Volume 4, Issue 1

Spatial fixing was an integral part of maintaining imperial power structures throughout the colonial period, and like other discourses, it later found itself reproduced in cinema. As such, the physical and mental use of space has become key to the dissemination of ideological messages in many films. Confronting this tendency, this study applies theories of postcolonialism to selected examples of contemporary Hollywood film to examine how far it reconstructs traditional binaries of space. This investigation finds that despite attempts to disseminate more culturally sensitive and globally-minded portrayals of the Other, space remains particularly problematic. It also remains vital to storytelling narratives of race, gender, class and society in consideration of the film cases analysed in this study. While Fanonian notions of space continue to permeate cinema—with Total Recall and Avatar in particular drawing upon stereotypical motifs, it is possible to observe developments upon these discourses. Elysium and District 9 exemplify this, with each feature employing space to address increased questioning of US cultural superiority since the failed Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and the 2008 global economic crash.

This article examines the construction of transcultural identity as it results from the process of border crossing in Tahir Shah’s The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca (2007. London: Bantam Books). Whereas mobility is mostly characterized by the movement from north to south, The Caliph’s House describes an inverted motion from England to Casablanca in search for belonging. With his roots in Afganistan and historical ties with Morocco, Tahir Shah provides new narrative lines that delve into questions of alterity, mobility, and negotiating difference when crossing borders. With this in mind, I aim to show how alterity is refracted within the migrant’s identity. In so doing, I seek to clarify how this refraction helps in producing forms of selves that recognize all notions of silences and transform them metonymically into moments of conversation. With the help of Stephen Clingman’s theory on transnational literature, I will show that integration can be achieved successfully when difference is negotiated as part of the process of bordering.

This article aims at exploring the subversive nature of two Sinophone Malaysian cultural products, namely “Bie zai tiqi” (2002) a short story by Ho Sok Fong and You Mean the World to Me (2017), a full-length feature film by director Saw Teong Hin. I argue that, despite their differences, both fictional products use powerful metafictional and metanarrative devices to challenge factuality. In doing so, they not only blur the fine line between fiction and reality, but they also question cultural power dynamics and ethnic politics in Malaysia. Moreover, they defy the truthfulness of Mandarin as the preferred Sinitic cultural language as well as the idea that, in Malaysia, literature and film can be considered Malaysian only if produced in Malay, the official language of the country. By performing an analysis of the linguistic choices made by Ho Sok Fong and Saw Teong Hin, I will suggest that both the short story and the feature film analysed in this article use metafiction and metanarration to subvert widely-accepted, yet problematic, notions of national culture and common ethnic language.

According to the philosopher Fabián Ludueña, before biopolitics, Rome and Greece put in motion the zoopolitics of an Anthropotechnical machine. The practice of expositio is the foundational zoopolitical human gesture. It consisted of leaving new-born children exposed at street markets to be sold as slaves, or in nature, left to survive (or die). The spectres of those body-minds still haunt our onto-epistemologies: by creatively fabulating with Ludueña’s work, I suggest looking back to the broken chains of the production of able bodies instead of perpetuating the reproductive futurity. Ludueña’s work investigates how and why the figure of the spectre gradually disappeared from the discursive milieu, and why it needs to be brought back into the spotlight. Its potential resides in its existence between binary categories like God and human, man and animal, male and female. It queers, defying epistemological boundaries, what it means to be dead or alive. Melanie Yergeau employs the term “neuroqueer” to talk about the non-neurotypical and queer subjectivities that are a continuum of indiscernibility and are violently dislodged into binary categories. In the conclusion, I argue for operationalising the concept of the spectre to help to short-circuit the able-neurotypical and heteronormative futurism, looking back to the ghosts of the exposed children.

In Sisyphus Outdone (2012), Nathanaël’s particular tribute to Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), the reader faces a challenging hybrid text in which the verbal and visual dimensions intermingle to produce an idiosyncratic type of narrative. Fragmentary, elliptical, a web of quotations, dictums, and meditations on the difficult condition of the individual in the current image-saturated scenario of the first decades of the 21 st century, the text manages to propose a rigorous reflection upon crucial aspects of representation from History and temporality, to the Subject now, photography, catastrophe theory, architecture, failure and translation, among the most salient. Sisyphus , I suggest, exhibits a strategic photopoetics which operates as a self-reflective mechanism contributing to the persistence of an impermanent liminal subject and to the (re)production of textuality and the proliferation of voices against silence.

Contemporary times have triggered for an interdisciplinary cusp between disciplines that were conventionally read in a hinged academic encore. The Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ near Allahabad city where three holy rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati converge, is believed to be the holiest riverscape as one drop of amrit (nectar) during ocean churning by Gods and demons fell into its water and therefore, bathing and dipping in this sangam or confluence is considered auspicious. It is not that people only experience such spiritual values, rather internalize the same, even sometimes beyond religious restraints formulating a holistic human and ecological bonding. Therefore, river or for that matter riverscape like sangam transcends the environmental physical boundary to the living one as it shapes people’s experiences and accordingly adds meaning in their lives. Indian English author Neelum Saran Gour’s fictional representation of the riverscape of Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ in her select writings like Allahabad Aria (2015), Invisible Ink (2015), and Requiem in Raga Janki (2018) are woven within the interdisciplinary framework of ‘eco-spirituality’. The present research will examine how riverscape as an eco-spiritual entity shapes individuals’ experiences and helps them to locate the ‘self’ both in vyashti (the individual) and samashti (the collective) scale.

Women’s activism within various ethnic groups in Nigeria dates back to the pre-colonial era, with notable heroic leaders, like Moremi of Ife, Amina of Zaria, Emotan of Benin, Funmilayo Kuti, Margaret Ekpo and many others. The participation of Nigerian women in the Beijing Conference of 1995 led to a stronger voice for women in the political landscape. Several women’s rights groups have sprung up in the country over the years. Notable among them are the Federation of Nigerian Women’s Societies (FNWS), Women in Nigeria (WIN), Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (KIND) and Female in Nigeria (FIN). However, majority have failed to actualize significant political, social or economic growth. This paper examines the challenges and factors leading to their inability to live up to people’s expectations. Guided by patriarchy and liberal feminism theories, this paper utilizes both historical and descriptive methods to examine these factors. The paper argues that a lack of solidarity among women’s groups, financial constraints, unfavourable political and social practices led to the inability of women’s groups in Nigeria to live up to the envisaged expectations. The paper concludes that, for women’s activist groups to survive in Nigeria, a quiet but significant social revolution is necessary among women. Government should also formulate and implement policies that will empower women politically, economically and socially.

This paper explores women’s activism and political engagement in contemporary Pakistan. In this exploration with self-identified liberal and conservative groups of women, emerged their experiences and narratives about Feminism and Nationalism with a common moderator being religious affiliations . In this qualitative and phenomenological exploration, the informants belonged to various self-identified liberal and conservative women-led organizations. To this end, 20 women (age-range 23-48 years) were interviewed. Results indicated that gender roles and feminism were seen very differently between the two groups; gender and national identity were closely associated with Islamic values and there was a negative association between nationalism and feminist ideology. Women from liberal organizations, mostly feminists, emphasized pro-public-sphere engagement of women, rebelling against religious fundamentalism. On the contrary, many self-reported conservative women proclaimed nationalist, anti-feminists (they did not identify as Islamic feminists) and pro-private-sphere engagement of women. Many of the liberal informants complained about Pakistan’s misogynistic society and hurdles they faced in demanding equal opportunities for women. This research has implications for gender equality and female identity in the context of nationalism, women’s mobility and entitlement to the public sphere. The study also has applied significance for prejudices and stereotypes that make it difficult for women, to break away from fixed categories of gender role expectations. This paper informs academics and practitioners on socially and politically engaged Pakistani women’s views regarding these narratives. The study concluded that women’s activism is influenced by their religious views and their religious interpretation of feminism and nationalism in Pakistani society.

The aim of this article is to pay tribute to Marielle Franco, a Brazilian LGBTQ+ Black activist from the favela who was brutally executed in March 14, 2018. Taking Marielle’s life and death as a case study, I will demonstrate how she embodied Black feminist theory and practice and how her execution can be better addressed by situating it within the context of spatialities of race and the necropolitical governance of Rio de Janeiro.

The paper develops a concept of conviviality as a form of friendly togetherness that includes people, technical infrastructures and nature. Therefore, Marcel Mauss’s concept of the gift, different strands of thinking about conviviality (e.g. Ivan Illich), John Dewey’ experimentalism and the political theory and movement of convivialism are firstly depicted and discussed. The goal, secondly, is to integrate these various theoretical perspectives in order a) to better grasp already existent forms of conviviality and to b) develop an analytical and normative standpoint that on the one hand helps to evaluate unsustainable, non-convivial and on the other convivial forms of living together. Thus, such an analytical and normative model of modes of conviviality points out that associative self-organisation is decisive for the theory and practice of conviviality. Exchange without remuneration (between people and between people and nature) as well as self-organised gathering can be seen as the basis of a convivial social order which is differentiated from a solely instrumental, unsustainable and monetarily defined version of prosperity and the good life.

The article sets out the thesis that the social-ontological account based on the form of life concept can be used to analytically and normatively reflect alternative economies and their attempt to overcome capitalistic structures.2 To develop the thesis, I provide conceptual work on the “economic form of life”, pointing at its plasticity due to the general substitutability of economic practices. Against this background, I argue that Capitalism makes use of this plasticity to create a fully commodified, radical contingent form of life. Actors of alternative economies can wake up of from this dream world of Capitalism by using the substitutability of economic practices to deconstruct the capitalist form of life. The two most important practices for doing so are the practices of “in-sourcing” and “solidary out-sourcing”. They also reveal the normative kernel of conviviality, namely to seek to do justice to the economicity of human life. The paper ends with locating the presented form-of-life-account within the strand of literature on alternative economies.

In his book Tools for Conviviality (1975), Ivan Illich calls for human self-limitation in technology development. His aim is neither environmental protection nor the prevention of unforeseen side-effects of technology development, but the comprehensibility of technologies’ operating principles for the user. For if the construction or repairing of tools requires expert knowledge inaccessible to the public, this necessarily entails social imbalances in power. In a similar manner, Bernard Stiegler conceives the delegation of know-how to technological systems as a kind of proletarianization that ultimately may result in a loss of savoir-vivre. Without sweepingly rejecting the division of labour, automation or specialized knowledge, practices of commoning respond to such diagnoses: free software like GNU/Linux or open hardware largely succeed in unlinking the expert knowledge that advanced computing doubtlessly requires from problematic power effects. From this perspective, proprietary algorithms are problematic, as their lack of transparency prevents conviviality. This also holds for the practices of data aggregation and extraction which steadily increase the information gap between platform providers and users. An even more fundamental problem is posed by so-called “self-learning”, i.e., recursively adapting, algorithms: it is not clear how and to what extent the knowledge and instructions generated by “artificial intelligence” can be traced and reconstructed by human insight. Thus, we are confronted with a situation of potentially non-recoverable proletarianization and non-conviviality that exposes a renewed urgency of Illich’s considerations concerning technological self-limitation.

This article explores the use of agent-based modelling as a critical and playful form of engagement with cooperative housing organizations. Because of its inherent complexities vis-à-vis decision-making, commoning is a well-suited field of study to explore the potential of humanities-driven experimental design (media) research to provoke critical reflection, problem-finding and productive complication. By introducing two different agent-based models, the interdisciplinary research team discusses their experience with setting up parameters for modelling, their implications, and the possibilities and limits of employing modelling techniques as a basis for decision-making. While it shows that modelling can be helpful in detecting long-term results of decisions or testing out effects of unlikely yet challenging events, modelling might act as a discursive practice uncovering hidden assumptions inherent in the model setup and generating an increase of scientific uncertainty. The project “ThinkingToys for Commoning” thus argues for a critical modelling practice and culture, in which models act as toys for probing alternative modes of living together and exploring the constructedness of methods. In countering late forms of capitalism, the resulting situated and critical practice provides avenues for enabling more self-determined forms of governance.

Attitudes to digital communication technologies since the 1990s have been characterized by waves of optimism and pessimism, as enthusiasts have highlighted their democratic and liberating potentials, while critics have pointed to the socially, politically and psychologically deleterious consequences of unchecked digital capitalism. This paper seeks to develop an analytical framework capable of appreciating and assessing the capacities of such technologies both to genuinely enhance democratic agency, and to become tools through which capitalist power is enhanced with widespread negative consequences. The paper in particular deploys my concept of ‘potent collectivity’ in order to name the type of democratic agency that such media technologies can be seen both to enable and enhance under certain circumstances, and to inhibit under others. It also considers the affective qualities of ‘potent collectivity’, and in particular the utility of a Deleuzo-Spinozan concept of ‘collective joy’ as designating the affective quality typical of ‘potent collectivity’. The paper uses the specific example of left-wing political activism in the UK during the period 2015-17 to illustrate the potential for platform technologies to enable new forms of democratic mobilization, while arguing for an analytical position that eschews any simple celebration of the liberating potential of new technologies; remaining sensitive to the negative features of ‘platform capitalism’.