Screening postcolonial Intellectuals: cinematic engagements and postcolonial activism

This special issue proposes new ways of seeing and thinking about postcolonial intellectuals through the frame of transnational screens. For this purpose, the issue develops around the twofold notion of the intellectual as a filmmaker and the intellectual as an object of filmmaking. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which this interrelationship expands notions of postcolonial theory and practice regarding the aesthetic and political intervention of intellectuals in transnational screen culture. Many postcolonial figures have been influential not only in rethinking the ways in which representation should be conceived and theorized but also in inspiring new forms of visuality and aesthetics through their life and work. These figures include Frantz Fanon, Assia Djebar, and Stuart Hall, and others explored in this issue, such as Toni Morrison, Raoul Peck, Ai Weiwei, and Steve McQueen. The special issue also includes exclusive interviews with Ai Weiwei and Trinh T. Minh-ha, artists, intellectuals, activists, and filmmakers whose engagement with postcolonial debates, and more broadly with the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking, have contributed to a reshaping of contemporary postcolonial realities and discourses, in scholarship and the public sphere.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Post-Humanitarianism and the Crisis of Empathy

The constant mediatization of conflict, violence, and suffering has created a feeling of “compassion fatigue” (Möller 1999; Sontag 2003) among viewers who consume images of “distant suffering” from the safe space of their own living rooms (Boltanski 1993; Chouliaraki 2006, 2013). This has prompted not only a sense of context collapse (Marwick and boyd 2011) but also a crisis of empathy. How should we respond to, and continue to engage with, disasters, underdevelopment, pandemics, and political conflicts, as part of multiple competing worlds of short-term and long-term humanitarian crises? The booming virtual reality (VR) industry has broken new ground as allegedly the “ultimate empathy machine” (Milk 2015; Bailenson 2018; Uricchio 2018; Raessens 2019) which puts the viewer in other people’s shoes. VR as a unique and novel form of “immersive technologies” has been postulated as a “technology of feelings,” a good technology that promotes compassion, connection, and intimacy by allowing the viewer to experience the lives of those who are distant others. e.g., migrants or refugees. This chapter explores the enthusiasm, but also the ethi- cal reservations, surrounding this new media genre of post-humanitarian appeal through the analysis of some VR projects dealing with migration and refugee is- sues, namely Nonny de la Peña’s Project Syria (2012), Gabo Arora and Chris Milk’s Clouds over Sidra (2015), Ben C. Solomon and Imraan Ismail’s The Displaced, (2015), and Tamara Shogaolu’s Queer in a Time of Forced Migration (2020)

Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe

Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe presents a collection of six- teen chapters that explore the themes of how migrants, refugees and citizens express and share their political and social causes and experiences through art and media. These expressions, which we term ‘citizen media’, arguably become a platform for postcolonial intellectuals as the studies pursued in this volume investigate the different ways in which previously excluded social groups regain public voice. The volume strives to understand the different articulations of mi- grants’, refugees’, and citizens’ struggle against increasingly harsh European pol- itics that allow them to achieve and empower political subjectivity in a mediated and creative space. In this way, the contributions in this volume present case studies of citizen media in the form of ‘activistic art’ or ‘artivism’ (Trandafoiu, Ruffini, Cazzato & Taronna, Koobak & Tali, Negrón-Muntaner), activism through different kinds of technological media (Chouliaraki and Al-Ghazzi, Jedlowski), such as documentaries and film (Denić), podcasts, music and soundscapes (Ro- meo and Fabbri, Western, Lazzari, Huggan), and activisms through writings from journalism to fiction (Longhi, Concilio, Festa, De Capitani). The volume argues that citizen media go hand in hand with postcolonial critique because of their shared focus on the deconstruction and decolonisation of Western logics and narratives. Moreover, both question the concept of citizen and of citizenship as they relate to the nation-state and explores the power of media as a tool for participation as well as an instrument of political strength. The book forwards postcolonial artivism and citizen media as a critical framework to understand the refugee and migrant situations in contemporary Europe

Conclusions: on Doing Digital Migration Studies

This volume addressed how migrants navigate their being in the world, crossing national borders, shaping new forms of diasporic affiliations and transnational belongings, while facing new forms of surveillance, control and datafication. We took as a starting point the main premise that the relationships between digital media technologies and migration / mobilities cannot be captured within the limited confines of single disciplines. Aiming to animate an interdisciplinary exchange, we therefore purposefully invited contributors from various fields and areas of expertise, including media, communication, geography, anthropology and sociology, to share their perspectives on (studying) migration in relation to digital media technologie

Doing Digital Migration Studies: Introduction

In our contemporary world, migration and digital technologies mutually shape one another. They have historically always been intertwined, yet their dynamic relationship is constantly evolving. People on the move mediate their being and belonging in increasing conditions of datafication and digitization. Mobile devices, social media platforms and smartphone apps are used to shape the transnationally connected, and locally situated, social worlds in which migrants live their everyday lives. Connecting with friends, peers and family, sharing memories and information, navigating spaces and reshaping the local and the global in the process illustrate the proliferation of migration-related digital practices

Digital Media and Migration: Reflections from the Southern Margins of Europe

This chapter aims to untangle the relationship between digital media practices and marginality in one of the geographical and discursive peripheries of Southern Europe, Italy, in particular in the city of Rome. Its intention is to disrupt the myth of Europe by exploring the epistemological and methodological limitations of the field of digital media at the crossroads with migration studies from this position of marginality, by taking into account the digital practices of Somali and Turkish migrant women living in Rome. Indeed, a Southern European focus might help to engage critically with North-Western European migration and digital media scholarship, as the product of unequal power relations articulated between the centre and its peripheries. This is to deconstruct universalizing theories and concepts of digital media and migration based on North-Western European and North American perspectives but also revive this interdisciplinary field by reading social phenomena that are grounded in specific empirical realities, which are situated and localized. Hence, in this chapter this epistemological map is turned upside down, showing what a Southern look can offer to the digital migration studies canon, both theoretically and empirically

Postcolonial Theory & Crisis: Contemporary Interventions

The volume aims at a conceptualisation of the relations between postcolonial theory and crisis, while also looking at the crisis of postcolonialism and the ways in which it can respond to contemporary issues. It seeks to understand, situate, and analyse postcolonial theory in the face of neo-liberalism, neo-imperialism, and neo-colonialism – the relation between ‘post’ and the increasing use of ‘neo’ is in itself part and parcel of the question. The volume is organised in four sections, each containing four chapters. Even though all the chapters present a reflection on Postcolonial Theory and Crisis, some focus more specifically on aspects of the crisis in a global perspective such as humanitarian crisis and the role of mediatisation of conflicts, to issues related to human rights, refugees, migrancy, environmental crisis to questions of memory and postmemory as well as the critique of art and utopian thought. The questions posed are addressed at both a conceptual and theoretical level, alongside the analysis of specific case studies

Creating Europe from the Margins: Introduction

This edited volume centres on how the idea of Europe can be explored by focusing on Europe’s margin. It inquires critically into the relations and tensions in the Global South/Global North divide and the internal differentiation within Europe itself (Southern, Eastern, Northern Europe) and across and within the different nation-states. While recent discussions of migration and Europe and of Fortress Europe seem to assume the concept of Europe as coherent and clearly demarcated, Europe’s history shows ambiguity with a lack of clear delimitations. The contributors ask how different geopolitical hierarchies intersect with racialized subject positions of diverse people living in Europe, while also cutting across classifications of gender, class, sexuality, religion and nationality. What kinds of hierarchies are at play in being and becoming European and how do they engage with a racialized logic of the past and present? What do margins mean in a space that is increasingly digitalized? This introduction considers the main theoretical ideas behind the book, grounding these questions in critical theories of race and inequalities. It positions margins and centres as open to negotiation and contestation and characterized by ambiguity

Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe

Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe presents a collection of sixteen chapters that explore the themes of how migrants, refugees and citizens express and share their political and social causes and experiences through art and media. These expressions, which we term ‘citizen media’, arguably become a platform for postcolonial intellectuals as the studies pursued in this volume investigate the different ways in which previously excluded social groups regain public voice. The volume strives to understand the different articulations of migrants’, refugees’, and citizens’ struggle against increasingly harsh European politics that allow them to achieve and empower political subjectivity in a mediated and creative space. In this way, the contributions in this volume present case studies of citizen media in the form of ‘activistic art’ or ‘artivism’ (Trandafoiu, Ruffini, Cazzato & Taronna, Koobak & Tali, Negrón-Muntaner), activism through different kinds of technological media (Chouliaraki and Al-Ghazzi, Jedlowski), such as documentaries and film (Denić), podcasts, music and soundscapes (Romeo and Fabbri, Western, Lazzari, Huggan), and activisms through writings from journalism to fiction (Longhi, Concilio, Festa, De Capitani). The volume argues that citizen media go hand in hand with postcolonial critique because of their shared focus on the deconstruction and decolonisation of Western logics and narratives. Moreover, both question the concept of citizen and of citizenship as they relate to the nation-state and explores the power of media as a tool for participation as well as an instrument of political strength. The book forwards postcolonial artivism and citizen media as a critical framework to understand the refugee and migrant situations in contemporary Europe