CS 411G

Decolonizing Media Studies

What does it mean to “decolonize” media studies? Conversely, what is colonial about media studies? This course takes its name and inspiration from the Summer 2018 “In Focus” dossier section of Cinema Journal, edited by members of the Decolonize Media Collective, Nicholas Mirzoeff and Jack Halberstam. Taking a media history and media archeology approach, this course will investigate media and mediation as forms of power/knowledge that have constructed landscapes, territories, people groups, criminals, “moderns” and “primitives.” We will read historical accounts of “picturing,” from land surveys, to casta portraiture, to museums and World Fairs, to early anthropological photography and film. We will examine the role of sound recordings in producing salvage ethnographies of “vanishing” cultures, civilizations, and primitivized “folks.” We will discuss the long durée of surveillance technologies, from the slave ship, to the passport photograph, to the mug shot. And we will approach race “and/as” media, and privacy/publicity as raced, gendered, and sexualized. Throughout, we will also examine counter-histories and performances of anti- and de-colonial resistance, often hidden in plain sight. Under this rubric, visual sovereignties, hidden transcripts of resistance, new technologies of the body, and relations across land/human/species divides will emerge. The final assignment will be a a praxis-based class “action” that will materialize and manifest decolonial activism in the present.