access to alternative forms of financing as well as the input of foreign talent. The fluidity of digital modes of production also contributed to an eradication of the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Instead, the real divide lies between “the desire for cinema” and “the desire for documentation.”

In 1990s post-Reform China, a growing number of people armed with video cameras poured out upon the Chinese landscape to both observe and contribute to the social changes then underway. This digital turn has given us a 'DV China' that includes film and media communities across different social strata and disenfranchised groups. This study takes stock of these phenomena by surveying the social and cultural landscape of grassroots and alternative cinema practices.

This thesis argues that photography is tainted with ingrained racist ideologies that have been present since its earliest inception in 1839. It considers the act of photographing the Other as a site of Western violence, myth, fantasy and disavowal. It examines archival images through the prism of race, representation and human rights with the aim of extracting new meanings that bring the Other into focus. This is done by reading the images both against the politics of the time in which they were made and as contemporary objects at work in the political and cultural present. The thesis makes the case that photography is burdened with ideological fault-lines concerning race and rights. The fault-lines have been forged by cultural and colonial violence resulting in Western scopic regimes that have dominated and fixed the Other within an inescapable set of Western epistemologies that have been used to serve and enhance imperial perspectives on race. I argue that these perspectives are still active within the Western mindset manifest as benign acts of photographic empathy that work to ultimately bolster Western hegemonies and economies. This thesis is based on 25 years of experience as a researcher and curator of international photography exhibitions, direct research into archives in different continental settings, the presentation of papers in a variety of national and international contexts, and interviews withphotographers, curators and academics. My hypothesis is that the history of photography can only be complete if the voice of the subaltern is made critically present within it, so allowing us to engage with important political racial memory work that can help us re-read the past and reconfigure different meanings concerning history, race, rights and human recognition in the present. I argue that photography requires decolonising work to be carried out on its history. I propose that if we do not recognise the historical and political conjunctures of racial politics at work within photography and the effects on those that have been culturally erased, made invisible or less than human by such images, then we remain hemmed within established orthodoxies of colonial thought concerning the racialised body, the subaltern and the politics of human recognition.

Video games have long been seen as the exclusive territory of young, heterosexual white males. In a media landscape dominated by such gamers, players who do not fit this mold, including women, people of color, and LGBT people, are often brutalized in forums and in public channels in online play. Discussion of representation of such groups in games has frequently been limited and cursory. In contrast, Gaming at the Edge builds on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws on qualitative audience research methods to make sense of how representation comes to matter. In Gaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently. She asks: How do players identify with characters? How do they separate identification and interactivity? What is the role of fantasy in representation? What is the importance of understanding market logic? In addressing these questions Shaw reveals how representation comes to matter to participants and offers a perceptive consideration of the high stakes in politics of representation debates. Putting forth a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and the blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis, Shaw finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalized gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.

In their introduction to a collaborative study of crowds organized by the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000, Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews observe that while the first half of the twentieth century witnessed a rise of collective social action and various forms of mass assembly, the second half was a period of the decline of collective political formations and the replacement by virtual and media-based assemblies for physical crowds (Schnapp and Tiews 2006, xi). The postindustrial political economy in the West is “characterized by the coexistence of media aggregation and bodily disaggregation,” Schnapp and Tiews claim (xi).

At the closing awards ceremony for the 7th Annual DOChina Festival held in May 2010 in Songzhuang—a gentrified artists’ village at the far eastern edge of the Beijing municipality—young animator, poet, and filmmaker Xue Jianqiang was recognized with an honorable mention for his haunting documentary Martian Syndrome. The award came with 2000 RMB, a Panasonic DV camera (the jury’s official comments noted that Xue lacked his own camcorder and had to borrow one to make his film), and the chance to speak before a gathering of who’s who in Chinese independent documentary filmmaking.