Indigenous Media Caucus

Joanna Hearne and Jennifer Gómez Menjívar

Robyn Muir

Captive and Captivated Audiences: Native American Film Exhibition, 1903-1929

Cara Caddoo

Abstract: This article considers the history of Native American film exhibition and filmgoing in the silent era. During this time, Native Americans were forced to watch films on reservations and in US government–sponsored day and boarding schools—an important but overlooked chapter in the development of non-theatrical and educational film. Simultaneously, they also developed their own cinema practices. From at least 1903, Native Americans attended and exhibited films across Indian Country. Whether procuring their own film projectors, opening their own theaters, or attending Native-operated film exhibitions, their activities frequently expressed desires for autonomy, community building, and survivance.

FKA twigs and the Impossibly Sonorous Body

Yanie Fecu

Abstract: This article examines how FKA twigs's audiovisual staging of Black masochistic desire transforms Pierre Schaeffer's concept of the acousmatic—sound heard in the absence of a corresponding visual source. Within her music videos, the singer/choreographer experiments with what I call the impossibly sonorous, a paradoxical form of sensory entanglement that insists upon the incongruity of visible source and audible sound. I argue that, taken together, her album art, videos, lyrics, and vocal delivery reveal ongoing developments in how contemporary Black diasporic musicians challenge the visual and sonic color line with new erotic scripts.

Going to the Video Hall: A Sensory Encounter with a New Urban Space in Post-Mao China

Yiyang Hou

Abstract: Against the rising tide of marketization sweeping across China in the 1980s and 1990s, many people sought profitability by opening up private video exhibition sites to showcase bootleg videotapes. By drawing on a wide range of written sources and material artifacts—including interviews, fictional works, and photographs—this article pays special attention to how the experience of going to the video hall was remembered by the video-goers. Through an investigation into Chinese people's multisensory encounters with the video hall, this article calls for a contextualized reevaluation of such a prominent urban space against post-Mao China's turn to market reform.

Fatty Arbuckle's Fingerprints: Race, Photographic Evidence, and the Smudge

Tory Jeffay

Abstract: This article uses the historical entanglement of photography and fingerprinting in order to explore the racialized fallibility of visual evidence and the operation of a forensic imaginary in the interpretation of photographic imagery. Looking at the forensic evidence in the trials of silent film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, I argue that the over-investment in what can be known from photographic evidence stems from a racialized desire to make imagined difference visible and knowable. Ultimately, I suggest the figure of the smudge rather than the fingerprint better characterizes the unstable nature of photographic evidence.

Speculating in Latent Space: Visibility Politics and the Impasse of Representation in Generative AI

Gary Kafer

Abstract: This article examines how generative artificial intelligence (AI) is used in speculative media making practices to foster a marginalized visibility politics in digital culture. Through a close reading of the computational processes in text-to-image programs, This article shows how generative AI operates upon a gap between human and machinic modes of perception that forecloses practices of speculation grounded within representational politics of identity. At the same time, through glitch, This article demonstrates how generative AI might foster a revised framework of speculation for a marginalized political imagination that attends to the nonvisual forms of minoritarian experience that subtend the digital image.

Set-Going Chronicles: Rethinking Turkish Cinema through the Lens of New Cinema History

Serkan Şavk, Aydın Çam, and İlke Şanlıer

Abstract: In this article, we propose set-going as a novel concept for studying the experience of visiting filming locations to watch the making of a film. This experience creates a field of interaction between movie enthusiasts and movie professionals. We argue that set-going should be considered as a new trajectory for studying the cultural and social history of cinema. Theoretically, we benefit from the New Cinema History paradigm. Departing from a case study of the Yeşilçam era of Turkish cinema (1950s–1980s), we discuss the practice of set-going as embracing a wide range of social and cultural contexts surrounding the production process.

Introduction: Actual Play as Actual Art

Maria K. Alberto and Emily C. Friedman

"Class Conflict": Dimension 20: Misfits and Magic and TTRPGs as Transformative Fantasy

Emma French

Dimenson 20 and Collaborative Moral Imagination

Mynt Marsellus

Occult Texts and Redacted Realizations: Agency and Bleed in Mice & Murder

Shelly Jones

Chosen Structures of Belonging: Kith and Kin in Actual Play

Adrianna Burton

Coming Out in the Bloom: Identity, Play, and Playing with Identity in A Court of Fey & Flowers

Stephanie Hedge

Haunted Time in New York by Night

EA Wilcox

Matters in the Bloom: Material Ecocriticism in Dimension 20's Actual Play A Court of Fey & Flowers

Sylvan Baker

Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife
by Tonia Sutherland

Reviewed by Briana Barner

The Other Side of Glamour: The Left-Wing Studio Network in Hong Kong Cinema in the Cold War Era and Beyond
by Vivan P. Y. Lee

Hong Kong Media and Asia's Cold War
by Po-Shek Fu

Reviewed by Ho Chak Law

Media and the Affective Life of Slavery
by Allison Page

Reviewed by Jasmine Mitchell

Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.-Mexico Underground
by Juan Llamas-Rodriguez

Reviewed by Phillip Penix-Tadsen