In Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes (2021), which I watched this spring while working on two articles related to decolonizing and de-westernizing film and media studies, this quote from Sven Lindqvist, intoned in Peck’s gravitas-heavy voice, felt most apropos: “You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.” In our disciplines, we have read enough for long enough about the imperative and urgent need to dismantle our Euro-American curricula and canons, to address the sustained epistemic violence of center-periphery logics, and to smash white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, colonial epistemes. It is not knowledge we lack.

Also this spring, I attended two spirited workshops on World Cinema[1] and global media at the SCMS conference.[2] In both, we remarked on how the usual suspects, often BIPOC scholars working on non-Western film and media, keep returning to participate in these vibrant conversations, expressing the same frustrations and hopes about opening up our disciplines beyond their sedimented, narrow West European and North American frameworks. It was in one of these workshops that Masha Salazkina, a scholar with an insightful oeuvre of writing on World Cinema, asked, “why aren’t we questioning the need for a World Cinema course in the first place?” Salazkina articulates this concern as well in her essay, “World Cinema as Method”: “World Cinema continues to be offered as a separate course that constitutes an “alternative” presenting parallel and separate developments, an addendum to the “mainstream” (European and North American) cinemas that at best responds to or is influenced by these, while implicitly maintaining the separation between the assumed “norm” and its “others.”[3]

The short reflection that follows responds to these generative provocations with a particular focus on pedagogical questions around teaching global media.[4] In responding to calls for decolonizing and de-imperializing university curricula, our courses need to foster global understandings of how media engage with the specific histories and workings of categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in order to aspire to a truly internationalist decolonial praxis. A pedagogy that centers film and media geopolitics is critical for unmasking power relations in knowledge production and in the maintenance of a dominant epistemic order. Globalizing the curriculum is essential to decolonizing it. Through reference to one of my courses, “Queer Cinemas around the World,” I reflect on my own recognition of how a critical global lens can move a course like that from the anodyne reform-oriented approach of the “coverage” model of teaching to a reckoning with queer geopolitics in all its unruly, polycentric, dissident proliferations.

Why Do We need Global Film and Media Survey Courses?

Where it exists at all, the coverage model of film and media studies pedagogy often restricts students’ exposure to non-Western media to “World Film History” and similar survey courses, so that, as Malini Guha remarks, the teaching and research of World Cinema becomes “merely a matter of coverage rather an epistemological shift that radically alters how we conceive of both cinema and the world.”[5] In this curricular imagination, World Cinema functions as “a “soft” (non-confrontational and all-inclusive) solution to the problem of Eurocentrism in the study of cinema.”[6] Instead of remaining siloed, forever operating in relation to the terms set by the Western core to its many epistemological margins, World Cinema (and other global media) can challenge its perception as “a peaceful universalist term”[7] by infiltrating and usurping the traditional film and media studies curriculum. The rich scholarship on World Cinema, area studies, postcolonial theory, and global queer studies I draw on here alerts us to the dangers of an additive model that is content in ensuring that an adequate variety of continents, hemispheres, identity formations etc. are represented in our courses. Rather, thinking globally foregrounds the importance of historicizing regions and power differentials within them so that our cine-cartographic imaginations are forever shifting between the categories of locality, region, nation, area, continent, world, planet in an overlapping system of folds and unfoldings, rendering the global as plastic, contingent, incommensurable, emergent, partial, mutable, and heterogeneous.

Rather than the stingy loan of a separate World Cinema survey course, what if this global imaginary infiltrated every film and media course? How would our “core” courses, such as, Introduction to Film, Media Theory, Film Analysis, Film Sound, etc. alter radically when we move away from their core Euro-American media and scholarly texts? The work of decentering the white Western canon must permeate all curricular design, including core graduate and undergraduate courses to the point where we will no longer require a World Cinema survey course as a separate offering. Where such courses currently labor to address and repair the structural erasure and dispossession effected by the Euro-American curriculum, truly globalizing our curricula has the potential to dismantle the foundational center-periphery framework of this “West and the rest” organizing principle.[8] Such a move would bring to a contentious but productive fore foundational aspects of our disciplines: their institutional histories; conceptual hegemonies; small, meager gestures towards inclusion; resistance to deep unsettling – all of which contribute to the epistemic violence of centering some texts and giving others their one course per year, one breadth requirement, a few representative media-makers and scholars.

Just imagining courses like Queer Film Festivals in the Global South, Global Superheroes, Streaming Media around the World, Global Cellphone Cultures, Cinemas of Insurrection, The Global 1960s etc. invites us to envision how globalizing our entire curriculum can nourish nuanced, granular, and textured media histories and theories that emerge from and respond to a wide range of texts and contexts. In such a world where hegemonic cartographies of media production, reception, and scholarship are disassembled, these courses would not even need “global” and “world” in their titles to signal their capacious ambit. Since we do not live in that world right now, it might not be possible – or wise – to abandon our World Cinema and other global media survey courses just yet, especially when they have been fought for by so many for so long. But knowing that utopias are horizons of expectation that drive our everyday practices, we may build daily towards a global, decentered, decolonial curriculum in our classrooms, syllabi, and institutional contexts.

We may demolish the abiding center-periphery framework and commit to building a robust internationalist decolonial curriculum in a number of ways.[9] One would be to eliminate the separate “non-Western” breadth requirement in so many graduate and undergraduate programs that makes ever so plain a Eurocentric curricular imagination. Another is to de-imperialize Eurocentric frameworks by foregrounding their local, regional provenance rather than enforced universal relevance.[10] As Bhaskar Sarkar trenchantly observes of the framing of modernity, “A handful of ascendant localisms – British, French, or German – usurp the place of the global, relegating vast segments of the globe to the proverbial boonies.”[11] One easy change that may be effected right away is to not leave courses focused predominantly on Euro-American texts unmarked, but rather to name those traditions so it is clear that they are not universal and timeless but situated, as much as any other course, in particular texts and traditions.[12] As a corollary to this, courses like “Film Theory,” “Media Theory,” “Avant-garde Cinema,” “Documentary Traditions” etc. should actually strive to be radically diverse if they are to carry such unmarked titles that make claims to universality.

Queer Geopolitics through Global Queer Cinemas

In his manifesto, “A Queer(’s) Cinema,” Manuel Betancourt declares that queer cinema is global cinema and queer cinema is not universal.[13] Through film and video from Kenya, Hong Kong, India, The Dominican Republic, South Korea, Spain, Palestine, Argentina, the US, South Africa, Colombia etc., my undergraduate “Queer Cinemas around the World” course attempts to move beyond the Euro-American focus of gender and sexuality studies, and of queer cinema courses to examine how “queer cinema enables different ways of being in the world and creates different worlds.”[14] A range of queer cinematic forms and spectatorial practices attune students to regional specificities in queer expression and representation. The critical global approach of the course has the potential to challenge multiple orders of knowledge – what is queerness, what is cinema, what is the world, and how might a hermeneutic of wandering help us move away from straight, homogenizing, hegemonic narratives of each?

Pointing out that within queer studies, “geopolitics provides the exemplars, but rarely the epistemologies,” Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel urge attentiveness to itinerant provincialisms so we may read histories of sexuality alongside histories of region and develop a queer hermeneutic that refuses the seductions of theoretical homing devices and origin sites in the West.[15] Wandering through the films on my syllabus that have particularly challenged students reveals something about the work required to develop a queer geopolitics and “new queer idioms of the geopolitical.”[16] A film like Dólares de Arena (Sand Dollars, Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas, 2014), set in the Dominican Republic, for instance, does a certain kind of work in a US-based classroom. Through its Afro-Dominican protagonist, Noeli, her brown Dominican boyfriend, and the much older white French woman she has a complicated sexual-economic relationship with, the film weaves into a transnational economy of desire and sex work, histories of the plantation order, slavery, and contemporary economic and migration patterns. Something ineluctably shifts in my U.S. students’ reflections on queerness, the African diaspora, the economic underpinnings of romantic, erotic relationships within capitalist logics, as we contend with the importance of understanding a region and its histories in parsing sexual formations and affective inhabitations.

This framework of queer regionalism[17] that is attuned to localized sexual geographies and “specific forms of queer subjectivity that develop under certain circumstances”[18] informs our reading, as well, of the Kenyan film Rafiki (Wanuri Kahiu, 2018), whose “Afrobubblegum” aesthetic of bright colors and a vibrant Afro-pop soundtrack defies “human rights” style narratives about sexual minorities in Africa, instead “representing queer African subjects without subjecting them to the panoptic control of an ethnocentric gaze.”[19] Even as one of them says, “I wish we could go somewhere where we could be real,” gesturing to the paucity of material and discursive spaces for the expression of lesbian desire in Nairobi, the protagonists, Kena and Ziki, enact a “queer habitation of the neighbourhood”[20] by making love in an abandoned matatu van, taking a day trip in a rickshaw, one braiding the other’s hair on the street, and in a particularly evocative early scene, sensing their attraction to each other atop an apartment building rooftop terrace. As I asked my students to analyze that charged scene where the two women look out at the Nairobi sky, and down at people walking in the busy bylanes, and to consider why it is staged on a rooftop filled with drying clothes, I found myself interpreting what such a terrace might mean in Nairobi by transposing my adolescent memories of Bombay’s rooftop terraces in the 1980s, as spaces of lazy afternoon play for children, for women to hang clothes or place pickles to dry in the sun, and as clandestine getaways for lovers. These analogous yet separate spatial intimacies across geographies alert us to regionally situated and embodied reading practices that make queerness legible outside of a Western hermeneutic of visibility, even as Kahiu’s staging of Kena and Ziki’s desire in the haptically sensuous fabric-filled space of women’s work, intimacy, and stolen leisure suggests that this, right here, is a space where they could in fact “be real.” Discerning these queer regionalisms in Rafiki’s Nairobi invites us to wander through various idioms of intimacy, recasting, as students reported, their received understandings of queerness in Africa, but also provoking complex foldings and unfoldings of similarity and difference, empathy and opacity, intrigue and distance in relation to these cultural texts from not-so-familiar locations.

Gayatri Gopinath’s framework of a queer regional imaginary allows for the tracing of “lines of connection and commonality, a kind of South-South relationality, between seemingly discrete regional spaces” so that we may produce new mappings of space and sexuality.[21] By including as well in the course films like Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015), Irattajeevitham (Double Life, Suresh Narayanan, 2018), among others, with an emphasis on their particular economies of production and networks of circulation, we consider queer cartographies across and between Las Terrenas (in the Dominican Republic), Nairobi, Los Angeles, and Kerala respectively, unsettling simple East-West/North-South axes in thinking about the global, reading it rather as a shifting terrain, marked by both recognition and confounding incommensurability. Engaging with the wanderings of what Navaneetha Mokkil refers to as “vernacular sexual figures” is critical for developing a sexuality politics that is in intimate conversation with varied local publics and articulated through a range of regional media practices.[22]

Conclusion: Thinking Globally as Intersectional Practice and Ethical Imperative

How do Rafiki, Dólares de Arena, Irattajeevitham change in the U.S. classroom? How do the questions we pose to these texts impose on them certain shapes and forms? How might we begin to arrive at the questions to ask of them and of our viewing of them? Wandering along the Las Terrenas beach with the “inscrutable” Noeli or gazing down the Nairobi terrace with Kena, we begin to forge intimate routes, always incomplete, always needing to be returned to. The epistemic humility and tentativeness this generates is why globalizing our curriculum is so important. Teaching global media can transform place, identity, representation into shifting ground, generating epistemological uncertainty while filling us with a sense of splendorous curiosity, inciting wandering rather than coverage, encounter rather than capture. “Waywardness as epistemic possibility”[23] suggests the impossibility of knowing fully and the impossibility of knowing anything if we don’t venture in the first place.

To return to the opening provocations, since we “already know enough,” what remains to be done is to infiltrate and dismantle the anemic canon our film and media curriculum is currently beholden to, and through affective dispositions of joyous usurpation and conspiratorial coalition-building, build richer repositories of media and their geopolitics so we may engage with how “unstable and overlapping media ontologies” give rise to “multiple mediated globalities.”[24] When we commit to rebuilding our disciplinary foundations with an internationalist decolonial vision, we will invest material and intellectual resources as well on the infrastructures of translation, subtitling, and access required for this re-envisioning. We owe it to our increasingly racially, ethnically, regionally, sexually diverse student bodies. While attacks on critical race theory, minority rights, indigenous ecologies proliferate around us, our film and media courses offer portals to smuggle in vital frameworks of resistance and dissidence from around the world.

Usha Iyer is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. Her book, Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020), examines constructions of gender, stardom, and sexuality in Indian cinema with a focus on women’s labor and collaborative networks. Her next project is a study of the traffic of cultural forms between South Asia and the Caribbean, engaging with transnational perspectives on race, ethnicity, and migration. She is Associate Editor of the journal, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

1. For the capitalization of “World Cinema,” see David Richler, “Introduction: Reflections on the World Cinema Turn,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 29, no. 2 (2020): 1–9, 7. ↑

2. Teaching “the Global” in Media Studies workshop, Geographies & Genealogies of World Cinema seminar. ↑

3. Masha Salazkina, “World Cinema as Method,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 29, no. 2 (2020): 10–24, 11. ↑

4. Given my location within film studies, my examples and references mainly draw from that discipline but similar demands are being made within media studies too that alert us as well to the intersections and continuities between these disciplines, especially when we view them through a global lens. ↑

5. See Malini Guha, “World Cinema 3.0? The “World as Backdrop” for a Multimedial Age,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 29, no. 2 (2020): 37–51, 37. ↑

6. Salazkina, 10. ↑

7. Luca Caminati, “Italian Cinema and the World Cinema Stress Test,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 29, no. 2 (2020): 25–36, 33. ↑

8. Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Race and Racialization: Essential Readings (Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2007): 56–64. ↑

9. See also Usha Iyer, “A Pedagogy of Reparations: Notes towards Repairing the Film and Media Studies Curriculum,” forthcoming in Feminist Media Histories. ↑

10. Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 3. ↑

11. Bhaskar Sarkar, “Plasticity and the Global,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 56, no. 2 (2015): 451–471, 452. ↑

12. A similar argument may be made for book and article titles that have the privilege of remaining unmarked by regional or area markers. ↑

13. Manuel Betancourt, “A Queer(’s) Cinema,” Film Quarterly 72 no.3 (2019): 15–17. ↑

14. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, Queer Cinema in the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 5. ↑

15. Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel, “Area Impossible: Notes toward an Introduction,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 2 (2016): 151–171, 152. ↑

16. Arondekar and Patel, 166. ↑

17. Howard Chiang and Alvin K. Wong, “Queering the Transnational Turn: Regionalism and Queer Asias,” Gender, Place & Culture 23, no. 11 (2016): 1643–1656. ↑

18. T.A. Osinubi, “Queer Subjects in Kenyan Cinema: Reflections on Rafiki,” Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies 5 no. 1 (2019): 70–77, 72. ↑

19. Ashley Currier and Thérèse Migraine-George, “Queer Studies/African Studies: An (Im)possible Transaction?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 2 (2016): 281–305, 291. ↑

20. Osinubi, 73. ↑

21. Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 5. See also Gayatri Gopinath, “Queer Regions: Locating Lesbians in Sancharram,” in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008): 341–354. ↑

22. Navaneetha Mokkil, Unruly Figures: Queerness, Sex Work, and the Politics of Sexuality in Kerala (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019). ↑

23. Arondekar and Patel, 164. ↑

24. Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar, eds., Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 5. ↑