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"Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings proposes a theory of sexual politics that works in the interstices between radical queer desires and the urgency of transforming public policy, between utopian longings and everyday failures. Considering the ways in which bodily movement is assigned cultural meaning, Juana Maria Rodriguez takes the stereotypes of the hyperbolically gestural queer Latina femme body as a starting point from which to discuss how gestures and forms of embodiment inform sexual pleasures and practices in the social realm. Centered on the sexuality of racialized queer female subjects, the book's varied archive--which includes burlesque border crossings, daddy play, pornography, sodomy laws, and sovereignty claims--seeks to bring to the fore alternative sexual practices and machinations that exist outside the sightlines of mainstream cosmopolitan gay male culture. Situating articulations of sexual subjectivity between the interpretive poles of law and performance, Rodriguez argues that forms of agency continually mediate among these various structures of legibility--the rigid confines of the law and the imaginative possibilities of the performative. She reads the strategies of Puerto Rican activists working toward self-determination alongside sexual performances on stage, in commercial pornography, in multi-media installations, on the dance floor, and in the bedroom. Rodriguez examines not only how projections of racialized sex erupt onto various discursive mediums but also how the confluence of racial and gendered anxieties seeps into the gestures and utterances of sexual acts, kinship structures, and activist practices. Ultimately, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings reveals--in lyrical style and explicit detail--how sex has been deployed in contemporary queer communities in order to radically reconceptualize sexual politics"--

This chapter locates India, and broadly the post-colonial context, within the larger debates concerning television’s audiovisual form and mode of address. It tries to demonstrate that certain key traits in Indian popular performative traditions, representing an ‘alternative’ negotiation with modernity, are somewhat homologous with what western theorists have tried to specify (though in contradicting terms) as the features of televisual mode of address and ‘flow’. The chapter reads the specific imports of this correspondence in histories of Indian television with special reference to a somewhat novel way television has started imagining the nation after liberalization. The significance of the Indian popular film form as lending a major legacy to tele-viewership in India constitutes a major strand of argument.

This chapter looks at one well-known format in reality television– Big Brother (Bigg Boss in India) – in order to shed light on the complicated relationship between the forces of globalization, national and local cultural formations and the dictates of commercially driven entertainment. It analyses the essential features of format television to argue that the very mode of its constitution as an economic and aesthetic object inclines it towards the global. The chapter elucidates the reality behind global cultural formations by discussing the two main theoretical approaches to the question of global culture – cultural imperialism and cultural globalization. It also offers some speculations about how reality television embodies global form and thus functions as a sort of “Bigg Boss” that dictates contemporary modes of meaningful behaviour.

Beneath many instances of ’sweeping’ change, both structural and representational, in the market-dominant, liberalized and privatized Indian televisual scenario there lies a hidden transcript of continuity insofar as the encoding of development issues, images and messages is concerned. In the periods of Doordarshan and later corporate channels, though with markedly different historical contexts, reference points, contents and styles — the encoding of ’development’ leaves little autonomy to the audiences. In a political slant indicating how the two televisual periods converge in contracting the space for public debate and civic engagement the essay seeks to make a departure from the dominant view which puts them in binary positions.

The exponential growth of television news in India – from one state controlled network until 1991 to more than 100 news channels in 2012 – has transformed broadcast journalism in the country. This proliferation of news networks has intensified competition for audience and advertising revenue, leading to excessive marketization of news, which increasingly veers toward infotainment. The chapter examines the challenges faced by Indian television news – focusing on economic and political dimensions of television news - and its implications for the world’s largest democracy.

À l’heure où les artistes visuels autochtones (Premières Nations, Inuits et Métis) se détachent de la « politique de l’identité », les artistes allochtones (d’ascendance européenne) font de plus en plus souvent référence dans leurs oeuvres à des questions en lien avec l’autochtonie. Cet article examine certaines de ces questions en établissant trois dialogues entre le travail d’un artiste autochtone et d’un artiste allochtone vivant au Québec : l’exploitation industrielle des territoires autochtones dans le Nord du Québec, par l’Algonquine Nadia Myre et l’artiste d’origine suisse Thomas Kneubühler ; les nouvelles attitudes et comportements générés par la société d’hyperconsommation, par l’artiste laich-kwil-tach Sonny Assu et le collectif BGL ; les relations entre Autochtones et colons durant le régime colonial français, chez l’artiste innue Sonia Robertson et l’artiste montréalaise Cynthia Girard. Bien que l’autochtonie, à travers ces trois dialogues, apparaisse comme une question partagée par les artistes actuels autochtones et allochtones, à aucun moment il n’est possible d’établir une équivalence entre les uns et les autres. Alors que chez les artistes allochtones l’autochtonie est traitée comme un motif secondaire, passant parfois inaperçue aux yeux des critiques d’art, elle constitue toujours le thème central des artistes autochtones chez qui elle s’ancre dans le destin, souvent tragique, de leur communauté.

Tamil television lends itself to some interesting initiatives in gender empowerment through its programming in 3 categories – fiction, reality, and talent shows. This chapter provides a glimpse into television programmes on leading Tamil channels over the last decade (2000–10) from a gender perspective. Focusing particularly on women and transgender characters/hosts, emotional and psychological quotients of the shows and their audiences, moments of dramatic intensity, the chapter demonstrates how the vernacular televisual representations were quite different from the stereotypical portrayals of the mainstream ‘national’ television, even though the programmes were produced, televised, and received within the broader patriarchal framework of Tamil cultural and political contexts. The chapter, as a whole, intends to look at the production, representation and identification of Tamil television soaps and reality shows as vehicle for spotlighting gender issues and alternative sexualities in the public domain.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, a number of calls were made by scholars to “internationalize” or “dewesternize” the field of media and communication studies. I argue that these approaches have indirectly silenced a much longer disciplinary history outside “the West” that has not only produced empirical knowledge but has also actively challenged Western epistemologies. This article seeks to reinscribe the epistemological and historical foundations of media and communication studies in Africa. By framing the research of African media and communication scholars within the changing nature of knowledge production, shifting power relations between African nations, and the evolving role of African universities, I demonstrate how academic knowledge production is frequently driven and constrained by particular dominant social, political, and economic interests.

Inuit have been participating in the development of photo-reproductive media since at least the 19th century, and indeed much earlier if we continue on Michelle Raheja’s suggestion that there is much more behind Nanook’s smile than Robert Flaherty would have us believe. This paper examines how photographer Peter Pitseolak (1902-1973) and filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk have employed photography and film in relation to Raheja’s notion of “visual sovereignty” as a process of infiltrating media of representational control, altering their principles to visualize Indigenous ownership of their images. For camera-based media, this pertains as much to conceptions of time, continuity and “presence,” as to the broader dynamics of creative retellings. This paper will attempt to address such media-ontological shifts – in Pitseolak’s altered position as photographer and the effect this had on his images and the “presence” of his subjects, and in Kunuk’s staging of oral histories and, through the nature of film as an experience of “cinematic time,” composing time in a way that speaks to Inuit worldviews and life patterns – as radical renegotiations of the mediating properties of photography and film. In that they displace the Western camera’s hegemonic framing and time-based structures, repositioning Inuit “presence” and relations to land within the fundamental conditions of photo-reproduction, this paper will address these works from a position of decolonial media aesthetics, considering the effects of their works as opening up not only for more holistic, community-grounded representation models, but for expanding these relations to land and time directly into the expanded sensory field of media technologies.

Television and the Modernization Ideal in 1980s China: Dazzling the Eyes explores Chinese television history in the pivotal decade of the 1980s and explains the intellectual reception of television in China during this time. While the Chinese media has often been a topic within studies of globalization and the global political economy, scholarly attention to the history of Chinese television requires a more extensive and critical view of the interaction between television and culture. Using theories of media technology, globalization, and gender studies supplemented by Chinese periodicals including Life Out of 8 Hours, Popular TV, Popular Cinema, Modern Family, and Chinese Advertising, as well as oral history interviews, this book re-examines how Western technology was introduced to and embedded into Chinese culture. Wen compares and analyzes television dramas produced in China and imported from other nations while examining the interaction between various ideologies of Chinese society and those of the international media. Moreover, she explores how the hybridity between Western television culture and Chinese traditions were represented in popular Chinese visual media, specifically the confusions and ambitions of modernization and the negotiation between tradition and modernity, nationalism and internationalism, in the intellectual reception of television in China.

Following the exportation of Japanese media products such as TV dramas, Japanese culture and products have swept across many Asian countries, especially Taiwan. Based on the historical background and unique characteristics of games, this study investigates the cultural effect of Japanese video games on players in Taiwan. This study also presents an analysis of the differences between TV and the video game as cultural vehicles. We used both quantitative and qualitative methods. Results indicate a relationship between game-playing behavior and the identification of Japanese culture. However, the relationship between video game playing and consumption was nonsignificant. This shows the power of video games in nation-building but not in nation-branding, in contrast with TV. This study presents a discussion of the findings to shed light on the cultural effects of video games.

This study explores the globalization and liberalization that has occurred in Indian television over the two decades starting from 1990.

Katharina Nötzold explores whether and how mass media can contribute to nation-building after civil war. Drawing on the example of Lebanon’s audiovisual media organisations, which are mostly privately owned by politicians, she demonstrates how political elites use television to transmit their visions of post-war society. Lebanon’s nation-building process from 1990 to 2005 was characterized by Syrian dominance over political life. From an extensive content analysis of Lebanese news and interviews with analysts, journalists and managers from all Lebanese TV stations, it emerges that political information on television focused more on divisive experiences than cohesive ones. This has underpinned continued sectarianism in Lebanon, in the media as in society at large, and has impeded nation-building. Biographische Informationen Katharina Nötzold is a political scientist and RCUK Research Fellow at the University of Westminster's Arab Media Centre, and she completed her PhD in Media and Communications at the University of Erfurt, Germany. She lived in Beirut and Amman and worked previously for the Center for International Peace Operations, Berlin. She is editor of Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture and author of articles on Arab media and media representations of migrants and Islam. Reihe Medien und politische Kommunikation – Naher Osten und islamische Welt - Band 19

By the end of the twentieth century, Mexican multimedia conglomerate Televisa stood as one of the most powerful media companies in the world. Most scholars have concluded that the company’s success was owed in large part to its executives who walked in lockstep with the government and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which ruled for seventy-one years. At the same time, government decisions regulating communications infrastructure aided the development of the television industry. In one of the first books to be published in English on Mexican television, Celeste González de Bustamante argues that despite the cozy relationship between media moguls and the PRI, these connections should not be viewed as static and without friction. Through an examination of early television news programs, this book reveals the tensions that existed between what the PRI and government officials wanted to be reported and what was actually reported and how. Further, despite the increasing influence of television on society, viewers did not always accept or agree with what they saw on the air. Television news programming played an integral role in creating a sense of lo mexicano (that which is Mexican) at a time of tremendous political, social, and cultural change. At its core the book grapples with questions about the limits of cultural hegemony at the height of the PRI and the cold war.

The Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) research program is a collective project associated with Latin America. In addition to a critique of Eurocentric “colonial modernity,” the project highlights non-Eurocentric forms of knowing and being in the world. It also aims to foster alternative or decolonial thinking emerging from the lived colonial experiences of those situated “outside” Europe. This last is what MCD proponents claim differentiates it from postcolonial critiques of modernity with their emphasis on deconstruction. This review provides a brief but critical overview of the MCD project's parameters and claims. It makes a cautionary call to those tempted by “alternatives to modernity,” who might want to uncritically adopt alternative decolonial thinking. It concludes with a call for a closer and critical engagement with Latin American decolonial ideas and those they contest.

Discursos sobre “raza” y nación en Colombia, 1880-1930 constituye un aporte a la investigación sobre la formación de la nación en Colombia durante los siglos xix al xx. El libro es producto de la investigación de tesis de maestría del autor y se centra en mostrar cómo las elites del país concibieron y, en específico, aplicaron con la legislación y otros recursos políticos y culturales, formas de poder y hegemonía mediante las cuales establecieron su dominio a partir del control social, la higienización -“depuración racial o blanqueamiento de la raza”- y el señalamiento a los grupos que resistieron esas formas arbitrarias de poder desde arriba. La estructura del libro está dividida en una introducción, cuatro capítulos, las conclusiones, la bibliografía y una corta semblanza del autor. El primer capítulo es un análisis metodológico de la “alteridad”, a partir de la perspectiva poscolonial y decolonial; siguiendo a autores de renombre en ese campo, trata de demostrar – lamentablemente de modo uniforme– el carácter cruel y violento del proceso de europeización y de sus valores “irracionales” más recurrentes. Los capítulos del dos al cinco se dedican a sustentar la postura metodológica con un material de fuentes y de análisis sobre el racismo colombiano en los siglos xix y xx.

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

While sharing fundamental similarities with other colonial and post-colonial experiences, Latin America has a unique history of having been the proving ground for early Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects, of having experienced a relatively long duration of – but also historically early end to – these projects, and of negotiating a particular and complex trajectory of internal and external post-colonial relations. What can the study of this distinct colonial and post-colonial experience contribute to a broader program of postcolonial sociology? Conversely, what can a revitalized postcolonial sociology contribute to the study of Latin America? This article develops provisional answers to these questions by reviewing major currents in South and North American scholarship on the Latin American colonial and post-colonial experience. Some of this scholarship self-consciously identifies with broader movements in postcolonial studies; but much of it – both historical and contemporary – does not. By bringing together diverse strands of thought, this article sheds new light on what postcolonialism means in the Latin American context, while using the comparative leverage that this set of often overlooked cases provides to contribute to a new program of postcolonial sociology.