Archipelagic Archives

This article examines the intertwined cultural politics of geology, mining, and archival media in the context of Japan’s development as an archipelagic empire. The first Japanese geological map (1876) was completed by American geologist Benjamin Smith Lyman, who surveyed mineral deposits in Hokkaidō, Japan’s northern island, long inhabited by the Indigenous Ainu people. Following decolonial and archipelagic thoughts, the author reads across earthly archives of geological strata and colonial archives of historical documents to elucidate the conceptual duality of archipelago as a geological formation and a geopolitical territory. In tracing this formative era of Japan’s resource extraction and settler colonialism, which precedes and informs the current rush to extract rare earth minerals necessary to maintain global digital infrastructures, this article aims to both de-Westernize the methodological orientation known as media geology and offer a prehistory of contemporary rare earth mining in the Pacific Ocean.

The Ends of Media Studies

This article poses the question: what are the ends of media studies? It discusses a turn to “nature” and the elements that has pushed media studies beyond its traditional objects and subjects. While the conceptualization of environments and bodies as communicative substrates offers new avenues for media research, mediation has also been taken up in a wide range of disciplinary and intellectual contexts. Rather than establishing limits or an essential core of media studies, the article suggests that media scholars take an etic orientation and attend to the questions whose invisibility is constitutive of the field. Using the example of undersea cable systems, the article describes some of the many conceptual, institutional, and pedagogical ends of media analysis.

Atmospheric Citizenship

In Mumbai the sonic dimensions of place-making and religious life are deeply connected to the right to the city. For Twelver Shi‘i Muslims, who are marginal to both the city and the nation, public religious rituals and processions have long played very important roles in staging claims to the city. Investigating the sonic aspects of urban place-making, including its religious dimensions, this essay draws on an analytic of atmospheres in order to capture the powerful emotive dimensions of place-making through sonic performances. Through its coupling with the feltbody, the sonic plays a privileged role in giving urban locales a specific feel as belonging to particular groups, investing this feel with an air of facticity that is largely immune to discursive critique. This article focuses on ritual performances and processions among Twelver Shi‘i Muslims during the Islamic month of Muharram in order to analyze nondiscursive and atmospheric forms of citizenship.

American Elegy, Reflux

This is a meditation on bad air as a defining bodily, temporal, political, and atmospheric condition of the twenty-first-century American Dream. In 2020, the novel viral respiratory illness COVID-19 stole the final breaths of nearly 350,000 Americans (and severely damaged the lungs of many, many more). George Floyd and Daniel Prude, unarmed and Black, were suffocated by the police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Rochester, New York, respectively. Protesters marching in the streets for racial justice were tear-gassed under milky skies. Wildfires raged up and down the West Coast of the United States, thickening the air in the mountains, in the valleys, in the woods, in the cities, with particulate matter. And doctors found a malignant mass in the right lung of this author’s mother. This essay uses the double meaning of aspiration (to inhale and to dream) to trace the myriad ways our collective breathing is central to, and curtailed by, the American Aspiration. Grounded through the breath, it traces the deep entanglements of global pandemic, climate change, state violence, and lung cancer, and their combined social, political, and environmental implications for Americans’ collective flourishing, or collective strangulation. Carried on the polar jet stream from rural Oregon, to the streets of Minneapolis and Rochester, to the tobacco plantations of the American South, it is a rhetorical exercise in breathless grief, in having the wind knocked out, in going up in smoke.

Portrait and Scan

This article is an ethnography of color and black-and-white in medical images of a particular kind—prenatal ultrasound—in a particular place—Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It is also a meditation on histories and theorizations of color. It moves from the discourse and practice of pregnant women, family members, and doctors about color and black-and-white, to political and intellectual histories of color in Cambodia and in anthropology, to Buddhist ontologies of pregnancy and life. Across this diverse terrain, the notion of the image-affect conveys how images stimulate affective responses in viewers and how images affect their referents. A method of listening to and for image-affects helps us to understand how people relate to the elemental instability of images and the instability of beings to which images refer and with which they become.

Sense Experiences

This article provides an account of how sense experiences are drawn into processes of contest over the boundaries of citizenship and belonging. Based on ethnographic research in Istanbul and Ankara, it examines the ruptures of the 2016 failed coup attempt in Turkey. Particular forms of listening emerged in Western urban centers, newly attuned to sounds of warfare commingled with Islamic melodic devotionals ordered by state officials. Unique and pronounced engagements with bodily liquids accompanied the handling and placement of the dead. The multi-sensory experiences of Muslim women municipal employees who wash and shroud the deceased elucidated the foundational roles of scent and body weight in constituting martyrdom. This article demonstrates how the body politic operates—with various forms of acquiescence and repudiation—through sound, smell, and touch.

The Cinematic Milieu

To what extent are media technologies autonomous forces that reorganize the environment around them to accommodate their own technological needs? In what ways are these technologies responsive to the milieu they grow within? A central theme of comparative media examines how media enter into reciprocal exchange with the broader cultural, social, and economic formations in which they emerge and which differ from place to place and over time. This article draws on the concept of milieu in order to analyze the evolution of digital cinema infrastructures in contemporary Nigeria.

Face Mask Face-Offs

In the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be especially destructive and divisive. One of the few things that has united Americans during the pandemic, however, is the experience of watching a new genre of viral videos—face mask face-offs—that showcase citizens going toe-to-toe in public places because someone refuses to wear a mask. These videos are not mere political theater; they are replete with sociologically meaningful data about the nature of Americans’ cultural divisions. By closely analyzing recorded conflicts over collective coronavirus risks and individual freedoms in public settings, the authors identify six justifications for not wearing a mask. These justifications point to emerging cultural discourses and practices organized around phones that not only point to new ways for us to observe social life but participate in the reconfiguration of social life—and social conflict—itself.