Global Media and Race – serie

A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture explores the cultural and creative lives of the largely young undocumented Mexican population in New York City since September 11, 2001. Inspired by a dialogue between the landmark works of Paul Gilroy and Gloria Anzaldúa, it develops a new analytic framework, the Atlantic Borderlands, which bridges Mexican diasporic experiences in New York City and the black diaspora, not as a comparison but in recognition that colonialism, interracial and interethnic contact through trade, migration, and slavery are connected via capitalist economies and technological developments. This book is based on ten years of fieldwork in  New York City, with members of  a vibrant community of young Mexican migrants who coexist and interact with people from all over the world. It focuses on youth culture including hip hop, graffiti, muralism, labor activism, arts entrepreneurship and collective making.

The rise of digital media and globalization's intensification since the 1990s have significantly refigured global cinema's form and content. The coincidence of digitalization and globalization has produced what this book helps to define and describe as a flourishing border cinema whose aesthetics reflect, construct, intervene in, denature, and reconfigure geopolitical borders. This collection demonstrates how border cinema resists contemporary border fortification processes, showing how cinematic media have functioned technologically and aesthetically to engender contemporary shifts in national and individual identities while proposing alternative conceptions of these identities to those promulgated by the often restrictive current political rhetoric and ideologies that represent a backlash to globalization.

The rise of digital media and globalization's intensification since the 1990s have significantly refigured global cinema's form and content. The coincidence of digitalization and globalization has produced what this book helps to define and describe as a flourishing border cinema whose aesthetics reflect, construct, intervene in, denature, and reconfigure geopolitical borders. This collection demonstrates how border cinema resists contemporary border fortification processes, showing how cinematic media have functioned technologically and aesthetically to engender contemporary shifts in national and individual identities while proposing alternative conceptions of these identities to those promulgated by the often restrictive current political rhetoric and ideologies that represent a backlash to globalization.

Media Culture in Transnational Asia: Convergences and Divergences examines contemporary media use within Asia, where over half of the world’s population resides. The book addresses media use and practices by looking at the transnational exchanges of ideas, narratives, images, techniques, and values and how they influence media consumption and production throughout Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran and many others. The book’s contributors are especially interested in investigating media and their intersections with narrative, medium, technologies, and culture through the lenses that are particularly Asian by turning to Asian sociopolitical and cultural milieus as the meaningful interpretive framework to understand media. This timely and cutting-edge research is essential reading for those interested in transnational and global media studies.

Media Culture in Transnational Asia: Convergences and Divergences examines contemporary media use within Asia, where over half of the world’s population resides. The book addresses media use and practices by looking at the transnational exchanges of ideas, narratives, images, techniques, and values and how they influence media consumption and production throughout Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran and many others. The book’s contributors are especially interested in investigating media and their intersections with narrative, medium, technologies, and culture through the lenses that are particularly Asian by turning to Asian sociopolitical and cultural milieus as the meaningful interpretive framework to understand media. This timely and cutting-edge research is essential reading for those interested in transnational and global media studies.

Indigenous Peoples Rise Up: The Global Ascendency of Social Media Activism illustrates the impact of social media in expanding the nature of Indigenous communities and social movements. Social media has bridged distance, time, and nation states to mobilize Indigenous peoples to build coalitions across the globe and to stand in solidarity with one another. These movements have succeeded and gained momentum and traction precisely because of the strategic use of social media. Social media-Twitter and Facebook in particular-has also served as a platform for fostering health, well-being, and resilience, recognizing Indigenous strength and talent, and sustaining and transforming cultural practices when great distances divide members of the same community.  Including a range of international indigenous voices from the US, Canada, Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Africa, the book takes an interdisciplinary approach, bridging Indigenous studies, media studies, and social justice studies. Including examples like Idle No More in Canada, Australian Recognise!, and social media campaigns to maintain Maori language, Indigenous Peoples Rise Up serves as one of the first studies of Indigenous social media use and activism.

Indigenous Peoples Rise Up: The Global Ascendency of Social Media Activism illustrates the impact of social media in expanding the nature of Indigenous communities and social movements. Social media has bridged distance, time, and nation states to mobilize Indigenous peoples to build coalitions across the globe and to stand in solidarity with one another. These movements have succeeded and gained momentum and traction precisely because of the strategic use of social media. Social media-Twitter and Facebook in particular-has also served as a platform for fostering health, well-being, and resilience, recognizing Indigenous strength and talent, and sustaining and transforming cultural practices when great distances divide members of the same community.  Including a range of international indigenous voices from the US, Canada, Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Africa, the book takes an interdisciplinary approach, bridging Indigenous studies, media studies, and social justice studies. Including examples like Idle No More in Canada, Australian Recognise!, and social media campaigns to maintain Maori language, Indigenous Peoples Rise Up serves as one of the first studies of Indigenous social media use and activism.

Singer. Dancer. Movie star. Activist. Queer icon. Afrofuturist. Working class heroine. Time traveler. Prophet. Feminist. Android. Dirty Computer.  Janelle Monáe is all these things and more, making her one of the most fascinating artists to emerge in the twenty-first century. This provocative new study explores how Monáe's work has connected different media platforms to strengthen and enhance new movements in art, theory, and politics. It considers not only Monáe's groundbreaking albums The ArchAndroid, The Electric Lady, and Dirty Computer, but also Monáe's work as an actress in such films as Hidden Figures and Antebellum, as well as her soundtrack appearances in socially-engaged projects ranging from I May Destroy You to Us. Examining Monáe as a cultural icon whose work is profoundly intersectional, this book maps how she is actively reshaping discourses around race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism. Tracing Monáe's performances of joy, desire, pain, and hope across a wide range of media forms, it shows how she imagines Afrofuturist, posthumanist, and postcapitalist utopias, while remaining grounded in the realities of being a Black woman in a white-dominated industry. This is an exciting introduction to an audacious innovator whose work offers us fresh ways to talk about identity, desire, and power.

Across the globe, the violent effects of patriarchy are manifest. Women, trans people, gender-nonconforming people, and the racialized Other are regularly subjected to physical danger, beginning with the denial of vitally important health care, and, in its most horrific form, rape, trafficking, and murder. Monsters vs. Patriarchy links these real-world horrors to the monstrification and dehumanization of people as expressed in contemporary global cinema. This monstrification has been achieved through a toxic imagination attributed to women, a trait that historically referred to the power of women to negatively affect others, including their own children in the womb, with only the use of their imagination. This process reflects the misogynist and racist world in which we live, where female bodies, people of color, and alternative identities represent a threat to patriarchal power.Monsters vs. Patriarchy examines female monstrosity as it appears in horror films from around the world and considers specific political, scientific, and historical contexts to better understand how we construct and reconstruct monstrosity, using an intersectional approach to examine the imposition of gender and racial hierarchies that support national power structures. The authors contend that monstrous female cinematic subjects, including ghosts, witches, cannibals, and posthuman beings, are becoming empowered, using the tools of their monstrification to smash the colonial, white supremacist, and misogynist structures that created them.

Across the globe, the violent effects of patriarchy are manifest. Women, trans people, gender-nonconforming people, and the racialized Other are regularly subjected to physical danger, beginning with the denial of vitally important health care, and, in its most horrific form, rape, trafficking, and murder. Monsters vs. Patriarchy links these real-world horrors to the monstrification and dehumanization of people as expressed in contemporary global cinema. This monstrification has been achieved through a toxic imagination attributed to women, a trait that historically referred to the power of women to negatively affect others, including their own children in the womb, with only the use of their imagination. This process reflects the misogynist and racist world in which we live, where female bodies, people of color, and alternative identities represent a threat to patriarchal power.Monsters vs. Patriarchy examines female monstrosity as it appears in horror films from around the world and considers specific political, scientific, and historical contexts to better understand how we construct and reconstruct monstrosity, using an intersectional approach to examine the imposition of gender and racial hierarchies that support national power structures. The authors contend that monstrous female cinematic subjects, including ghosts, witches, cannibals, and posthuman beings, are becoming empowered, using the tools of their monstrification to smash the colonial, white supremacist, and misogynist structures that created them.

"Black Orpheus" and the Globalization of Afro-Brazilian Culture is the first historical study in English to examine the development, production, and reception of the 1958 film Black Orpheus and its legacy in the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the making of the film and the trajectories of the major actors and musicians who helped construct an image of Black Brazil and provides an analysis of the globalization of Afro-Brazilian images and music in France and the United States in the wake of the movie's success. Using archival sources, interviews, and the secondary literature from France, Brazil, and the United States, this book reveals information about the cultural histories of all three countries and gives readers new insight into the trajectories of diverse actors such as Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn, and Léa Garcia and performers such as Agostinho dos Santos, Baden Powell, and Maria D'Apparecida.

"Black Orpheus" and the Globalization of Afro-Brazilian Culture is the first historical study in English to examine the development, production, and reception of the 1958 film Black Orpheus and its legacy in the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the making of the film and the trajectories of the major actors and musicians who helped construct an image of Black Brazil and provides an analysis of the globalization of Afro-Brazilian images and music in France and the United States in the wake of the movie's success. Using archival sources, interviews, and the secondary literature from France, Brazil, and the United States, this book reveals information about the cultural histories of all three countries and gives readers new insight into the trajectories of diverse actors such as Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn, and Léa Garcia and performers such as Agostinho dos Santos, Baden Powell, and Maria D'Apparecida.

Digital Activism in the Mexican Nations analyzes Mexico's rich history of digital activism, which is among the most vibrant of any country in the Hispanic world. The book begins with a discussion of the Zapatista uprising of 1994—which is widely understood as the first digital social movement in the history of the world—and ends with a discussion of the digital strategies of migrant communities trekking through Mexico into the present.Conceptualizing (digital) activism as a type of performance, the book opens a dialogue with Brecht's binary of cathartic and transformative performance. As such, it suggests that activist movements centered on expressive manifestations of emotion tend to stifle a social movement's revolutionary potential by stifling their ability to resonate with potential allies outside their community. At the same time, it argues that the most successful digital social movements seek strategies to build connections with allies who can help them to shift state policy.

Digital Activism in the Mexican Nations analyzes Mexico's rich history of digital activism, which is among the most vibrant of any country in the Hispanic world. The book begins with a discussion of the Zapatista uprising of 1994—which is widely understood as the first digital social movement in the history of the world—and ends with a discussion of the digital strategies of migrant communities trekking through Mexico into the present.Conceptualizing (digital) activism as a type of performance, the book opens a dialogue with Brecht's binary of cathartic and transformative performance. As such, it suggests that activist movements centered on expressive manifestations of emotion tend to stifle a social movement's revolutionary potential by stifling their ability to resonate with potential allies outside their community. At the same time, it argues that the most successful digital social movements seek strategies to build connections with allies who can help them to shift state policy.