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Anthropologists of the senses have long argued that cultures differ in their sensory registers. This groundbreaking volume applies this idea to material culture and the social practices that endow objects with meanings in both colonial and postcolonial relationships. It challenges the privileged position of the sense of vision in the analysis of material culture. Contributors argue that vision can only be understood in relation to the other senses. In this they present another challenge to the assumed western five-sense model, and show how our understanding of material culture in both historical and contemporary contexts might be reconfigured if we consider the role of smell, taste, touch and sound, as well as sight, in making meanings about objects.

Satellite television has not only provided migrant communities with stronger ties to their home countries but also enabled second-generation migrants in particular to know more about their country of origin beyond their family ties. The aim of this chapter is to explore the ways in which Turkish television contributes towards the making of the transnational identity of the “twice minority” group of Alevi Kurds through what I call mediatised culturalisation. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews that I conducted with the second-generation members of the Alevi Kurdish community in London in 2016, I explore the role of Turkish television in contesting the boundaries of transnational social imaginaries of the second-generation viewers.

Art, performance, and spoken or now written text, all belong to the same register of cultural practice in the First Nations I am familiar with or belong to: ceremony. This ceremonial register takes place in a set of spaces created to enact cultural responsibilities to place, people and balance. Galleries and museums, as sites of cultural production and presentation, have the potential to nurture new ceremonies and new working methods.

In this edition, we consider Ancestral materiality, intellectual traditions and expressions spanning the great oceans, skies and lands connecting the kin and Country of First Peoples from around the world. We see the artistic, economic and cultural paradigms as a reflection on life and death, on black holes and shining stars illuminated as constellations in the night skies from the times of our Ancestors and traced in the footprints made on the lands we travel.

This book uncovers popular games' key role in the cultural construction of modern racial fictions. It argues that gaming provides the lens, language, and logic - in short, the authority - behind racial boundary making, reinforcing and at times subverting beliefs about where people racially and spatially belong. It focuses specifically on the experience of Asian Americans and the longer history of ludo-Orientalism, wherein play, the creation of games, and the use of game theory shape how East-West relations are imagined and reinforce notions of foreignness and perceptions of racial difference.

Les auteures dressent le portrait tant des défis actuels que des possibilités qui naissent des relations interculturelles se tissant entre commissaires et cinéastes autochtones et non-autochtones dans le cadre du plus grand festival du film autochtone du Brésil, Cine Kurumin. Ce festival annuel, fondé en 2011, se déroule dans des villages ruraux autochtones, de même que dans des métropoles brésiliennes, attirant ainsi des auditoires variés. Le festival est ouvert aux cinéastes autochtones et non-autochtones qui produisent du matériel audiovisuel portant sur des sujets autochtones de partout dans le monde. Divers processus créatifs y sont encouragés grâce à l’organisation d’ateliers de scénarisation, et des partenariats établis avec des chaînes de télévision permettent une plus large diffusion des films sélectionnés. Alors que les productions audiovisuelles autochtones se développent, leurs contenus se diversifient ; elles englobent en effet de plus en plus de thèmes et de styles, de formats et de perspectives variées. En s’appuyant sur un cadre théorique postcolonial et décolonial, les auteures proposent de nouvelles perspectives sur un cinéma en pleine expansion ; les réalisateurs autochtones et leurs films circulent de plus en plus au sein de festivals non thématiques, reçoivent des prix et font rayonner leurs propres voix et points de vue auprès de publics variés, ce qui crée de nombreuses possibilités d’interactions et de dialogues interculturels. En outre, la mise sur pied de Cine Kurumin témoigne du pouvoir des productions audiovisuelles autochtones de générer des relations interculturelles entre cinéastes, commissaires et public.

Playing back to the Empire, in videogames, is rife with tensions. The imperialist sentiment inherent in reverse-colonist discourse featured in most strategy-based videogames like Europa Universalis IV, where the player could conquer Europe playing for the Marathas, has been noted by Souvik Mukherjee (2017) as playing into the colonial logic while futilely trying to challenge it. Studio Oleomingus, an Indian two-man game studio, is one of the few involved in a different experiment. Their mythical game Somewhere, chronicling a postmodernist search for identity and narrative in the forgotten city of Kayamgadh, has generated significant spin-offs into its universe. With attention to one such spin-off, I will focus critical attention on the issue of the postcolonial gaming of the Museum in A Museum of Dubious Splendors. I will examine the New Museological implications of A Museum of Dubious Splendors, keeping in mind Museologist Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s assertion of museums embodying “the power to name, to represent common sense, to create official versions, to represent the social world, to represent the past” (Hooper-Greenhill 2001: 2). Oleomingus’ own description of A Museum, as an adaptation of edited, mangled, contested short stories by a fictional Urdu writer, Mir Umar Hassan, eschews the linear narrative production of the colonial museum for a game of meanings, where the player enters rooms according to his choice and constructs his/her own “quiet game about prosaic objects and spurious histories.” ("A Museum" 2018) The paper would take this into account and examine the reconceptualization of the museum space with respect to James Clifford’s sense of museums being “contact zones”: A Museum’s lack of any curator, with its curious blend of colonial and native tales and banal objects defamiliarised by “spurious histories” lends itself to questions of playing the Empire back according to a different episteme, through subaltern histories that the colonial museum space silenced. Paying close attention to the question of postcolonial spatiality in this game, I will analyze the historiographical implications of these identity-scatterings and recuperations at constant play in the structure of the game. Keywords: Museum Studies, Thing Theory, Game studies, Marginal identity, Postcolonial Studies

Quand les conditions requises pour le dialogue ne sont pas réunies, il est difficile d’expliquer à une femme blanche : " écoute, nous ne voulons pas qu’on nous impose des de critères féministes hégémoniques " . Cela étant, je reconnais et j’apprécie tout ce que j’ai appris sur les différents courants féministes. Car grâce à eux, je me reconnais comme sujette épistémique et je peux me penser à partir du corps et de l’espace où je vis. Ou encore tisser des idées féministes. C’est ainsi que la construction consciente de mon identité féministe communautaire se renforce et en même temps, nous contribuons au mouvement féministe dans le monde. Par exemple, l’une des étapes que nous devons franchir passe par la langue : nommer dans nos propres langues, qui auront été libérées, les catégories et les concepts que nous élaborons pour analyser l’oppression subie par notre peuple dans l’histoire et notre libération en tant que femmes indigènes, autochtones, paysannes, rurales, ou villageoises. Francesca Gargallo est une écrivaine et féministe autonome italo-mexicaine. Licenciée en philosophie de la Sapienza de Rome et docteure en Études Latinoaméricaines de l’UNAM mexicaine, cette spécialiste de l’histoire des idées féministes, prenant acte de l’échec de l’utopie socialiste, propose de chercher des alternatives à partir d’un féminisme clairement antiraciste, qui fasse la critique de l’ eurocentrisme. Elle s’intéresse au concept de colonialisme interne de Pablo González Casanova, ou de Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. Le livre dont nous traduisons deux extraits, Feminismos desde Abya Yala. Ideas y proposiciones de las mujeres de 607 pueblos en NuestraAmérica, a été publié en 2012 aux éditions Desde abajo.

Esta investigación propone una lectura detallada de una obra de arte de performance creada por el artista ecuatoriano Santiago Reyes, “(REM) Romantic Eyes Movement”. Al examinar la representación de los ojos de Reyes, esta reflexión considera hasta qué punto su pieza puede proveer un espacio de resistencia contra-visual y de curación generacional. Por ende, la obra de Santiago Reyes se interpreta bajo la enmarcación teórica de la “futuridad Latinx” y desde una perspectiva decolonial, mostrando cómo la performance transnacional latinoamericana puede proporcionar un vasto corpus de estudio que reflexiona sobre el alcance y la potencial de la expresión corporal performática.

L’exposition Öndia’tahterendih, oubliées ou disparues : Akonessen, Zitya, Marie et les autres, créée par la Boite Rouge Vif, une OBNL autochtone du Québec, et la commissaire wendate Sylvie Paré, présente 10 artistes rendant hommage aux femmes et aux filles autochtones touchées par le féminicide autochtone, tout en cherchant à mobiliser le public. Je souhaite dans le cadre de cet article explorer les stratégies mises en place au sein de l’exposition, telle qu’elle a été présentée au musée de la Civilisation du Québec en 2018. Je conclurai en explorant l’inscription de l’exposition dans le développement d’un commissariat engagé autochtone au Canada.

When, in 2015, students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa demanded the removal of a statue of British colonial and diamond merchant Cecil Rhodes from their campus, they initiated what was to become a global call to ‘decolonize the university’. In the same year, students at University College London began to ask the question: why is my curriculum white? Other public sector cultural institutions soon joined the chorus in an overdue acknowledgement that unspoken colonial legacies had for too long upheld and promulgated white privilege. The role of public sculpture as a catalyst for political debate and change has a long tradition within art's histories. It serves to remind us of the centrality of the discipline in promoting and maintaining dominant cultural values; and yet it also enables us to interrogate them as historically located and subject to inevitable temporal mutation. Whilst postcolonial studies and critical race studies have been informing and challenging the shape of art history for several decades, new generations of students, scholars, critics, curators, collectors, artists and audiences are seeking radical re-evaluations of the academy and those cultural institutions who hold themselves up as standard-bearers of our collective cultural heritage. But, what, if anything, is specific about the current moment's demands to reassess how universities, museums, and galleries teach, research, collect and exhibit? How can art historians, curators, collectors, museum directors, artists and writers respond to the call to decolonize art history? How can we draw from the rich legacy of postcolonial, feminist, queer and Marxist perspectives within art history, and what are the new theoretical perspectives that are needed?

This article paves way for a materialist analysis of the games industry as 21st century imperialism that is economically and culturally structured to cultivate anti-democratic norms that lead to fascist movements against those who question or seek to change the status quo. While much research has studied the politics of reactionary movements in gaming cultures, few have paid attention to the relation between the games industry as part of an imperialist economic system, the chauvinistic ideals symptomized in their cultural products, and the reactionist consumer audiences they attract and cultivate. As I argue, the economic structure of the industry as 21st century imperialism leads to perpetual anti-democratic crises that are maintained by reactionary forces that cultivate, attract, and form fascist grassroots organization. To conceptualize this dynamic, I invoke the labor aristocracy theory as suggested by Friedrich Engels and V.I. Lenin. This theory helps highlight the material basis from which consumers of digital games are bribed to become ideologically aligned with the chauvinism that the imperialist nature of the games industry is justified by. I also invoke W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of a public and psychological wage to highlight the chauvinistic tendencies that the games industry cultivates via their products and marketing, in which the lack of democratic and equitable representation provides the reactionary consumers a sense of superiority. Together, these approaches account for the economic and cultural bases of both the games industry and its reactionary consumers. By anchoring my analysis in critical theories on imperialism and race, the article identifies the root causes of organized harassment and chauvinism in game cultures, as well as how the industry as 21st century imperialism benefits from and is protected by these forces of reaction.

This contribution interrogates the figure of the perpetrator as it emerges in narrative videogames. First, we provide a brief outlook on some key characteristics of videogames, before we discuss how the specific affordances of this “new” medium offer unprecedented ways of approaching and dealing with perpetrators and perpetration. Finally, we offer concrete examples from three games to illustrate different possible configurations of the playerperpetrator nexus—Yager Development’s Spec Ops: The Line (2012), 11 Bit Studio’s This War of Mine (2015), and Hangar 13’s Mafia III (2016). In contrast to other media, games enable an active exploration of, and participation in, a variety of possible offenses. Rather than merely witnessing evil deeds, players are immersed in simulated environments that demand constant evaluations of complex settings and require decision-making under systemic limitations. This performative aspect of play makes games a unique medium for learning and teaching about the intricate logics and innate dynamics of perpetrations.

This article aims to answer two questions. The first is: What is a Sámi art museum? The second question considers whether there is no Sámi art museum, as assumed by the Nordnorsk kunstmuseum (NNKM) as the title of a museum performance and exhibition in 2017. To answer the first question, it is necessary to tell the long story of the Sámi cultural-historical museum in Karasjok, Samiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (SVD). This museum was inaugurated in 1972 as an act of resistance against the increasing assimilation politics towards the Sámi population in the post-war period. The building that was erected became a cultural and political centre, and a living cultural institution that housed the increasing Sámi ethno-political movement and its energy. Furthermore, as I will argue, the activity that took place at the site became a part of Sámi cultural heritage. The museum has also collected art since 1972 - a collection that today comprises 1400 artworks. Since the 1980s, various plans have been made for a Sámi art museum in a separate building, somehow connected to SVD, however, none of these plans have yet been realised. The article discusses the different reasons for this, and points to the connotations embedded in the SVD building as a cultural and political centre as one of the contributing factors. To answer the question of whether there is no Sámi art museum, a critical reading of the Nordnorsk kunstmuseum’s 2017 museum performance There Is No is necessary. My answer to the question is that NNKM, unfortunately, fell into several traps in their attempt to focus on the fact that there is no physical building. One such trap, that is very common in Western museums displaying indigenous art, is their use of traditional art-historical models as interpretive lenses when displaying indigenous art. A different concept of what an art museum could be today, as a place where things happen, where we could meet counter narratives, or Sámi art and culture could be presented as being part of the present as well as the past and future, would have been closer to a Sámi art museum. I offer this conclusion both through the deeper understanding of Sámi cultural and ethno-political movements as offered in the story of SVD, and through my reading of the theories of the indigenous American scholar John Paul Rangel. While there may indeed be no physical building claiming to be a Sámi art museum, it does in fact exist through the Sámi concept of árbevierru.

This article looks at videogames about politics within the theoretical framework of Giorgio Agamben’s states of exception and argues that while videogames can reveal political issues by implementing rules into the gameplay, they simultaneously render the in-game rules and consequences inoperative in regard to real-world politics, which can be described as states of exception in Agamben’s sense. Agamben distinguishes between the fictitious and the real state of exception, and this distinction leads to his proposal of a politics of pure means in which he considers play as a means of profanation that renders what has been played with inoperative and free. Drawing on this discussion, the article looks at the parallel between the rules in videogames and the laws in states of exception and re-examines the concepts of game rules and play under the rubric of Agamben’s political philosophy. In so doing, it explores how playing with rules in videogames about politics can turn these games into states of exception to talk about and reflect on various political issues.

Indigenous Futurisms: Transcending Past/Present/Future investigates a major trend in Contemporary Native Art--the rise of futuristic or science-fiction inspired Native American art. The essays and artworks present the future from a Native perspective and illustrate the use of Indigenous cosmology and science as part of tribal oral history and ways of life. Several of the artists use sci-fi related themes to emphasize the importance of Futurism in Native cultures, to pass on tribal oral history and to revive their Native language. However, Indigenous Futurism also offer a way to heal from the traumas of the past and present--the post-apocalyptic narratives depicted in some of the artworks are often reality for Indigenous communities worldwide.

This book proposes contemporary decolonization as an approach to developing cultural economies in the Global South. This book represents the first critical examination and comparison of cultural and creative industries (CCI) and economy concepts in the Caribbean and Africa.

This article examines how “colonial time” is called into question in two short films of the National Film Board of Canada’s series Souvenir, from 2015. The question of time lies at the heart of this series, for which the NFB commissioned contemporary Indigenous filmmakers to take up their archives of visual material on Indigenous peoples. The colonial temporal framework is at work in the vast archives of ethnographic and documentary film and photography on Indigenous peoples dating back to the early twentieth century, in which Indigenous people are often represented as part of “vanishing” cultures. Thus, in this article, I underscore the temporal interruptions that occur when ethnographic visual material of Indigenous peoples is put into the hands of contemporary Indigenous artists. I focus first on what it means to repurpose dehumanizing colonial archives and ask whether visual sovereignty is in fact possible within the archives. By analyzing the reappropriation of archival footage in the short films Mobilize by Caroline Monnet and Etlinisigu’niet (Bleed Down) by Jeff Barnaby, I elucidate how the filmmakers break with modes of colonial time through what I propose to call “reframings” that offer alternative ways of conceiving of time. By rehabilitating ethnographic images, these filmmakers refuse to project the material into the distant past and complicate the readability of Indigenous images in the archives, revealing how the reappropriation of old images can be just as powerful as the production of new ones.