Rechercher

In this paper I offer a brief overview of the academic debates about post-colonial theories and the concept of coloniality, seeking to map out their Latin American translations, especially from the perspective of feminist theories in relation to the coloniality of gender. By emphasizing an intersectional approach to understand the gendered character of coloniality, decolonial feminists are seeking innovative ways of articulating new epistemologies or “saberes propios”. However, in these debates little attention has been given to the issue of the travels and translations of decolonial feminisms in Latin America. In focusing on the vexed issue of translation, I want to explore some of the challenges Latin American decolonial feminists are facing today.

Video games are an enormous segment of popular media today, comparable to tele-vision and movies. Moreover, video games represent a new form of media distinguishedfrom previous forms due to the interactive element, where game players have the ability to change and influence the game world. This paper contributes to the study of race and popular media by examining how race is presented in role-playing video games throughthe feature of avatar creation. Capabilities for avatar creation are analyzed in over sixty massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) in service as of early2010 and twenty offline role-playing games (RPGs) published over the past 10 years.The analysis shows that the vast majority of games, both online and offline, do not allow for the creation of avatars with a non-white racial appearance. Forcing an Angloappearance on avatars that purport to represent the player has the potential to reinforce asense of normative whiteness as well as shape the social composition of online worldsinto all-white virtual spaces, contributing to the creation of a virtual“white habitus.”

In this investigation, the authors ask how media exemplars of Black masculinity influence the views of and intentions toward other Black men. An experiment compared the effects of exposure to Black video game characters fitting the exemplar thug or street criminal (e.g., Carl Johnson from GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN ANDREAS) versus exemplars of professional Black men (e.g., political leaders), on evaluations of an unknown and unrelated Black or White political candidate and on pro-Black attitudes. Results revealed significant interactions of exemplar type and candidate race on favorability and capability candidate ratings and on pro-Black attitudes. These data demonstrate the power of mass media exemplars of Black masculinity to prime meaningfully different outcomes in viewers. As the face of gaming evolves with advances in technology, so too should the characterization of race in games.

This book introduces the term "otherism" and looks at the discourse of otherism and the issue of otherness in South Asian religion, literature and film. It examines cultural questions related to the human condition of being the "other," of the process of "othering" and of the representation of "otherness" and its religious, cultural and ideological implications. The book applies the perspectives of ideological criticism, theories of hybridity, orientalism, nationalism, and gender and queer studies to gain new insights into the literature, film and culture of South Asia. It looks at the different ways of interpreting "otherness" today. The book goes on to analyze the ideological implications of the creation of "otherness" with regard to religious and cultural identity and the legitimation of power, as well as how the representation of "otherness" reflects the power structures of contemporary societies in South Asia. Offering a well-thought-out reflection on important cultural questions as well as a deep insight into the study of religion and "otherness" in South Asian literature and film, this book is a pioneering project that is of interest to scholars of South Asian Studies and South Asian religions, literatures and cultures.

What does it mean to be white? This remains the question at large in the continued effort to examine how white racial identity is constructed and how systems of white privilege operate in everyday life. White Out brings together the original work of leading scholars across the disciplines of sociology, philosophy, history, and anthropology to give readers an important and cutting-edge study of ""whiteness""

The written curatorial statement from the organizing committee of the 11th Havana Biennial arrived via email the same day that we were preparing a dossier for the Romanian magazine IDEA. As we put together a brief history of “Decolonial Aesthetics” meetings and some portions of the “Decolonial Manifesto,” we discussed the need to bring to the biennial some of the critical and creative processes emanating from the decolonial collective. Previous editions of the biennial were overcharged with doses of “postmodernity,” marginal notes on the “postcolonial” condition, and celebrations of the “altermodern” (with its postproduction and relational dimensions). These were present in the curatorial practices, as well as in several of the presentations at the Theoretical Forum during the 2006 and 2009 editions. As we kept reading through the Biennial‘s curatorial statement, its content promoted a heated discussion among us where the idea of presenting a panel on decolonial aestheSis at the Havana Biennial became seen as not only relevant, but also, and above all, necessary.

En medio del proceso de construcción de la República, durante el siglo xix, en Venezuela los sectores no blancos de la sociedad intentaron legitimarse a través de la fotografía en las carte-de-visite, con el objetivo de ratificar su posición en esta sociedad ‘café con leche’. El uso de esta tecnología, así como la aparición y aceptación de manuales de urbanidad, fueron parte de un proceso en el que estos sectores intentaron ‘modernizarse’, reflejando las tensiones sociales asociadas, por ejemplo, a la dicotomía campo-ciudad o a la necesidad de ‘blanquearse’ ante los ojos de los coterráneos. El objetivo de este trabajo, es estudiar la manera en que el retrato fotográfico y el manual de urbanidad actúan en una sociedad cuyas diferencias y distancias sociales y económicas han sufrido un gran trastorno luego del proceso independentista. During the process of the construction of the Republic, in the 19th Century, non-white sectors of Venezuelan society attempted to legitimise themselves through photographs in their cart-de-visite, with the object of ratifying their position in this ‘coffee and milk’ society. The use of such technology, as well as the introduction and acceptance of urbanity handbooks, were part of a process in which these sectors tried to ‘modernise’, reflecting related social tensions, for example, the urban-rural dichotomy or the need for ‘whitening’ themselves in the eyes of their fellow citizens. The purpose of this paper is to study the way in which photographic portraits and urbanity handbooks act in a society in which social and economic differences and distances have undergone a great upheaval since the independence process.

Sakahàn' celebrates a growing international commitment to the collection, study and exhibition of indigenous art. Featuring more than 75 artists from around the world, this remarkable project places indigenous art squarely at the centre of contemporary art produced today.

Video games are inherently transnational by virtue of their industrial, textual, and player practices. This collection includes essays from scholars from eight countries analyzing game cultures on macro- and micro-levels and investigates the growing transnational nature of digital play

Game Studies is a rapidly growing area of contemporary scholarship, yet volumes in the area have tended to focus on more general issues. With Playing with the Past, game studies is taken to the next level by offering a specific and detailed analysis of one area of digital game play -- the representation of history. The collection focuses on the ways in which gamers engage with, play with, recreate, subvert, reverse and direct the historical past, and what effect this has on the ways in which we go about constructing the present or imagining a future. What can World War Two strategy games teach us about the reality of this complex and multifaceted period? Do the possibilities of playing with the past change the way we understand history? If we embody a colonialist's perspective to conquer 'primitive' tribes in Colonization, does this privilege a distinct way of viewing history as benevolent intervention over imperialist expansion? The fusion of these two fields allows the editors to pose new questions about the ways in which gamers interact with their game worlds. Drawing these threads together, the collection concludes by asking whether digital games - which represent history or historical change - alter the way we, today, understand history itself.

Article sur les machinimas de l'artiste Skawennati (Kanien'kehá:ka) et du travail du laboratoire d'ABTEC (Aboriginal Territories on cyberspace) à l'Université Concordia.

Depuis la « découverte de l’Amérique », les cosmologies amérindiennes et inuit n’ont cessé de nourrir l’imaginaire et les fantasmes de l’Occident. Les chroniqueurs missionnaires ont introduit un paradoxe qui persiste de nos jours, les Amérindiens et les Inuit étant souvent décrits comme des êtres religieux mais sans véritable religion (Désy, 1988 ; Gélinas et Teasdale, 2005). La notion de spiritualité est une manière commode de reproduire ce point de vue. D’une part, elle permet de regrouper ...

The conceptualization of decolonial aesthetics is fairly recent, however its points of departure — the epistemic shifts that have been challenging coloniality in the artistic and cultural practices of the Global South — are as old as the colonial system. The defiance of colonialism in Vodou dance and rituals, which in Haiti ultimately led to the first successful enslaved people’s revolution, is a splendid case in point.

The years following the Cultural Revolution saw the arrival of television as part of China's effort to 'modernize' and open up to the West. Endorsed by the Deng Xiaoping regime as a 'bridge' between government and the people, television became at once the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party and the most popular form of entertainment for Chinese people living in the cities. But the authorities failed to realize the unmatched cultural power of television to inspire resistance to official ideologies, expectations, and lifestyles. The presence of television in the homes of the urban Chinese strikingly broadened the cultural and political awareness of its audience and provoked the people to imagine better ways of living as individuals, families, and as a nation. Originally published in 1991, set within the framework of China's political and economic environment in the modernization period, this insightful analysis is based on ethnographic data collected in China before and after the Tiananmen Square disaster. From interviews with leading Chinese television executives and nearly one hundred families in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Xian, the author outlays how Chinese television fosters opposition to the government through the work routines of media professionals, television imagery, and the role of critical, active audience members.

This book explores crucial moments in the emergence of feminine culture in Colombia hitherto unexamined in English-language criticism through an examination of the work of ground-breaking artist Débora Arango, best-selling novelist Laura Restrepo, and three generations of documentary filmmakers.

Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. Neal argues that black men and boys are bound, in profound ways, to and by their legibility. The most “legible” black male bodies are often rendered as criminal, bodies in need of policing and containment. Ironically, Neal argues, this sort of legibility brings welcome relief to white America, providing easily identifiable images of black men in an era defined by shifts in racial, sexual, and gendered identities. Neal highlights the radical potential of rendering legible black male bodies—those bodies that are all too real for us—as illegible, while simultaneously rendering illegible black male bodies—those versions of black masculinity that we can’t believe are real—as legible. In examining figures such as hip-hop entrepreneur and artist Jay-Z, R&B Svengali R. Kelly, the late vocalist Luther Vandross, and characters from the hit HBO series The Wire, among others, Neal demonstrates how distinct representations of black masculinity can break the links in the public imagination that create antagonism toward black men. Looking for Leroy features close readings of contemporary black masculinity and popular culture, highlighting both the complexity and accessibility of black men and boys through visual and sonic cues within American culture, media, and public policy. By rendering legible the illegible, Neal maps the range of identifications and anxieties that have marked the performance and reception of post-Civil Rights era African American masculinity.

The history of videogames has largely been imagined as a patrilineal timeline. Women, when they emerge as participants in the game industry, are typically figured as outliers, exceptions, or early exemplars of “diversity” in the game industry. Yet the common practice of “adding women on” to game history in a gesture of inclusiveness fails to critically inquire into the ways gender is an infrastructure that profoundly affects who has access to what kinds of historical possibilities at a specific moment in time and space. This contribution aims to shift the relevant question from “Where are women in game history?” to “Why are they there in the way that they are?” To do so, the essay strategically deploys Sierra On-Line co-founder and lead designer Roberta Williams as an exceptional case study on the problem of gender in videogame history. Drawing from both media archaeology and feminist cultural studies, this contribution first outlines the function Roberta Williams serves as a gendered subject of game history. The remainder of the essay is organized as three short, non-chronological vignettes about specific objects and practices in the biography of Roberta Williams. Attention to the contextual specificity of Roberta Williams and her historical moment produces an alternative genealogy for gaming centered around relations of intimacy and labor in domestic space. Rather than producing a chronology, the method of this essay illustrates a historical critique by sketching a contour that unsettles the presumptive logic of what we must account for when we write about the objects and subjects of game history.

This remarkable volume, many years in the making, records and scrutinizes definitions of Northwest Coast Native art and its boundaries. A work of critical historiography, it makes accessible for the first time in one place a broad selection of more than 250 years of writing on Northwest Coast "art." Organized thematically, its excerpted texts are from both published and unpublished sources, some not previously available in English. They cover such complex topics as the clash between oral and written knowledge, transcultural entanglement, the influence of surrealist thinking, and the long history of the deployment of Northwest Coast Native art for nationalist purposes. The selections are preceded by thought-provoking introductions that give historical context to the diverse intellectual traditions that have influenced, stimulated, and opposed each othe