Media archaeology is a historical method based in rapid time travel. What is old about new media and what is new about old media are the playful questions that shape a media archaeological approach to understanding media in society. As such, many media archaeology courses juxtapose old and new media to draw into relief the continuities and ruptures of media across time. The effect on students, one hopes, is a disillusionment with the rhetoric of the “new” in both its dystopic/technophobic and utopic/technophilic varieties. Because media archaeology courses tend to keep time central, they rarely take global geography as a framework for interrogating old and new media. Why might the “global,” with all its unwieldy breadth, be useful for reimagining media courses like media archaeology which have previously ignored geography? And how might we cope with the discomforting challenges of scope that a worldwide approach may entail? In an attempt to offer some answers to these questions, in this essay I share my experiences developing and revising an undergraduate media archaeology course in the Cinema Studies department at Oberlin College that is attentive to global media histories and practices.

Recent scholarship in decolonial media archeology makes evident the need for media history to be reoriented.[1] Media archeology artifacts have mostly been collected from Euro-American archives and contexts with the implied understanding that “media” denotes a distinctly “modern” material culture. In this way, media discourse has always been about mapping time (modernity) onto spatial relations. Bringing the “global” into the media archaeology classroom is essential for highlighting the coloniality of new media as a symbol of Western modernity in the past and present.

The central challenge I faced while designing my course was how to structure a fourteen-week syllabus that would send students back and forward through time and around the globe from one class meeting to the next without inducing motion-sickness. In other words, how much cultural, economic, and political context did I need to give to help students engage deeply with media histories from outside of the United States and how could I give it in such a quick-moving non-linear course? This is a critical question for any globally oriented course and the specific course topic may require different levels of contextual engagement. For my course, rather than smooth out the ride with copious background information, I opted to embrace the shock of spatial and temporal juxtaposition, queasiness and all. Like a TARDIS zipping through time and space, each class excursion into different geographically specific media pasts was a brief episode designed to unsettle student assumptions about the geographic configuration of old and new media rather than give students a comprehensive understanding of the history of media across the world.

In the 2014 Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier on New Approaches to Teaching World Cinema, Shekhar Deshpande and Meta Mazaj suggest that “displacement and disorientation” are a “productive point from which to begin exploring and mapping both a specific cinema site and its global coordinates.”[2] I too am interested in the pedagogical possibilities of displacement and disorientation. In a media archaeology classroom, the disorientation caused by geographically displacing students through globally oriented media histories can help delink new media, geography, and time from modernity/coloniality’s narrative of progress.[3] Thus, for me, displacement and disorientation are not a starting point for students to map the world, but rather a way to unmap geographic imaginaries that have their origins in the Empire building project. In this way disorienting the “Orient” in the media studies classroom can be a decolonial pedagogical tool.

I organized the course into two parts: Foundations and Excursions. The first unit, Foundations, introduces key concepts (media, new media, dead and zombie media) and media archaeology as a historical method and artistic practice. We read Lisa Gitelman, Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka by way of introduction, interrogate the colonial origins of Marshall McLuhan’s foundational media theory in Understanding Media, and consider Rakesh Sengupta and Sudhir Mahadevan’s respective decolonial and postcolonial media archeology alternatives.[4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

In the second half of the course, we take brief excursions through time and space to explore different qualities of media (i.e. networking, education, immersion, illusion). For example, in a week on communication we watch early United States silent film classics featuring the telegraph and telephones (Mckinley at Home—Canton, Ohio (Biograph, 1896); The Lonedale Operator (D.W. Griffith,1911); and Death’s Marathon (DW Griffith, 1913)) alongside Cho Il-hyung’s recent South Korean zombie film #Alive (2020) to explore the representation of new communication technologies in moments of crisis. We ask how new media either help or hinder communication and how values about new and old media are worked out in such fantasy scenarios. In a week on fidelity, we watch Nanook’s famous encounter with a gramophone in Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) while reading Brian Hochman’s “Originals and Aboriginals: Race and Writing in the Age of the Phonograph” from Savage Preservation to discuss the way that racial difference was used to validate the phonograph’s objectivity and its ability to reproduce the real.[9] We follow this with a screening of Moussa Sene Absa’s Ça Twiste à Poponguine (1994) and Tsitsi Ella Jaji, “Pirates Choice: Hacking into (Post-) Pan-African Futures” in Africa in Stereo.[10] Set in 1964 in the village of Poponguine, Ça Twiste follows a group of Senegalese teens who scheme to buy a record player to play their favorite French pop music while a rival group horde their record player to exclusively play African American soul. We situate Jaji’s reading of the film as an example of Senegalese using new media technologies to forge pan-African solidarities and play with fluid identities in juxtaposition with the emphases on phonography’s supposed objectivity in the ethnographic discourses the Hochman reading recounts.

While students may find themselves disoriented in time and space in the Excursions segment of the course, assignments ground students by centering their experiences with old media and foregrounding their engagement with local media contexts. After reading Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka “Zombie media: Circuit bending media archaeology into an art method” and discussing its call to bring media archaeology methods into art practice, we visit Oberlin’s Clarence Ward Art Library to analyze pieces in their mail art collection.[11] [12] Mail art arose in the mid-twentieth century out of American artists’ dissatisfaction with the commercialization of the United States art market. A group of mostly New York based artists began using the postal service to exchange small works of art with each other for free. By the 70s and 80s the mail art movement extended across the globe. Oberlin’s collection reflects mail art’s transnational proportions with pieces from over a thousand artists from sixty countries. In the context of our class, we talk about mail art as a type of social networking and create our own mail art network to explore this old media form. Student analyses of mail art from international artists like Shozo Shimamoto, Pawel Petasz, and Edgardo Antonio Vigo inform the artistic choices they make and the local configuration this global media form takes within our network. After sending their mail art through our “snail mail” social network, students are asked compare this old media to those new digital social networks they use every day.

The other major assignment in the course is a “dead” media research project.[13] This project is composed of a series of three small media research exercises that ask students to engage in different historiographic methods. The first component of the project is to analyze a “dead” media technology by looking at its material history. Students can choose to analyze things like VHS/VHR or records and record players, but the assignment is situated around a special visit to the Oberlin Library to play with its collection of optical devices (stereoscopes, view-masters, zoetropes to name a few). Students were encouraged to analyze one of the devices that they encounter at the library. Through this exercise students explore what it is we can know about media history based on the media object itself and what knowledge is gained from experiences of media devices that exists outside of written accounts. With the second research component of the “dead” media project, students conduct oral histories about a “dead” media technology with their friends and family. This exercise asks students to consider the kinds of knowledge about old media that oral histories can offer that goes beyond what is typically available in the media archive. For many students, their “dead” media oral histories intwined closely with their own family histories and allowed them to think critically about media technologies they used in their youth. The third research component asks students to analyze the representation of a “dead” media technology in popular culture (film, video, magazine, meme, etc.). While students can bring in content from outside of the class, I encourage students to use film and television examples from the syllabus. In this exercise, students analyze how ideas about old and new media are constituted and mediated through their representation.

After each research task students write a short essay detailing their findings. At the end of the course, they bring all the data that they have gathered from the three small research projects into dialogue with each other and the themes of the course in a final essay. When designing their “dead” media project they can choose to research one media technology in depth with each historiographic approach or three different technologies and compare them at the end. The discomfort caused by the intellectual disorientation in time and space of our course forays, coupled with projects that center student’s personal experiences with old media and those of their friends and family ultimately allow students to examine their own orientation toward contemporary media systems more critically and to situate themselves as part of a global community.

Reorienting a course to contain many different geographies changes whose thought is centered and may help diversify the list of scholars, directors, and other artists featured in our syllabuses. However, globetrotting as a means for inclusion alone is not enough. Rather than appropriating multicultural differences to maintain the epistemological status quo, we might strive to incorporate global studies of media into all media studies courses as a way to make visible coloniality in media history and theory. However, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang note, one should “consider how the pursuit of critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves to innocence—diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege.”[14] The “global” in media studies then can never be a solution or an absolution. But unsettling colonial thinking through feelings of displacement and disorientation may better position students to imagine other media futures and bring them into practice.

Jennifer Blaylock is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Cinema Studies at Oberlin College. Her current book project is a postcolonial media archaeology that analyzes discourses about new media technologies in Africa from the early twentieth century to the present. Her research has appeared in the Journal of African Cinemas and Screen.

1. Rakesh Sengupta, “Toward a Decolonial Media Archaeology: The Absent Archive of Screenwriting History and the Obsolete Munshi,” Theory, Culture, & Society 38, no. 1 (2021): 3–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420930276. ↑

2. Shekhar Deshpande and Meta Mazaj, “Centers, Forms and Perspectives in World Cinema,” Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier 2, no. 1 (2014): https://www.teachingmedia.org/centers-forms-perspectives-world-cinema/ ↑

3. Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). ↑

4. Lisa Gitelman, “Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects,” in Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006). ↑

5. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, “Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). ↑

6. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994). ↑

7. Rakesh Sengupta, “Toward a Decolonial Media Archaeology: The Absent Archive of Screenwriting History and the Obsolete Munshi,” Theory, Culture, & Society 38, no. 1 (2021): 3–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420930276. ↑

8. Sudhir Mahadevan, “Traveling Showmen, Makeshift Cinemas: The Bioscopewallah and Early Cinema” in A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015). ↑

9. Brian Hochman, “Originals and Aboriginals: Race and Writing in the Age of the Phonograph,” in Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). ↑

10. Tsitsi Ella Jaji, “Pirates Choice: Hacking into (Post-) Pan-African Futures,” in Africa in Stereo: modernism, music, and pan-African solidarity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). ↑

11. Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka, “Zombie media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method,” Leonardo 45, no. 5 (2012): 424–430, https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON_a_00438. ↑

12. See examples from the digitized collection here: https://libraries.oberlin.edu/collections/special-collections/mail-art ↑

13. I am quite loose in what counts as “dead” as we talk extensively throughout the course about the problems and politics of declaring a media technology “dead” especially in the context of global media. ↑

14. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 21. ↑