- Convenors:
-
Rajat Nayyar
(York University)
Rana El Kadi (Toronto Metropolitan University)
Jared Epp (Carleton University)
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- Discussant:
-
Karen Waltorp
(University of Copenhagen)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 7 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel highlights the importance of grounding our visual anthropology methodologies in decolonial ontologies and radical ethics: How can we imagine differently and co-create multimodal outputs that challenge narratives produced by capitalist and xenophobic media ecologies?
Long Abstract:
This panel extends our conversations at Emergent Futures CoLab (EFC) around ontological frameworks that may allow scholars to imagine differently in times of radical uncertainty. Visual anthropologists have recently been developing and employing creative methodologies to speculate and imagine new, alternative futures with their interlocutors (Culhane & Elliott, 2017; Salazar et al., 2017). As curators of Talking Uncertainty, EFC's online talk series and podcast, we have been hosting scholars engaging with futurisms within indigenous, disability, migration, and aging studies, among others. These discussions have alerted us to a serious issue: in our rush to take up innovative, often utopia-driven future-making methodologies, we risk imposing colonial frameworks of imagination (Kazubowski-Houston, 2020) and even our own potentially colonial desire for speculating new futures (Chandler, 2022). Such approaches can result in releasing images and stories that reinforce narratives produced by larger neoliberal, colonial, racist, sexist, xenophobic, and ableist media ecologies (Waltorp, 2022). These conversations have shown us the importance of grounding our methodologies in decolonial ontologies and radical ethics in order to avoid advancing the logic of enslavement, extractivism, and genocide (Manning, 2020). In this panel, we ask: How might decolonial ontologies inform our imaginative methodologies that allow us to become "radical bricoleurs," to co-create with humans and more-than-humans multimodal outputs that "cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system" (Alvarez Astacio et. al, 2021)? We invite papers that highlight how visual anthropologists and interlocutors are navigating these issues and critically gesturing towards decolonizing imagination in their work on speculative futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 7 March, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
Building on ethnographic fieldwork, this practice-based research experiments with multisensory storytelling technologies to co-create and negotatiate speculative futures according to the perceptions of the Nahuales of Milpa Alta, in Mexico City.
Paper long abstract:
Led by Gloria Anzaldúa's invitation (2015) to decolonise reality through Nepantla epistemology (understood as 'in-between' zones with the potential for transformation), this transdisciplinary project navigates the intersection of Indigenous Futurisms, Latinx queer feminist theory and decolonial research methods in order to trace the processes and implications of co-creating extended reality (XR) storytelling environments with indigenous knowledge guardians. Building on ethnographic fieldwork with the Nahuales of the Nahuatl-speaking cultural organisation, Calpulli Nahui Ollin in Milpa Alta, a rural municipality in the south of Mexico City, this practice-based research experiments with emergent forms of immersive and multisensory storytelling technologies to co-create, critically negotatiate and activate speculative futures according to the lifeworlds, narratives and alternate perceptions of the Nahuales of Milpa Alta.
The Calpulli Nahui Ollin offer a decolonising lens through which to understand the Nahual, a trickster entity typically understood by contemporary Mexicans to be bad brujos, evil sorcerers or shamanic shapeshifters who can turn into jaguars or curse a lover. According to the Calpulli Nahui Ollin, a Nahual is a person of wisdom (or knowledge guardian) who acquires ancestral knowledge about their local environment and plays a political role by imparting cosmic wisdom to their neighbourhood.
Paper short abstract:
“Las caras lindas”, sings Ismael Rivera, but just how pretty are Puerto Rican faces given their scarcity in film? This paper uses historical mis/representations of Puerto Ricans and the author’s own experiences to discuss the failure of Hollywood towards racial othering and autochthonous filmmaking.
Paper long abstract:
This paper works on two consecutive arguments: first, that the predominately White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant Hollywood film industry preys on an exoticism of racial “others” to perform stereotypes easily consumable by the American public eye. Using the primary example of Puerto Rican actors and characters in films such as West Side Story, it discusses how White-authored narratives trend towards a misunderstanding of non-autochthonous cultural representations that have damaging effects on the further representation of these cultures in American pop media. Secondly, it argues how the enfranchisement of creatives from “othered” backgrounds with storytelling autonomy leads to a greater sense of respect for the characters within the narrative and the culture. I cite the production process for my own film, The Only Good Thing, to show how the above-mentioned systematic issues originally discouraged me from writing for an all-Puerto Rican cast, only for luck to play its hand in giving in me a full set of Puerto Rican leads. I subsequently explore the history of representation of Puerto Ricans in film, both in front of and behind the camera, as well as provide a general analysis of the systematic failures by the corporative Hollywood industry to portray the aforementioned racial “others” in a respectful fashion. The paper concludes by arguing that the continued active participation of culturally autonomous creatives will lead to better representation and a greater diversity in filmmaking that cannot be provided by the current status-quo.
Paper short abstract:
I explore collaborative filmmaking as a means to centre unorthodox or outsider knowledge, to challenge conventions of meaning and value. While film allows novel forms of communicative encounter, what generative possibilities may be silenced due to disciplinary epistemic and aesthetic parameters.
Paper long abstract:
An interlocutor and I created a series of speculative ethnofiction films we called ethnographic B movies. Though poor in quality and absurdist in content, they provided an opportunity for my interlocutor to share his philosophical, sociopolitical and cosmological system called the Musicality of Reality. He has a PhD in sociology and had once taught at a Turkish university but for various reasons had ended up back in Toronto, Canada unhoused living in and out of shelters. As a self-professed failed academic, he maintains a desire to generate and share knowledge though an outsider to both the academy and contemporary mainstream. It is this knowledge that's centered in our films.
I present several filmic fragments that document his ideas as a way to bring them into an academic space. As a kind of decolonial practice, it is his own imagination and ideas, as he desired to present them, that are on display as opposed to my version of him rendered in an imposed ethnographic frame. Too often anthropologists render their interlocutors as specific kinds of subjects that fit neatly into disciplinary "slots" for the sake of communicability and epistemological relevancy. In a contemporary moment of weak attention and near infinite content, what space remains for multimodal ethnography that's off beat, requires deep audience investment or contains subject matter outside accepted contexts of inquiry. Within this media context and the need to be current what kinds of unique experiences and imaginative worlds go unnoticed?
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents experiments in XR in an Afghan-Danish film collective, asking: How might we craft and circulate anthropological knowledge in an algorithmic age drawing on multimodal registers and articulating with actors within film-, gaming-, and digital archives?
Paper long abstract:
Anthropology, born alongside colonialism and around the same time as photography, has grappled with its vices and the crisis of representation since the inception of the discipline. Practitioners of visual anthropology have been reckoning with this earlier than the mainstream of the discipline, due to its reach beyond the academe which afforded more immediate feedback from different audiences and publics, including from the communities and people portrayed. A new set of vices with regards to representation emerges in an algorithmically driven media ecology, where bias is inbuilt and reproducing at an unprecedented speed and scale. Might the virtues of anthropology (the long-term grounded work of ethnography and the critical inquiry) counter this and produce stories and images otherwise that circulate and have effects in the world? How might we craft and circulate anthropological knowledge in an algorithmic age drawing on multimodal registers and by articulating with actors within film-, gaming-, and museums? What are the opportunities and what are the inherent dangers? With a starting point in the joint efforts of the Afghan/Danish ARTlife Film Collective, this paper will discuss recent experiments in XR towards emerging forms of multimodal collaborations at DOX:LAB (https://cphdox.dk/cphlab/letter-to-bibijan/ ).