Afterword

Author(s):  
Shweta Kishore

Whilst making a significant contribution to public visual culture and narrative formation, documentary filmmakers hold the key to our understanding of independence, occupying the position of agent and subject, whose position can be understood primarily by examining responses to narrow definitions of ‘function’ that have plagued documentary film and filmmakers. Where ‘function’ carries meanings that harness images and image-makers to measurable phenomena of profit-making, institutional communication, consumption or mass persuasion, independent documentary works to challenge the teleological meaning of ‘function’ and its use as a yardstick to evaluate the value and legitimacy of cultural production and cultural producers.

ARTMargins ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 86-87
Author(s):  
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

This essay reviews two theoretical books on neoliberalism written by Mexican cultural critics: Capitalismo gore (Gore Capitalism), by Sayak Valencia, published originally in Spanish in 2010 and translated into English in 2018, and La tiranía del sentido común ( The Tyranny of Common Sense) by Irmgard Emmelhainz, published in Spanish in 2016 and yet to be translated into English. These works are pioneering in their discussion of the correlation between neoliberalism, subjectivity, and culture in Mexico, and they have become widely influential in broader discussions of art, visual culture, literature, and cultural production. They add to the work of economic and political historians, such as Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo and María Eugenia Romero Sotelo, by connecting landmark moments in neoliberalization (from the financialization of the global economy in the 1970s to the War on Drugs in the 2000s) to changing paradigms in art. Author Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado contextualizes both books within larger discussions of Mexican cultural neoliberalism and describes the theoretical frame works through which both authors read Mexican politics, art, and popular culture. In Valencia's case, Sánchez Prado discusses her idea of “gore capitalism”: a framework for understanding how neoliberalism relies on dynamics of the shadow economy and on the subjectification of gore (what Valencia calls endriago subjectivity) to function at the social and artistic levels. In the case of Emmelhainz, Sánchez Prado engages with the author's idea of semiocapitalism, a term borrowed from theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, which Emmelhainz deploys to account for the interrelation between culture and capital in the era of neoliberalism. As such, Sánchez Prado argues, Emmelhainz and Valencia provide ways of reading artistic and visual production, including museum curatorship and narcocultura, in ways that show their organic relationship to neoliberal economic and political reforms. Find the complete article at artmargins.com .


Author(s):  
Gina K. Velasco

The discourse of the Filipina trafficked woman collapses together women who perform multiple kinds of commodified sexual and domestic labor within a global capitalist economy, from Filipina mail-order brides to migrant sex workers. This chapter focuses on the diasporic circulation of the figure of the Filipina trafficked woman / sex worker within three sites of Filipina/o American cultural production: the web site for Gabriela Network’s Purple Rose Campaign, the Filipina American documentary film Sin City Diary, and the Pilipino Cultural Night vignette National Heroes. These sites reveal the tension in representing the Filipina trafficked woman / sex worker, from her portrayal as a victim to be saved by her Filipina American sisters, to her discursive construction by the Philippine state as a “national hero.”


Ethnography ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mats Trondman ◽  
Anna Lund

This article is an introduction to a Special Issue dedicated to Paul Willis’s classic Learning to Labour at its 40th anniversary, and beyond. His theoretically informed and theorizing ethnographic study is read, explored, and utilized all around the globe. Its use also stretches across the borders of social, cultural and educational sciences and to manifold research areas and settings. Besides laying out its main content, that is, the answers to the question of how working-class kids let themselves get working-class jobs, this article argues that the most significant contribution of Willis’s study is the way it illuminates, both theoretically and empirically, the meaning of cultural production and cultural autonomy in the midst of ongoing social reproduction of class. This introduction ends by presenting the eight contributions to the actual Special Issue, and with an invitation to Paul Willis himself to take issue with cultural production and cultural autonomy.


Author(s):  
Vanessa Pérez Rosario

This chapter highlights the multiple ways in which Burgos's legacy extends into visual culture and El Barrio neighborhood in East Harlem. In the act of remembering Julia de Burgos, visual artists are less concerned with finding the “true” Julia; rather, they create sites of memory that are at once collective and individual. As Burgos emerged as an icon specific to New York Latino/a culture, remembering her became one of the memory circuits mapping the migratory routes of New York Latino/a cosmopolitan networks. The chapter then charts the course of Burgos's iconography, mapping the migratory trajectories and circulation of her influence from New York to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and consequently offering insight into New York Latino/a cultural production.


Author(s):  
Joshua Davies

This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It works with material drawn from across the medieval period – in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as material and visual culture – and explores modern translations, reworkings and appropriations of these texts to examine how images of the past have been created, adapted and shared. It interrogates how cultural memory formed, and was formed by, social identities in the Middle Ages and how ideas about the past intersected with ideas about the present and future. It also examines how the presence of the Middle Ages has been felt, understood and perpetuated in modernity and the cultural possibilities and transformations this has generated. The Middle Ages encountered in this book is a site of cultural potential, a means of imagining the future as well as imaging the past. The scope of this book is defined by the duration of cultural forms rather than traditional habits of historical periodization and it seeks to reveal connections across time, place and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. It reveals a transtemporal and transnational archive of the modern Middle Ages.


Public ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (60) ◽  
pp. 278-281
Author(s):  
Adrienne Huard

Curated by Lisa Myers, Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto, October 10, 2018 - May 26, 2019This exhibition demonstrates a shift from archaic notions of Indigenous cultural production and celebrates the ongoing perseverance of Indigenous knowledges, which are steeped in technological advancements. By challenging the idea of “tradition”, it allows these artists to generate discussions towards new modes of Indigenous cultural display and tradition. Acknowledging that Indigenous beading and quillworks continue to be a symbol of our resilience and political sovereignty, this exhibition embraces the grounded progression of innovation within our visual culture.


Author(s):  
Rohan Kalyan

This article discusses the life and work of the French philosopher Alain Badiou in the context of a broader meditation on the relationship between film, philosophy, and communism. It draws in large part from the author’s own experiences codirecting and coproducing a feature-length documentary film about this octogenarian communist philosopher. It further juxtaposes this film with several other films on communism, as well as their analyses by Badiou himself and other leftist critics. Ultimately, by foregrounding the historical intersection between film, communism, and critical thought, the article argues that in the process of making the documentary Badiou, the author became an ambivalent participant in the production of late-communist visual culture.


Author(s):  
Laura M. Rusnak

The intent of this chapter is to understand the implications of online education for the visual arts and how the objectives of a traditional art education can be adapted to computer-mediated learning. The focus is on three trends affecting the arts: visual culture, cultural production, and originality in art and practice.


Author(s):  
Wang Zheng

Xia Yan, the underground leader of the left-wing films in the 1930s and top official of the film industry in the PRC since 1954, embodied the cultural history of the CCP. A brief biography of this Communist feminist artist leader disrupts the reductive dichotomy of the Party vs. artists in film studies and illuminates a tension-ridden history of socialist filmmaking that constituted a highly contentious site in the socialist revolution. Situating his politically engagingartistic creativity inside ashiftingpolitical process, this chapter traces Xia Yan’s major role in transmitting the New Culture agenda of transforming a patriarchal culture in socialist cultural production and delineatesdiverse and contradictory politicalpositions and artistic preferences in artists’ innovative experimentsofcreating a socialist new culture. It also analyzes his films that continued the paradigm of revolutionary heroines.


Author(s):  
Christopher Ian Foster

This chapter expands the study of new African diasporic writing beyond Francophone and Anglophone worlds, to important works of African migrant literature in Italy written in Italian. It engages important historical moments including Italian colonialism, the Cold War, neoliberal economic globalization, and the ways in which these destructive histories create destabilization and thus African emigration. The chapter analyzes Somalia as a case study and engages with digital art and documentary film in contemporary Italy as important markers of Afro-Italian migrant cultural production. Through a close reading of Cristina Ali Farah’s novel Little Mother, it delineates not only the pasts of Italian colonialism on the continent, but the ways in which colonial racialized modes of managing movement appear in present-day Italy, particularly since the 1980s.


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