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Citation: Endres, D. (2009). The rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical exclusion of American Indian arguments in the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste siting decision. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 6(1), 39–60.

Annotation: The article I’m submitting this week fits well into our discussions of coloniality, however it should be mentioned that the author, Danielle Endres, is a rhetorical scholar from the U.S. Still, the article (citation listed below) contains a review of nuclear colonialism as a material process prior to elaborating its more discursive elements, and I think it fits well into Grosfoguel’s argument of ‘coloniality’ as an ongoing, contemporary occurrence. In fact, Endres cites both Spivak and Shome (also cited in Grosfoguel, 2008) in her review and similarly argues that “Although postcolonialism is a crucial area of study, it unfortunately implies that colonialism is over” (p. 43). Ultimately, while it may not fit entirely into our decolonial media archive, I chose this article because it is in line with my research interests in environmental communication, where, in the context of CRD 701, we might consider energy and natural resource infrastructures as media. Furthermore, the focus on U.S. coloniality, and specifically American indigenous people/land, is a space I hope to explore this semester.

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1. See: Barry Brummett, "Perfection and the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Teleology, and Motives," Journal of Communication 39 (1989): 85-95; Thomas B. Farrell and G. Thomas Goodnight, "Accidental Rhetoric: The Root Metaphors of Three Mile Island," 48 (1981): 271-300; Edward Shiappa, "The Rhetoric of Nukespeak," Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 253-72.

2. Ward Churchill,* "Radioactive Colonization: A Hidden Holocaust in Native North America," in Struggle for the Land: Indigenous Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide, and Expropriation in Contemporary North America (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1993), 261-328; Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke, "Native North America: The Political Economy or Radioactive Colonization," in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 241-66; Donald A. Grinde and Bruce E. Johansen, Ecocide of Native America: Environmental Destruction of Indian Lands and Peoples (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 1995); Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American Southwest (New York: Routledge, 1998); Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, (Boston: South End Press, 1999); Grace Thorpe, "Our Homes Are Not Dump Zones," paper presented at the North American Native Workshop on Environmental Justice, ILIFF School of Theology, Denver, Col., 17 March 1995, http://necona.indigenousnative.org (accessed December 29, 2008). *I am aware of the charges of plagiarism and academic misconduct against Ward Churchill. After closely reading the report from U.C. Boulder, I found that Churchill's work on radioactive colonization is not indicted in the report. Although Churchill was the first to introduce the term "radioactive colonization," much subsequent independent research has substantiated the phenomenon. See: Report of the Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder (May 2006), http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/churchill/download/WardChurchillReport.pdf (accessed December 29, 2008).

3. LaDuke, 97.

4. Indigenous Environmental Network, "Indigenous Anti-Nuclear Statement," http://www.shundahai.org/IndigenousAnti-NuclearStatement.htm, (accessed December 29, 2008).

5. LaDuke, 97.

6. Grinde and Johansen, 203-4; Kuletz, 21.

7. Churchill, 264-82; Grinde and Johansen, 204-11.

8. Joseph G. Jorgenson, "The Political Economy of the Native American Energy Business," in Native Americans and Energy Development, ed. Joseph G. Jorgenson (Boston: Anthropology Resource Center/Seventh Generation Fund, 1984), 9-20.

9. Grinde and Johansen, 217.

10. Cited in Grinde and Johansen, 212.

11. Arjun Makhijani, "A Readiness to Harm," in Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects, ed. Arjun Makhijani, Howard Hu, and Katherine Yih (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 8.

12. Speech by Corbin Harney, Mother's Day Gathering at the Nevada Test Site, 11-13 May 2007.

13. Cited in LaDuke, 99.

14. Joe Bauman, "A Fallout over Eligibility: Many N-victims Don't Live in Compensation Counties," Deseret Morning News, 13 April 2005.

15. Kuletz, 70-73.

16. The Navajo Nation, "Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley, Jr. signs Dine Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005" [press release], http://www.sric.org/uranium/Navajo%20pres.%20signs%20uranium%20ban,%20for%20April%2030.pdf (accessed December 20, 2007); "Owe Aku & Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council Defeat Uranium Corporation" [press release], 9 November 2007, received via email on 9 November 2007.

17. M. V. R. Gowda and Doug Easterling, "Voluntary Siting and Equity: The MRS Facility Experience in Native America," Risk Analysis 20 (2000): 917; LaDuke, 103.

18. Geoffrey Fattah and Suzanne Struglinski, "Pressure to stop N-Dump, Lawsuit Says," Deseret Morning News 19 July 2007.

19. Kuletz, 137.

20. Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossburg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 217-313.

21. Raka Shome "Caught in the Term 'Postcolonial': Why the 'Postcolonial' Still Matters," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 203-12; Raka Shome and Radha Hegde, "Postcolonial Approaches to Communication: Charting the Terrain, Engaging the Intersections," Communication Theory 12 (2002): 249-70.

22. Glenn T. Morris, "International Law and Politics: Toward a Right to Self-Determination of Indigenous Peoples," in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 55-86; Gail Valakakis, Indian Country: Essays on Contemporary Native Culture (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005).

23. Linda Tuhawai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999), 98.

24. Al Gedicks, The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporations (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 13.

25. Marjene Abler, Breaking the Iron Bonds: Indian Control of Energy Development (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990).

26. Charles F. Wilkinson, Indian Tribes as Sovereign Governments: A Sourcebook on Federal-Tribal History, Law, and Policy (Oakland, CA: American Indian Resources Institute, 1991), 26-27.

27. O'Brien, 292.

28. Gabrielle Hecht, "Globalization Meets Frankenstein? Reflections on Terrorism, Nuclearity, and Global Technopolitical Discourse," History and Technology 19 (2003) 3.

29. Mary Stuckey and John M. Murphy, "By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North America," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25 (2001): 73-98.

30. Caskey Russell, "Language, Violence, and Indian Mis-Education," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 26 (2002): 98.

31. Morris; Sharon O'Brien, American Indian Tribal Governments (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); David E. Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the US Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); Wilkinson.

32. Johnson v. McIntosh, 1823; Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 1831; and Worchester v. Georgia, 1832.

33. Wallace Coffey and Rebecca Tsosie, "Rethinking the Tribal Sovereignty Doctrine: Cultural Sovereignty and the Collective Future of Indian Nations," Stanford Law and Policy Review 12 (2001): 192.

34. Ambler; Gedicks.

35. John J. Borrows, "A Genealogy of Law: Inherent Sovereignty and First Nations Self-Government," Osgoode Hall Law Journal 30 (1992): 291-353; Coffey and Tsosie, 192-96.

36. Borrows, 352.

37. Piyush Mathur, "Nuclearism: The Contours of a Political Ecology," Social Text 19, no. 1 (2001): 1-18; Bryan C. Taylor, "Nuclear Weapons and Communication Studies: A Review," Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 300-15.

38. Taylor, "Nuclear Weapons," 301.

39. Bryan C. Taylor and William J. Kinsella, "Linking Nuclear Legacies and Communication Studies," in Nuclear Legacies: Communication, Controversy, and the US Nuclear Weapons Complex, ed. Brian C. Taylor and others (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 1.

40. Bryan C. Taylor, "Nuclear Waste and Communication Studies," The Review of Communication 3 (2003): 288.

41. Taylor and Kinsella, "Linking Nuclear Legacies," 2.

42. Carol Gallagher, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Kuletz; Mathur; Taylor, "Nuclear Weapons."

43. Kuletz, 7.

44. William J. Kinsella, "One Hundred Years of Nuclear Discourse: Four Master Themes and their Implications for Environmental Communication," in The Environmental Communication Yearbook Volume II, ed. Susan L. Senecah (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), 49-72; Kinsella, "Nuclear Boundaries."

45. Bryan C. Taylor, William J. Kinsella, Steven Depoe and Marybeth Metzler, "Nuclear Legacies: Communication, Controversy, and the US Nuclear Weapons Controversy," in Communication Yearbook 29, ed. P. Kalbfleisch (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 382.

46. John Sanchez, Mary E. Stuckey and Richard Morris, "Rhetorical Exclusion: The Government's Case Against American Indian Activists, AIM, and Leonard Peltier," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23 (1999): 28.

47. John Sanchez, Mary E. Stuckey and Richard Morris, "Rhetorical Exclusion: The Government's Case Against American Indian Activists, AIM, and Leonard Peltier," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23 (1999): 28.

48. John Sanchez, Mary E. Stuckey and Richard Morris, "Rhetorical Exclusion: The Government's Case Against American Indian Activists, AIM, and Leonard Peltier," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23 (1999): 28.

49. Few scholarly works have engaged the concept of rhetorical exclusion except: Jeremy Engels, "'Equipped for Murder': The Paxton Boys and 'the Sprit of Killing All Indians' in Pennsylvania, 1763-1764," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8 (2005): 355-82; Mark Meister & Ann Burnett, "Rhetorical Exclusion in the Trial of Leonard Peltier," American Indian Quarterly 28 (2004): 719-42.

50. Spencer Abraham, Recommendation by the Secretary of Energy Regarding the Suitability of the Yucca Mountain Site for a Repository Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (Washington D.C., February 2002), http://ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/sr/sar.pdf (accessed December 29, 2008).

51. US Department of Energy, "How Much Nuclear Waste is in the United States?" http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ym_repository/about_project/waste_explained/howmuch.shtml (accessed December 29, 2008).

52. There were 52 comments and statements made by self-identified Americans Indians from 26 nations (17 Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute reservations) and two organizations.

53. See: Steven Depoe, John W. Delicath and Maire-France Aepli Elsenbeer, eds, Public Participation in Environmental Decision Making (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004); Steven B. Katz and Carolyn R. Miller, "The Low-Level Radioactive Waste Siting Controversy in North Carolina: Toward a Rhetorical Model of Risk Communication," in Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America, ed. C. G. Herndl and S. C. Brown (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 111-40; Jeanne Nelson Ratliff, "The Politics of Nuclear Waste: An Analysis of a Public Hearing on the Proposed Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository," Communication Studies 48 (1997): 359-80; Craig Waddell, "The Role of Pathos in the Decision-Making Process: A Study in the Rhetoric of Science Policy," Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 381-400.

54. Mark R. Powell, Science at the EPA: Information in the Regulatory Process (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 1999); Caitlin W. Toker, "Public Participation or Stakeholder Frustration: An Analysis of Consensus-based Participation in Georgia Ports Authority's Stakeholder Evaluation Group," in Communication and Public Participation in Environmental Decision Making, ed. S. P. Depoe, J. W. Delicath and M. A. Elsenbeer (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 175-200; Waddell.

55. Abraham; Nuclear Waste Policy Act as Amended, http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/documents/nwpa/css/nwpa.htm (accessed December 29, 2008), page 8; US Department of Energy, Site Recommendation Comment Summary Document (Washington, DC, 2002), http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/documents/csd_a/index.htm (accessed December 29, 2008).

56. "Treaty between the United States of America and the Western Bands of Shoshone Indians," 1 October 1863, 18 Stat. 689-92.

57. US Department of Energy Public Hearing on the Possible Site Recommendation of Yucca Mountain (proceedings taken on 5 December 2001 at Pahrump, NV), 7. All public comment transcripts are available at http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/documents/sr_comm/index.htm and http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/documents/sr_trans/index.htm (accessed December 29, 2008).

58. Amnesty International, Indigenous Rights Are Human Rights: Four Cases of Rights Violations in the Americas, May 2003; United States v. Dann, 470 US 39 (1985).

59. Steven Newcomb, Failure of the United States Indian Claims Commission to File a Report with Congress in the Western Shoshone Case (Docket 326-K), Pursuant to Sections 21 and 22(a) of the Indian Claims Commission Act: A Report Prepared on Behalf of the Western Shoshone National Council (Eugene, OR: Indigenous Law Institute, January 2003), http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/shoshone/ili-report.html (accessed December 29, 2008).

60. UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedure, Decision 1(68), UNCERD 68 th sess. (March 2006), http://www.indianlaw.org/pdf/ppa/ws/WS%20CERD%20Decision%202006-03.pdf?PHPSESSID=bf83c14359077a7fa279e574a8e2aa06 (accessed December 20, 2007). ; UN Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Report No., 75/02, Case 11.140, Mary and Carrie Dann, United States (27 December 2002).

61. Hearing for Site Recommendation Consideration of the Yucca Mountain Site for Geologic Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste (proceedings taken on 12 December 2001, Las Vegas, NV), 102; US Department of Energy, Science and Engineering Report for a Geologic Repository for the Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste at Yucca Mountain (proceedings taken on 5 September 2001, Elko, NV), 9; US Department of Energy, Yucca Mountain Project Comments (proceedings taken on 5 October 2001, Las Vegas, NV), 13.

62. US Department of Energy, Yucca Mountain Project Comments (10/5/2001), 23.

63. Kuletz, 131.

64. Vine Deloria Jr. God is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1992), 62.

65. Native American Rights Fund Newsletter, Winter 1997, http://www.narf.org/pubs/justice/1997winter.html (accessed December 29, 2008).

66. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routlege, 1999), 8.

67. Stuckey and Murphy, 82.

68. Chad Smith, Letter to the Department of Energy (public comment #551117), http://www.ymp.gov/documents/sr_comm/sr_pdf/551117.pdf (accessed December 29, 2008).

69. Abraham, 32-45.

70. Abraham, 32.

71. Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1963; reprinted from 1828).

72. Abraham, 9.

73. Abraham, 9.

74. Sanchez, Stuckey and Morris, 33

75. Robin Patric Clair, Organizing Silence: A World of Possibilities (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998).

76. Barry Brummett, "Towards a Theory of Silence as a Political Strategy," Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1980): 290.

77. Derek T. Buescher & Kent A. Ono, "Civilized Colonialism: Pocahontas as Neocolonial Rhetoric," Women's Studies in Communication 19, 2 (1996): 130.

78. "Assertion 1: The citizens of Nevada were denied an adequate opportunity to be heard; Assertion 2: The project has received inadequate study; Assertion 3: The rules were changed in the middle of the game; Assertion 4: The process tramples states' rights; Assertion 5: Transportation of nuclear materials is disruptive and dangerous; Assertion 6: Transportation of wastes to the site will have a dramatically negative economic impact on Las Vegas; Assertion 7: It is premature for DOE to make a site recommendation for various reasons" (because of a GAO report that criticized the project, an unrealistic timeline, and the 293 technical items that the NRC said need to be resolved before licensing). Abraham, 32, 33, 37, 38, 39, 49.

79. Abraham, 31-32.

80. Damian Short, "Reconciliation and the Problem of Internal Colonialism," Journal of Intercultural Studies 26 (2005): 275.

81. Based on Lexis Nexis search of all the articles containing "Yucca Mountain" in national newspapers in 2002.

82. Clair, Organizing Silence, 39.

83. Robert D. Bullard and Benjamin Chavis, Jr., ed., Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston: South End Press, 1993); Richard Hofrichter, ed., Toxic Struggles: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Justice (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002); Jace Weaver, ed., Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis books, 1996).

84. Robert D. Bullard, "Environmental Justice in the Twenty-first Century," in The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution, ed. Robert D. Bullard (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2005), 32.

85. US Department of Energy, "Yucca Mounatin Repository," http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ym_repository/about_project/why/remote.shtml (accessed December 29, 2008); US Department of Energy, "Restricted Access," http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ym_repository/about_project/why/restricted.shtml (accessed December 29, 2008).

86. Matthew Glass, Citizens against the MX: Public Languages in the Nuclear Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Kuletz.

87. Maurice Charland, "Property and Propriety: Rhetoric, Justice, and Lyotard's Differénd," in Judgment Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, and Indeterminacy, ed. John M. Sloop and James M. McDaniel (Boulder, CO: Westfield Press, 1998), 220-35.

88. Clair, "Organizing Silence," 324.

89. Deborah Bulkeley, "Goshute Leader Calls N-Waste Rulings Thin," Deseret Morning News, 14 September 2006.

90. This interview was part of the Nuclear Technology in the Great Basin Oral History Project at the University or Utah.

91. K. Rogers, "Western Shoshones File Yucca Lawsuit," Las Vegas Review Journal, 5 March 2005.

92. Personal communication.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

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The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision

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1. See: Barry Brummett, "Perfection and the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Teleology, and Motives," Journal of Communication 39 (1989): 85-95; Thomas B. Farrell and G. Thomas Goodnight, "Accidental Rhetoric: The Root Metaphors of Three Mile Island," 48 (1981): 271-300; Edward Shiappa, "The Rhetoric of Nukespeak," Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 253-72. 2.

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Citation: Steele, C. K. (2021). Digital Black Feminism. New York University Press.

Annotation: In this book, Dr. Steele analyzes Black women’s technology use as a virtual beauty shop. One specific metaphor that stands out in the book is Dr. Steele’s analysis of braiding as technology as she explores the emergence of Black technoculture. She cites Andréa Rose Clarke’s description and argument that braiding is structured by rules similar to algorithms. “The beautician’s own complex system of codes, braiding is a mathematical and artistic design experience… they are a way to understand how Black technoculture culture comes to be” (p. 39).

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Citation: Behkalam, Kaya and Knut Ebeling. “The Augmented Archive: History in Real Time. An Archaeology of Images of the Egyptian Revolution.” International Journal of Communication, vol. 14, 2020, pp. 5092-5107.

Annotation: Behkalam and Ebeling explore the implications of archival work, specifically in the colonial context and in the context of their archival project, The Augmented Archive. They ask poignant questions about whether or not archival work can truly be decolonial in nature. However, they propose that their approach to archival work which places photos and videos in the context of their original physical location is an act of decentering that works well within a decolonial context.

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Citation: Dasuki, I. S., & Abubakar, H. N. (2019). The contributions of WhatsApp to social inclusion: A case of internally displaced persons in Nigeria. Petter Nielsen Honest Christopher Kimaro Eds.) Information and Communication Technologies for Development: Strengthening Southern-driven cooperation as a catalyst for ICT4D, Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries, 15(1), 414 – 424.

Annotation: Dasuki’s et al (2019) article explores how WhatsApp can improve the lives of internally displaced persons (IDPs) affected by conflict. Using the IDPs in Nigeria as a case study, the authors theorize the complex relationship between mobile technologies and social inclusion. They also used Sen’s five distinct instrumental freedoms to understand the use of WhatsApp by IDPs affected by Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria and its impact on their social inclusion. The five instrumental freedoms are, (a) Political Freedoms: Freedom of expression and the freedom to scrutinize and criticize authorities, to enjoy a free press and multi-party elections, (b) Transparency Guarantees: Freedom to trust others and to ensure that information is honestly disclosed, (c) Economic Facilities: Opportunities people have to participate in economic activities, (d) Social opportunities: Freedom to health facilities and education, (e) Protective Security: Opportunities available to prevent vulnerable people from abject deprivation. Based on a one-week ethnographic fieldwork of an ongoing research, the case narrative presented both the freedom outcomes afforded the IDPs by the use of WhatsApp and also the impediments that hinder the developmental impact. Finally, they conclude by providing some implications for research and practice.

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Citation: Scherker, A. (2019). The forgotten women who hand-painted the first color films. Artsy. Retrieved November 1, 2021, from https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-forgotten-women-hand-painted-first-color-films

Annotation: This article discusses a twofold lack in cinematic history: the missing hand-colored films in early film history and women’s labor that was relied on to make these films. These films and these women have been neglected; many early films were ruined by time and the lack of preservation knowledge/efforts, and the forgotten work can be attributed to classifications of commonality and femininity. This article seeks to reveal the intricate labor and materiality that comprise films that were (and still are) celebrated. In many ways, Scherker is complicating gendered ideas about mainstream media and storage technologies, which conveniently lean into binaries that are frequently factually unsound. This is especially the case for female colorists whose hands shaped this media in some of its earliest forms.

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The Forgotten Women Who Hand-Painted the First Color Films

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Early color films were fantastical and strange-and the women who meticulously applied dyes to the 35mm frames have been left out of cinematic history.

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Citation: Keller, J. M. (2012). VIRTUAL FEMINISMS: Girls' blogging communities, feminist activism, and participatory politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15(3), 429-447. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2011.642890

Annotation: While this article is a little outdated (it’s almost ten years old and is limited to blogs, not necessarily social network sites), it is still relevant as blog use has only increased since its publication and it recognizes the digital activism of an often-overlooked population: young girls. This study focuses on two case studies of popular teenage feminist blogs and interviews four girls who engage with these two blogs: three girls from the United States and one from the Middle East. The article analyzes the community building, agency, and activism of these young women and women like them.

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Citation: Keller, J. M. (2012). VIRTUAL FEMINISMS: Girls' blogging communities, feminist activism, and participatory politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15(3), 429-447. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2011.642890

Annotation: While this article is a little outdated (it’s almost ten years old and is limited to blogs, not necessarily social network sites), it is still relevant as blog use has only increased since its publication and it recognizes the digital activism of an often-overlooked population: young girls. This study focuses on two case studies of popular teenage feminist blogs and interviews four girls who engage with these two blogs: three girls from the United States and one from the Middle East. The article analyzes the community building, agency, and activism of these young women and women like them.

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Citation: Brazelton, B. (2020). “On the 10-year anniversary of Minecraft: Two interventions in extractive colonialism.” Cultural Geographies 27(3), p. 491-497. DOI: 10.1177/1474474019890319.

Annotation: This article explores the many ways Minecraft is a “foundational digital text of settler colonialism,” (p. 492). The default skin is coded white and coded according to western ideas of gender, reflecting how colonizers brought patriarchy with them to the lands they colonized. There’s an immediate antagonistic relationship to many of the mobs that spawn in the game world, reflecting how colonial narratives often frame the actions of settlers as in self-defense when it’s really a projection of their own messed up violence. The procedural nature of the seemingly infinite world of Minecraft reflects the colonialist idea that resources are infinite. The article then points to two other ludic projects that deconstruct colonial gameplay. This article is a bit flawed. There’s no mention of the villager mob - the game’s closest parallel to indigenous people (even more so than the monster mobs that the article names as the indigenous people). The analysis is a bit too focused on the content of the game, though it does go into the procedural nature of the virtual world. It also doesn’t consider ways the player can resist these colonial narratives within Minecraft, such as engaging in more sustainable practices in the game, changing the default skin, or installing mods that let you harvest resources from animals without killing them. Also, while the connections to colonial narratives are valid, some of the connections are reaching a bit. But the article is a great jumping off point for discussions of the authorship of algorithms and how they change the procedural rhetoric of games - how colonial, eurocentric data can make procedural rhetoric colonial and eurocentric.

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SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class research journals

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Subscription and open access journals from SAGE Publishing, the world’s leading independent academic publisher.

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Citation: Russel, L. (2020). Glitch Feminism. Verso.

Annotation: Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russel explores what it means to be a glitch or to use a glitch in order to create disruption of one's identity within a structure. Russel states, “Here, in that disruption, with our collective congregation at that trippy and trip-wired crossroad of gender, race, and sexuality, one finds the power of the glitch. A glitch is an error, a mistake, a failure to function” (7). For me, I have been struggling with the way that infrastructural and materialist studies forgo and obfuscate the individual experience, especially to those who are in marginalized or minority groups. This book looked at how this would work in the case of digital technologies and how one can announce themself as different and lively. Russel claims, “The glitch challenges us to consider how we can ‘penetrate…break…puncture…tear’ the material of the institution, and, by extension, the institution of the body” (25). It’s the institution of black metal that I am hoping to discuss in my essay about Transcendental Black Metal and one artist within the changing field of black metal, but it's something that I think fits within other music genres as well.

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A New York Times Best Art Book of 2020

A new manifesto for cyberfeminism

Simone de Beauvoir said, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." The glitch announces: One is not born, but rather becomes, a body.

The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. What must we do to work out who we are, and where we belong? How do we find the space to grow, unite and confront the systems of oppression? This conflict can be found in the fissures between the body, gender and identity. Too often, the glitch is considered a mistake, a faulty overlaying, a bug in the system; in contrast, Russell compels us to find liberation here. In a radical call to arms, Legacy Russell argues that we need to embrace the glitch in order to break down the binaries and limitations that define gender, race, sexuality.

Glitch Feminism is a vital new chapter in cyberfeminism, one that explores the relationship between gender, technology and identity. In an urgent manifesto, Russell reveals the many ways that the glitch performs and transforms: how it refuses, throws shade, ghosts, encrypt, mobilises and survives. Developing the argument through memoir, art and critical theory, Russell also looks at the work of contemporary artists who travel through the glitch in their work. Timely and provocative, Glitch Feminism shows how an error can be a revolution.

"Our software and our wetware are constantly glitching. How could it be otherwise? Rather than try for perfect order, let's embrace the glitch and find out how else it all could play out. Let's just admit we're done with the old empire of imperatives about both flesh and tech and tune in to those who are playing in the ruins, hacking their way through to another life. This book takes you there."

" Glitch Feminism offers wry insights into the opportunities inherent in the implications of formerly discarded traces of both ourselves and our culture. This fascinating, profound and engrossing book places Legacy Russell as one of the more provocative, radical and original thinkers of her generation."

"Russell helps us understand that the components of our identity are in fact technologies. Glitch Feminism offers a powerful shift in mindset that empowers a generation of activist remixers."

"'A glitch is an error, a mistake and a failure to function,' and with this warning, Legacy Russell takes us on a lightening tour through the terminologies and theories of AFK, IRL, Glitch Ghosts, Digital Dualism, Binary Bodies, and other markers in the current lingo of on-line criticism. She translates the Internet world as she lives it right now. Russell is an important writer to follow as she points out shifting viewpoints of Internet politics in real time."

"A timely rethinking of cyberfeminism from an intersectional perspective-a deeply personal investigation of blackness and queerness in and through technology. This erudite, vividly-rendered text weaves astute discussions of contemporary artistic practices with personal narrative, capital-T Theory, and virtuosic riffs on twenty-first-century slanguage."

" Glitch Feminism offers technological failure, machinic anxiety, and seams in the interface as the very platforms from which we may begin to rework singular identities into inventive networks, proposing a reboot of feminist discourse. While channeling the boldness of the manifesto form, Legacy Russell offers a nuanced look at inspiring artists whose works reprogram systems of race, gender, and sexuality in the virtual places between living bodies and data bodies. Here, the paradox is the opportunity: the glitch shows you how things work, just as they don't."

" Glitch Feminism is a vital new manifesto and Russell's research as a curator breaks new ground on themes of gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new-media ritual."

"The feminism we need to break and remake the systematic regimes of power, not just in the digital world (and where is that line anyway?) but from the bottom up."

" Glitch Feminism is a rallying cry, a recapturing of cyberfeminism oriented to include and spotlight the many queer and non-white voices who in their practice live out the awesome potential of an enmeshed digital feminism: the glitch ... The deftness with which Russell wields language is artwork in itself. Like the vibrant contrast of the book's cover, Glitch Feminism is a bright declaration, an ecstatic embrace of the new futures that lurk just behind hegemonic defaults."

"[In Glitch Feminism] Russellis serving roses. But they are wild, shape-shiftingroses, outrageously lush and wondrous, and it iscertainly worth taking a moment to find out whatyet-unimagined visions we might have if we stop fora moment to smell them."

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A New York Times Best Art Book of 2020 A new manifesto for cyberfeminism Simone de Beauvoir said, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." The glitch announces: One is not born, but rather becomes, a body. The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time.

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Citation: Sen, N. D. (1994). Secondary Orality: How words speak through television. Indian Literature, 37(5 (163)), 125–141. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44295586

Annotation: Sen (1994) talks about secondary orality in the Indian television, and contends that the television shows, news, advertisements, and other programs serve to reinstate the dominant ideology. She asserts that technological advancements do not necessarily mean progress under such conditions, rather the technology becomes a tool to propagate certain beliefs and ideas. She then goes on to define secondary orality in Ong’s terms and classifies the dialogues that take place on TV as a form of secondary orality. Television in India speaks in multiple voices—"the institutional voice, the bureaucratic voice, the didactic voice, the entertaining voice, the academic voice, the titillating voice, the political rhetoric, the informative voice”—but all of these voices are created out of the dominant ideologies. Sen also draws on the use of formulas, of music, visuals, and phrases that the audience is familiar with, and how they’re used to create new structures of presentation. An interesting point she makes about the TV’s orality is that the West regards it as an inferior cultural medium—the one for the un-intellectuals—because of its predominantly oral nature. Her main idea here, as she states at the very beginning of the essay, is that television in India doesn’t let you question the ideology but rather reinforce it by means of various presentations. These ideologies, thus, can also become social identities.

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SECONDARY ORALITY: HOW WORDS SPEAK THROUGH TELEVISION on JSTOR

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NABANEETA DEB SEN, SECONDARY ORALITY: HOW WORDS SPEAK THROUGH TELEVISION, Indian Literature, Vol. 37, No. 5 (163) (Sept.-Oct., 1994), pp. 125-141

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Citation: Y.Z. Ya'u (2004) The new imperialism & Africa in the global electronic village, Review of African Political Economy, 31(99), 11-29, DOI: 10.1080/0305624042000258397

Annotation: After reading Jin (2013) article on Platform Imperialism, I was inspired to search for how the concept of ICTs and Platform imperialism relates to Africa. I was lucky to find Ya'u (2010) article which discusses how globalisation is enabled by new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and has made it easy to move vast quantities of market information and intelligence, as well as capital, around the world. Conscious of the importance of ICTs in the globalisation process, the author noted that the “World Trade Organization (WTO) developed a vision for structuring the ICT sector in developing countries. [However], although embedded in international efforts to address the digital divide, itself occasioned by uneven access to ICTs at a range of geographic scales, WTO strategy for configuring the ICT sectors of developing countries appears to work in the interest of multinational corporations, which have tended to exacerbate the digital divide” (p. 11). His statement goes hand-in-hand with Jin’s idea on platform imperialism. The author highlighted the resurgence of imperialism in this time as highly represented by knowledge dependence. While locating the marginality of Africa in cyberspace within its colonial past,Ya'u argues that current international attempts at bridging the digital divide are part of wider efforts to not only secure the virgin markets of developing countries, but also to configure the world in the interest of the new imperial powers. Within this context, therefore, Africa faces the challenge of imperialism anew. His paper discusses the substance of this challenge, and argues that while isolationism cannot be promoted as a counter-force to globalisation, Africa must re-establish the basis of its integration into a globalising world by developing a framework that challenges the dominant assumptions of processes of globalisation promoted by the WTO. Other nuggets such as globalization pathways and the challenges facing Africa were discussed. No doubt that this article is a factual resource to inform my final paper.

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Globalisation is enabled by new information and communication technologies (ICTs) that have made it easy to move vast quantities of market information and intelligence, as well as capital, around the world. Conscious of the importance of ICTs in the globalisation process, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has developed a vision for structuring the ICT sector in developing countries. However, although embedded in international efforts to address the digital divide, itself occasioned by uneven access to ICTs at a range of geographic scales, WTO strategy for configuring the ICT sectors of developing countries appears to work in the interest of multinational corporations. Furthermore, WTO policy initiatives, especially those which come under the ambit of the Agreement on Telecommunications, GATs and TRIPs, have tended to exacerbate the digital divide. The result is the resurgence of imperialism, this time represented by knowledge dependence. While locating the marginality of Africa in cyberspace within its colonial past, this paper argues that current international attempts at bridging the digital divide are part of wider efforts to not only secure the virgin markets of developing countries, but also to configure the world in the interest of the new imperial powers. Within this context, therefore, Africa faces the challenge of imperialism anew. The paper discusses the substance of this challenge, and argues that while isolationism cannot be promoted as a counter-force to globalisation, Africa must re-establish the basis of its integration into a globalising world by developing a framework that challenges the dominant assumptions of processes of globalisation promoted by the WTO.

Notes

This section draws from an earlier paper (Ya'u, 2002a)

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The new imperialism & Africa in the global electronic village

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Globalisation is enabled by new information and communication technologies (ICTs) that have made it easy to move vast quantities of market information and intelligence, as well as capital, around the world. Conscious of the importance of ICTs in the globalisation process, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has developed a vision for structuring the ICT sector in developing countries.

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Citation: Ganteaume, C. R. (2020). ‘Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field’ Presents Contemporary Native Experiences from the Inside.

Annotation: This article talks about a photo exhibition last year: a collaborative project to combat colonial portrayals of the Genízaro people in Abiquiú and to display the authenticity and complexity of their lives today. These photos involve a mutual involvement between the photographer and the photographed, both indigenous peoples, and therefore disrupt the hierarchy that is frequently present in photography. The project discussed in this article exemplifies photography’s continued function and impact, all while confirming political and social dispositions of the photograph.

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The exhibition Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field presents photo essays by Native photojournalists Russel Albert Daniels (Diné descent and Ho-Chunk descent) and Tailyr Irvine (Salish and Kootenai), created in collaboration with the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Their essays reflect the work of a new generation of Native professional photographers who are motivated by two objectives: combating lingering stereotypes of Native Americans and pursuing what they call modern Indigenous stories-stories of contemporary Native people rooted in their lived experiences. These stories, as the photographers contend, are underrepresented, if not entirely overlooked, in the media. Deeply concerned with who tells these stories, which fall outside most non-Native Americans' experiences, Daniels and Irvine offer complex, nuanced, and thought-provoking portraits of what it means to be Native in the United States today.

Their work, like that of other socially aware Native photographers, is even more remarkable in light of the fact that (as they know) Native Americans' relationship to photography is steeped in colonialism and its costs. During the 19th century, photography was used as a tool by the dominant society to promote its ideology of Manifest Destiny. Whether they were photographed by the growing cadre of commercial photographers documenting the country's westward expansionism or by members of the Bureau of American Ethnography trying to establish anthropology as a modern academic discipline, Native peoples were overwhelmingly portrayed as a "Vanishing Race," captured in their "native wilds" or posed in photographers' studios with props that would ensure their "Otherness."

Images taken by commercial photographers were mass produced as carte de visites or stereo cards for parlor entertainment-which is to say, to confirm Victorian notions of "savage life." They were sold to publications such as Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly to be translated into engravings and used to illustrate coverage of the United States' final push to settle the West. In these journals' pages, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, and other Native leaders who resisted giving up their homelands and seeing their people confined to reservations were excoriated as obstacles to "Progress."

Equally indifferent to Native Americans' human condition, ethnographers, for whom photography went hand-in-hand with fieldwork, used their cameras to document racial types and illustrate disproven and disgraced concepts concerning the relationship between race and mental ability. Or they were used to help create "accurate" museum dioramas showing mankind's presumed life stages and relationship to the natural environment. Well into the 20th century, government employees and missionaries alike used photography of American Indians to document the success of the country's assimilation policy. These images appeared in publications such as Indians at Work, produced by the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the 1930s and early 1940s. At the same time, an army of marketing men used images of Native people in traditional dress selling crafts or, preferably, performing "picturesque" traditions to promote tourism to Niagara Falls, the Florida Everglades, and the American Southwest. Traditions photographed at will included sacred ceremonies. The conception of respect for American Indian religious practice was absent.

But also beginning at the turn of the last century, a small number of gifted Native individuals got hold of state-of-the-art cameras (e.g., wood view cameras outfitted with Bausch & Lomb Unicum shutters and Graflex Speed Graphics) and trained their photographer's eye on people and places important to them. Jennie Ross Cobb (Cherokee, 1881-1959), Horace Poolaw (Kiowa, 1906-1984), and Lee Marmon (Laguna, b. 1925) stand out among them. Considered the first female Native American photographer, Cobb photographed her Cherokee Female Seminary classmates attired in Edwardian womenswear: large brimmed hats, loose white blouses with cuffed sleeves and high collars, and ankle-length skirts cinched and belted at the waist. Cobb photographed students not only on their campus but walking newly laid railroad tracks along with local townsfolk. Working in and around Anadarko, Oklahoma, Horace Poolaw captured his Kiowa family and neighbors as they saw themselves-as flappers, deacons, parade-goers, and World War II sailors and soldiers. Lee Marmon trained his camera on Laguna and other Pueblo peoples and brought an artist's sensibility to every scene he shot, whether of elders, such as, famously, a Laguna elder wearing Chuck Taylor All-Star sneakers; adobe architecture shown from unexpected angles with a minimalist's aesthetic; ceremonies; or the surrounding landscape. Together, a slowly increasing number of 20th-century Native photographers produced views of public and private Native life that had never been caught on film before. Creating remarkable portraits, these photographers imaged their community members-educated, sophisticated, and fashionable, or humble and hard-working-with humanity and dignity, and clearly grounded in the present.

Today's Native photographers-a growing new generation-bring their own way of looking and their own way of focusing on Native peoples' lived experiences as they unfold in the 21st century. Many use photography to investigate and raise awareness about social and political issues confronting Native peoples and are concerned with capturing moments that can create social impact-even social change. Think of those who traveled to the Standing Rock Reservation in 2016 and 2017 to document the Dakota Access Pipeline protests spearheaded by Lakota peoples. Few of these young Native photographers are well known to mainstream magazine and newspaper photo editors, let alone to the public at large. Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field features essays by two such talented and concerned photographers.

Both Russel Albert Daniels' The Genízaro Pueblo of Abiquiú and Tailyr Irvine's Reservation Mathematics: Navigating Love in Native America are about community and people's intensely felt identification with their community. They are also about how that relationship is, in one way or another, profoundly shaped by colonialism. Daniels' essay presents a 266-year-old community born out of an incredibly violent history. In many ways, its members have long come to terms with that history as a strategy for survival. Yet as a community they also feel a deep need to memorialize it every year. Irvine's essay introduces tribal members whose perception of belonging has been problematized by tribal enrollment regulations concerning their and their partner's blood quantum (see Notes below) that will determine their children's eligibility for membership within their own tribe. Daniels' essay looks at how colonialism still casts a long shadow over a community and smolders within. Irvine's essay looks at young Native Americans facing an existential crisis and perhaps the most worrisome legacy of colonialism impacting their generation.
The Genízaro Pueblo of Abiquiú, Russel Albert Daniels
The Genízaro people whose lives Russel Albert Daniels explores in his photo essay live on the Abiquiu Land Grant in northern New Mexico. The 16,000-acre land grant was issued by Spanish colonial authorities in 1754, and Genízaro have been living on and managing the land for almost 300 years. Genízaro descend from Indigenous peoples who bore the brunt of Spanish colonialism in the Southwest. Their ancestors were war captives-mostly Hopi, Comanche, Apache, Ute, Kiowa, Pawnee, and Navajos-whom Spanish colonists "ransomed" from other Native nations during the 16th and 17th centuries. Under the guise of humanitarianism, these people were baptized, given Christian names, and taught Spanish while being forced to work as household servants, tend fields, herd livestock, and serve as frontier militia to protect Spanish settlements. Many experienced great physical and sexual abuse. Thus "re-educated," they and their children, many fathered by Spaniards, were classified by the Spanish as Genízaro. ​

In some ways, Daniels' essay is made in response to Genízaros who have recently expressed their thoughts about their history and identity in the press, including National Public Radio and The New York Times, and to Genízaro academics, such as Moises Gonzales, co-author of Slavery in the Southwest: Genízaro Identity, Dignity and the Law. But equally Daniels is motivated by his own family history. Daniels' great-great-grandmother, Rose, was taken captive by White River Utes who killed her family. She was Diné and about five years old at the time. She was trafficked among Utes until she ended up in the family of a Mormon frontiersman. Daniels' knowledge of how violence, human trafficking, and disenfranchisement have dramatically impacted the lives of many Native peoples living in the present-day American Southwest drew him to explore the unsettling history of the Genízaro people.

Daniels does so through 24 black-and-white images showing Genízaro life in and around the Pueblo of Abiquiú. Made over a two-month period in late 2019, Daniels' photographs subtly reveal a people literally surrounded by their history. It is embedded, for example, in the remains of colonial architecture that define their landscape, the acequias -ancient irrigation systems that combined Indigenous and Spanish technologies-and apple orchards first introduced by the Spanish that they maintain, and the ancient Pueblo sherds they find in their fields, reminders of the Indigenous peoples who farmed the land long before the Spanish intrusion.
Reservation Mathematics: Navigating Love in Native America, Tailyr Irvine
But as Daniels' photography also illuminates, the Genízaros' history is commemorated directly and indirectly through community observances. Daniels photographed Abiquiú around the feast days of Santa Rosa de Lima and Santo Tomás. Throughout their history, the Genízaro people of Abiquiú have attended mass on the Feast Day of Santa Rosa de Lima in what are now the remains of the early-18th-century church built in her name, one mile outside Abiquiú. This celebration was of profound importance to their earliest and most vulnerable ancestors, who recognized Santa Rosa de Lima as their pueblo's patron saint and protectress. (This even though the church in their pueblo is dedicated to Santo Tomás, a fact not unnoticed historically by parish priests.) On the feast day of Santo Tomás, in a ceremony dating back at least two centuries, the Genízaro people of Abiquiú reenact the Spanish ransom of their captive ancestors, history that dramatically altered their lives. Virtually every generation of Genízaro living in Abiquiú, in other words, has paid homage to their ancestors who bore the painful brunt of colonialism and has expressed pride in those who carved out meaningful lives for themselves on the Pueblo of Abiquiú Land Grant.

In Reservation Mathematics: Navigating Love in Native America, Tailyr Irvine examines the legacy of U.S. government regulations affecting Native Americans' most personal decisions-specifically, the challenge blood quantum requirements pose for young Native Americans who want children and want them enrolled within their own tribe. With the passage of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, the U.S. government created blood quantum requirements as a means for determining who could be considered "Indian" and enrolled in a specific tribe. These requirements set not only criteria for tribal enrollment, but also qualifications for housing, healthcare, education, etc. According to Irvine, young Native Americans are facing greater pressures in their dating life and choice of partner than previous generations. These pressures are the result of the increasing number of tribal members whose blood includes more than one tribe or race and thus limits their child's eligibility to be enrolled in their tribe. As Irvine points out, these dating pressures are unique to Native Americans. Irvine visited the Flathead Reservation in Montana and the nearby city of Missoula to document tribal members' personal and political outlooks on blood quantum and its toll on their lives.

Irvine's photo essay provides a clear understanding of what these regulations mean to actual couples and individuals, some with whom she is personally involved. She takes us into their homes where life is simply happening and follows them through their day as they socialize, hunt on restricted tribal lands, or visit tribal enrollment offices to confirm their own blood quantum or register their child, and we see what they are living through. Her images speak to family concerns and government red tape. Irvine's essay also includes several formal portraits of individuals and couples-high schoolers, members of the LGBT community, a tribal council member, a college student-whose awareness of and attitudes towards blood quantum regulations vary greatly, according to their age, gender, sexual orientation, and place of birth, as well as their own blood quantum. Frontally posed (for the most part) against a minimal background, some of the sitters are carefree; others express tension. One sitter's tribal status has recently changed due to a re-evaluation of her blood quantum. She is left knowing that inside she is still the same person, although on a piece of paper, her status within the tribe is now legally different. Irvine's portraits promote awareness of how individual lives are impacted. These powerful glimmers of individuality bind her essay together. Her sitters' human presence fills her frames, as do their individual stories, which are as unique as are they and all too familiar-to Native Americans.

Arguably, Native American photography is at a transformational point. A growing number of Native editorial photographers and photojournalists are examining contemporary Native life and communicating honestly about it. They are delving into political, economic, and social justice issues; concepts of identity, gender, sexual orientation, and race; climate change; and legacies of colonialism in order to make sense of the world. And like Daniels and Irvine, they are revealing aspects of the America experience that are largely invisible to mainstream society.
Notes
_________

According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, one's degree Native American or Alaska Native blood "is computed from lineal ancestors of Indian blood who were enrolled with a federally recognized Indian tribe or whose names appear on the designated base rolls of a federally recognized Indian tribe." ( Bureau of Indian Affairs. Accessed online March 12, 2020.)

For more work by contemporary Native photographers, see Native American Photographers Unite to Challenge Inaccurate Narratives, The New York Times, May 1, 2018, and Native Americans Are Recasting Views of Indigenous Life, National Geographic, December 2018. Also see Natives Photograph, a directory of emerging and professional Native photographers.

Daniels' and Irvine's photo essays will be on view at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York and Washington, D.C., as well as online.

The Genízaro Pueblo of Abiquiú, Russel Albert Daniels
Washington and New York through July 6.

Reservation Mathematics: Navigating Love in Native America, Tailyr Irvine
​Washington and New York July 14 through October 18.

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"Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field" Presents Contemporary Native Experiences from the Inside

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Since the turn of the 20th century, Native American photographers have taken the representation of their people into their own hands. In "Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field," Russel Albert Daniels and Tailyr Irvine present original images that illustrate issues important to Native Americans today.

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Citation: Scherker, A. (2019). The forgotten women who hand-painted the first color films. Artsy. Retrieved November 1, 2021, from https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-forgotten-women-hand-painted-first-color-films

Annotation: This article discusses a twofold lack in cinematic history: the missing hand-colored films in early film history and women’s labor that was relied on to make these films. These films and these women have been neglected; many early films were ruined by time and the lack of preservation knowledge/efforts, and the forgotten work can be attributed to classifications of commonality and femininity. This article seeks to reveal the intricate labor and materiality that comprise films that were (and still are) celebrated. In many ways, Scherker is complicating gendered ideas about mainstream media and storage technologies, which conveniently lean into binaries that are frequently factually unsound. This is especially the case for female colorists whose hands shaped this media in some of its earliest forms.

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The Forgotten Women Who Hand-Painted the First Color Films

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Early color films were fantastical and strange-and the women who meticulously applied dyes to the 35mm frames have been left out of cinematic history.

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Citation: Clark-Parsons, R. (2017). Feminist ephemera in a digital world: Theorizing zines as networked feminist practice. Communication, Culture and Critique, 10(4), 557-573. https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1111/cccr.12172

Annotation: This week’s decolonial source discusses how specific self-published works, like the zine, emerge in digital networks as a form of social practice. More broadly, it considers a tension that new media technologies bring to older forms: namely print media. The media she discusses are feminist zines, which “call a counterpublic into being that legitimizes the intimate politics of everyday life through discursive representations” that then foster deep and uninterrupted connections (567). This essay delves into the digital’s ability to disrupt boundaries and transform older media, ultimately making them more accessible and visible on the internet. This restructuring of space doesn’t detract from this physical media form, however; instead, digital networks function as boundary spaces that “democratize access” and “enable points of contact” between makers and readers (568). And rather that this being a result of these newer terrains, Clark-Parsons discusses how the ability of these networks is determined by the specific media that exist within them.

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Citation: Licona, A. C. (2012). Zines in third space: Radical cooperation and borderlands rhetoric. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Annotation: Licona looks at media forms and technologies that challenge dominant literacies, knowledge production, and borders. Her book argues that zines possess this oppositional capacity, largely thanks to their self-publishing practices, generation of intertextual conversations, and “third-space” subjects who make them (p. 19). Here, “third-space” is a nongeographical distinction that functions to “materialize what borders serve to divide, subordinate, and obscure” (p. 11). The third space employs a variety of media tactics and strategies that are all counterhegemonic. For example, “the decolonized imaginary” is a tool that allows participants to “reclaim certain spaces in time” and retell their stories in a process of re‑creation and re‑presentation—ultimately through the zine (p. 18).

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Citation: Dube, A. (Ed.). (2020). Echo zine: Decolonial thought, practices and actions. [zine]. https://issuu.com/nativesoul/docs/web_upload_low_res_echo_decolonial_zine

Annotation: “Echo Zine: Decolonial Thought, Practices, and Action,” imagines a decolonized future by emphasizing various heritages and decolonial practices that confront coloniality in its present and past. It comprises several works by artists and activists, all of which are engaged in decolonization efforts across multiple disciplines and nationalities. This project, the result of “a curiosity and a deep feeling for healing, standing ground, dismantling, [and] bringing forth other knowledge systems,” resists any prescriptive approach to decolonization, focusing instead on its dynamism and the unavoidably intimate nature of this work by having personal histories and expressions guide the zine (p. 3).

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Echo Zine - Decolonial Thought, Practices and Actions

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ECHO ZINE came to be because of a curiosity and a deep feeling for healing , standing ground , dismantling , bringing forth other knowledge systems , and building community in putting out an offline and simultaneously linked zine , The tech out there these days allows for some pretty wonder filled ways of visualizing a stream of consciousness.

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Citation: Dube, A. (Ed.). (2020). Echo zine: Decolonial thought, practices and actions. [zine]. https://issuu.com/nativesoul/docs/web_upload_low_res_echo_decolonial_zine

Annotation: “Echo Zine: Decolonial Thought, Practices, and Action,” imagines a decolonized future by emphasizing various heritages and decolonial practices that confront coloniality in its present and past. It comprises several works by artists and activists, all of which are engaged in decolonization efforts across multiple disciplines and nationalities. This project, the result of “a curiosity and a deep feeling for healing, standing ground, dismantling, [and] bringing forth other knowledge systems,” resists any prescriptive approach to decolonization, focusing instead on its dynamism and the unavoidably intimate nature of this work by having personal histories and expressions guide the zine (p. 3).

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Echo Zine - Decolonial Thought, Practices and Actions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ECHO ZINE came to be because of a curiosity and a deep feeling for healing , standing ground , dismantling , bringing forth other knowledge systems , and building community in putting out an offline and simultaneously linked zine , The tech out there these days allows for some pretty wonder filled ways of visualizing a stream of consciousness.

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Citation: Dube, A. (Ed.). (2020). Echo zine: Decolonial thought, practices and actions. [zine]. https://issuu.com/nativesoul/docs/web_upload_low_res_echo_decolonial_zine

Annotation: “Echo Zine: Decolonial Thought, Practices, and Action,” imagines a decolonized future by emphasizing various heritages and decolonial practices that confront coloniality in its present and past. It comprises several works by artists and activists, all of which are engaged in decolonization efforts across multiple disciplines and nationalities. This project, the result of “a curiosity and a deep feeling for healing, standing ground, dismantling, [and] bringing forth other knowledge systems,” resists any prescriptive approach to decolonization, focusing instead on its dynamism and the unavoidably intimate nature of this work by having personal histories and expressions guide the zine (p. 3).

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Echo Zine - Decolonial Thought, Practices and Actions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ECHO ZINE came to be because of a curiosity and a deep feeling for healing , standing ground , dismantling , bringing forth other knowledge systems , and building community in putting out an offline and simultaneously linked zine , The tech out there these days allows for some pretty wonder filled ways of visualizing a stream of consciousness.

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Citation: Bennett, J. (2017). "I became more Maya": International Kaqchikel Maya migration in Central America. Universitas Psychologica, 16 (5):1-13. https://doi.org/10.11144/Javeriana.upsy16-5.bmmi

Annotation: Last week my decolonial reading analyzed the documentary film La Pequena Semilla en el Asfalto in which a Chiapas Maya woman is recorded walking through town in a traditional traje. The film addresses the colonial gaze and the efforts of this Maya woman to confront coloniality and to make a stand. Bennet 2017, in contrast, while it still addresses themes of racism towards the Ladino – the other, the indigenous in Mexican culture – demonstrates the ways in which Brenda, another Maya woman, is empowered by her traje once she escapes the oppression of Guatemala City and moves to El Salvador. Here, her “otherness” is celebrated, and it enables her to sell more trinkets, which allows her to commission a greater number and variety of traje in ever increasing quality. In contrast to Pryor 2017, Bennet 2017 demonstrates the ways in which Maya women are empowered by their traditional garb and her traje becomes, in some way, a status symbol.

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Barrett, A. N., Gibbons, J. L., & Peláez Ponce, A. V. (2014). "Now I can help someone": Social remittances among returned migrants in highland Guatemala. International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, Consultation, 3, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1037/ipp0000010

Barrios, L. (2014). ¿Cómo me siento usando mi traje maya en la USAC? [How do I feel using my tradition Mayan clothing at USAC?]. Estudios Interétnicos, 20, 34-43.

Bernard, H. (2011). Research methods in anthropology: Qualitative and quantitative approaches (5th ed.). New York, NY: AltaMira Press.

Burns, A. (1993). Maya in exile: Guatemalans in Florida. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Caballeros, A. (2013). Perfil migratorio de Guatemala 2012 [Migration profile of Guatemala 2012]. Guatemala: Organización Internacional para las Migraciones.

Carey, Jr., D. (2001). Our elders teach us: Maya-Kaqchikel historical perspectives/Xkib'ij kan qate' qatata'. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.

Cohen, J., & Sirkeci, I. (2011). Cultures of migration: The global nature of contemporary mobility. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Cojti Cuxil, D. (1991). Configuración del pensamiento politico del pueblo maya [Configuration of the political thoughts of the Maya people]. Quetzaltenango, Guatemala: Asociación de Escritores Mayances de Guatemala.

"Crece la migración a Costa Rica". (2015, June 17). Crece la migración a Costa Rica desde Triángulo Norte de Centroamérica [Migration from the Northern Triangle of Central America to Costa Rica grows]. La Prensa Libre. Retrieved from http://www.prensalibre.com/guatemala/migrantes/crece-la-migracion-a-costa-rica-desde-triangulo-norte-de-centroamerica

Creswell, J. (1998). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Crystal, D. (2000). Language death. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Curran, S. R., & Saguy, A. C. (2001). Migration and cultural change: A role for gender and social networks? Journal of International Women's Studies, 2(3), 54-77. http://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol2/iss3/4

Dammert, A. C. (2010). Siblings, child labor, and schooling in Nicaragua and Guatemala. Journal of Population Economics, 23, 199-224. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-008-0237-0

Del Cid, J. R. (1992). Migración interna e internacional en Centro América [Internal and international migration in Central America]. In R. Castillas (Ed.), Los procesos migratorios centroamericanos y sus efectos regionales [Central American migratory processes and their regional effects] (pp. 31-41). Mexico: FLASCO.

Domingo, E. D. (2007). El derecho a usar el traje indígena en Guatemala [The right to wear indigenous clothing in Guatemala]. Retrieved from http://www.albedrio.org/htm/documentos/edd-001.pdf

Elías, S. (2016). Guatemala. Guatemala City: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs.

England, N. (2003). Mayan language revival and revitalization politics: Linguists and linguistic ideologies. American Anthropologist, 105, 733-743. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2003.105.4.733

Farber, A. (1978). Language choice and problems of identity in a highland Maya town (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Columbia University, New York, NY.

Farley Webb, M. (2015). Yojkanäj wawe' (We remain here): Kaqchikel migrants' wives under surveillance (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS.

Fernández-Guzmán, E., & Shiomara del Carpio-Ovando, P. (2013). Regresar a casa, a Huandacero, Michoacán: remesas, retorno inversor y cambio social [Coming home to Huandacero, Michoacán: Remittances, return investment, and social change]. Ra Ximhai, 9(1), 121-134. http://www.redalyc.org/pdf/461/46127074011.pdf

Fink, L. (2003). The Maya of Morgantown: Work and community in the nuevo new South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Fischer, E., & Hendrickson, C. (2002). Tecpan Guatemala: A modern Maya town in global and local context. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Foxen, P. (2007). In search of providence: Transnational Maya identities. Nashville, TN: Vanderbuilt University Press.

Garzón, S. (1998). Indigenous groups and their language contact relations. In S. Garzón, R. Brown & J. Richards (Eds.), The life of our language: Kaqchikel Maya maintenance, shift, and revitalization (pp. 9-43). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Garzón, S., Brown, R. M., Richards, J. B., & Ajpub', W. (1998). The life of our language: Kaqchikel Maya maintenance, shift, and revitalization. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Geiger, S. (1990). What's so feminist about women's oral history? Journal of Women's History, 2, 169-182. https://doi.org/10.1353.jowh.2010.0273

Guatemala, Decreto 19 de 2003[Congreso de la República]. Ley de Idiomas Nacionales. Esta ley tiene por objeto regular el reconocimiento, respeto, promoción, desarrollo y utilización de los idiomas de los pueblos Mayas, Garífuna y Xinka en Guatemala. Mayo 7 de 2003. (E-475-2003)-26-Mayo. Retrieved from http://old.congreso.gob.gt/archivos/decretos/2003/ gtdcx19-2003.pdf

Guatemala, Acuerdo Gubernativos N.° 288 de 2016 [Ministerio de Trabajo y Previsión Social]. Por medio del cual se establecen los nuevos salarios mínimos para el año 2017. Diciembre 29 de 2016. (E-925-2003)-30-Diciembre. Retrieved from http://www.mintrabajo.gob.gt/images/organizacion/leyesconveniosyacuerdos/Acuerdo_Gubernativo_288-2016.pdf

Hallman, K., Peracca, S., Catino, J., & Ruiz, M. J. (2006). Multiple disadvantages of Mayan females: The effects of gender, ethnicity, poverty, and residence on education in Guatemala. Population Council Policy Research Division Working Papers. Retrieved from http://www.popcouncil.org/uploads/pdfs/wp/211.pdf

Hendrickson, C. (1995). Weaving identities: Construction of dress and self in a highland Guatemala town. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Holmes, S. (2013). Fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Instituto Nacional de Estadística Guatemala [INE]. (2015). Encuesta nacional de empleo e ingresos 2-2014 [National survey of employment and revenue 2-2014]. Guatemala City, Guatemala: R. Narcisco.

International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs. (2016). Indigenous peoples in Latin America: A general overview. Retrieved from http://www.iwgia.org/regions/latin-america/indigenous-peoples-in-latin-america

Jonas, S. (2013). Guatemalan migration in times of civil war and post-war challenges. Migration Information Source. Retrieved from http://www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?id=939

Jonas, S., & Rodríguez, N. (2014). Guatemala-U.S. migration. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Landry, V. (2011). Migración y cambios sociales en Guatemala: familia transnacional y mujer [Migration and social changes in Guatemala: Transnational family and women]. Sociedad & Equidad, 1, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.5354/0718-9990.2011.10603

Levitt, P., & Nyberg-Sorensen, N. (2004). The transnational turn in migration studies (Global Migration Perspective Report No. 6). Geneva: Global Commission on International Migration. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.430.2817&rep=
rep1&type=pdf

Little, W. (2004). Mayas in the marketplace: Tourism, globalization, and cultural identity. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Loucky, J., & Moors, M. (Eds.). (2000). The Maya diaspora: Guatemala roots, new American lives. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Lyman, B., Cen Montuy, M. J., & Tejeda Sandoval, E. (2007). Migration and ethnicity. In W. Cornelius, D. Fitzgerlad & P. Fischer (Eds.), Mayan journeys: The new migration from Yucatán to the United States (pp. 169-191). La Jolla, CA: University of California Press.

Maddox. (2010). Chwaq chik iwonojel: Language affect, ideology, and intergenerational language use patterns in the Quinizilapa valley of highland Guatemala (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

Martínez López, J. F., & Díaz Aldana, E. R. (2007). Migraciones internas en Guatemala, C. A. (1950 -2002) [Internal migration in Guatemala, Central America (1950 -2002)]. Retrieved from http://www.eclac.cl/celade/noticias/paginas/7/29527/martinez.pdf

Massey, D., Arango, J., Hugo, G., Kouaouci, A., Pellegrino, A., & Taylor, J. E. (1998). Worlds in motion: Understanding international migration at the end of the millennium. New York: Oxford University Press.

Maxwell, J. (2009). Bilingual bicultural education: Best intentions across a cultural divide. In W. Little & T. Smith (Eds.), Mayas in postwar Guatemala: Harvest of violence revisited (pp. 84-95). Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.

Monzón, A. S. (2006). Las viajeras invisibles: mujeres migrantes en la región centroamericana y el sur de México [The invisible travelers: Migrant women in the Central America and southern Mexican regions]. Guatemala City: Project Counseling Services-Consejeria Oxlajuj Ix para Centroamérica y México.

Moran-Taylor, M. J. (2008). Guatemala's Ladino and Maya migra landscapes: The tangible and intangible outcomes of migration. Human Organization, 67, 111-124. https://doi.org/0018-7259/08/02111-14$1.90/1

Nimatuj, V., & Alicia, I. (2004). Traje folclorización y racismo en la Guatemala postconflicto. [Indigenous clothing folklorization and racism in post-conflict Guatemala]. In M. Heck & G. P. Murga (Eds.), Racismo en Guatemala: De lo políticamente correcto a la lucha antirracista [Racism in Guatemala: From politically correct to the antiracist fight] (pp. 235-270). Guatemala City, Guatemala: Avansco.

Otzoy, I. (1996). Maya' b'anikil, maya' tzyaqb'al/Identidiad y vestuario maya [Maya identity and clothing]. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Editorial Cholsamaj.

Palma, S. I. (2010). El impacto cultural de las migraciones guatemaltecas a EE. UU.: una primera aproximación [The cultural impact of Guatemalan migration to the US: A first approximation]. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios Sociales y Desarrollo.

Romero, S. (2015). Language and ethnicity among the K'ichee' Maya. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press.

Smith, C. (1996). Race/class/gender ideology in Guatemala: Modern and anti-modern forms. In B. Williams (Ed.), Women out of place: The gender of agency and the race of nationality (pp. 50-78). New York: Routledge.

Stephen, L. (2007). Transborder lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Taylor, M. J., Moran-Taylor, M. J., & Ruiz, D. R. (2006). Land, ethnic, and gender change: Transnational migration and its effects on Guatemalan lives and landscapes. Geoforum, 37, 41-61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.12.002

Thomson, A. (2007). Four paradigm transformations in oral history. The Oral History Review, 34, 49-70. https://doi.org/10.1525/ohr.2007.34.1.49

Velásquez Nimatuj, I. A. (2008). Vías de exclusión: indumentaria maya y racismo en la Guatemala contemporánea. [Means of exclusión: Maya clothing and racism in Guatemala]. In M. Holsbeke & J. Montoya (Eds.), Kemtzij: Kemon Taq Tzij Na'oj - Palabras y pensamientos tejidos [Weaving words: Words and thoughts on weaving]. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Cholsamaj.

Warren, K. (1998). Indigenous movements and their critics: Pan-Maya activism in Guatemala. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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“Me convertí en maya”: la migración internacional Maya Kaqchikel en Centroamérica | Universitas Psychologica

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La literatura se enfoca en la migración desde el sur global hasta el norte global. El presente artículo se enfoca en la migración sur-sur, a partir del caso de una mujer Kaqchikel Maya de Guatemala, Brenda, que migra a El Salvador. Tanto su historia de vida como los datos de observanteparticipante s…

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Citation: Okamoto, T. (2015). “Otaku tourism and the anime pilgrimage phenomenon in Japan.” Japan Forum 27(1), p. 12-36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2014.962565.

Annotation: Okamoto (2015) explores the phenomenon of the “anime pilgrimage,” where fans of anime travel to specific locations in Japan featured in their favorite shows. The article examines the practice as a distinctive travel culture born out of new forms of communication. The article does a good job of placing the phenomenon in a historical/cultural context, arguing that it wasn’t born in a vacuum and instead out of policy/economic decisions that led to and encouraged the phenomenon. The anime pilgrimage is born from a networked community; one must know where the locations featured in the anime are in order to visit them, and the online fan community shares this information. The article also ties into themes for this week, including the use of photography in tourism (fans traveling to locations featured in anime take the photos in the same angle as how it was presented in the anime), and about notions of an imagined community (people going on an anime pilgrimage often update people on their adventures in real time on the internet). I’m not sure this is a completely decolonial article, however. While it examines both the good and bad of tourism and does some ethnography work, it takes a postmodern (and maybe even a little bit neoliberal) look at the phenomenon. It doesn’t so much as “community for whom” as much as it could have. I also have some misgivings about the use of terms such as “animalization.” There are some interesting decolonial points the article makes. Residents of one community were unhappy about the way their town was represented in one anime as the site of a murder mystery story and how the anime pilgrimage was reinforcing this image of the town that they didn’t want. Others complained that the influx of fans do not fit with the “atmosphere” of the community. I think it functions more as a jumping off point for decolonial conversations/further research than a site of decoloniality itself.

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Otaku tourism and the anime pilgrimage phenomenon in Japan

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1. Azuma Hiroki's seminal 2001 book Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan was translated into English in 2009. Citations from this book are taken from the 2009 English version. When Azuma's work is referred to in other Japanese language sources, the 2001 version is cited. 2. Other definitions focus on forms of behaviour, clothing or communication styles.

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Citation: Sonwalkar, P. (2015). Indian journalism in the Colonial Crucible. Journalism Studies, 16(5), 624–636. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670x.2015.1054159

Annotation: Sonwalkar (2015) talks about the emergence of modern journalism in India in the late eighteenth century. Print journalism in India was (obviously) an adoption of the British model, but it really laid the groundwork for freedom struggles, especially in the colonies of India. Print journalism became a tool of resistance, nationalism, and religious and cultural reforms. It found its home in Calcutta, and soon the first Bengali journal was published. The use of print journalism and the nature of the content it distributed led to panic among British officials, and the colonial government imposed certain restrictions. The overarching theme of this essay is that print journalism in India, from its very beginning, was deeply rooted in politics. Even contemporary newspapers in India show that the reports and articles have an element of politics. For instance, the way COVID vaccination is framed in Times of India hints at what the government has done for the production of vaccines, how the government is distributing vaccines to other countries, how the government plans to reach the various populations in its vaccination drive, etc. This shows that at its root, journalism in India is highly influenced by politics.

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Citation: Leonard, D. J. (2020). "Virtual Anti-racism: Pleasure, Catharsis, and Hope in Mafia III and Watch Dogs 2." Humanity & Society 44(1), p. 111-130.

Annotation: My next decolonial archive contribution is “Virtual Anti-racism: Pleasure, Catharsis, and Hope in Mafia III and Watch Dogs 2” by David J. Leonard. The article examines two video games with black protagonists and argues how games can be a site of the representation of intervention and transformation against white supremacy. That being said I only skimmed this article so take the article with a grain of salt.

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Virtual Anti-racism: Pleasure, Catharsis, and Hope in Mafia III and Watch Dogs 2 - David J. Leonard, 2020

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This essay examines the representation and consumption of Mafia III and Watch Dogs 2 as a site of catharsis, pleasure, and empowerment. Through not only its rep...

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Citation: Pryor, E. (2017). Decolonial articulations of gender: queering Buen Vivir in the Tsotsil-Maya documentary film La Pequeña Semilla en el Asfalto. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 12(1): 48-70, DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2016.1273857

Annotation: For my decolonial narrative this week I chose an article that examines the ways in which the film La Pequeña Semilla en el Asfalto challenges heteronormative stereotypes and encourages an inclusive branding of Buen Vivir (good living) that fosters happiness for all. This reading has little to do with this week’s readings except that it discusses the ways in film is being used for in a variety of ways to push back against the dominant society – it challenges colonialism and “the colonial gaze”, it pushes against heteronormativity and traditional gender norms. Emily Pryor discusses the ways in which the film’s “testimonies, camera shots, editing, and forms of production all contribute to exemplify what Freya Schiwy might call ‘a means of talking back to the colonial gaze” (50). She then suggests that the documentary “redirects the gaze outwards, offering its audience the ‘power and responsibility’ that reside in knowing ‘that the use we make of what we learn extends beyond our engagement with documentary films to our engagement with the historical world represented by such films’ (Nichols 2010, 41).” In a sense, this article contrasts with Kittler’s equation of film with Lacan’s notion of imagination – the documentary film instead presents us with a reality that challenges our previous imaginations and misconceptions.

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Citation: Suárez, J. A. (2014). Warhol’s 1960s’ Films, Amphetamine, and Queer Materiality. Criticism, 56(3), 623–651.

Annotation: My decolonial source consders the queer materiality of Andy Warhol’s films in the 1960s. There is a mention of Kittler that discusses the ways that art disappears into the mechanical technology through media notation. We see throughout Gramophone, Film, Typewriter Kittler separating art from media from entertainment. Juan Suárez, in this article, is continuing this idea of the materiality of technologies but coding it through queerness. Suárez states, “these material concerns disclose a queer materiality. They open up unsuspected vibrations in the physicalobjectual horizon captured by the camera, rendering that horizon radically strange—or “queer”—and they channel and embody the peculiar sexuality—the queerness—of Warhol’s films” (628). In relation to Kittler, he is often focused on materialism and the technologies through the heteronormative view of men, often delegating women to places of subversion or in the gaze of the media. Suárez is considering, then, how Warhol’s films can embody a turn around from the normative and into the “queer” as the opposite to a normative society. He asks us to consider who are technologies and films for while answering how a queer audience and perception can expand a viewpoint.

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Citation: Gray, K. L. (2016). The Internet: Oppression in digital spaces. In The Routledge Companion to Media and Race (pp. 107-116). Routledge.

Annotation: This chapter in The Routledge Companion to Media and Race discusses the racial inequality of the Internet. Gray frames her argument through an exploration of the racial dynamics of industry, Internet usage, and access.

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Citation: Coming Soon

Annotation: My decolonial source is a bit unorthodox. It's a Discord bot that provides several magic and divination tools, all created and coded by a 17 year old LGBTQ+ Mexican person of Native heritage who goes by Witchie. Cabot provides several different tools to connect with the occult through Discord. The bot's official Discord server (available on the link) contains several resources to aid practicioners. Most importantly, Cabot was inspired by Witchie's Christian parents, who wouldn't let him get witchcraft tools, and his own frustration of not being able to test anything before getting them. More importantly, Cabot curates its tools in order to keep Native practices away from being appropriated - by virtue of omission and education, Witchie protects his knowledge and heritage.

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Cabot ~ A friendly occult mouse, Bring divination, witchcraft and the occult to your discord servers with Cabot!

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Södertörn University, Alfred Nobels allé, Huddinge, Sweden

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Södertörn University, Alfred Nobels allé, Huddinge, Sweden

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Södertörn University, Alfred Nobels allé, Huddinge, Sweden

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Citation: Kuan, A. (2016) Archiving protest digitally: The temporal regime of immediation. International Journal of Communication, 10, 5395-5408.

Annotation: Kuan explores how archiving protests digitally shifts the temporality of archival work to be in a constant state of updating. In the shift away from physical archives, Kuan notes how digital archival work is often at the mercy of other platforms, such as social media, in order to preserve protest communications. The move to digital therefore can put archivists at a loss: “Instead of reclaiming the power over history writing… power shifts to commercial players providing storage and processing possibilities if groups do not consider the infrastructure of the technology that they employ” (Kuan 5405). Kuan suggests using archival platforms that open-source and nonproprietary, such as OMEKA, in order to retain control over an archive.

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Citation: Coming Soon

Annotation: My decolonial source is an interview published in the Times of India. It outlines how colonialism has still persisted during COVID-19, and how it has led to health and vaccine inequalities. It offers an interesting take on how vaccinations lessons were learned from South Asia and taken back to create modern vaccines around the 1800s. It also talks about how the efforts to decolonize global health are still prominently based on what "experts" are saying rather than what the communities need.

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‘Global health has its origins in colonialism and imperialism … it explains why IPRs are used to withhold technologies’

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Jesse B Bump, a lecturer on global health policy at the Harvard TH Chan Public School of Health, has researched the evolution of ideas and institutions that improve societal performance in health. He shares his...

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Citation: Gitau, S., Marsden, G., & Donner, J. (Apr 10, 2010). After access. Paper presented at the 2603-2606. https://10.1145/1753326.1753720 http://dl.acm.org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/citation.cfm?id&#61;1753720

Annotation: My source this week focused on exploring and understanding the challenges that 1st time mobile users (internet users only) in the developing world experience even after access to these communication technologies. The study reports results of an ethnographic action research study, exploring mobile-centric internet use. Over the course of 13 weeks, eight women, each a member of a livelihoods collective in urban Cape Town, South Africa, received training to make use of the data (internet) features on the phones they already owned. None of the women had previous exposure to PCs or the internet. Activities focused on social networking, entertainment, information search, and, in particular, job searches. Results of the exercise reveal both the promise of, and barriers to, mobile internet use by a potentially large community of first-time, mobile-centric users. Discussion focuses on the importance of self-expression and identity management in the refinement of online and offline presences, and considers these forces relative to issues of gender and socioeconomic status.

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After access | Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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This study reports results of an ethnographic action research study, exploring mobile-centric internet use. Over the course of 13 weeks, eight women, each a member of a livelihoods collective in urban Cape Town, South Africa, received training to make use of the data (internet) features on the phones they already owned.

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Citation: Shadrack, J. H. (2021). Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity and Sound: Screaming the Abyss. Emerald Publishing Limited. DOI: 10.1108/9781787569256

Annotation: Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity, and Sound: Screaming The Abyss by Jasmine Hazel Shadrack is a study of US Black Metal through a lens of affirmation—opposite to the abusive and often dark history of black metal through patriarchy and masculinities. The author uses auto-ethnography throughout the book to describe experiences and viewpoints within the genre as a way to explore what the genre means for individuals as well as the structure of the genre. While there is not much discussion of temporalities, there were a few instances where time experience and temporalities are mentioned, such as in her description of the scream (17). I think about when I saw the band Liturgy and how, for moments of blistering music and soaring vocals, my own body feels intertwined with the rhythms and time of the music; the body is tethered to experience in the theory of phenomenology, and experience can often lead to altered conceptions of time. Through the experience of the scream, Shadrack is found in a “temporal void plateau”—a space in which time seems to freeze and suspend the participant within the musical act. The move from the internal turmoil that produces the scream, the guitar sounds, or the blast beats can create an exteriorization of time and experience for those around the individual.

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Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity and Sound: Screaming the Abyss | Emerald Insight

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Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity and Sound: Screaming the Abyss | Authors: Jasmine Hazel Shadrack

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Citation: Guerrettaz, A., Chan Dzul, M., & Pomol Cahum, I.Y. (2020). Yucatec-Maya Language Revitalization: A Reconceptualization of Indigeneity and Call for Action. Modern Language Journal, 104 (2):511-519.

Annotation: The authors of this paper, all linguist scholars declare themselves to have a "critical friendship." Chan Dzul and Pomol Cahum are Yucatan Mayas well-versed in a Maya language and the importance of language on cultural identity. Many younger Maya are searching for ways to reclaim their Maya identity and to master the customs and language. This is particularly true for youth who have come to realize that no one in their immediate family can speak the language fluently. Some of their efforts to preserve their heritage come in restructuring and redefining their relationships with the rest of the world. For example, as seen in the quote, most Maya activists prefer the term "originario" is more appropriate than the term "indigeno," a fact often missed even by well-intentioned academics.

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Citation: Zaugg, I. and Reeve, J. (2021). The Hegemony of Keyboard Defaults. The 22nd Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers.

Annotation: Zaugg and Reeve, in this article, examine the way QWERTY defaults have become a standard. This ‘standard’ has had a bad impact on non-Latin languages, particularly the ones with an oral history. They argue that “No single tool is more fundamental to writing today — and more unexamined — than the computer keyboard” (p. 1). In order to decolonize the digital space and make it accessible, it is important to understand these impacts and create ways in which all languages, Latin or not, get equal opportunities to create, share, and find their content.

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View of THE HEGEMONY OF KEYBOARD DEFAULTS

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Return to Article Details THE HEGEMONY OF KEYBOARD DEFAULTS

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Citation: Fleming, D. T. (2018). "'I have a copyright': The Privatization of Martin Luther King's Dream." The Journal of African American History 103(3), 369-401. DOI: 10.1086/698521

Annotation: The article is about how Dexter Scott King, MLK’s second son, attempted to keep his father’s legacy alive in the environment of Reagan era of economics by turning the legacy into a brand. This would standardize the legacy so that it would appear the same all over the world, echoing the marketing strategies of the Coca-Cola company. Fleming argues that Dexter privatized the legacy of MLK by restricting access to his words. But in doing so, as Fleming argues, he played into conservative critics of MLK who wanted to limit the promotion of MLK’s legacy.

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“I have a copyright”: The Privatization of Martin Luther King’s Dream | The Journal of African American History: Vol 103, No 3

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Citation: Brown, D. (2007). Bury my heart at wounded knee : An indian history of the american west. ProQuest Ebook Central https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

Annotation: Dee Brown tells the story of the invasion of the United States West during the 19th century, from the indigenous peoples' points of view.

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Concordia University, Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, Canada

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Concordia University, Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, Canada

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Concordia University, Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, Canada

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Citation: Srigley, K., Zembrzycki, S., & Iacovetta, F. (Eds.). (2018). Beyond Women's Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.4324/9781351123822

Annotation: Admittedly, I was unable to read this source in its entirety as it’s a full book; however, I think it would be a great resource for not only me but others as well (and it’s free through the library!). The book, Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century contains 25 essays from a diverse group of scholars. This collection of essays “considers Indigenous modes of storytelling, feminism in diverse locales around the globe, different theoretical approaches, oral history as performance, digital oral history, and oral history as community-engagement.” For my purposes, Chapter 17 “Oral Histories for Building Social Movements, Then and Now” by Sarah K. Loose and Chapter 22 “The Medium is Political and the Message is Personal” by Mary A. Larson are the most relevant.

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University of Toronto, King's College Circle, Toronto, ON, Canada

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University of Toronto, King's College Circle, Toronto, ON, Canada

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University of Toronto, King's College Circle, Toronto, ON, Canada

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Citation: Srigley, K., Zembrzycki, S., & Iacovetta, F. (Eds.). (2018). Beyond Women's Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.4324/9781351123822

Annotation: Admittedly, I was unable to read this source in its entirety as it’s a full book; however, I think it would be a great resource for not only me but others as well (and it’s free through the library!). The book, Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century contains 25 essays from a diverse group of scholars. This collection of essays “considers Indigenous modes of storytelling, feminism in diverse locales around the globe, different theoretical approaches, oral history as performance, digital oral history, and oral history as community-engagement.” For my purposes, Chapter 17 “Oral Histories for Building Social Movements, Then and Now” by Sarah K. Loose and Chapter 22 “The Medium is Political and the Message is Personal” by Mary A. Larson are the most relevant.

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To continue, you must log into your library account.

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Nipissing University, College Drive, North Bay, ON, Canada

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Nipissing University, College Drive, North Bay, ON, Canada

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Nipissing University, College Drive, North Bay, ON, Canada

# data[].attributes.body
Citation: Srigley, K., Zembrzycki, S., & Iacovetta, F. (Eds.). (2018). Beyond Women's Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.4324/9781351123822

Annotation: Admittedly, I was unable to read this source in its entirety as it’s a full book; however, I think it would be a great resource for not only me but others as well (and it’s free through the library!). The book, Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century contains 25 essays from a diverse group of scholars. This collection of essays “considers Indigenous modes of storytelling, feminism in diverse locales around the globe, different theoretical approaches, oral history as performance, digital oral history, and oral history as community-engagement.” For my purposes, Chapter 17 “Oral Histories for Building Social Movements, Then and Now” by Sarah K. Loose and Chapter 22 “The Medium is Political and the Message is Personal” by Mary A. Larson are the most relevant.

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Citation: Sell, S., Huet Bautista, N., Méndez Pérez, M. and Hernández-Avila, I., 2017. Chiapas Maya awakening. 6th ed. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Annotation: This book is a collection of poems and short stories, written in three languages - the Mayan language is presented first, followed by Spanish, and then English. The editors begin the book with an introduction that explains the context - Mayan writers struggling to identify themselves to themselves, their community, and the world.

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Contemporary Poems and Short Stories

Edited and translated by Sean S. Sell

Edited by Nicolás Huet Bautista

Foreword by Marceal Méndez

Introduction by Inés Hernández-Ávila

Published by: University of Oklahoma Press

Imprint: University of Oklahoma Press

200 Pages | 6 x 9 | 11 b&w illus., 1 map, 1 table

9780806155616

Published: January 2017

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Chiapas Maya Awakening - University of Oklahoma Press

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Edited and translated by Sean S. Sell Edited by Nicolás Huet Bautista Foreword by Marceal Méndez Introduction by Inés Hernández-Ávila Published by: University of Oklahoma Press Imprint: University of Oklahoma Press 200 Pages | 6 x 9 | 11 b&w illus., 1 map, 1 table 9780806155616 Published: January 2017

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Annotation: Steele, C. K. (2016). The digital barbershop: Blogs and online oral culture within the African American community. Social Media + Society, 2(4) doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2056305116683205

Citation: Steele considers the affordances of the digital world, and specifically blogs, in providing a space for more traditionally oral forms of storytelling in the African American community. Similar to the Gage article, Steele shows a traditionally marginalized group that utilizes infrastructures of power to both critique dominant cultures and maintain the traditions of their own.

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For African Americans, the legacy of oral communication within the community is being transferred to online spaces. Blogging provides a platform with features that mirror many of the components of the Black barbershop. The barber and beauty shop symbolize a space of retreat, wherein African Americans have formed alternate publics used to critique the dominant culture, foster resistance, and strengthen African American institutions. Analysis of nine African American-authored blogs using a method of critical technocultural discourse analysis demonstrates that each blog used traditional Black rhetorical strategies while making modifications to contemporary goals. The strategies involve modifications made to traditional Black humor and folktales. The writing style is highly performative, yet relies upon participant interaction. This reliance on orality is a necessary force in the maintenance of cultural traditions that have long worked to assist in group definition and acts of resistance in political power struggles. By utilizing modified song, narrative, and fables to articulate resistance and craft African American identity, African American online oral culture persists as a strategy to house political discourse within the often hidden enclave spaces of the digital barbershop.

Black Oral Culture as a Rhetorical Strategy

Rethinking the online Black public sphere from a feminist and afro-centrist perspective begins with an interrogation of the role that orality plays in the unique experience of those of African descent in the United States. The United States was built and expanded with an emphasis on paper and literacy. Literacy has heavily influenced the structure of the government, our relationship to religion, and our creation of hierarchical systems of power distribution and social organization. Time-based media, such as speech, are limited by their extension into time and favor stability, community, and tradition. Space-based media extend influence and facilitate rapid change, development, and "progress" ( Innis, 1950). In the United States, the dominant group's emphasis on space-based media links our mode of communication to our quest for dominance, order, and power. Literacy has been privileged in Western society for its ability to separate ideas from the thinkers and create an "objectivity" that orality does not ( Innis, 1950). While literacy contributes greatly to contemporary society, orality adds symbolic complexity, individual creativity, and complex audience relations ( Finnegan, 1988). Speaking provides the opportunity for reaction, whereas writing offers delayed response ( Sidran, 1971). In prioritizing the rational, literacy has moved the dominant US culture away from an appreciation of emotionality and community. While writing has seemingly made us more "civilized" through the creation of the individual, the provision of continuity of time and space, and the uniformity of codes, and our ability to be more expressive and communal is diminishing greatly ( McLuhan, 1962, 1964/1994).

Reliance on literacy, print, and now electronic communication have been instrumental in the maintenance of dominant US culture. Black culture was created and transformed in a process that included slavery and the merging of practices, traditions, and modes of communication of various Western African ethnic groups and colonial American (European) traditions. The hybrid culture that formed in the United States is strongly connected to African traditions of orality. Orality has implications for knowledge and recall, and possesses several salient features. In a primary oral culture, a person can know only as much as she can recall, making mnemonics important cognitive and social tools and proverbs emerge as a means to evaluate decisions. Oral cultures are not objective but empathic in their speech. The interiority of sound places man at the center of his universe within a society of primary orality. These features separate oral cultures from print-based cultures ( Ong, 1988/2002). The traditional conception of the bourgeois public sphere centers knowledge within a literate society. Black counterpublics instead center knowledge and debate within the realm of orality.

The age of electronic media widely signaled a shift to a secondary orality for the dominant US culture ( McLuhan, 1964/1994; Ong, 1988/2002). Patterns of interaction online further a shift back to the oral ( December, 1993; Ferris & Wilder, 2006; Fowler, 1994; Harnad, 1991; Rheingold, 1993). Features, like their additive, redundant, and polychromic nature, signal that blogs and social network sites (SNSs) demonstrate the adoption of secondary orality in the dominant culture of the United States. Given the continuing significance of orality among those of African descent, it is not surprising that African Americans readily participate in social networking and blogging ( Brock, 2009, 2011; Esco, 2011; Madden et al., 2013). Blog sites offer an interface, wherein users can connect with one another. Blog posts and comments hold political discourse, and blogging communities form insular spaces separate from the dominant culture to interrogate issues of concern to marginalized communities.

Four primary elements of African American oral culture in America exemplify the features of orality as described by Ong. These include the sacred song, slave tales, the secular song and humor, and African American folklore and folk heroes ( Levine, 1977).

Sacred Songs Hide Dissent

The sacred song, or spiritual, is indicative of how aspects of life like religion, humor, and politics are intertwined in the oral traditions of African Americans. The spiritual provided the slave a way of expressing a sense of hope in a seemingly hopeless situation and an articulation of the desire for freedom. During the period of chattel slavery, systematic attempts to suppress the native religions of slaves led to an adoption and re-appropriation of the Christian religion. While the laws and social codes restricted enslaved Africans in their ability to congregate, expression of Christian faith allowed for slaves to utilize the motifs of the Old Testament to create the double meanings of sacred songs used to guide collective revolt, signal rebellion, and voice dissent ( Levine, 1977, p. 75).

Sacred songs provided a means to express out loud the anguish and peril of slavery and the hope of freedom that remained ( Fisher, 1990; Thurman, 1975). Beyond the lyrics, the music of the spiritual was refashioned as a cultural form of expression that was unique to the African American experience ( Southern, 1997). Africans who were living in enslavement re-appropriated Christianity, a tool of their oppressors, in the pursuance of freedom. Since the dominant group was not aware of the dual meanings of the song, dissent could be voiced openly and without consequence.

Folktales and Cunning

The folktales of slaves, which still exist today in many forms, enabled African Americans to craft a world where people of their own race were centered. Re-centering the experience via storytelling is a common facet of African Americans' oral communication. This world-building and centering function of storytelling allows oral cultures to foreground their importance even as they are often decentered in the discourse of more dominant literate cultures. Folklore is a communicative process, performative in nature ( Ben-Amos, 1989), and "is constantly reflecting and refashioning the experience of the community" ( Akoma, 2007). Common themes in the folktales of oral cultures are important indicators of cultural assumptions and values.

The trickster tale and the folktale showcase linguistic prowess and verbal cunning in stories that are about both content and performance. This dual purpose signals the importance of face-to-face community interaction within an oral culture. The introduction of writing, on the other hand, signals an alienation of the spoken word ( Havelock, 1963; Ong, 1977/2012). When the need for recall and performance dissipates, so too can the aesthetic pleasure of storytelling and the cultural and philosophical thoughts embedded and enacted in the forms of interaction of a given community ( Akoma, 2007).

Secular Song Critique and Parody

Post-slavery, diasporic Africans living in America embedded themes of grievance and sexual relations within secular songs and humor that could not otherwise be addressed in sacred music. Humor allowed for a release of the aggression that typically had to remain guarded in conditions of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. An example of the combination of humor and culturally condoned release of aggression, as well as the importance placed upon verbal prowess, is the practice of "signifyin." In popular English vernacular, the term "signification" refers to the denotation of meaning through the use of a sign or word. Within the African American community, the term "signifying" generally refers to a verbal contest where the most imaginative user of indirection, irony, and insult wins ( Lee, 1993). It is an elaborate, indirect form of goading or insult, at times making use of profanity ( Bell, 1987). Signifying is also defined as implying, goading, or boasting by indirect verbal or gestural means ( Abrahams, 1999). Scholars ascribe the origin of "signifyin" to the poem, "The Signifying Monkey," a story recounted in music and comedy routines since the beginning of the 20th century. According to Gates (1989), signifyin(g) "functions as a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary tradition" (p. xxii). In this context, authors reuse motifs from previous works, altering them and "signifying" upon them so as to create their own meanings.

Another subset of secular humor and cultural expression in African American communities is an activity called "playing the dozens," or more simply "the dozens." The key distinction between "the dozens" and signfyin(g) is the directness of the insult. "The dozens" is best described as a contest of personal power-of wit, self-control, verbal ability, mental agility, and mental toughness. In most cases, two parties exchange barbs with increasing intensity ( Leland, 2004). Signifyin(g) and the dozens are also used to critique negative characteristics of the community as a form of community self-disciplining. As Levine (1977) explains, "the need to laugh at our enemies, our situation, ourselves is a common one but exists more urgently in those who exert the least power over their immediate environment" (p. 300).

Work Songs, Heroes, and the Maintenance of Dignity

The work songs of African Americans were an instrument used to co-opt forced labor, removing the mental power from those in physical control. The songs acknowledge the power the Whites held in a racialized system of separation and the diminished status of African Americans in the 19th century ( Bay, 2000). The songs, sung during the labor process that furthers this system of oppression, function as an act of community re-appropriation.

While used as a tool to recognize oppression, the songs often reified systems of patriarchy, colorism, and racial hegemony, cementing the ideology of the oppressor in the minds of the oppressed. African American heroes, who tended to be meek and quietly manipulative in folklore, became more powerful and confrontational of authority as African Americans sought additional rights. Exaggerated tales of African Americans fighting for their rights were important in crafting dignity and strength for the community. All of these aspects of African American oral tradition and orality, more generally, continue to help to build a community that developed in opposition to the dominant US culture in values, systems of power, and communicative traditions.

The Black Barbershop as a Hush Harbor

The unique nature of Black hair care and the discourse that surrounds the practice make hairstyling an "in-group activity" ( Harris-Lacewell, 2004). Early Black barbers catered to a White clientele by keeping personal identity hidden ( Bristol, 2009). In sharp contrast, the Black barbershop of the later 20th century became an enclave within the African American community. In these shops, Black working- and middle-class male patrons received services for their hair while engaging in the rituals of Black hair care, and everyday talk is a place of retreat for African American clientele and barbers. Outside the gaze of the dominant group, African Americans can openly discuss things personal to the community with no need to hide their opinions and ideas for fear of reprisal. The shop provides a place where no one is confused by African American hair, and no explanation needed for one's hair care needs. The need to explain or justify Black hair or identity is absent. Beauty shop talk also builds upon features of primary orality in its reliance upon empathic communication over objective knowledge. Rather than the debates of the barbershop, the beauty shop creates a safe space for communal sharing. Black feminist writers explain this differentiation as a privileging of personal ways of knowing and writing, narrative, and dialog rather than debate, validation of emotion, and personal accountability. Black feminist writers insist that theory and systems of knowledge that exist outside of what is normalized as scientific should be considered valuable as well ( Lorde, 1984; Thomas, 1998).

In the case of blogs, Black oral culture and shop talk may provide African Americans with a unique ability to navigate and manipulate technology in the creation of alternate publics. For those who used the rhetorical strategies of Black oral culture in voicing dissent, re-centering the African experience, critiquing oppressive systems on the American continent, and maintaining dignity, everyday discourse is a political strategy. Therefore, in the history of Black oral culture, the lines between art, politics, and technology become blurred. While African American art, politics, and technology can be studied separately, understanding their interrelated nature in the African American experience provides a more in-depth analysis of how everyday discourse online can foster the creation of alternate public spheres. The literature has thus far lacked an in-depth analysis of Black blogs outside of the realm of traditional political discourse. Analysis of African American participation online requires a socio-historical basis to better understand the rhetorical strategies of the group and the goals and motivations of online participants in blogging communities. This frees the space to be used by for other discursive purposes, including political communication.

Mode of Analysis

CTDA works from the premise that populations other than the dominant group do not fundamentally lack technological capabilities, even though they have frequently been excluded from the literature ( Brock, 2009). While similar to critical discourse analysis, Andre Brock's CTDA adds the examination of "structural analysis of an artifact with a discourse analysis of the cultural means through which users interpolate themselves within relations to the artifact" (p. 1087). As a method, CTDA favors the subjective analysis of the researcher guided by a conceptual framework in order to yield a more holistic analysis of the interaction between users, technology, culture, and practice. In this case, my framework for analysis is built upon Levine's explication of Black oral culture. CTDA provides an analysis of not just the content of the blog posts and comments but how the affordances of blogging contribute to content and discourse ( Sweeney & Brock, 2014).

The following analysis focuses on the rhetorical strategies employed by bloggers and their communities. To better understand how blogging accommodates or transforms facets of Black oral culture/rhetorical strategies, I conducted an analysis of the posts and comments of nine blogs. I archived posts over a period of 4 months yielding a total of 1,670 posts and 36,271 comments for this study. While content analyses of blogs traditionally rely on online search engines and directories for sampling frames, because of the interpretive nature of designating a blog as a "black blog," these tools are less useful in this context. Drawing upon The Root, a Black online magazine owned by The Washington Post and The Black Weblog Awards, the purposive sample included the following: Very Smart Brothas (VSBs) authored by Damon Young and Panama Jackson (lifestyle/humor), A Belle in Brooklyn authored by Demetria Lucas (lifestyle/relationships), Until I Get Married authored by Jozen Cummings (relationships), Black Girl With Long Hair (BGLH) authored by Leila Noelliste (lifestyle), Necole Bitchie authored by Necole Bitchie (entertainment/media), Young Black and Fabulous authored by Natasha Eubanks (entertainment), Afrobella by Patrice Yursik (fashion), PostBourgie by Gene Demby (news/opinion), and The Field Negro Blog by Wayne Bennett (news/opinion/politics). Selection for inclusion in the sample was as follows: Black/African American authored, oriented toward Black/African American community, active comments section, and no overt espousal of political agenda by authors. Therefore, while I included blogs where politics were discussed, I excluded those that had the word "politics" in the title or the description penned by the founder on the blog website.

The High Context of Black Blogs

Black blogs employ a high context for participation. High-context cultures are those in which less verbally explicit communication is common. Such cultures also tend to use less written/formal communication and instead rely upon internalized understandings, long-term relationships, and strong boundaries to guide effective communication. The long-term relationships guarantee that those involved in communication share meaning. The internalized understandings can often make it difficult for outsiders, especially those from low-context cultures to participate. Low-context cultures are rule-oriented and task-centered. Such cultures, which would include the dominant US culture, codify knowledge, making it public and external. High-context cultures focus on personal face-to-face interaction. The tone, vocabulary employed, and context required for participation in the blogs within this study demonstrate the parallels between blogging and personal face-to-face dialog ( Hall, 1976). Unlike some other social media platforms used by African Americans, blogs provide the space necessary for discourse that does not rely solely on pre-established communities but re-builds new communities over time.

One can see examples of the high context needed to participate in conversations on blogs like VSBs, PostBourgie, and BGLH. Writers on each of these sites regularly employ synecdoche specific to the blogging community. This includes simple acronyms on VSBs and a more complex categorization system for hair textures on Black Girl Long Hair. While this means of categorizing natural hair textures did not originate on the site, the bloggers never define the terms for the reader. Style icons on the bloggers of BGLH are identified by various categories referencing their respective hair textures. A post tagged 3C hair provoked a higher than usual volume of comments, wherein readers debated whether 3C was an appropriate label given the pictures provided. The high context required to participate in this discussion demonstrates how bloggers take advantage of the features of the platform to create communities who share insider knowledge.

Writers on sites like VSBs and PostBourgie display the high context of the Black blogosphere by connecting with readers with whom they share cultural touchstones. Black pop culture references from the 1980s and 1990s linked readers to the present by reflecting upon a similar coming of age movie or album that is shared by the community. In a February 2014 post, Panama Jackson, blogging for VSBs describes the "People he hates the most." People who read while walking are first on the list. He explains,

If you're a woman you already can't walk in a straight line when you're paying attention (yeah, I said it. Shots fired.) But now you're engrossed in some sh*t that has taken your full attention, meanwhile I'm just trying to get to my final destination without bumping into random motherf*ckers I see in the street, but noooooooooooooooo . . . here you go, zig zagging like you learned something about how not to get shot from watching Ricky get shot in Boyz N The Hood.

Here Jackson references the shootout scene in the film Boyz in The Hood, wherein a beloved character, Ricky, is shot and killed. This interjection does not cause the audience to focus in any long-lasting way on the plot of the film. Rather, as a cultural touchstone, the film reference does the job of signifying upon women reading the post while tying the community together with a film reference widely known among readers. Such cultural touchstones are predominantly used as metaphors to describe the lived experience of the writers and readers in the present. There is a double meaning for only those who are a part of this community, both on and offline, and fully appreciate the metaphor, narrative, or joke in question. The high context required for participation not only sets a bar for understanding the content of the original post but also affords readers the credibility needed to engage in discussions.

Remixing Black Oral Culture

The four facets of oral culture created by Africans living in America during chattel slavery and the antebellum South were spirituals, folktales, secular song/humor, and slave tales as detailed by Levine (1977). While rooted in the legacy of enslavement, these components of Black oral culture have had a long and important history in the preservation of Black culture and Black cultural identity in America, and serve as a way of analyzing the rhetorical work done by Black bloggers and their communities in the online digital barbershop.

Substituting the Sacred

The spiritual is the creation of a people who restrained physically but not mentally. In the creation of the spiritual, Africans surviving under enslavement in the Americas took the religion that was used to oppress them and created a tool of freedom. This was done figuratively through the embrace of spiritual practices that adopted the ideas of social justice and liberty from biblical texts. It was done literally through the use of spirituals to guide collective revolt, signal rebellion, and voice dissent through biblical metaphors. Spiritual metaphors kept inside meanings hidden from outsiders. Spirituals have remained an important cultural tie for many in the African American religious tradition. The tie that binds many African Americans in the online blogging community is not the traditional spiritual. Black bloggers who came of age during the 1980s and 1990s share the connection to the popular culture of that time. Early hip hop, Black sitcoms, and Black films hold the cultural weight of spirituals for this group of Black bloggers and the blogging communities. Substitution of the sacred occurs by re-appropriating tools of oppression, including media stereotypes of African Americans and other artifacts.

During this period of analysis, the hashtag #byefelicia became popular on Twitter as well as on other social media platforms. "Bye Felicia" is utilized at the end of a description of a person no long worthy of consideration, usually because their opinion or behavior is contradictory to that of the community of which they are a part. At the end of a February post on VSBs titled "Under the Radar Significant Contributors to Black History," Panama Jackson quips about pop culture figures Cam'ron and Ray J as being important parts of Black history. The post is comedic in nature explaining that Ray J,

is all of the most ratchet parts of black twitter combined. He's like Captain Planet if the five elements were Subtweets, Absurd Stories, B!tchmade Behavior, Delusions of Grandeur, and Wayyyyy too much free time on his hands. Brandy's brother is tired of being humble, and we should all thank him for that.

Using elements of the dozens in his description of multiple pop culture figures, Jackson is mocking the way that certain members of the Black community take Black history month too seriously. He uses pop culture figures with little respect in the community to prove this point. The picture that accompanies the post, wherein actor Samuel Jackson's character from Pulp Fiction is captioned in a meme saying, "Say something about Black history. I dare you." The meme points us closer to the message of the post, which is never directly stated.

The final way the author alludes to the double meaning is in the conclusion of the post which reads, "Happy Black History Month (Also, if you are offended and feel that we're trivializing Black history month . . . bye Felicia.)." The expression comes from the classic film Friday which features actors Ice Cube and Chris Tucker spending a Friday at home in south central LA. Friday was released in 1995. In the film, Craig (Ice Cube) and his friend Smokey (Chris Tucker) smoke marijuana, attempt to meet and hook up with various women, and are eventually involved in an altercation with a neighborhood thug. Felicia is a local drug-addicted woman who regularly interacts with the pair and displays many of the signatures of the stereotypical 'crackhead' in many African American urban comedies. Craig and Smokey regularly dismiss Felicia's requests for cash, drugs, or other favors with a simple phrase, "Bye Felicia."

These scenes are not an integral part of the plot of the film, rather they are a part of the mundane and normative experiences communicated by the film signifying life in an underserved African American inner-city community. This reference by bloggers and the blogging community is an example of substituting the sacred common in modern Black oral culture online. "Bye Felicia" does several things for its speakers. The expression creates an in-group space, wherein cultural context is required for participation. This cultural context is created both by viewing the film and by understanding the relative normality of a character like Felicia, one who is a part of the community but not a productive member of the community. Felicia, as the neighborhood crackhead, is welcome until she becomes an annoyance or disturbance to the overall maintenance of comfort and stability for the rest of the members of the community. A person who holds positions in contrast with the blogger or who is not worthy of attention is "Felicia."

The phrase serves as a means to diminish contrarian positions without the direct attack that one might find within the low-context dominant culture. Because protection of relationships is important in this space, "Bye Felicia" dismisses someone from the current dialog but does not exclude from the community. In this case, those who, in the opinion of the blogger, hold Black history month to be sacrosanct are not helpful and are doing relative harm to the complexity and heterogeneity of Black culture. After the satirical post, telling those who are offended "Bye Felicia" allows readers to take the assertions in the post as biting humor and lets naysayers remain in the community but without the credibility to critique this position effectively.

Blogger Tales

Slave Tales centralized the importance of the African living in an America that marginalized him. Through the creation of tales, the cunning, intelligence, and expertise of the slave were lauded, not as exceptional but as a norm. Slave tales worked to preserve dignity for a community that faced unending degradation. In the blogs VSBs and PostBourgie, one sees the modern manifestation of these tales. Used for the same purpose, bloggers routinely tell stories filled with humor, moral lessons, and examples of the wit and cunning of the central figure.

Panama Jackson and Damon of VSBs routinely tell stories filled with humor that demonstrates their verbal prowess and the strength and dignity of African Americans faced with the most undignified circumstances. Damon posts about his experiences in his neighborhood and fashions the post as a modern (slave) tale. In this blog tale, we follow him from sun-up in his Brownstone with his fiancé, through breakfast as he reflects upon the noisy neighbors and dilapidated buildings that surround his home. As he drops his fiancé off at work and heads back home to write, he blogs:

My route back home takes me through the hood part of the neighborhood. Sometimes there will be cops circling around. I do not consider the police to be an antagonistic entity. But I do not feel safe around them. I don't necessarily feel unsafe either. I guess the best word to describe how I feel is aware . . . But there are also times when I notice them paying me more attention than I'm comfortable with. I might even get followed for a block. And then, at that point, I realize nothing matters. I'm a popular published author and professional writer with a fiancee. A fiancee with multiple degrees. We're renting a brownstone with hardwood floors throughout and 12 foot ceilings. We're getting married in July. We go to gallery crawls and board meetings. I own t-shirts proclaiming my love for Bougie Black People. We have four corkscrews, collected over time from the parties we throw and attend. I have a morning routine. And a dog.

But, in that moment, I'm a Black man in a sketchy neighborhood wearing a parka, sweats, and sneakers, and driving a Charger. To them, I am a potential suspect. Or, even worse, a potential threat. One awkward move or one overzealous officer could end everything for me.

The bloggers of PostBourgie and VSBs speak from the position of the Black middle class, those who are painfully aware of the legacy of oppression and discrimination African Americans have faced in America. Yet, given their current social and economic conditions, find themselves in a privileged position within the community. Much of this privilege comes from access to education. Bloggers reference college and the college experience as an unquestioned norm within their community of readers.

During the period of study, a new story about a Black high school student from New York's acceptance to eight Ivy League schools began making the rounds of various social media sites, news sites, and in the TV news. Many individuals and publications heralded the young man's accomplishments. None of the websites in this study linked to or mentioned the story. They ignored this example of Black male accomplishment, not because the achievement is scorned by the bloggers, rather holding this young man up as exceptional in the mainstream press works to discourage the public from thinking of Black males as typically excellent. By weaving conversations about education into the everyday stories, bloggers re-center their experiences as normative. There is no plea for Black males to go to college or reference to questionable statistics about graduation or incarceration rates. Discussions of college assume a familiarity with this experience for the readers. Instead of proving a point to the dominant group, their tales centralize the Black experience and establish the central figures in the story as normal. They are not coons or sambos, yet they are also not exceptional credits to their race. In this way, the modern blog tale, like the slave tale, reifies the African American experience as part of the American experience. Their struggles, like their accomplishments, are an ordinary part of being Black in America. The tales situate the bloggers and other characters in the tales as ordinary yet worthy of attention.

Humor and Wordplay

All of the blogs in the study rely on humor and verbal wordplay in different forms and to varying degrees. For VSBs, verbal wordplay utilizing indirection and signifying are a part of the brand. One example of the use of indirection in signifying is the running themed post "Shit bougie black people do." In this post, the bloggers subtly reference Internet memes such as "Shit girls say" and the many others that followed to signify upon a group to which they belong. Another example of indirection directed within the community is the running joke of signifying upon the Black Greek Organization Delta Sigma Theta on the site, VSBs.

Blogger Maya Francis describes, in her 7 January 2014, post, "On D. Wade, Gabby Union, And Making Sense Of Non-Break 'Breaks' And Condomlessness," addresses the problems with irresponsible sex. She says, "One of my personal rules in life is 'never make a mistake you can't fix.' This is why I'm not a Delta." The single line that uses Delta Sigma Theta, a Black Greek organization, as the butt of a one-line joke signifies upon the women of the organization. The organization is respected within the community; therefore, there isn't any obvious harm done. Likewise, Damon (The Champ) Young's post published on 14 February 2014, "When Your Worst Behavior And Best Behavior Is The Same Damn Thing," begins, "We've all heard the story before: Boy spots Girl at 6th annual Delta 'Chicken Wing Eating Contest For The Mouth Gout Cure' . . . " This is the opening line of a longer tale woven by the blogger that makes a joke at the expense of the organization again. The joke works in this instance because it diminishes the high esteem of the organization by pairing them with an African American stereotype and a stereotype about uneducated African Americans. Again, because neither of these stereotypes would typically be assigned members of this group, the humor is not biting or defaming. Rather the humor does the work of strengthening group bonds. They can joke about the organization because they respect it.

The 13 January 2014 post, "Ode to Deltas," explains the running joke signifying upon sorority. The author explains that they joke about the Deltas because "they don't take themselves too seriously," "make a major impact," and "follow the blog more closely than others." This explanation, while complementing the Deltas, also subtly jabs at other African American sororities for whom the implication is that they do take themselves too seriously, do not make a major impact, or would not follow their blog. Signifyin, while present on other social media platforms, can be used differently by bloggers. Joking about the Deltas simultaneously makes use of a part of Black culture and requires readers to engage regularly on the site to follow the humor. Signifyin on the Deltas is a demonstration of group solidarity through the use of Black rhetorical strategy. This form of signifyin', as Florini (2014) explains, "often speaks to the shared experiences of Black Americans as raced subjects and can be a resource for encoding and expressing experiential knowledge about Black identities" (p. 224).

Bloggers reserve directness of address in humor for those who are detrimental to the Black community. Whether outsiders or members of the community, when the actions of an individual or group serve to oppress further, the bloggers engage in name-calling and direct critique. We see this on The Young, Black, and Fabulous (YBF) in the section titled Foolywang. Foolywang refers to individuals or institutions that engage in senseless acts of depravity, sexism, or racism. On 26 February 2014, the satirical newspaper The Onion was called out in the Foolywang section for calling 9-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis a c-t. Bloggers labeled J.R. Smith's actions as "foolery" in the "Foolywang" section of the site after he reportedly asked an underage girl for sex. The blog Field Negro regularly castigates African Americans whose behavior causes harm to the community or whose public image and discourse "embarrasses" African Americans. Secular Song traditionally served the purpose of this self-policing that Foolywang or "House Negro" does on the blogs The YBF and Field Negro.

Performance, Narrative and Humanizing Heroes

The performative aspect of telling folktales and recounting the history of a community remains active in the Black blogosphere. Demetria Lucas an author, life and relationship coach, and co-star of a cable reality show is the proprietor of A Belle in Brooklyn. A Belle in Brooklyn is a lifestyle and relationship blog wherein Lucus interweaves personal anecdotes about her romantic relationships with relationship advice and guidance. In both cases, we see the emergence of the blogger as griot rather than as diary writer or journalist. The blog is personal but not written for the self. The blogger understands the parameters of journalism, yet the blog posts exist as performance rather than prose. Too often, the lens through which communication scholars view bloggers is connected to expectations for journalists ( Deuze, 2009; Gillmor, 2010). Bloggers are marginalized as writers because of their emphasis on the subjective experience. As Papacharissi and Meraz (2012) explain, "A hobby for most, blogging is motivated by goals and priorities that are subjective, aimed at connecting bloggers to their social sphere and a variety of publics, and involving them in the process of information production and consumption." The insertion of self into "reporting" disqualifies the blogger from the realm of the professional. The attempt to compare blogging to standard practices of journalism obscures the creation of a new category of writing that is personal and professional, simultaneously individual and communal. Within the African American oral tradition, the insertion of self and personal experience brings validity to the conversation rather than weakness to one's argument. Re-centering one's experience, or the experience of a sub-culture within the dominant society, replicates the practices of folktales and songs common in the Black oral tradition.

Within an oral culture, the performance of narratives and tales is as important as the material content. Folktales along with secular songs were performed by a person equipped to share messages of cautionary tales and critiques of the community along with powerful, confrontational heroes. Lucus' blogging style commonly elucidates the folktale as well as the secular song/humor. Posts like "You never held it while he pees?" use a comical story of romantic encounters to bring levity to an awkward conversation about relational intimacy. Rather than an advice column about how to know or determine your level of intimacy, Lucas's 18 February 2014, blog post, functions like a secular humorous "song" of traditional oral culture, eliminating the difficult path to navigating intimacy with a romantic partner.

Extended narratives differentiate the interface of blogs from sites like Twitter. The Black Twitter community talks about the television show Scandal regularly, but it does so for 1 hr each week and 140 characters at a time. This prevents a facilitated dialog about the complexity of character development and the ability to formulate impassioned arguments regarding the development of characters in relation to the larger significance of their representation on prime-time television. The blog, insulated from the dominant culture, does not need to protect main character Olivia Pope, producer Shonda Rhimes, or the representation of Black women on television. PostBougie's weekly recap of Scandal features open letters from two different bloggers giving their take on the week's drama. In a post on 7 March 2014, bloggers Stacia and G.D. laude the White wife of the president as their favorite character rather than Olivia Pope (played by Kerry Washington), one of the few Black female prime-time protagonists. G.D. blogs about Mellie's take-control attitude and explains: "This shit right here is why I'm Team Mellie."

The PostBougie community understands the significance of the show culturally and, therefore, can critique it using extended narratives. They can use Olivia Pope and her relationship failures as cautionary tales and treat characters like Rowan Pope, Olivia's father, as heroes who stand up to the President and hegemonic power. The blog post functions as the performance of two storytellers responding to each other with commenters and engaging in the call and response typical in Black oral culture.

Discussion

Black blogs provide a platform to replicate modes of discourse present in Black oral culture and serve as a medium through which African Americans can modify facets of Black oral culture to meet the community's current needs. As a marginalized population in the United States, the shop talk and employment of recognizable rhetorical devices preserve the culture and can potentially foster the discourse needed to create an effectual counterpublic. Substituting the sacred with popular culture reflects a shift within this generation's experience and their disconnect from the traditional Black church. While the Black church maintains its cultural role, bloggers in this study were drawn together more by their common experiences with music, television, and film than by the sacred songs of the church. Yet, the same re-appropriation occurs. As much of mainstream American pop culture has devalued African Americans in stereotypic representations, this community of bloggers has re-appropriated mainstream disparaging images of African Americans to demonstrate solidarity and resistance and to urge uplift.

While the content of folktales changes, the bloggers still utilize tales to reassert the dignity of African Americans in an undignified system of racial stratification. Signifying and dozen's playing persist within this group of bloggers. Because this generation of bloggers spends much of their time communicating through short messages on other social media platforms, humor like "Bye Felicia" becomes typical. The platform of blogging, specifically, is not fully responsible for shaping the rhetorical strategy; rather, the communicative culture as determined by all of the technologies readily available to the community impacts the discourse. The desire to move beyond hero worship allows for nuanced exploration of prominent real and fictional African Americans through extended narratives. Rather than a simple transference of the historical features of Black oral culture or the rhetorical strategies, modern-day bloggers are making important changes to these features that better navigate the platform and the politics of the time.

Though dominant US culture and African American culture evolved over the same period and often in the same geographic spaces, the communicative features of the two are often in direct opposition. The high context needed to participate in African American oral culture is in opposition to the highly structured, public, and codified communication of the dominant group. The preservation of oral communication is evident even as African Americans embraced literacy. African American oral rhetorical strategies are a part of a cultural legacy rather than a cultural deficiency. Furthermore, they serve as a strategy used to pass on history, empower, subvert oppression, assert agency, and create representations of self and community ( Fulton, 2006).

According to Ong (1988/2002), writing separates ideas from the thinker and acts to create a sort of "objectivity" that orality cannot. The form of writing is significant in ordering and privileging our understanding of the text ( Ong, 1988/2002). The dynamic structure of blogs, where newer posts appear at the top of the screen, challenges the traditional horizontal-vertical system for organized formal writing, instead of reflecting the dynamic character of spoken communication. Many new online platforms allow users to replicate features of oral culture, creating a more natural process of explanation and storytelling. On SNSs, blogs, and other online media, there is a shift away from elite notions of knowledge, definitive "correctness" in writing, and notions of traditionally conceived privacy that reflect the community-building priorities of orality more than the hierarchical priorities of literacy.

Examining the rhetoric of the metaphorical barbershop demonstrates the ingenuity of African Americans as a marginalized population able to reimagine a medium that was previously considered exclusionary. The barbershop reflects the same ingenuity and reclamation of space. Previously, Black barbers were forced to exclude Black men from their shops, and Black beauticians were taught that they had to accommodate White standards of beauty. The present-day barbershop exists as a space of reprieve for Black men and a means of economic advancement for Black entrepreneurs. The reclamation of these spaces is made possible by the use of Black oral culture to foster dissent, re-centralize the importance of the African American experience, and preserve dignity in the face of oppression. Though bloggers in the communities within this study modified many of the facets of Black oral culture, the goals of the original rhetorical strategies remain intact.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Author Biography

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The Digital Barbershop: Blogs and Online Oral Culture Within the African American Community - Catherine Knight Steele, 2016

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For African Americans, the legacy of oral communication within the community is being transferred to online spaces. Blogging provides a platform with features that mirror many of the components of the Black barbershop. The barber and beauty shop symbolize a space of retreat, wherein African Americans have formed alternate publics used to critique the dominant culture, foster resistance, and strengthen African American institutions.

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ISBN: 9780262539739

Citation: Philip, Kavita. "The Internet will be Decolonized." Your Computer is on Fire. MIT Press, 2021.

Annotation: “The Internet Will Be Decolonized” by Kavita Phillip,takes a “material, infrastructural view” of the internet and the ways in which the political choices embodied in its materiality are inherently entwined with the knowledge created from and through it.

# data[].attributes.body
ISBN: 9780262539739

Citation: Philip, Kavita. "The Internet will be Decolonized." Your Computer is on Fire. MIT Press, 2021.

Annotation: “The Internet Will Be Decolonized” by Kavita Phillip,takes a “material, infrastructural view” of the internet and the ways in which the political choices embodied in its materiality are inherently entwined with the knowledge created from and through it.

# data[].attributes.body
Citation: Luker, T. (2017). Decolonizing archives: Indigenous challenges to record keeping in “reconciling” settler colonial states, Australian Feminist Studies, 32(92), pp. 108-125.

Annotation: Luker writes about the role of feminist approaches to affect in context of archiving indigenous artifacts in Australia and Canada. She writes about the destruction of knowledge and how decolonial archival practices must acknowledge the tensions involved in archiving. Power dynamics can easily be reproduced in archival practices, so being aware of the colonial power dynamics of the people whose history and artifacts are being archived is key.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ABSTRACT
Feminist and queer engagements with archives and archival theory have emphasised the affective dimensions of archival processes, particularly the meaning and place of archives when they concern marginalised people and intimate lives. In settler colonial contexts such as Australia and Canada, these ways of thinking about archives have been influential in responding to histories of removal, institutionalisation and abuse of Indigenous children. This article investigates the importance of feminist engagements with archives and historiography in 'reconciling' settler colonial states, with attention to sites of archival contention. Feminist modes of history that foreground affect in the formation of public culture need to take account of divergent views regarding the propriety of archival records in 'reconciling' settler colonial states. Indigenous peoples' mistrust of state and institutional archives, demands for control of archives and legal actions for destruction of records, as well as establishment of autonomous archives, all contribute to the important and fraught process of decolonising settler colonial archives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by UTS Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship 2012-16, Reading the Archive: Use of Historical Documents as Evidence in Law (2012000681) and an ARC Discovery Project, The Court as Archive: Rethinking the Institutional Role of Federal Superior Courts of Record [grant number DP130101954].

Notes on contributor

Trish Luker is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Decolonising Archives: Indigenous Challenges to Record Keeping in 'Reconciling' Settler Colonial States

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ABSTRACT Feminist and queer engagements with archives and archival theory have emphasised the affective dimensions of archival processes, particularly the meaning and place of archives when they concern marginalised people and intimate lives. In settler colonial contexts such as Australia and Canada, these ways of thinking about archives have been influential in responding to histories of removal, institutionalisation and abuse of Indigenous children.

# data[].attributes.body
Citation: Luker, T. (2017). Decolonizing archives: Indigenous challenges to record keeping in “reconciling” settler colonial states, Australian Feminist Studies, 32(92), pp. 108-125.

Annotation: Luker writes about the role of feminist approaches to affect in context of archiving indigenous artifacts in Australia and Canada. She writes about the destruction of knowledge and how decolonial archival practices must acknowledge the tensions involved in archiving. Power dynamics can easily be reproduced in archival practices, so being aware of the colonial power dynamics of the people whose history and artifacts are being archived is key.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ABSTRACT
Feminist and queer engagements with archives and archival theory have emphasised the affective dimensions of archival processes, particularly the meaning and place of archives when they concern marginalised people and intimate lives. In settler colonial contexts such as Australia and Canada, these ways of thinking about archives have been influential in responding to histories of removal, institutionalisation and abuse of Indigenous children. This article investigates the importance of feminist engagements with archives and historiography in 'reconciling' settler colonial states, with attention to sites of archival contention. Feminist modes of history that foreground affect in the formation of public culture need to take account of divergent views regarding the propriety of archival records in 'reconciling' settler colonial states. Indigenous peoples' mistrust of state and institutional archives, demands for control of archives and legal actions for destruction of records, as well as establishment of autonomous archives, all contribute to the important and fraught process of decolonising settler colonial archives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by UTS Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship 2012-16, Reading the Archive: Use of Historical Documents as Evidence in Law (2012000681) and an ARC Discovery Project, The Court as Archive: Rethinking the Institutional Role of Federal Superior Courts of Record [grant number DP130101954].

Notes on contributor

Trish Luker is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Decolonising Archives: Indigenous Challenges to Record Keeping in 'Reconciling' Settler Colonial States

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ABSTRACT Feminist and queer engagements with archives and archival theory have emphasised the affective dimensions of archival processes, particularly the meaning and place of archives when they concern marginalised people and intimate lives. In settler colonial contexts such as Australia and Canada, these ways of thinking about archives have been influential in responding to histories of removal, institutionalisation and abuse of Indigenous children.

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Citation: Duke Franklin Humanity Institute. (2020, December 17). Left of black: André Brock, Jr. discusses African American cybercultures on the web [Video file]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/JTF4jFcSNus

Annotation: André Brock, Jr. discusses his work on digital Black cybercultures. Brock makes a case for The Green Book as a media environment that helped African Americans navigate the Jim Crow South. With the U.S. highway system serving as its network, The Green Book is an example of distributed technological blackness. Brock’s work is focused on the libidinal or sensual aspect of Blackness online – Black joy as illustrated by hashtags such as #BlackGirlMagic. Brock also discusses his vision of Black Twitter as a space for shared catharsis.

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Left of Black | André Brock, Jr. Discusses African American Cybercultures on the Web

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Citation: Sunil Amrith. (2007). Political Culture of Health in India: A Historical Perspective. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(2), 114–121. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4419132

Annotation: In his article, Amrith draws on the discourses put forth by the National Planning Committee (NPC) in the 1930s with regards to “national health.” The NPC produced a report on national heath, that is, the health of Indian people, and this report was built upon the strands of discourses about health, body, and the nation. The discourse echoed that “poverty was in some sense a ‘natural’ condition in India, and at the root of the problem of public health” (p. 115). The article also discussed in detail how the NPC’s vision of transformation would go much further than what the colonial state had in mind—the NPC imagined a future in which health services and treatments would be dispersed not as charity or something that is made available to people; rather, health would become the “right” of each individual. Amrith also outlined the anti-malaria campaign efforts and the discourses used to define the initial success of the campaign (later on the campaign began to falter). He used an excerpt from a newspaper report in The Hindu that highlighted how this campaign, with the support from WHO, was helping eradicate malaria. Overall, the article shows how political activism has been present in the health messages in India: “The language of sacrifice, the redemptive or even messianic narrative of public health as personal and social liberation never disappeared” from these discourses. (p. 120)

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Political Culture of Health in India: A Historical Perspective on JSTOR

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This paper provides a historical perspective on the political culture of public health in India. It examines the genesis of the state’s commitment to provid...

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Citation: "Symposium Deafness and Orality: An Electronic Conversation." (1993). Oral Traditions 8(2), pp. 413-437.

Annotation: (Coming Soon)

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Citation: adi (2012). "Oral cultures and writing: Where does Deaf culture fit in?" ETEC540: Text, Technologies – Community Weblog, 1 October 2012.

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Oral cultures and writing: Where does Deaf culture fit in? | ETEC540: Text, Technologies – Community Weblog

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Walter Ong’s (1982) ideas on oral cultures and writing are not altogether correct in that they exclude Deaf cultures and their communities. This fault lies in his narrowed view that not “only communication, but thought itself relates in an altogether special way to sound” (Ong, 1982:7). What of the…

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Citation: Wigzell, Faith. 2021. “Traditional Magic or European Occultism? Commercial Fortune-Telling and Magic in Post-Soviet Russia and Their Relationship to Russian Tradition”. FOLKLORICA - Journal of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Folklore Association 1

Annotation: Wigzell analyzes the role of several forms of fortunetelling in Russia, before, during, and after the Soviet era, in society. She observes that a few of them (cartomancy, oneiromancy, reading coffee cups) were common before the very literacy-oriented and anti-superstition and mysticism Soviet regimen - but they continued in secret of great discretion, through word of mouth, to meet a new place after the end of Soviet Russia.

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Authors Faith Wigzell University College London-SSEES, London, UK

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Traditional Magic or European Occultism? Commercial Fortune-Telling and Magic in Post-Soviet Russia and their Relationship to Russian Tradition | FOLKLORICA - Journal of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Folklore Association

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The article examines the vibrant commercial magic and fortune- telling industry in Russia today. Based on fieldwork in Petersburg conducted in 2006, supplemented by printed and, in particular, web material, it seeks to show that, despite the many similarities with its counterparts in Europe and Nort…

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Citation: Shasore, Olasupo (2018). Journey of an African Colony. African on Netflix.

Annotation: The Journey of an African Colony documentary, done by Olasupo and a team of other researchers, takes us through a timeline and history of how Nigeria was formed. From the colonial masters to the founding fathers, many truths were told about the nation's formation and some colonization power effects that took place during its establishment and is still prevalent today. Many myths were debunked and tables were broken to throw light into the real narrative of slavery, post-colonial effects and many more. The documentary proved the point that nationalism is NOT a gift from Europe to African and its nation; rather, it is a novel means of oppression and control.

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Journey of an African Colony | Official Trailer | Netflix

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Citation: Farooqi, M. (2009). Introduction to Tilism-e Hoshruba. The Annual of Urdu Stories.

Annotation: This article is a brief introduction to one of the oldest and finest dastaans (stories) of South Asia. Tilism-e-Hoshruba is a great example of how oral traditions have been preserved over generations. Another important aspect that this story highlights, in line with what Ong (1985) and Havelock (1986), is the importance of poetry in oral cultures. This entire tale has pages filled with poetry. From describing the characters of a person to narrating the events of a battle, poetry has served all purposes.

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Citation: Rounds, C. D. (2020). “’Dead Men Make Such Convenient Heroes’: The Use and Misuse of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Legacy as Political Propaganda.” Journal of Black Studies 51(4), p. 315-331. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934720908489.

Annotation: Burke shows how information can be shared to strengthen an ideology when discussing the use of the printing press in the Protestant Reformation. Rounds argues that, similarly, political actors have used the history and memory of MLK as a medium to bolster their political platform, suggesting that, if he were alive, MLK would support their candidacy, position, or initiative. However, MLK can no longer speak for himself, so there’s no guarantee he would be for those things.

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In American history and memory, few figures stand as prominently as Martin Luther King Jr. In the minds of countless Americans, he remains the consummate activist for civil rights and social justice. Perhaps the most telling indication of his stature is the manner in which he is called upon, again and again, by proponents of varying political parties and ideologies as somebody who would, were he alive, support their candidacy, position, or initiative. The objective of this article is to document and discuss how the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. has become political propaganda. This is not a partisan effort and will not argue who "got it right" or "got it wrong" in claiming King as a supporter. Nor will it posthumously assign King membership in a political party or align him with a particular ideology. It aims only to present this ongoing history.

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"Dead Men Make Such Convenient Heroes": The Use and Misuse of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Legacy as Political Propaganda - Christopher D. Rounds, 2020

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In American history and memory, few figures stand as prominently as Martin Luther King Jr. In the minds of countless Americans, he remains the consummate activist for civil rights and social justice.

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Citation:

Annotation: In her speech, Adichie (2021) raises the importance of protecting material objects of Africans which serves as a form for strengthening their identity. She highlighted the relevance of history and art in terms of the appropriation of material objects by the Europeans who were keen on destroying African art." She stresses the need to teach African art and history in institutions - preferable euro/western-centric ones where they can all learn about the truth of her history. She reminded us about the story that Europe tells itself about its colonial history, "it is a story that basically says "yes, colonialism happened BUT..." She noted that in such instances, whatever comes after the but is the focus of the story because it absorbs, frees Europe of responsibility, and allows them the glow of charity - which in itself is colonialism in display

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Chimamanda Adichie Speech at the Humboldt Forum

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Citation: Williams, A. (2020). Black memes matter: #LivingWhileBlack with Becky and Karen. Social Media + Society, 6(4). http://dx.doi.org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1177/2056305120981047

Annotation: Williams (2020) examines “BBQ Becky [and] Karen memes” through a visual Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA). The author makes the argument that these memes contribute to and shed light on a larger conversation on Black oppression by presenting counternarratives to White supremacist ideologies that proliferate online.

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Citation: Cushman, E., Jackson, R., Nichols, A. L., Rivard, C., Moulder, A., Murdock, C., M. Grant, D. M., &  Adams, H. B. (2019) Decolonizing Projects: Creating Pluriversal Possibilities in Rhetoric, Rhetoric Review, 38:1, 1-22, DOI: 10.1080/07350198.2019.1549402

Annotation: Another article, one more centered specifically in rhetoric, seeks to examine textual, ethnographic, and pedagogical practices within the field in an attempt to “epistemically delink from the Imperial differences created by the formation of the Rhetorical Tradition and to imagine transrhetorical and pluriversal knowledge making” (22).

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Citation: Schmidt, K.M. and Beucher, R. (2020), "Affective intensities: Emotion, race, gender and the push and pull of bodies", English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Vol. 19 No. 4, pp. 403-416. https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1108/ETPC-11-2019-0147

Annotation: For my decolonial archive resource this week (and for my final paper), I’m thinking about the ways in which we can move away from our linear (read: colonial) understanding of orality versus literacy and move toward a more holistic understanding of how these modes of communication are entwined. I’ve chosen an article about a small study of three Black girls that “aims to investigate the ways affective intensities arise in the intra-actions within an assemblage as the girls create multimodal responses to literature” (Schmidt and Beucher 403). While this is still a response to literature, which Newman would be wary about, I think it is an interesting start to moving away from “traditional” notions of communal and communicative meaning-making.

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Citation: Stephanou, A. (2012). Black Metal and the Mouth: Always Serving You as a Meal, or, Infected Orality, Pestilential Wounds and Scars. Glossator 6: Black Metal.

Annotation: (CW: Bodies, gore, bodily descriptions, death--serously has some really disgusting images throughout!) I went to look for a source that discusses the orality of Black Metal; I found it within “Black Metal and the Mouth: Always Serving You as a Meal, or, Infected Orality, Pestilential Wounds and Scars” by Aspasia Stephanou. This essay does two things: 1) defines Black Metal (“…infects life with death, inviting one to participate in an enduring taste of undeath where ‘boundaries between subject and object evaporate, as they are not predicated on a dialectic of consumer and consumed’ (Morton 229)” (50)) and 2) displays the nihilism present within the music genre (“…both human and animal become potential carcasses, consumed in their mutual consummation, open to horror and the abyssal pit/mouth/womb of the earth” (48)). The focus of orality in Stephanou’s essay positions the mouth as a place of convalescing tortured victims within Black Metal's lyrics and imagery. However, this is also at the cost of saying that wounds and scars also act as the mouth of utterances in this because of how “the body is always at the point of decomposition” (55). This take on Black Metal positions the wound and dead body as one holding the power of utterances, and the questionable history of Black Metal can attest to it as it’s a site of pure hatred and derogatory musicians: Hyperborean Black Metal focuses on nihilism to escape these realities. Simultaneously, it horizontalizes the relationships of all things through the presences of open wounds and bodies containing utterances.

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Citation: Tharoor, S. (2015). Britain Does Owe Reparations. OxfordUnion.

Annotation: Tharoor (2015) talks about the impacts of British colonialism on the sub-continent (now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). While speaking at the Oxford Union, he cites examples and statistics to prove how the British Raj impacted the economic, social, and cultural aspects.

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Dr Shashi Tharoor MP - Britain Does Owe Reparations

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Citation: Millaleo, A. (2018). El Witral: La antigua y profunda escritura mapuche manifestada en la textilería ancestral. Territorio Ancestral. Retrieved from: https://www.territorioancestral.cl/2018/03/15/el-witral-la-antigua-y-profunda-escritura-mapuche-manifesta

Abstract: Durante décadas se ha manifestado de que el pueblo Mapuche no conocía la escritura ni la lectura, que la transmisión cultural mapuche se hace por medio de la oralidad (1); y además se ha sostenido que son los hombres mapuche los que ostentan las posiciones de poder al interior del entramado social. Dichas narraciones surgen principalmente del análisis de cronistas en su totalidad hombres ajenos a la cultura mapuche, quienes luego de observaciones superficiales relataban la vida cotidiana de este pueblo, fijándose en los aspectos que les parecían mayormente relevantes desde su perspectiva.

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Durante décadas se ha manifestado de que el pueblo Mapuche no conocía la escritura ni la lectura, que la transmisión cultural mapuche se hace por medio de la oralidad (1); y además se ha sostenido que son los hombres mapuche los que ostentan las posiciones de poder al interior del entramado social. Dichas narraciones surgen principalmente del análisis de cronistas en su totalidad hombres ajenos a la cultura mapuche, quienes luego de observaciones superficiales relataban la vida cotidiana de este pueblo, fijándose en los aspectos que les parecían mayormente relevantes desde su perspectiva.
Por Ana Millaleo (*)
Título original del texto:
El Witral, la escritura ancestral de las mujeres mapuche
Al igual que la historiografía universal en donde las mujeres como actores relevantes y constructoras de historia fueron invisibilizadas, las mujeres mapuche se transforman, en las crónicas, y relatos de historiadores, en acompañantes de los grandes guerreros mapuche, preocupadas principalmente de los aspectos reproductivos.

"Aunque en general tienen las mujeres el color más castaño que moreno, tiénenlo muchas veces verdinegro y quebrado, y unas más blanco que otras, según los temples de las tierras donde nacen y se crían... Son comúnmente de mediana estatura, y en general tienen grandes y negros ojos, cejas bien señaladas, pestañas largas y cabello muy cumplido... Su vestir es honesto para bárbaras, pues usan de faldas largas, mostrando sólo los pies descalzos y los brazos desnudos. Sus ejercicios son hilar y tejer lana de que se visten... Tienen a cargo las mujeres la labranza de las tierras, y el hacer los vinos...".(2)

Uno de los temas que han sido poco investigados es lo de la escritura ideográfica por medio del telar, escritura (dato no menor) que era manejada principalmente por las mujeres mapuche. La invisibilización de estas temáticas se inscriben principalmente en la centralidad que se le da en la historiografía occidental a los hombres mapuche, principalmente a la utilización de la figura del héroe para la construcción de los estados nacionales, a la asociación de lo indio a la barbarie y al reduccionismo del arte mapuche a la artesanía.

La complejidad del entramado social del pueblo mapuche queda constreñida en un paradigma que supone una superioridad de la cultura del observador respecto a lo observado y que habitualmente reduce las creaciones culturales del pueblo mapuche al folklore, a lo sin importancia; algo que tiene sólo un valor de uso y remite por ende a la cotidianeidad, y no a la permanencia o a la trascendencia. Esto es lo que ha sucedido con algunas de las manifestaciones culturales mapuche. Se ha subestimado su importancia y se han dejado de lado muchas fuentes de conocimiento y de comprensión de esta cultura milenaria.

Subestimación e invisibilización de la escritura mapuche

Por siglos, la sociedad occidental con su carácter universalista y expansionista, ha concebido la escritura y la imprenta como el elemento fundamental que ha dado soporte y justificación a la existencia y la historia de "todos" los pueblos, Levi - Strauss definió de la siguiente forma a los pueblos sin escritura llamados primitivos:
"Estudiemos, pues, sociedades "primitivas". ¿Pero que entendemos por esto? A grandes rasgos, la expresión es bastante clara. Sabemos que "primitivo" designa un basto conjunto de poblaciones que han permanecido ignorantes de la escritura y sustraídas, en consecuencia, a los métodos de investigación del historiador puro; sociedades a las que la expansión de la civilización mecánica ha llegado solo en época reciente..." (3)
Por la imposición y validación de estas visiones los pueblos sin escritura han sido considerados más atrasados en la escala evolutiva de la humanidad, esta ultima teniendo su origen en las teorías del darwinismo social impulsadas potencialmente durante el siglo XIX en América latina por los criollos republicanos y las cuales constituyen el soporte teórico e ideológico del discurso de progreso, el cual se sobrepuso y materializó sobre la mal llamada "barbarie" representada en los pueblos originarios mediante la imposición de los Estados Nacionales y por tanto "civilización" traducida en la cultura occidental como la forma exclusiva, legitima y valida de organización socio-política que debía predominar en estos territorios. De esta manera, "Los europeos (...), satisfacieron su apetito de territorios al ocupar aquellos de los pueblos primitivos" (4). Bajo esta óptica y lógica situada en tal contexto, planteamos que históricamente se ha establecido la subestimación e invisibilización, de la escritura del pueblo mapuche como estrategia de dominación.
El solo hecho de denominar a un pueblo como sin escritura, era ponerlo en un status de inferioridad esto es visible en el ensayo de Derrida "La violencia de la letra: de Levi - Strauss a Rousseau".
"Si se deja de entender la escritura en su sentido estricto de notación lineal y fonética, debe poder decirse que toda sociedad capaz de producir, vale decir de obliterar sus nombres propios y de valerse de la diferencia clasificatoria, practica la escritura en general. A la expresión "sociedad sin escritura" no correspondería entonces ninguna realidad ni ningún concepto. Esa expresión pertenece al onirismo etnocéntrico, que abusa del concepto vulgar, es decir etnocéntrico, de la escritura.(5)

La dominación de los conquistadores por sobre el otro "indio" se sustentó y hasta el día de hoy se sustenta, en una superioridad imaginada. Es así de este modo que a utilizado al otro para sustentar el discurso propio, la cultura occidental se sirve del significante para llegar rápidamente al significado, haciendo que ciertas situaciones sean borradas invisibilizadas, y no permite que la otredad hable.

Es así como se ha situado al centro de la producción cultural y ha leído desde la linealidad la historia, estableciendo jerarquías y estadios en donde hay pueblos inferiores y otros superiores, siendo la escritura un parámetro para el posicionamiento de estas. El establecimiento de estas jerarquías son planteadas y legitimadas a partir de un pensamiento científico que se plantea como objetivo pero que sin duda es utilizado al servicio de las formas polimorfas del poder que en el caso de los pueblos originarios tiene que ver con la instauración de los Estados Nacionales.

Es por eso que puede mirarse con sospecha el no reconocimiento de la existencia de la escritura ideográfica mapuche, ya que a otros pueblos originarios si se les ha posicionado dentro de esta lógica clasificatoria en un estadio superior donde se reconocen escritos a pueblos originarios que consecuentemente presenten características y rasgos de "civilización", como son los Maya y en un caso mas cercano a nuestra realidad, las tablas parlantes del pueblo Rapa Nui (Tablas Rongo Rongo).

El manejo de la escritura en el caso de los Maya era de uso exclusivo de los sacerdotes y solo ellos podían descifrarlos (6), en el caso Rapa Nui, la explicación del no desciframiento del significado de las Tablas Rongo Rongo se atribuye al traslado forzado de "hombres" Rapa Nui a las guaneras del Perú (1862 - 1863) (7) . En ambos casos la escritura está asociada al manejo masculino de esta, el conocimiento reconocido como legítimo es el manejado por los hombres, lo que podría llevarnos a que la invisibilización de la escritura mapuche es consecuencia directa de la invisibilización y desvalorización de la mujer mapuche en la lectura histórica que se hace de este pueblo originario.
"esas infelices, vendidas por sus padres por un precio vil, casi podría decirse por algunos alimentos o por algún vestido, pasaban a constituir un hogar triste y sombrío, en que faltaban casi todos los goces de la vida doméstica" (8)
La mujer mapuche es vista solo como un sujeto de intercambio, víctima de su realidad histórica y "retraso" cultural, supeditada a un espacio domestico, espacio inferior al en que se ubicaban las mujeres occidentales. El espacio domestico en que se desenvuelven las mujeres mapuche, no era de interés para los cronistas, ni para los historiadores, era someramente descrito, como reversa de la gran cantidad de material que existe sobre las hazañas militares, de los héroes masculinos de ese pueblo, de los grandes parlamentos, en resumen del espacio publico mapuche, todos espacios de interacción entre los conquistadores y los conquistados. Son relatos de la interacción, relatos que tienen que ver con lo visible desde el punto de vista del relator, y como ya hemos dicho con anterioridad, de quienes se atribuyen el manejo de la producción cultural.

No es de extrañar por lo tanto que la escritura mapuche y la manipulación simbólica, producción que se llevaba a cabo en este espacio altamente despreciado por la cultura occidental, no haya salido a la luz quedando olvidado y oculto tras los grandes relatos épicos de este pueblo.

El telar y la escritura ideográfica en manos de las Domo.

La construcción del imaginario mapuche desde lo occidental tiende a generar comparaciones y ordenamientos, juegos de poder en donde el dominador interpreta la cultura de los "dominados" desde la arbitrariedad de su paradigma. De ahí la negación de la existencia de la escritura mapuche y la invisibilización del rol de las mujeres al interior de esta. Muchos de los relatos de los cronistas hacen referencia a la gran capacidad bélica y las características viriles de este pueblo (9), siempre relegando y subvalorando el espacio de desarrollo femenino mapuche. La modernidad se abre con esta idea de que todo gira entorno al Pater. A América llega un conquistador con altos índices de masculinidad que trae consigo una estructura societal que se basa en el patriarcado.

Esto no tiene que ver con victimizar o poner en el rol de victimas pasivas de la historia occidental, a las mujeres mapuche, sino mas bien con develar la poca sinceridad de la historiografía occidental y sus errores en la interpretación de las culturas otras, al trasladar la valorización negativa y la insignificancia que tiene lo domestico para esa cultura. El occidente desprecia la labor y a quienes la realizan, a diferencia de lo mapuche donde el cuidado de la vida es de enorme relevancia, centro del conocimiento y de la reproducción cultural, no es por nada que las mujeres mapuche se tratan entre si de ñuke (madre), estado de respeto y de gran valoración social.
"Ni la labor ni el trabajo se consideraba que poseyera suficiente dignidad para construir un bios, una autónoma y auténticamente humana forma de vida; puesto que servían y producían lo necesario y útil, no podían ser libres, independientes de las necesidades y exigencias humanas." (10)
La lectura occidental del rol de las mujeres mapuche claramente a ayudado no tan solo a borrarlas como constructoras de su propia historia, sino también a que aspectos relevantes situados en los espacios femeninos mapuche de poder, pasen desapercibidos, por cuanto la lectura occidental de la historia mapuche además de estar sesgada por la inferioridad que se le asigna a lo indígena, queda sesgada por la inferioridad que se le asigna a lo femenino y el lugar en que este se desenvuelve.

La textilería mapuche parte del mundo femenino de este pueblo a quedado relegada a la construcción de objetos útiles para la sobre vivencia, y desde ese punto de vista es difícil que este sea abordado en su complejidad, como espacio de relación e interacción entre mujeres, como un espacio de construcción de realidad y del discurso de este pueblo.
"Un día, una chiquilla lavaba mote en el río, llegó un viejo y se la robó; se la llevó pa' sus tierras. Se caso con el viejo la chiquilla. Dicen que le dijo: "Me voy pa' la Argentina, cuando vuelva yo me tienes que tener toda esta lana hilada". Se fue el hombre y la niña quedo llorando... cuando sabía hilar! llorando junto al fogón y en eso el choñowe kuzé (el fuego vieja), le habló: "No tienes por que afligirte tanto, yo voy a llamar a Lalén Kuzé (la araña vieja) y le dijo a la chiquilla: "Tienes que hacerlo como yo, mírame y aprenderás a hilar". Así que pasaron los días, cuando volvió el hombre, las lanas estaban hiladas.
Lalén Kuzé todas las noches fue a ayudar a la niña y juntas terminaron el trabajo." (11)

Este epew (12) mapuche cuenta como el traspaso del conocimiento del telar es propio de las relaciones entre mujeres, y que el ejercicio de este conocimiento se mantiene y perpetua por medio de un pacto sagrado entre las mismas. La sabiduría de estas dos ancestros con quienes se realiza este pacto, es traspasada a la mujer joven quien tiene una responsabilidad al interior del entramado social mapuche, responsabilidad a la cual no puede renunciar.

Los procesos de aprendizajes de la textilería mapuche, tienen que ver directamente con la socialización femenina, en estos espacios las mujeres intercambian conocimiento y se relacionan con sus pares, comparten situaciones y la responsabilidad de generar los ropajes que brindaran abrigo y protección a los integrantes del lof.
"El telar es una de las responsabilidades de la mujer a través de ella se transmite información relevante, se utiliza un sistema de escritura ideográfica, pues a partir de la observación del color de la prenda, se identifica la procedencia geográfica (Tuwün) de la persona y a través de las formas es posible identificar el origen sanguíneo, las funciones que desarrolla en su familia, su historia personal, etc. A través de los diseños es posible identificar si quien usa el producto tejido es Longko, Machi, su estado civil, su edad, etc.
Al elaborar un tejido, sea este una manta, un trarihue, trarilongko, o cualquier otra prenda, se construye pensando en la persona que lo va a usar y por tanto allí la tejedora define las formas que serán incorporadas en el tejido y los colores a utilizar; vaciando en el objeto energías que acompañaran a la persona, para quien es dedicada la prenda; por lo tanto no existe una producción en serie como lo es actualmente." (13)

Las mujeres mapuche visten principalmente de negro, color que simboliza lo sagrado por que es la expresión de la amplitud del universo, de lo imposible de ser escrito, son pocas las prendas que estas utilizan que contengan simbología o escritura ideografica, me atrevería a decir que el trariwe es la única prenda que cumple con estas características, prenda que se relaciona directamente con el resguardo de la fertilidad y la protección sagrada de donde se alojara la nueva vida, el útero.

Las mujeres como manipuladora de símbolos es la que escribe al otro y lo constituye en che, ellas construyen al individuo poseedor de las prendas, en esta se puede leer la procedencia del individuo, su estatus en el entramado social y características personales. En los textiles se expresa el sentir de las mujeres, en ellos se cuenta y relatan historias, y desde la elección de las tinturas por medio de la recolección, hasta las terminaciones, se describe la historia del poseedor de cada prenda.

Otro aspecto importante a recalcar que es visible en este manejo simbólico expresado en el witral, es el conocimiento que debían poseer las mujeres de su entorno, y de los ciclos naturales. Tejer a telar esta directamente relacionado a manejar los códigos de la naturaleza, ya que esta es parte de todo el proceso de confección de las prendas, de ella dependen las tonalidades de las tinturas, que salen de diversos frutos y raíces que son recolectadas para este uso, las plantas recolectadas en diferentes estaciones del año dan colores distintos aunque se trate de la misma raíz, los tiempos de esquilado de la lana, entre otros inscribe el trabajo y el conocimiento del witral en una temporalidad espacial.

Ciertas capacidades mas elevadas de la lectura y reestructuración de los símbolos ideográficos en el witral, son solo conocidos por las tejedoras más experimentadas, por las grandes tejedoras, ñeminfe, ñeminchefe, ñemintufe o ñeminñürekafe. Estas ostentaban el manejo de los códigos ideográficos no tan solo su repetición y concreción en las prendas. Hasta el día de hoy son las que resguardan estos conocimientos, pueden leer y escribir difíciles entramados. Cuentan los relatos que las mejores tejedoras se encontraban en el Puelmapu, de hecho existen diseños que se realizan aún en esas zonas y que ya no son trabajados en el Gulumapu debido a los grados de dificultad y producción masiva que trajo consigo la frontera y el intercambio hasta nuestros días.

El traspaso del conocimiento del witral, entre mujeres, puede realizarse según distingue Willson por medio de dos modalidades, la primera de estas es la observación en lo cotidiano, al estar situado el desarrollo del arte textil al interior del espacio domestico y de crianza, las niñas aprenden mirando, muchas veces juegan a repetir las labores de la madre, la segunda modalidad distinguida por esta autora es por medio del aprendizaje especializado, la familia recurre a una ñeminñürekafe para que se haga cargo de la enseñanza del telar, previo acuerdo de pago y forma en que se llevara a cabo.

De acuerdo a mis observaciones puede darse el caso que la ñeminñürekafe reconozca en una niña ciertas habilidades o espiritualidad a fin para realizar este trabajo y sea la maestra que pida a la ülcha domo para que esta se transforme en su aprendiz. Ha estas dos modalidades podría agregarse una tercera que tiene que ver con el aprendizaje por medio de los sueños y de la entrega de un don por parte de los ancestros, esta es la otra lectura que puede hacerse del epew de Lalén Kuzé.
"poner telas de araña alrededor de la muñeca de la mano de las niñas, o bien pasarles pequeñas arañas sobre la palma de la mano para que sean buenas hilanderas. Estos ritos se realizan en el momento del nacimiento, infancia o adolescencia de una mujer y tienen por objeto facilitar el proceso de aprendizaje."(14)
Estos ritos no tan solo tienen que ver con facilitar el aprendizaje de las técnicas del witral, sino que conectan el ámbito en que se desarrollan con el entramado sagrado del traspaso del conocimiento en lo mapuche, el conocimiento proviene de lo sagrado, por ende toda acción es sagrada porque tiene que ver con el ejercicio de un conocimiento, el pacto entre Lalén Kuzé y la niña acongojada porque no manejaba los códigos ni la producción textil mapuche, pacta con la naturaleza y sus fuerzas femeninas para adoptar ciertas cualidades presentes en esta.
"toda expresión 'artística' de los aborígenes es algo sagrado, es una representación grafica de lo que se puede percibir en otros ordenes de la Realidad, de ningún modo es fruto de la imaginación o de la 'creatividad'. Es un retrato realista, pero estilizado, de algo objetivo".(15)
La estructura de la escritura mapuche se basa en la combinación de figuras geométricas para la construcción simbólica, dentro de las figuras geométricas pueden distinguirse cuatro principales: rombos, triángulos, cuadrados y cruces, las combinaciones de estas son amplias y la innovación y repetición de las mismas estaba en manos de las ñeminñürekafe.

A través de las obras del witral se establece un dialogo entre las creadoras y los miembros de una sociedad. Las creación de estas esta inscrita en temporalidades históricas determinadas, los significados simbólicos van a ser leídos de acuerdo a esta temporalidad y variaran de acuerdo a la misma, es por lo tanto que un símbolo en cierto estadio no significara lo mismo en otro, el dinamismo de la escritura mapuche tiene que ver con su variabilidad temporal y con la capacidad de ir incorporando nuevos símbolos al engranaje simbólico principal.

Podrían distinguirse 4 procesos históricos de la escritura mapuche que cumplen la estructura cíclica propias de su historicidad, la primera es el intercambio interno, marcada por la reciprocidad, aquí las mujeres ostentaban un mayor poderío en la definición del sujeto a partir de la estructura simbólica de las prendas puesto que en los espacios de encuentro social eran ampliamente usados y aún muchos mapuche reconocían en el otro el discurso portado en cada prenda, las mujeres eran protagonistas y personajes de poder reconocidas y de alto estatus social, la segunda es la que llamaremos de comercio fronterizo, de intercambio con españoles y criollos, esta es etapa está marcada por una transformación en las formas económico sociales del pueblo mapuche, que no generan grandes variaciones en el proceso de elaboración textil, pero si en la lectura y en el desprendimiento de la significación de las prendas superponiéndose la utilidad de las mismas, ya que el receptor no comprendían los códigos sociales mapuche, aunque si existen evidencias históricas de prendas elaboradas para personas no mapuche de alta estima y respeto, en donde puede realizarse una lectura simbólica que nos puede llevar a la percepción que se tenia del sujeto, y el status que ocupaba, un ejemplo de esto es la Manta que fue del General José de San Martín, llamada manta de la luz, la cual le fue obsequiada por los mapuche, y hoy se encuentra en el Museo Histórico Nacional de Buenos Aires. Las mujeres eran intermediarias, estaban en el entramado comercial en el lugar de la producción, eran el nexo con el mundo occidental y sus textiles el mensaje intercambiado.
"La abertura central del poncho, o ñancal, esta adornada con el diseño del rewe - lonko, simbología que deriva del lukutuel (orante arrodillado), lo cual indica la gran jerarquía del portador." (16)
La tercera la folklorización del arte mapuche y la perdida de significado, el valor de lo autóctono en un mundo globalizado, en esta etapa muchas mujeres abandonan la profundidad del conocimiento del witral por la producción a gran escala, en la actualidad se usan teñidos sintéticos, se realizan ventas al por mayor y por catalogo en Internet, es muy difícil encontrar ya, prendas hechas exclusivamente para un sujeto determinado a menos que existan tejedoras en su familia, aun así, la gran mayoría elabora tejidos de uso diario (sin diseños) son pocas las ñeminñürekafe ancianas.

La cuarta etapa la reconocemos en el retorno de lo mítico a partir del desarraigo, producto de las migraciones campo ciudad, encarnadas principalmente en la figura femenina mapuche, se produce una migración del conocimiento, el cual ya se había visto afectado por la segunda y tercera etapa, pero al desarraigarlo de la utilidad y de los aspectos pragmáticos de la vida, se ha comenzado a rescatar en su aspecto simbólico cultural, por mujeres jóvenes hijas de las primeras migrantes reconstituyéndose las formas de aprendizaje ya antes descritas, el aglutinamiento de personas mapuche en ciertos sectores periféricos de la Región Metropolitana hace mas fácil ir en búsqueda de las pocas ñeminñürekafe, y que estas reconozcan en otras mujeres perfiles espirituales similares y así potencien el rescate de la escritura ancestral un ejemplo de esto es el grupo denominado "las arañitas" compuesto por mujeres de edad joven o mediana edad. Estos grupos de mujeres han comenzado a escribir nuevamente, por lo menos los símbolos tradicionales, no me atrevería a aseverar si aun están capacitadas para la creación de nuevos símbolos con la nomenclatura de los ya existentes.

Errores y desentendidos de las ciencias sociales en el estudio de la mujer mapuche

Es bueno aclarar con respecto a la lectura de los datos ciertos males entendidos por parte de las ciencias sociales sobre la comprensión de la complejidad cultural mapuche. Dentro de ellos. está la lectura por medio de oposiciones binarias, tales como el de naturaleza / cultura, divino / humano, sagrado / profano, independientemente a que no se le asigne un valor negativo, estas divisiones polarizadas fragmentan el entendimiento de la simbología mapuche y de la complejidad de su paradigma.

Entender la escritura mapuche en el telar fuera de lo sagrado, o dentro de un espacio solamente doméstico, es seguir leyendo con categorías occidentales la cultura mapuche, un ejemplo de esto es la utilización de algunas investigadoras feministas, que se han dedicado a la temática mapuche, de la comprensión dual del mundo para el sustento de estas oposiciones.
"Lo masculino reside en el sitio en donde mora el Sol, el Antü, astro permanente, inmóvil, que anima a la naturaleza iluminándola. Lo femenino se posa en el lugar de la luna, cuerpo traslaticio que irrumpe, escindido y luego pleno, el espacio celeste"... La mujer puede estar en el bien y en el mal: el carácter completo e incompleto de la luna. El hombre debe estar en el bien (la cualidad de luz y calor del sol)."(17)
En esta cita, puede verse que la femineidad mapuche es comprendida como una oposición binaria y la masculinidad queda en la inmanencia, en este caso del bien. Este tipo de ordenamientos generan comprensiones románticas de la estructura sexual mapuche. Para subsanar estos errores y la creación de las figuras románticas a partir de la comprensión dual simplificada, creo que es más pertinente dentro del proceso histórico en que se inscribe el mundo mapuche (periodo cíclico), que nos refiramos a la comprensión cuatricíclica del universo: está lo dual femenino y masculino, pero estos sujetos se inscriben dentro de una temporalidad, algo que ha sido muy pocas veces abordado en los estudios de este pueblo, aspecto fundamental que da la variabilidad y dinamismo a los roles sexuales al interior del pueblo mapuche. Analizarlos como sujetos diluidos y no aferrados a atributos concretos, no hace más que esencializar la división sexual del mundo mapuche.

"se pretende fijarla en objeto y consagrarla a la inmanencia, ya que su trascendencia será perpetuamente trascendida por otra conciencia esencial y soberana." (18)

La negación de las especificidades socio históricas y culturales, impide el seguimiento de los efectos que estas mismas producen en las relaciones que las mujeres establecen con su entorno, no permitiendo dilucidar las relaciones de poder que se establecen en este entramado, relaciones de poder siempre variables. De este modo surgen los malos entendidos, que se inician con la comprensión fragmentada del universo mapuche, la visión esencialista de la cultura que la desarraiga y la pone en una posición ahistórica, y ahora con los análisis feministas la subscribe a un ordenamiento patriarcal y machista.

Andrea Coñuecar frente a esta situación dejara abiertas las interrogantes:

" Sin embargo, existen conceptos que incluyen variaciones en cuanto a conceptualizar y otorgar en forma correspondiente grados de valor ¿Qué era lo bueno o lo malo, para una sociedad que no establecía en su cosmovisión el concepto de pecado? ¿Es pertinente adjetivar de machista a una sociedad indígena, desde los ojos del dominador? " (19)

Metodología de reconstrucción histórica del saber de las mujeres mapuche

Con respecto al trabajo de reconstrucción histórica de las mujeres mapuche, se ha hecho muy difícil recabar información desde fuentes no contaminadas, es por bien sabidos que en lo que dice relación con el telar y la escritura ideografica en manos de las domo, que la segunda etapa y la tercera han influido en cierta perdida de la interpretación de la simbología icnográfica mapuche y sus significados, las lecturas que pueden hacer incluso las propias tejedoras no están libres de las influencias introducidas por el contacto con los dominadores, internalizadas por medio de los aparatos de control propios de cada estructura cultural, reconociendo como principales la adopción de la religión foránea y la inserción en la educación formal occidental.

Es por lo tanto que ha mi parecer es de enorme interés referirnos a fuentes no conscientes en el abordaje investigativo del mundo mapuche, una de estas puede ser el relato de las machi en transe. Para esto hay que tener claro que son los propios mapuche los que deben partir a esta reconstrucción y el investigador debiera cumplir con las siguientes categorías principales.

Ser Mapuche

Conocedor de la cultura propia y del protocolo

Hablante de Mapudhungun

Este tipo de investigación es de difícil acceso y por eso el muestreo debiera realizarse por bola de nieve, es recomendable en los casos de observación no asistir con métodos invasivos que puedan generar algún tipo de interferencia en la comunicación entre el espíritu de la machi y los ancestros o fuerzas. El investigador debe ejercitar su memoria posterior al encuentro y conocer el protocolo espiritual no tan solo el societal, a la hora de interrogar a esas fuerzas como interlocutor con los espíritus que se comunican por medio de la machi.

Es labor de estas nuevas generaciones utilizar los elementos aprendidos como herramientas de la interpretación de la cultura propia, y es una lucha constante ser manipulador de estos y no ser determinado como sujeto, por los mismos. Así podremos hacer como Lalén Kuzé, tejedores de nuestro propio entramado histórico mapuche.

Notas

(1) http://www.serindigena.org/territorios/recursos/biblioteca/monografias/historia/documentos/9_primera_parte_IV_mapuche_cap1.htm

(2) Así describe a la mujer mapuche Alonso González de Nájera, autor del Desengaño y Reparo de la Guerra del Reino de Chile, fuente: www.icarito.cl . Es importante destacar que esta fuente es base para el desarrollo de tareas escolares y a contribuido a formar una suerte de conciencia colectiva en relación a la comprensión histórica, en este caso de los mapuche.

(3) Levi - Strauss, 1987, p137, citado en "La literatura de resistencia de las mujeres ainiu", Yolanda Muñoz González, México D.F, Centro de estudios de Asia y África, 2008, p 200.

(4) Friedrich Ratzel, "La geografía política", fotocopia, Pág.65.

(5) Derrida Jacques, "La violencia de la letra: de Levi Strauss a Rousseau", Revista Observaciones filosóficas, Libros y recensiones, Octubre 2006, PDF, p. 39.

(6) http://coleccion.educ.ar/CDInstitucional/contenido/recursos/1492.html

(7) Grebe Vicuña, Maria Ester, "Culturas indígenas de Chile: Un estudio preliminar", Pehuén, Santiago, 1998, p51.

(8) Barros Arana en Jose Bengoa, "Conquista y Barbarie", Pág. 127.

(9) Francisco A. Encina, Historia de Chile, Zigzag, Tomo I , p 36

(10) Hannah Arendt, La condición humana, Paidós, Buenos Aires, 1993, p.p 39 - 40.

(11) Montesino, Sonia, "Mujeres de la tierra", Ediciones CEM - PEMCI, Santiago, 1984, p41.

(12) El epew al interior de la enseñanza tradicional mapuche tiene que ver con el traspaso de valores sociales por medio del relato oral, sus protagonistas principales generalmente son animales o fuerzas de la naturaleza, estas historias no necesariamente son reales a diferencia del piam.

(13) http://ln.fica.cl/tcpdf.php?id=4266

(14) Willson, Angélica, "Textilería mapuche, arte de mujeres", Ediciones CEDEM, Santiago, 1992, p11.

(15) http://nasdat.com/index.php?topic=1304.0;wap2

(16) Varios autores, "Mapuches del Neuquen; arte y cultura en la Patagonia Argentina", LUZ Editora, Buenos Aires, p.148

(17) Montesinos Sonia, "Sol viejo, sol vieja; lo femenino en las representaciones mapuche", SERNAM, Santiago, 1995, p.17.

(18) Simone de Beauvoir, El segundo sexo, Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1999, p.31.

(19) Intersección mujer mapuche / género: Aproximaciones desde la mirada mapuche, Andrea Coñuecar Ojeda

Noviembre, 2000. http://www.mapuche.info/mapuint/conuecar001100.html

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* Socióloga investigadora mapuche, Magíster de Género y Cultura con Mención en Ciencias Sociales en la Universidad de Chile. Autora e intérprete del grupo musical Wechekeche ñi Trawün.

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El Witral: La antigua y profunda escritura mapuche manifestada en la textilería ancestral

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Durante décadas se ha manifestado de que el pueblo Mapuche no conocía la escritura ni la lectura, que la transmisión cultural mapuche se hace por medio de la oralidad (1); y además se ha sostenido que son los hombres mapuche los que ostentan las posiciones de poder al interior del entramado social.

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Citation: Catrileo, D. (2020). Antes de escribir, leer.  La Última Línea. February 18. Retrieved from https://laultimalinea.cl/antes-de-escribir-leer/.

Annotation: Daniela Cantrileo is a Mapuche writer, philosopher, and activist. In this poem, "Before writing, read," she urges us to read "the signs that existed before the State."  She refers to reading the threads of Mapuche weavings, to read nature, to read the rivers and ocean currents, to read the lines in our gradmothers' faces, to reread colonial maps in order to dismantle expropriations of land, and to read the names of those who have been murdered or disappeared.  Cantrileo's poem broadens the scope of what "reading" is, suggesting a vast practice of decoding of other marks and signs inscribed in the landscape, the people, and non-alphabetic cultural objects.  Her poem refers to the weavings of the Mapuche people, which Ana Millaleo, another Mapuche writer, explains as a non-alphabetic form of writing (see the second source annontation, below).

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Antes de escribir, leer. Pero leer los signos preexistentes al Estado. Leer más allá del Estado. Permitir la lectura con los dedos, con la piel, leer con el cuerpo. Olernos, saborearnos, tocarnos. Pasar las manos sobre las tramas de un witral, enredarnos, leer los signos que deja el hilado. Tejer y leer en otras lenguas. Ser wirin, línea, estría. Desear otras lenguas hasta que la mixtura sea un puente y no cuota-paternalismo-asistencialismo. Leer mapuche y no terrorista. Leer las líneas de la tierra en el arado, las siembras, leer las nervaduras del lawen. Leer como animales, leer como bosque. Leer como quien traduce o compone nuevas escrituras. Leer la corriente del lewfü, seguir con el nado hasta el océano profundo y volverse lafkenche, yene, shumpall. Leer en las arrugas de nuestras abuelas para imaginar las propias. Extender los mapas para emborronar los títulos de merced. Leer para que las reducciones se extiendan y expropien forestales, hidroeléctricas, mineras, fundos de colonos cuicos. Leer los perdigones incrustados en el bosque nativo para que retornen a quienes los arrojaron. Leer los nombres de quienes nos asesinan, para que nuestras muertas y muertos puedan leer con nosotras. Leer para que antes de escribir "plurinacional", Chile sepa que deseamos la autonomía y la recuperación. Leer Autodeterminación. Leer Wallmapu y no "La Araucanía". Leer los surcos de la Cordillera de los Andes como un cordón umbilical, para que nuestrxs lamngen del Puelmapu nos abracen más seguido. Leer el made in Israel de drones y armamentos del sur. Leer para que nunca más la letra chica. Leer bien para tachar Minera Escondida Ltda, RP Global Chile S.A, Celulosa Arauco, CPMC, BHP Billiton. Leer como quien escucha un epew antiguo junto al fogón. Leer las huellas de un ave en la arena. Leer los muros para recordarlos rayados como niñas que aprenden recién a escribir. Leer las estrellas para saber cómo estará la cosecha. Leer lo que resta del mate, el café, el té de nuestra taza en la mañana. Leer el viento como presagio de la tarde. Leer los lunares. Leer los pewmas del amanecer. Leer en otros alfabetos, símbolos. Leernos al oído, susurrando. Leer subrayando para hallar esa cita que necesitábamos en un libro hermoso. Leer para quienes perdieron su vida, sus ojos. Leer con ternura, con deseo, con risa, con rabia como quien lee todo por vez primera.

DANIELA CATRILEO, wirife/ escritora mapuche.

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Antes de escribir, leer. Pero leer los signos preexistentes al Estado. Leer más allá del Estado. Permitir la lectura con los dedos, con la piel, leer con el cuerpo. Olernos, saborearnos, tocarnos. Pasar las manos sobre las tramas de un witral, enredarnos, leer los signos que deja el hilado.

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Citation: Palmer, H. (2020). U nojil a ch'i'ibal: Briceida cuevas cob's poetic empowerment of yucatec maya women. Studies in American Indian Literatures, 32(1), 26-51. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/u-nojil-chiibal-briceida-cuevas-cobs-p

Abstract: Because Cuevas Cob writes in a context distinct from that found in the United States and Canada, I begin my argument with a historical overview of Indigenous writing in Yucatán, Mexico. Neoliberal Translation in Waldemar Noh Tzec," the conversion of Indigenous expressions into a colonial language represents an act of "neoliberal translation" through which "moments of irreconcilable otherness are translated into the terms and structures of the neoliberal multicultural nation-state, thereby reaffirming that nation-state's norms and values" (291). Because the majority of readers, even members of Native communities, lack the linguistic tools to read Indigenous-language texts, they may miss out on these crucial moments of radical difference. [...]Ts'íib is a process that produces physical space [ . . . ] wherein subject formation takes place and knowledge is acquired through the process of creating and experiencing that space through social interaction" (28). Before the Spanish invasion, glyphic inscriptions recorded histories, spiritual lineages, and prophecies to legitimize ruling families.4 During the Colonial Period, the books of the Chilam Balam documented sacred and historical knowledge, validating Indigenous practices and foretelling the return of Indigenous rule.5 In the nineteenth century, letters written to and by the cruz parlante, or talking cross, authorized Caste War rebels to rise up against oppressive landowners and reclaim their ancestral lands.6 The most recent wave of Yucatec Maya literature emerges from this genealogy of writing as power.

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Citation: Heaven's Vault. (2019) [PC version]. Inkle Ltd

Annotation: In "Heaven's Vault", you play as a jaded archaelogist recruited by her university advisor to help find her missing predecessor. She soon realizes that her investigation demands deciphering a lost ancient language through logic, notes, and wit. It's an engaging sci-fi mystery (the story takes place in a distant galaxy, a la Star Wars) with easy controls for unexperienced players, heavily focusing on story, and an engaging scholarly-friendly tone for students and nerds alike.

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About This Game

From the creators of massively-branching interactive adventure 80 Days.
Winner - IGF Excellence in Narrative award 2019
Nomination -BAFTA for Best British Game 2020
Story

Aliya Elasra is an archaeologist, exploring a strange region of space called the Nebula with her robot sidekick Six, hoping to uncover the secrets of the long-forgotten past. When a roboticist from the University of Iox goes missing, Aliya begins a trail of discoveries that will lead to the very edge of her world - and the ancient secret of Heaven's Vault.

Gameplay

Explore ancient sites, discover lost ruins

Find artefacts and translate their strange hieroglyphics

Sail an open-world of fast flowing space-rivers

Piece together the history of the world and an entire ancient language

Diverse cast of characters that remember everything you say

Heaven's Vault is not your usual linear adventure game. Progress through the game in any order you choose - the game's fully adaptive narrative remembers every choice you make, every discovery and every action you take, influencing what happens next. Meet a diverse cast of characters who remember everything you say, and who's attitude to you will change with how you act. Some are friendly, some are cautious, and some are out to trick you.

Who will you trust? What will you find? What will you learn? What will you risk? What will you lose?

Translate Ancient Hieroglyphs

An entire ancient hieroglyphic language awaits to be deciphered. A puzzle mechanic with a twist: solutions are narratively significant and further the story - but the wrong translation might send you down the wrong track!

Critically Acclaimed

"One of the most well-realized video game worlds ever, with your curiosity and personality molding your story through the Nebula" - USGamer

"Heaven's Vault is both ambitious and beautiful. It conjures a world rich with life... I don't hesitate to recommend Heaven's Vault." - Game Informer

"Heaven's Vault is one of the most enthralling narrative-driven adventure games I've played" - Wired

Industry leading narrative engine

Powered by the ink engine, the narrative technology behind 80 Days, Sorcery!, NeoCab, Sable, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine and many more, Heaven's Vault is a dynamically constructed adventure game that responds to every move you make.

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From the creators of massively-branching interactive adventure 80 Days. Winner - IGF Excellence in Narrative award 2019 Nomination -BAFTA for Best British Game 2020 Aliya Elasra is an archaeologist, exploring a strange region of space called the Nebula with her robot sidekick Six, hoping to uncover the secrets of the long-forgotten past.

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Citation: Flad, R. K. (2008). Divination and Power: A Multiregional View of the Development of Oracle Bone Divination <br/>in Early China. Current Anthropology, 49(3), 403–437.

Annotation: Flad (2008) makes an extensive study of divination tools in Chinese Neolithic and Bronze Ages, its status in State power, and its importance in social organization in China's pre- and early history before the development of written codes.

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DOI: 10.1177/1555412011402676

Citation: Brock, A. (2011). “’When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong’: Resident Evil 5, Racial Representation, and Gamers.” Games and Culture 6(5), p. 429-452. DOI: 10.1177/1555412011402676

Annotation: The article explores the audience reaction to the use of African people as enemies in Resident Evil 5. Brock discusses how video games, like the science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories that inspired them in the golden age of gaming, often draw from Western values of White masculinity and construct worlds that White male protagonist conquer and exploit. The article has a connection to the Towns article and the theory of the use of the black body as a medium; the African bodies used for RE5's zombified antagonists are portrayed as near human but violent in order to justify violence against them (p. 449).

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Citation: Chakrabarti, P. (2020, July 14). Covid-19 and the Spectres of colonialism. The India Forum. Retrieved September 29, 2021, from https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/covid-19-and-spectres-colonialism.

Annotation: Chakrabarti (2020) provides an interesting take on how the India’s lockdown regulations and vaccine experimentation are mimics of its colonial past. The lockdown restrictions imposed in 2020 were very similar to those invoked by the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897 which targeted the poor, migrant workers and their movements. In 1895, the colonial government had also introduced the Pilgrim Ships Act that controlled the movement of Haj pilgrims. These two acts established in 1895 and 1897 respectively provided “the colonial authorities almost unrestricted power to restrict the movements of the poor, migrant workers, and Muslim pilgrims.” Chakrabarti gives various examples of how the 1897 act is resurrecting itself today in India’s Covid-19 regulations and claims that the pandemic has “made the return of the spectre of colonialism more real.”

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The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about unique challenges for governments and public health authorities across the world. It has also provided them with exceptional legal and judicial powers to restrict and control people's lives and livelihoods. But while the virus may be new, the modes of its control and prevention are not. Key aspects of the outbreak of Covid-19 and the measures to control it have historical and colonial legacies. Although the lockdown and the restrictions on public life in India appear unprecedented, they reproduce measures that colonial governments and public health officials had used to segregate, isolate, and confine people during epidemics.

These measures include the legal provisions used for control, the development of experimental vaccines, the tracing of the asymptomatic carriers, the asymmetrical social and economic consequences, and the violation of basic human rights, particularly those of the poor and marginalised communities. Historically, governments have sought to deal with largescale epidemic outbreaks through isolation and vaccination, both of which are at play in dealing with Covid-19. The extraordinary powers assumed by governments to undertake this twin task raise questions of ethics, human rights, and the use of state powers over the lives and bodies of its citizens.

Colonialism provided the first model of using scientific means of pandemic control for the large-scale and often coercive regulation of people's lives and livelihoods [...] In times of crisis, postcolonial governments, health officials, and privileged citizens keep returning to these familiar patterns of self-preservation.

The instances of pandemic control in South Asia in the colonial past are vital to revisit. They illustrate the precedents of how political and social power operates in such times. Colonialism provided the first model of using scientific means of pandemic control for the large-scale and often coercive regulation of people's lives and livelihoods. This model has been useful for states in the current crisis. In times of crisis, postcolonial governments, health officials, and privileged citizens keep returning to these familiar patterns of self-preservation, which often add to the suffering of the most vulnerable.

In imposing the strict restrictions of the lockdown for Covid-19, the Indian government invoked the very same Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897, originally passed by the British government during plague outbreaks. This was a unique act, designed specifically to control an epidemic outbreak, giving special powers to the state, which is partly why it has appeared relevant for Covid-19.

The outbreak of the plague epidemic in Bombay in 1896 fundamentally changed the relationship between the colonial state and its subjects. This was the first instance when the state acquired special legal and judicial powers for an apparently humanitarian cause: to prevent the spread of the epidemic. To do so, it specifically targeted the poor and the migrant workers, seen as the carriers of the disease, restricting their movements, demolishing their homes, and subjecting their bodies to medical experiments. This became the model for subsequent governments to use disease or epidemics to justify authoritarian measures, all the way into the current pandemic.

The colonial authorities [had] almost unrestricted power to restrict the movements of the poor, migrant workers, and Muslim pilgrims. [Such measures] continued to be the mainstay of the colonial state's anti-plague campaign well into the first part of the twentieth century

The Epidemic Diseases Act gave the colonial government the right to inspect and isolate anyone suspected of being infected with plague, in public places, trains, ships and inside their homes. It simultaneously protected the state or the government officials from any legal action while acting under the act. Prior to this, the colonial government had in 1895 introduced the Pilgrim Ships Act to control the movement of Haj pilgrims from South Asia on health grounds. This gave local authorities in India new powers to board the pilgrim ships at any time to carry out inspections and apprehend any passenger in the name of disease prevention. The two acts combined to provide the colonial authorities almost unrestricted power to restrict the movements of the poor, migrant workers, and Muslim pilgrims.

The act was used in large parts of the plague-affected localities of Bombay and Pune, to demolish dwellings and clear the cities of so-called 'vagrants', beggars, and migrant labourers. These measures continued to be the mainstay of the colonial state's anti-plague campaign well into the first part of the twentieth century. The government used the acts to prohibit immigration from India, particularly from the infected areas; to to suspend railway travel to certain areas, and to obstruct of the pilgrimage to Mecca. After the plagues ceased, the Epidemic Diseases Act was employed rarely, perhaps because there were few such sudden pandemic outbreaks.

The Bombay plague provided the opportunity for public health officials and scientists for the production and the large-scale experimentation of vaccines in the colonies. Just a decade before the outbreak, the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur had created the first attenuated vaccine for the rabies virus. This created the possibility that all viral and bacterial diseases could be prevented by similarly developed vaccines.

Bombay, with its vast and diverse population and confined spaces such as jails, hospitals, and slums, became the ideal site for experimenting with these vaccines.

When plague broke out in the 1890s, the bacteriologists Alexandre Yersin and Shibasaburo Kitasato had independently announced the isolation of the plague bacillus in Paris and in Hong Kong, respectively. With the outbreak of the plague, scientists developed competing vaccines, similar to the present day global rush to produce vaccines for Covid-19 and to conduct human trials. In India, the Russian-Jewish scientist Waldemar Haffkine prepared his own plague vaccines in a small lab in Bombay..

Bombay, with its vast and diverse population and confined spaces such as jails, hospitals, and slums, became the ideal site for experimenting with these vaccines. During the outbreak, colonial medical officials experimentally injected residents with at least six different types of vaccines. European bacteriologists such as A. Lustig, Yersin, Paul-Louis Simond saw Bombay as the perfect laboratory for their vaccines and visited the city to observe the experiments. The authorities carefully selected groups of communities as samples for the experiment with the respective vaccines. These vaccinations were not designed to introduce any immunity against plague among the population but were carried out as 'trials' for these vaccines (Chakrabarti 2012, 49-55). There is no evidence that any kind of consent was ever sought for these experiments. While the colonial government did not introduce any legal protection for those being vaccinated, even experimentally, it introduced laws to enforce vaccination.

These colonial measures were part of a trend in the 19th century where governments across the world assumed greater legal powers to conduct large-scale vaccination. Smallpox vaccinations were made compulsory in various parts of the world. Beginning in 1853 in the United Kingdom, it was soon applied in the colonies. The outbreaks of smallpox in 1865 in Calcutta, in 1876 in Bombay, and in 1884 in Madras led the provincial governments to introduce Compulsory Vaccination Acts in these Presidencies.

Gaps in legal provision ensured that human subjects in colonial India had little control over their bodies in the pandemic state. These trends continue into the postcolonial state.

The coercive nature of vaccination has left a strong legacy of anti-vaccination campaigns and protests. Throughout Europe and North America, opponents regarded vaccination as threats to their health as well as an invasion of their rights. They formed anti-vaccination leagues, demanded that the government abolish compulsory vaccination, rioted, forged vaccination certificates, staged boycotts, and hid sick children. In India, the persistence of the arm-to-arm method, in which children, often belonging to lower castes, were used as carriers of the lymph for vaccination, was a matter of fierce public debate and resistance.

The debates have been on whether rights of individuals are greater than that of the welfare of the larger collective. As and when vaccines, prophylactics, or drugs become available for Covid-19, there will be questions of how these can be made acceptable and accessible to large sections of the population. Historically, mass vaccinations and drug trials, particularly of those at early stages of their development, are as beset with abuse of human rights as with the exercise of state power. Gaps in legal provision ensured that human subjects in colonial India had little control over their bodies in the pandemic state.

These trends continue into the postcolonial state, with state governments and public health authorities recommending the use of unproven hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic against Covid-19 for slumdwellers, police, and other frontline healthworkers, including those in present day Mumbai. The recent controversy on the Indian Council for Medical Research's rush to produce a vaccine for Covid-19 by Independence Day on 15 August 15, which has been deemed unfeasible by many experts, highlights that vaccine production timetables have deeply political mandates. With the decision to cut out some of the unnecessary 'red tape', questions of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, whenever it is available, will remain important.

Identifying asymptomatic carriers, individuals who do not show any symptoms yet carry the pathogens in their bodies and are capable of infecting others, is a significant part of any preventive strategy for Covid-19. When millions of Indians might never be tested for the virus or its antibodies how will we establish who is an asymptomatic carrier? In the absence of scientific proof, the question often is: who appears to be symptomatic?

Prejudices about class, gender and caste address this question. In India, the scientific idea of 'asymptomatic carrier' is introducing new forms of 'untouchability'. Upper caste and class Indians are seeking to distance themselves from the poor, Muslims, and lower castes, whom they perceive as the carriers of the virus. There have been reports in India of migrant workers being sprayed with chemical disinfectants, of several of them are restricted from returning to their home while facing starvation due to the lack of work, and of international travellers and visitors being assaulted by vigilantes.

Koch's scientific thesis of the asymptomatic carrier provided seeming validity to the entrenched layers of cultural, social, caste, racial, and nationalist prejudice in South Asia.

The idea of the asymptomatic carrier was proposed by Robert Koch in 1902, when he suggested that healthy individuals, who show no signs of a disease, could carry within them germs with which others may be infected. Long before this discovery, certain communities had historically been seen as likely carriers of disease. Koch's scientific thesis of the asymptomatic carrier provided seeming validity to the entrenched layers of cultural, social, caste, racial, and nationalist prejudice in South Asia.

This has contributed to government actions against individuals or groups perceived as disease carriers and towards upper-caste communities segregating themselves even further from the lower castes and the poor. In colonial India, the British widely regarded poor and working-class Indians as carriers of multiple diseases. As with the poor residents of Bombay in the time of plague, in times of the coronavirus, some groups continue to be presumed infected before proven.

The scientism of the so-called 'carrier-state' theory has become a tool to legitimise major and often prejudicial global and colonial immigration control and segregation policies. Twinning quarantine and immigration, authorities often identified certain groups as potential 'carriers' of diseases and subjected. Jews, Irish, Mexicans, Haj pilgrims from South Asia, and the Chinese were at various times in the past subject to rigorous medical checks or to lengthy quarantine at immigration points, and even barred from entering specific countries. To do so, authorities sometimes used existing legal provisions or created new ones.

The strict lockdown measures for Covid-19 needs to be seen alongside the general disinvestment in public health and the poor medical facilities available for the vast majority of the population. It is usually easier to establish quarantine measures than to build preventative healthcare.

The incidence of quarantine against Ebola during its outbreak in western Africa in 2014-15 and the restrictions imposed in the United States on travel from that region shows how the question of the asymptomatic carrier and quarantine remain. In a notable case Kaci Hickox, an American nurse treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone was quarantined on her return. R esearch showed that the very low risk of Ebola transmission from asymptomatic individuals and that quarantines of asymptomatic individuals with potential Ebola exposure were unnecessary. In the ensuing legal case, the court declared that quarantine of Hickox was not necessary since the evidence supported that asymptomatic persons were not infectious.

The resurrection of the Epidemic Diseases Act for Covid-19 reflects colonial modes of drastic governmental action, which has once again exposed the most vulnerable communities to greater health and economic risks. The strict lockdown measures for Covid-19 needs to be seen alongside the general disinvestment in public health and the poor medical facilities available for the vast majority of the population. It is usually easier to establish quarantine measures than to build preventative healthcare. While the colonial government introduced strict quarantine, it did not invest similarly in public health.

The colonial past provides important lessons of how pandemic outbreaks have not only caused huge mortalities but have also sanctioned extreme governmental powers.

In contemporary India as well, the lockdown is accompanied by an acute shortage of doctors, nurses, hospital beds, and other medical infrastructure. In these lockdowns in contemporary India, in the millions of poor people suffering without food, income, shelter, and adequate healthcare, colonialism is finding new forms of expression. As we deal with the current outbreak, we are also faced with the question of what Covid-19 will leave behind.

While on the one hand there is the possibility of more such outbreaks taking place, there is also the prospect of greater social and political control of our lives becoming the norm. While we prepare ourselves for and take precautions against similar such outbreaks in the future, we need to simultaneously raise questions of liberty and freedom associated with such provisions. The colonial past provides important lessons of how pandemic outbreaks have not only caused huge mortalities but have also sanctioned extreme governmental powers.

In the case of the Covid-19, the impetus for such control has come not just from the Indian state. Society itself has sought to be governed at a much wider and deeper level. Several of the strong governmental actions enjoy support from large sections of the population. Among certain sections, the popularity of government has reportedly soared because of the drastic lockdown measures it has taken. Bill Gates praised the Indian government's strong and 'proactive' actions against the outbreak, even as numerous migrant workers were stranded without food, money or any means of travelling or earning their livelihood.

For India, Covid-19 might imply that certain populations will be faced with long-term and stricter regimes of social control and exclusion, while their labour is extracted from a distance.

What is the humanitarian position here, imposing more restrictions on people's lives or alternatively allowing them to make their choices? We are clearly seeking more governance or more precisely stronger state intervention than ever before. Is that choice, both in India and elsewhere, being made by certain sections of the society at the expense of others? For India, Covid-19 might imply that certain populations will be faced with long-term and stricter regimes of social control and exclusion, while their labour is extracted from a distance. Covid-19 has made the return of the spectre of colonialism more real.

The India Forum welcomes your comments on this article for the Forum/Letters section.
Write toeditor@theindiaforum.in.

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Covid-19 and the Spectres of Colonialism

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India's lockdowns and questionable experimentation with vaccines and drugs to fight Covid-19 eerily mimic its colonial past.The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about unique challenges for governments and public health authorities across the world. It has also provided them with exceptional legal and judicial powers to restrict and control people's lives and livelihoods.

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Citation: Gundaker, G. (1998). Diaspora of signs. In Signs of diaspora / diaspora of signs: Literacies, creolization, and vernacular practice in African America. (pp. 63-94). Oxford University Press, Incorporated. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncsu/detail.action?docID=272698.

Annotation: In “Diaspora of Signs,” Gundaker (1998) describes the network of signs across the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. This is to reconceptualize traditional ideas of literacy and orality. The author claims that the combination of transatlantic symbolic inscription systems and traditional literacies are characteristic of African American vernacular.

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The Washington Post, K Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

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The Washington Post, K Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

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The Washington Post, K Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

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Citation: Dewey, C. (2013). How the Internet is killing the world’s languages. The Washington Post.

Annotation: This article refers to András Kornai’s (2013) research about the lack of diversity in internet languages. “Less than five percent of current world languages are in use online” which means a huge number of languages do not get any recognition. In modern times, the existence of anything is dependent on its availability and findability on the internet. If so many languages are not being used in the online/digital world, there is a fair chance that these languages will die out in the future.

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Residents of a village on the outskirts of Hyderabad, India, with smartphones and a laptop. (NOAH SEELAM/AFP/Getty Images)

Less than five percent of current world languages are in use online, according to a recent study by prominent linguist András Kornai -- and the Internet may be helping the other 95 percent to their graves.

Those startling conclusions come from a paper published in the journal PLOSOne in October titled, appropriately, "Digital Language Death." The study sought to answer a question that's both inherently fascinating and little-discussed: How many languages exist online? (And, on the flip side, how many don't?)

For reference, at least 7,776 languages are in use in the greater offline world. To measure how many of those are also in use on the Internet, Kornai designed a program to crawl top-level Web domains and catalog the number of words in each language. He also analyzed Wikipedia pages, a key marker of a language's digital vibrancy, as well as language options for things like operating systems and spell-checkers.

His finding: Less than five percent of languages in use now exist online.

Much of that gap can be attributed to the fact that the languages people use vary widely, in terms of scale and geography. More than 40 percent of world languages are already endangered, according to the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity. And even the ones that aren't technically endangered may be spoken by only a few thousand people -- often in places like sub-Saharan Africa, southeast Asia and South America, where Internet penetration can be lower.

Still, a language's failure to migrate online doesn't augur well for its long-term prospects. Linguists have a sort of road map for language death, which Kornai lays out in the paper: First, its speakers stop using it in practical areas like commerce; then younger speakers lose interest in speaking that language; and, finally, the younger generation forgets it all together. A language is technically still alive as long as one person speaks it. And there are typically many years between when a language starts to decline and when its last speaker passes on, during which time young people fail to adopt it in their daily activities, such as when using the Internet.

Kornai sees "an almost laboratory pure example" in Norway, where the government recognizes two varieties of Norwegian: Bokmål and Nynorsk. While Bokmål has long been the more widely spoken of the two, an estimated 10 percent to 15 percent of the population, roughly 500,000 to 750,000 people, still speak Nynorsk. That's enough so that the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity doesn't even consider Nynorsk to be "at risk." But Kornai's analysis revealed that only a tiny community of Nynorsk speakers use it online, owing perhaps to its rival Bokmål's association with "advertising, pop music, fashion, entertainment ... and the world of technology." In Kornai's words, "In spite of a finely balanced official language policy propping up Nynorsk, the Norwegian population has already voted with their blogs and tweets to take only Bokmål with them to the digital age."

The obvious question is whether the death of Nynorsk, and languages like it, can be averted. Plenty of organizations, including Wikipedia and the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, have devoted resources to that cause: The ALD has a massive crowd-sourced encyclopedia of endangered languages, complete with sample texts in tongues such as Nganasan (500 speakers, Russia) and Maxakali (802 speakers, Brazil). Wikipedia has an "incubator" to encourage projects in new languages (or very old ones). Kornai thinks the Wikipedia project has potential -- in fact, he argues that endangered languages need a core of digital fanatics, like Wikipedia moderators or educational app developers, to survive.

But that isn't enough to keep a fading language viable in the long term, particularly if there's another, more dominant language that's easier for people to use online. Even if you have a killer Cherokee wiki, for instance -- which, it turns out, some people do -- you're not necessarily going to be able to Google or Facebook or tweet in that language.

Still, the Internet is a difficult organism to predict. Linguists use a 100-year rule to gauge whether a language is dying: In 100 years, will children still speak it? But it's hard to conceive of what the Internet will look like in a century, let alone which languages people will use on it.

One thing is sad but certain: There will be far fewer than there are now.

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How the Internet is killing the world's languages

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Less than five percent of current world languages are in use online, according to a recent study by prominent linguist András Kornai -- and the Internet may be helping the other 95 percent to their graves. Those startling conclusions come from a paper published in the journal PLOSOne in October titled, appropriately, "Digital Language Death."

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American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West, New York, NY, USA

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American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West, New York, NY, USA

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American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West, New York, NY, USA

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Citation: Schildkrout, E. (2004). Inscribing the Body. Annual Review of Anthropology, 33(319–344).

Annotation: This paper describes the ways in which tattoos, scarification, and body paint all enable the "cultural construction of the inscribed body." It further addresses the historical relationship between indigenous cultures and bodily inscription as well as the relatively contemporary phenomenon of mainstream Western interest. The paper addresses the ways in which the human body constitutes a material media.

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Inscriptions on the body, especially tattoo, scarification, and body paint, have been part of ethnographic literature since before the birth of anthropology as a discipline. Anthropology's origins as the study of the exotic Other can be seen in the early descriptions of the body art of non-Western peoples. Anthropologists have generally focused on how the inscribed body serves as a marker of identity in terms of gender, age, and political status. More recently, scholars interested in this subject have looked also at issues of modernity, authenticity, and representation. The recent focus on the inscribed body responds to postmodern theory, the importance of body art in contemporary Western culture, reflections on the meaning of representations of the exotic, and an interest in the visible surface of the body as the interface between the individual and society. This article reviews recent literature in anthropology and related disciplines pertaining to the cultural construction of the inscribed body.

Journal Information

The Annual Review of Anthropology®, in publication since 1972, covers significant developments in the subfields of Anthropology, including Archaeology, Biological Anthropology, Linguistics and Communicative Practices, Regional Studies and International Anthropology, and Sociocultural Anthropology. The journal is essential reading for anthropologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, linguists, and scientists in related fields.

Publisher Information

Annual Reviews was founded in 1932 as a nonprofit scientific publisher to help scientists cope with the ever-increasing volume of scientific research. Comprehensive, authoritative, and critical reviews written by the world's leading scientists are now published in twenty-six disciplines in the biological, physical, and social sciences. According to the "Impact Factor" rankings of the Institute for Scientific Information's Science Citation Index, each Annual Review ranks at or near the top of its respective subject category. A searchable title and author database and a collection of abstracts may be found at https://www.annualreviews.org//. The web site also provides information and pricing for all printed volumes, online publications, and reprint collections.

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Inscriptions on the body, especially tattoo, scarification, and body paint, have been part of ethnographic literature since before the birth of anthropology as a discipline. Anthropology's origins as the study of the exotic Other can be seen in the early descriptions of the body art of non-Western peoples.

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Title: The Cango Caves on South Africa's Garden Route

Annotation: In this cave, you will learn alot about the geology and formation of these caves. Developed over millions of years, it still looks ancient and beautiful. The long miles of underground passing takes you down deep into the earth. It was discovered 80,000years ago. Meanwhile some caves in it are about 850,000 years old. Exploring this site will show and tell you alot about the existence of ancient technologies.

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Explore the Cango Caves on South Africa's Garden Route

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Citation: Waddell, K. "The alphabet that will save a people from disappearing." The Altantic, Nov 16, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-alphabet-that-will-save-a-people-from-disappearing/506987/

Annotation: This article covers the development of Adlam, a script invented by two young boys in Guinea to better transcribe their native language, Fulani. In the article, the author writes about both the development of the Fulani script and the Cherokee script because they are at different points of becoming officially recognized. Both have been added to Unicode, but at the time of this article both scripts were having trouble being added to technology platforms. This reveals the complexity that power has with the development of new scripts because although both are now widely used amongst their native language speakers, neither language as full access in the digital world.

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As kids, two Guinean brothers invented a new script for their native language. Now they're trying to get it on every smartphone.

Twenty-six years ago, two brothers decided their native language needed a new alphabet. The scripts they'd been using to read and write their native Fulani, an African language spoken by at least 40 million people, weren't working well.

Fulani's sounds were rendered imprecisely by the Arabic alphabet, the script most often used to write it; the Latin alphabet presented similar problems. Neither the Arabic nor the Latin alphabets could accurately spell Fulani words that require producing a "b" or a "d" sound while gulping in air, for example, so Fulani speakers had modified both alphabets with new symbols-often in inconsistent ways.

"Why do Fulani people not have their own writing system?" Abdoulaye Barry remembers asking his father one day in elementary school. The variety of writing styles made it difficult for families and friends who lived in different countries to communicate easily. Abdoulaye's father, who learned Arabic in Koranic schools, often helped friends and family in Nzérékoré-Guinea's second-largest city-decipher letters they received, reading aloud the idiosyncratically modified Arabic scripts. As they grew older, Abdoulaye and his brother Ibrahima began to translate letters, too.

"Those letters were very difficult to read even if you were educated in Arabic," Abdoulaye said. "You could hardly make out what was written."

So, in 1990, the brothers started coming up with an alternative. Abdoulaye was 10 years old; Ibrahima was 14.

After school, they'd shut themselves in their rooms to draw, filling blank composition books they brought home from the classroom with the shapes that would make up their new alphabet. They'd take turns drawing letters, and together, assigned sounds to the shapes they came up with.

Six months later, they had a working script. Like Arabic, its 28 letters were written right to left. But unlike Arabic, whose short vowels are written as diacritical marks above and below letters, the script assigned its five vowels proper letters. It looked something like a cursive version of Ethiopic. Ibrahima and Abdoulaye's parents started taking their project seriously, and invited one of their father's relatives, who had an influential post in the local government, for a demonstration.

The visitor tested them: With Abdoulaye in the other room, Ibrahima would take dictation. When Abdoulaye returned, he read aloud what his brother had written. They switched and repeated the test. Over and over, the brothers consistently read out the right sounds, even those unique to Fulani. Crucially, they spelled the same complicated words in the same ways, independently of one another.

The visitor turned to their father. "Oh, yes, these kids are being serious," he said.

It's not every day that a new alphabet is born. The scripts in widest use today-Latin, Chinese, Arabic, Devanagari, Cyrillic-are all at least a thousand years old, and they each evolved from earlier alphabets. Creating a new script and getting it adopted widely is an enormous challenge.

The Cherokee alphabet is a notable success story. In the early 19th century, a man named Sequoyah created a script for writing his native Cherokee, which until then had only ever been spoken aloud. At first, many thought his scribbles were meaningless, and that he was playing tricks on people. But in a blind test not unlike the one Abdoulaye and Ibrahima would complete more than a century and a half later, Sequoyah and his daughter, who had also learned the alphabet, proved that the symbols they'd drawn actually represented words by reading what the other had written.

Sequoyah began to teach others to read and write, and his simple alphabet spread quickly among tribe members. In 1828, just seven years after Sequoyah invented the alphabet, the first-ever Cherokee-language printing press was used to publish the Cherokee Phoenix, a newspaper that was distributed for free to Cherokee speakers who didn't know English. The press helped standardize and simplify the script, and made it possible to quickly publish newspapers and books.

Today, the computer-age equivalent of casting metal type in the shape of a new alphabet is encoding an alphabet in the worldwide typography standard known as Unicode. The Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization, develops standards for the way letters and numbers appear on computer screens. Since 1991, a group of technology companies have worked together to develop a universal character set-a system of coding letters, numbers, and symbols that allows computers to render any supported language in the world.

Cherokee was added to the Unicode standard in 1999, but it wasn't until 2003 that Apple created a Cherokee keyboard for Mac computers. The first Cherokee keyboard arrived on Windows several years later. Today, Cherokee keyboards exist on iPhones and Android devices, and Facebook, Gmail, and Google Search all support the language.

The Cherokee Nation has put a particular emphasis on language development: The language program has 13 full-time employees, many of whom worked with Google for two years to implement Android support for the alphabet. Even so, its progress toward digital inclusion has been slow.

"A script is not a biological entity," said Kamal Mansour, a specialist in non-Latin typography at Monotype who represents the company on the Unicode Consortium. "It doesn't live alone. It has to have acceptance from people."

"In Africa, there's been a spate of inventions from very clever people," he continued. "But many don't gain acceptance, and they just die off."

The Barry brothers had a long path ahead of them.

During the decade after that first big test in the brothers' house, their new alphabet-yet unnamed-spread at an astounding rate. Eventually, it would come to be called Adlam, after its first four letters: the equivalents of a, d, l, and m. The word is also an acronym for a phrase that translates to "the alphabet that will save a people from disappearing."

They started by teaching their friends and family, asking each student to teach three others. They transcribed school books-algebra, geometry, history-using their script, copying them into the very same blank composition books that were home to their first sketches.

In junior high school, they started visiting neighborhoods and markets to teach larger groups of people. Their big break came in 1993, when Abdoulaye-still a high schooler-traveled to Conakry, Guinea's capital city, during summer vacation. There, he tracked down a famous radio personality and got himself invited onto his show, where he demonstrated the script live on air, as the host described what he saw. "That's how the whole country learned about Adlam," Abdoulaye says.

By the mid-1990s, the brothers could walk into a market in a new part of Guinea and see people they'd never met reading and writing their alphabet. Many Fula people are nomadic farmers or traders, and the brothers credit their transitory nature with the writing system's quick propagation.

When Abdoulaye and Ibrahima moved to Conakry for college, in the late 1990s, their work on Adlam slowed, but Ibrahima dove back in with enthusiasm toward the end of his five-year civil engineering program. Others began getting involved in the development of Adlam through a student group called "Winden Jangen," Fulani for "reading and writing." The brothers transcribed more and more books, still by hand, with no help but a supply of carbon-copy paper they received as a gift from their relative in the government.

But the new alphabet wasn't sitting too well with others in power. During his last year in college, Ibrahima was arrested and put in prison for three months. He says he was never told exactly why he was imprisoned-officers raided a Winden Jangen meeting one day and hauled him away, he recalls-but he suspects that his work had made some people nervous. "Maybe they feared that he was trying to instigate something bigger because they did not understand the script," Abdoulaye said.

When Ibrahima was released, he was invigorated rather than discouraged. He set about writing with even more gusto, and started a Fulani-language newspaper, writing each issue by hand and distributing photocopies. He traveled to neighboring Senegal, where Fulani is also an official language, to try and spread Adlam-only to find that it had preceded him. Someone told him a palm-oil trader had been distributing his books in Senegal, the Gambia, Sierra Leone, and the Ivory Coast.

The brothers soon realized that Adlam reached a crossroads. "We knew that the only way to spread Adlam faster and publish more books was to have it in computers," Abdoulaye told me.

To bring the script into the digital world, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye looked overseas.

They didn't know it yet, but the help the brothers would need was tucked away in a maze of an academic building at the University of California, Berkeley. That's where Deborah Anderson, a linguistics researcher, manages a program called the Script Encoding Initiative. Since its founding, in 2002, the program has played a role in getting more than 70 scripts added to the Unicode standard, by helping to write detailed proposals for the organization's technical committee and providing funding for the work.

With money from donors like Google, UNESCO, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Anderson's mission is to help encode scripts that might not otherwise end up in front of the Unicode committee.* That includes historic scripts-one of her current projects aims to drastically expand the set of supported Egyptian hieroglyphs, to help Egyptologists who can't currently use search functions or copy/paste in their research-and scripts used by linguistic or religious minorities.

Preserving those living scripts through type can promote ethnic pride and identification, Anderson said, and encourage literacy and education in native languages. "By not including such scripts, the web will be relegated to the more politically prominent scripts and the languages using them," she said in an email.

In Unicode's early years, there was little focus on minority or dead scripts. The original proposal for the system, written in 1988, makes clear that the body would prioritize modern languages over "preserving past antiquities." But the first Unicode standard, published in 1991, indicated that "less common and archaic scripts" could find their way into future versions. Indeed, Unicode 3.0, which was published in 1999, included Norse runes alongside modern non-Latin scripts like Cherokee and Ethiopic.**
"Until these platforms support our script, it won't be acceptable, especially to the young generation."
Without Berkeley's script lab, many of the alphabets currently in Unicode may never have been encoded. Since a lot of funding for technology comes from hubs in the United States, Europe, and China, languages spoken in those areas are best supported on computers and phones, while others haven't gotten as much attention. Alphabets used to write languages spoken by communities without political clout are especially likely to be glossed over, potentially accelerating their demise as their speakers are forced to depend on technology that operates in English or French or Chinese instead of in their native tongue.

Being added to the Unicode standard is still only the first step in a script's path toward digital relevance. Next, technology companies have to be convinced to support the alphabet on their desktop and mobile operating systems, and social-networking platforms like Twitter have to translate their apps and websites to work with the script. For users to actually be able to type in the alphabet, developers have to create virtual keyboards for smartphones, and keyboard layouts for computers made to work with other scripts. The entire process can take years.

Ibrahima and Abdoulaye moved from West Coast to West Coast: Abdoulaye went first, traveling from Guinea to Portland, Oregon, with his American wife in 2003, and got a night job as a revenue auditor for Hilton Hotels and Resorts while he studied finance. Ibrahima joined him in Portland in 2007.

In between work and school, the brothers saved up enough to pay for the development of the first Adlam keyboard and font. They found a software company in Seattle that makes specialty fonts, and, in 2008, they were able to type in Adlam for the first time. It was a huge step, but it came with disappointment: Since Adlam was not yet supported by Unicode, if they sent a document written in Adlam to someone without the font installed, the recipient would see only a nonsensical jumble of random, disconnected Arabic letters. That's when the importance of being included in Unicode sank in.

For the next few years, development largely stalled. The brothers worked and studied, and continued supporting Adlam schools at home and in the United States. Ibrahima signed up for a calligraphy class in Portland, hoping to streamline the shapes of the letters he and his brother had first sketched on notebook paper decades ago.

At a calligraphy conference in Portland, he met an artist named Randall Hasson, who invited him to present Adlam at another event in Colorado Springs in 2013. (Hasson wrote about his first meeting with Ibrahima on his blog.)

In Colorado, an audience member asked Ibrahima what he wanted for his alphabet. "I said I want only one thing," Ibrahima told me. "I just want the script to be encoded. To be in Unicode. That is my main goal."

A type designer in attendance knew just who could make that happen. He introduced the brothers to Anderson, the linguist at Berkeley, who in turn put them in touch with Michael Everson, one of the co-authors of the Unicode Standard and a prolific writer of script proposals. As a part of the Script Encoding Initiative, Everson had already written upward of 60 proposals that had been accepted by Unicode-and he said he was willing to take this one on, too.

I asked Everson if any of the alphabet's quirks presented challenges-the fact that it's written right to left, for example, or the fact that the letters are connected to one another-but he said it was nothing new. What was new was that the script wasn't yet set in stone.

"Mr. Barry had learnt calligraphy and was working really hard on optimizing stroke order and [duration]," Everson said. "I was saying, 'You have to stop tinkering with this.' If he wanted this to be stable he needed to stop altering it."

With partial funding from the Berkeley encoding lab-Everson says he volunteered his time and resources to cover the rest of the cost-he worked with the brothers and the Fulani community in the U.S. to create a proposal. "It's very well developed and well designed," Everson said of the script. "These guys should be really proud of themselves."

Abdoulaye and Ibrahima traveled to the 2014 meeting of the Unicode Technical Committee in Sunnyvale, California, to iron out the last kinks in their proposal. That same month, the committee voted to approve Adlam.

"I can't even describe the feeling," Abdoulaye said. He tried anyway: "When we got the email that we were officially encoded, we were very, very happy."

Open up the settings on any smartphone and scroll through the keyboard options. If you're holding an iPhone, you'll find Macedonian and Telugu and Catalan-but not Adlam. The alphabet was included in Unicode 9.0, which was published this summer, but technology companies haven't leapt at the chance to use it in apps and keyboards.

Like Cherokee during the four-year lull between its induction in Unicode 3.0 and the first official support for its alphabet on Macs, Adlam is in purgatory. Neither Windows, nor Apple, nor Google supports it on their operating systems yet, and although Facebook recently added an option to use the network in Fulani, it used the Latin script rather than Adlam.

Last month, some hope came in the form of an enormous font family called " Noto," the culmination of a five-year collaboration between Google and Monotype that aims to create a typeface that supports more than 800 languages, all in a unified style. It already covers more than 30 alphabets-every single one released in Unicode 6.1, including Cherokee-and in its next phase of development, Google says it will cover 100 percent of Unicode 9.0, which includes Adlam. The Google font is an important step, but it doesn't yet mean Adlam will be supported on an operating system anytime soon.

Instead of waiting for official support for Adlam to arrive, some Fulani speakers have gone ahead and created their own apps. Two Android apps already allow smartphone users to text each other in Adlam (as long as both have the "Adlam SMS" app installed) and learn the Adlam alphabet on their device.

For their part, the brothers-now 36 and 40 years old-have focused recently on expanding the alphabet's role in education. Adlam is now being taught in more than 10 countries in West and Central Africa, and it's making it easier for speakers of different dialects of Fulani, from Senegal to Sudan to Cameroon, to communicate with one another.
"The appeal to equity or rightness or preservation of languages, I think that's going to fall on deaf ears."
Ibrahima recently finished writing the first-ever Adlam grammar book, and he'd like to create a Fulani dictionary in Adlam. Both brothers want to open more schools in Guinea and in nearby countries, with the hope of augmenting the French-speaking education system with one that teaches kids in their native language. The formal education system is exclusionary, they say, because it considers people illiterate if they can't read and write French-the colonial language-rather than asking whether or not they can read or write their own native tongue.

"That's one of the things that's really hindering the progress in Africa and Guinea in particular," Ibrahima says. "We spend so many resources learning new languages, even though we already have languages that we can use to develop our countries."

Facebook is the next big tech target for the brothers. "Today, the world is connected through the different platforms," Abdoulaye said. "Until these platforms support our script, it won't be acceptable, especially to the young generation."

Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook all declined to comment on whether they planned to support the script. Given how long it took to get Cherokee onto phones, tablets, and computers-and how many other languages still lack official support-Adlam may not fully inhabit the digital world for quite a while still.

I asked Roy Boney, the manager of the Cherokee Language Program, what advice he'd give the Barry brothers. He said the biggest hurdle his project faced was his own community's impatience. "It takes a while, especially for minority languages," Boney said, adding that "some people thought this wasn't necessary for the language."

Howard Gutowitz, the CEO of Eatoni, a company that makes apps in hundreds of different languages, was less hopeful. Five years ago, Gutowitz was involved in an effort to get N'Ko, an alphabet for writing another of Guinea's national languages, supported by cellphone manufacturers like Nokia. I called him up to see how it turned out.

"After banging my head against that wall for many years, I decided not to bother anymore," Gutowitz told me. He thought he might have better luck with apps, and released a calculator app in 200 languages to see which would be most popular. The N'Ko version did pretty well, he said, as did a couple other surprising languages, like Tibetan. The app was a sort of market research, to see which communities are hungriest for localized software.

His advice for the Barrys isn't too upbeat. "Well, the first thing that comes to mind is, 'Give up,'" he sighed. "The less despairing remark is, 'Yeah, build an app; that's what we did.'"

If an app does well, he says, it can signal to tech companies that it's worth sinking resources into supporting a particular language. "The appeal to equity or rightness or preservation of languages, I think that's going to fall on deaf ears when it comes to manufacturers that care about market or money."

But take the long view and things might not seem quite so bleak. Mansour, the Monotype designer, has been involved in type development for decades. He says it's easy to forget how far things have come since the '90s, when the internet was dominated almost entirely by the basic Latin alphabet.

"You couldn't even type Baltic languages like Estonian or Lithuanian. You couldn't! You had to buy an Eastern European supplement [software package]," Mansour said. "Now, nobody thinks of that. We collectively forget the stages of development that have happened. Now, you could even type Icelandic on an Arabic system, if you wanted."

For speakers of Fulani, there's still no easy way to type the only alphabet designed for their language. The script's inventors-still its chief advocates-hauled their writing system all the way from hand-drawn shapes on school notebooks to the doorstep of tech companies, neatly packaged into a Unicode block. All that's left is to hammer on the door until it opens.
* This article originally stated that the Script Encoding Initiative is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts; in fact, it's the National Endowment for the Humanities that contributes funding. We regret the error. ** This article originally stated that Syriac Aramaic is a dead language; in fact, modern Syriac dialects are spoken by small groups in several countries. We regret the error.

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The Alphabet That Will Save a People From Disappearing

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As kids, two Guinean brothers invented a new script for their native language. Now they're trying to get it on every smartphone. Twenty-six years ago, two brothers decided their native language needed a new alphabet. The scripts they'd been using to read and write their native Fulani, an African language spoken by at least 40 million people, weren't working well.

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Citation: Gaebl, Gina (2018). On the Liberation of All Women: Socialist Feminism and Materialist Ecofeminism. Acta Cogitata: An Undergraduate Journal in Philosophy 5 (2), 1-8.

Annotation: This week’s contribution to the decolonial archive is Gina Gaebl’s (2018) essay “On the Liberation of All Women: Socialist Feminism and Materialist Ecofeminism.” Gaebl criticizes western feminism’s limitations regarding its colonial undergirding, adherence to capitalism, and erasure of indigenous and other non-western voices. She ultimately recognizes this lack as detrimental to any feminist progress and moves into her argument for (social) feminism’s crucial need for ecofeminism and its materiality. She discusses how ecofeminism aims to counteract the environmentally destructive neo-liberal forces in developing countries by prioritizing land, bodies, and other material things to evince the effects of capitalism (p. 5). The material focus is especially compelling here, which points to how physical (and figurative) impact, devastation, degradation, and resistance are integral to feminist social action.

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Abstract

Feminists of the Western world claim to be striving for the liberation of all women, yet face a number of challenges in the pursuit of truly acting upon this objective. One of these challenges is the way in which western structures, such as capitalism, thrive off of the exploitation of women in developing countries. Other related challenges include the unintentional belittling of the cultures and feminist movements of developing countries through cultural imperialism and culture-blaming. In this paper, I argue that the only version of feminism that truly works for the liberation of all women is socialist feminism. Furthermore, this must be a version of socialist feminism that allows for feminists to approach the dismantling of capitalism in whatever way is most feasible and effective for them to do as such. In this paper, I focus specifically on the way that materialist ecofeminism in developing countries is a necessary component to the global dismantling of capitalism.

Recommended Citation

Gaebl, Gina (2018) "On the Liberation of All Women: Socialist Feminism and Materialist Ecofeminism," Acta Cogitata: An Undergraduate Journal in Philosophy: Vol. 5 , Article 2.
Available at: https://commons.emich.edu/ac/vol5/iss1/2

DOWNLOADS

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On the Liberation of All Women: Socialist Feminism and Materialist Ecofeminism

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Feminists of the Western world claim to be striving for the liberation of all women, yet face a number of challenges in the pursuit of truly acting upon this objective. One of these challenges is the way in which western structures, such as capitalism, thrive off of the exploitation of women in developing countries.

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Michigan State University, Michigan, USA

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Michigan State University, Michigan, USA

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Michigan State University, Michigan, USA

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Citation: Sano-Franchini, J. L. (2010). Intellectual property and the cultures of BitTorrent communities. Computers and Composition 27 (3), 202-210.

Abstract: In Technics and Time, 1, Bernard Stiegler (1998) challenged the prevalent philosophical distinction between tekhnē and ēpistēmē, arguing that humans are fundamentally technical beings. According to Stiegler, the industrialization of civilization led to a disequilibrium in the evolution of culture and the evolution of technics, with technics evolving more quickly than culture. Stiegler's discussions of technics, culture, time, and memory provide a useful theoretical framework for understanding some of the cultural implications of copyright issues, which are often viewed in terms of economics, legality, and/or ethics. In this article, I focus on the intellectual property debate as it pertains to peer-to-peer networks and the music industry. Drawing from Technics and Time, I theoretically frame these issues as a problem of temporality, memory, and a disconnect in the evolution of culture and technology. I then use small-scale/observational ethnographic analysis to examine a private torrent community to consider how torrent communities are cultural phenomena, the implications of this assumption, and how these considerations might inform or extend existing approaches to issues of intellectual property. More broadly, I ask, what are the affordances of thinking about these economic, legal, and political issues from a cultural framework?

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Citation: Schiwy, F. (2009). Digital ghosts, global capitalism and social change. Social Identities, 15(3), 313–330.

Annotation: Schiwy begins her essay by describing the ways in which mainstream digital media, even when it attempts to acknowledge the subaltern perspective and decolonialize, often only serves to reinforce the existing infrastructural and colonial status quo. She argues that despite the beliefs of researchers like Hardt, Negri, and Poster, that the colonial ghosts of exploitation yet haunt the realm of digital media. On the other hand, she demonstrates the ways in which indigenous activists have used digital media to not only bring attention and highlight their relevant human rights crises, but also to generate revenue by selling this media to institutions like Western academia to in turn fund their resistance. “Digital media are allowing for the creation of expanding communication networks among often times remote rural areas. Rather than in the backwaters of Wall Street and the emerging global cities, indigenous peoples in Latin America are at the forefront of experimenting with political and economic alternatives to global capitalism.” Failure to recognize the ways in which these indigenous cultures are embracing digital media to further their goals demonstrates that a paternalistic, colonial blind spot still exists. Schiwy demonstrates how the indigenous activists in both Bolivia and Chiavas have coopted the technology but failure to recognize these phenomena demonstrates an erasure of embodiment and indigenous identity. “Indigenous documentaries thus counter a dominant colonial gaze. In ethnographic film white colonizers and scientists have objectified colonial others and bound viewers into their desires and anxieties.” Indigenous documentaries offer an alternative perspective to the colonial gaze.

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1. For a selection of different positions see the essays in Kafka Zúñiga (2004). The strongest alternative proposal was issued by a coalition of multiple indigenous and peasant organizations. The document was printed on inexpensive paper and widely distributed for debate in rural and urban centers ( Asamblea, 2006).

2. CSUTCB (Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia), CSCB (Confederacion Sindical de Colonizadores de Bolivia), the above mentioned CIDOB, CONAMAQ (Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu), FNMCBBS (Federación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas Indígenas Originarias de Bolivia Bartolina Sisa).

3. This position contrasts with the fruitful engagement of radical Italian philosophers by theorists and activists in Buenos Aires. See Colectivo Situaciones (2002) and Fontana et al. ().

4. The analysis of indigenous media productions in Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia is based on my field research unless otherwise noted.

5. This tendency (still) contrasts with the way Australian Aborigines have creatively adapted documentary's and television's stylistic conventions as a means of talking back to the colonial gaze. Through parody, self-reflexivity, even avant-gardist aesthetics that mix realism and antirealism as well as poetic address (see Beattie, 2004, pp. 69-79) aboriginal film makers have at once made use of and undermined documentary's truth claims. Ten years prior to Beattie's account, Faye Ginsburg (, p. 368) noted that for most Australian Aboriginal video makers, form and innovative solutions do not seem relevant. The aesthetic criteria used by aboriginal people privilege instead the strengthening of community ties. As Beattie states, Aboriginal film makers have grown tired of documentary form and are moving into fiction where there seems to be greater space for creative reframing (2004, p. 66). Similarly, in Brazil, documentaries such as Video nas Aldeias se Apresenta reflexively and humorously address the relationship between indigenous video makers and the camera itself. For a more detailed discussion of indigenous documentaries made in Bolivia see Schiwy (2009, chapter five).

6. See also Shohat and Stam (1994) especially chapter 3. On the return of the gaze see also Rony ().

7. Alessandro Fornazzari discusses this aspect in depth in his essay in this volume.

8. The new global order, marked by networks, immaterial labor, and biopower is seen as coming into being as a response to the actions of labor movements, the emphasis on labor being stronger in Negri than in Hardt (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. xii-xv, 8-9, 19; Negri, 2003).

9. I would like to thank Thomas Reese (Tulane University) for calling my attention to the pervasive representation of labor in CEFREC-CAIB's fiction videos.

10. Members of CAIB and CEFREC expressed these views in personal conversations as well as during discussions of their videos at international film and video festivals, for instance in Guatemala (1999) and New York (2000). See also Mosúa, Copa and Pinto (2000) and Flores (2001-02).

11. As CEFREC ( 2005 CEFREC . 2005 . Communication strategies and indigenous rights. Report on the indigenous aboriginal national plan for audiovisual communication, 2000-2004 . Trans. F. Schiwy. Unpublished Grant Report, n.p . , n.p.) sees it, the process of audiovisual communication strengthens the tradition of collective decision-making in the communities.

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Digital ghosts, global capitalism and social change

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1. For a selection of different positions see the essays in Kafka Zúñiga (2004). The strongest alternative proposal was issued by a coalition of multiple indigenous and peasant organizations. The document was printed on inexpensive paper and widely distributed for debate in rural and urban centers ( Asamblea, 2006). 2.

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Citation: Jackson, Z. I. (2015). Outer worlds: The persistence of race in movement “beyond the human". GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2), 215-218.

Annotation: In this article, Jackson (2015) cautions us against accepting a theory of posthumanism without acknowledging how critical race theory presents implications for how ‘being’ and ‘the human’ have come to be defined. Jackson critiques posthumanism through the lens of critical race theory, addressing the question of what and whose idea of the human we are transcending.

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Reviewed Works: HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language by Kalpana Rahita Seshadri; The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture by Michael Lundblad; Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect by Mel Y. Chen

Review by: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

Published By: Feminist Studies, Inc.

https://www. jstor .org/stable/23719431

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Review: Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism on JSTOR

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Reviewed Works: HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language by Kalpana Rahita Seshadri; The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture by Michael Lundblad; Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect by Mel Y. Chen Review by: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Published By: Feminist Studies, Inc. https://www. jstor .org/stable/23719431

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Citation: Mushtaq, M. U. (2009, January). Public health in British India: A brief account of the history of medical services and disease prevention in colonial India. Indian journal of community medicine : official publication of Indian Association of Preventive & Social Medicine. Retrieved September 22, 2021, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2763662/.

Annotation: Mushtaq (2009) outlines the history of medical services and disease prevention in colonial India. The author provides an account of how the advent of infectious diseases, mostly as a consequence of colonialism, led to the establishment of health systems and shaped the prevention efforts to improve the health of the citizens. The article provides a detailed history of the establishment of hospitals and educational institutions in India and highlights how some plagues and diseases were handled by the British. He explains that the British government took its time in order to create a strong medical system in colonial India due to a lack of funds—it was a resistance on part of the Indian people to the colonial government. Development eventually took place “as the natives were educated according to the British system.”

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The evolution of public health in British India and the history of disease prevention in that part of world in the 19 th and early 20 th century provides a valuable insight into the period that witnessed the development of new trends in medical systems and a transition from surveys to microscopic studies in medicine. It harbors the earliest laboratory works and groundbreaking achievements in microbiology and immunology. The advent of infectious diseases and tropical medicine was a direct consequence of colonialism. The history of diseases and their prevention in the colonial context traces back the epidemiology of infectious diseases, many of which are still prevalent in third world countries. It reveals the development of surveillance systems and the response to epidemics by the imperial government. It depicts how the establishment of health systems under the colonial power shaped disease control in British India to improve the health of its citizens [].

Establishment of Medical Services

The civil chief medical officer or the person in-charge of the Indian Medical Department was the Director General, Indian Medical Services, who held the rank of Surgeon General. The Director General was under the orders of the Medical Board. He was assisted by the Deputy Director Generals and a team of administrative staff. The Sanitary Commissioner to the government of India supervised sanitation, vaccination, and vital statistics. The Public Health Commissioner and the Statistical Officer were responsible for public health matters. The functions of the central staff were surveys, planning, coordination, programming, and regulation of all health matters in the country. Provincial medical departments were under the control of the local governments of their respective provinces. Principal advisors to the government were the Inspector General of Civil Hospitals (called the Surgeon General in Bombay and Madras), Sanitary Commissioner for the province, and the Director of Public Health. The Deputy Surgeon Generals/Assistant Inspectors assisted the Surgeon General/Inspector General of Civil Hospitals. Provincial officers were responsible for the organization, direction, and inspection of all health facilities. District medical and sanitary arrangements were carried out under the charge of a medical officer called the Civil Surgeon. His duties were to superintend medical institutions and all matters regarding the health of the people. He was required to inspect rural hospitals and dispensaries at least three times a year, perform medico-legal work, and give professional attendance to the superior government officials. He was responsible for sanitary and public health work including vaccinations and vital statistics. The Civil Surgeon was called the District Medical and Sanitary Officer in Madras while in Bombay the Civil Surgeon was only person in charge of the district headquarters. Rural hospitals and dispensaries were under the direct control of the Surgeon General of Bombay. The Deputy Sanitary Commissioners, under the orders of Sanitary Commissioner of Bombay, supervised sanitary work and other public health duties, carried out by the Civil Surgeon in other provinces.( 1, 4)

Medical Institutions

The first hospital in India was the Madras General Hospital in 1679. The Presidency General Hospital, Calcutta was formed in 1796. About four hospitals were formed in Madras between 1800 to1820. To fulfill the growing need for health professionals, Calcutta Medical College was established by an order in February 1835, which was the first institute of western medicine in Asia. Medical College Hospital, Calcutta was formed in 1852 []. In 1860, Lahore Medical School (later named King Edward Medical College) started in Lahore, Punjab []. Afterwards, a network of hospitals was set up throughout India. In 1854, the government of India agreed to supply medicines and instruments to the growing network of minor hospitals and dispensaries. Government Store Depots were established in Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Mian Mir, and Rangoon.( 1) Lady Reading Health School, Dehli was established in 1918. In 1930, the All-India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health was established in Calcutta. In 1939, the first Rural Health Training Center was established in Singur near Calcutta.( 3)

The total number of public hospitals and dispensaries under the control of the Imperial government of India was about 1200 in 1880 and in 1902, the figure raised to approximately 2500. There was one hospital for every 330 square miles in 1902. The income of public health facilities was 3.6 million rupees in 1880 and about 8.1 million rupees in 1902. Patient turnover was 7.4 million in 1880; that increased to about 22 million in 1902.( 1)

Mental Health

Lunate asylums were established for insane persons under an act of 1858. These were under the control of the Civil Surgeon of each respective district. From 1895 to 1900, the average number of patients in lunate asylums was about 4600. Central asylums were formed in Bengal, Bombay, Madras, United Provinces, and Punjab. Later, Government Mental Hospitals were established at provincial headquarters. Medical officers were encouraged to attend these facilities and conduct research for improving mental health.( 1, 4)

Sanitary Work

The history of sanitary work in British India began with the reports of the Royal Commission of 1859. The commission reported in 1863 on the sanitary conditions of the Army. The mortality rate among British troops was 69 per 1000.( 2) The commission recommended the establishment of a Commission of Public Health in each presidency and pointed out the need to improve sanitation and prevention of epidemics in civil society for improving the health of the British Army. Under the Military Cantonments Act of 1864, a sanitary police force was formed under the charge of military medical officers to improve military hygiene. To improve civil sanitary conditions, sanitary boards were formed in each province in 1864. Sanitary Inspector Generals later named as Sanitary Commissioners replaced these boards and took over the charge of sanitation. In 1870, the sanitary department was merged with the vaccination department to form a central sanitary department. From 1870 to 1879, sanitary departments were set up in each province. Under the orders of the Governor General of India in 1880, Sanitary Engineers were employed in all major provinces. The Sanitary Commissioner of India and the provincial sanitary commissioners had no executive powers and were advisors to the government. They carried out the inspection of sanitation, the supervision of vaccinations, the maintenance of vital statistics, and the collection of meteorological data. In districts, civil surgeons (Districts Medical and Sanitary Officers in Madras and Deputy Sanitary Commissioners in Bombay) were in charge of sanitation. The local self-government policies of Lord Ripon strengthened the efforts to improve sanitation by increasing the availability of funds at the local level. In 1885, the Local Self-Government act was passed and local bodies came into existence. These were now responsible for sanitation at the local level but the necessary staff was not provided by the Central Government. In 1912, the Government of India sanctioned the appointment of Deputy Sanitary Commissioners and Health Officers with the local bodies and released funds for sanitation.( 1, 2, 4)

Vaccination and Vital Statistics

The history of vaccinations can be traced back to 1802 when a Superintendent General of Vaccination was appointed in India after the discovery of the small pox vaccine. In 1827, four European superintendents of vaccination with one Indian vaccinator were appointed to the Bombay presidency. Great efforts were made for vaccination under the charge of the superintendents of vaccination. In 1870, the vaccination work was transferred to the supervision of the Sanitary Commissioners and their staff. The district public vaccination staff was supervised by the Civil Surgeon except in Bombay where it was under the control of the Deputy Sanitary Commissioners. In 1880, an act was passed for the compulsory vaccination of children in municipalities and cantonments. Small pox was the main target during that period, although vaccinations were also carried out for plague and other diseases. Variolation (an Eastern inoculation technique) was also used initially to control small pox. In 1864 and 1865, 556 people were vaccinated in Bengal, the United Provinces, and Punjab while more than 5 million people were vaccinated in the same provinces in 1902 and 1903. In all of British India, the vaccination rate was 2.7% in 1880 and 1881; that number increased to 3.5% in 1902 and 1903. Successful vaccinations at birth were 19.9% in 1880 and 1881 and 39.1% in 1902 and 1903. The budg et allocated for vaccination was about 0.7 million rupees in 1880 and 1881. That figure rose to approximately 1.1 million rupees in 1902 and 1903.( 1, 2, 4)

In 1873, the Birth and Death Registration act was passed. Vaccination and sanitary staff was responsible for the maintenance of vital statistics i.e., the registration of births and deaths. In 1881, the first Indian Factories Act was passed and the first all-India census was held. To control epidemics, special officers, committees, and commissions were appointed.( 3)

Medico-legal Work and Drugs

At district headquarters, the Civil Surgeons carried out the medico-legal work. At the provincial level, it was under the orders of the Surgeon General Medico-legal. For the purpose of forensic chemical examination and drug testing, laboratories were created at provincial headquarters under the control of the Chief Chemical Examiner. In 1940, the Drugs Act was passed and drugs were made under the control of the government for the first time.( 3, 4)

Disease Control and Prevention

When the British Empire came into power in India, they faced the challenge of a new set of diseases that were endemic in that region. India was a vast country with environments ranging from the world's highest mountains to plain green fields, and from tropical forests to barren deserts. Such a diverse region had its own peculiar diseases, which were difficult to prevent with the limited resources of the IMS. Enormous amounts of work was done for the prevention of epidemics to save the lives of people in India in general, and the Imperial troops and officers, in particular. Epidemic diseases that had devastating effects during that period were plague, leprosy, cholera, and malaria. The British government took great efforts to prevent diseases but due to insufficient medical officers and funds, the major target was to alleviate suffering and render curative services as it was solely a state responsibility during that period with virtually no volunteer or private-sector organizations. Prevention and environmental hygiene had long been neglected. It wasn't until the late 19th century that the government realized that many deaths could be prevented and public health services were strengthened.

Plague

Being on the international trading route, there was immense pressure on the British Imperial government of India to control this emergency. The Plague Commission was constituted in 1896 under the chairmanship of Prof. T.R. Frasor, Professor of Materia Medica at the University of Edinburgh. It comprised of members from various departments including J.P. Hewett, Interior Secretary to the government of India, Prof. A.E. Wright, Professor of Pathology at Army Medical College Netley, and others. The report of the Plague Commission in 1904 concluded that the disease was highly contagious and considered human transit as an important source of spreading the disease as they carried the germs with them. The commission recommended necessary preventive measures to disinfect and evacuate infected places, to put a control over mass transit, and to improve sanitary conditions. The commission also suggested strengthening of public health services and development of laboratories.( 7)

The Epidemic Diseases Act was passed in 1897 and the Governor General of India conferred special powers upon local authorities to implement the necessary measures for control of epidemics. There was a vigorous execution of the act. Colonial power was used for forceful segregation of infected persons, disinfections, evacuation, and even demolition of infected places was carried out. Medical and administrative officials had the right to inspect any suspected person or place; they may have called for detention of any person from ships and railways. That gave rise to many concerns in the native people and riots were reported in some areas but the government used the military power to ensure proper enforcement of necessary preventive measures. Intensive research work was carried out.( 8- 14) The Plague Research Committee was formed. As indicated in reports of Surgeon Maj. Lyons, President of the Plague Research Committee and by Surgeon Capt. Childe, various types of research was conducted in 1897.( 15) The experiments of Hankins concluded that plague bacillus was not spread by saprophytic means from the outside world. Its main sources were poor sanitation and the resultant spread from excretions of humans and animals. Haffkine's Anti-Plague vaccine was used and inoculations were made on a large scale that proved useful as reported by W.B. Bannerman, Superintendent of the Bombay Plague Research Laboratory (1897-1900). Professor Lusting's curative serum was also used and found effective as described by the reports of G. Polverine, Officer in-charge of Parel Municipal Laboratory and Col. J. S. Wilkins Special Medical Officer for Plague Operations.( 16)

Detailed surveillance was carried out with individual case histories; camps and field hospitals were established and various extensive reports were drafted. Five plague committees were constituted to monitor the preventive measures. Noteworthy works include Reports on Bubonic Plague Administration in Bombay by M.E. Couchman (1896-1897);( 17) Brig. Gen. W.F. Gatacre, Chairman Plague Committee for the year 1896-97;( 18) Sir James MacNabb Campbell, Chairman of the Plague Committee for the year 1897-98;( 19) the Municipal Commissioner of Bombay for the years 1898 to 1901;( 20) and Capt. J.K. Condon for the years 1896-1899.( 21) Maj. E. Wilkinson, Chief Plague Medical Officer, also carried out extensive surveys of the epidemic in Punjab as depicted by his reports on plague administration and inoculation in the plague infected areas of Punjab and its dependencies (1901-1903).( 22- 24)

Leprosy

Leprosy was a big problem in British India. IMS medical officers did enormous amounts of research on the scientific treatment for leprosy. Despite its limitations and hardships, leprosy research in India received worldwide recognition; many Indian remedies for leprosy have been incorporated into western medicine.

Because of G.A. Hansen's discovery in 1873 that leprosy is spread by contact, H.V. Carter of the Bengal Medical Department gained an authority over leprosy control in India. He earned great recognition in the central imperial government of India and suggested isolating lepers. He urged the establishment of Leper Asylums in India as these were formed in Norway in those days.( 25, 26) After the 1889 Leprosy Bill, the National Leprosy Fund was constituted by the British Empire under chairmanship of the Prince of Wales. A Leprosy Commission was formed to investigate the etiology and epidemiology of leprosy. The Leprosy Commission concluded that leprosy is a disease sui generis caused by a bacillus having striking resemblance to tuberculosis. It is not a hereditary disease, there is spread by contagious means but the chances for that are very small. However, its spread is indirectly influenced by poor sanitation and malnutrition. The Commission suggested that segregation might not be fruitful in India. It suggested a prohibition on the sale of food articles, prostitution, and other occupations involving direct interference with people like barbers or watermen by the infected people. It insisted on the improvement of sanitary and living conditions.( 27) However, the government of India passed the All-India Leprosy Act in 1898 and Leper Asylums were established in major parts of the country and forcible segregation of lepers was carried out.

Cholera

Officers of the British East India Company were not familiar with cholera. Before 1817, cholera was confined to Bengal but the 1817-1821 cholera epidemics in India shocked the Company. By the 1830s, cholera was known to be a life-threatening disease to the western world. In India, it gained the focus of medical services due to its serious impact on the troops and officers of the Company; otherwise, it was a disease of poor people. Due to the lack of effective treatment for cholera in that period, the main focus was set on its prevention.( 1, 5)

In the 1860s and 1870s, Dr. James L. Bryden, India's first epidemiologist and government's chief advisor on epidemic cholera, studied cholera extensively. He had first-hand experience with cholera during his work as a statistical officer in IMS in Bengal. But, he considered cholera to be an air-borne disease probably spread by a seed-like organism. He reported that cholera is not transmitted by contaminated water. A.C. DeRenzy, Sanitary Commissioner of Punjab, opposed his views and stated that it would hurt the sanitary work going on in India to prevent the spread of cholera.( 2)

John Murray, who served as Inspector General of Civil Hospitals in North Western Provinces and Bengal, conducted detailed studies on cholera. Although there was evidence of contagiousness, Murray believed that environmental factors precipitated the attacks of cholera, but he gave valuable treatment guidelines for cholera in that period.( 34) Surgeon W.R. Cornish, Sanitary Commissioner for Madras, challenged metrological theories about the spread of cholera and carried out detailed surveillance and research work to establish the contagiousness of disease, which is evident from his reports on cholera in Southern India in 1871 and his investigations of cholera outbreaks in H.M.'s 18 th Hussars in Secunderabad in 1871 that killed 115 people in 1 month including 20 troops of the Royal Indian Army.( 35)

Other significant works include reports from H.W. Bellew, Deputy Surgeon General and Sanitary Commissioner for Punjab, about the cholera outbreaks in India from 1862 to 1881, and the reports of Commissioner Benarus Division (United Provinces) about the disease outbreaks in the sub-division of Bulliah and the district of Mirzapore.( 36) In the 1890s, metrological theories about cholera were abandoned, as desired by W.R. Cornish. New treatment options evolved along with better prevention methods resulting in the marked decrease in cholera mortality.

Malaria

Fever was one of the leading causes of deaths in India. The situation worsened in the early 19 th century. One of the contributing factors was the establishment of the railways and irrigation network by the British government of India without keeping in view the efficient drainage systems for floods and rainwaters. This created many fresh water reservoirs for the propagation of mosquitoes. Due to the heavy death toll, economic loss, and risk to the lives of British officers serving in vulnerable areas like Punjab, a lot of research was done for malaria control. In the 1840s, attention was paid to proper drainage and chemoprophylaxis was started with Quinine.( 1, 5)

Surgeon Major Sir Ronald Ross joined the Indian Medical Services in 1881 []. He started to study malaria in 1882. Despite initial failures and hardships, his devotion to research for nearly 2 1/2 years earned him great honor. In August 1897, he demonstrated the life cycle of the malarial parasite stating that anopheles mosquitoes carried the protozoan parasites called "plasmodia".( 37) He was later knighted and given a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1902. This discovery opened new horizons in malaria research and shaped the malaria control programs toward a new direction mainly focusing on the eradication of mosquitoes.

In 1900, Christophers, Stephens, and James conducted detailed research on mosquitoes in the military cantonments in Punjab. All-India Malaria Conferences (1900-1909) and Punjab Malaria Surveys (1909-1911) were carried out under the supervision of Christophers.( 5) From 1903 to 1908, Capt. S.P. James conducted research on the causation and prevention of malarial fevers. He wrote useful reports for the prevention and treatment of malaria for health care providers.( 38, 39) In 1909, the Central Malaria Bureau was formed in Kasauli for malaria control and investigations.( 3, 5)

Malaria was a major problem in Punjab. After initial works by Christophers, the Punjab Malaria Bureau carried out detailed surveillance and research on malaria. It is evident from the extensive investigations and reports of Chief Malaria Medical Officers of Punjab from 1913 to 1918 who were Capt. Clifford A. Gill (1913), Lt. Col. D.T. Lane (1914), Col. H. Hendley (1915-1917), and Col. R.C. MacWatt (1918), that malaria was a major problem in Punjab and extensive work was done for its prevention and control. These volumes are the comprehensive summary of works on malaria control in Punjab in those 6 years. The malarial death rate was 17.15/1000 in 1913, 27.613/1000 in 1915, 14.73/1000 in 1916, and 66.56/million in 1918.( 43- 48)

Research on malarial vectors i.e., mosquitoes were also performed. After Stephens and Christophers in 1900, noteworthy works on mosquitoes were the Stegomyia survey by Maj. McGilchrist in 1912-1913, the Survey of Malaria and Environs in Calcutta by M.O.T. Iyengar, Entomologist to the Department of Malaria Research of Bengal, and the Mosquito Survey in Karachi by Dr. K.S. Mhaskar in 1913.( 5, 49, 50) The League of Nations criticized the chemoprophylaxis with Quinine that was practiced on a large scale by the British Indian government. In high-risk areas like some parts of Punjab and the tropics, quinine was made available at special institutions like jails and post offices in small packs that contained 5-7 quinine granules with a price of only quarter-anna. However, it remained so until the introduction of chloroquine and WHO guidelines for the use of DDT.( 1, 5)

Other Communicable Diseases

In the province of Assam, Indian Officers faced a strange disease endemic called Kala-azar and Beriberi by the natives. An investigation about Kala-azar was carried out by G.M. Giles, Surgeon IMS on special duty in Assam in 1898. He concluded that the disease was anchylostomiasis with slightly different symptoms.( 51) In 1899, Surgeon Major Ronald Ross investigated the disease and reported that Kala-azar was an epidemic and communicable disease with symptoms resembling those of malaria except hepatomegaly and spleenomegaly. Spleen and liver enlargement observed in these cases by Ross was not a character of malaria. Anchylostomas were found but these do not cause such symptoms. Ross concluded that it was not a malarial fever but a disease microscopically and macroscopically similar, except for the absence of parasites and melanin; and the presence of visceral invasion especially that of spleen and liver.( 52) This initial research provided a base for future researchers and the disease was later proved to be visceral leishmaniasis caused by a protozoan Leishmania donovani.

T.G. Hewlett studied enteric fever in 1883 and conducted detailed studies on individual case histories and environmental conditions.( 53) The Sleeping Sickness commission (1908-1910) was formed to investigate the causes of the disease. Capt. F.P. Mackie studied the disease and preventive measures.( 54) Other significant works were on yellow fever by S.P. James in 1913 and on Hookworm disease by Maj. Clayton Lane in 1914.( 55, 56)

Tuberculosis had long been recognized as a lethal disease. It was present in India especially in lower socio-economic classes. In 1939, The Tuberculosis Foundation of India was established. As there was no clinically effective treatment available for tuberculosis at that time, tuberculosis sanatoriums were formed in hilly areas to provide a healthy environment and segregation.( 1, 3)

Research

Although there were groundbreaking works on a variety of diseases, which proved to be very helpful in the prevention of epidemics, the British government of India discouraged innovation and research due to a lack of funds and other difficulties. This branch of medical systems had long been neglected in India. In the late 19 th and early 20 th century, situations improved and it was widely accepted that medical research was an integral part of preventive medicine. In 1884, the foundation stone of India's first medical laboratory was laid down. A central laboratory was established in Kasauli near Simla.( 1) It was for research purposes and to act as a reference public health laboratory. Provincial laboratories were then established at major provincial headquarters to carry out public health and bacteriological laboratory work. In 1900, the Indian Pasteur Institute for the treatment of patients bitten by rabid animals was formed in Kasauli and later such institutes were also formed in other parts of the country.( 1) In 1911, the Indian Research Fund Association was formed to provide funds for research projects. A Nutritional Research Laboratory was set up in Coonoor in 1918.( 3)

The British Imperial government set up and strengthened an organized medical system in Colonial India that replaced the indigenous Indian and Arabic medicine systems. Slow progress in early years was due to indifference on the part of people and a lack of funds and medical professionals on the part of the government. The people of India resisted the British colonialism, and they were reluctant to support any services by the foreign government. These trends slowly changed as the natives were educated according to the British system. They then decided to serve in Indian civil and military services and lessen their hardships by taking part in government affairs. That is why Indian Medical Services flourished in the late 19 th and early 20 th century. There were dramatic improvements in medical and sanitary conditions in British India. IMS efficiently coped up with deadly epidemics like the plague and cholera. Almost all the diseases prevalent at that time in India like small pox, leprosy, and malaria were controlled successfully. There were very few epidemics in later years and many of the diseases were almost eradicated. Officers and researchers of Indian Medical Services contributed a lot to the study and prevention of diseases. The role of medical officers serving in India should be better judged by their aspirations, priorities, and limitations. Although the archetypical colonial design of medical services, Eurocentric policies, and neglect of the indigenous population failed to relieve the plight of the poor for many years, the work completed during that period of time formed the basis of what we have achieved today to improve the health of people.

Acknowledgments

Dr. Mushtaq Ahmad Shad, MBBS, DCH, MSc (Med Admin), FRSH (London); Executive District Officer (Health), Department of Health, District Government Nankana Sahib Pakistan, for being my mentor, providing continuous support to me and reviewing this article. Without his guidance, I would never be able to do anything.

Dr. Muhammad Ashraf Majrooh, MBBS, DCH, MPH, FCPS; Associate Professor of Community Medicine, Allama Iqbal Medical College, Lahore, Pakistan, for his guidance and support.

Waqar Ahmad, Qais Luqman, Muhammad Rizwan and Javed Aslam students of final year MBBS at Allama Iqbal Medical College, Lahore, Pakistan for proof-reading of this article.

Andrea Lyman, MD, MSCM, MS; Director, Public Health/Preventive Medicine Residency Program, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, New York for being very kind to me for my rotation at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and always giving me the courage to do literary work.

Footnotes

Source of Support: Nil

Conflict of Interest: None declared.

References

15. Lyons RW, Childe LF. I. - Report by Surgeon-Major Lyons, I.M.S., President of the Plague Research Committee. II. - Report by Surgeon-Captain Childe, I.M.S. III. - Summary of work carried on by Mr. Hankin. 1897.

19. Campbell JM, Mostyn R. Report of the Bombay Plague Committee, appointed by government resolution no. 1204/720P, on the plague in Bombay, for the period extending from the 1st July 1897 to the 30[ th April 1898. Bombay: Times of India (firm); 1898. Google Scholar]

20. Municipal Commissioner's Office Bombay (India) Report of the Municipal Commissioner on the plague in Bombay for the year ending 31[ st May 1899. Bombay: Times of India (firm); 1898. Google Scholar]

23. Wilkinson E. Report on plague and inoculation in the Punjab from October 1[ st 1901 to September 30 Google Scholar] th 1902, being the fifth season of plague in the province. Lahore: Punjab Government Press; 1904.

24. Wilkinson E. Report on plague and inoculation in the Punjab from October 1[ st 1902 to September 30 Google Scholar] th 1903, being the sixth season of plague in the province. Lahore: Punjab Government Press; 1904.

26. Carter HV. Observations on the prevention of leprosy by segregation. 1887 [ Google Scholar]

28. Department of Revenue and Agriculture India. A collection of reports from various provinces on the distribution and causation of leprosy. Department of Revenue and Agriculture India. 1879.

30. Planck C. Report on leprosy in the North-Western Provinces. 1876.

31. Sanitary Commissioner Madras (India: Presidency) Report of cholera committee: ordered under G. O. no. 216 of 27[ th February 1867, to report upon the arrangements which should be made to give practical effect in the Madras Presidency to the recommendations and suggestions of the International Sanitary Conference. Madras: Gantz Bros; 1868. Google Scholar]

33. Townsend SC. Report on the cholera epidemic of 1868. 1869.

39. James SP. The causation and prevention of malarial fevers: A statement of the results of researches drawn up for the use of assistant surgeons, hospital assistants and students. Office of Superintendent of Government Printing. 1903.

49. Iyengar MOT. Preliminary report of a malaria survey of Calcutta and environs

55. James SP. The protection of India from yellow fever. 1913.

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Public Health in British India: A Brief Account of the History of Medical Services and Disease Prevention in Colonial India

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The evolution of public health in British India and the history of disease prevention in that part of world in the 19 th and early 20 th century provides a valuable insight into the period that witnessed the development of new trends in medical systems and a transition from surveys to microscopic studies in medicine.

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Citation: Kohari, A. (2021). How to bring a language to the future. Rest of world.

Annotation: Alizeh Kohari (2021), in this article, talks about the efforts that are being made by individuals in and outside of Pakistan to ensure that Urdu font, typeface, and the language itself does not die in this digital age. With English being the dominant language of the internet, it is quite difficult for other languages to retain their identity, particularly when the script of these languages has nothing in common with English. The article also addresses some of the reasons because of which Urdu, and other non-Euro-American languages, have been lagging behind.

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By the time Mudassir Azeemi wrote to Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2014, he'd tried everything hecould think of to make it easier to type in his native language, Urdu. In 2010, the now 42-year-old Pakistani-American developed a keyboard app you could use on iOS devices; within two years, it had been downloaded over 165,000 times. But even with an Urdu-language keyboard, the characters appeared on the screen in an entirely different font.

"Dear Mr Tim Cook," he wrote. "Urdu language's beauty lies in the typeface."

Spoken by nearly 170 million people in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, Urdu is written in an alphabet derived from Arabic. But while Arabic is written in a script called naskh, simpler and more linear in its appearance, many other people - including Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, Urdu-speakers in India, and Uighur-speakers in parts of China - employ an ornate style of writing that originated in 14th-century Persia called nastaʿlīq. When Azeemi sat down to write his letter to Cook, nastaʿlīq was almost nowhere to be found online. To communicate in Urdu, you either had to type in naskh or spell words phonetically in Latin script.

Azeemi, a software developer now working and living in Silicon Valley, grew up in Pakistan's sprawling seaside city, Karachi. As a teenager during the days of dial-up, he once racked up an internet bill that cost half of his father's monthly salary; in his early 20s, he learned to code on one of those old calculator-sized computers called palmtops. He didn't give much thought to Urdu's digital future until he moved to California and became a father. Watching his children learn English through songs on YouTube, he'd felt a pang of loss - the anxiety that they might never speak or appreciate Urdu the way he does. One of the earliest apps Azeemi developed, even before the keyboard, was for nursery rhymes in Urdu.

These early attempts at yanking Urdu on to the internet hadn't been particularly profitable - Azeemi says he lost over $50,000 in the process. He remained determined. In 2013, Apple introduced an Urdu keyboard for iOS devices, but, much to the chagrin of Urdu users, the default font was still naskh, the Arabic font. In Azeemi's eyes, the solution was now pretty straightforward: operating systems - Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others - had to be persuaded to adopt nastaʿlīq.

His open letter, addressed to Cook and Apple's chief design officer at the time, Jonathan Ive, described the need for a nastaʿlīq font on iOS platforms. "The only hurdle for us is to bring the typeface that truly represent[s] the language," wrote Azeemi. "And every language, when it is written, shines when using the typeface which it truly presented in the world."

When Urdu calligraphers speak of nastaʿlīq, it is with deep reverence. In the subcontinent, it was the script that disseminated the Quran, considered the word of God. Mir Ali of Tabriz, a 14th-century Persian calligrapher known as the father of the script, is said to have developed it after a dream in which Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, instructed him to draw letters that looked like "the wings of flying geese." Squint at an Urdu verse in nastaʿlīq, and it might very well begin to resemble a flock of birds taking flight, or a branch in bloom. Nastaʿlīq characters, per one observation, appear to "swing from the upper right to the lower left of each word as if suspended by an imaginary line."

In some ways, this emphasis on the form of writing a language runs contrary to conventional wisdom. We tend to think of text as a means to an end, that the characters depicted are there only to convey meaning. If you could write the same Urdu word in the Arabic naskh script, even if it looked a little different - naskh is smaller, simpler, and sans serif - wasn't the demand for digitized nastaʿlīq just a minor typographical quibble?

Nastaʿlīq, after all, is a nightmare to code. It moves right to left, like all Arabic scripts, but also slopes downward: the longer the word, the steeper the slope. The shape of each letter changes, depending on the letter that comes before and after; in a 39-letter alphabet, there are thousands of permutations. Its multifaceted nature is precisely why coders haven't developed nastaʿlīq fonts as easily as, say, Cyrillic.

We tend to think of text as a means to an end, that the characters depicted are there only to convey meaning.

It didn't have to be this way. As early as 1951, just four years after wresting off British rule, Pakistan - where Urdu is both the official language and played a key role in the movement for independence - set up a national printing press that could compose in both English and Urdu, a substantial investment for the young, cash-strapped country and an indication, perhaps, of Urdu's importance for its nation-building project. But even though Monotype and Linotype, the predominant printing technology firms of the time, kept developing typefaces for the Urdu market, local publishers kept rejecting them because they just didn't match up to the local nastaʿlīq aesthetic.

Part of the reason nastaʿlīq ran into trouble was because the technology at the time - specifically the typewriter - was built with English in mind. Subsequently, as historian Thomas S. Mullaney notes in his book, "The Chinese Typewriter," all other languages are seen as permutations from that norm. Hebrew is English but backward. Arabic is English backward and in cursive. Russian: English with different letters. Siamese: English with too many letters. Perhaps the only major language to escape the thumb of Latin hegemony was Chinese, a script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic, and thus had to be imagined entirely outside the box of existing technology. But nastaʿlīq, presumably not quite significant enough to send typographers back to the drawing board, remained stalled until the 1970s, its mechanical rendering nowhere close to the sweep and flourish of the handwritten script.

In modern-day Iran, where nastaʿlīq originated, the font changed to meet the limitations of the existing technology. Over the years, Farsi slowly developed a typographical identity that worked within the constraints of the block printing press but was stylistically different enough from the Arabic naskh to feel sufficiently "Persian." If you pick up a newspaper in Tehran today, it looks significantly different from a paper in Karachi.

Why didn't Urdu, and Pakistan, go down a similar typographical route as Farsi did in Iran? Stubborn fidelity to nastaʿlīq aside, one reason may be the ways in which Urdu differed from other nastaʿlīq-favoring languages. One letter, "the baṛī ye (ے), is particularly influential on the look of written Urdu," writes typographer and historian Titus Nemeth in "Arabic Type-Making in the Machine Age" (2017), "and its typographic rendering is among the most challenging design questions in an Arabic font."

The baṛī ye, which resembles a bent elbow, produces all sorts of mechanical obstacles with regard to kerning and the placement of dots and diacritics. Baṛī ye and letters like it posed a problem that seemed so insurmountable, in fact, that, in the 1960s - mimicking Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's mission to convert Turkish script into a Latin alphabet - Pakistan's military ruler Ayub Khan proposed officially writing Urdu in Latin letters. He was met with near-instant pushback: the nastaʿlīq script, protested local religious leaders, was an essential marker of Pakistan's Islamic identity. Without meaningful progress in the printing process, Urdu publications in Pakistan, including dailies, continued to be written by hand well into the 1980s, armies of calligraphers scribbling furiously day and night.

Ahmed Mirza Jamil, owner of a printing business in Karachi, inherited his love for nastaʿlīq from his father, who, in his later life, took up the daunting task of writing the Quran in his own hand. He'd completed only a third of the holy book before he fell ill and died, but his sons vowed to finish his cherished project. They photographed their father's nine handwritten chapters, then cut and pasted his letter formations to piece together - like a jigsaw puzzle - the remaining two-thirds of the Quran. It was a staggeringly elaborate labor of love that took 14 years to complete. And it sowed the seeds for a long-awaited breakthrough in Urdu typesetting.

In 1980, Mirza Jamil wrote out every combination of Urdu letters that he could think of - roughly 20,000 by most accounts. These combinations, known as ligatures, became the basis of a new Urdu typeface: Noori Nastaliq, a font Jamil named after his father. It solved the difficulty posed by the shape-shifting nature of nastaʿlīq: instead of representing letters, it represented entire combinations of letters written together. The 20,000 ligatures were by no means exhaustive, but the chances of any other combination cropping up, Mirza Jamil reckoned, were negligible. He'd been inspired to address Urdu typographical troubles after encountering a Chinese keyboard, a 48-inch contraption with up to 500 characters, on a trip to Singapore.

"I thought, if the Chinese could do it," he told a journalist in 1996, "so could we."

With the advent of Noori Nastaliq, Mirza Jamil was hailed as Pakistan's Gutenburg and bestowed with state honors. Urdu's path to progress, one writer wrote, "will be lit with the candle of Noori Nastaliq." Still, adoption was tentative: for a while, according to the historian Nemeth, the country's largest national newspaper, Daily Jang, carried typographically composed text alongside columns that were still handwritten, hoping to convince the nastaʿlīq purists that their beloved font could be printed too.

For decades, Noori Nastaliq remained the dominant typeface in Urdu publishing; a digitized version of it continues to be used today. But it is very much a product of its time: certain letter combinations don't show up if you type them,glyphs jostle one another, clumps of misplaced nuqtas mar the text. For a generation now accustomed to sleek interfaces, the effect is off-putting.

Nasrullah Mehr, a veteran calligrapher based in Lahore, explained the downsides of a ligature-based approach to typesetting. "You can do 42 thousand ligatures, you can do a hundred thousand, you can do one million - it won't end," he said, shaking his head emphatically. "Words from other languages crop up, new words come up; you cannot remain true to a language this way."

"To be a good calligrapher, you have to be a very good artist. And you also have to be a good person."

Nasrullah has a wide, white beard he keeps tucked inside his Covid-19 mask these days; it's one measure of how long he's been in the calligraphy business. He taught himself nastaʿlīq as a young man and has since composed countless books, covers, and even the entire Quran by hand. I met him and his son Zeeshan last November at Pak Tea House, a storied pre-Partition café historically frequented by writers and intellectuals in Lahore. We sat under a framed photo of one of Urdu's most recognized poets, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and sipped doodh patti. "To be a good calligrapher, you have to be a very good artist," Nasrullah noted solemnly. "And you also have to be a good person."

Zeeshan, seemingly reticent, either by nature or out of deference to his father, grew up more mathematically inclined than Nasrullah. Throughout his childhood, he'd resisted his father's attempts to pass down the craft. But as the family calligraphy business began dwindling, in tandem with a general decline in local publishing, father and son set about developing a digital font, which they called Mehr Nastaliq. It is the first Urdu nastaʿlīq font to be developed entirely locally.

Nasrullah and Zeeshan are pioneers in the field of digitized Urdu fonts. If you were to walk down a street in New York City, you might encounter hundreds of fonts on a single block: everything from street signs to shop names take on distinct personalities. Urdu and its nastaʿlīq typeface, lagging in the digital space, are much more difficult to iterate on with existing technology. Where there are hundreds of thousands of Latin digital fonts - fonts so iconic that we know them by name, like Helvetica or Times New Roman - digital Urdu fonts are limited to a handful at most. The nastaʿlīq typography that you might see on the streets of Pakistan is most likely to be hand painted.

"We went on Google and typed "what are fonts, how do we develop them," Zeeshan recalled. "We purchased software but sat on it for a long time because we didn't know how to use it." Produced in collaboration with a government technology board over the course of a decade, Mehr Nastaliq uses 500 characters, all handwritten by Nasrullah - a tiny fraction of the 20,000 glyphs Jamil so painstakingly wrote in the 1980s. The Mehrs are particularly proud of how light their font is: at 60 KB, it doesn't slow down websites and renders quickly. You can elongate letters and add diacritics.

Their experience of developing Mehr Nastaliq drove home an important lesson: the need for close collaboration between the calligrapher and developer. "It is imperative that the calligrapher and developer understand each other," emphasised Zeeshan. "Abbu understands programming too now, so he can offer a different solution when confronted with tech limitations." Working with his parent comes with its own challenges, of course. "Sometimes, Zeeshan would say, This letter isn't looking nice," Nasrullah said with a chuckle. "And I'd get huffy and say, Are you the calligrapher?"

Unicode, developed in the early 1990s, is now a global standard for representing characters across language systems in computing code, which means if you write Urdu - in naskh or nastaʿlīq - on one computer, it won't appear as a string of garbled symbols in another. But technological advances don't automatically bode well for the digitization of non-Latin type languages. Nemeth notes that the proliferation of easy-to-use design software doesn't eliminate the need for script-specific expertise. "Designers who are not willing or able to invest the years of learning and research necessary to master a foreign script," he says, "are led to believe that their tools and some superficial 'borrowing' of design elements are sufficient for successful design."

The Mehrs are determined to put their expertise to use. They've formed a company of their own, which, as a hat tip to the firms that played such an outsized role in the trajectory of type design, Monotype and Linotype, they've named MehrType. They have global aspirations. The need isn't for one good Urdu or nastaʿlīq typeface but for an entire galaxy of fonts. Urdu typography is a vast, empty sea, Nasrullah lamented - hundreds of thousand of fonts for English and a paltry half-dozen at most for Urdu.

For a while now, Nasrullah has been collecting manuscripts of the great nastaʿlīq masters: fragments, loose pages, out-of-print tomes, whatever he can get his hands on. Nasrullah is working on transforming the handwriting of Abdul Majeed Parveen Raqam, founder of the 20th-century Lahori school of nastaʿlīq. His loopy, curlicued font is often referred to as the national script of Pakistan. Seventy-five years after his death, Nasrullah is converting his handwriting into a digital font that will live on forever.

By the time Mudassir Azeemi wrote to Tim Cook in 2014, typesetting technology had more or less caught up to the intricacies of nastaʿlīq. Fonts like Mehr Nastaliq were being developed, but the script was still difficult to find on the internet.

In the absence of easily available nastaʿlīq, Urdu poets composed ghazals by hand or used specialized software, then shared these as image files on Facebook and Twitter; Urdu dailies did the same on their websites. For a while, SMS poetry booklets became popular: romantic couplets would be written in the Urdu script along with a Latin transliteration, to aid lovers with their online flirtations. Some students were even doing schoolwork in Latin Urdu. "Writing a language in another script," one teacher lamented in disgust, "is like trying to drop off your skin and trying to have a new one."

What would it take for nastaʿlīq to be easily available online? There was a growing belief that the only real fix was system-level support. This growing consensus unleashed a wave of consumer activism: blog posts, appeals to Big Tech to exercise "linguistic humanitarianism," attempts to trend #NastaleeqItApple on Twitter, many spearheaded by Azeemi.

A week after he mailed his letter to Cook (he later posted it on Medium as well), Azeemi received a call from Apple representatives. "I honestly wasn't expecting a reply," he toldme on a Zoom call. "But I'd read in Steve Job's biography that the tradition of the Valley is that, if you ask, you'll get an answer, so I thought I'd try." He was so surprised by the call, he thought he was being served a cease-and-desist notice or, at the very least, about to be told off for repeatedly tagging Cook on Twitter.

Instead, Apple acknowledged his letter and lament, promising it was on the case. Three years later, a typeface called Noto Nastaliq became the default Urdu typeface on Apple devices. The resulting fanfare was reminiscent of how Ahmed Mirza Jamil and his 20,000 glyphs had been hailed 30 years earlier. "One day, when telling the story of how you're able to write Ghalib and Bulleh Shah and Punjabi curses on your iPhones," writer Ali Eteraz exulted on Facebook, "hope you'll remember a guy named Mudassir."

For a time, Urdu's online existential crisis felt as if it had been averted. Zeerak Ahmed, a Pakistani software designer now based in Seattle, is more circumspect. Apple's integration of the typeface, Ahmed noted in a blog post he wrote at the time, was either half-hearted or careless: words in nastaʿlīq would appear so small as to be nearly illegible on a screen or would exceed the bounds of text boxes. "Ironically," he quipped, "the Urdu word for 'complete' fails to completely fit in Apple's bubbles for text messages."

The problem, he pointed out, was bigger than the availability of appropriate fonts: system interfaces, despite the advancements of Unicode, were still being built primarily for the Latin script. "We're just at the point where we're beginning to make sure our interfaces work throughout the world - that the moment you switch to a right-to-left language, things don't break," said Ahmed, who exudes a quiet, professorial air. This inability to scale nastaʿlīq to a system font might be why it still isn't available as a system option on Android devices, which are far more popular than iPhones in Urdu-speaking countries.

Even if Urdu's typeface problem is, in theory, resolved, the ghosts of old technologies continue to trip up developers in other ways as they scramble to keep up with new advances. "We don't have the data needed to build artificial intelligence on top of existing technology: voice, handwriting recognition, dictionaries, autocorrect," said Ahmed.

Existing Urdu datasets, according to Ahmed, are rife with errors. Glitchy nastaʿlīq typefaces mean publishers add or remove spaces for aesthetic reasons; the absence of spell-check software results in a proliferation of typos. From a machine-learning perspective, this spells disaster. "We simply took a bunch of Urdu digests and digitized them. It's just blobs of text. You don't know when it's from, where it was published, who wrote it," he lamented. "All Urdu software is broken because the underlying data is broken."

Ahmed thinks a lot about the long-term effects of technological oversight. For the past several years, he has been working alongside scholars and researchers to build an Urdu dataset that can support modern machine learning. He has named it Maḵẖzan, or "repository."

When you flip open an old Urdu textbook or newspaper, it is most likely to have been written in Noori Nastaliq. But you'll also come across words in parentheses, written in English or in a conspicuously different script, probably naskh - a manifestation of the holes in Mirza Jamil's 20,000-word bank of character combinations.

These might represent a figurative hole, too, Ahmed argues: the constraints in the typeface have stifled some forms of progress in Urdu-speaking society. "The one major discipline that has shown up in the world since the eighties is information technology, and that seems to be the one discipline that, coincidentally, doesn't seem to have any technical vocabulary in Urdu." Ahmed doesn't think this is a coincidence. "There's no way to prove it at a causation level, but I think it says a lot about what incomplete digitization does to the development of a language."

Ahmed's Maḵẖzan has sourced enough data to become the de facto starting point for any Urdu machine-learning application. Ahmed is aware of the responsibility that comes with this. He cites a recent study of predictive text and its influence on how people wrote restaurant reviews. "They had one group use a keyboard that made positive suggestions and another that made negative suggestions, by changing the underlying weights of the language model being used. That changed what people typed - the actual language people used changed as a result of what the technology was enabling."

The expansion of the internet is precipitating a massive linguistic extinction.

"This scares me," he continued. "Because it means, if I feed my system bad grammar, it's going to suggest bad grammar, and people are going to write in bad grammar and that bad grammar is slowly going to be ingrained. If I take terminology and slowly ingrain it, it will become part of our vernacular." He is particularly meticulous with the datasets added to Maḵẖzan and insists on keeping it open source. The proper preservation of Urdu, in his view, will require a careful curation of the materials used to power its autocorrect and autocomplete technologies, in order to avoid encoding unwanted bias. (He recognizes that, much like Urdu publishing, Maḵẖzan currently overrepresents works by men and texts from Lahore.)

The open source dataset is also in response to frustrating attempts at correcting proprietary datasets, especially for underrepresented languages, such as Urdu. It often becomes impossible to understand why language algorithms behave a certain way, what sort of language they are promulgating. "If you use Google Translate for Urdu and Hindi, words that should be the same end up being really different," explained Ahmed. "We assume part of the reason is that the datasets they're learning from are very different ... but we have no way of double checking, because Google's dataset is proprietary, so you can't audit it."

Urdu isn't the only language facing an existential crisis when it comes to its digital future. In his 2013 study, mathematical linguist András Kornai found that, of the more than 7,000 languages used around the world - 2,500 of which are considered endangered - less than 5% were becoming fully functioning languages in the online realm. The expansion of the internet, in other words, is precipitating a massive linguistic extinction.

For Urdu speakers to feel fully at home on the internet, work may be required on multiple fronts: on making sure veteran practitioners like Nasrullah Mehr are included in the conversation; on wriggling out, as Ahmed is attempting, from under the shadow cast by Latin-centric tech; on putting popular pressure on major tech platforms, as championed by Azeemi. Much of this is quiet, steady work. As new generations of Urdu speakers come of age, most may not even be aware of the ways in which technology has shaped - and continues to shape - their tongue.

"I don't think it's an eventuality that all languages will one day be represented fully digitally," said Ahmed. "It's totally plausible we get to a point where it makes more sense to shift the culture than to shift the underlying tech." Last year, scientists changed the official guidelines for naming genes because Microsoft Excel kept misreading them as dates. In other words, scientific tradition buckled before computer formatting. "The same thing," Ahmed warned, "could happen culturally."

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Meet the people fighting to keep a language alive online

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By the time Mudassir Azeemi wrote to Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2014, he'd tried everything hecould think of to make it easier to type in his native language, Urdu. In 2010, the now 42-year-old Pakistani-American developed a keyboard app you could use on iOS devices; within two years, it had been downloaded over 165,000 times.

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Pink: Not Categorized

Yellow: Race and Indigenous Studies

Red: Feminism, Gender and Sexuality, Queer Studies

Blue: International Focus (Pinned at Institution of Author)

Green: Race, Ethnicity and Indigenous Studies with International Focus (Pinned at Institution of Author)

Purple: Feminism, Gender and Sexuality, Queer Studies with International Focus (Pinned at Institution of Author)

Lines: Connect the same sources to multiple locations, due to either scholarly focus or to the authors' institutions

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Kilwa Kisiwani. Atlas Obscura podcast

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We dig through more than 1,000 years of dirt, history, colonialism, and myth on the Swahili Coast. Read more in the Atlas https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/kilwa-kisiwani-ruins

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Vanessa Watts (2013). Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans.

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Citation: Brian Semujju, Theorizing Dependency Relations in Small Media, Communication Theory, Volume 30, Issue 4, November 2020, Pages 370–387, https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtz032

Abstract: The paper questions the pervasive western intellectual universalism which disregards Global South imaginations for generalized approaches. Using field data from Uganda about Community Audio Towers (CATs), the western-generated community media theory is interrogated, accentuating its failure to account for the intricate relationship between the individual, society, and small media. To cover the gap, the Small Media System Dependency theory is herein introduced as a geocultural response to lack of theory from the South.

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Abstract

The paper questions the pervasive western intellectual universalism which disregards Global South imaginations for generalized approaches. Using field data from Uganda about Community Audio Towers (CATs), the western-generated community media theory is interrogated, accentuating its failure to account for the intricate relationship between the individual, society, and small media. To cover the gap, the Small Media System Dependency theory is herein introduced as a geocultural response to lack of theory from the South.

In an attempt to southernize community media theories, this paper develops a theory of Small Media System Dependency (SMSD). To achieve this aim, the paper, in the first part, presents Community Audio Towers (CATs), a type of small media in Uganda which use horn speakers, and explains their behavior as small media. The second part interrogates the four community media theories and the Media System dependency (MSD) theory for their universalistic approach (based on Western/Euro-centric assumptions) and calls for theorizing from the South to accommodate some Small Media attributes that are unexplained by the existing framework. This creates a ground for the data and discussion parts that present the SMSD theory as a candidate to solve the theoretical imbalance. In doing so, I demonstrate how theorizing from/in the Global South offers a framework for conceptual threads that on one hand, disrupt the overarching ideologies of Western/Euro-centric knowledge production, and on the other hand, create theoretical anchors rooted in the South.

Community Audio Towers

CATs use "powerful speakers hoisted on top of 10 to 20 metre bamboo or steel poles" ( Tabing, 2000, p. 84). They are used in Thailand ( Gaviria, 1996; Gumucio-Dagron, 2001), Philippines ( Tabing, 2000), Uganda ( Semujju, 2016a), Ghana ( Chapman, Blench, Kranjac-Berisavljevic', & Zakariah, 2003) and in some other countries. They narrowcast "regular programmes at specific times of the day over the loudspeakers" ( Tabing, 2000, p. 84). CATs in Uganda use the following technology: horn speakers (about three or four) hoisted on top of long dry wooden poles next to a small room that has an amplifier and a microphone ( Semujju, 2016b). CATs are locally-owned. They are created out of the need to relay events happening in communities ( Gumucio-Dagron, 2001). The owner, who usually doubles as the presenter, then receives information from the village members, some of whom pay less than $1 for each announcement, in order to sustain the towers. CATs' narrowcasting starts at 6:30 a.m. up to 7 a.m. and then from 9:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. ( Semujju, 2017). As platforms in the Global South, CATs deviate from the Western community media logic in various ways including: nature of content, time of operation, ownership and access. Denying these differences by continuing to explain Global South community media practice using theories rooted in Western civilization is a way for the West to conquer the southern intellectual thought ( Maldonado-Torres, 2017).

Theorizing small media

Under the community media framework, which encompasses small media, most seminal theories are Western (see for example Carpentier, Lie, & Servaes, 2003; Bailey, Cammaerts, & Carpentier, 2008). The two volumes suggest that community media vary in behavior where some are community media, because they promote community access, participation, and are self-managed ( Carpentier et al., 2003). The second kind becomes community media because of its alternative vision, attained by being the opposite of what mainstream media do ( Atton, 2001; Downing et al., 2001). The third theory looks at community media as a civil society that engages government and other big players on behalf of the local person. Finally, community media can also be understood as a rhizome because they act as a root that links local areas by communicating local messages ( Bailey et al., 2008).

Within the above four-tier theory, CATs, the small media understudy, can be crammed under the first theory because of their access, participation, and ownership patterns (as more details about the towers show later in the article). However, the theory may not appropriately explain the intricate relationship between the individual and small media (micro dependency relations) and the esoteric connection between small media and society (macro dependency relations). In relation to this article, the main challenge presented by community media theories is that in the Ugandan media ecology where CATs are just one player (in addition to radio, TV, newspapers, word-of-mouth, church, family and friends, etc.), the theories do not tell when and how small media attract undivided community attention, in order to accommodate the nature of "dependency" that exists in small media. In their generic nature, the community media theories instead present a community media picture that is conceptually homogeneous, disregarding years of observation that points at existing structural differences within community media in the Global South ( Gumucio-Dagron, 2001).

"Understanding" is concerned with knowing about an individual's surrounding and about the individual him/herself, while "orientation" relates to the need to make sense of or attain guidelines about a certain situation that may have arisen; the goal of "play" is mostly recreational where people connect with media to pass time or escape a task ( Ball-Rokeach & Jung, 2009; Lowrey, 2004) by, for example, watching a movie or listening to music. Within the framework of social justice, the MSD theory lays ground for the understanding of an audience that is information-privileged, able to navigate communication artifacts from across a vast range of coverage, thereby eliminating rural social groups whose basic information needs might not go beyond a single village. Therefore, there are inconsistencies in the above theories when considering both the macro and micro dependency relations in small media. To cover the gaps, a Global South theory is here presented with a reversal of how the relations are understood. The information presented later in the data section shows how individuals (and society) depend on small media. Before the data is presented however, the following section explains the methods used to collect the findings.

Methodology

The study used both quantitative (survey) and qualitative research (key informant interviews) methods.

Sampling

This study employed the sampling technique given by Bailey (1994) that the idea of choosing a sampling frame from the whole population is wise in both time and financial terms. Using Bailey's advice above, a type of sampling (detailed below) based on the nature of communities and location of the CATs, whether rural or semi-urban, was used. Additionally, qualitative samples, which were picked purposively based on special knowledge and relationship with the subject of CATs, were used.

Sample size

Two CATs served as the sample units, one in Nyendo (rural Uganda) and another in Nassuuti (semi-urban Uganda). The choices of the locations and which CAT to use were made purposively in order to help the researcher to identify a case study that had features of interest ( Silverman, 2005). The two CATs were: Nassuuti FM, and Voice of Nyendo. They are distinct from each other mainly in terms of geographical location and distance from the capital city (which is also the business city). Voice of Nyendo is located 120kms from the Capital on the western Uganda route while Nassuuti FM is located 21kms from the Capital, on the eastern route. This means that they serve communities that are economically different. Among the advantages of this kind of sampling is that the researcher, in making a choice, can use his/her experience or prior knowledge on the issue ( Bailey, 1994).

Random and purposive sampling

Random walk sampling was done by selecting an initial starting point and walking to a house after next ( Manyozo et al., 2012; Nassanga et al., 2013). The selection of the initial starting point was also random, from all the houses at the center of the village. To correct for gender bias, if the first respondent was a male, the researcher looked for a female in the next house, unless where available evidence suggested that a certain area was dominated by one gender. Children below 18 years of age were also excluded from participating because the Ugandan regulations on research suggest that they have to be interviewed in the presence of an adult who doubles as a caretaker. Otherwise, any adult of a sound mind, provided he/she lived in the village and was willing to participate, was invited to participate. Those who declined (these were seven people in total) to participate gave reasons like prior arrangements and being newcomers in the area, and were not included in the study.

In studies that take long hours or days, the habit of respondents talking to the people yet to be interviewed ahead of the researcher has been reported in Uganda before ( Manyozo et al., 2012). This sometimes creates bias when the researcher finds some respondents already familiar with the questions and the very answers previous respondents gave. The house-after-house walk sampling ( Manyozo, Nassanga, & Lopes, 2013) therefore invited potential respondents to a venue from where they were individually interviewed, 30 meters away from the rest of the group. After answering the questionnaire, each of the 100 respondents left without talking to the next person to be interviewed. For the response rate, the seven (three in Nassuuti and four in Nyendo) people noted above, who declined to come to the interview area during the random walk sampling, were replaced by seven extra houses within the same communities. The sample for the key informants was selected purposively in order to get information from people whose offices or jobs had a connection to CATs. The key informants therefore included: CAT presenters, the communication experts, local community leaders, and the community members. They were divided as follows:

Data were collected among 100 CAT audience members (50 from each tower) using a questionnaire, two CAT presenters (one at each tower) and six community, district and national CATs stakeholders. These were distributed as follows: two local council chairpersons (one from each village with a chosen tower), two district information/communication officers (one from each district with a chosen tower), one technical person from the Uganda Communications Commission, two district legal officers (one from each district) and the State Minister for Information and Communication Technology.

Findings

The main concern for this article is to articulate dependency relations in small media. Therefore, in relation to the MSD theory tenets and the four community media theories highlighted above, the first part of the findings deals with the individual goals that CATs fulfill in order to show how CATs relate to the individual to remain relevant. The last part focuses on the individual contribution towards CATs, and ends with a comment about the position of society (government, advertisers, etc.) in relation to CATs. Data from the field indicate that the two communities that were studied have a media ecology that includes CATs, radio, TV, newspapers, word-of-mouth (which includes church, family, and friends). Data also show that in terms of frequency of access, CATs, radio and word-of-mouth, were more pronounced sources of information in relation to within-village events, out-of village events, and social networking information respectively. The CAT's micro dependency relations described below, therefore, are more connected to the SMSD theory suggested later in the article than the existing Western theories described above.

The goals individuals seek to fulfill from CATs

To understand the goals that CATs help the individual to fulfill, it is necessary to identify the type of information that CATs give the communities. That way, we can identify which information falls under which goal, using the gauge created by the MSD theory. This is informed by individual responses (from the survey) on what kind of information they obtain from CATs. This information is represented in the graph ( Figure 1).

The above data indicate that announcements are listened to by 93 respondents, taking the biggest number of listeners. They are followed by religious programs which are listened to by 19 respondents, followed by sports with 10 respondents, business with seven respondents, music with three respondents, jobs with one respondent, while the others (greetings, discussion and education) have one respondent each. Divided between the total program time on CATs, announcements take up 68% of the time, followed by religious programs at 14%, sports at 7%, business at 5%, music at 2% and the rest at 1%. Most times, even the content that is not classified as announcements gets narrowcast as announcements.

Apart from music, religious programs and sports, the responses in the graph above can be summed up under announcements. The announcements are mostly about: the dead, lost-and-found, jobs, appreciation to the community for service rendered towards another community member's event, police notice, local council notice, and warning about thieves (M. Mulindwa, personal communication, July 22, 2014). Beyond the community-generated content, there is mobilization for government and non-government programs like immunization, farming, climate change, blood donation, national ID registration and several others (O. Nakanwagi, personal communication, July 19, 2014). The commonest goal individuals seek to fulfill under CATs therefore is information (understanding). Information includes mostly emergencies like a missing child in the market full of people, a cow that has wandered off from the kraal or one that has been found, a wallet lost in a taxi or one that has been found, thieves, etc. (J. Mugerwa, personal communication, July 9, 2014). As soon as information comes in, the presenter switches on the tower and informs the community for intervention (J. Ssendago, personal communication, July 8, 2014). This behavior was supported by data from both CATs. Without an emergency, CATs narrowcast early in the morning and late in the evening. Sports and gospel are the closest effort CATs have towards fulfilling the goal of orientation, which goes beyond mentioning what is happening in the vicinity to giving details about the situations. During the 10 days of observation, both towers did not narrowcast any sports or religious programs however, but they gave announcements about several sports and religious events. While the Western community media theories fail to accommodate dependency relations at all, the MSD theory too provides a different set of goals from what the above data describes.

Individual contribution to CATs

From the interviews with each presenter, it was clear that each of them does not have any co-workers as the CAT budget does not allow for extra workers. Besides, there is not a lot of work that requires extra workers. This kind of one-man structure informs how information that goes through the tower is gathered. The CATs have a fixed or permanent address so that everyone in the community knows their location. As soon as something happens in the village, someone takes the information to the tower willingly. If the presenter is away from the premises, since running a tower is not a full time activity, the person returns later if the information was considered important. At Voice of Nyendo, the wooden poles that hold the speaker high above have a mobile phone number inscribed on them. Some community members call and inform the presenter and if it is an emergency, he returns and reports it right away. If it is not an emergency, the information becomes part of the events the presenter collects to be narrowcast in the evening. "Most times the information is of a serious nature, which means i have to listen carefully and note down all the important details" (H. Lwanga, personal communication, July 21, 2014). The other way that information or news is gathered is through direct contact with the presenters away from the towers (B. Naluwooza, personal communication, August 12, 2014). After the morning session, the presenter may decide to lock the premises and go along with other businesses. Besides community members taking information to the towers, using mobile phones, and contacting the presenter away from the towers, information is also generated by the presenters themselves while going about their business in the community. "I try to keep my ear to the ground even when I am doing something unrelated to the tower" (J. Mugerwa, personal communication, July 9, 2014). Within the Western community media theories, the information gathering and dissemination role is left to a pocket of people known as volunteers, while the rest of the community listens.

CATs and society

CATs and other stakeholders relate when there is special information to deliver to the community. The information, which includes announcements from government and non-government actors on immunization, farming, climate change, blood donation, national ID registration and several others, is not generated by the community members (J. Ssendago, personal communication, July 8, 2014). Mostly though, it is information from the police which occupies the biggest space given to non-community players (M. Mulindwa, personal communication, July 22, 2014). Additionally, CATs are not regulated (J. Nsimbe, personal communication, August 12, 2014); they have no policy and do not get adverts from big corporations because they are just a one-village platform. Having a communication channel responding to the needs of just one-village is what needs to be highlighted as unique to the Global South. It is this strictly demarcated access that advertisers do not find profitable enough. From the perspective of Western community media literature, the disappearance (and sometimes appearance) of advertisers and government is a cause for concern because of issues of sustainability and autonomy. New explanations were therefore necessary to cover the one-village scenario where community media are individually-funded, more locally accessed and communally regulated.

Discussion

The current knowledge paradigm was borne out of the friction between Western renaissance and the enlightenment period ( Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2006). Enlightenment finally offered a living space based on reason, interpreted as the Western white male logic ( Mignolo, 2011). The logic in question demanded that reality be understood as an intersection between the object and the subject ( Quijano, 2007). Western community media theories later questioned that epistemic demand and noted that isolating "the subject" ( Quijano, 2007, p. 169) denies the rich context that comes from the unpredictability of being human. The focus in this article is that if the Western white male can be unique in various ways, the southern person must have differences too that need exploration and therefore explanation. For this to happen, the southern imagination has to be welcomed on the "domain of sustainable knowledge" ( Mignolo, 2011, p. 275) not as an alternative but as an independent source of intellectual thought in its own right.

Community media theory in its current form explains an idea based on the Western logic of "community" which encompasses all people brought together by a special interest or geographical closeness ( Tabing, 2002; Howley, 2010). If, for example, the community media in question is a radio, all villages that access its frequency (this could be millions of people because of "broadcasting") become the "community" for that community radio. Community participation fulfills another level that qualifies the station as a truly "community" radio, especially if the overall running of the station is local as well ( Atton & Forde, 2016).

The goals individuals seek to fulfill from CATs

The MSD theory suggests that the individual is keen on fulfilling three goals of understanding, orientation and play ( Ball-Rokeach & Jung, 2009; Lee, 2012; Li, 2014). The theory was created to explain media in the Global North (and perhaps media situations in the Global South that emulate the Western media behavior). Under CATs, individuals can seek to fulfill one goal, which is the goal of understanding. In the rural Global South, communities still face challenges created by socio-political circumstances that plague such poor countries. "Understanding" what is around oneself could be the difference between poverty and better living conditions, and so they depend on a channel, however local and rudimentary (by Global North standards) that can help bridge the local information gap. Such differences in dependency relations between mainstream media and small media are a good example of why the Southern intellectual effort must rise to the occasion within the media and communication field to avoid being submerged by Western intellectual centrality.

Individual contribution to CATs

CATs and society

Although differences exist between the MSD theory and the proposed SMSD theory, some similarities exist between the two relations. For example, as more people find themselves in distress, the more dependency relations will increase ( Jung et al., 2012). Individual dependency on small media increases too, especially if the media are announcing an emergence in the community.

In defense of the Small Media System Dependency theory

The need for the above theory is created mainly by two aspects: one is the overreliance of community media theories on the channel, an approach introduced to the field by Western academics. Literature that attempts to theorize community media focuses on what such channels do (see for example the four theories articulated by Carpentier et al. [2003], Bailey et al. [2008] discussed above) for the community, how different the channels are from traditional media ( Atton, 2001) and the rebellion against established media relations which aids their focus ( Downing et al., 2001; Downing, 2016). A southern perspective should compare relationships between the individual and the media. The SMSD theory focuses on how villages depend on small media by explaining the complex nature of the relationship between the individual and small media on one hand and small media and society on the other. This is a southern contribution to community media theory, which had previously been stifled by the Western hegemonic community media discourses ( Maldonado-Torres, 2017).

The theory can be used to explain and describe small media further so that development programs are implemented using such platforms. Currently, there are arguments that communication for development programs are implemented in the South using a diffusionist mindset ( Waisbord, 2008) while participatory media preside over non-participating communities ( Semujju, 2014). The SMSD theory on the other hand explains development anchored in the Global South. Explaining CATs or other small media can also inform government, development partners, and other stakeholders who implement planned social change ( Dutta, 2015) and ease the way information is dealt with at both levels. With the ideas suggested above, the dependency relations can now be explained in mainstream media ( Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur, 1976), Internet ( Sun et al., 2008) and community media (the current article).

Conclusion

This article makes a case for the SMSD theory in order to account for micro- and macro-dependency relations in small media. This has been done using data collected about CATs in Uganda among community members and communication stakeholders. Attempting to theorize a Southern media channel using existing community media theories and the MSD theory required suggesting radical new ways through which dependency relations in Southern media can be better explained. The above effort puts the underrepresented community media practice in the Global South up for discussion by making a non-Western contribution to the global knowledge pool. The article concluded by noting that while the suggested SMSD theory explains how dependency relations in CATs occur, more research is needed to focus on studying the theory in relation to other small media like blackboard newspapers, community puppetry, and others, in the Global South. Since the main focus of the article was theory, more work on decolonizing community media methodology is urgently needed. As long as southern intellectuals are still indoctrinated into European epistemic traditions, they are mere foot soldiers, socially commissioned to help the Western episteme to maintain its legacy status.

Acknowledgment

This paper comes from a PhD thesis supervised by Dr. Lauren Dyll (Centre for Communication, Media and Society) University of KwaZulu-Natal.

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Theorizing Dependency Relations in Small Media

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The paper questions the pervasive western intellectual universalism which disregards Global South imaginations for generalized approaches. Using field data from Uganda about Community Audio Towers (CATs), the western-generated community media theory is interrogated, accentuating its failure to account for the intricate relationship between the individual, society, and small media.

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Annotation: Through analyzing an annotated version of an archival text, Wetzel offers how assigning students a layered feminist historiography project can be beneficial as it "yields valuable pedagogical benefits while calling attention to 'the enormous complexity' of the past, the inevitable limitations of history texts, and the importance of approaching history as 'inquiry'. DIY material annotation practices help students critically intervene in the histories that have been handed to them and in doing so builds multimodal composing skills, rhetorical facility, and Composition Studies archival/research capacities" (43-44). I think this is especially relevant to our decolonial project.

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Social Dance in the Age of (Anti-)Social MediaFortnite, Online Video, and the Jook at a Virtual Crossroads

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By all accounts, we are again in the midst of a "dance craze," a cultural moment when a wide swath of people-most remarkably, white middle-class youth-embrace the ability to communicate and coordinate using little loops of codified gesture.

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Annotation: Estrada-Belli uses archaeological discoveries to demonstrate that the Mayans had rich cultural and ritualistic norms long before the Classic Mayan period. The author draws attention to the importance of the power of the sky and the purity of water. Of particular relevance to this week’s readings is Tlapacoya, the sky monster, and “center of the sky and portal to the sky itself” (69). During the colonial-period, the Quiché, one of a number of Mayan groups referred to Tlapacoya as Hu racan, a supreme god who resides at the center of the sky (70). It is interesting to note that the word hurricane derives from Hu racan and illustrates the power of both the god and the phenomenon. This sky monster is revered, and the location of Mayan pyramids coincides with locations where lightning frequently strikes (66).

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Aoyama, Kazuo Inomata, Takeshi Triadan, Daniela Pinzón, Flory Palomo, Juan Manuel MacLellan, Jessica and Sharpe, Ashley 2017. Early Maya Ritual Practices and Craft Production: Late Middle Preclassic Ritual Deposits Containing Obsidian Artifacts at Ceibal, Guatemala. Journal of Field Archaeology, Vol. 42, Issue. 5, p. 408.

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LIGHTNING SKY, RAIN, AND THE MAIZE GOD: The Ideology of Preclassic Maya Rulers at Cival, Peten, Guatemala | Ancient Mesoamerica | Cambridge Core

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This article has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by CrossRef. Rosenswig, Robert M. and Kennett, Douglas J. 2008. Reassessing San Estevan's Role in the Late Formative Political Geography of Northern Belize. Latin American Antiquity, Vol. 19, Issue. 2, p. 123.

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Citation: Kimmerer, R.B. (2013). Braiding
sweetgrass, Milkweed Editions.

Annotation: Robin Wall Kimmerer is another Anishnaabe scholar and begins her book with a retelling of Sky Woman falling. Similar to Watts, Kimmerer explores the relationship among human and non-human entities. She shares her lesson from various plants and bodies of water throughout the book, creating a profound story of how all things are interconnected. Placing Kimmerer in the context of elemental media creates a productive tension, just as putting Peters and Watts together does. Kimmerer is not a media scholar. She is a botanist. But the way she interacts with the world fits in with elemental media, which is telling in her reason for choosing her field of study: "I chose botany because I wanted to learn about why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together" (39).

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Citation: Scauso, M. S., FitzGerald, G., Tickner, A. B., Behera, N. C., Pan, C., Shih, C.-yu, & Shimizu, K. (2020). Covid-19, democracies, and (de)colonialities. Democratic Theory, 7(2), 82–93. https://doi.org/10.3167/dt.2020.070211

Annotation: In this article, the authors assert that COVID-19 has reintroduced the “colonial continuities” in the form of discrimination, inequality, and violence towards certain groups of people. The article talks about how in the 18th and 19th centuries colonizers would treat natives as filthy or unsanitary beings even though it was them, the colonizers, who would expose these people to certain foreign viruses. In the times of COVID-19 too, people of Asian descent were particularly blamed in the United States for spreading the virus, leading to racist behaviors. The authors argue that “debates about democracy and pandemic must also go beyond the boundaries delineated by Eurocentric assumptions about democracy’s form and content to focus on substantive issues of equity, analyzing which social forces are exercising power in particular contexts, for whose benefits, and at whose expense” (p. 90). They also suggest that such conversations must include the non-human bodies—including the coronavirus—as part of our ecology.

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As the specter of COVID-19 haunts the world, another specter-that of colonialism-has made a spectacular (re)appearance. Colonial continuities, as evidenced in myriad forms of inequality, discrimination, and violence, are prevalent throughout the countries of the world irrespective of global power positions, economic wealth, development indicators, or governance structures. The exclusionary responses of states and societies mirror the colonial vilification of natives characterized as "treacherous," "filthy," and "unsanitary" during the global health outbreaks of the 18th and 19th centuries, notwithstanding the historical irony that the colonizers repeatedly brought with them viruses that decimated subjugated populations. Although people of Asian and, in particular, Chinese descent have borne the brunt of racist outbreaks in the United States and elsewhere, migrants, asylum seekers, and Muslims (in the specific case of India), have also been blamed for spreading the contagion.

Such binary boundaries between "us" and "them," and their associated forms of othering, stigmatization, and erasure are not limited to discursive practices, but are also rooted in material inequities and the disproportionate sufferings of disadvantaged social groups. Higher mortality rates among racial and ethnic minorities, indigenous communities, the poor, and the elderly, have exposed the deeply embedded and intersectional nature of inequality among many of the world's oldest democracies. Indeed, the pandemic has unveiled egregious and ongoing material injustices linked to coloniality often hidden beneath long-cherished modern notions of progress, equality, reason, liberty, and democracy.

Although the exclusionary epistemic foundations of liberal democracy have been reinforced by global responses to COVID-19, a decolonial lens brings democratic vistas beyond these legacies into focus. In this brief article, we sketch some of liberalism's exclusions, indicating how ideal subjectivities (such as citizens) are constructed against racialized, gendered, and geographically distant "others." We then show how such tendencies are exacerbated by neoliberal governance and are now being further compounded by the present crisis. Making the marginalizing nature of liberal democracy visible opens space for more substantive consideration of how these equalities and inequities cut across the axes of race, gender, class, and other constructed categories coimbricated within the legacies of coloniality. Subsequently, we explore logics of exclusion have shaped responses at the international level by reinforcing long-standing colonial binaries between East and West. We end the article by describing a number of alternatives brought to the fore by decolonial thought and practice.

Epistemic Foundations, (In)Equality, and Liberal Democracy

Critiques of liberal democracy are well-rehearsed and widespread. Feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial writers have analyzed how, even though liberal democracy often claims universality and equality for all, it includes epistemic notions that lead to marginalization and forms of othering ( Hartz 1955; Rivera 1990; Mills 1997; Mehta 1999; Weber 2016). For the purpose of this article, we focus primarily on liberal democracy's Lockean inheritances, arguably one of the main sources of contemporary liberal democratic theory and practice. This kind of liberalism is rooted in the principles of private property, individual freedom, and government by consent, all of which have their basis in the idea of a God-given, reasoning human nature ( Jahn 2013: 43-53).

Despite its seemingly broad respect for all those "human" beings whose exercise of reason grants them theoretical equality, this particular form of Western, liberal identity upholds characteristics that create a marginalizing boundary against those considered outside its validated commonality, historically including women, indigenous peoples, and the dispossessed. The oppressive hierarchy and division of labor constructed through such boundaries would be impossible without their epistemic commitments ( Mehta 1999: 18). Namely, the universalization of a particular racialized, gendered, and territorialized European subjectivity provides the epistemic conditions of possibility to elevate one way of being over others framed oppositionally as barbaric, uncivilized, traditional, or irrational. These characteristics, often described as colonial wounds ( Mignolo 2000), are the bases for platforms of citizenship that delineate possibilities for inclusion and exclusion within the body politic, and create the boundary of participation and privilege in liberal democracies.

The neoliberal turn, notwithstanding its contradictions, contestations, and temporal and geographical variation, unifies many of these tendencies, as evident in the responses mounted by liberal democratic states to the current crisis. As an increasingly globalized mode of governance and form of reason, neoliberalism affects all spheres of human activity as well as human subjectivities themselves ( Brown 2015: 48-49). It reads them through economic criteria such as value, competitiveness, and rank, and justifies conditions of othering with long colonial antecedents. Despite historical associations between socioeconomic equality and democracy, neoliberal promises of common prosperity through seemingly limitless economic growth have resulted in world-historic levels of inequality against which the pandemic is playing out. The neoliberalization of the global economy has likewise hollowed out the capacities of post-war democratic welfare states, shifting to neoliberal, regulatory, and networked governance that proves:

[better] at creating the illusion of activity than actually delivering concrete public goods and services. This has left political elites scrambling for an emergency response, in which controlling the population substitutes for providing for them. ( McCormack and Jones 2020)

Within this framework, historical inequalities appear as a natural, necessary, or temporary problem that will eventually be solved by the magic of trickle-down benefits.

To mask these marginalizing tendencies, neoliberalism elevates the individualistic pursuit of happiness as a key aspect of "humanity" ( Linera 2015; Peet and Hartwick 2015). This explains why the needs of corporations, banks, and other "key" actors are often located above those of the majority of the population, even in times of crisis. For example, many state policies deployed to address the fallout of COVID-19 portray them as core drivers of development, job creation, freedom, and other neoliberal euphemisms linked to the pursuit of happiness. Alongside this hierarchically elevated set of actors, other strategies privilege a home-owning middle class that has the economic means to work remotely, stay at home, take time off, and/or stockpile resources ( Shani 2020). Such policies inherently devalue those who have not successfully satisfied their own pursuit of happiness, and who appear less rational, developed, and free as a result-a direct continuance of the foundational, exclusionary logics of liberal democracy. In the United States, the layering of neoliberal governmentality atop enduring colonial legacies manifests through the disproportionate risks, disadvantages, and suffering of indigenous communities and other people of color. Economic inequality has long been associated with ethnic and racial differences in this country ( Darity, Dietrich, and Guilkey 1997), but recent research also shows that income and access to internet inequality are correlated to higher risks of infection and lower possibilities of self-isolation ( Chiou and Tucker 2020). The story is not much different in India, the world's largest democracy and former British colony, where the pandemic has deepened already existing class divides and religious fault lines. The Indian prime minister's decision to impose an obligatory nation-wide lockdown with little forewarning or state assistance has had a devastating impact on the country's 470 million-strong informal labor force. Overnight, it left millions of internal migrants and daily wage laborers jobless, hungry, and homeless. Similar conditions, frequently compounded by the structural legacies of colonial rule, have played out to varying degrees across much of the global South. In Brazil, home to one of the largest outbreaks, the virus has disproportionately affected already marginalized indigenous and Afro-descendent communities, especially in the Amazon, given the deadly mix of ineffective government response and active hostility to these communities by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.

In addition to their racial legacies, these colonial logics carry implications for other intersecting and mutually reinforcing forms of discrimination and oppression. Eurocentric categorizations of gender historically frame women in opposition to the ideal, rational subject described above ( Tickner 1992; Tickner and Sjoberg 2013; Collins and Bilge 2016), a dynamic only compounded through colonial encounters ( Rivera 2015; Méndez 2018). In the midst of COVID-19, gendered hierarchies often exacerbate material inequalities and create disproportionate impacts upon women around issues of employment, food security, risks of domestic violence, and so on. A class-based reading similarly highlights social deprivation that is shared by the working poor and economically marginalized both in the global South and the North. As the "essential" service-providers, many of the most vulnerable members of society must remain functional to serve and protect the life requirements of the middle classes and capital owners, even at the risk to their own lives. The experience of people living in the slums with poor access to food or clean water and soap to wash their hands reveals social distancing itself to be a privilege ( Ayuub 2020; Mosbergen 2020). An intersectional optics shows that these racial, gender, and class analyses cannot be neatly disaggregated from one another in order to grasp their combined effects in terms of discrimination, exclusion, and suffering; nor can they be properly understood apart from the imperial duress underlying their conditions of possibility.

A more comprehensive picture would require more space than afforded here. But attention to patterns of racial, gender, and class disparities in national responses to COVID-19 help to expose some of the latent colonial fault lines in many allegedly democratic countries, as women, people of color, the working poor, ethnic minorities, indigenous communities, and many others have found themselves in precarious positions aggravated by colonial continuities (Stoler 2016).

Othering and Inequality in the "International"

The abovementioned hierarchies have also been reiterated in the international sphere as a result of the pandemic, usually between democracies and non-democracies, and the West and non-West, confirming Young's (1990: 14) observation that democracy at home is largely maintained through (neo)colonial oppression abroad. For example, several democratic countries have created policies that intensify the securitization of those regarded as enemies of the "civilized" world, including the deportation and exclusion of undocumented and documented migrants deemed to threaten the "body politic" due to potential disease and the decrease of employment in the midst of emerging economic recession. The securitizing construction of "others" is also reflected in isolationist policies that have led to the defunding of the World Health Organization ( Klein and Hansler 2020) and a broader decline in international cooperation ( Stein and Eran 2020; Busby 2020).

Enduring colonial logics also drive dominant discourses concerning Asia. While China continues to epitomize a politically inadequate "other," wet markets-the alleged source of the outbreak-denote an exotic, superstitious, and primitive way of life that typifies Orientalist views of Asia more broadly. Even relatively high rates of mask wearing have been represented negatively as evidence of a kind of "herd mentality" framed in contrast to Western democratic individualism. As such, the pandemic and responses to it reveal faded colonial boundaries. Even Trump's outrageous labelling of COVID-19 as the "Chinese virus" is nothing new, but mirrors a long Western history of representing infectious diseases such as smallpox and leprosy as originating in China ( Craddock 2000; Mawani 2003; Watters 2012).

Imperial remnants are also the main spring of continued epistemic violence, which, among other things, refuses to recognize the colonial "other" as a source of reliable knowledge in the fight against the virus. The initial focus of much Western media on China's authoritarian system and questions about its ability to self-govern are reminiscent of the colonial wisdom that Oriental polities cannot govern themselves. Even China's apparent efficiency and success in containing the outbreak has been taken to further reinforce the point because this was achieved through authoritarianism or the country's underlying Confucian ethos ( Escobar 2020), both of which rely on presumed relations of conformity and collectivism that liberal theorists consider obstructive of individual freedom and agency. Current marginalization and stigmatization of China parallels previous Asian learning experiences with SARS and MERS, in which Western recognition of their potential value was both delayed and partial.

That the roots of the colonial presence run deep is also apparent in Taiwan's "Orientalist" handling of the pandemic. The government offered charter flights to its residents in Wuhan as a ploy to insinuate Taiwanese independent statehood, but this gesture was rejected by China. While parents who held a Taiwanese passport were allowed back in, children with only resident status were denied entry. As a result, many parents had to stay in China with their offspring. Even after Wuhan's reopening, entry into Taiwan has been restricted for these populations. In contrast, returnees fleeing from much graver pandemic conditions in the United States and Europe have been allowed entry on the grounds that the human rights of passengers from these countries must be respected. Ultimately, Taiwan has stigmatized its own citizens as a means of proving its Westernness and devaluing its Chineseness. Such self-othering is a distinct kind of colonial wound resulting from the need to adopt the standard of civilization acquired from former colonizers.

Contrary to Taiwan's strategy of equating China to the virus, Japan has taken a different route characterized by relational rapprochement. In addition to official donations of medical supplies and equipment, civil society actors have been active in building bridges of solidarity with their Chinese counterparts. One such gesture entailed attaching an ancient poem to the boxes shipped to the Hubei province that said: "different river, mountains, areas but wind and moon on the same sky." This poem was originally sent to China from an ancient Japanese prince, Nagayao, to invite a Chinese Buddhist monk, Jianzhen/Ganjin to participate in spreading Buddhism in Japan in the eighth century. Tellingly, this gesture garnered massive applause in China and when COVID-19 subsequently broke out in Japan, a group of Chinese citizens, including the co-founder of Chinese conglomerate Alibaba, sent a million masks along with another ancient poem saying: "like mountains stretching before you and me, let's withstand the hardship together." Despite deep-seated tension and animosity between Japan and China, the exchange of small kindnesses between societal actors traced an alternative route. Namely, instead of shutting down physical and symbolic boundaries by othering their historical opponent, civil society organizations and private companies avoided adopting a Western Orientalist lens (like the one embraced by Taiwan) and thus allowed people to subvert prevailing colonial logics.

Decolonial Alternatives

A decolonial analysis of continuities in othering, marginalization, inequality, and epistemic violence, among others, sheds light on how COVID-19 and responses to it are infused with coloniality. But despite a grim picture of worsening inequalities and violence, this approach also highlights the ways in which experiences of marginalization, oppression, and injustice may offer alternative imaginaries, and ways of being and doing.

The horrific toll that the pandemic is taking on communities such as the Navajo and Pueblo Zuni in the United States, and the indigenous peoples of the Amazon and elsewhere in Latin America has been attributed to entrenched structural violence. Moreover, considerations of the virus' impact on these peoples, and of its broader implications for decolonization, must grapple with the enduring effects of epistemic and ontological erasure on ancestral economic, social, cultural, and political practices. For many indigenous communities, the current crisis must be understood as the continuation of centuries-old, interlinked processes of genocide and epistemicide, the systematic eradication of non-Western peoples and their knowledges that was key to the project of modernity ( Grosfoguel 2015).

Despite such continuities, indigenous voices also construct other ways of knowing and being that provide important lessons and alternatives. For example, the existence of self-described indigenous democratic practices demonstrates democracy's capacity for resignification and suggests that the violent history of its globalization does not exhaust its potentialities ( Quijano 2002). Diverse examples of indigenous democracy reflect both the existence of and possibilities for democratizing decolonial projects emerging from non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world, as these communities self-consciously reappropriate and recast the concept of democracy to describe their practices of self-government ( Rivera 1990; Crawford 1994; Mignolo 2011; Grosfoguel 2012).

Indigenous forms of governance are not offered as universal blueprints meant to compete alongside (neo)liberalism as ideological frameworks for democracy, but to enact practices of "epistemic decolonial democratization" by refusing to impose either their own new universals or to "leave the word democracy only in liberal or neo-liberal hands" ( Mignolo 2011: 92). In other words, democratic possibilities do not emerge from exclusionary understandings of identity and citizenship, but instead foster respectful and heterogeneous forms of dialogue and solidarity between different ways of knowing and being. Through such multiplicity, indigenous reappropriations of democracy move beyond state-centric understandings of politics, enacting paths to cooperation that traverse borders and isolationist boundaries-lessons of vital importance during a pandemic that has proven so adept at crossing these same lines. By decoupling democracy from the Eurocentric epistemic commitments outlined above, these communities "[create] the space to reflect on what might be more just forms of governance, not only for Native peoples, but for the rest of the world" ( Smith 2005, 311) and point to alternatives for broader practices of democratization and decolonization ( Santos 2005; Mignolo 2011: 89).

Conclusion

The crisis of COVID-19 has revealed and accelerated deeply entrenched problematics, many of which are rooted in coloniality. The continuity, diversity, depth, and scope of the colonial wounds described only superficially in this article, point to the urgency of continued analysis and debate in ways that avoid erasing the agency that sometimes emerges from distinct sites of struggle. Learning to take the deeply diverse, if not divergent, lived realities of people across the globe as a scholarly touchstone for theorizing, rather than universalizing certain abstract categories of "humanity" or unreflexively validating specific characteristics of "democracy" to explain the successes or failures of state regimes (especially outside the West), constitutes an important first step. This diversity of lived experiences-gendered, racialized, sexualized, classed, and so on-confronts any sedimented and solidified singularity in the analysis of the epistemic and ontological assumptions underlying the present crisis by bringing into the debate radically different experiences of colonialisms and decolonialities, including the possibility of re-imagining democracy beyond its colonial legacies.

Debates about democracy and the pandemic must also go beyond the boundaries delineated by Eurocentric assumptions about democracy's form and content to focus on substantive issues of equity, analyzing which social forces are exercising power in particular contexts, for whose benefits, and at whose expense. This entails a deeper engagement with the political character of the state, the boundaries of citizenship, the biases of specific policies, and the power arrangements and dynamics implicated therein. It also requires analysis of multiple forms of cooperation and solidarity that may not take the state as their primary referent.

Finally, and although beyond the scope of this brief article, the pandemic also provides an opportunity to expand the demoi by including all human and non-human bodies-potentially even the coronavirus itself-as part of a vibrant ecology indicated by many strains of indigenous (and more recently, post-humanist) thought. Several countries, such as Ecuador and Bolivia, have already expanded notions of citizenship to include "nature" as an equal subject of rights. This form of ecological analysis poses perhaps one of the most difficult challenges to those who conceive democracy solely through a Eurocentric lens, while also underwriting a reanalysis of COVID-19. In the longer run, practices of quarantine will ultimately have to yield to antibody/vaccine, through which both humans and the virus can restore a more balanced form of coexistence. However, the othering of nature itself silences decolonial struggles and alternatives that offer key lessons in deeper forms of cohabitation and environmental respect.

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Abstract Liberal democracies often include rights of participation, guarantees of protection, and policies that privilege model citizens within a bounded territory. Notwithstanding claims of universal equality for "humanity," they achieve these goals by epistemically elevating certain traits of identity above "others," sustaining colonial biases that continue to favor whoever is regarded more "human."

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Citation: Eteraz, A. (2013). The Death of the Urdu Script. Medium.

Annotation: In this article, Ali Eteraz writes about his struggles when he tried to make a case for the standard Urdu font on digital media. When this article was published, Urdu was written in the digital world either using Roman/English characters or the Arabic font. A few years later, Apple introduced the original Urdu font in all of its devices. Google and Microsoft devices, however, have not yet changed. You cannot write Urdu in Google docs the way it is supposed to be written. Additionally, many leading media sources (BBC, for example) write news in Urdu using the standard Arabic font. Eteraz argues that this is, in no way, fair to the people who read and write in Urdu. The digital space should be more accessible and inclusive. He requests all the tech companies and smartphone makers “to feel a moment of linguistic humanitarianism and offer us i) an Urdu keyboard in our smartphones with all the letters and ii) to let us render the Urdu in nastaliq. If even then we fail to make Urdu a popular online language, then the onus for its death will be upon us.”

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A few years ago the Swedish store IKEA changed its font from Futura to Verdana and the Futura loyalists, fifty years faithful, created a veritable media storm. But most of us didn't care, because to us both fonts are very similar.

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Citation: Dasuki S.I., Abubakar N.H. (2019). The Contributions of WhatsApp to Social Inclusion: A Case of Internally Displaced Persons in Nigeria. In: Nielsen P., Kimaro H.C. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies for Development. Strengthening Southern-Driven Cooperation as a Catalyst. Advances in Information and Communication Technology (551)1. 414-424.

Annotation: In the article, the authors addresses how WhatsApp can be used to improve the lives of internally displaced persons (IDPs) affected by conflict. Their aim was to show how the digital platform contributes to the social inclusion of these population. To theorize the complex relationship between mobile technologies and social inclusion, Sen’s five distinct instrumental freedoms was drawn upon to understand the use of WhatsApp by IDPs affected by Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria and its impact on their social inclusion. And based on a week's fieldwork of an ongoing research, the case narrative presented both the freedom outcomes afforded the IDPs by the use of WhatsApp and also the impediments that hinder the developmental impact. The authors findings shows that the use of this platform by the IDPs result in social and economic opportunities, political participation and transparency, and protective security measures.

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Citation: Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. Durham: Duke University Press.

Annotation: Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others by Sara Ahmed takes to task looking at phenomenology through a queer lens that primarily center on the concepts of “orientation.” In a similar fashion to how Peters considers orientation in space with the human body and the media around it, Ahmed is taking the next step by embracing the theory of phenomenology and thinking about “the question of sexual orientation [and] the orientation of orientalism as a point of entry for reconsidering how racism ‘orientates’ bodies in specific ways” (p. 21). It’s the focus on sexual orientation and race that makes Ahmed’s considerations stand out in the field of phenomenology, especially in how she tackles Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. In addition to those orientations in queer and race, Ahmed concludes by thinking about the disorientation caused by ruling, prevailing structures and thinking about the ways that the disorientation can lead the way for a reorientation for the bodies at the center of Ahmed’s study.

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" Queer Phenomenology makes a valuable contribution to queer theory, philosophy, cultural theory, psychology and geography/spatial studies alike, raising questions and providing a possible theoretical framework both for and
across these fields of inquiry."
- Jessica Lehman Heather McDermid Karen Moxley and Carolyn J. Rowe, Gender, Place & Culture

"In the context of recent literary and critical theories that have often favored impatience over patience, a hermeneutics of suspicion over a sense of wonder, extremity over everydayness, one of Ahmed's singular achievements is to reorient our affective stances and intellectual idioms toward a less punitive engagement with the ordinary." - Rita Felski, Contemporary Women's Writing

"While the text is rich and dense in its theoretical discussion, Ahmed's language is surprisingly accessible and cautiously intimate. Drawing on the works of a wide range of thinkers, Ahmed establishes multiple connections and points of conversation between the theories and does so with an astute clarity. Students of both phenomenology and queer studies, or anyone in search of a new theoretical framework for non-normative bodies and subjects, are guaranteed to benefit from reading this truly novel work." - Dai Kojima, Phenomenology and Practice

"Writing out of the intersections of several academic fields, Ahmed's book should speak to several audiences. . . . To read [the book] is to be challenged out of our habitual ruts of reading, writing, and thinking as trained philosophers." - Shannon Winnubst, APA Newsletter

"[G]round shaking. The book is disorienting in a good way. It invites the reader to be shaken, disoriented, to question our selves and our position and it evokes the power and necessity of disorientation as a source of movement and challenge. Ahmed doesn't seem to insist that we deny the positions we currently occupy, or to move on, but to reorient ourselves. Like earthly tremors, queer phenomenology facilitates the formation of lines and fissures along the spaces of our existence, as events that open up new connections, rather than points in lines that bind us to existing structures and spaces in which living obliquely is made uncomfortable, if not impossible." - Margaret Mayhew, Cultural Studies Review

"Ahmed's most valuable contribution in Queer Phenomenology is her reorienting of the language of queer theory. The phenomenological understanding of orientation and its attendant geometric metaphors usefully reframes queer discourse, showing disorientation as a moment not of desperation but of radical possibility, of getting it twisted in a productive and revolutionary way." - Zachary Lamm, GLQ

"In her book, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Sara Ahmed offers a thorough and at times playful analysis of what it means to be oriented-oriented toward objects, ideas, cultures, and sexes. . . . This book is . . . inspiring, stimulating, and a pleasure to read." - Elizabeth Simon Ruchti, College Literature

"Rarely does philosophical writing successfully manage to make its reader embrace the abstraction that comes along with such writing and bridge this abstraction with everyday, lived experience. Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology astoundingly does both. . . . Queer Phenomenology impressively emerges as a text that is reachable to its readers." - Yetta Howard, Women's Studies

"The aim of Sara Ahmed's dense, stimulating and thought-provoking book is to connect sexual orientation with phenomenology in a way that takes the spatiality of sexuality, gender and race seriously, opening up new questions for the cross-disciplinary audience that should read this book. . . . In the acknowledgment, Sara Ahmed notes that her book was a pleasure to write. It is also a pleasure to read. The author's immense erudition is worn lightly and the book, although dealing with complex ideas is a joy to read as it guides the reader through the argument with great clarity. It will appeal to a wide range of readers-and deservedly so." - Linda McDowell, Sexualities

"Finally, a theorist who takes sexual 'orientation' at its word. In this moving meditation on directionality, Sara Ahmed takes phenomenology for a turn through queer theory, postcolonial studies, feminism, critical race theory, geometry, and labor politics. In the world Ahmed encourages us to reinhabit, as bodies come to matter, bodily action materializes space, children inherit proximities rather than attributes, privileged bodies sink into familiarity, and politics is at its best when it involves a measure of disorientation. Follow her 'lines' of reasoning and you'll never again reach for an explanation, a book, or a lover without wondering how your grasp extended so far in the first place." - Kath Weston, author of Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age

"In this dazzling new book, Sara Ahmed has begun a much needed dialogue between queer studies and phenomenology. Focusing on the directionality, spatiality, and inclination of desires in time and space, Ahmed explains the straightness of heterosexuality and the digressions made by those queer desires that incline away from the norm, and, in her chapter on racialization, she puts the orient back into orientation. Ahmed's book has no telos, no moral purpose for queer life, but what it brings to the table instead is an original and inspiring meditation on the necessarily disorienting, disconcerting, and disjointed experience of queerness." - Judith Halberstam, author of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

"This is an original and refreshing use of phenomenological theory to address the kinds of questions-about orientations and about how bodies and objects become oriented through their interrelations-that help link it more directly to political and social questions-about gender, sexuality, and race, for example-that have tended to be treated as outside or beyond phenomenological frameworks. This extension and development of phenomenology is a major contribution." - Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely

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" Queer Phenomenology makes a valuable contribution to queer theory, philosophy, cultural theory, psychology and geography/spatial studies alike, raising questions and providing a possible theoretical framework both for andacross these fields of inquiry." - Jessica Lehman Heather McDermid Karen Moxley and Carolyn J.

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KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Brinellvägen, Stockholm, Sweden

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KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Brinellvägen, Stockholm, Sweden

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KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Brinellvägen, Stockholm, Sweden

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Citation: Allen, I. K. (2020). Thinking with a feminist political ecology of air-and-breathing-bodies. Body & Society, 26(2), 79-105.

Annotation: In the article, Allen attempts to “track and trace a specifically Feminist Political Ecological engagement with air-and-breathing-bodies, proposing that feminist theory, with its concern for porosity and vulnerability, is poised to open up embodied accounts of air, where air, breath and bodies are taken as inseparable, to inform more nuanced and intimate political–ecological accounts of how they come to matter in intersectional intra-relationship” (96-97). Though not necessarily focused on media studies, Allen focuses on bodies, environment, and air (an element!) in ways that echo Peters’ discussion in Chapter Two of his book (and a bit of Chapter Three with the oxygen talk). Again, this comes from a social theory standpoint, but I think ties in nicely with some of the elemental media conversation.

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Social theory has paid little attention to air, despite its centrality to bodily existence and air pollution being named the world's biggest public health crisis. Where attention to air is found, the body is largely absent. On the other hand, conceptualizing the body without life-sustaining breath fails to highlight breathing as the ongoing metabolic bodily act in which the materiality of human and more-than-human intermingle and transmute one another. Political ecology studies how unequal power structures and knowledge production reproduce human-environment relations, including a nascent focus on the body and air - but as separate issues. This article argues that a political ecology of air would productively fuse with a political ecology of the body to bring the visceral realm into intersectional analysis of air's contemporary materialities. A feminist political ecology situates explicitly air-and-breathing-bodies, their intimately posthuman, relational, elemental and corpomaterial intra-action, at the heart of such analysis.

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Thinking with a Feminist Political Ecology of Air-and-breathing-bodies - Irma Kinga Allen, 2020

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Social theory has paid little attention to air, despite its centrality to bodily existence and air pollution being named the world's biggest public health crisis. Where attention to air is found, the body is largely absent.

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Citation: Coronado, M.I.N. (2019). El lenguaje ritual del fuego en los mayas del periodo Clásico: un acercamiento. Estudios de Cultura Maya Liv, 54 (91-127).

Annotation: In her paper, Coronado illuminates the special relationship that the Maya had with fire. The Mayans recognized and revered fire, both for its destructive capabilities but also for its role in regeneration, revitalization, and making way for new life. They used fire to communicate political changes (105) and the destruction or creation of new towns (109). Themes of both creation and destruction are frequently addressed. Some of the Mayan rituals for creating fire point to a healthy inclusion and respect for both men and women in Mayan culture. Coronado describes the process in a new fire was created by “[rubbing a male element, a pointed wood, in a concave container, the female element, which contained wood residues and dry leaves; the ‘male toothpick’ rotated alternately in one direction or the other causing a heating, until the coveted flame was generated]” (translated, 106). Her depiction of this ritual is obviously sexual in nature and highlights the importance in Mayan thought of fire to fertility and creation. The presence of fire in holy spaces serves as a sign of the presence of their deity, who facilitates the crossing over between life and death, or from nonexistence into existence (110-113). To relate this paper to the course topic, I considered how fire communicated with the Mayans who revered its destructive and creative attributes. In this way, the medium is the message, fire conveys meaning implicitly. But the Mayans also used the fire to communicate important events and had a variety of complex, context-dependent rituals for fire-starting. How the fire was created was an important facet of the communication and this is very interesting to me – it seems as if the Mayans recognized different kinds of fire, which makes me believe that they recognized and could “read” the nuances of meaning and communication in these different forms of fire.

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Agurcia Fasquelle, Ricardo

"Rosalila: templo del rey Sol en Copán", Los mayas. Señores de la creación: los orígenes de la realeza sagrada, pp. 72-74, Virginia M. Fields y Dorie Reents-Budet (eds.). México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

Bell, Catherine

Ritual. Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bernal Romero, Guillermo

El trono de K'innich Ahkal Mo' Nahb': una inscripción glífica del Templo XXI de Palenque, tesis de maestría en Estudios Mesoamericanos. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Programa de Posgrado en Estudios Mesoamericanos, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas.

a "Dignatarios cuatripartitas y cultos direccionales en las inscripciones de Palenque, Copán y Quiriguá, Primera parte", Lakamha', 31: 2-13.

b "Dignatarios cuatripartitas y cultos direccionales en las inscripciones de Palenque, Copán y Quiriguá. Segunda Parte", Lakamha', 32: 2-9.

"El señorío de Palenque durante la era de K'inich Janaahb' Pakal y K'inich Kan B'ahlam (615-702 d.C.)", tesis de doctorado en Estudios Mesoamericanos. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Programa de Posgrado en Estudios Mesoamericanos, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas.

a "El fuego, el taladro y el tlacuache. Ritos de joch k'ahk y otras ceremonias de fuego en el Clásico", Arqueología Mexicana, XXII (128): 66-71.

b "Jeroglíficos enigmáticos de la escritura maya. El logograma T514, YEJ, 'filo'" [https://www.academia.edu/12620139/EL_LOGOGRAMA_T514_YEJ_FILO_Jeroglíficos_Enigm%C3%A1ticos_de_la_Escritura_Maya_VERSI%C3%93N_LARGA_. Consultado el 18 de enero de 2017].

"Monumento 175 de Toniná Chiapas", no. catálogo 161, p. 162, en Mayas. Revelación de un tiempo sin fin. Mercedes de la Garza (coord.). México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

"El ciclo de 63 días en la cultura maya: descubrimiento de un nuevo factor calendárico", El papel de la arqueoastronomía en el mundo maya: el caso de la Isla de Cozumel, pp. 111-124. México: Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura (UNESCO).

Bernal Romero Guillermo y Gabriel Laló Jacinto

"Pomoy. Una de las ciudades perdidas de los mayas", Noticias, Arqueología Mexicana, 4 (79): 10.

Boot, Erik

Continuity and Change in Text and Image at Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, México: A Study of the Inscriptions, Iconography, and Architecture at a Late Classic to Early Postclassical Maya Site. Leiden: Research School Centre of Non-Western Studies, Leiden University (CNWS Publications, 135).

Brady, James y Pierre Colas

"Nikte' Mo' Scattered Fire into the Cave of K'ab Chante'. Epigraphic and Archaeological Evidence for Cave Desecration in Ancient Maya Warfare", Stone Houses and Earth Lords. Maya Religion in Cave Context, pp. 149-166, Keith M. Prufer y James E. Brady (eds.). Boulder, Colorado: University Press of Colorado.

Colas, Pierre Robert

"Tok' and Tok: Two Examples of Rebus Writing in Maya Script", The Sacred and the Profane, Architecture and Identity in the Maya Lowlands, 3rd European Maya Conference, pp. 83-92, Pierre R. Colas, Kai Delvendahl, Marcus Kuhnert y Anette Schubart (eds.). Markt Schwaben: Verlag Anton Saurwein (Acta Mesoamericana, 10).

Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo

"Fire and Sacrifice in Mesoamerican Myths and Rituals", Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice, pp. 29-53, Vera Tiesler y Andrew K. Scherer (eds.). Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo y Oswaldo Gómez

"El nacimiento del sol en Tikal: Interpretación de un entierro en Tikal asociado al conjunto de tipo 'Grupo E' de Mundo Perdido", XXIII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2009, pp. 1193-1201, Bárbara Arroyo, Adriana Linares, Lorena Páiz y Ana Lucía Arroyave (eds.). Guatemala: Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, Instituto de Antropología e Historia y Asociación Tikal.

Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo, Vera Tiesler, Oswaldo Gómez y T. Douglas Price

"Myth, Ritual, and Human Sacrifice in Early Classic Mesomerica: Interpreting a Cremated Double Burial from Tikal, Guatemala", Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 25: 187-210. DOI: 10.1017/S0959774314000638.

Diccionario maya-español, español-maya

Alfredo Barrera Vásquez (dir.), Juan Ramón Bastarrachea y William Brito (reds.). Mérida: Ediciones Cordemex.

: 11-15

Fahsen, Federico, Arthur A. Demarest y Luis Fernando Luin

"Sesenta años de historia en la escalinata jeroglífica de Cancuén", XVI Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2002, pp. 703- 713, J. P. Laporte, B. Arroyo, H. Escobedo y H. Mejía (eds.). Guatemala: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, [Consultado el 30 de junio de 2016].

García Barrios, Ana

Chaahk, el dios de la lluvia, en el periodo Clásico maya: aspectos religiosos y políticos. Tesis doctoral, Madrid, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

García Barrios, Ana y Erik Velásquez García

El arte de los reyes mayas, Puebla: Museo Amparo, Programa de Estudios y de Investigación de la Colección del Museo Amparo.

García Campillo, José Ma.

"Implicaciones de un aniversario de doce años túnicos en las inscripciones de Chichén Itzá", Revista Española de Antropología Americana, 29: 131-157.Chichén M CAMPILLO José M. GARCÍA CAMPILLO

García Juárez, Sara Isabel

"La historia de Piedras Negras a través de sus inscripciones jeroglíficas: auge y ocaso del linaje de las Tortugas", tesis de licenciatura en Historia. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras: 2 vols.

"Yokib'Chan Ch'e'en, "El cielo y el pozo de Yokib": Historia sagrada y espacios primordiales de Piedras Negras", ponencia presentada para el Premio Palenque. (Consultada el 20 de noviembre de 2018).

Garza, Mercedes de la, Guillermo Bernal y Martha Cuevas

Palenque-Lakamha' Una presencia inmortal del pasado indígena. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, El Colegio de México.

Graham, Ian y Eric von Euw

Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, vol. 3, num. 1, Yaxchilán. Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Grube, Nikolai

"Fire Rituals in the Context of Classic Maya Initial Series", The Sacred and the Profane. Architecture and Identity in the Maya Lowlands, 3rd European Maya Conference, pp. 93-110, Pierre R. Colas, Kai Delvendahl, Marcus Kuhnert y Annete Schubart (eds.). Markt Schwaben: Verlag Anton Saurwein (Acta Mesoamericana, 10).

Grube, Nikolai y Ruth J. Krochock

"Reading Between the Lines: Hieroglyphic Texts from Chichén Itzá and its Neighbors", Twin Tollans, Chichén Itzá, Tula, and Epiclassic Mesoamerican World, pp. 157-194, Jeff Karl Kowalski y Cynthia Kristan-Graham (eds.), Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Harvard University Press.

Grube, Nikolai, Alfonso Lacadena y Simon Martin

"Chichén Itzá and its Neighbors", Notebook for the 27h Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas, pt. 2: Chichén Itzá and Ek Balam: Terminal Classic Inscriptions from Yucatan, pp. 1-84. Austin: University of Texas, Center for the History of Ancient American Art and Civilization, Department of Art and Art History.

Houston, Stephen D., David Stuart y Karl A. Taube

The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Houston, Stephen D., Andrew Scherer, Héctor Escobedo, Mark Child y James Fitzsimmons

"Classic Maya Death at Piedras", Antropología de la eternidad: la muerte en la cultura maya, pp. 113-144, Andrés Ciudad Ruiz, Mario H. Ruz y María Josefa Iglesias (eds.). Madrid / México: Sociedad Española de Estudios Mayas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Mayas (Publicaciones de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Mayas, 7).

Inomata, Takeshi y Daniela Triadan

"Middle Preclassic Caches from Ceibal, Guatemala", Maya Archaeology, 3: 53-91.

Jackson, Sarah E.

Politics of the Maya Court. Hierarchy and Change in the Late Classic Period, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Lacadena García-Gallo, Alfonso,

"El corpus glífico de Ek' Balam, Yucatán, México", [Consultado el 3 de marzo de 2016].

"Tiempo histórico y tiempo mítico entre los mayas del periodo Clásico", Disparidades. Revista de Antropología, 59 (1): 83-106. DOI: 10.3989/rdtp.2004.v59.i1.142.

Limón Olvera, Silvia

El fuego sagrado: simbolismo y ritualidad entre los nahuas. México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

López Austin, Alfredo

Los mitos del tlacuache. Caminos de la mitología mesoamericana. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de investigaciones Antropológicas.

Cuerpo humano e ideología. Las concepciones de los antiguos nahuas, I. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas.

MacLeod, Barbara y Andrea Stone

"The Hieroglyphic Inscriptions of Naj Tunich", Images from the Underworld. Naj Tunich and the Tradition of Maya Cave Painting, pp. 155-184, Andrea Stone (ed.). Austin: Universidad of Texas Press.

Martin, Simon

"The Old Man of the Maya Universe: A Unitary Dimension To Ancient Maya Religion, Maya Archaeology, 3: 186-227.

Martin, Simon y Nikolai Grube

Crónica de los reyes y reinas mayas. La primera historia de las dinastías mayas. México: Editorial Planeta.

Nakamura, Seiichi

"Descubren importantes tumbas mayas e indicios de ritos con fuego en Copán", National Geographic España. Octubre, [consultado el 18 de agosto de 2017].

Olivier, Guilhem

a "Bultos sagrados, flechas y Fuego Nuevo. Fundación y poder en el Mapa de Cuauhtinchan número 2", Cueva, ciudad y nido de águila: una travesía por el Mapa de Cuauhtinchan número 2, pp. 281-313, David Carrasco y Scott Sessions (eds.). Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

b "Los bultos sagrados. Identidad fundadora de los pueblos mesoamericanos", Arqueología Mexicana, XVIII (106): 53-59.

Pérez Suárez, Tomás

"Monumento 161 de Toniná, Chiapas", no. Catálogo 155, Mayas. Revelación de un tiempo sin fin, pp. 159, Mercedes de la Garza (coord.). México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

"Pomoná, Tabasco. Una revisión histórica del sitio y sus inscripciones", ponencia presentada en Los mayas de ayer y hoy, IV Mesa Redonda del Mayab, 14-22 de octubre de 2016, Mérida, Yucatán.

Pitts, Mark

A Brief History of Piedras Negras as Told by the Ancient Maya. History revealed in Maya Glyphs, The Aid and Education Project, Inc., [Consultado el 16 de mayo de 2016].

Sharer, Robert J. y Loa P. Taxler

"Las tumbas reales más tempranas de Copán: muerte y renacimiento en un reino maya clásico", Los mayas. Señores de la creación: los orígenes de la realeza sagrada, pp. 145-160, Virginia M. Fields y Dorie Reents-Budet (eds). México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia

Sherer, Andrew K. y Stephen Houston

"Blood, Fire, Death. Convenants and Crises among the Classic Maya", Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice, pp. 109-150, Vera Tiesler y Andrew K. Scherer (eds.). Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Sheseña, Alejandro

"Ritos de fuego nuevo en cuevas mayas", Bolom. Revista del Centro de Investigaciones Frans Blom, 2: 91-125.

"Los textos jeroglíficos mayas de la cueva de Joljá, Chiapas", Mesoweb, 1-25, [consultado 23 de abril de 2017].

"El papel de las cuevas en las guerras de los antiguos mayas", Itinerarios, 19: 53-74.

Joyaj ti 'ajawlel. La ascensión al poder entre los mayas clásicos. Tuxtla Gutiérrez: Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas, Afinita Editorial.

Somohano, Ana y Antonio Jaramillo

"Registro epigráfico de reentradas a tumbas mayas durante el periodo Clásico", XXIX Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, pp. 727-739. Guatemala: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología.

Stone, Andrea y Mark Zender

Reading Maya Art. A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture. Nueva York: Thames and Hudson.

Stuart, David

"'The Fire Enters His House'. Architecture and Ritual in Classic Maya Texts", Function and Meaning in Classic Architecture, pp. 373-425, Stephen D. Houston (ed.). Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks.

Comentarios sobre las inscripciones del Templo XIX de Palenque. San Francisco: The Pre-Columbian Art Resarch Institute, [Consultado el 18 de junio de 2016]

Tate, Carolyn E.

Yaxchilán: The Design of a Maya Ceremonial City. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Taube, Karl

"A Study of Classic Maya Scaffold Sacrifice", Maya Iconography, pp. 330-351, Elizabeth P. Benson y Gillet G. Griffin (eds.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

The Major Gods of Ancient Yucatan. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks (Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology, 32).

"The Jade Hearth: Centrality, Rulership, and the Classic Maya Temple", Function and Meaning in Classic Architecture, pp. 427-478,

Stephen D. Houston (ed.). Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks.

"Structure 10L-16 and Its Early Classic Antecedents: Fire and the Evocation and Resurrection of K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo'", Understanding Early Classic Copan, pp. 265-295, Ellen E. Bell, Marcello A. Canuto y Robert Sharer (eds.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Tiesler, Vera, Oswaldo Chinchilla, Julio Chi Keb, Saúl Chay y Oswaldo Gómez

"Fuego y sacrificio durante el Clásico Temprano: los restos humanos del Entierro PP7TT-01, Tikal", XXVI Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2012, pp. 445-456, Bárbara Arroyo y Luis Alberto Méndez (eds.). Guatemala: Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, Instituto de Antropología e Historia y Asociación Tikal.

Tiesler, Vera y Andrew K. Scherer (eds.)

Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Vega Villalobos, María Elena

La historia de Ceibal en la época Clásica, tesis de maestría en Estudios Mesoamericanos. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Programa de Posgrados en Estudios Mesoamericanos, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas.

El gobernante maya. Historia documental de cuatro señores del periodo Clásico. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Fideicomiso Felipe Teixidor y Monserrat Alfau de Teixidor.

Vega Villalobos, María Elena, Moisés Aguirre y José Crasborn

"Entre escultores, textos e imágenes: la Estela C de Quiriguá", XXV Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2011, pp. 1050- 1060, B. Arroyo, L. Paiz, y H. Mejía (eds.). Guatemala: Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, Instituto de Antropología e Historia y Asociación Tikal.

Velásquez García, Erik

"Iconografía real de K'ahk Tiliw Chan Yo'aat: política y fundación del mundo en Quiriguá, Guatemala", La imagen política, XVI Congreso Internacional de Historia del Arte, pp. 113-146. México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas.

"Los dioses remeros mayas y sus posibles contrapartes nahuas, Acta Mesoamericana, 22: 115-131.

Voss, Alexander W.

"Astronomía y matemáticas", Los mayas. Una civilización milenaria, pp. 131-143, Nikolai Grube (ed). Colonia: Kónemann.

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culto al fuego; mitos del fuego; rituales de poder; ceremonias de encendido del fuego; comunicación con los antepasados

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El lenguaje ritual del fuego en los mayas del Periodo Clásico: Un acercamiento | Nájera Coronado | Estudios de Cultura Maya

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Agurcia Fasquelle, Ricardo "Rosalila: templo del rey Sol en Copán", Los mayas. Señores de la creación: los orígenes de la realeza sagrada, pp. 72-74, Virginia M. Fields y Dorie Reents-Budet (eds.). México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Bell, Catherine Ritual.

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Citation: Parks, L. & Walker, J. (2020). Disaster media: Bending the curve of ecological disruption and moving toward social justice. Media+Environment, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.13474.

Annotation: This week, I chose an article from two feminist scholars from UC Santa Barbara, Lisa Parks and Janet Walker. In this article, they define disaster media as “the project of attuning to ways that media are both complicit in the amplification of disastrous occurrence and helpful in the provision of reckoning and relief, support and succor” (4). They look at disaster media through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how satellite media and data visualizations link coronavirus capitalism with digital capitalism.

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Citation: Rivers, L. P. (2007). A genealogy of media regulation in South Africa since 1892. South African Law Journal(124)3.

Annotation: Patric Lynn Rivers highlighted how Apartheid survived in post-apartheid media regulation. He underscored that remnants remain even as a post-apartheid agency like the Film and Publication Board (FPB) deploys a regulatory method grounded in the 'classification' and 'certification' of media, as opposed to the outright 'censorship' wielded by the apartheid state. These observations and findings about the history of media regulation in South Africa since 1892 provide readers with insights on how “traditional” media evolves in various contexts and what practices and structures were put in place to achieve such transformation.

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Abstract

Apartheid survives in post-apartheid media regulation. Remnants remain even as a post-apartheid agency like the Film and Publication Board (FPB) deploys a regulatory method grounded in the 'classification' and 'certification' of media, as opposed to the outright 'censorship' wielded by the apartheid state.

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A genealogy of media regulation in South Africa since 1892 : note

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Apartheid survives in post-apartheid media regulation. Remnants remain even as a post-apartheid agency like the Film and Publication Board (FPB) deploys a regulatory method grounded in the 'classification' and 'certification' of media, as opposed to the outright 'censorship' wielded by the apartheid state.

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Citation: Towns, A. (2019) Black “Matter” Lives. Women's Studies in Communication 41 (4). DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2018.1551985

Annotation: In this essay, Towns also considers the elemental media proposed by Peters to consider the Black and female body. This seems to extend from the last Towns reading that we did by first focusing on the “vibrant matter” of Jane Bennet to discuss “Black female slave bodies, and Black bodies in general, function as media through which Western conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality are materialized” (3). Towns references the last essay but now is extending to think more specifically on the Black female body as “…a vehicle through which man continued to maintain his dominance over nature,” and then references the distinction between matter and media from The Marvelous Clouds (6). While avoiding the discussion, specifically, of elemental media, Towns is drawing attention to how the bodies of Black women perpetuate the Western coloniality. Instead, he draws more specificity to the way Peters discusses McLuhan’s ideas to think about how the bodies at the center of the essay are extensions in the same way the ship or fire are: tools of Westernization.

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Abstract

Since its inception, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has opened space for three interrelated discourses on the polysemic nature of matter, but so far two have dominated Black and communication studies. First, the BLM organization promotes the thought that Black lives, as human lives, should matter enough to convict White people of the murder of unarmed Black people. Second, some argue that while BLM is an important organization, historically, the lives of Black people in the West have not mattered. The third discourse, one suggested in the growing work of Black feminist new materialism, is more complicated, as it inherently calls into question the human: Why do Black lives equal matter? This article interrogates the relationship between blackness, matter, and communication to argue that racial violence situates Black bodies as matter/"elemental media" necessary for the materialization of Western (White) man as the dominant raced, gendered genre of humanity.

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Abstract Since its inception, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has opened space for three interrelated discourses on the polysemic nature of matter, but so far two have dominated Black and communication studies. First, the BLM organization promotes the thought that Black lives, as human lives, should matter enough to convict White people of the murder of unarmed Black people.

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Citation: Furuhata, Y. (2019) Of dragons and geoengineering: rethinking elemental media. Media+Environment 1 (1). https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10797.

Annotation: This is a direct response to the elemental media conceptions of The Marvelous Clouds. Furuhata is asking the reader to not just consider the four Greek elements, but instead the Eastern five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, water. By focusing specifically on the high rise buildings of China with “dragon holes” on the side, she breaks down the building through Peters conception and argues for the five elements to be considered instead as a decolonial move and a materialist move. She argues that the focus on the Greek elements is another example of Westernized colonialism and that elemental media are inherently political with prior conceptions and considerations of the infrastructures in place.

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Of Dragons and Geoengineering: Rethinking Elemental Media | Published in Media+Environment

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Citation: Brizzi, Y. C. (2021) Ontological Drawings: A collaborative method for research with Amerindian societies. Espaço
Ameríndio, Porto Alegre, v. 15, n. 2, p. 285-309

Annotation: The study of Amerindian onthologies and the understanding of their epistemologies, diverse as they are, have been historically ignored or demeaned by eurocentric modes of analysis and understanding of the organized written language as superior to any other form of shaping media and technologies of those peoples. Through extensive bibliographical research, Cacela Brizzi seeks to exemplify what can be retrieved from drawings and graphisms from many distinct Amerindian ethnicities, exploring those ontologies and what does the imagetic record represent in their relationship with the world.

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Citation: Coupaye, L. The living shape of time
Time and technics in the case of Abulës-speakers yams. in Fortis, P., & Küchler, S. (2021). Time and Its Object: A Perspective from Amerindian and Melanesian Societies on the Temporality of Images (1st ed.). Routledge.

Annotation: A fascinating dive in the ceremonies revolving aroung the long yam cultivation by the Abulës-speaking people of the Maprik area (Papua New Guinea). The yams, more than food and ancestral signifiers, are a living medium through which these populations experience an unique temporality, which permeates their organization and experience of time and space. An detailed example of the phenomena of technologies and medium through the natural world, shaping the world as being shaped by it, Peters explores in his book.

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Citation: Sulehria, F. (2018). Introduction In Media Imperialism in India and Pakistan (pp. 1-43). Routledge.

Annotation: Sulehria states that, both in India and Pakistan, “globalization is reinforcing media imperialism”. The media and entertainment industries in these countries appear to be dependent on the West, both in terms of the use of technology and content. Similarly, the biggest TV advertisers in both countries are western multinationals, thus expanding their markets and reaching a wider audience. Farooq Sulehria gives a different view of the globalization of media, indicating how this has impacted local and cultural content, thus promoting a colonized view.

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Examining anew the notions of media imperialism and globalization of media, this book disrupts the generalised consensus in media scholarship that globalization of media has put an end to media imperialism. One elemental aspect of media imperialism is the structural dependency of television systems in the global South on the imperial North. Taking India and Pakistan as its case studies, this book views globalization of media as the unleashing of processes that have translated into the liberalization of air waves and privatization of television systems whereby commercialization of television is privileged over public interest television. Additionally, it argues that the globalization of media has contributed to corruption, tabloidization, and marginalization of subaltern classes in the Indian and Pakistani media.

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Examining anew the notions of media imperialism and globalization of media, this book disrupts the generalised consensus in media scholarship that globalization of media has put an end to media imperialism. One elemental aspect of media imperialism is the structural dependency of television systems in the global South on the imperial North.

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ISBN: 9780262539739

Citation: Philip, Kavita. "The Internet will be Decolonized." Your Computer is on Fire. MIT Press, 2021.

Annotation: “The Internet Will Be Decolonized” by Kavita Phillip,takes a “material, infrastructural view” of the internet and the ways in which the political choices embodied in its materiality are inherently entwined with the knowledge created from and through it.

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Citation: Costanza-Chock, Sasha. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. MIT Press, 2020. {open access text}

Annotation: "Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need" by Sasha Constanza-Chock, considers who is left out when we utilize “universal” design approaches and offers ways that we can challenge this type of structural inequality.

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An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.
What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? "Design justice" is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world.

This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people-specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)-and invites readers to "build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability." Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.
Chapters of Design Justice will be made OA on a monthly basis.

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An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival. What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? "Design justice" is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities.

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ISBN: 9780415906166

Citation: Yoshimoto, M. “Images of Empire: Tokyo Disneyland and Japanese Cultural Imperialism.” In Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, edited by Eric Smoodin, p. 181-202. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Annotation: Yoshimoto takes a postmodernist look at the success of Tokyo Disneyland, pushing back against the idea of the park being an example of the cultural imperialism of Disney’s global media empire. He argues that viewing Tokyo Disneyland in that way is too reductive of an argument because is views Japan, despite being an economic powerhouse, as still culturally a third world country with its obsession with western culture. It also assumes that the domination of the world by western powers cannot change once it happens. Tokyo Disneyland is instead an example of the neocultural imperialism of Japan (p. 190-191). The park eliminates symbols of American nationalism and adapts them to fit the Japanese audience, and repackages American culture as something to be bought and sold. Japan has an active role in adapting, consuming, and shaping the culture of Disneyland to suit their needs rather than being passive recipients of American culture. While this article is interesting, I wonder if its use of postmodern theory makes its critique of Tokyo Disneyland inadequate as Grosfoguel (2008) argues.