Global Media Cultures

In this week's episode, guest Channette Romero discusses her article "Toward an Indigenous Feminine Animation Aesthetic," which analyzes the aesthetics and politics of animation shorts created by Indigenous women situated in North America. Romero argues that these women's innovative animation styles draw attention to the pervasive colonial gaze in mainstream animation and position Indigenous creatives as foremost multimedia artists.

In this week's episode, guest Xiomara Cervantes-Gómez discusses her article "Where Blackness Dies: The Aesthetics of a Massacre and the Violence of Remembering," which analyzes the digital altar created to commemorate the lives of 72 Central American migrants massacred in Mexico in 2010. Cervantes-Gómez builds on this analysis to interrogate the sensationalist depictions of migrant death, the affordances and limitations of digital media for attending to the divine, and, ultimately, the politics of blackness in the context of Mexico and the American continent.

In this week's episode, guest Mohan Ambikaipaker discusses his article "Music Videos and the 'War on Terror' in Britain: Benjamin Zephaniah's Infrapolitical Blackness in Rong Radio," which analyzes the political project of the music video Rong Radio, created by British artist Benjamin Zephaniah based on his own dub poem. Ambikaipaker argues that Rong Radio illustrates an "infra-political blackness," a form of coalition building that is less tied to specific identity markers and instead builds solidarity across people of color responding to shared legacies of disenfranchisement through colonialism and imperialism. Ambikaipaker also discusses the affordances of music videos for activists looking to raise awareness of transnational issues and for educators hoping to generate discussion on complex topics in the classroom.

In this week's episode, guest Jasmine Nadua Trice discusses her article "Manila's New Cinephilia," which analyzes the informal circulation of DVDs through Manila's street vendors during the early 21st century. Trice demonstrates how these pirate forms of film distribution and consumption are quotidian practices in the Global South and why they represent new form of cinephilia, an appreciation of and deep knowledge of cinema's technological aspects independent of the text itself.

In this week's episode, guest Curran Nault discusses his article "Documenting the Dead: Call Her Ganda and the Trans Activist Afterlife of Jennifer Laude," which analyzes the production and circulation of the documentary that Nault co-produced about the murder of transpinay Jennifer Laude by a US marine. Informed by his roles as both producer and media scholar, Nault raises critical questions about the aesthetics and ethics of re-presenting trans death and, ultimately, reflects on the possibilities and limitations of documentary as a trans activist tool.

n this week's episode, guest Moon Charania discusses her article "Ethical Whiteness and the Death Drive: White Women as the New War Hero," which examines how contemporary films use white women protagonists to justify drone warfare and military intervention in the Middle East. Charania argues that media mobilize the figure of the suffering brown girl to elicit empathy and to assuage Western audiences' guilt about collateral damage in neo-colonial wars. Through what Charania calls "ethical whiteness", Global North citizens can promote humanitarian causes to rescue Global South brown girls from numerous atrocities without interrogating how their own governments are responsible for creating the conditions for such atrocities.

In this week's episode, guest Michael Curtin discusses his article "Post Americana: Twenty-First Century Media Globalization" a wide-reaching examination of the political and social forces that shaped the United States' dominance in global media during the 20th century. Curtin argues that, after nearly a century of American hegemony, media industries are today growing more plastic and complicated, scaling their ambitions and operations in an increasingly dynamic environment filled with new technologies, shifting audiences, and emerging economies.

In this week's episode, guest Eszter Zimanyi discusses her article "Digital Transience: Emplacement and Authorship in Refugee Selfies" which analyzes "refugee selfies" collected from Instagram's Explore Places map feature as an alternative viewpoint on the so-called 2015 European refugee crisis. Zimanyi argues that that refugee selfies are best conceived as a form of digital transience that provide the refugee with a sense of emplacement in a particular location along with an archive of their movement across locations. At the same time, these digital posts also prompt a disruptive affective charge that forces other viewers of the image to contend with the precarity of the refugee’s existence in any location.