Challenging the Roma Structural Discrimination: Deterritorialization Practices in Romanian Cinema

This paper examines the cinematographic reworking of memory spaces associated with power relations and structural injustice. The way in which space is represented and used as a medium that reflects power relations allows to question the space itself in cultural productions from Central-Eastern Europe when associated with Romani people (space and power relations, memory of slavery and discrimination, space and freedom, territoriality, space and its inhabitants, non-belonging, segregation, etc.). The paper focuses on motion pictures produced in the last decade in Romania, a prolific period due to the increasing interest for memory activism and to the multiplication of the cultural exploration of challenging topics. It aims to identify narrative, visual, and aesthetic expressions used as deterritorialization practices to stimulate relational remembrance and engagement with ongoing social inequality and structural injustice. Two short films – Alina Șerban’ s Bilet de iertare (Letter of forgiveness) and Adrian Silișteanu’s Scris/Nescris (Written/Unwritten) – and a western type film – Radu Jude’s Aferim!, winner of the Silver Bear for Best director at Berlinale in 2015, are analysed here.

Melancholic Vision and Utopian Imagination: Amma Ariyan and Left-wing Culture in Kerala in the 1970s

Situating the Malayalam film Amma Ariyan in the context of radical Left politics in Kerala during the “long 1970s”, this paper argues that Left-wing cultural productions during the period offered a melancholic vision of history that sustained a utopian imagination. In popular discussions, the 1970s is seen as a period of “misguided adventurism” and defeat, and the nostalgia for the period is treated as a paralyzing, backward looking attitude. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on Left melancholy, nostalgia, and utopia, this paper looks back at the 1970s from a perspective where melancholia is a stance that offers a critical vision of the past as well as the future. This paper argues that the “failed heroes” in Left-wing cultural productions in the 1970s refused to “resign themselves to … the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities”. This “refusal to be realistic” has been very central to the sustaining of a utopian imagination which acquires more significance in the context of the perceived reactivation of “communist desire” in the contemporary times.

Commodifying Tragedy

By focusing on the representation of violence against Native American women in Craig Johnson’s "The Cold Dish" and the television show "Longmire," this article demonstrates how these cultural productions perpetuate settler-colonial power relations. Although Longmire is one of the more progressive shows thanks to its development of Native American characters and storylines, the settler-colonial status quo is affirmed in four main ways. Not only do the novel and TV show redeploy the racist stock characters of the Magical Indian and the White Savior, but the TV show especially also reiterates a version of the stereotypical Vanishing American narrative inherited from the Western genre. Furthermore, both cultural productions heavily pathologize the Cheyenne community, depriving them of agency. Finally, the novel and show both transform pain, suffering, and grief into transferable commodities. This allows them to disinvest the pain and tragedy suffered by the Native American characters in order to reinvest this tragic potential in white characters, which serves to reinforce the white characters’ heroism. The commodification of tragic potential and emphasis on its sentimentalization help obscure the settler-colonial origins and systemic perpetuation of violence against Native American women. In sum, this analysis shows that the deeply ingrained and normalized settler-colonial ideology inherent to representational strategies limit the progressive potential of even the most benevolent and well-meaning white cultural productions.

The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema

Queer media is not one thing but an ensemble of at least four moving variables: history, gender and sexuality, geography, and medium. Although many scholars would pinpoint the early 1990s as marking the emergence of a cinematic movement in the United States (dubbed by B. Ruby Rich the “new queer cinema”), films and television programs that clearly spoke to LGBTQ themes and viewers existed at many different historical moments and in many different forms: cross-dressing, same-sex attraction, comedic drag performance; at some points, for example, in 1950s television, these were not undercurrents but very prominent aspects of mainstream cultural production. Addressing “history” not as dots on a progressive spectrum but as an uneven story of struggle, the writers in this volume stress that queer cinema did not appear miraculously at one moment but arrived on currents throughout the century-long history of the medium. Likewise, while queer is an Anglophone term that has been widely circulated, it by no means names a unified or complete spectrum of sexuality and gender identity, just as the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup struggles to contain the distinctive histories, politics, and cultural productions of trans artists and genderqueer practices. Across the globe, media-makers have interrogated identity and desire through the medium of cinema through rubrics that sometimes vigorously oppose the Western embrace of the pejorative term queer, foregrounding instead indigenous genders and sexualities or those forged in the Global South or those seeking alternative epistemologies. Finally, though “cinema” is in our title, many scholars in this collection see this term as an encompassing one, referencing cinema and media in a convergent digital environment. The lively and dynamic conversations introduced here aspire to sustain further reflection as “queer cinema” shifts into new configurations.

Framing Disability in Fashion

The fashion industry has long neglected people with disabilities, opting instead for a cast of uniformly slender and (overwhelmingly) White models. But recent efforts toward diversity and inclusion suggest that change may be underway. This chapter examines these changes with a focus on fashion media published online. Specifically, this chapter looks to a collection of 50 editorial articles published by Teen Vogue between 2018 and 2020 to determine how disability is framed for consumers. It does this within a broader discussion on the cultural logics and industry conventions that shape the production of fashion content. The findings reported here suggest that online fashion media may hold unique opportunities for diversity and inclusion, with stories and images that cast disability in new and less narrow terms than have been previously reported. These include terms related to the importance of representation across cultural industries and stories that center disability rights in focus. Moving forward, more work is needed to ensure that this representation carriers forward in cultural productions within and outside of the fashion industry.

Music, Migration, and Public Space: Syrian Street Music in the Political Context

Due to the lack of social systems supporting the cultural productions of migrant societies in Turkey, the venues and opportunities to which migrant musicians have access for the maintenance of their musical practices are limited. Under the given circumstances, especially in the first years after their arrival, street musicianship emerged as a new musical practice for Syrian musicians in Istanbul, and Beyoğlu District, the city’s cultural and political center, has become the venue for street musicians’ performances. Despite undergoing a rapid neoliberal transformation, Beyoğlu district, with Taksim Square and Istiklal Avenue, is a venue of interaction among locals, tourists, and various migrant groups from diverse social classes and identities. As such, it still possesses the potential to be the public sphere which can operate as the space of “a democratic ideal.” For migrant musicians, the street music practices, which fill the very heart of city with their voices and sounds, are means of claiming their existence in the city as potential actors of this public sphere. However, conducting the interaction with the other public space actors and the state officials through street music is not an easy task for Syrian musicians, and it requires the use of tactics from them. In this article, I summarize the given circumstances of Syrian street music performances and discuss the Beyoğlu district in the frame of being—or not being—a public space. I propose street music practice as political action, a “social non-movement”, as Asef Bayat calls it, and situate migrant musicians as political actors who are possible allies of other subaltern groups in Turkey.

TRACES—In 2030, Artificial Intelligences Will Visit Museums?

Within the SISCODE project, the science and society association TRACES, based in Paris, addresses the issue of making algorithms and artificial intelligence intelligible to their users. The project intends to raise awareness of algorithmic decision making in the citizen’s daily life through co-creation activities involving research, education, civic right organisations and policymaking. Within general cultural activities in an art-science, provocative approach, the issue has been addressed through an inversion of perspective, by analysing people’s relationship with AI when considering them as the target group of cultural productions.

Digital Archiving of Diasporic Cultural Productions and Transnational Citizenship of Arabs in the West

When transnationally constructed art forms, such as the works of diasporic cultural productions of Arabs in the West, are made available in open-source on a digital archive, this supports the transnational flow or exchange of citizenship-enhancing ideas, skill-sets, technologies, tools, capacities, and practices. In this theoretical investigation, we explore imagined outcomes when new audiences can engage with diasporic cultural productions of Arabs. Digital archiving of ethnically diverse cultural productions can expand civility, solidarity, and common ground among people; these latter behaviors are the ideational foundations of agency-based claims of transnational citizenship. Such cultural productions help to reconfigure the questions, opportunities, and nature of political and social agency in ways that empower diaspora communities and expand their abilities to make citizenship claims in multiple societies. This is what the Internet enables despite its tendency towards parochialism in globalized pockets. Moreover, we highlight the possibilities of open-source digital archiving—with a focus on literature, poetry, biographies, and letters—for agency-based claims of citizenship and the many caveats that require further attention and consideration.

Building empathy through a comparative study of popular cultures in Caracas, Venezuela, and Albany, United States

During our six-week Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) module (Oct.-Nov. 2019), 58 students jointly developed task-based projects on expressions of popular culture in Albany (USA) and Caracas (Venezuela). In teams of seven to eight participants, learners from both countries reflected on variations of popular culture through assignments to be resolved in teams that included summaries and critical assessments of readings, contextualization of theoretical concepts, the drafting of a joint video script, and finally creation of a ten-minute video that focused on popular expressions in both cities. All learners were native, fluent, or near-native speakers of Spanish. We experienced the topic of popular culture to be exceptionally well poised to help students engage with each other from the beginning, represent everyday realities and build empathy and transcultural understanding through written reflections and joint creative final projects in the form of documentaries that included slices of life from the two different realities. The small-scale, everyday popular cultural productions allowed for a connection beyond cultural divides, helped students discover novel terrain within their own contexts, and vice versa, find common ground in the new context, thus fostering empathy toward transcultural awareness and equitable collaboration. In their exchange students actively created a shared ‘third’ culture of collaboration.