This book engages with the idea of the Global South through cinema as a concept of resistance; as a space of decolonialisation; and as an arena of virtuality, creativity and change. It opens up a dialogue amongst scholars and filmmakers from the Global South: India, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, and Egypt. The essays in the volume approach cinema as an intertwined process of both production and perception not divorced from the economic, social, political and cultural. They emphasise film as a visual medium where form, structure and content are not separable. Through a wide array of film-readings, the authors explore the concept of a southern cinematic esthetics, in particular, and the concept of the Global South in general. The volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of film and media studies, critical theory, cultural studies and Global South studies.
The volume is ideal for graduate and undergraduate courses on the long sixties, political cinema, 1968, and new waves in art history, cultural studies, and film and media studies.
The Western in the Global South investigates the Western film genre's impact, migrations, and reconfigurations in the Global South. Contributors explore how cosmopolitan directors have engaged with, appropriated, and subverted the tropes and conventions of Hollywood and Italian Westerns, and how Global South Westerns and Post-Westerns in particular address the inequities brought about by postcolonial patriarchy, globalization and neoliberalism. The book offers a wide range of historical engagements with the genre, from African, Caribbean, South and Southeast Asian, Central and South American, and transnational directors. The contributors employ interdisciplinary cultural studies approaches to cinema, integrating aesthetic considerations with historical, political, and gender studies readings of the international appropriations and U.S. re-appropriations of the Western genre.
Southern Screens: Cinema, culture and the global South adopts a transversal south-south approach to the study of screen culture across national and cultural territories. It examines the conditions by which screen culture participates in the generation, sharing, and circulation of new knowledge that is both southern and about the global South. The contributors, all of them residents of the world’s southernmost nations, examine new and traditional media that manifests an affinity with southern cultural imaginaries and territories identifiable through the sociological category of "Global South." Some of their chapters engage in analysis linked to specific national contexts, others follow comparative approaches to screen culture across national, regional, and socio-historical borders. Sketching a new tapestry of references to other areas of southern social science and cultural theory, Southern Screens traces a critical genealogy that here finds a productive place within an emerging, comparative discussion of the screen cultures of the Global South. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies.
This book provides an overview of the cinemas of Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia, interpreting some of the recent developments as strategic responses to globalisation. Highlighting transnational and cross-cultural structures, influences and themes.
This volume adopts a transversal South-South approach to the study of visual culture in transnational, transcultural, and geopolitical contexts. Every day hundreds of people travel back and forth between southern countries, including Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, New Zealand, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and South Africa. With these people travel cultures, experiences, memories, and images. This creates the conditions for the generation, sharing, and circulation of new knowledge that is both southern and about the South as a specific kind of material and imaginary territory (or territories). It does so through the study of the southern hemisphere’s screen cultures, addressing the broad spectrum of cultural expression in both traditional and new screen media, including film, television, video, digital, interactive, and online and portable technologies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Arts.
For too long, the field of amateur cinema has focused on North America and Europe. In Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures, however, editors Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez fill the literature gap by extending that focus and increasing inclusivity. Through carefully curated essays, Salazkina and Fibla-Gutiérrez bring wider meaning and significance to the discipline through their study of alternative cinema in new territories, fueled by different historical and political circumstances, innovative technologies, and ambitious practitioners. The essays in this volume work to realize the radical societal democratization that shows up in amateur cinema around the world. In particular, diverse contributors highlight the significance of amateur filmmaking, the exhibition of amateur films, the uses and availability of film technologies, and the inventive and creative approaches of filmmakers and advocates of amateur film. Together, these essays shed new light on alternative cinema in a wide range of cities and countries where amateur films thrive in the shadow of commercial and conventional film industries.
Studying the case of Latin American cinema, this book analyzes one of the most public - and most exportable- forms of postcolonial national culture to argue that millennial era globalization demands entirely new frameworks for thinking about the relationship between politics, culture, and economic policies. Concerns that globalization would bring the downfall of national culture were common in the 1990s as economies across the globe began implementing neoliberal, free market policies and abolishing state protections for culture industries. Simultaneously, new technologies and the increased mobility of people and information caused others to see globalization as an era of heightened connectivity and progressive contact. Twenty-five years later, we are now able to examine the actual impact of globalization on local and regional cultures, especially those of postcolonial societies. Tracing the full life-cycle of films and studying blockbusters like City of God, Motorcycle Diaries, and Children of Men this book argues that neoliberal globalization has created a highly ambivalent space for cultural expression, one willing to market against itself as long as the stories sell. The result is an innovative and ground-breaking text suited to scholars interested in globalization studies, Latin-American studies and film studies.
This book undertakes an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural interrogation of the Global South through the prisms of media and cultural studies. It closely explores the quotidian (re)territorialization, and brazen ruination of the material geographies of this vast expanse of the world by forces and proxies of (neo)colonialism and global capitalism of resource extraction. We cite the ongoing expulsion of Palestinians from their homelands by occupational forces, the emerging detritus dump across Mexico City and Lagos, the infrastructural precariousness of the favelas of Brazil, the unending resource-war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the flagrant operation of the oil industry in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria as examples of this geographic cataclysm. The centripetal forces of neo-colonialism and resource extraction at full-flight in the Global South, aided by toxic hegemonic forces, have overtly tossed some of the population to the peripheries of existence and the society at large. As such, this book, additionally, explores the resistance of the subalterns from the margins to this socio-political malaise, and further unmasks the knowledge production from these margins of the Global South. This project is divided into five (5) parts of three essays each. The first part examines the territorial contestation in the Middle East framed and expressed through films and literary lenses. The second part examines the environmental burden of modern consumerism and urbanization on metropolis across Mexico, Brazil, and Nigeria, while the third part explores the attritional violence of resource extraction in the DRC, Brazil, and Nigeria via filmic and journalistic lenses. The fourth part offers a swift response from the margins through ethnographic and journalistic interrogation of the subjectivity of the subalterns of Brazilian favelas, and street artists. The fifth part offers an engaging critique of the political climates of South Africa and Brazil that reinforce the environmental catastrophe of the regions of the world.
This volume investigates the cultural sites where the global Cold War played out. It brings to view unpredictable encounters that arose as writers, artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals from or aligned with the Third World navigated the ideological and material constraints set by superpowers and emerging regional powers. Often these encounters generated communitas and solidarity, while at times they fed old and new conflicts. Pushing forward recent scholarship that tracks the Cold War in the Global South and draws on postcolonial approaches, our contributors use archival, secondary, and ethnographic sources to trace the afterlives and memories of key figures and to explore meetings that performed cultural diplomacy. Our focus on sites of encounter or exchange underscores the situated, interpersonal, and embodied dimensions through which much of the cultural Cold War was experienced. While the global conflict divided citizens along ideological fault lines, it also linked people through circulating media—novels, film, posters, journals, and theatre—and multinational conferences that brought artists, intellectuals, and political activists together. Such contacts introduced new axes of solidarity and hierarchies of exclusion. Examining these connections and disjunctures, this new and necessary mapping of the cultural Cold War highlights under-addressed locations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
