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- Volume 11, Issue 3, 2015
International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2015
Volume 11, Issue 3, 2015
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Embodying change: Cinematic representations of Indigenous women’s bodies, a cross-cultural comparison
More LessAbstractIndigenous women have been exoticized, objectified and hypersexualized throughout the history of cinema. As more Indigenous film-makers take the camera into their own hands, they challenge these representations and disrupt existing hierarchies of power. Here I examine the work of two Indigenous women film-makers, Tracey Moffatt (Aboriginal Australian) and Tracey Deer (Mohawk), whose films speak back to historical images of Native women. Rather than exotic objects of the man’s gaze, they are powerful agents of their own lives and identities. Through close readings of two films, Moffatt’s Nice Coloured Girls and Deer’s Club Native I argue that their work exemplifies a unique Indigenous aesthetic. Rooted in Fourth Cinema, this genre highlights such issues as performativity, motherhood and Indigenous women’s embodied experiences.
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Reading anger, compassion and longing in Beatrice Culleton Mosionier’s In Search of April Raintree
More LessAbstractThis article engages with polarizing debates about compassion by exploring the relationship between this emotional response and anger in Beatrice Culleton Mosionier’s In Search of April Raintree. While Martha Nussbaum argues that compassion functions as an ethical bridge linking one person to the next, affect theorists argue that compassion reaffirms unequal relations of power. This article maps the ways Mosionier’s novel might evoke the reader’s compassion, and investigates the role of this response by focusing on a narrative pattern where April experiences abuse, expresses intense anger at her suffering and then longs for markers of privilege such as white skin and affluence. This article contends that April’s anger interrupts the potential for passive compassion, and foregrounds the social stratification that gives rise to April’s suffering.
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In front of and behind the camera: Media images from Northern Norway
More LessAbstractBased on Bourdieu’s concept of ‘field’, and my own dual experience as a journalist and interviewee, I discuss ways in which editorial policies intervene in journalistic decision-making in documentaries included in the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s (NRK) Faktor series. The empirical material includes one documentary in which I was an interviewee, and two documentaries that I produced. In a reflexive way, I discuss two positions within the journalistic field, the journalist and the interviewee, and describe how journalistic intuition is required to comply with the NRK’s written guidelines and how, in addition, negotiations between the external producer and the NRK intervene in the film-making process. The article exemplifies these processes by analysing how certain polarizing representational practices become central to how interviewees are presented. The article deals with diversity and representations of the Sámi people and Northern Norway, and who gets to decide how this is expressed in documentary films.
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Disrupted translations: Legibility and identity in the works of Nadia Myre
More LessAbstractThis article examines two series of work by contemporary Algonquin French Canadian artist Nadia Myre, Indian Act (2000–2002) and Journey of the Seventh Fire (2008–2009). These two bodies of work, which combine typed document or corporate logo with traditional techniques of beadwork, address issues of identity, history and historiography in modern Aboriginal culture and life. By defining these works as objects mired in the problems of translation, I argue that they operate as strategies of negotiation between languages, writing systems, and legal structures through which asymmetrical power relationships are defined. Appropriating the tools of settler government and capitalist authority, Myre reinscribes these objects into handbeaded colour fields, redefining that authority in relationship to the peoples, histories, and territories they displace and seek to control. Her works assert the shifting, relational quality of identity formation through melded yet contradictory techniques and require new modes of reading the resultant blended texts.
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Sites of exuberance: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema, ten years on
More LessAbstractThe Ma-ori film-maker Barry Barclay used the term ‘Fourth Cinema’ to describe indigenous cinema, a philosophy based on his own practice as a director. He sought to privilege the indigenous gaze and the indigenous audience by centralizing te ao Ma-ori or the Ma-ori world-view in principle and in practice. However, much has changed in the world of film-making since Barclay developed his theory. The range of storytelling by Ma-ori on large and small screens has increased exponentially, and Ma-ori films such as Boy (Waititi, 2010) and Mt Zion (Kahi, 2013) have reached the top of the domestic box office, implying a wide Ma-ori and non- Ma-ori audience within the settler-centric culture of New Zealand. This article reviews and contextualizes Barclay’s philosophy. It then uses his central concepts to examine the feature Mt Zion, exploring aspects of the film’s text, production and distribution, to establish what conclusions can be drawn regarding the relevance of Barclay’s thinking to the practice of a new generation of Ma-ori film-makers.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 19 (2023)
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Volume 18 (2022)
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Volume 17 (2021)
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Volume 16 (2020)
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Volume 15 (2019)
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Volume 14 (2018)
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Volume 13 (2017)
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Volume 12 (2016)
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Volume 11 (2015)
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Volume 10 (2014)
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Volume 9 (2013)
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Volume 8 (2012)
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Volume 7 (2011)
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Volume 6 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 5 (2009)
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Volume 4 (2008)
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Volume 3 (2007)
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Volume 2 (2006 - 2007)
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Volume 1 (2005)