InsUrgent Media from the Front

Description

In the 1940s, it was 16 mm film. In the 1980s, it was handheld video cameras. Today, it is cell phones and social media. Activists have always found ways to use the media du jour for quick and widespread distribution.

InsUrgent Media from the Front takes a look at activist media practices in the 21st century and sheds light on what it means to enact change using different media of the past and present. Chris Robé and Stephen Charbonneau's edited collection uses the term "insUrgent media" to highlight the ways grassroots media activists challenged and are challenging hegemonic norms like colonialism, patriarchy, imperialism, classism, and heteronormativity. Additionally, the term is used to convey the sense of urgency that defines media activism. Unlike slower traditional media, activist media has historically sacrificed aesthetics for immediacy. Consequently, this "run and gun" method of capturing content has shaped the way activist media looks throughout history.

With chapters focused on indigenous resistance, community media, and the use of media as activism throughout US history, InsUrgent Media from the Front emphasizes the wide reach media activism has had over time. Visibility is not enough when it comes to media activism, and the contributors provide examples of how to refocus the field not only to be an activist but to study activism as well. 

Foreword. "Then and Now: A Comparative POV on Activist Media" by John D.H. Downing
Introduction. "Insurgent Projections" by Chris Robé and Stephen Charbonneau
I. US Radical Histories
1. Tanya Goldman / Men and Dust, Labor Advocacy, and Alternative Film Distribution, 1939-1942
2. Angela Aguayo / Subjugated Histories as Affective Resistance: U.S. Abortion Documentaries, Middle-Class Resistance, and Botched Political Subjectivity
3. Alexandra Juhasz and Sam Feder / Setting the Terms of Our Own Visibility: A Conversation between Sam Feder and Alexandra Juhasz on Trans Activist Media in the United States
4. Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr / Seeing What the Patrimony Didn't Save, Alternative Stewardship of the Activist Media Archive: A Conversation between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr
II. Indigenous Resistances and Indigenous Issues in Canada, US, and Australia
5. Lisa Gye, Daniel Marcus, Oliver Vodeb, Kristy-Lee Horswood and Sam Burch / Coming to the Fire: Collaboration across Cultures in Media Activism
6. Ezra Winton / The Program(ming) is Political: Documentary, Festivals and the Politics of Programming
7. Dorothy Kidd / Mobilizing with Video in the Extractive Zone
8. Kristi Kouchakji and Jason W. Buel / Analog No More: Idle No More as Digital Nation
9. Ezra Winton / Letting it Seep In: Ojibwe Filmmaking Duo Adam and Zack Khalil
Discuss Political Filmmaking as Covert Ops
III. Community Media in the Americas and Asia
10. Ruth Goldman / Media Activism through Community: A Case Study of Squeaky Wheel/Buffalo Media Resources
11. Chun Chun Ting / Community Organizing and Media Activism: The Case of v-artivist in Hong Kong*
12. Kara Andrade / WhatsApp Messaging and Murder in Mexico
13. Ben Lenzner / Film, Video, and Digital Media Activism Collection: Regional Video Activism in India—Video Volunteers, Community & Empowerment
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Patriarchy
• Political opportunity
• Grassroots
• Social change
• Indigenous
• Advocacy
• Heteronormativity
• Class discrimination
• Social sciences
• Media studies
• Activism
• Community
• Digital

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253051424
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

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2020 by Indiana University Press.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-05138-7 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-05139-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-05140-0 (ebook)
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CONTENTS
Foreword: Then and Now: Comparative POV on Activist Media, by John D. H. Downing
Introduction: InsUrgent Projections, by Chris Rob and Stephen Charbonneau
I. US Radical Histories
1 Men and Dust , Labor Advocacy, and Alternative Film Distribution, 1939-1942 / Tanya Goldman
2 Subjugated Histories as Affective Resistance: US Abortion Documentaries, Middle-Class Resistance, and Botched Political Subjectivity / Angela Aguayo
3 Setting the Terms of Our Own Visibility: A Conversation between Sam Feder and Alexandra Juhasz on Trans Activist Media in the United States / Sam Feder and Alexandra Juhasz
4 Seeing What the Patrimony Didn t Save: Alternative Stewardship of the Activist Media Archive-A Conversation between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr / Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr
II. Indigenous Resistances and Indigenous Issues in Canada, the United States, and Australia
5 Coming to the Fire: Collaboration across Cultures in Media Activism / Sam Burch, Lisa Gye, Kristy-Lee Horswood, Daniel Marcus, and Oliver Vodeb
6 The Program(ming) Is Political: Documentary, Festivals, and the Politics of Programming / Ezra Winton
7 Mobilizing with Video in the Extractive Zone / Dorothy Kidd
8 Idle No More as Digital Nation / Kristi Kouchakji and Jason W. Buel
9 Letting It Seep In: Ojibwe Filmmaking Duo Adam and Zack Khalil Discuss Political Filmmaking as Covert Ops / Ezra Winton
III. Community Media in the Americas and Asia
10 Media Activism through Community: A Case Study of Squeaky Wheel/Buffalo Media Resources / Ruth Goldman
11 Community Organizing and Media Activism: The Case of v-artivist in Hong Kong / Chun Chun Ting
12 WhatsApp Messaging and Murder in Mexico / Kara Andrade
13 Film, Video, and Digital Media Activism Collection: Regional Video Activism in India-Video Volunteers, Community, and Empowerment / Ben Lenzner
List of Contributors
Index
FOREWORD
Then and Now: Comparative POV on Activist Media
John D. H. Downing *
A LERTNESS TO WHERE WE HAVE COME FROM, IN media activism as in all political engagement, is essential to gauging how best we should direct our energies in the present. Hopefully these personal reflections, requested by the editors, will help. For these reflections, I have drawn on my fifty-plus years of experience of the various media that have emerged in social movements, have helped to generate movement activism in the first place, and, when movements have ebbed, have generated space for urgently needed debate and reflection. I have also drawn on my experience of dissident sparks that have flashed here and there in mainstream media and, not to be forgotten, dissonant angles of vision emerging in-often despite-K-12 education. Readers are invited to consider throughout the contrasts and/or resonances with their own shaping as regards media activism. My experience is based on the years from 1956 to 1980 in England, mostly London, and from 1980 to the time of this writing in various US locations. This binational exposure has been expanded at various points in time by studying activist media in Italy, Germany, Portugal, late Soviet-era Russia, and Poland in some depth.
These were, to be sure, only some of the global locations where insurgent filmmakers, later joined by video makers, did their work. Italian, French, Indian, Brazilian, Argentinean, Chilean, Cuban, and Senegalese neorealist and documentary cinemas of the 1960s, often drawing on early Soviet cinema innovations, made major contributions. Britain s northern social realist films are discussed below. India s parallel cinema began in the 1950s. FEPACI (the F d ration Panafricaine des Cin astes) began in 1970 in Dakar. Notable international filmmakers conferences in Algiers (1973) and Buenos Aires (1974) pushed the envelope still further. Around this time, too, activists seized upon the lightweight-at least compared to a 35 mm film camera!-camcorder. Boyle (1997) offers many examples of those early video days from the United States. 1 .
In what follows, activist media communication is addressed wherever it occurs. That is to say, no either-or, mainstream-or-activist media scenario is in view. Some instances are taken from mainstream sources. The media sphere s domination by capital and the state is heavy but porous to a degree. Furthermore, the instances selected below from my earlier biography are meant to illustrate how media activism is never a purely intellectual operation, a rational fact-counterfact juxtaposition. Media activists at their best engage with the imagination, with feeling, with pent-up frustration with the status quo, with humor, with sarcasm, with the absurd, with the utopian, with evocative personal histories, and with the iron processes of state violence and capital s maneuvers.
Another crucial dimension highlighted by my own development is how a variety of activist media may build layers of political awareness over time, rather than in some kind of blinding flash. Especially in the ultra-high-speed world of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, instantaneous mobilizations have caught the public imagination during their era of novelty. Yet digital connective media can equally be used to feed the maturation of political insight, to aid the necessarily long, drawn-out processes 2 . of debating together toward building a social movement and of learning from reflecting collectively on ongoing activism. The long haul, the long revolution, is no flash mob. Think of how long women s suffrage had to be battled for or how long before slavery was banished from the Americas.
What Shaped Me and My Generation in the UK Post-World War II?
I was the last child of a colonial irrigation engineer and a clergyman s daughter, brought up in wartime and postwar northern England, and I spent a couple of years in Punjab and Kashmir. There was a sharp difference between austerity with grayness (England) and sun with house servants (India). My parents took their Christianity seriously, though, inviting Indians of all faiths to their dinner table- n ot the norm. Not the servants, though. They did, however, instantly insist I apologize when once I insulted the head servant. That stayed with me. Alertness to gender issues, beyond what might be called everyday fairness, had to wait till I read Sheila Rowbotham, Kate Millett, and Shulamith Firestone, in the early 1970s, and the British Sociological Association s 1974 annual conference focusing on sexual divisions, organized by Sheila Allen and Diana Leonard Barker.
Regarding my generation s shaping in Britain: it is impossible to understand the multifaceted eruptions of the mid-1960s unless we link together the organized labor movement s size and militancy with the increasing irritation among the teenage baby boomers at conventional taboos, dress, restraints, austerity, snobbery, and elite hypocrisy. Furthermore, the Red Scare, Hooverism, and McCarthyism were rather faintly echoed in British public life, the Cold War conflict lines being far less sharply drawn than in France or the United States.
Sited very loosely midway between Moscow and Washington, DC, Britain, in common with other European nations, stood certain to be incinerated if a nuclear holocaust erupted. War logic required the other side s missiles to be put out of action instantly, and many US missiles were stationed in the UK. This led to a certain, shall we say, coolness among the British public toward both superpowers, and incredulous amusement at the duck-and-cover civil defense strategy promulgated in K-12 schools, if people heard about it.
This did not stop public admiration for many features of American life or simultaneous resentment among quite a few at the United States shift into superpower status, permanently squashing Britain s imperial top-dog vanities. For a younger generation, though, procolonial flag waving was often seen as the laughable hobby of stuffy old farts.
Back to the austerity question for a moment, though. Nineteen fifty-four marked forty straight years of sacrifice, austerity, anxiety, and loss since the beginning of World War I (1914, not 1917), followed by the Depression in the 1930s, the Second World War ( six years for the UK, with sustained bombing), and an economy ravaged by industrial-area bombing. Then peace meant that the purpose of austerity and sacrifice vanished, with only necessity left. The abrupt demand for US Lend-Lease repayment in August 1945 shook the UK economy at its weakest point. It meant that rationing of food and other staples continued for nine years after the war s end, finally finishing in 1954.
These are just some of the salient cultural dimensions of the period in Britain within which activist and dissonant media-in the widest sense of media, including murals,