Digital Unsettling Udupa, Sahana; Dattatreyan, Ethiraj Gabriel
04/2023
eBook
Odprti dostop
How digital networks are positioned within the enduring
structures of coloniality The revolutionary aspirations
that fueled decolonization circulated on paper-as pamphlets,
leaflets, handbills, and ...brochures. Now-as evidenced by movements
from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter-revolutions, protests,
and political dissidence are profoundly shaped by information
circulating through digital networks. Digital Unsettling
is a critical exploration of digitalization that puts contemporary
"decolonizing" movements into conversation with theorizations of
digital communication. Sahana Udupa and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan
interrogate the forms, forces, and processes that have reinforced
neocolonial relations within contemporary digital environments, at
a time when digital networks-and the agendas and actions they
proffer-have unsettled entrenched hierarchies in unforeseen ways.
Digital Unsettling examines events-the toppling of statues
in the UK, the proliferation of #BLM activism globally, the rise of
Hindu nationalists in North America, the trolling of academics,
among others-and how they circulated online and across national
boundaries. In doing so, Udupa and Dattatreyan demonstrate how the
internet has become the key site for an invigorated anticolonial
internationalism, but has simultaneously augmented conditions of
racial hierarchy within nations, in the international order, and in
the liminal spaces that shape human migration and the lives of
those that are on the move. Digital Unsettling establishes a
critical framework for placing digitalization within the longue
durée of coloniality, while also revealing the complex ways in
which the internet is entwined with persistent global calls for
decolonization.
ABSTRACT
In this article, I engage with the insights that emerged through the making of Desiring Bollywood, a collaborative ethno‐fiction project I produced in 2018. The project recruited academics, ...amateur actors, novice filmmakers, and enthusiastic university students to narrate the story of Jason, an aspiring actor and filmmaker from Nigeria who I first met in 2013, soon after his release from Tihar Prison in Delhi, India. My goals are two‐fold: first, to share a few scenes from the film—embedded in this article as video clips—to broadly theorize the affordances and limits of what I call re‐staging, the collaborative, performance‐based multimodal method we devised and deployed to produce Desiring Bollywood. Second, and more central to the article, I aim to analyze these very same scenes to show how re‐staging, as it offered participants involved in the project the opportunity to reflexively explore how Jason's experiences of discrimination in Delhi and the aspirations and desires that led him there in the first place, creates a rich site of analysis to engage with the nuances of anti‐Black racism in India in a moment where “India–Africa” economic relationships are on the rise. multimodality, collaboration, racism, migration, Africa, India, Nigeria
RESUMEN
En este artículo examino el entendimiento que surgió a través de la producción de Desiring Bollywood, un proyecto colaborativo de etno‐ficción que realicé en 2018. El proyecto reclutó académicos, actores amateurs, productores cinematográficos novicios y entusiastas estudiantes universitarios para narrar la historia de Jason, un aspirante a actor y productor cinematográfico, de Nigeria a quien conocí en 2013, poco después de su puesta en libertad de la Prisión Tihar en Delhi, India. Mi propósito es doble: primero, compartir algunas escenas del filme –embebidas en este artículo como video clips– para teorizar ampliamente las affordances y límites de lo que llamo remontaje, el colaborativo método multimodal basado en performance, que nosotros ideamos y utilizamos para producir Desiring Bollywood. Segundo, y más central al artículo, tengo como objetivo analizar estas mismas escenas para mostrar cómo el remontaje, en la medida que ofreció a los participantes involucrados en el proyecto la oportunidad de explorar reflexivamente cómo las experiencias de Jason de discriminación en Delhi y las aspiraciones y deseos que lo llevaron allí en primer lugar, crea un sitio profundo de análisis para abordar los matices del racismo anti‐negro en India en un momento donde las relaciones económicas “India‐África” están en aumento. multimodalidad, colaboración, racismo, migración, África, India, Nigeria
Digital Unsettling Udupa, Sahana; Dattatreyan, Ethiraj Gabriel
04/2023
eBook
How digital networks are positioned within the enduring structures of colonialityThe revolutionary aspirations that fueled decolonization circulated on paper-as pamphlets, leaflets, handbills, and ...brochures. Now-as evidenced by movements from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter-revolutions, protests, and political dissidence are profoundly shaped by information circulating through digital networks. Digital Unsettling is a critical exploration of digitalization that puts contemporary decolonizing movements into conversation with theorizations of digital communication. Sahana Udupa and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan interrogate the forms, forces, and processes that have reinforced neocolonial relations within contemporary digital environments, at a time when digital networks-and the agendas and actions they proffer-have unsettled entrenched hierarchies in unforeseen ways. Digital Unsettling examines events-the toppling of statues in the UK, the proliferation of #BLM activism globally, the rise of Hindu nationalists in North America, the trolling of academics, among others-and how they circulated online and across national boundaries. In doing so, Udupa and Dattatreyan demonstrate how the internet has become the key site for an invigorated anticolonial internationalism, but has simultaneously augmented conditions of racial hierarchy within nations, in the international order, and in the liminal spaces that shape human migration and the lives of those that are on the move. Digital Unsettling establishes a critical framework for placing digitalization within the longue dureI e of coloniality, while also revealing the complex ways in which the internet is entwined with persistent global calls for decolonization.
The Impossible Portrait DATTATREYAN, ETHIRAJ GABRIEL
Visual anthropology review,
03/2023, Letnik:
39, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
ABSTRACT
This article focuses on a portrait of a young Somali man living in Delhi, India. The portrait depicts him in a park in South Delhi wearing a cap distributed by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) ...during their insurgent 2012‐2013 campaign to establish themselves as an alternative political force. I argue this parodic portrait and the text it accrues in its circulations on Facebook functions as a
networked image‐event
that evinces the impossible contradictions that Somalis face in India. Tracing this networked image event reveals how a surging antiblackness linked to the rise of the AAP Party in Delhi punctuates the in‐betweenness that Somalis experience while they wait for life elsewhere.
This introduction and the articles included in this special series (spread across several issues of this journal) theorize the possibilities--and pitfalls--that emerge as anthropologists utilize a ...combination of audio, video, text, still images, performance methodologies, and web platforms to iteratively, collaboratively, and sensually generate relations with research participants, interdisciplinary colleagues, and others. We are not necessarily interested in developing multimedia approaches to representing or disseminating anthropological knowledge; rather, we are concerned with how multimodality may contribute to a politics of invention for the discipline.
For those of us located in the Global North, 2021 began with a barrage of media content documenting a coup attempt in the United States, the United Kingdom's split from Europe after four years of ...Brexit deliberations, and talk of mass vaccinations amid the uneven global devastation of COVID-19. For the three of us, with our connections to South Asia, Latin America, and West Africa, current Euro-American mediatized stories were supplemented by ongoing narratives of state-sponsored sectarian violence in India and Brazil, police brutality in Nigeria, and “Southern” stories related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences.In each of these cases, social media has fostered contradictory participatory potentials. On the one hand, social media has the potential to foment the creation of shared and iterative conspiracy theories, disinformation, and right-wing plots. From QAnon to antimask and antivaccine discourses to anti-immigrant “Leave.EU” campaigns in the United Kingdom, the circulations of images, texts, and videos have sowed the seeds for an amplification of white supremacist violence, a rejection of public health guidance, and a rearticulation of virulent nativist political thought in an age of capitalist dispossession. On the other hand, just as multimodal making and circulation strategies on social media have played a role in fomenting right-wing violence and homicidal disinformation, they have also played an integral part in social movements towards justice. Grassroots mobilizations of images, videos, and texts collocating collective imaginaries towards various projects of recognition and solidarity in and across Chile, India, Thailand, Argentina, and Puerto Rico, just to give a few examples, demonstrate the ways in which the “multimodal” plays an important role in generating the potential for visualizing, articulating, and conceptualizing different futures, both online and off. This short essay—written as a manifesto and an invitation—engages with an ambivalent multimodality in three different frames: the visual, the collaborative, and the sensorial. Our manifesto is a means not just to participate in the vibrant theorization of multimodality that has unfolded over the last several years in the discipline but to embrace an ambivalence towards its promise and potential and to offer an invitation for you to do the same. In short, our embrace of “the manifesto” as a rhetorical device is as much a call to action as it is about theorizing the affordances and limits of multimodality in the present conjuncture. In what follows, we briefly mark the ways in which an ambivalent multimodality has the capacity to draw our attention to the different problematics of doing ethnography in the contemporary moment while recognizing, simultaneously, the tremendous opportunity it presents for us to imagine anthropology on different grounds. We believe that when we account for those problematics in creative-critical ways—including the ways we are deeply embedded in and complicit in them—we open speculative possibilities and potentially enact anthropology otherwise. We conclude this short essay by discussing the experiments we will take up to create a different sort of review process for this type of work, one that is transparent, dialogic, and guided by the key tenets of our manifesto.
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