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This article presents the ways in which Muslims and Arabs are represented and represent themselves in video games. First, it analyses how various genres of European and American video games have constructed the Arab or Muslim Other. Within these games, it demonstrates how the diverse ethnic and religious identities of the Islamic world have been flattened out and reconstructed into a series of social typologies operating within a broader framework of terrorism and hostility. It then contrasts these broader trends in western digital representation with selected video games produced in the Arab world, whose authors have knowingly subverted and refashioned these stereotypes in two unique and quite different fashions. In conclusion, it considers the significance of western attempts to transcend simplified patterns of representation that have dominated the video game industry by offering what are known as 'serious' games.

Video games have become a limitless and multifaceted medium through which major corporations and Hollywood visionaries alike are reaching broader global audiences and influencing cultural trends at a rate unmatched by any other media. This book traces the growth of a global phenomenon that has become an integral part of popular culture.

Today’s media are vast in both form and influence; however, few cultural studies scholars ad-dress the video gaming industry’s role in domestic maintenance and global imposition of U.S. hegemonic ideologies. In this study, video games are analyzed by cover art, content, and origin of production. Whether it is earning more “powers” in games such as Star Wars, or earning points to purchase more powerful artillery in Grand Theft Auto, capitalist ideology is reinforced in a subtle, entertaining fashion. This study shows that oppressive hegemonic representations of gender and race are not only present, but permeate the majority of top-selling video games. Finally, the study traces the origins of best-selling games, to reveal a virtual U.S. monopoly in the content of this formative medium.

This paper is based on ongoing research into the gendered use of mobile convergent media in the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, what role does the cute have and how does it correlate with types of consumption? As a region, the Asia-Pacific is marked by diverse penetration rates, subject to local cultural and socio-economic nuances. Two defining locations - Seoul (South Korea) and Tokyo (Japan) - are seen as both mobile centres and gaming centres which the world looks towards as examples of the future-in-the-present. Unlike Japan, which pioneered the keitai (mobile) IT revolution with devices such as i-mode, South Korea has become a centre for mobile DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadband) with the successful implementation of TV mobile phones (TU mobile) in 2005. One of the key features of mobile media technologies is the attempt by the industry to find the next killer application . One such application is the possibility of online multiplayer games accessed through mobile (broadband) telephonic devices such as MMO golf RPG Shot Online (a golf game for mobile phones). Amongst this frenzy of trend spotting and stargazing, Seoul as a mobile broadband and gaming centre provides a curious case study for the social and cultural intricacies informing the rise of gaming as an everyday practice for many Koreans.This article begins by outlining the game play and technoculture particular to South Korea and then explores the phenomenon of Kart Rider in South Korean gaming cultures - and its perception/ reception outside Korea - to sketch some of the issues at stake in playing it cute (particularly in the form of cute avatars), consuming Korea and the endurance of co-present communities. In particular, it contemplates the implications of current emerging online mobile gaming genres such as so-called female games such as the cute' Kart Rider in order to think about changing modes of game play and attendant social spaces.

This collection of essays explores the mosaic of East Asian cinema by focusing on issues of identity, history and trans-regional cultural flow withnin this dynamic region. The argument of the editors is firstly, cinematic cross-pollination within East Asian film has been a constant since 1945, and second, any discussion of the complex identity of East Asia and its national cinemas must consider regional historical issues. These arguments run counter to recent literature published in the field of East Asian cinema that claim responses to Western globalization and modernization are the shaping forces for Asian cultural identity.

The US Army developed multiplayer online First Person Shooter video game, America's Army, was examined as the first instance of an entirely state-produced and directed enterprise leveraging video game popular culture. Specifically, this study is concerned with the potential of the America's Army gamespace as a US civilian-military public sphere of the Information Age, as assessed through Habermasian theories of democratic communication. Interview fieldwork was carried out in several America's Army game communities including those of real-life military personnel, Christian Evangelicals, and hackers. The political activities of these exceptional game communities are considered for the ways they escape and transcend current critical theories of Internet-based public spheres.

Globalization of Japanese popular culture is reshaping the global cultural landscape. Some forms of Japanese popular culture (such as video games animation and sushi) are well-received internationally, whereas others (such as pop music, films and TV dramas) are only popular in Asia. Of all forms of Japanese popular culture, video game is perhaps the most powerful due to its strong universal appeal. It has dominated the world market since the mid-1980s. This article uses Singapore as a case study to demonstrate the global popularization of Japanese video games. There has been a boom of Japanese popular culture in Singapore in the 1990s. In particular, Japanese video games, comics and animation have become an integral part of youth culture in Singapore (Ng, March 2000: 234-246; Ng, May 2000: 44-56; Ng, June 2000: 1-14). Video game is a neglected topic in cultural studies. Although there are some basic studies of Japanese video games in the Western world (Hayes & Disney, 1995; Herz, 1997; Kinder 1991; Monopolies, 1995; Sheff, 1993), its impact in Asia is largely unknown. This article is a preliminary study of the Japanese video game culture and industry in Singapore from historical and socio-cultural perspectives, focusing on consoles, games and players. Based on interviews, questionnaires and data from newspapers and magazines, this research aims at pro viding a general overview of the history and impact of Japanese video games in Singapore. All the data and analyses are basic and this is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss any particular issue or theory in details. This paper consists of four sections. The first three sections outline the development of home video game consoles, handheld electronic games and game arcades respectively. The concluding section pinpoints the characteristics of the video

It's about the role that music, film, visual art, and Indigenous cultural practices play in and beyond Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. The essays question the ways in which components of the reconciliation, such as apology and witnessing, have social and political effects for residential-schools survivors, intergenerational survivors, and settler publics."-- Provided by publisher

This book develops a nuanced decolonial critique that calls for the decolonization of media and communication studies in Africa and the Global South. Last Moyo argues that the academic project in African Media Studies and other non-Western regions continues to be shaped by Western modernity’s histories of imperialism, colonialism, and the ideologies of Eurocentrism and neoliberalism. While Africa and the Global South dismantled the physical empire of colonialism after independence, the metaphysical empire of epistemic and academic colonialism is still intact and entrenched in the postcolonial university’s academic programmes like media and communication studies. To address these problems, Moyo argues for the development of a Southern theory that is not only premised on the decolonization imperative, but also informed by the cultures, geographies, and histories of the Global South. The author recasts media studies within a radical cultural and epistemic turn that locates future projects of theory building within a decolonial multiculturalism that is informed by trans-cultural and trans- epistemic dialogue between Southern and Northern epistemologies.

This chapter argues that media and communication studies lie at the centre of Euro-American modernity. There is no doubt that the interdiscipline is the bastion of the coloniality of knowledge and its decolonization is way overdue given the indispensability of communication in the political, cultural, and epistemic liberation in the Global South. As a field as well as a social process, ‘mass communication was instrumental in the twentieth century crusade of modernity where it remained a key element in the unfolding of the future’ (Hardt in Myths for the Masses: An Essay on Mass Communication. Blackwell, London, p. 3, 2004). Decoloniality arises as a necessary moral and epistemic project to develop a nuanced praxis of decolonization agenda in the interdiscipline. Decolonization must decentre Eurocentrism and imperial theories and deprovincialize the marginalized alternate epistemologies in media and communication studies. The aim of decolonial turn is not to reproduce a new Hegelian hierarchies or new knowledge power structures in the field, but to give birth to a truly multicultural critical media theory that emerges from intercultural and trans-epistemic dialogue between the geographic Northern and Southern epistemologies.

Telenovela shapes important and highly favorite section of the television productions. The T.V. series have moved out from their traditional structure with an entertaining aspect and have been divided into different types and scopes. Taking into consideration the time and the atmosphere of dissemination which the Telenovela programs hold in T.V. antenna, there is a need to conduct studies on sociology of Telenovela more than any other times in the past. This article is an attempt to review the two subject-matters of Telenovela and Narration and their connection with democracy through sociological sporadic studies. This will also present the significance of this genre in T.V. productions at local and international discourses. Observations, field researches and library study methods have been employed in this research.

Rentable produit d'exportation diffusé dans 128 pays, le feuilleton télévisé brésilien fait partie du quotidien de la population depuis une trentaine d'années. Si une grande part de son succès repose sur l'exploitation de « la culture des sentiments », dans sa version la plus moderne, il sait aussi plonger au cœur de la réalité comme l'a démontré entre autres avec brio « Le roi du troupeau » (1986) qui mettait en scène le conflit entre les sans-terre et les grands propriétaires terriens.

N.D.

Este texto analiza la transcendencia de la revolución feminista que se inició en los años 60 a partir del lema «Lo personal es político» y su influencia en la transformación del arte contemporáneo. En este contexto el trabajo desarrollado por las prácticas artísticas y la crítica feminista en relación a la denuncia de la violencia contra la mujer ocupa una posición destacada. A lo largo de estas últimas décadas no sólo ha evidenciado la violencia como un hecho continuado y global hacia la mujer sino que, además, ha iniciado nuevas narraciones que dan respuesta a un drama considerado socialmente como un irremediable «trágico final».

Postcolonialismo y feminismo utilizan conceptos comunes para el análisis y de/construcción de las narrativas dominantes. En países donde la colonización ha hecho estragos, las mujeres ponen en valor su empoderamiento como protagonistas de su destino. En esta línea las mujeres han aportado sus propuestas feministas para una nueva visión de lo colonial/postcolonial. Este trabajo pretende hacer un chequeo por aquellos trabajos videográficos de mujeres que, después de haber sido colonizadas, han realizado una descolonización cultural, situando su creatividad en varios continentes.

En este artículo, se aborda la temática del video como tecnología de género. El video es el medio de creación artística que algunas mujeres están utilizando para crear lo que se puede llamar imá genes en femenino. Se hace un acercamiento al discurso feminista y los presupuestos teóricos que se han tomado para el análisis del discurso videográfico de las mujeres. Se presenta un breve análisis de los trabajos de las videastas Pola Weiss y Pilar Rodríguez.

A history of a past phenomenon - racial art - which has ramifications for the present.