Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global 9780822372547

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ASIAN

VIDEO

C U LT U R E S

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A S I A N V I D E O C U LT U R E S > ​I N T H E P E N U M B R A O F T H E G L O B A L

Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar, editors

duke university press Durham and London 2017

© 2017 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Neves, Joshua, [date] editor. | Sarkar, Bhaskar, [date] editor. Title: Asian video cultures : in the penumbra of the global / Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar, editors. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017028528 (print) | lccn 2017044091 (ebook) | isbn 9780822372547 (ebook) isbn 9780822368915 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822368991 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Digital media—Social aspects—Asia. | Digital media—Political aspects—Asia. | Video recording—Social aspects—Asia. | Video recording—Political aspects—Asia. | Mass media— Political aspects—Asia. | Mass media—Social aspects—Asia. Classification: lcc hm851 (ebook) | lcc hm851 .a853 2017 (print) | ddc 302.23/1—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028528 Cover art: Illustration by Laila Shereen Sakr.

CONTENTS

acknowl­edgments 

vii

Introduction 1 PA R T   I  ​>  ​ I N F R A S T R U C T U R E S 1

Video Documentary and Rural Public Culture in Ethnic China Jenny Chio  35

2

EngageMedia: The Gado Gado Tactics of New Social Media in Indonesia Patricia R. Zimmermann  54

3

Wei dianying and Xiao quexing: Technologies of “Small” and Trans-­Chinese Screen Practices Chia-­chi Wu  72

4

Converging Contents and Platforms: Niconico Video and Japan’s Media Mix Ecol­ogy Marc Steinberg  91

5

In Access: Digital Video and the User Nishant Shah  114

PA R T I I  ​>  ​ I N T I M A C I E S 6

MicroSD-­ing “Mewati Videos”: Circulation and Regulation of a Subaltern-­Popular Media Culture Rahul Mukherjee and Abhigyan Singh  133

7

Documenting “Immigrant Brides” in Multicultural Taiwan Tzu-­hui Celina Hung  158

8

Bollywood Banned and the Electrifying Palmasutra: Sensory Politics in Northern Nigeria Conerly Casey  176

9

The Asianization of Heimat: Ming Wong’s Asian German Video Works Feng-­Mei Heberer 

198

PA R T I I I  ​>  ​ S P E C U L AT I O N S 10

Politics in the Age of YouTube: Degraded Images and Small-­Screen Revolutions S. V. Srinivas  217

11

Pop Cosmopolitics and K-­pop Video Culture Michelle Cho  240

12

Videation: Technological Intimacy and the Politics of Global Connection Joshua Neves  266

13

Staying Alive: Imphal’s HIV/AIDS (Digital) Video Culture Bishnupriya Ghosh  288

14

“Every­one’s Property”: Video Copying, Poetry, and Revolution in Arab West Asia Kay Dickinson  307 bibliography 327 contributors 349 index 353

A C K N O W L­E D G M E N T S

This book grew out of our dissatisfaction with the rather narrow conceptualizations of digital modernity circulating in Euro-­American media and cultural studies, as well as with ways in which ­these frameworks locate Asian and other non-­Western media experiences in the shadowy peripheries of global media. ­These epistemological bound­aries seem particularly binding for the North American context in which we work, and to which this volume’s modest interventions are most directly pitched. But we have a broader objective: to document the myriad media practices and join the robust conversations already ­going on across Asia and beyond—in Hong Kong, Indonesia, or Australia. ­These vital zones show up the edges and frays of mediatized contemporaneity, and signal impor­tant entry points in the proj­ect to decolonize standardized epistemes and to understand global media in its unruly fecundity. As with any book, especially a collection put together over the past four years, we are indebted to many for their advice and encouragement. The proj­ ect emerged from the vibrant intellectual community at University of California, Santa Barbara, in Film and Media Studies and beyond. Our heartfelt thanks to Michael Berry, Swati Chattopadhyay, Michael Curtin, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Rahul Mukherjee, Lisa Parks, Juan Llamas-­Rodriguez, Jeff Scheible, Nicole Starosielski, Athena Tan, Cristina Venegas, Janet Walker, and Chuck Wolfe. Bhaskar Sarkar is indebted to Madhusree Dutta and the Cinema City Proj­ect in Mumbai, and to Moinak Biswas and the Media Lab at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, for many a conversation that enriched his thoughts. Joshua Neves received early support for this proj­ect from an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto; Sarkar started work on the volume while on a fellowship at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities. We are grateful to the Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Richard  B. Salomon Faculty Research Awards, both at Brown University, for supporting the Asian Video

Cultures Conference held at Brown in October 2013. The conference was key to the f­ ormation of this volume, and we thank the contributors for their rigor and generosity, as well as the many participants who joined in the conversations, including Mariam Lam, Eng-­Beng Lim, Hoang Tan Nguyen, Philip Rosen, ­Niranjan Sivakumar, Nathaniel Smith, Paromita Vohra, Alex Zahlten, and Vazira Zamindar. Thanks to colleagues and friends who also offered comments on versions of our proposals and introduction: Michelle Cho, Megan Fernandes, Yuriko Furuhata, Sangita Gopal, Lynne Joyrich, and Marc Steinberg. Gradu­ate students at Concordia University helped us prepare the manuscript—­thanks especially to Wexian Pan and Darien Sanchez Nicolás. The Global Emergent Media (gem) Lab at Concordia University supported Neves in the final stages of writing and editing. Special thanks to Laila Shereen Sakr for the cover image, Athena Tan for the index, and Matt Tauch at Duke University Press for the book design. Fi­nally, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their close engagement with this manuscript, and Courtney Berger, our editor at Duke University Press, for wisely shepherding this proj­ect over ­these past few years.

viii 

A cknowl­edgments

INTRODUCTION

Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar

Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global focuses on video as a cultural form and practice across Asia. While invoking its titular terms—­Asia, video, culture—as necessary organ­izing frames, the volume si­mul­ta­neously seeks to trou­ble, recast, and pluralize them. Our aim is to move conversations about Asian media beyond static East-­West imaginaries, residual Cold War mentalities, triumphalist declarations about resurgent Asias, and budding jingoisms. The essays collected ­here explore the region’s pulsating relation­ship with the transnational, paying close attention to the role of video in shaping sub-­and trans-­Asian encounters. How, for instance, do global media pro­cesses transform our understanding of “Asia” as overlapping cultural, economic, and po­liti­cal potentiations? And how do the region’s videomedia, too often consigned to the underbelly of the digital, not only drive new forms of cultural circulation and contact, but also animate new infrastructures, intimacies, and speculations? How are t­ hese proliferating Asias at once an engine of planetary growth and a glaring register for all the contradictions of the global? In what ways does this shifting continental imaginary instantiate the “Global South,” taken as a dynamic formation with its agonistic histories and convulsive geo­ graphies?1 To foreshadow the collection’s thematic and analytical scaffoldings, we hope to situate Asian video cultures as crucial constituents of a “global

media” phenomenology whose southern vitalities are too often dismissed or overlooked in media epistemologies. Across this collection, we focus on a range of mainstream and mundane video forms that are widely bracketed as aberrations both by the universalizing claims of global and digital culture, and by dominant discourses inside and outside the region. The chapters explore media formations that are salient in their own contexts and yet remain marginalized by commonsense understandings of technomodernity and development. Distinctive and variegated Asian experiences trou­ble and exceed the “universal” grids of intelligibility through which academics, journalists, and policymakers approach video—­ grids derived largely from Anglo-­U.S. and continental Eu­ro­pean contexts and protocols. While informal infrastructures (photocopiers, optical discs, hard drives, sd cards, torrents) make up the primary means of media circulation in much of Asia (indeed, in much of the world, but particularly in southern socie­ ties), such ubiquitous practices are criminalized by aggressive l­ egal discourses, regulatory mea­sures, and technomoral ideologies (of which the Agreement on Trade-­Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or trips, is particularly significant).2 The central contention of this volume is that ­these frames, rather than the allegedly aberrant video formations, constitute the crucial “prob­lem” in the problematic of con­temporary Asian media. This assertion suggests a first, primarily epistemological, reason for our designation of Asian video cultures as “penumbral”: something (­here, hegemonic approaches to global media culture) comes in the way of our understanding, occluding and partially eclipsing it. But what exactly is a penumbra? The prosaic understanding of it has to do with the semi-­dark ­belt during eclipses, a shifting zone in between the dark umbra and the bright part of the sun or moon. But t­here are more magical figurations: in ancient Hindu my­thol­ogy, eclipses occur when the demons Rahu and Ketu attempt to devour the sun and the moon, respectively. Similarly, Filipino lore tells of the Bakunawa, a ­giant sea serpent who, entranced by the moon’s beauty, ascended from the oceans to swallow it. In t­ hese accounts, the penumbra marks the resilience of light—­its refusal to be erased from the sky, and its glorious reemergence into view. Asian cosmologies presume the celestial bodies’ ability to burn through the demons’ throats and emerge resplendent. Even as astronomy demystifies eclipses with its scientific explanations, the enchantment of astrological legends lingers. Our invocation of the penumbral underscores the indelible presence of local cosmologies and practices in the mediation of globalities—­distinctively local aspects that can never be 2 

J oshua N eves and B haskar S arkar

fully subsumed within any universal imagination.3 The penumbral also gestures ­toward the irrepressibility of local media practices in the face of dominant global norms. In its thrust, the volume follows a genealogy of critical-­historical interventions of which the Third Cinema movement remains exemplary. Emerging at the peak of a planetary trend ­toward po­liti­cal decolonization, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s manifesto of the late 1960s extended a strident call for cinema to fight the tyranny of aesthetic, epistemological, and institutional orthodoxies derived from colonial contexts and serving neo­co­lo­nial interests. In spite of grim material odds, the stakes w ­ ere nothing short of a radical  4 “decolonization of the mind.” But for the most part, the Third Cinema movement remained wedded to a vanguardist conception of culture, staking out a radical position girded by pronouncedly masculinist—­even militaristic—­rhe­toric. Its revolutionary agenda projected a domain of practices heretofore illegible, even unimaginable, to a colonial modernity, only to re-­emplot it within a definitive postcolonial telos. Thus, the “popu­lar” was to be a domain mainly of engineered cultural-­political engagements, rather than an organic and vibrant realm consolidating extant po­liti­cal ­will and action. Skeptical about such ­grand blueprints for transformation, this volume takes the quotidian popu­lar more seriously, although with a mea­sure of criticality: what do p­ eople do when they “do” culture, how do they do it, and why? Tellingly, Solanas and Getino stressed new infrastructural affordances of the 1960s—­including more affordable and mobile technologies, greater dissemination of skills, and alternative distribution networks and exhibition platforms—as conditions favorable to the expansion of cinema’s social role beyond the diktat of media capital.5 Similar infrastructural developments are, once again, upon us. Hence, it may not be so incongruous to speculate that the “third” of Third Cinema now lives on in the cultural formations that our contributors examine, albeit without the burden of a radical vanguardism, or even an overarching po­liti­cal program, and more within the messy context of contingent make-do and everyday living. More close to our times, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies—­ inspired by British Marxist histories of working-­class lifeworlds and Antonio Gramsci’s interrogations of the hegemonic sublation of southern Italian peasant interests in nationalist politics—­expanded its purview to include vari­ous minoritarian and subcultural social formations, providing an approach to grassroot cultures and local popu­lar histories unencumbered by prescriptive po­liti­cal agendas. The local, micropo­liti­cal interests of Anglophone cultural studies, including the Australian and North American variants, made it generally oblivious I ntroduction  3

to the lived realities of Asian, African, and Latin American socie­ties.6 Yet it did not hesitate to posit implicitly universal theories of vari­ous popular-­cultural phenomena—­including reception, fandom, subjectivity, racial/gender/queer politics, embodiment, creativity, circulation, translation, technoagency, and cultural hegemony—­that are of par­tic­ul­ar interest to this volume’s contributors. About the same time, the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective (and ­later, its Latin American counterpart) initiated the proj­ect of resuscitating “the small voices of history.” Starting from Gramsci’s observation—­following Marx on “small-­holding peasants”—­that subaltern groups ­were incapable of representing themselves and thus awaited repre­sen­ta­tion, the collective, initiated by Ranajit Guha, attended to the conditions of po­liti­cal agency on the part of marginalized groups with predominantly oral cultures—­tribals, peasants, untouchables—in colonial and postcolonial contexts.7 ­Later formulations moved away from this kind of demographic fixity in ­favor of a more relational understanding of subalternity. Dismissing characterizations of subaltern consciousness as “prepo­liti­cal” and agency as “spontaneous,” this historiographic proj­ect increasingly focused on the possibility of distinctive subaltern epistemologies and tactics.8 This analytical move is of ­great significance to us, as we seek to assess popu­lar media practices on their own terms. However, while several of our contributors explore cultural practices that may be considered subaltern in a relational sense, their interest is less in holding on to its radical alterity—­what Gayatri Spivak characterizes as “removed from all lines of social mobility”—­than in exploring novel affordances enabled by con­temporary intersections between the popu­lar and the subaltern.9 Subaltern studies scholars investigated subalternity in relation to colonial administrations or within the framework of the postcolonial nation-­state. More recently, scholars associated with the Inter-­Asia Cultural Studies proj­ect have begun to analyze Asian realities in a transnational context and across the elite-­subaltern divide.10 Kuan-­Hsing Chen, in par­tic­u­lar, has called for a critical undoing of both Cold War mentalities whose embrace of a bipolar world elides large chunks of Asian experiences, and surreptitious pro­cesses of imperialization that subsume Asian ruling classes and state machineries. This collection builds on the strategic regionalism of inter-­Asian approaches, for which Asian locales become each other’s primary point of reference. But we are also interested in broader South-­South exchanges and global fusings—an interest that courses through several chapters and is most evident in ­those on South Asian media in Nigeria (Casey) and Chinese diasporic mediations across Singapore and Germany (Heberer). 4 

J oshua N eves and B haskar S arkar

Stuck in their vexed histories, East and West now appear as ossified geographic imaginaries. In contrast, North and South signify unstable, over­ lapping, amoeboid formations that mutate according to the needs of global capital, while spawning enclaves of divergence, recalcitrance, even subversion. We argue that Asia, with its manifold cultures and economies, is best understood as emerging out of t­ hese ambivalent negotiations. Indeed, the opening up of Asia via transregional encounters, as well as its acute localization, addressed in many of the case studies collated h­ ere, qualifies the productivity of an Asian regionalism. We take such foldings and unfoldings—­whereby media cultures stretch proximate points afar and bring remote corners together—to be fundamental to con­temporary materializations of the global. One of Chen’s sharpest criticisms is directed against the continuing grip of imperial dyads (West-­East, colonizer-­colonized) on late twentieth-­century postcolonial studies, and thus the per­sis­tence of the West in articulations of self and nation. While we take his point, we also want to hold on to the postcolonial as a critical perspective on globalization—in par­tic­ul­ ar, to complicate the idea of a global modernity unfolding along a linear, universal pathway. Short-­ circuiting hegemonic scripts, the varied registers of video practice produce unstable and overlapping media ontologies: confounding preset expectations, they glide between—­and enfold—­industrial and amateur, l­egal and illegal, ratified and renegade, giving rise to multiple mediated globalities. This ontological plurality arises from the intrinsically supple nature of creativity: creative practices routinely diverge from idealizations, challenging notions of unilateral transmission of technologies and skills, derivative cultures, and modular modernities. One might even argue that some of the most exhilarating instances of creativity appear when the fetish of creativity is abandoned in the throes of quotidian life. This ontological mutability and plurality of the global brings us to a second, more experiential sense of the penumbral. In invoking the hazy band that appears as a sliding intermediary between light and dark—­between clear visibility and complete opacity—­during an eclipse, we seek to capture the plasti­ city of the global, to stress the ongoing improvisational creativity that goes into its production. Our phrase “the penumbra of the global” does not refer to the shadow cast by a solid and prefab globality; rather, it is meant to describe the global itself as a penumbral formation. This sense of a continually evolving global is markedly dif­fer­ent from the gradual dialectical incorporation of vari­ ous locals within a homogeneous and universal structure: penumbral globality would, of necessity, remain partial and contingent, as an emergence. Thus, I ntroduction  5

we summon the penumbral for two reasons: first, to move past common discourses of light and shadow, center and edge, that reflect a universalizing approach to the global and that necessarily frame Asia (and southern configurations in general) as secondary, supplemental; and second, to foreground the transitional, the processual—to underscore that the global is productively chaotic, always in the pro­cess of becoming.11 ­Going by mainstream discourses, Asia is at once the bright sun in neoliberal capital’s blue horizons and the demon that gnaws away at capitalism’s health. Starting from this conundrum, this introduction explores the structural schisms that enable such allegations of autosarcophagy and seeks to move beyond the institutional and epistemological apparatuses that, in marking Asian media forms and practices as trivial, transient, and illicit, inhibit our understanding. G ­ oing against the grain of such frames, this volume’s collective enterprise is to write Asia’s vibrant media practices into the mainstream of global media and cultural theories, thereby transforming the latter. VI D E O I N/A S T ECH N OMODERN ITY

Seeking to open up the question of what counts as digital modernity, Asian Video Cultures begins with a set of intertwined assertions. First, video forms and practices are integral to Asian media cultures. Video’s plasticity across lo-fi and high tech, on-­and offline networks, social groupings, and diverse geo­ graphies is crucial to its ubiquity and irrepressibility. Next, the enthusiasm surrounding new media, too often focused on idealized digital experiences in northern ­metropolitan cultures, leads to narrow prescriptive frameworks. Fi­ nally, such normative imaginations of global technoculture occlude actually existing media assemblages in much of the world. It is this occlusion that inspires our use of penumbral across this collection: phenomenologically speaking, penumbral forms and practices comprise much of the mainstream and seem marginal only ­because something opaque comes in the way of their legibility. Extending beyond familiar optical disc formats, streaming sites, and YouTube, Asian video forms and flows challenge basic assumptions about the digital pres­ent, as well as its explanatory frameworks rooted in concepts like speed, reliability, ubiquity, access, participation, innovation, and convergence. While the untimeliness of Asian media arises from the entanglement of the latest high tech with the most ad hoc informalities, engrained perspectives shrink such complexities into a narrative of backwardness. Take, for example, the media scholar Henry Jenkins’s influential study Convergence Culture (2006), 6 

J oshua N eves and B haskar S arkar

which begins with a familiar account of new-­media circulation. A Filipino-­ American high-­school student “photoshopped” an image of Sesame Street’s Bert alongside Osama Bin Laden and posted it on his webpage as part of a spoof series called “Bert Is Evil.” B ­ ecause it offered a good likeness of Bin Laden, the image was downloaded by a publisher in Bangladesh and put on anti-­American placards by protesters throughout the M ­ iddle East, before being rebroadcast to viewers on cnn. Representatives of Sesame Street saw the signage on tele­vi­sion and threatened ­legal action, “outraged” that their character was appropriated in this manner—­though it was not clear who exactly could be held accountable for the infringement.12 For Jenkins, the anecdote captures the key ele­ments of convergence, including new and unanticipated constellations of participation (teenage techies, grassroots social movements, corporate media), the entanglement of analog and digital forms (photo editing, the Internet, printed signs, tv), as well as the fast and far-­flung transmission of such images (North Amer­i­ca, M ­ iddle East, transnational tv and web coverage). Recessed in this foundational anecdote of new media studies are consequential genealogies that inform our proj­ect, but also become fodder for yet another routine account of straggled technological dissemination. Jenkins’s retelling of the adventures of Osama and Bert consolidates commonsensical ideas of “global” and “digital” media: in short, digital media are produced and consumed by North American teen­agers, tele­vi­sion networks, and audiences, whereas Arab activists—­themselves mere images for Western televisual consumption—­seem limited to “old media” modalities. Thus, the protesters’ use of the picture suggests not only a misreading of the “Bert Is Evil” parody, but also imitation and a lack of the capacity to remix and broadcast images of one’s own.13 Emblematic of widely held views on global media circulation, the Jenkins example throws into sharp relief key areas of critique and intervention, including transcultural (mis)appropriations, lagged and derivative cultures, and per­sis­tent discourses of “influence.” Whereas concepts like convergence signal the consolidation of digital-­ media conglomerates, and the rapid coming together of new and old media across connected platforms (mobile phones, tablets, laptop and desktop computers, living-­room screens, large format displays, e­ tc.), southern media cultures often “converge” rather differently. In her work on mobile phones in China, Cara Wallis describes mi­grant ­women’s use of a single device for multiple purposes as a “necessary convergence” born of economic necessity. The mobile phone—­often in low-­tech and improvised versions (a homespun improvisability evoked in local terms such as jugaad, shanzhai, gambiarra, I ntroduction  7

etc.)—is central to a range of emergent media cultures: from sd cards and microdisplays, to offline Internet practices that we might call the extranet to capture the truck between formal and informal networks. Several contributions to this volume (Chio, Shah, Mukherjee and Singh, Srinivas) describe how online videos are regularly downloaded and sold on optical discs, sd cards, and hard drives—at grocers, paan shops, and mobile-­ phone charging stations—­taking on new lives outside the metered legibility of Snapchat posts and Youku views. This capacity to jump infrastructures, via a more intensified and opportunistic circulation, fosters unmea­sured access and use across breakdown, blackout, and brand new, creating new ­capacities in the pro­cess. It is t­hese improvised infrastructures, not new or remixed content, that provide the true mea­sure of the creativity and impact of con­temporary Asian videos as social media. Attention to t­ hese diverse cir­cuits, informal practices, and bazaar atmospherics—­more than content, authorship, and owner­ ship—is a key disposition that unites the essays in this collection. Pursuing such video practices in the penumbra of the global, this volume illuminates grey zones that are routinely marginalized as illegible, contraband, or out-­of-­sync. It challenges the standard historiographic arc of Euro-­American-­ centered approaches to video, which typically moves from magnetic tape to digital formats to the Internet. Such scholarship, with its narrow focus on video art, official tape and disc distribution, and online platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, underscores new and improved technologies (a dominant vector of “new media” studies), diffusion models of Americanization or similar core-­to-­fringe transfers (with Japan as an earlier center), questions of clarity (high definition, more pixels, vibrant color) if not fidelity (qua indexical link to some real­ity), the consolidation of formal and ­legal media industries within a framework of global governance, and the new significance of high-­tech user-­ consumers.14 This high-­bandwidth politics—in which you are the person of the year—is tethered to imaginations of Web 2.0 and specific protocols for technological living, and thus also of mediated lives marked as obsolescent. Video forms and practices outside the implied cultural “center”—­say, from Mongolia, Palestine, or Vietnam—­are elided by this more or less neat trajectory, as alternate formats, aesthetic regimes, and modes of circulation are relegated to a separate time zone of lagged development. Note the per­sis­tence of the video compact disc (vcd) over the previous two de­cades in Asia, as well as its current iterations in differentially compressed dvds, Blu-­ray discs, and myriad digital files. Instead of situating t­ hese variegated formats in relation to the substrate of material practices from which they spring, dominant 8 

J oshua N eves and B haskar S arkar

discourses of video dismiss them as cheap, vestigial, and peculiarly Asian containers of media content. Standard analytical frames and habits cannot, ­will not, acknowledge local practices as legitimate, pushing the latter into an epistemological periphery with significant material ramifications. For global observers, media practices across the region embody cultures of copy and counterfeit, distortion and cut-­rate dissemination: they are denounced as parasitic aberrations. Extending an orientalist trope, innovative video technologies are readily dismissed as tools of repression and censorship, instruments of an Asian authoritarianism deemed more sinister, more violent than its Euro-­American counter­parts framed by technorationalist rhe­torics of governance. As a corollary, videos from Asia are more readily accepted when they can be tethered to a politics of re­sis­tance. To be labeled as “banned” in China, Iran, or Myanmar seemingly guarantees a certain level of success in Western portals and the global press, which find a certain comfort in reproducing visions of authoritarian, excessive, or unruly Asia(s), and thus ignore both site-­specific concerns and a broader politics of exclusion by no means unique to the region. The media portals that Patricia Zimmermann explores in her essay ­here—­all salutary instances of ngo-­backed pro-­democratic initiatives—­remain open to charges of reiterating such a reductive po­liti­cal imaginary. The under­lying friction—­between, on the one hand, the value of ­these websites to grassroots activists fighting repression across Southeast Asia and, on the other, the pitfalls of embracing imported, top-­down, and “modular” paradigms of democracy and civil society—­indexes the fuzzy role of video in the region’s popu­lar mobilizations. While numerous scholars of video since the 1990s have argued that ­there ­will never be a cogent field of video theory, a claim induced by the medium’s perceived lack of a single, essential form or practice, this volume contends that it is precisely video’s heterogeneous shapes, rituals, and ­ripples that demand theorization. Moving beyond disciplinary preoccupations with medium specificity, we take video to be an integral ele­ment in giving shape to, and circulating, a wide range of residual and emergent Asian formations. What we mean by video includes the usual analog and digital forms, platforms, and configurations, but also something more that is historically specific to Asia. Our sense of video includes technologies, idioms, and practices that point not just to the gleaming new Asia of neoliberal triumphalism, but also to the slums, shantytowns, and “survival sector” that shore it up. To emphasize cultures of informality and spaces outside planned development, recalcitrant enclaves that undercut modernist rationality and modes of civil society, is not to romanticize I ntroduction  9

a subaltern realm, but to attend to uneven historical experiences and demotic agencies. The point is to highlight crucial porocities and interpenetrations—­ what Lawrence Liang has called “ave­nues of participation,” and Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas pursue as irreducible interdependencies among informal and formal economies.15 The essays commissioned for this volume chart video’s plastic, transmedial, and promiscuous assemblages, complicating notions of technoscientific capacity and modernity. They examine a vibrant field that runs from media platforms to industrial ­labor, hiv/aids communities to rural documentary collectives, microcinema to dance cover videos. The exigencies of a structurally distinct Global South shape the contours, textures, and flavors of Asian video formations, their distinctive “accents” pressing against standard understandings of the medium.16 Which is to say, alongside the high-­def and high-­gloss worlds of commercial cinemas and new technophilias thrives a distinctly “southern” video assemblage—­marked by its affinities with local popu­lar cultures, social movements, pirate economies, and ecologies of desire and anxiety, and indexed in the contagious, compressed, and embodied videographies that drive a new sensuous politics. Thus, beyond dismissals of the medium as the mundane conduit of commerce or the low-­tech option for amateurs, artists, and activists, this collection asks: what is video at this point? And how does it recalibrate technomodernity in the outposts of globalization? BE YO ND NO RM ATIVITIES

Taken as a ­whole, this volume also puts into question the idea of culture, especially its bourgeois-­liberal conception as a pedagogical tool that helps produce discerning, well-­tempered citizen-­subjects of a modern polis. Beset with this onerous function, the concept comes with its share of contradictions. Notwithstanding its numerous local instantiations, culture as civilizing force serves as a universal template, the modern conduit to a rootless cosmopolitanism. And while crucially circumscribed by par­ameters of taste and propriety, culture is, nevertheless, expected to promote ­free and spontaneous expression. Modern forms of governmentality, with their balancing of local specificity with translocal commensurability, and their paradoxical intertwining of a desire for freedom and a need for control, have depended on the pedagogical role of culture. The complementarity of rights and responsibilities in civil society discourses finds its parallel in the obligatory pairing of censorship with creativity. 10 

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Michel Foucault’s work on the crucial intercalations of control and freedom in liberal thought alerts us to culture’s ambiguous role in the art of governance—­especially the cultural production and normalization of hierarchies of power (insides and outsides, the normal and the pathological). Even as Foucault focuses on Eu­ro­pean contexts, he stresses the racial dimensions of modern biopolitics that lead to the obsessive production and monitoring of binaries of the self/other genus. But the genealogy of governmentality encounters additional prob­lems when confronted with the history of colonialism and the challenges of postcolonial life.17 Edward Said, drawing on Foucault’s methodology, reveals the role played by ­human imagination and culture in the concerted production of “the Orient” as Eu­rope’s Other and in the consolidation of territorial, economic, and psychic occupations.18 We submit that the discussion of governmentality stands to gain much from the incisive mid-­ twentieth-­century interventions of Frantz Fanon. The racialization of both explicit and covert mechanisms of control, so astutely analyzed in Fanon’s ­exploration of emancipation, adds a distinctly postcolonial twist to our understanding of modern biopolitics and its constitutive role in the itineraries of imperialism. Fanon’s ruminations on the shackles on consciousness of an all-­engulfing “whiteness,” and his critique of postcolonial “national culture” for both its essentializing tendencies and its lingering sense of lack, constitute a power­ful exegesis of control and freedom that have impor­tant lessons for the interrogation of all non-­Euro-­American formations, including Asian media cultures.19 If Asia is now widely acknowledged as an engine of cap­i­tal­ist growth, it is also the source of much apprehension in the West. The tenacious (re)production of racial ste­reo­types and the discounting of Asian consciousness and creativity continue to be common strategies for managing anx­i­eties around the region’s resurgence. Con­temporary connectedness ensures that ­these anx­i­eties come to inflect Asian attitudes: local elite classes, often in thrall with Euro-­American worldviews and normativities, seem particularly susceptible to the continued dismissal of Asia as culturally backward and po­liti­cally retro­ grade. But the same connectedness also ensures that Asia now infiltrates the West with its ideas and orientations, thereby imploding the East-­West dyad. In response, a neurotic impulse to categorize, distinguish, and segregate shows up in the domain of global interactions, producing a racialized pecking order of the “our brilliant creativity, their crass imitation” strain. Many of the essays in this collection (Chio, Cho, Heberer, Neves, Srinivas, Steinberg, Wu) establish the démodé status of such binaries, situating Asian video practices as I ntroduction  11

essential to understanding the ambidextrous modulations of global-­popular cultures. At the same time, we note a tendency among many Asianists to fall into a racialized revisioning of Asia as, essentially, East and South Asia, expunging West Asia as external to global civil society (a move countered by Dickinson’s essay in this volume). At issue ­here is a power­ful drive t­ oward universal normalization, crucially shaping con­temporary desire and aspiration, ­will and agency. Dominant modes of d­ oing ­things take on the force of universal absolutes, although shadowed by the proviso of the exception. Thus, warfare must follow international conventions of just and fair combat, u­ nless it is the war on terror or drugs or piracy—­some discernible ­enemy that is deemed unjust. Thankfully, e­ very centralizing normativity must contend with countervailing, often rhizomatic tendencies: ebullient deviations that cannot be accommodated by the sanctioned exception. One entry point to this interminable square-off is the institution of law that seeks to negotiate tensions between control and emergence, to arbitrate disputes, and to codify stable criteria for their resolution. For the postcolonies (or, more broadly, the Global South, including postsocialist contexts), the prob­lems posed by the sedimentation of Euro-­American ­legal structures have now been compounded by the rising demand for global governance. Con­ temporary international law poses itself as a transhistorical, transcultural, universal entity, threatening to bulldoze all manners of incommensurabilities to establish con­ve­nient equivalences. To argue, as Euro-­American l­egal scholars such as Lawrence Lessig do, that “law is law,” and that all sovereign nation-­ states must strictly sync their ­legal frameworks to international statutes, is to willfully ignore the messy historicity of international copyright laws (described in one influential commentary as “information feudalism”), not to mention the par­tic­ul­ar exigencies of local media cultures.20 It is only ­because of such tunnel vision that Lessig can separate out creative forms of piracy (such as collage and sampling) that generate value, as opposed to “piracy plain and s­ imple” that merely pilfer ­others’ creativity without adding any value.21 Interestingly, he locates this latter form of “bad piracy” mainly in Asia and the “Asiatic” parts of Eu­rope from the former Soviet Union. From such a liberal perspective, invested in the sanctity of bourgeois law, the myriad cultural activities of Asian media compute as uncivil recalcitrance—­a per­sis­tent prob­ lem for institutions of global governance like the World Trade Organ­ization (wto) and the World Intellectual Property Organ­ization (wipo). Yet, as scholars like Ramon Lobato and Madhavi Sunder have demonstrated, media

12 

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practices such as poaching and copying generate local value streams that remain opaque to narrowly ­legal frameworks.22 Laikwan Pang has noted the broad ac­cep­tance among Asian upper and ­middle classes of the rhe­toric that adherence to international laws is an index of a p­ eople’s modernity and civility.23 The con­temporary focus on the creative industries in mainstream media and academic knowledge production—­a focus on the ­legal and legible that values only certain types of productive ­labor—is emblematic of this normalizing trend. It also fortifies the sense of culture as a pedagogic force within civil society. However, this class-­ideological purchase of a universalized model of Law (and Culture) runs up against local economic and po­liti­cal expediencies. Shujen Wang has demonstrated that the revenue needs of local administrators in China come in the way of the effective operationalization of anti-­piracy laws.24 The Indian Copyright Act of 2012, which seeks to update the statutes for the digital era and to be consonant with the global Trade-­Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (trips) regime, leaves enough ambiguity in its language to accommodate deviations considered essential to nurturing local potentialities.25 LE GI TI M ACY

What­ever the law is, it frequently seems remote from what is felt to be socially legitimate in light of cultural and economic exigencies. Since global copyright statutes derive mainly from Euro-­American interests and frameworks, they do not reflect the ground realities of media cultures in the rest of the world. Even the mainstream Economist magazine has reported on staggering discrepancies in the international pricing of media. The dvd of a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster such as The Dark Knight, which sells for just u­ nder $20 in the United States, has a price tag in Rus­sia that, when adjusted for real income differentials, amounts to nearly $75; the corresponding value in India is a stunning $663.26 Even for Rus­sian or Indian ­middle classes, ­legal dvd prices of Hollywood products prove to be exorbitant and unfair; thus, ­there is l­ ittle incentive to eradicate piracy of imported media, the only po­liti­cally compelling pressure coming from established domestic industries. An entire range of piratical activities emerges in the wide gap between legality and legitimacy. Sometimes, t­ hese practices negotiate established institutions and norms, pressing for change: Kay Dickinson’s essay in this volume addresses the legitimation of copy culture via poetic practices across West

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Asia; Tzu-­hui Celina Hung addresses documentaries that seek greater social ac­cep­tance for already ­legal “immigrant brides” within a Taiwanese multiculturalist paradigm. At other points, the piratical consists of more desperate acts of communication spilling into the realm of terrorism: instantiations of ­these include videos made by Palestinian jihadis before they go on a suicide mission, exhorting younger generations to join their legitimate strug­gle, or the more macabre recordings of isis beheadings aimed primarily at inducing horror, forcing specific concessions, and inciting armed retaliation. Common to t­ hese disparate practices is a strug­gle over sovereignty. In his musings on Roman law against pirates, Daniel Heller-­Roazen speaks of the littorum, that shifting line where land meets sea: an area of confusion and dispute, given the defining role played by the fluctuating waterline, on the one hand, and the land-­centric articulation of civil law, on the other. As that threshold moves with the seasons and the tides, it produces a zone of indeterminacy in which all instituted rights—­over land and property—­find themselves, literally and figuratively, at sea.27 The moving shoreline marks a realm of blurred experiences and puts to question not only the jurisdiction of established laws, but also our very notions of the licit and the illicit (for instance, of kinship structures, sexualities, and ethics). With this unraveling of a stable and shared sense of the l­egal and the licit arises a crisis of competing sovereignties. The issue of legitimacy keeps returning as an open question, not quite tractable by the institution of laws. The prob­lem is not exclusive to the shifting shoreline: whenever a new set of potentialities arise due to novel technologies, economic opportunities, po­liti­cal realignments, or social transformations, the tension between legality and legitimacy surfaces. So far we have been talking primarily in terms of law, specifically copyright law and related forms of intellectual property. But the figure of the moving shoreline is evocative of a wide variety of experiential domains inducing fickle affiliations, moving moralities, and nebulous agencies. At once the center and outpost of the global con­temporary, Asia is marked by frictions, incongruencies, and uncertainties that normative dispensations seek to manage. Video, broadly construed, offers ways of negotiating—­apprehending, reframing, living out, intervening in—­this shifting terrain. One useful approach might be to ask how ­these negotiations engage vari­ous normativities and the institutions that bolster them. What, for instance, is the relationship of emerging video cultures to the state and its policies? Jenny Chio writes about rural Chinese documentary collectives which benefit from state-­sponsored training facilities, equipment pools, and distribution networks, but whose recordings of community 14 

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festivals move well beyond official tourism cir­cuits to serve local needs for self-­ representation. In contrast, Patricia Zimmermann provides an account of ngo-­ backed online media collectives that evince a decidedly critical relationship to the state, but whose objective of expanding egalitarian access and participation in Southeast Asia has the ­future po­liti­cal firmament in sight. For S. V. Srinivas, reposts of audiovisual material on YouTube and other social-­media sites, with minimal or no modification, help mobilize popu­lar support for the carving out of a new province: video ­here takes on a direct role in gerrymandering the po­liti­cal cartography of India. Joshua Neves’s exploration of Chinese workers laboring ­under inhuman conditions in factories serving transnational companies suggests that the state, now reduced to an appendage of global capital, has rethought and relinquished much of its responsibility ­toward its citizens. Since the state makes its presence felt in the media world largely in terms of censorship, subverting or bypassing such regulatory norms becomes a primary preoccupation for many of the media prac­ti­tion­ers discussed h­ ere. At issue are contending par­ameters of taste, prescriptive notions of culture, and moral policing, often at the intersections of the popu­lar and the subaltern. Conerly Casey takes a close look at popu­lar tactics of negotiating the ban on Bollywood cinema and m ­ usic in the wake of the shari‘a laws in Nigeria. Likewise, Rahul Mukherjee and Abhigyan Singh analyze the circulation of Mewati ­music videos on microsd cards, viewable on mobile phones in private and away from the disapproving gaze of religious clerics; complicating conceptions of subalternity as a space outside of the mainstream, their case study demonstrates the extent to which aspects of the popu­lar now infiltrate and enable subaltern lives and endeavors. In her contribution, Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that hiv activists and social workers in Manipur—­caught between a callous state and a militant underground that turns punitive in reaction to the disease’s social stigma—­must be particularly discreet about the production and circulation of hiv/aids media. Th ­ ese varied media publics experience the censorious state, and nascent po­liti­cal formations with statist aspirations, as rather arbitrary arbiters of what is acceptable and what is tainted as illicit. This is why William Mazzarella has described media censorship as oscillating between the dual roles of police and patron while seeking to manage “the open edge of mass publicity” via a series of “performative dispensations.”28 Like Mazzarella’s work, the case studies examined by Casey, Ghosh, and Mukherjee and Singh chart the uncertain relationship between meaning and affect, media techne and social efficacy. But ­these instances also entail media production and reception practices that are grounded in local communities, thus conjuring up I ntroduction  15

the relatively more utopian, if still volatile, realm of the popu­lar. At stake in ­these case studies are the ingenuity, viability, and limits of popu­lar sovereignty as it mediates, via video practices, the always dubious legitimacy of normative structures. The necessarily contentious nature of the terrain suggests a conceptualization of “Asia” that must depart fundamentally from an “area studies” paradigm predicated on an additive model of the global. The Asia (as well as the global) that materializes from the pages of this volume seems to be exemplary of penumbral formations—­always emergent, without any predetermined shape or stable destination. Refusing to simply accept a neoliberal narrative of Asia, we claim that Asia also names an arduous and continuing search for legitimacy, equity, and social justice. Asia’s diversity and dynamism is not a ­matter of epistemological incoherence, but the mark of what mediatized life looks and feels like in a globalizing-­yet-­localized world. Without imposing nomenclatural consistency or insisting on ontological unity, we signal and work with the incompossibilities that are constitutive of Asia (and the global) at this point. M E D I ATI O N

Not surprisingly, cultural theorists who work primarily with Asian contexts have come up with some of the most stimulating formulations of world­ making practices and globalities. Particularly germane to our collective proj­ ect is Rey Chow’s consciously provocative elucidation of entanglements as a mediatic mode for our dissonant-­yet-­overlapping contemporaneity. As she suggests, entanglements might well provide the figure for the “topological looping together” of t­hings characterized by “disparity rather than equivalence,” the “linkages and enmeshments that keep t­ hings apart, the voidings and uncoverings that hold ­things together.”29 Her formulation points to a pro­cess of mediation far more involved than the ­simple one-­to-­one correspondence between real­ity and its classical re-­presentation: a pro­cess that is constitutive of material real­ity rather than simply reflecting it in an empire of signs. And the medium of video seems rather apposite for such entangled mediations. Many of the video interventions explored in ­these pages feature an ecologic of the body as their central problematic. Bodily m ­ atters have been firmly at the center of video art from its early days: the affordability, ease of use, and plastic modalities of video helped to make it the medium of choice for artists and activists, especially ­those concerned with a micropolitics of corporeality.30 If the advent of the digital has expanded the purview of video cultures, many of the 16 

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medium’s advantages have multiplied with chroma keying and nonlinear editing suites, networked publics and platforms for rapid duplication and sharing, cheaper equipment and simplified do-­it-­yourself operations. Laura Marks’s delineation of video haptics—ascribed to its emergence “in the permeable space between source and viewer,” and thus to its manipulability—­can now be extended well beyond the textures and tonalities of the image itself, to the plasticity of the social body.31 Particularly suited to the cultural necessities, economic exigencies, and po­liti­cal energies of the Global South, video thrives in that zone of limited resources and inspired improvisations, fissured communities and explosive mobilizations, elastic topographies and asynchronous temporalities. Southern experientialities—­their density, pulsation, and piquancy—­find repre­sen­ta­tion and materialization in video’s corporeal ­mediations: hence our speculation that some of Third Cinema’s techno-­aesthetic features, affective resonances, and po­liti­cal sensibilities live on in southern/­ piratical video cultures. The corpus of video—­the performative body at its center and the real­ity assembled by video cultures—is the analytical focus for all of our contributors. For Hung and Neves, it is the laboring body of the worker, of the immigrant bride in her unfamiliar settings and the young industrial worker in the Chinese special economic zones; for Casey as for Shah, it is the sexualized body susceptible to exhibitionistic and voy­eur­is­tic excess, deviancy, and surveillance; for Michelle Cho and Feng-­Mei Heberer, it is the gesturing body as translator within cross-­cultural registers of orientalist fantasies and containments. Other contributors explore video cultures that mount physically palpable worldings: Chio explores videos from the hinterlands of China that, in representing ethnic festivals, become a crucial part of t­ hose very events; Chia-­chi Wu examines small-­screen technologies, often mobile and handheld, in their forging of translocal Chineseness; Marc Steinberg considers the material interface, metamorphosis, and convergence within a Japa­nese media sphere comprising video games, books, comics, animation films, and toys. And both Srinivas and Dickinson investigate video cultures that are evocative in their projections of what is yet to be, but are no less real for this virtuality.32 Among the corporeal tensions addressed in this volume’s case studies, a crucial one is that between the idealized and the experiential bodies encountering everyday challenges. Take, for instance, the chapters by Heberer and Ghosh. The Singapore-­born German video artist Ming Wong uses the repertoire of already “improper” images of Germanness, drawn from the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, to interrogate his own lived experiences as both a I ntroduction  17

model minority and a not-­quite-­German subject (Heberer). In Haoban Pawan Kumar’s video, a Manipuri bodybuilder seeks to overcome the precariousness of his hiv-­ravaged body by winning the “Mr. India” bodybuilding title, putting to question what it means to be Manipuri or Indian (Ghosh). While Kumar’s and Wong’s works evince “indie” or even avant-garde sensibilities, Tsung-­lung Tsai’s “immigrant brides” trilogy takes a much more mainstream, made-­for-­television approach; but as Hung shows in her essay, the trilogy is no less incisive in its exploration of the niggling “foreignness” of ­these ­women within Taiwanese society, hailing as they do from elsewheres such as Cambodia, Vietnam, and mainland China. Under­lying ­these localized case studies is a common concern about the normative national body type and subjectivity; at a translocal level, this recurrent anxiety indexes structural presumptions about the idealized universal subject of modern history. In its gestural capacities, the body also emerges as an expressive register for the dizzying folds of transnational culture and the contradictions of global capital. As Cho demonstrates in her analy­sis of fan videos responding to the K-­pop artist Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” the m ­ usic video that si­mul­ta­neously celebrates and parodies the lifestyles of the super-­wealthy and privileged in a Seoul neighborhood in terms of exaggerated, repetitive, and often comical dance movements, its planetary reception—­recorded in equally over-­the-­top gestures of reaction ranging from hilarity to dumbfoundedness—­reveals a wide array of affective positions from enchantment to aversion, tender fan choreography to corporate-­sponsored dance contests. H ­ ere, the body is the medium for ambi­ valent negotiations of Asia’s alleged inscrutability, as well as working out more cosmopo­liti­cal relationships to it. For Casey, the widespread physical symptom of Nigerian teenage girls in the throes of spirit possession—­“dancing like they do in Bollywood musicals”—­marks a rather spirited response to the censors’ attempts to immunize infantilized national subjects from cultural corruption and deracination. In his essay on Chinese workers at the mercy of transnational capital, Neves focuses on ludic video dispersions that highlight the risks besetting laboring bodies. The young female worker who inserted the image of her smiling face onto the screen of a brand-­new iPhone, and Cao Fei’s video lampooning the modalities of haute couture fashion runways to critique l­ abor practices in Chinese garment factories, employ aestheticized yet precarious corporealities to comment on shifting notions of l­ abor and leisure and the constitution of risk-­bearing subjects within a neoliberal world order. Across ­these multifarious explorations of the video-­body emerges a common, larger concern with how media figures in the biopo­liti­cal management 18 

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of the living and its milieu—­especially in the wake of the digital. What media ecologies are forged in the triangulation between life pro­cesses, technological forms, and power structures? Media theorists such as Alex Galloway and Wendy Chun address a version of this question, in terms of con­temporary iterations of the citizen-­subject in the digital public sphere.33 Now they experience a large part of their social and po­liti­cal lives via the mediation of codes, protocols, and communication systems that double as mechanisms of surveillance: they mutate into something like a “data subject” (see Shah’s contribution in this volume).34 Expanding and deepening the shifts that Gilles Deleuze characterized as the harbinger of “control socie­ties,” the so-­called digital revolution refabricates subjecthood—­imploding, distributing, prostheticizing it—­even as it restructures governmentality.35 Recent biotechnological innovations, inaugurating a parallel realm of code-­based bioinformatics, allow not only unpre­ ce­dented interventions in public health (now increasingly privatized), but also the intensification of monitoring in terms of compressed “fingerprints” ranging from the capture of indexical impressions of h­ uman digits to the mapping of dna profiles. Signs of the quotidian convergence of the two realms, the biological and the cybernetic, are all around us: from the institution of universal identity cards (e.g., India’s Aadhar card or Rus­sia’s universal electronic card) to the appearance of advertisements on social network sites reflecting one’s online browsing history. In Ghosh’s essay, national security and biosecurity converge to an unnerving degree; Dickinson’s contribution on Syrian activism and Zimmermann’s work on Southeast Asian media co­ali­tions explore the possibilities and limits of digital interventions. The idealized po­liti­cal agency associated with a Habermasian bourgeois public sphere is further attenuated by such radical transformations of the ­social subject. With transnational capital emerging as the main locus of a global socius, and the nation-­state appearing more like its own spectral trace, the under­standing of citizenship has shifted, and po­liti­cal and cultural agencies now materialize largely as consumption-­like activities: note the preponderance of consumer boycotts, dial-in opinion polls, and social-­network posts (so-­called clicktivism). Even as nonrepresentative demo­cratic participation seems to expand, demo­cratic ideals and institutions appear to come “undone.”36 With con­temporary life increasingly materialized, comprehended, and lived at the intersections of the biological and the cybernetic, how does the po­liti­cal get recalibrated, especially from Asianist perspectives? Such questions about lived experiences, distributed agencies, and emergent politics converge in the concept of mediation: the ways in which media I ntroduction  19

forms, networks, and pro­cesses come to or­ga­nize, shape, and energize “life itself ”—­now rethought to include the animate and the inanimate, the living and the nonliving, the monadic and the all-­enveloping. A provocation that has emerged from the work of neovitalist media scholars such as Eugene Thacker, Sarah Kember, and Joanna Zylinska, and drawing on the increasing convergence of the informatic and the bioinformatic realms, the idea of mediation lends a centrality to media technologies and practices of mediatization in the production of social life.37 In mediation, the older vitalist sense of “medium” comes together with the idea of “media” as technologies of repre­sen­ta­tion and communication: now they interface, so that social space, media infrastructures, and practices of living become mutually constitutive. While such a formulation across multiple levels, scales, and the living-­ nonliving divide pres­ents the hazard of metaphysical romanticization, untethered from and unmindful of real divisions (remember vari­ous connective, immersive, plasmatic imaginaries—­most notably the nineteenth ­century’s ether), the specific contexts of the individual case studies collected ­here ground them in tangible materialities and power strug­gles. What do ­these situated instances of videopoiesis teach us? Beginning with the counterindustrial minimalism of well-­known East Asian filmmakers, and the small screens that have now infiltrated ­every aspect of trans-­Chinese life, Wu offers a meditation on wei or “micro” at vari­ous levels: mini-­screen gadgets, microblogs and micromessages, short duration, modest mode, ­simple trope, small tone, basic affect, mundane lives, micropolitics—in short, the mediation of life in a minor key and the shaping of a populist governmentality. Srinivas tracks a “cultural turn” in the demand for a Telangana state separate from Andhra Pradesh, away from the earlier focus on regional underdevelopment and economic inequities. He shows how charges of an Andhra hegemony stifling local language and culture ­were made affectively compelling largely through YouTube uploads of literary works, film clips, and songs: media “crap” that, posted with ­little or no embellishment, was nevertheless drawn from the cultural fabric of regional life to highlight its distinctiveness. In her essay on Arab video cultures, Dickinson explores the po­liti­cal potentiations of two distinct replication-­based media tactics that push well beyond monetization and copyright infringement: video artists’ recycled footage of the Syrian uprisings seeking to highlight aspects of living-­in-­common, and the performative appropriation, in po­liti­cal demonstrations, of the widely recognizable blue-­ skinned Na’vi ­people from the Hollywood blockbuster Avatar (2009), now adorned with “Palestinian flags and kufiya loincloths.” While not explic­itly 20 

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articulated by Mukherjee and Singh, a far-­ranging implication of their piece on Mewati video production arises from the Latin word amator, lover. The original impetus ­behind amateur media is not market exchange but the love of media. While Mewati media production has developed into an informally or­ ga­nized business, it sprang from a desire for self-­expression: even as the videos enter localized cir­cuits of exchange, they dabble in the art of engaged, intimate, sensuous living. Video’s deep penetration of the life of the community—an intense form of circulation that cannot be blocked by censuring authorities—­ indexes the ingenuity and expertise involved in quotidian mediation. In its imaginative flairs, affective orientations, and concrete entanglements, mediation enables a fluid, relational approach to the global. Rather than being pegged as an immutable universal structure, the global is ­imagined and worked out in myriad local ways, with media playing a vital role in such realizations. In the context of this collection, we might say that videopoiesis paves the way for cosmopoiesis. The global, from such a perspective, is best understood as an ongoing speculative proj­ect involving multiple scales, locations, temporalities: nonlinear, unpredictable, and evolving, it takes on the attributes of an emergence. Such contingent formulations of the global—or, rather, of an array of global ­orders—­call attention not only to established modes of worldmaking, but also local, informal, and unauthorized forms of participation. PA R TI CI PATI O N AN D P EN U MB RAL CAPACITIES

Participation has become such a buzzword with the rise of digital interactivity and social media that it is worth reminding ourselves that the concept did not emerge with Web 2.0. Po­liti­cal phi­los­op­ hers have evinced two distinct dispositions ­toward participation: excitement and anticipation about its untapped potentialities, and apprehension about its uncharted volatility, especially when participation takes the shape of popu­lar expression and mobilization. Is the popu­lar the tabula rasa that must be directed and molded by a cultural-­ political vanguard, or is it a space of dynamism where the politics of inhabiting the social (the digital, the global) is always already at play? The ­people, the masses, the multitude: t­ hese interchangeable terms register the ambivalences of and about popu­lar participation. One question cuts across their varied nuances: who is the subject of history? ­W hether it is the Marxist proletarian subject of Revolution or the vote-­bearing citizen-­subject of Western democracies, both forms of agency have their moorings in the Enlightenment with its stress on humanist values, technoscientific rationality, and agnostic legality; I ntroduction  21

both presuppose a teleological realization of history.38 This is why the unplanned and dispersed nature of po­liti­cal emergences remain problematic for both traditions: from Eric Hobsbawm’s characterization of the consciousness of “primitive rebels” as “prepo­liti­cal” to the more recent criticisms of the Arab Spring and the Occupy and Umbrella Movements for their un­co­or­di­nated spontaneity, participatory irruptions get deprecated as immature and inconsequential for their intrinsic virtuality.39 In the Global South, the incommensurability between pedagogical ideals of participation and popu­lar mobilizations is compounded by its strained spatio­ temporalities. The turbulent historicity of the postcolonial subject (not to mention her postsocialist counterpart) complicate meaningful participation: questions of historical difference and cultural authenticity, derivative imaginations, and failed modernity shadow her ­every step. A wide range of tactics has been proposed for overcoming such challenges: from Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation,” drawing on postcolonial errantry and “the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures,” to the subaltern studies proj­ect of recovering discounted epistemologies and agencies.40 The subaltern, an errant figure in the dual and relational senses of deviant and itinerant, infiltrates the realm of the popu­lar and usurps its affordances to figure out a participatory role in an increasingly variegated mainstream. It is impossible to overlook the renewed salience that culture has come to enjoy in late modernity as a conduit to participation. If mass media and culture once stood as emblematic bad objects for acolytes of the Frankfurt School, con­temporary modes of expression—­mass cultural or subcultural—­ take on undeniable momentum as vital zones of possibility, power­ful speaking positions, and tactical resources. With globalization and networked cultures, ­these possibilities multiply along unforeseen vectors: even the most ideologically compromised sectors of culture come to augment the crucial status of “the imagination as a social practice,” not only keeping alive the possibility of small interruptions and subversions, but, more impor­tant, restructuring the social in profound ways.41 Embracing current polemics about active users, porous creativities, and new solidarities, this collection takes seriously even the seemingly mundane itineraries of con­temporary participatory cultures, suggesting more than a shift from consumer to “produser.” But we also note that everyday instances of participation featuring producing consumers, which frequently move away from models of cultural agency projected by twentieth-­century radical aesthetic movements, are signposts of a decidedly neoliberal economy of interactivity. Nevertheless, this participatory economy remains distinct from 22 

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a reifying culture industry with its top-­down fabulations. The newly dominant cognitive-­affective economy proliferates even as it fixes cultural differences (as brands, experiences, lifestyles, geo­graph­i­cal indicators). It is crucially reliant on forms of l­abor previously taken to be nonproductive and now dispersed well beyond industrial sites—­shoring up a “social factory” animated by “­free ­labor.” This l­abor not only blurs the line between pleas­ur­able engagement and crass exploitation, but has also transformed what it means to play a part—­a shift from ideological dupes to cruel optimists.42 Our prob­lem h­ ere is ­simple: the knowledge economy, with its dual pleasure-­exhaustion logic, has come to define what it means to participate in economic, po­liti­cal, and cultural life. In this context, participation, too, becomes a technology in the narrow instrumentalist sense. How do we keep track of the more heterogeneous, contingent, “southern” forms of participation in the face of this relentless instrumentality, which appears to enfold contingency itself? Paolo Virno’s conception of the “multitude” is useful for us ­here, as it draws on just such instabilities and differences to postulate a global-­participatory realm beyond “the p­ eople,” signaling a unity that is not one. The concept zeroes in on a key shift in l­ abor processes—­ from productive waged ­labor to the economy of the “general intellect.” No longer satisfied with the extraction of a fixed number of ­labor hours from workers, post-­Fordist relations of production now subsume and are sustained by a broad range of h­ uman occupations: our leisure and boredom, affects and desires, clicks and memes. This revamped conjunctural totality, in which “the gloomy dialectic between acquiescence and ‘transgression’ ” is no longer sufficient, demands and offers new conduits for po­liti­cal engagement.43 Beyond the resistance-­acquiescence model, Virno offers a surprising definition or call for participation: exit. To exit is to defect; or as he puts it, “Exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the game.” 44 To deny hegemonic structures their controlling inevitability is to pursue and proliferate other options, thus putting pressure on—­and seeking to shift—­the very terms of legality and legitimacy. Virno’s rejoinder is consonant with our claim that what is blocked from view, foreclosed, and made penumbral is also marked by exuberant potentialities. It suggests that what appears as shadowy or illegible from one perspective might be better understood, from another ­angle, as a tactical exit-­as-­participation (Glissant’s errantry is particularly redolent h­ ere). Asian video cultures are not simply eclipsed by the teleologies of globalization discourse or digital media studies: they also point to deliberate departures that recalibrate the conditions in which contestation and creation take place. In this sense, they are otherworldly. I ntroduction  23

­There is, of course, nothing inherently progressive about participation. New modes of production and distribution (sweatshop assembly recast as “­free l­abor,” transnational commodity chains, online distribution ser­vices), technohabits, trails, and tracking (from data mining to drone cameras) not only inspire new kinds and intensities of engagement, but also enforce specific forms of it. Greater access, as it is becoming increasingly evident, comes with more invasive forms of surveillance and regulation. Or as Deleuze coyly describes the shift from disciplinary society to socie­ties of control: “A snake’s coils are even more intricate than a mole’s burrow.” 45 While Deleuze’s often cited “postscript,” speculating about newly dominant and distributed forms of control and new weapons of response, casts a tall shadow over new media studies, what concerns us is its rather narrow vision of technomodernity.46 Beginning as a manifesto-­like treatise on digitization and modulation, even the ethereal diffusion of new economies of control, it also takes on a prescriptive dimension that, contrary to its rhe­toric, channels “users” in par­tic­u­lar molds. This includes shoring up long-­standing tensions between “active” and “passive” agents, accentuated by oppositions between what is presumed to be dominant and aspects that lag. Such binaries have the effect of dividing populations into ­those with capacity and ­those without. Such epistemic divisions of the world into zones of capacity and incapacity are at the heart of our critique of new media’s participatory modes. We argue that the relative neglect of historically grounded conceptions and instances of participation vacates southern capacities and acts to trivialize participation itself. That the entrepreneurial-­cum-­consumer logics of Web 2.0 distinguish value-­ generating cultures of innovation from “primitive” cultures of imitation and corruption only acts to intensify long-­standing exclusionary articulations of publics. Take the so-­called informal sector, which remains a key arena for appreciating the overlooked potentialities of eclipsed modes of participation, and which includes many of the media formations that interest us ­here. If we acknowledge creativity beyond its abstract and universalized contours, and beyond the heroic figure of the startup entrepreneur, a world of situated capacities comes into view. We move from a focus on content and commodity to a consideration of the inventive tactics via which distinct, often underprivileged actors inhabit the pres­ ent and make claims on the f­ uture. Such tactical ingenuities lead us to the informal and unpredictable field of circulation—­and hence video—­which includes vari­ous un­regu­la­ted, illegible, and unmea­sured practices and flows. Circulation—as a set of cumulative

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synergies, connective flare-ups, and opportunistic repurposings that are at once destabilizing and procreative—constantly modulates and remakes infrastructure itself. In this context, what once seemed concrete and stable is transformed into something fluid and ephemeral, so that improvisation and destabilization become central to its very operation. This pro­cessual understanding of creativity and its infrastructural substrate recasts the entire question of participation in a new light. Beyond the two poles of transcendental normativity and narrow instrumentality, the capacity for participation opens up to the manifold possibilities arising from the intersections of the cultural, the economic, and the po­liti­cal. In thinking about creative capacities, we want to emphasize the links ­between informal infrastructures and what Partha Chatterjee has termed “po­liti­cal society.” Chatterjee argues that the domain of po­liti­cal activity for many—­indeed, “for most of the world”—­lies outside the realm of civil society. The prob­lems associated with an already striated public domain are compounded by the unfeasibility of rights-­based claims: vast segments of the citizenry (not to mention fringe, undocumented groups) are unable to pursue their aspirations by civil means. In response, contingent publics resort to moral and other nonlegal languages, and sometimes to vio­lence, calling out the contradictions in official discourse, tactically (re)routing “the Law” and short-­ circuiting state dispensations to their advantage. In short, uncivil and illegal means become an essential part of everyday social life. To focus analytical attention on this agonistic domain, Chatterjee proposes “po­liti­cal society” as a conceptualization of “the rest of society that lies outside the domain of modern civil society.” 47 Our aim is to bring this notion of po­liti­cal society squarely into conversations about con­temporary media worlds and popu­lar cultures, and more specifically to steer research on media industries into the messy terrain of informal creative economies of the Global South.48 The shifting gap between civil and po­liti­cal socie­ties drives our usage of the concept of the penumbra over more familiar terms like Ramon Lobato’s shadow economies. In part, this is b­ ecause the shadow’s semantic field fixes certain media forms and practices as illegitimate, rather than casting light on the production and contestation of legitimacy itself. Indeed, Lobato and Julian Thomas’s The Informal Media Economy usefully demonstrates how the informal is very often integral to, and interdependent with, official modalities. But if narratives of interde­pen­dency underscore transactions between seemingly polarized realms and remain crucial to understanding the value of grey-­market practices, they offer incorporation as their typical endpoint.

I ntroduction  25

I­ncorporation suggests a linearity, a pro­cess of becoming legitimate: it suppresses activities that do not lend themselves to marketization, state proj­ects, or the increasing sway of the innovation industries. Thus, industry techies celebrate China’s shanzhai culture precisely ­because they can easily incorporate and benefit from it. H ­ ere, street-­level ingenuity effectively functions as outsourced research and development, promising all the profit with ­little risk: its other significations fade away. Even if one ­were to accept the eventual capitalization of all media-­related activities, and the adoption of efficiency and optimal rates of return as the most decisive metrics, “global media” remains a curiously divided phenomenon, with the international distribution of creative endeavors mimicking the international division of l­abor. And yet, no par­tic­u­lar array of infrastructural assemblages is immune to the eddying forces of global circulation. As Steinberg’s contribution to this volume demonstrates, considerations of regional-­ cultural-­geopolitical circulation nuance our understanding of the global distribution of production-­distribution capacities and infrastructures.49 His essay is exemplary of this collection’s challenge to key methodological proclivities of a hegemonic media industries paradigm, such as the subordination of the cultural to the political-­economic, the dismissal of the local-­popular in ­favor of global mass culture, and a narrow focus on media at the expense of crucial interpenetrations. But our volume pushes further, seeking to advance the study of penumbral industries—­or, better still, industriousness. Th ­ ese shifts in focus rest on the belief that the social value of media cultures exceeds economic concerns in impor­tant ways. On the evidence of the case studies ­assembled h­ ere, practices such as covering, copying, reposting, archiving, multiplying, cohabitating, and becoming possessed exceed “repre­sen­ta­tion” in the techno-­aesthetic sense. Th ­ ese activities constitute, properly speaking, more-­than-­representational modes of mediation, which (re)circulate social and po­liti­cal capacities that are themselves generative.50 In a fundamental sense, t­hese ongoing mediations potentiate and achieve fresh alignments of the social, of our lived worlds. A BRI E F ROA D MAP

Infrastructures, intimacies, and speculations, the three sections organ­izing the book, highlight the work of video and actually existing forms of technomodernity in the global Asias. ­There is, expectedly, some overlap between the sections; nevertheless, the essays grouped together in each section share the 26 

J oshua N eves and B haskar S arkar

primary preoccupation signaled in its title. Thus, “Infrastructures” interrogates videomedia’s technological, institutional, and geospatial conditions of possibility, tracking its passages between formal and informal organ­izations, high-­ tech and low-­tech networks, content and platform, online and offline formats. “Intimacies” examines videomedia’s fabrication of desiring publics and affective communities in terms of insides and outsides, familiar and unfamiliar, permissible and impermissible, while registering the dissolution of precisely such polarities. Fi­nally, “Speculations” explores videomedia’s embodied assemblies and emerging cultural and po­liti­cal geographies, not only acknowledging the untimely, the unseemly, the unhomely, but also gesturing t­ oward the nascent, the virtual, even the unexpected. Methodologically, Asian Video Cultures embraces materialist and ethnographic approaches, training a keen eye on ground-­level sensuous engagements with media technologies and dispersed forms of affective politics that have no recognizably cogent endpoints. Such methodologies help illuminate everyday practices that are elided by the surprisingly common conflation of the global with a per­sis­tent imagination of the First World. At the same time, the collection refuses to jettison established modes of textual and ideological analy­sis. ­Those of us who study Asia (or the Global South) cannot afford to ignore textual idioms and ideological sleights of hand, as ­these are the grounds on which Asian creativities and worldviews get dismissed so often as trailing anomalies or recalcitrant idiosyncrasies. Attention to ­these multiple registers, and to the truck between them, map a media field that is strikingly—­and profoundly—­heterogeneous: it helps foreground vari­ous informal, diffuse, and possibly illicit media forms, cir­ cuits, and practices. The volume’s three organ­izing concepts—­Asia, video, culture—­exceed and escape all manners of standardizing tendencies, and implode normativities that now are bundled con­ve­niently u­ nder the sign of neoliberalism. Indeed, one of the central interventions of this volume is the epistemological restitution of media phenomenologies that, for their allegedly divergent, ad hoc, and derivative nature, have long been relegated to the scandalous peripheries of global media. The real scandal, speaking more broadly, is the relentless orchestration of a hegemonic and universal global order (be it trade relations, media networks, or the idea of civil society), when ­actual experience is ineluctably multiple. What happens, this volume asks, when we consider the global in light of Asia—­not just the glistening Asia showcased in triumphant narratives of cap­i­tal­ist expansion, but also the “southern” congeries of Asia embodied in the I ntroduction  27

teeming slums of Manila and Mumbai, the remote hinterlands of Tajikistan and Yunnan, or the vital informal economies of Seoul and Taipei? Thus, collectively, our contributors examine not only the large media conglomerates, but also grassroots video interventions often directed against statist power, and the myriad colloquial media cir­cuits and localized practices that constitute the domain of popu­lar culture. At least two far-­reaching ramifications of this approach are worth reiterating h­ ere. First, as a w ­ hole, the volume effectively offers a critical exploration of the global-­popular, where the hyphen indexes not simply an additive model but a more intricate set of folds, intersections, and entanglements. Second, in acknowledging and recording digital modernity’s tainted or overlooked southern manifestations, the volume shifts focus away from online, clean, high-­res idealizations and offers a more expansive and accurate sense of global digital cultures. As a result, the “world picture” provided by a digital media studies firmly entrenched in Euro-­American preoccupations begins to unravel, suggesting more accommodating and incisive conceptions of global media and digital humanities. Both ­these “gains” result from our collective attempt to overcome forms of epistemological blockage by positing a penumbral—­multiple, dynamic, irrepressible, and illuminating—­ sense of Asia and the global. Other­wise, our discipline (in its vari­ous avatars) would remain mired in what, following Ackbar Abbas, is designable as “reverse hallucination”: if a hallucination is seeing something that is not ­there, then its reverse, as Abbas argues, is not to see what is.51 > NOTE S  ​ 1

2

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We invoke the “Global South” not as a stable geographic entity, but as a mutating formation with its historically produced conflicts, injustices, and inequities. This formulation clearly echoes Gramsci’s writings on southern Italy. On the pitfalls and potentialities of transporting the idea of “the South” from a nationalist setting to the global scale, see Cesare Casarino, “The Southern Answer: Pasolini, Universalism, Decolonization,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 4 (2010): 673–96. On informal infrastructures of media circulation in the Global South, see, for ­instance, Erwin Alampay, ed., Living the Information Society in Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009); Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Lawrence Liang, “Porous Legalities and Ave­nues of Participation,” Sarai: Bare Acts (Delhi: Sarai, 2005); Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (New York: Routledge, 2010).

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3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12 13

In his well-­known reading of the global history of capital, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that t­hese insistent local traces come to constitute capital’s “history 2s.” Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Eu­rope: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2000), esp. 47–96. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “­Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” in New Latin American Cinema Vol. I, ed. Michael  T. Martin, translation from Cineaste revised by Julianne Burton and Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, [1969] 1997), 37, emphasis in original. For a more detailed development of this point, see Bhaskar Sarkar, “Theory of ‘Third World Cinema,’ ” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, ed. Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland (New York: Routledge, 2013), 470–77. Significant exceptions include Ziauddin Sardar, Consumption of Kuala Lumpur (London: Reaktion, 2000); Ackbar Abbas and John Nguyet Erni, eds., Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2004); Meaghan Morris and Mette Hjort, eds., Creativity and Academic Activism: Instituting Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Representative essays appear in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Ileana Rodríguez, ed., The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). See Ranajit Guha’s critique of Eric Hobsbawm in his magisterial Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, foreword by James Scott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), especially 5–7. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popu­lar,” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 4 (2005): 475. Also see Swati Chattopadhyay and Bhaskar Sarkar, “Introduction: The Subaltern and the Popu­lar,” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 4 (2005): 357–63. Kuan-­Hsing Chen, “Introduction: The Decolonial Question,” Trajectories: Inter-­ Asia Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1998), 1–46; Kuan-­Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: T ­ oward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). We employ “chaos” ­here in the positive sense that Ien Ang theorizes as capitalism’s deep uncertainty. See Ien Ang, “In the Realm of Uncertainty: The Global Village and Cap­i­tal­ist Postmodernity,” in Living Room Wars: Media Audiences for a Postmodern World (London: Routledge, 1996), esp. 175–76. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 1–2. Jenkins had to pay more serious attention to populist mobilizations in Iran and the Arab world between 2009 and 2012. But even then, the “digital” remained very much the prerogative of select savvy netizens well versed in the use of proxy servers: “Ira­nian protesters w ­ ere particularly well prepared to use digital networks to spread their perspectives, given the country’s high level of digital literacy when compared to many of its neighbors in the region.” And Jenkins’s I ntroduction  29

14

15 16

17

18 19

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l­opsided understanding of the “global” is evident in seemingly innocuous assertions such as this: “Global citizens helped the Ira­nian protesters route around potential censorship and technical roadblocks, translated their thoughts into En­glish, distinguished reliable information from rumors, passed what they had learned on to ­others, and rallied to force news outlets to pay more attention.” Henry Jenkins, “Twitter Revolutions?,” Spreadable Media, n.d., http://­spreadablemedia​.­org​ /­essays​/j­ enkins​/­#​.­ViFqcBCrSqA. A key prob­lem ­here is the relative disappearance of video as a coherent field of study since the 1990s. While certain lineages related to video art, Internet videos, and guerilla tv-­cum-­dv activism persist, what is erased is the crass popularity of videomedia, including its manifold forms and site-­specific uses. On the one hand, studies like Roy Armes’s On Video (London: Routledge, 1988), Sean Cubitt’s Timeshift: On Video Culture (New York: Routledge, 1991), and Lucas Hilderbrand’s Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) are largely predigital in their formulations and limited by U.S. and U.K. perspectives. On the other hand, more recent works like Yvonne Spielmann’s Video: The Reflexive Medium (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2010), Akira Lippit’s Ex-­Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), Michael Newman’s Video Revolutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), and the vari­ous readers published by Geert Lovink’s Institute of Network Cultures, among o­ thers, are primarily invested in avant-­garde politics and high-­bandwidth practices. The unspoken implication of many such works is that every­thing beyond the well-­worn video genealogies of art-­activism-­Internet, especially the aberrant practices of the Global South, are inconsequential to con­temporary media cultures. Liang, “Porous Legalities and Ave­nues of Participation”; Ramon Lobato and ­Julian Thomas, The Informal Media Economy (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). We borrow the concept of “accented” media from Hamid Naficy’s An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2001), although in an expanded sense to cover a far broader range of media production than his original focus. We are invested in studying not only the interstitial and artisanal modes that emerge in conditions of exile and diaspora, but also the improvisational, do-­it-­yourself, and often piratical modes that characterize media production by rooted populations, as well as the cross-­cultural circulation of media forms. See the recent work of Partha Chatterjee, especially The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popu­lar Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) and Lineages of Po­liti­cal Society: Reflections on Popu­lar Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). See, particularly, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994). Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, [1952] 2008). J oshua N eves and B haskar S arkar

Lawrence Lessig, ­Free Culture: The Nature and Culture of Creativity (New York: Penguin, 2004), 64; Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? (New York: New Press, 2007). 21 Lessig, ­Free Culture, 63. 22 Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema; Madhavi Sunder, From Goods to a Good Life: Mapping Global Justice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 23 Laikwan Pang, Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 14. 24 Shujen Wang, Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 25 On the Act’s ambiguous tone, see Bhaskar Sarkar, “Media Piracy and the Terrorist Boogeyman: Speculative Potentiations,” positions 24, no. 2 (2016): esp. 353–60. 26 “Spotting the Pirates,” Economist, August  20, 2011, http://­www​.­economist​.­com​ /­node​/2­ 1526299. This pricing discrepancy is noted as a key structural f­actor ­behind global piracy in a Social Science Research Council report: Joe Karaganis, ed., Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2011), http://­www​.s­ src​.­org​/­publications​/­view​/­media​-­piracy​-­in​ -­emerging​-­economies​/­. 27 Daniel Heller-­Roazen, The E ­ nemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (New York: Zone, 2009), 61–68. 28 William Mazzarella, Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 29 Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 1–2, 12. 30 Illuminating this context, for instance, are the three volumes in the Resolutions series, including Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, eds., Resolutions: Con­ temporary Video Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Ming-­Yuen  S. Ma and Erika Suderburg, eds., Resolutions 3: Global Networks of Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 31 Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 9–10. 32 Indeed, the dream of Telengana as an autonomous province became a real­ity as Srinivas was writing his piece. 33 Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Works ­after Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2004); Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2008). 34 See also Rita Raley, “Dataveillance and Counterveillance,” in “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2013), 121–46. 35 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Socie­ties,” in Negotiations: 1972–79, by Gilles Deleuze, trans. Martin Jougin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177–82. 36 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2015).

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Eugene Thacker, Biomedia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life ­after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Pro­cess (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2014). 38 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1991). 39 Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Norton, 1965). 40 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 144. 41 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 31. 42 Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004), chap. 3, esp. 74–78. See also Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 43 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analy­sis of Con­temporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti et al. (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004), 70. 44 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 70. 45 Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” 182. 46 Even the main thrust of Deleuze’s arguments on technomodernity, directed against a post-­Enlightenment understanding of the ­human, betrays its utterly Euro-­ American roots. Long-­standing Asian traditions of thinking human-­nonhuman relations—­embodied, for instance, in the idea of the hermitage in the classical Sanskrit playwright Kalidasa’s fifth-century play Abhigyana Shakuntalam, an idea revived in the early twentieth ­century by the poet Rabindranath Tagore—­have a lot to offer for conceptions of technomodernity, not to mention con­temporary “radical” posthumanist thought. 47 Partha Chatterjee, Empire and Nation: Selected Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 169. 48 We follow Ravi Sundaram’s useful extension of Chatterjee in the introduction to Pirate Modernity, 20–22. 49 Scholars like Michael Curtin, among ­others, have demonstrated the need for globally inflected studies of media industries. See, for instance, Michael Curtin, Playing to the World’s Largest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and tv (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 50 We borrow the phrase from Hayden Lorimer’s nuanced critique of Nigel Thrift’s widely celebrated “non-­representational theory.” See Hayden Lorimer, “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More-­than-­Representational,’ ” Pro­gress in ­Human Geography 29, no. 1 (2005): 83–94. 51 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1997), 6–7. 37

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1  ​>

V I D E O D O C U M E N TA R Y A N D R U R A L P U B L I C C U LT U R E IN ETHNIC CHINA

Jenny Chio

The technological and po­liti­cal advances afforded by digital video are, by now, canonized and celebrated in the narrative history of post-­Mao in­de­pen­dent Chinese documentary filmmaking. Whereas many documentaries in the 1980s and early 1990s w ­ ere produced by filmmakers with access to state-­run tele­vi­sion stations and equipment, the introduction of the mini-­dv camera in the late 1990s spurred a radical rise in the number and scope of documentaries produced outside of the state media system.1 Not only ­were filmmakers more able to work individually, but more individuals could be filmmakers; this was to become, according to Jia Zhangke, “the age of the amateur.”2 Or, as Wu Wenguang, one of the first and most active in­de­pen­dent Chinese documentarians, has written, “The result of this way of d­ oing ­things [using a dv camera and digital, nonlinear editing] is that I have moved farther and farther away from ‘professionalism,’ tele­vi­sion, film festival competitions and awards. . . . ​It was dv that saved me, that allowed me to maintain a kind of personal relationship to documentary making.”3 Yet while digital video production has become more accessible and personal, the production and consumption of video documentaries in China are associated with modern, and by extension urban, practices and p­ eople, even if many films themselves depict rural conditions. This reflects and refracts a

discursive tendency to approach the rural from the perspective of the urban, or more precisely, to focus on the urbanization of the rural rather than the qualities of rural lives and livelihoods in and of themselves. Recent national policies in China bolster and lend empirical justification for this perspective: the goal of urban-­rural integration (chengxiang yiti hua) under­lying state policies of “city and town-­ification” (chengzhenhua) makes explicit the expectation that the “three rural issues” (sannong wenti) ­will be solved precisely when rural ­people, places, and economies are overcome by urbanization and modernity.4 Furthermore, emboldened by statistics about population density, construction booms, and highly publicized state-­led policy initiatives to resettle nomadic communities in newly built concrete planned communities, what is considered impor­tant about China now is expected to fall within the realm of the urban, so much so that any and all changes to social lives and practices in rural regions become subsumed ­under, and understood as constituent steps ­toward, the ultimate goals of development and modernization.5 Bringing media to villages has been a critical component of previous attempts to address the “three rural issues,” commonly glossed as farmers, villages, and agriculture. But the assumption that media is primarily an urban practice collapses rural media u­ nder the rubrics of modernity and urbanity and risks overlooking the significances of digital video and documentary forms in rural and peri-­urban contexts. This also obscures the potential for differences in interpretation, meaning, and politics that documentary video production, consumption, and circulation might hold in urbanizing or even non-­urban contexts. The “digital divide” in China, as elsewhere, is no more or less a lived real­ity than the rural-­urban divide: ­these bound­aries are contingent and porous. As Paola Voci reminds us, although many p­ eople in China are excluded from even the (supposedly) most accessible forms of digital media, including the Internet, “for many poor, ict [Information and Communication Technology] is not completely out of reach but, rather, it is associated with much more restricted (both in terms of time and sophistication) occasional encounters.” 6 The question of how and in what form some ­people may “occasionally encounter” video documentary thus points ­toward both the empirical and theoretical necessity of understanding how video is integrated into con­temporary rural and, specifically for this essay, ethnic minority experiences in China ­today. I take seriously the on-­the-­ground realities of rural video practices in ethnic China in order to move beyond the framework of media and modernity as indicative of an urban experience. The challenge is to define what 36 

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might be considered rural modernity, or the ways of being modern and rural and ethnic that may not align with dominant discourses and state-­led policies of development, modernization, and urbanization. The increasing affordability of digital video technology combined with gradually rising incomes has facilitated a vibrant, dynamic business in rural and regional marketplaces, far from the centers of state-­run and commercial media (such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou), for the production and purchase of video recordings of local festivals and folk per­for­mances on video compact disc (vcd) and more recently on dvd. Likewise, the portability and low overhead costs of digital video production have prompted the inclusion of documentary video training as a commonplace feature of rural, ethnic minority community-­development programs across China, many of which are or­ga­nized by scholars, filmmakers, and local cultural institutions and groups. Taken together, ­these form a range of pos­si­ble encounters that rural, ethnic minority individuals have with video and with documentary. As media texts and mediated contexts, video documentary in rural ethnic China thus provokes the question of how (video) media relates to, or perhaps even contributes to, the formation of a more distinctly rural way of being modern. Given the real­ity of video documentary production, circulation, and consumption in rural ethnic China, is it pos­si­ble to trace the salient features of an emerging, specifically rural public culture? Elsewhere, I have argued that local, nonstate media is shaping what I called a dif­fer­ent kind of “visual mainstream” in parts of rural and ethnic minority Guizhou Province.7 ­Here, however, I push this idea to a fuller and possibly more challenging extreme—to consider not only the possibility of multiple “mainstreams,” but also of a rural public culture that is engendered and enlivened by local video documentaries and that exists alongside, but not necessarily in conflict with, mainstream national media. ­Delineating the contours of rural public culture in ethnic China opens the possibility of understanding rural ways of being modern without subsuming t­ hese practices within the value-­laden frames of “alternative” or “re­sis­tance.” 8 It also steps out of the framework of urbanization as the defining feature of rural transformation. The video documentaries I discuss are almost all self-­consciously celebratory, not critical, in feel and content. Moreover, the popularity of locally produced video documentaries in rural ethnic China suggests ongoing desires to grapple with social transformations in very par­tic­ul­ar ways, beginning with the experiences afforded by engagement with media itself. Digital video is exceptionally quotidian and common throughout much of ­r ural China. Developments such as the state-­led expansion of tele­v i­sion V ideo D ocumentary in E thnic C hina  37

to ­villages (the Cun Cun Tong policy), the relative affordability of satellite dishes, and the sale of vcds and dvds of domestic and international tele­vi­ sion shows and films throughout provincial towns and cities illustrate both Voci’s point about how p­ eople might occasionally encounter media and my assertion that we must take seriously what kinds of media and what kinds of practices are located in the continuum between rural and urban, ict haves and have-­nots.9 Any investigation into locally produced media in rural, ethnic minority communities therefore demands a critical inquiry into the epistemo­ logical foundations of media making as a way of knowing, and participating in, modernity. Such media practices, made pos­si­ble by specific qualities of digital video technology, cultivate new subjectivities for their producers and audiences while si­mul­ta­neously constituting local interpretations and expressions of dominant state discourses. In the current period of intense po­liti­cal attention on maintaining social stability and mitigating ethnic tensions, the production, circulation, and consumption of video documentary suggest new forms of self-­representation for rural, ethnic minority Chinese and speak to changing relations between media and society in the postsocialist era, as well as to the need to reconceptualize the idea of public culture, beginning with rural ethnic realities. The rise in rural video documentary practices can be explained in terms of technology and economics: digital video is cheaper, smaller, and thus more accessible than previous audiovisual technologies, and p­ eople across China are slightly richer, are more educated, and have more leisure time to develop new skills and interests. Voci has dubbed t­ hese emergent media forms, such as online and cellphone videos, as “smaller-­screen realities” that are defined by a par­tic­u­lar lightness, a term she uses to describe “their ‘insignificant’ weight in terms of production costs, distribution size, profit gains, intellectual or artistic ambitions, but also their deep meaning in defining an alternative way of seeing and understanding the world.”10 The video documentaries I am concerned with ­here are also light ­because they circulate quickly and cheaply on dvd and, more recently, through social media platforms like Weixin/WeChat, but ­there is more to them than accessibility and affordability. The prevalence and popularity of video documentaries in rural ethnic China, the contexts of their production and circulation, suggest that they are heavy or “thick” with cultural meaning. The challenge, therefore, is to unearth what is social, shared, and personal in ­these videos and to think deeply about how ­these practices indicate not only an individualistic desire to preserve but also an impulse to contribute to public expressions of identity and belonging. For ethnic minority 38 

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communities in con­temporary rural China, this is particularly salient b­ ecause of the links between media, media literacy (including the abilities to read, understand, use, and derive enjoyment from media), and modernization. Understanding the connections between media and modern selves in video documentary practices thus contributes to a conceptualization of rural public culture—­modern ways of being rural that are publicly expressed in forms of cultural production and consumption that si­mul­ta­neously reinforce a rurality distinct from urbanity and insist on its own modernity (first and foremost through the medium of digital video). I draw on two case studies to analyze video documentary as a response to and engagement with development and modernization, and to demonstrate how t­ hese media practices are indicative of rural public culture in ethnic China. First, I discuss the production and sale of ethnic Miao festival, per­for­ mance, and bullfighting videos in and around the city of Kaili, in Guizhou. I call ­these documentaries “village videos” ­because they focus on events central to rural Miao village life and communities, although they are not always filmed in villages.11 Second, I examine community media and participatory video programs or­ga­nized by From Our Eyes (known in Chinese as Xiangcun zhi Yan).12 Initiated in the early 2000s by scholars at the Yunnan Acad­emy of Social Sciences and Yunnan University and since 2015 a registered in­de­pen­ dent organ­ization in China, From Our Eyes runs video-­production training workshops for cohorts of amateur and first-­time rural, ethnic minority filmmakers from Yunnan, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Guangxi, many of whose documentaries have gone on to screen throughout China and internationally. D O CUM E NTI NG RU RAL VIDEO REALITIES

Locally produced media in rural China is not a new phenomenon, nor is it unique to ethnic minority regions in China. ­There are nationally and internationally well-­known examples of or­ga­nized training proj­ects similar to From Our Eyes. The films from Wu Wenguang’s China Village Documentary Proj­ect have been perhaps most widely discussed and screened.13 Starting in 2005 with funding from the Eu­ro­pean Union, Wu and his team trained a group of ten villa­gers to use small digital video cameras and edit footage. Over the course of the proj­ect, individual villa­gers directed and produced several documentaries on issues and situations occurring in their home communities, and the films have been shown at festivals, major art museums, and universities across China, the United States, and Eu­rope.14 Other individuals have also founded V ideo D ocumentary in E thnic C hina  39

rural media workshops, such as IFChina Original Studio, a “participatory documentary center,” started in 2009 by Jian Yi (who worked with the China Village Documentary Proj­ect).15 The anthropologist Tami Blumenfield collaborated with Na, or Moso, filmmakers in the Lugu Lake area for many years, and coproduced a short documentary, Some Na Ceremonies, edited from footage recorded by two Na documentarians and museum curators, Onci ­Archei and Ruheng Duoji.16 Moreover, Chinese magazines such as dv Da Zhong (Popu­lar Digital Video) regularly report on cases of entrepreneurial villa­gers using digital video cameras to produce both dramas and documentaries. Village videos as well as the From Our Eyes documentaries are ele­ments of something larger happening in and about rural China, and they are unique from other types of media practices in China in distinctive ways—if, but not only ­because, they are focused on and made by ethnic minorities and are sometimes, but not always, directly engaged with issues of cultural heritage. Village videos in and around the city of Kaili (estimated pop. 700,000 in 2017) in Guizhou illuminate how video documentary has been taken up by entrepreneurial locals in response to perceived local desires.17 My ethnographic fieldwork in Kaili is centered on the local Miao community, drawing on observations at shops, casual conversations with customers and residents, and interviews with shop ­owners and videographers from Kaili and nearby towns. A range of media material is for sale in most shops, from copies of tv shows, films, and ­children’s cartoons to videos made by local videographers. In Kaili, most local videos for sale feature annual Miao cele­brations (such as lusheng [bamboo reed flute] festivals), per­for­mances of drinking and courtship songs (videos often commissioned by the singers themselves), or bullfighting (between two male ­water buffalo), a popu­lar pastime held during major festivals. Bullfight videos, in par­tic­u­lar, are often played on tvs in shops at high volume in order to attract passing pedestrians and shoppers.18 The videographers who produce t­hese videos are self-­taught, and some earn a living through commissions for weddings and other events. A few also run stores; in one location, the husband manages the shop, while the wife produces videos on the side. Local videos of Miao traditions exist alongside a glut of tourism media about the region, which depict Miao cultural per­for­ mances of often heavi­ly produced and stylized shows, complete with elaborate stages and lighting. At both the prefectural and provincial levels, government bureaus in Guizhou have been deeply invested in promoting rural ethnic tourism as a central aspect of local economic development, and per­for­mances and media are key features of this effort.19 Village videos are distinct, therefore, 40 

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1.1  ​Video still from Xiao Wen’s Gan’nangxiang (2010).

not only ­because they depict local, familiar annual events, but also b­ ecause of their intended audience: they are for “insiders,” local and usually rural Miao themselves, I have been told. Village videos typically have ­little or no narration; intertitles are used to describe place names, dates, and perhaps the name of the festival, but ­little more. Tourism videos often have voice-­over narrations or feature staged shows with emcees who introduce acts in Mandarin Chinese, thus indicating the acts are for outsiders, who by virtue of not being local would require and expect explanation of what has been recorded. Nevertheless, stylistically, many village videos begin by approximating tourism media through the use of graphics, recorded m ­ usic, and some explanatory text or voice-­over narration. This adds an aesthetic and structural ele­ment of professionalism to the recordings, even though t­ hese features are typically used only at the very beginning of a video. For example, a dvd of the 2010 International Lusheng Festival held in Gan’nangxiang, in Zhouxi township just outside Kaili, begins with a series of still frames set to a soundtrack of studio-­recorded lusheng m ­ usic and the sound effect of a camera shutter as one frame changes to the next, showing aerial views of the village, ­children in festival clothes being photographed by tourists (or media), and the village ancestral plaque. This is followed by the title, describing the date (2010 Spring Festival) and place, and a statement that this is a direct, live recording of an international lusheng festival (guoji lushengjie shikuang luxiang). Next are a few slow-­motion scenes of lusheng dancers (­women in Miao festival attire V ideo D ocumentary in E thnic C hina  41

1.2  ​Video still from Xiao Wen’s Gan’nangxiang (2010).

and men playing lusheng) with the text “Gan’nangxiang lusheng square: The center of Miao countryside culture” (Gan’nangxiang lusheng tang: Miao xiang wenhua zhongxin) at the top and “Part One” at the bottom. But by two minutes, t­ here is only the ambient sound of, first, a ritual lusheng ceremony and then of the vari­ous lusheng groups from the area performing in an open space filled with other groups and spectators milling about. The ­women in Miao festival clothes and men playing lusheng dance in a wide circle while crowds of ­people watch. The camera stays in front of the dancers at a medium distance but occasionally zooms in on the lusheng, the ­faces of dancers, or the ­women’s intricately embroidered clothes. Other photog­raphers and videographers can be seen throughout, affirming (as if the crowds w ­ ere not enough) that this is a sight to be seen and recorded. In a departure from earlier village videos I have seen, this video includes the videographer’s name in the upper left corner, a ­running line of text describing his videography business at the bottom, and the name of the festival in vertical text on the lower right side. Like most local videos of lusheng festivals, which are typically or­ga­nized around Miao New Year or Spring Festival cele­brations in the winter, the bulk of this video comprises scenes of w ­ omen dancing and men playing lusheng. Such festivals last one to three days, sometimes longer, and groups ­will dance for many daylight hours in a repetitive, steady pace. It is not just the act of documentation that m ­ atters; other­wise, any video, made by anyone, would do. Village videos draw their significance and mean42 

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ing from a shared sense of being Miao, rather than from the communication of knowledge about the Miao. In this village video, the collective experience of a lusheng festival is not framed as the past or as a lost tradition; indeed, according to shop­keep­ers and videographers alike, village videos are edited and put on sale quickly during or shortly a­ fter a festival or event. The immediacy of the videos indicates the con­temporary relevance of t­ hese video documentaries to Miao modernity in this corner of Guizhou. Moreover, the steady availability of recently recorded, locally produced videos in Kaili speaks to how the videos themselves, through their production and circulation, signify a publicness that is distinct from the national image of the Miao perpetuated in state and commercial media. This is a public culture in the dual sense of both depicting and thus constituting what is considered to be rural and Miao. Many shop­keep­ers and customers explained that village videos are mostly purchased by farmers (nongmin), not by city-­dwelling Miao in Kaili, although I have met ethnic Miao mi­grant workers who bought videos in order to take them back to the factory towns in other parts of China and share them with their non-­Miao friends. Watching, sharing, and even making village videos speak to the vari­ous means of finding plea­sure and meaning in being Miao, in celebrating among oneself and one’s local community ele­ments of Miao cultural life (festivals, singing, bullfighting) that have become icons in the national tourism industry—­but in mediated forms that directly, and somewhat exclusively, address a Miao public. Furthermore, by considering village videos like Gan’nangxiang alongside From Our Eyes community videos and the broader context of rural public culture, I want to draw attention to how such videos engage with an idea of the public in rural, ethnic minority spaces. Juan Francisco Salazar and Amalia Córdova, in their genealogy of indigenous video in Latin Amer­i­ca, describe the poetics of indigenous media as follows: “The poiesis, or making, of media refers both to the pro­cesses and the products of repre­sen­ta­tion, in what may be regarded as a par­tic­u­lar cultural logic of Indigenous media—­specifically, the way media practices become effective strategies for Indigenous ­people to shape counter-­discourses and engender alternative public spheres.”20 While I remain ambivalent about categorizing village videos as a form of indigenous media, certain productive convergences are apparent between how village videos make Miao culture vis­i­ble and consumable specifically for a local audience and the poetics of indigenous media Salazar and Córdova describe.21 Village videos “make culture vis­i­ble” through self-­representative practices of video production and consumption that draw on collective under­ standings of symbolic, ritualized ways of being ethnically Miao in China V ideo D ocumentary in E thnic C hina  43

t­ oday. The digital video recording and playback of Miao cultural festivals and activities reiterate many of the visual and performative motifs that are used in national tourism campaigns to depict “the Miao.” Th ­ ese repre­sen­ta­tions are extraordinarily public and immediately recognizable as “Miao” at a national scale, but the production and consumption of local videos featuring Miao festivals, songs, and bullfights also serve to reinforce a sense of solidarity that can better be understood as “we Miao.” It is an aesthetic that is inclusive and self-­referential, operating to solidify Miao-­ness for Miao, and amplified in the repetitive, unrelenting lusheng dance that, with no clear ending or climax, to outsiders could easily come across as simply boring ­after a short period. Village videos, widely sold in shops throughout Kaili and the surrounding region, are in this way constitutive of a rural public culture, based in social institutions of annual festivals and rituals and the symbol-­laden per­for­mances that are deemed worthy of being recorded on video. They gesture to the emergence and local recognition of collective, Miao forms of being and belonging within, but not entirely predetermined by, larger strictures of Chinese state-­ run media, repre­sen­ta­tions, and nationalist sentiments. In contrast to village videos, the video documentaries produced in From Our Eyes workshops are premised on the idea of using digital video technology as a means of fostering individual reflections and community dialogue, an approach often glossed as “community based visual education” or “participatory visual education.”22 From Our Eyes began as an ongoing series of workshops started in the early 2000s by Guo Jing, of the Yunnan Acad­emy of Social Sciences, originally through the bama Mountain Culture Research Institute. In the beginning, video-­documentary training workshops took place in multiple rural locations around Yunnan, with financial support from international organ­izations including the Ford Foundation, Conservation International, the Nature Conservancy, and the EU-­China Biodiversity Programme. Around 2008, logistical organ­ization for the proj­ect was coordinated and largely funded by Shanshui Conservation Center, a Beijing-­based Chinese environmental ngo, and in 2015, From Our Eyes was established as an in­de­pen­dent ngo in Kunming, Yunnan. Workshop participants are all ethnic minorities, including Tibetan, Miao, Yao, and Zhuang from Yunnan, Qinghai, Sichuan, and more recently, Guangxi. Most participants have had limited experience with digital video production prior to joining the training programs, although t­ here are exceptions. One Miao man had worked as a wedding videographer in his community before turning to documentary video. ­Others used the training programs to extend and build on their video documentary skills, including 44 

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the Na (Moso) filmmakers Onci Archei and Ruheng Duoji, who had first begun video recording as a part of their work with a local heritage museum, and a Tibetan ­woman, Cili Zhuoma, who first participated in Wu Wenguang’s China Village Documentary Proj­ect. In each iteration of From Our Eyes training workshops, participants have devoted significant time and energy to ­attending workshops and screenings, often both in rural villages and in the provincial capital city of Kunming, in Yunnan. From Our Eyes workshops are similar to other participatory media proj­ects in China and globally, in that they are or­ga­nized around the idea of using media technology as a means of “giving voice” to communities and individuals who other­wise are often unrepresented (or represented by o­ thers) in mass-­media outlets. According to Joanna Wheeler, a development activist who has worked with community activism proj­ects around the world utilizing video, “Participatory video provides a vehicle for ­people to see themselves as citizens in new ways and for them to learn a new mode of citizenship.”23 Within the Chinese context, Voci has critically raised the question of a “subaltern paradigm” in such proj­ects, noting that in the China Village Documentary Proj­ect videos, each film is preceded by a still image of the filmmaker and a description of the person: name, age, gender, and place of residence. As a result, “the villa­gers cannot f­ree themselves from their social belonging and are therefore defined not simply as makers of their documentaries but, first and foremost, as subaltern men and w ­ omen, who thus need to explain and justify their incursion into film-­ 24 making.” The same format is true of From Our Eyes videos from 2006 to 2009; each documentary begins with a photo­graph of the filmmaker(s) and their names, ethnicity, and place of residence. While I take Voci’s point, which is a critique that has been raised with regard to the often over exuberant cele­bration of “giving the camera back” in much media training-­as-­development discourse, a need and a desire for specificity—­ethnic, geographic, and other­wise—­are expressed both in the videos themselves and in their reception, as I observed during screenings of selected workshop videos during the 2011 Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival.25 The desire to be specific, to identify the filmmakers in this way as both rural and ethnic, suggests a certain politics of precision that would be lost if the videos and their makers ­were simply considered “filmmakers.” At the festival screenings in 2011, filmmakers introduced themselves by stating their ethnicity and place of residence, and while it is pos­si­ble to take a cynical view and suggest that they have simply ­adopted the ele­ments of a “subaltern paradigm,” it seemed to me that t­ hese filmmakers w ­ ere also (rightly) quite proud to publicly announce their work as theirs and to talk about their communities.26 V ideo D ocumentary in E thnic C hina  45

1.3  ​Video still from Wangta’s Shui (Won­ders of ­Water, 2009).

Often the overarching themes of the films are set by external funders—­for example, in 2009 the films all addressed biodiversity—­but the specific content of the films is self-­determined, and the aesthetic form each video takes varies greatly: some use extensive voice-­over, other none at all; some have m ­ usical soundtracks, while ­others rely solely on ambient sound; some are driven by formal interviews, while ­others take a more observational approach. What unites all the videos is the explicit connection between the filmmakers and the places and phenomena they have documented, which is the result of the participatory, community-­based framework for the training workshops; for example, the close relationship between the late filmmaker Wangta and w ­ ater in Jisha, his home village, is evident and crucial to his poetic and abstract short film Won­ders of W ­ ater. Likewise, the film What S­ hall We Do? Change in Luoshui Village, by Onci Archei, comprises a series of interviews with village residents, and his own investment in the community is clearly a crucial component of the conversations that unfold. This is not to suggest that t­hese filmmakers would be incapable of producing thoughtful documentaries about other places or communities. Rather, in the context of From Our Eyes, this form of video documentary practice necessarily draws from their perspectives as locals and 46 

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insiders to the community. The focus of the workshops on representing a shared experience of being ethnic and being rural is explic­itly acknowledged in the concepts of “participatory video” and “community media” and speaks to the po­liti­ cal necessity of the rural and the ethnic as collectivities within the nation. The production of video documentaries, in turn, constitutes a central component of the filmmakers’ local, lived experiences of rural modernization and develop­ ment in China. Indeed, some videos have been produced in conjunction with local heritage and conservation groups, such as the Kawagebo Culture Society in northwest Yunnan and the Snowland ­Great Rivers Environmental Protection Association of Qinghai. One consequence of the convergence of video training programs with local community organ­izations, however, has been a greater degree of specialization, and possibly of social segmentation, between individuals who engage in cultural heritage and conservation efforts and are connected with scholars and funding sources across China and internationally, and t­ hose who do not, or who cannot, participate for myriad social, economic, and po­liti­cal reasons. Unlike village videos, From Our Eyes documentaries are also intended for nonlocal viewers. While they are filmed in the local minority languages, including regional dialects of Tibetan, Miao, and Yao, the videos are subtitled in Chinese and sometimes En­glish. Over time, through the efforts of the program and Guo Jing, the documentaries have garnered attention and acclaim from outside audiences. Some of the films have been screened at festivals in China and overseas, including at the Asia Society in Hong Kong and New York and at the 2012 ImagiNative Indigenous Film Festival in Toronto.27 Both Guo Jing and Lü Bin, the current director of From Our Eyes, have stressed that the fundamental purpose of the proj­ect is to create ways and opportunities for rural, ethnic minority ­people in China to publicly discuss socially impor­tant issues within their own communities and with ­others by participating in forums and workshops. They are aware that video production itself has changed relationships in the communities where the proj­ect has been implemented, and in 2012 Guo Jing began organ­izing research teams to study and document ­these transformations.28 A R UR A L PUBLIC CU LTU RE

An impor­tant ­factor often overlooked, and undertheorized, are the ele­ments of entertainment and joy that are crucial to understanding how and why locally produced, relatively low-­quality video documentaries are popu­lar V ideo D ocumentary in E thnic C hina  47

and commonplace in rural ethnic China. As with home movies, t­ here is joy in watching videos of events and p­ eople with which one is already familiar. This joy exceeds the content of the videos and forces our attention to ­pro­cesses and practices. ­These videos are impor­tant, socially and collectively, as entertainment—­a very real value that should not be dismissed. Village videos and From Our Eyes videos have created a means for local audiences to discover and revel in their own experiences (or at least in the perceived collectivity of their experiences) and subsequently to enjoy nostalgic longings for festivals that have passed (but which ­will take place again in a year), for songs sung in a language that fewer and fewer ­people can fully understand, and for depictions of livelihoods and skills that are becoming obsolete or less relevant. For example, the film Yak Dung by Lanzhe, a first-­time participant in a From Our Eyes workshop in Qinghai from 2009–2010, reportedly became so popu­lar locally in his home region that shop­keep­ers sold copies of it for around RMB 50 (about US$8). This is remarkable on two fronts: first, ­because it suggests that Yak Dung, a film produced as part of an internationally funded participatory video workshop on the theme of biodiversity, had made a categorical “leap” into the realm of market-­driven village videos, like the ones in Guizhou; and second, b­ ecause RMB 50 is, quite simply, a lot of money for a dvd in rural China.29 It remains to be seen if some of the other trained From Our Eyes documentarians ­will deliberately take their efforts into local markets. The circulation of ­these videos, produced in a closed workshop environment, into rural communities opens up the possibility of new spaces and collective subjectivities that are, in part, engendered by this phenomenon of video production and consumption. I conceive this as a rural public culture, and its significance lies in the videos’ potential as points of entry into exploring what it means to be rural, and an ethnic minority, in China t­ oday, not only on a personal level of identification, but also in a shared, public sense. The question of how video documentary in rural, ethnic minority regions in China is or can be considered public raises several impor­tant considerations. Rural media practices like village videos and participatory video workshops are manifestations of a documentary impulse that is an impulse not only to produce repre­sen­ta­tions, but also to consume them in a shared, social way. Even if customers purchase village videos in Kaili to watch at their homes away from the city, the media they are watching—­Miao festivals or singing, for example—­are distinctly linked to a public that they themselves feel a part of. This is publicness in the sense of public engagement, and it is a way of thinking about video documentaries as a channel for the formation of a sense 48 

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of community, which is clearly what the From Our Eyes videos attempt to do. But it is also publicness in the sense of being less tied (though nowadays not completely untied) to a single author or producer and a personal aesthetic vision. Rather, the filmmakers perceive t­ hese rural media practices and products, particularly the village videos, primarily as fulfilling an already existing public, even market-­driven, need or desire for media entertainment. And it is, therefore, precisely the video producers’ and consumers’ ability to be entertained by video documentaries about their own rural ethnic communities that suggests the need for us, as scholars of media, to reassess the relationships between media and modern subjectivities. The videos, in their very modern form as “new” media without links to state broadcast or distribution channels, create (video/media) space for being rural in urbanizing China. As Purnima Mankekar and Lousia Schein note, “The question of circumventing the nation provokes related debates around the question of the so-­called ‘public sphere.’ ”30 Although Mankekar and Schein are concerned with how transnational media forms may pose challenges to nation-­states, it is also necessary to examine subnational media, like village videos and From Our Eyes videos, as potential circumventors of the nation. The question therefore becomes not only what kinds of video exist in rural ethnic China, but more impor­tant, what about the videos that are in t­ hese places. As the Chinese nation seeks, through policy and public discourse, to envision a ­future that is developed, rather than developing, it is all the more impor­tant to pay close attention to the everyday details of what it means to be modernized or urbanized and what kinds of relationships, imaginations, and knowledges may emerge from this experience. None of the videos discussed h­ ere take on or posit an explic­itly activist stance of re­sis­tance to the state, or even a direct critique of state development policies, yet the possibility remains that by their continued existence and popularity, in the face of the massive and far-­reaching state-­owned Chinese media system, local videos in rural ethnic China do suggest grassroots desires for dif­fer­ent and other forms of repre­sen­ta­tion. Rural media practices, in this way, reveal the slight fissures and frictions within the Chinese nation, in which subnational forms of collective belonging and social imaginary circulate, create, and reinforce difference without directly challenging state goals of harmony, unity, and social stability. As Igor Kopytoff has argued, “Public culture cannot be defined or examined outside of the overall structural context surrounding it.”31 In rural ethnic China, public culture has emerged through digital video media in a period of urbanization; being rural and being ethnic are publicly meaningful not just V ideo D ocumentary in E thnic C hina  49

as tourist attractions but as a way of living and experiencing modernity. The collective repre­sen­ta­tion of being rural and ethnic in China ­today is one that by now extends beyond Marxist, and Maoist, notions of the rural as defined by agricultural work (as in the still-­existing hukou designation of individuals as ­either agricultural [nongye] or nonagricultural [fei nongye]). Village v­ ideos from Guizhou, through their continued production and circulation in markets, enliven a collective experience of being Miao ­today through ritual festivals and folk per­for­mances, while From Our Eyes training proj­ects have spawned local awareness of the reach and impact of video repre­sen­ta­tions within and beyond local communities. Thus, the concept of a rural, and e­ thnic, public culture directs our attention to both the video documentaries and the conditions that have made them pos­si­ble. Such videos are produced and consumed as a form of response, however oblique, to greater national transformations, which at pres­ent are couched in terms of modernization and urbanization. > NOTE S  ​ 1

2

3

50 

In­de­pen­dent Chinese documentary film has become a growing scholarly field. Key works include Lu Xinyu, Jilu Zhongguo: Dangdai Zhongguo xin jilu yundong [Documenting China: The new documentary movement in China] (Beijing: Sanlian Shudian, 2003); Luke Robinson, In­de­pen­dent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel, eds., The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Rec­ord (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010); Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang, eds., From Underground to In­de­pen­dent: Alternative Film Culture in Con­temporary China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); and Zhang Zhen and Angela Zito, eds., dv-­Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations a­ fter In­de­pen­dent Film (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015). Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel, “Introduction,” in The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Rec­ord, ed. Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 9; Jia Zhangke, “Yeyu dianying shidai jijiang zaici daolai” [The age of amateur cinema w ­ ill return], in Yigeren de yingxiang: dv wanquan shouce, ed. Zhang Xianmin and Zhang Yaxuan (Beijing: Zhongguo q­ ingnian chubanshe, 2003), 307–8. Also available in En­glish translation, “Jia Zhangke: ‘The Age of Amateur Cinema W ­ ill Return,’ ” dGenerate Films, http://­ dgeneratefilms​.­com​/­critical​-­essays​/­jia​-­zhangke​-­the​-­age​-o­ f​-­amateur​-­cinema​-­will​ -­return. Wu Wenguang, “dv: Individual Filmmaking,” trans. Cathryn Clayton, in The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Rec­ord, ed. Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 54.

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4

Mi Shih, “Making Rural China Urban,” The China Story, June  18, 2013, www​ .­thechinastory​.­org​/­2013​/­06​/­making​-r­ ural​-­china​-­urban​/­. The “three rural issues” ­were named by researchers in China in the 1990s, and in 2006, t­ hese issues ­were again highlighted by state leaders and in state policies. The three issues referred to are nongmin (farmers, peasants), nongcun (villages), and nongye (agriculture). 5 The anthropologist Yan Hairong has argued that post-­Mao policies of “reform and opening” ushered in a “shift in rural-­urban relations—­the rise of the city and the emaciation of the rural” whereby “Modernity and Pro­gress reside in the city . . . ​[and] the city monopolizes modern culture.” Yan Hairong, New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and W ­ omen Workers in China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 39, 44. See also Robin Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Discourses of modernity have permeated the scholarly study of presumably “modern” phenomena such as media and video as primarily “urban” experiences. 6 Paola Voci, China on Video: Smaller-­screen Realities (London: Routledge, 2010), 149. 7 Jenny Chio, “ ‘Village Videos’ and the Visual Mainstream in Rural, Ethnic Guizhou,” in Mapping Media in China: Region, Province, Locality, ed. Wanning Sun and Jenny Chio (London: Routledge, 2012), 79–93. 8 Brian Larkin’s critique of scholarship in African studies and media studies that “focus on ‘local re­sis­tance’ to vari­ous forms of ‘dominant culture’ ” is a significant reminder of the “reductive binary distinction between oppression and re­sis­ tance” that can cause “phenomena that cannot be neatly or­ga­nized within that binary distinction [to] fall out of view.” Brian Larkin, “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities,” Africa 63, no. 7 (1997): 408. Thanks to the editors for bringing my attention to this essay. 9 See Wusan Sun, “Top-­down Policies versus Grassroots Re­sis­tance: The Management of Illegal Satellite Dishes in Chinese Villages,” trans. John Alexander, in Mapping Media in China: Region, Province, Locality, ed. Wanning Sun and Jenny Chio (London: Routledge, 2012), 62–76. 10 Voci, China on Video, 13. 11 For a more extended discussion on why I call them village videos, see Chio, “ ‘Village Videos’ and the Visual Mainstream in Rural, Ethnic Guizhou.” My phrase acknowledges earlier studies of indigenous and village-­based media, such as Video nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages) in Brazil, run by Vincent Carelli, although the village videos I discuss are not or­ga­nized ­under an umbrella proj­ect of any kind. 12 “From Our Eyes” is the most recent En­glish translation of the Chinese name, Xiangcun zhi Yan, for this series of community media-­training proj­ects. Prior to 2015, the En­glish name was “The Eye of Villa­ger” (see Zhang Zhongyun, ed., The Eye of Villa­ger: Yunnan and Vietnam Community-­based Visual Education and Communication [Kunming: Yunnan Chuban Jituan Gongsi, 2009]), but for consistency I use the current En­glish translation throughout this essay. V ideo D ocumentary in E thnic C hina  51

13

“Chinese Realities #5: China Villa­gers Documentary Proj­ect,” dGenerate Films, ­accessed April 27, 2017, http://­dgeneratefilms​.­com​/­uncategorized​/­chinese​-­reality​ -­5​-­china​-­villagers​-­documentary​-­project. 14 For analyses of the proj­ect, see Voci, China on Video, 149–70, in which she also looks at another community video proj­ect in Guangzhou, or­ga­nized by the artist and filmmaker Ou Ning. See also Yiman Wang, “ ‘I Am One of Them’ and ‘They Are My Actors’: Performing, Witnessing, and dv Image Making in Plebian China,” in The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Rec­ord, ed. Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 223–27. 15 Dan Edwards, “You ­ Can’t Build on an Emptiness,” ReelTime Arts 103 (June–­ July 2011), http://­www​.­realtimearts​.­net​/­article​/­103​/­10321. 16 Tami Blumenfield Kedar, “Scenes from Yongning: Media Creation in China’s Na Villages” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2010); Onci Archei, Ruheng Duoji, and Tami Blumenfield, dirs., Some Na Ceremonies (Berkeley Media, 2015). 17 “Kaili City Profile,” Kaili People’s Government, http://www.kaili.gov.cn/zjkl/ kljj/201702/t20170227_1952212.html. 18 The soundtrack to bullfighting videos usually comprises fast-­paced ­music combined with ambient sounds of crowds cheering. 19 See Jenny Chio, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014); Louisa Schein, Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Tim Oakes, Tourism and Modernity in China (London: Routledge, 1998). 20 Juan Francisco Salazar and Amalia Córdova, “Imperfect Media and the Poetics of Indigenous Video in Latin Amer­i­ca,” in Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics, ed. Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 40. 21 Chio, “ ‘Village Videos’ and the Visual Mainstream in Rural, Ethnic Guizhou,” 89. 22 For reports on the proj­ects or­ga­nized by the Yunnan Acad­emy of Social Sciences in cooperation with vari­ous domestic and international groups and funders, see Guo Jing, “Yingxiang de Shengyin” [Voice of image making], in Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival 2005, ed. Guo Jing (Kunming: Yunnan Documentary ­Archives Series, 2005), 66–67; Zhongyun, The Eye of Villa­ger. 23 Joanna Wheeler, “Seeing Like a Citizen: Participatory Video and Action Research for Citizen Action,” in Digital (Alter)Natives with a Cause?: Book 2: To Think, ed. Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen (Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society/ Hivos Knowledge Programme, 2011), 47–60, http://­issuu​.­com​/­hivos​/­docs​/­book​ _­2​_­final​_­print​_­rev​/­1. 24 Voci, China on Video, 157. 25 See Rachel Moore, “Marketing Alterity,” in Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1994), 126–39.

52 

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26

27

28

29 30

31

For a more detailed analy­sis of the film festival screenings, see Jenny Chio, “Rural Films in an Urban Festival: Community Media and Cultural Translation at the Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival,” in Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation, ed. Chris Berry and Luke Robinson, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 279–99. Yak Dung, directed by Lanzhe (2010), screened at the Asia Society in Hong Kong (2013) and New York (2014), and at the festival in Toronto. Grandma’s House Leaves the Village, directed by Onci Archei (2009), was also screened in Toronto in 2012. Some of ­these research reports by researchers as well as essays by rural film­ makers ­were published in an online journal, Visual Anthropology (yingshi renleixue luntan), edited by Guo Jing and other visual anthropologists in China between 2013 and 2014. By comparison, village videos in Guizhou sell for between RMB 5–10 for dvds. Purnima Mankekar and Louisa Schein, “Mediation and Transmediations: Erotics, Sociality, and ‘Asia,’ ” introduction to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia, eds. Purnima Mankekar and Louisa Schein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 9. Igor Kopytoff, “Public Culture: A Durkheimian Genealogy,” Public Culture 1, no. 1 (1988): 15–16.

V ideo D ocumentary in E thnic C hina  53

2  ​>

ENGAGEMEDIA T H E G A D O G A D O TA C T I C S O F N E W S O C I A L M E D I A IN INDONESIA

Patricia R. Zimmermann

EngageMedia is an environmental and human-­rights social-­media portal engaging the Asia Pacific region. It features heterogeneous short videos spanning amateur user-­generated films, activist and youth-­activist works, advocacy pieces, nongovernmental organ­izations (ngo) trainings, public-­health videos, professionally produced news, and experimental works. Engage­Media navigates contradictions between the dissemination of consumer-­grade, accessible media technologies, the opening up of social media, the closing down of commercial media through regulation, and the need for distribution of works produced across disparate locations. EngageMedia also enters unresolved, contentious debates about the relationships between online and ­offline media practices within ­these contradictory interstitial zones. EngageMedia enters the debate about the malleability and migration of media ­between and across dif­fer­ent media sectors and communities of reception. With offices in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, EngageMedia (www​.­EngageMedia​.­org) exemplifies concepts of permeable media. As a new-­media portal, it aggregates and contextualizes user-­generated social media about Asian Pacific environmental and social-­justice issues. Deemed the “YouTube for Southeast Asian Activists,” EngageMedia assem­bles genres, topics, and countries to map the underside of the massive economic development

redefining the Asia Pacific. EngageMedia pres­ents a regionally specific intervention into the vast architecture and false universalisms of YouTube. Although both marshal and create space for user-­generated work, EngageMedia is explic­itly situated as a place for work that probes the specificities of culture and politics of the Asia Pacific region. It operates through po­liti­cally explicit aggregation and curation to highlight the heterogeneity and silenced voices and strug­gles of this region, a countervailing discourse and practice to corporate globalization and techno-­utopianism. The site intermingles activists, nongovernmental groups, aid organ­izations, youth groups, health educators, and artists in a shared digital space, producing contiguities through a multiplicity of discourses. In this essay I analyze the significance of EngageMedia as a portal for video file-sharing and as a generator of sustainable media networks for environmental and social-­justice work. EngageMedia posits the Asia Pacific as transnational and heterogeneous. It operates in constant realignment between globalized development and environmental and human-­rights degradation. It also situates itself within contradictions between top-­down ngos, bottomup in­de­pen­dent media activists, humanitarian initiatives, national and transnational state agendas, civil-­society ideals, and Asian Pacific specificities regarding the creation of public places for dialogue.1 EngageMedia’s Enrico Aditjondro has observed that intersections between new-­media technologies and Southeast Asian po­liti­cal and environmental challenges propel constant realignments between social change and social media. In contrast to the utopian technological determinist euphoria that unproblematically links social change and social media, EngageMedia focuses not on the national but on microterritories and micropractices. Within Southeast Asia’s complex histories, po­liti­cal movements, and volatile relationships with globalization, the coupling of social media and social change is variegated: uneven, productive, problematic, polyphonic, emancipatory, dangerous, unresolved, contradictory. As result, a singular, linear strategy for activist po­liti­cal media is not feasible. Aditjondro advocates for a multifaceted, multi-­technological approach to create microterritories, a strategy he identifies as gado gado.2 Gado gado is a signature Indonesian salad that combines boiled kang kong (­water spinach), potatoes, bean sprouts, long beans, cabbage, eggs, and raw cucumber, topped by sambal kacang (spicy peanut sauce made with shallots, chili, shrimp paste, and tamarind), lontong (compressed rice cake), and krupuk (deep fried crackers). Gado gado, which also translates as potpourri or medley in Bahasa Indonesia, functions E ngage M edia  55

as a structuring princi­ple for new-­media practices in post-­reformasi, post-­ Suharto, economic-­development-­oriented Indonesia. Although some might read ­EngageMedia’s invocation of a gastronomic meta­phor as essentialist and problematic, from an internal point of view the term gado gado locates the conceptual structure of the organ­ization within Indonesian—­rather than Global North academic—­epistemes. EngageMedia’s website pres­ents a gado gado of genres, including documentary, experimental, fiction, animation, ­music, and news. Topics create connections through and across Association of Southeast Asian Nations (asean) member countries: poverty, indigenous ­peoples, mi­ grants, health, corporations, ­labor, conflict, h­ uman rights, racism, religion, arts, environment, forest, ­water, food security, biotech, civil liberties. EngageMedia’s transposition of gado gado from the culinary to a social-­ media conceptual princi­ple pushes documentary theory into new areas of permeable, participatory media practice; networked circulation rather than an image-­centric practice; and polyphonies of mosaic structures. As a social-­ media and capacity-­building organ­ization and portal, EngageMedia suggests the need to reframe new media documentary theory within a more mutable, adaptive, and dialogic concept of permeable media straddling the online and offline worlds in networks of circulation. The significance of EngageMedia’s aggregation of user-­generated and advocacy media can be fully understood only within the larger context of Indonesia’s location in globalization and its transnational tourist imaginary. Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelago, with 17,000 islands. The third-­ largest country in Asia, it features the most extensive rainforest cover in Asia. As the world’s fourth most populous region, it boasts the largest economy in Southeast Asia—­the fastest growing Asian economy a­ fter China.3 The largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia is multicultural and multiethnic. ­Because Indonesia is a rising global economic power with an emerging market of over 250 million ­people, the government has produced campaigns to c­ ounter perceptions of po­liti­cal instability and economic corruption.4 A national advertising campaign called “Invest in Remarkable Indonesia” croons, “Imagine a place that inspires the senses, indulges the soul, and invokes the spirit” over images of batik, beaches, mangroves, coral reefs, and mountains. Produced by the Indonesia Investment Coordinating Board, the video argues that this new democracy boasts one of the largest under-­thirty populations in Asia.5 Analysts argue that the country, the leading asean member, is one of four growth markets in the world, with South ­Korea, Mexico, and Turkey.6 56 

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Tourism campaigns create an Indonesian transnational imaginary to ease the country into globalized capital investment. In a series of tele­vi­sion ads in Asia, in the United States, and on YouTube, the “Discover Indonesia” videos figure Indonesia as an idyllic, exotic landscape. For example, I Love My Indonesia, produced by the Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy, features three young Chinese tourists rollicking through landscapes, beaches, gamelan, rice paddies, batik, mangroves, waterfalls, corals reefs, and massage. ­These landscapes erase Indonesians, except as dancers, guides, or waiters. They pres­ent landscapes without ­people. However, international ngos and Indonesian media activists working on avian flu, clean w ­ ater, mining, chemical contamination of the ocean, and overfishing dispute ­these transnational investment, marketing, and tourism strategies. According to the World Bank, an expanding population, inadequate management of rapid development, and exploitation of Indonesia’s abundant natu­ral resources in crude oil, palm oil, natu­ral gas, tin, rubber, cocoa, and fishing have produced devastating environmental challenges: rapid deforestation, ocean contamination, unsafe ­water and sanitation, overfishing, and extreme air pollution.7 EngageMedia functions as both an online and offline site to collect counterdiscourses and practices that refute this essentialized Indonesian imaginary with the specificities of microterritories. PE R M E A BLE A N D PARTICIPATORY MEDIA

Recent scholarship has analyzed the emergence of a transmedia, multiplatform media ecol­ogy where media travel across film, social media, gaming, and product tie-­ins. This newly emerging media sector creates synergies, expands the shelf life of media products through long-­tail marketing, and develops ongoing affective relationships with consumers wherein passionate, often individualized fandom drives deep engagement with storyworlds. ­These multiple platforms recalibrate relationships between producers, media, and audience, providing participatory affordances rather than passive consumption.8 In this emerging, reconfigured media ecol­ogy, participation does not represent one utopian vision of active spectatorship, but instead reveals a spectrum of active individual and collective agencies spanning international ngos and consumerist and community-­activist modalities: engaging popular-­culture narratives in fan culture; uploading to YouTube vaudev­illian cell phone videos of cats and makeup tutorials; conflict-­zone citizen journalism; artist proj­ects requiring audience action for completion; ground-up documentation in antiregime E ngage M edia  57

demonstrations in Cambodia, China, Burma, Iran, Tunisia, Eqypt, and Brazil; collaborations between ngos and citizen media groups for social-­justice advocacy campaigns.9 EngageMedia enters this ecol­ogy not as a producer, but as a portal and aggregator. For Henry Jenkins, this multiplatformed transmedia universe functions somewhat differently than do legacy forms: it depends on participatory audience engagement through sharing, appropriation, remixing, user-­generated media, and fan-­culture narratives. Rather than media products emanating from one source and then being marketed to special sectors, consumers disseminate ­these products through the participatory affordances of social media and Web 2.0, creating “spreadable media.”10 However, Jenkins’s concept of spreadable media remains within commercial popular-­culture marketing, figuring participation as consumer engagement. Other scholars, like Grant Kester and Claire Bishop, have offered a dif­fer­ent notion of participation, one that mobilizes collective po­liti­cal encounters in socially engaged community-­arts practices.11 Although resonating with the idea of spreadable media in its emphasis on circulation, human-­rights social media operates within a more porous, open structure that shifts from engagement with commercial media products t­ oward producing engagements with social and po­liti­cal issues, a significant distinction. Less about spreading a par­tic­u­lar media formation initially produced by a transnational media corporation, human-­rights social media facilitates the permeation of media practices, participation, and po­liti­cal ideas into multiple sectors to amplify dialogue. This permeable strategy is characterized by migration into and through communities, ngos, governments, and commercial media as news sourcing. Rather than entrapping users within a corporate story­ world, permeable practices operate on a princi­ple of seepage and mutation. They dispose of storyworlds with more stories across dif­fer­ent institutional locations and platforms. Permeability suggests mutual, two-­way seepage between user-­generated, activist, advocacy, and educational media and the more popu­lar commercial corporate forms.12 Infiltration and seepage replaces confrontation and binaries. Rather than user-­generated media that offers participation with popular-­ culture media products, human-­rights social media constitutes participatory media as a means to expand public spaces for engagement and dialogue. It should be noted ­these public spaces are not the public sphere of Jürgen Habermas, but the dynamic place of Tim Cresswell, where ­people and an environment create meaning at the nexus of intersecting flows.13 Permeable media offers convenings of microcommunities on a much smaller scale outside 58 

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popular-­culture marketing. This more community-­, issue-­, people-­centered strategy of participation involves training in journalistic princi­ples of safety and accuracy and capacity building in technology and distribution, jettisoning top-­down spreadable media strategies energized by consumerist participation. EngageMedia thus offers permeable media as a generative, active pro­cess of multiple foci and tactics that include festival screenings, commercial news sourcing, community history, and targeted advocacy campaigns. EngageMedia developed among activists, journalists, and technologists who identified a disconnect between massive social-­media usage in Indonesia and Southeast Asia and the mainstream media strangleholds on information. Thus, EngageMedia needs to be analyzed not only as a generalizable model of permeable media, but as a specific intervention into the contradictory conjuncture of reformasi, Suharto, media owner­ship, emergence of mobile and social media, globalizations, and environmental degradation. Reformasi is the name for the period of reform that followed the student demonstrations and economic collapse in Indonesia in 1998. For example, Indonesia has the second-­highest number of Facebook users in the world. Yet conglomerates with links to energy and communications own commercial film and tele­vi­ sion. According to Merlyna Lim, the end of the Suharto era marshaled in deregulation and loosened the powers of the Department of Information. This deregulation, linked to reformasi, resulted in the issuance of over 1,200 new print media, 900 new radio, and 5 commercial tele­vi­sion licenses. However, despite this expansion, twelve media groups control the majority of tele­vi­ sion stations, newspapers, and radio stations.14 Banned by Suharto, Tempo, a commercial news organ­ization, offers in­de­pen­dent news reporting in Indonesian and En­glish beyond media-­conglomerate-­sanctioned topics. It features investigative reporting on mi­grant and environmental issues, Papua, and corruption.15 Although post-­Suharto Indonesia abolished state censorship, editors can still be jailed for libel or defamation. While reformasi opened a very small provisional space for participatory video and open po­liti­cal discussions, works ­were not distributed effectively.16 Formed in 2005, EngageMedia bridges the gap between experimental works, social-­activist videos, ngo health-­training videos, and oppositional voices to engage Asian Pacific rapid development. As a video file-­sharing portal, EngageMedia a­ dopted a gado gado strategy to aggregate diverse topics, regions, communities, and politics. As an organ­ization, EngageMedia offers a portal for video file-­sharing that highlights significant Asian Pacific po­liti­cal issues. E ngage M edia  59

NE TWO R KS O F CIRCU LATION

In Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, Meg McLagan and Yates McKee argue po­liti­cal media should not be analyzed as static objects of repre­sen­ta­tion and deconstruction, but instead positioned within the “pro­cessual aspects” of the activist imaginary, defined by networks of production, distribution, and exhibition across proliferating platforms. Media forms evolve in relation to their modes of circulation, affordances of emerging media technologies, and material networks of online platforms and offline exhibition sites. McLagan and McKee term this nexus of image and networks “image complexes.”17 Their concept of networks of circulation acknowledges both the mobility of images within Web 2.0 and their mutability across and between dif­fer­ent platforms, contexts, and communities. In this model, EngageMedia is more than an activist website to showcase Asian Pacific social and po­liti­cal works. It is also an active producer of networks of circulation. EngageMedia’s Mi­grant Worker Stories proj­ect exemplifies an image complex, where the testimonies and evidence gathered in a multiplicity of short, shareable videos produced by mi­grants themselves are designed to circulate through transnational ­labor networks. The Mi­grant Worker Stories proj­ect combines economic contexts, social issues, ­labor documentation, and user-­generated social media, inserting t­hese videos into networks of circulation that remap ­labor flows through the voices of the mi­grants. A key contentious geopo­liti­cal issue in Indonesia revolves around the question of mi­grant ­labor. Large numbers of young w ­ omen depart for work as maids and factory workers across Asia and the M ­ iddle East.18 The International ­Labor Organ­ization, a specialized agency of the United Nations, estimates that over 4.3 million Indonesians are overseas mi­grants, of which 75  ­percent are ­women, most of whom are domestic workers in the ­Middle East and Asia.19 Th ­ ese mi­grants contribute a staggering US$8.2 billion in remittances. In this geopo­liti­cal context, EngageMedia offers a section called “Mi­grant Workers, Refugees, and Stateless ­People,” featuring 146 short videos about mi­grant issues in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia. This proj­ect collaborates with Citizen Journalists Malaysia, an initiative from Malaysiakini, a highly successful alternative news website founded by Premesh Chandran to ­counter government and corporate monopolization of news. Parallel to EngageMedia, the Citizen Journalists Malaysia group conducts production trainings, emphasizing truth and accuracy, editorial integrity, public interest, fairness, and a no-­gift policy. 60 

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To date, 400 citizen journalists have been trained, producing 1,900 videos and 2,000 stories.20 Collaborations between activist organ­izations, ngos, media organ­izations, and po­liti­cal movements across the asean region constitute a key new-media practice. EngageMedia operates not only as a video aggregator, but also as a partnership and orga­nizational aggregator, countering asean trade objectives that mobilize a regional, state-­focused hegemony. Mi­grant Worker Stories features videos produced by mi­grants. A 56-­second video called Mi­grant Workers and the Computer features a close-up of a young man in a mahettnik (Indonesian mi­grant worker Internet corner) discussing Internet use to prevent human-­rights trafficking by sustaining mi­grant ­family connections. A six-­minute video documents a mi­grant workers demonstration in Hong Kong on May Day, 2011. How Dare You Say: May Day 2011 Hong Kong, by V-­Artivist, chronicles a domestic and foreign workers rally in Hong Kong. Shot amid the demonstrations, the video features Nepalese, Filipino, and Indonesian ­women marching with signs that detail challenging working conditions. Cantonese and En­glish text explains the protesters’ demands: standard working hours, minimum wage, workers’ rights. In this video, a slow, ethereal soundtrack contrasts with the images of the protest march, suggesting a more meditative interpretation of l­abor strug­gle and agency. Modest in execution, the short nonetheless provides ground-up documentation from mi­grant workers as agents actively seeking change. To ­counter the mi­grant narratives emanating from Indonesian government sources, EngageMedia initiated the Mi­grant Worker Stories proj­ect in 2012. It collaborated with migrant-­worker advocacy organ­izations in Indonesia and Malaysia, such as Asosiasi Tenaga Kerja, Garda bmi, Mi­grant Care, and Solidaritas Buruh Migran Cianjur, to launch technological access and capacity-­building workshops in Kuala Lumpur and West Java, with the goal of training mi­grants to tell their own stories with cheap video and mobile phones.21 They worked in two Malaysian immigrant villages, Cianjur and Indramayu. In 2012, Dhyta Caturani, a EngageMedia engagement trainer, ran after-­work night classes for Indonesian mi­grant workers in Malaysia. The training included basic journalistic tenets, citizen journalism, safety and security issues, storyboarding, and uploading instructions.22 Fifteen videos have been produced and uploaded to EngageMedia. The dvd is subtitled in En­glish. Mi­grant Worker Stories needs to be situated within larger image complexes of participatory, social-­media, artistic, and activist practices operating within Southeast Asia since the 1990s. Videochronic: Video Activism and Video Distribution in Indonesia, the kunci Culture Studies Center and EngageMedia E ngage M edia  61

report published in 2009, argues Indonesian video activism emerged from a convergence between po­liti­cal change and technological shifts. Suharto’s New Order promoted growth through economic exploitation of oil and timber and spurred development of national tele­vi­sion. Videocassettes of Bollywood and Hong Kong action films entered the country in the early 1980s. Suharto’s New Order imposed censorship, taxation, and antipiracy classification systems to control emerging video practices driven by more accessible and affordable consumer-­grade media technologies. The distribution formats moved from videocassette, to ­laser disc, and then to video compact disc (vcd), a cheaper format than dvd used across Asia. Digital video discs became prominent in 2003.23 As a result, the contradiction between state-­controlled media and the proliferation of accessible new technologies in Indonesia intensified. According to Krisna Murti, the Suharto regime (1966–1998) used media censorship and regulation for nation-­building and to impose a pan-­Indonesian identity on an ethnically and regionally diverse multicultural archipelago; thus, prior to 1987, when the first private tv stations appeared, tv functioned as “nationalist propaganda.”24 Tod Jones argues that Suharto’s New Order, bolstered by oil and economic growth in the 1970s, garnered expanded resources for state intervention into culture with an authoritarian, prodevelopment policy. Between 1990 and 2000, the proliferation of affordable new technologies and the spread of consumer culture challenged state media regulation. Reformasi advocated freedom of expression. Licensing and regulation weakened, facilitating the expansion of social spaces for small arts institutions, venues, and organ­izations. However, according to Jones, an authoritarian cultural policy still persists.25 The in­de­pen­dent media movements in Indonesia functioned both as intervention into politics and as a production of public spaces: videos w ­ ere screened in art galleries, one of the few spaces outside government control. Advocating information decentralization and media democ­ratization of government-­ controlled media, in­de­pen­dent video activists documented the 1998 uprisings against Suharto, the New Order regime, and East Timor human-­rights abuses. Videochronic notes that private tele­vi­sion airing of shootings of Trisakti University students in Jakarta “sparked sentiments of national solidarity, leading to mass student protests in several cities across Indonesia, denouncing the New Order regime.”26 The proliferation of amateur video cameras contested state-­sponsored media repre­sen­ta­tions during the anti-­Suharto-­regime demonstrations. The student movement marshaled the Internet, mobile phones, and fax machines 62 

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to or­ga­nize demonstrations and disseminate information. Warnets (neighborhood Internet cafés) emerged as embodied places for po­liti­cal dialogues outside state purview.27 Murti contends the development of warnets, strongly linked with the reformasi movement, functioned as an “alternative public space for young ­people to subvert the hegemony of power.” Warnets opened new material places to convene for po­liti­cal discussion and served as nodes in larger student po­liti­cal movements. Arts organ­izations like the Bandung Center for New Media Arts/Common Room offered physical space for artistic and musical gatherings based on alliances to counteract limited financial resources.28 According to Videochronic, “Post-­Suharto Indonesia saw an unleashing of media production and distribution, both commercial and non-­profit.”29 In the post-­reformasi period, many grassroots, tactical, experimental, and activist video groups emerged: Offstream, Gekko Studio, Video Babes, Common Room, Etnoreflika, Ragam, RuangRupa. In Indonesia, emerging social movements and new technologies converged both offline and online. With an exploding global fine-­art market, art galleries provided relatively safe open spaces for po­liti­cal encounters, social convenings, and oppositional media screenings.30 However, many prob­lems challenged ­these new video formations. Small-­scale hand-­to-­hand distribution reduced impact. High-­resolution videos ­were difficult to download given slow Internet speeds and limited bandwidth in more remote parts of Indonesia.31 In this context, EngageMedia responded to a po­liti­cal need to aggregate a multiplicity of voices and organ­ izations that countered the government’s pan-­Indonesian identity and a technological incentive to provide a portal as a workaround to deal with uneven technology infrastructures. THE PO LYPHO N IES OF MOSAIC STRU CTU RES

Documentary studies have primarily focused attention on textual meanings and institutional histories. Social media and new media collapse distinctions between production, textuality, distribution, exhibition, and spectators. They provoke new theorizations of documentary directed to new affordances for producing dialogue, community, and public space. Human-­rights social media shifts the coordinates of documentary from the auteur fixed text to a multiplicity of makers producing texts to circulate, change, migrate, infiltrate. This media circulation, with its infinite malleability by other social actors, raises significant ethical questions concerning the rights of subjects and makers. Beyond their utopian framings, online social media also pres­ent new complicaE ngage M edia  63

tions. Sometimes security forces excavate social-­media-­produced images to identify and arrest protesters in conflict zones. Commercial news producers mine social media for story leads. This fluid image ecol­ogy sheds fixity for mobility across networks, where images are remixed, shorn of context, and inserted into new environments. The seemingly infinite publicness, accessibility, and mutability of social-­media circulation pose ethical and po­liti­cal challenges within the human-­rights foundational concept of “Do no harm,” as Sam Gregory has noted.32 With its discourse of democ­ratization of the means of production and the idealism of circulatory networks, proliferation of access to media technologies raises ethical questions about the rights of t­ hose represented and remixed. The multiplication of voices, agents, and actors constitutes a dialogic turn in documentary t­ oward more polyphonic strategies and structures, what Engage­ Media might term a gado gado strategy. This dialogic turn, however, is not a unified terrain. Disjunctures, ruptures, heterogeneities, contradictions, and discontinuities stage complex polyvalent discourses and practices. Robert Berkhofer  Jr. has noted that multivocal histories, emerging from poststructural critiques of evidentiary and explanatory models emphasizing linearity and unity, depend more on contingency and conjuncture than on causality.33 ­These heterogeneous conjunctions can be termed a polyphony, a Baroque musical strategy of layering musical lines to create a new, complex sound. ­Dipesh Chakrabarty also addresses issues of writing the minoritarian into history: simply adding new archives can replicate existing power relations and linearity ­because it fails to question the existing architectures of the archive itself.34 A more conjunctural, polyphonic historiography reorganizes the archive. It creates structures that enable multiple voices, signaling an impor­tant shift from texts ­toward more dialogic pro­cesses. Social-­media portals and networks function not only as new archival structures, but also as strategies for participatory heterogeneity. Portals like EngageMedia can be theorized as disjunctive, contingent polyphonic archives where each microdocumentary can open up more dialogue in circulation and exhibition. Microdocumentaries do not function as deductive arguments or finished, fixed texts, but rather serve as nodes in a diverse, contradictory dialogic field. Helen De Michiel has advanced the idea of microdocumentaries (short works produced for social media) engaging and immersing in microterritories (a focus on small places) through collaboration as a countermove to the recent proliferation of theatrical documentaries. She argues for a mosaic structure, where small pieces combine in dialogue and exchange to compose a 64 

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bigger picture. In ­these mosaic structures—­often produced as Web interfaces for short films designed for social-­media engagement which combine online and offline modes—­offering definitive answers to po­liti­cal and social prob­lems is not as impor­tant as facilitating substantive, embodied encounters for making sense and determining meaning.35 Through aggregation and curation, EngageMedia employs a mosaic structure, creating space for a gado gado mix of voices and topics. EngageMedia’s bilingual Papuan Voices proj­ect operationalizes t­hese theories of polyphony and mosaic structures. Its website asserts, “Papuan Voices is a video advocacy initiative working with Papuan activists to more effectively tell their stories to the world.”36 EngageMedia functioned as a collaborative facilitator with activist groups in Japapura and Merauke. The organ­ization trained Papuan grassroots activists, students, campaigners, and churches to produce video documentation of their po­liti­cal and ecological strug­gles. Rather than a long-­form documentary produced by outsiders, Papuan Voices offers nine small works produced by indigenous makers. ­These community-­ produced, grassroots shorts expand the repre­sen­ta­tion of Papuans beyond the highly contentious in­de­pen­dence movement (merdeka). A volatile conflict zone, Papua is marked by complex, interwoven layers of po­liti­cal strug­gle: Indonesian military occupation, sustainability issues, environmental degradation, gold and copper miner l­ abor confrontations, and ­battles against multinational corporations that control the police and military. In their World Report 2013, ­Human Rights Watch contends Papua’s oil, gas, and gold extractive industries have precipitated enormous human-­rights and environmental challenges. Gang rapes, government corruption, excessive force against demonstrators, torture, and sexual vio­lence have escalated.37 The Papuan conflict for autonomy is one of the longest unresolved conflicts in the Asia Pacific, with an armed re­sis­tance movement; aggressive exploitation of natu­ral resources by companies like Barrick Gold (Canada), Bougainville Copper (Australia), Center West Gold (Australia), and British Petroleum; and tight restrictions on foreign researchers, journalists, and humanitarian aid.38 Agribusiness plantations and massive logging contribute to further environmental destruction of the rainforest and the loss of large amounts of land for Papuans. The Indonesian government is currently engaged in what some scholars identify as an armed occupation of West Papua. Although Papua ranks as the richest province in Indonesia, its residents are the poorest, most unhealthy group in Indonesia.39 Ignoring the po­liti­cal strug­gles, Indonesian E ngage M edia  65

mainstream media represent Papua as a place of sex-­crazed, naked cannibals, framing Melanesians as racially inferior to the Javanese.40 Papua has been the subject of many ethnographic films from the United States and Australia, such as Dead Birds (Robert Gardner, United States, 1963), Dani Houses (Karl Heider, United States, 1974), and Trobriand Cricket (Gary Kildea and Jerry Leach, United Kingdom/Australia, 1976). As a counterdiscourse to both the media misrepre­sen­ta­tion of Papua and the ethnographic film production of a Papuan imaginary, Papuan Voices pres­ents the complexities in Papua from the point of view of everyday ­people in a nonconfrontational, community-­media-­driven approach. Designed for international screenings, the proj­ect features nine microdocumentaries: Love Letter to the Soldier (from a ­woman to the Indonesian soldier who fathered her child); Papua Calling (minority Papuan Muslims); Awin Meke (Papuan ­women traders fighting for market space); Hopes of the Cendrawasih ­Children (child ­labor in palm-­oil plantations); Ironic Survival (damaged sago plant ecologies); Jerry Can Coconuts (coconut-­based alcohol environmental prob­lems); What Mama Kasmira Wants (a w ­ oman who lost her cocoa-growing land); Left to Survive (a man refusing to sell his land to palm-­oil producers); and The Last Hunter (a man abandoning hunting to sell timber). Ironic Survival, produced by Malind tribal members in Merauke, exemplifies how microdocumentaries complicate the larger po­liti­cal issues of mining, environmental destruction, plantations, and race. Five minutes long, Ironic Survival explains the environmental impact of the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (mifee), with thirty-­five multinational investors using 1.4 million hectares approved by the Ministry of Agriculture of Indonesia, on the Malind tribe. The Malind are protectors of the sago tree, their staple food. With the loss of lands to mifee, the tribe has been forced to mine the beaches for sand, propelling erosion. One interviewee says sand mining has accelerated “­because mifee has made me hungry.” With voice-­over from the Malind subtitled in En­glish, the soundtrack links the sago as a food staple, the loss of lands, and the environmental destruction of beaches. The video is structured with testimonies in medium close-up and visual evidence in medium long shots of the sago and the beaches for sand mining. The images chart the environmental degradation of the land from the sago to the mined beach, a visualization of “ironic survival.” As a direct result of this video, which was posted in September 2011, EngageMedia​.­org ranked number three in social-­ media traffic in Merauke, ­after Google and Facebook. However, ­because Ironic Survival was produced in En­glish, it was not usable for video activists on the 66 

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ground in Papua. The Malind produced a twenty-­minute version. This longer proj­ect was designed as narrowcasting for the Malind community, to increase awareness of the environmental impact of sand mining on the beaches. Each Papuan Voices video runs five to eight minutes. They are featured on a single webpage with buttons for sharing on social media or for high-­quality downloads for public exhibition. A dvd compilation is also available, a workaround to address bandwidth challenges in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia. Thus, Papuan Voices intervenes into prob­lems of access and the limits of online networks by offering supplemental formats for offline exhibition and community circulation. The Papuan Voices site provides material for distribution and exhibition to facilitate deeper context. ­These resources include a history of Papua, a toolkit with study and screening guides, links to international organ­izations researching Papua, and information on human-­ rights and environmental campaigns. Papuan Voices exemplifies the strategies of polyphony and mosaic structure. It aggregates bottom-up, community-­situated voices from Papua—­activists, ­women in markets, hunters, miners, tribes, church groups—to widen discourse beyond journalists, ethnographers, and extractive industries. Each microdocumentary contributes to a more complexly layered mosaic. Outside journalists, anthropologists, religious organ­izations, and ngos had long been producing images of Papua. Most of the media produced by ngos featured ngo workers. Very few repre­sen­ta­tions of Papua had been made by Papuans themselves. To address the absence of Papuan-­produced, indigenous repre­sen­ta­tions, EngageMedia cooperated with church groups who offered protection and cover in an often deadly conflict zone. EngageMedia shifted to working with villa­gers, grassroots activists, students, and campaigners, encouraging them to tell their own stories. By offering hands-on training in video activism and human-­rights princi­ples that ensure the security of participants, EngageMedia has built capacity for video self-­representation.41 This strategy of community-­ produced media has mapped a dif­fer­ent geography of Papua. CO NCLUS I O N

The case study of EngageMedia suggest that social-­media reconfigurations of production, distribution, exhibition, technology, microterritories, and politics require thinking about both repre­sen­ta­tions and mobile image complexes. As a social-­media portal and aggregator, EngageMedia, in a very provisional way, opens spaces for Southeast Asian urgent but repressed social and po­liti­cal issues. E ngage M edia  67

EngageMedia works within contradictory, problematic liminal zones marked by the expansion of consumer-­grade media technologies, development of social-­media networks, distribution needs for in­de­pen­dently produced short media works, commercial media regulation, po­liti­cal movements, participatory media, uneven technological access and capacity, and media blackouts on indigenous voices. However, the public media ecologies of Indonesia and Southeast Asia cannot simply be bifurcated between regulated commercial enterprises and participatory-­media capacity building. ­These multilayered ecologies include flows of commercial films in theaters and on dvd from the United States, China, and India and their illicit circulation within informal black-­and grey-­ market pirate economies. EngageMedia enters into ­these flows as a site for aggregating diverse content. It addresses impor­tant issues of distribution, context, exhibition, subtitling, and offline dvds. The bottom-up, user-­generated videos on ­women, mi­grants, Papua, and the environment on the Engage­Media site represent a participatory node that pirates digital spaces rather than transnational media. Employing a gado gado strategy to materialize multiplicity, EngageMedia demonstrates how permeable participatory media, networks of circulation, and polyphonic mosaic structures suggest the need to move beyond the image to consider how to operationalize sustainable media development for indigenous voices in conflict zones. EngageMedia pres­ents many unresolved contradictions in participatory media in the Asia Pacific. It operates between the vectors of po­liti­cal activism, indigenous media, ngos, advocacy campaigns, and user-­generated proj­ects. It builds co­ali­tions and collaborations between organ­izations. Exploring t­ hese contradictions, EngageMedia offers a node for aggregation and curation within the larger global media ecol­ogy. > NOTE S  ​ 1

2

Andrew Lowenthal, executive director of EngageMedia, contends that EngageMedia emerged from significant debates in the IndyMedia movement, which refused foundation grants. EngageMedia was focused on sustainability and salaries, and accepted grants from vari­ous foundations. Andrew Lowenthal, interview by author, 14 October 2013. For a critique of humanitarian ngos, see Julia Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: ngos, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Enrico Aditjondro, EngageMedia, interview by author, 28 September 2011.

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3

4 5

6

7 8

9

10

11

12 13 14

15

See Steve Crabtree, “Opinion Briefing: Indonesia’s Economic Emergence,” Gallup, May  31, 2013, http://­www​.­gallup​.­com​/­poll​/­162848​/­opinion​-­briefing​-­indonesia​ -­economic​-­emergence​.­aspx; and World Bank, Indonesian Economic Quarterly: Adjusting to Pressures ( Jakarta: World Bank, 2013). See Greg Felker, “The Po­liti­cal Economy of Southeast Asia,” Con­temporary Southeast Asia, ed. Mark Beson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 46–73. Badan Koordinisai Penanaman Modal (Indonesia Investment Coordinating Board), “Reasons to Invest in Indonesia,” http://­www2​.­bkpm​.­go​.­id​/­en​/­investing​ -­in​-i­ ndonesia. Dawn Kissi, “Indonesia Economy Becomes a ‘Standout’ among Emerging Markets,” cnbc, October 1, 2016, http://­www​.c­ nbc​.­com​/­2016​/­09​/­30​/­indonesian​ -­economy​-b­ ecomes​-­a​-­standout​-­among​-­emerging​-m ­ arkets​.­html; Karen B. Brooks, “Six Markets to Watch: Indonesia and the Philippines,” Council on Foreign Relations, January/February  2014, http://­www​.­cfr​.­org​/­emerging​-­markets​/­six​-­markets​ -­watch​-­indonesia​-­philippines​/­p32506; Latifah Elisa Kusrini, “Indonesia: An Emerging Market,” tc World, December  2013, http://­www​.­tcworld​.­info​/­e​-m ­ agazine​ /­business​-­culture​/­article​/­indonesia​-­an​-­emerging​-­market​/­. “Indonesia: Overview,” World Bank, September 22, 2016, http://­www​.­worldbank​ .­org​/­en​/­country​/­indonesia​/­overview. For a discussion of transnational media multiplatform business models, see Tino Balio, Hollywood in the New Millennium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). For explanation of social-­media marketing, see Adam L. Penenberg, Viral Loop (New York: Hyperion, 2009). For analy­sis of user-­generated participatory media, see Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). See Claire Bishop, ed., Participation (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006); Nato Thompson, ed., Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2012); Manual Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012). Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 11–84. See Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Con­temporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); and Bishop, Participation. Special thanks to Bhaskar Sardar and Joshua Neves. Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 13. Merlyna Lim, @Crossroads: Democ­ratization and Corporatization of Media in ­Indonesia (Tempe: Arizona State University Participatory Media Lab/Ford Foundation, 2001), 11. Tempo’s En­glish website is http://­en​.­tempo​.­co​/­. For a discussion of Tempo ­under Suharto, see Team of Tempo Journalists, “Why Was Tempo Banned?,” in

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16 17

18

19

20 21 22

23

24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32

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The Indonesia Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Tinke Hellwig and Eric Tagliacozzo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 397–401. Colin Brown, A Short History of Indonesia: The Unlikely Nation (Crow’s Nest, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2003), 225–46. Meg McLagan and Yates McKee, “Introduction,” in Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, ed. Meg McLagan and Yates McKee (New York: Zone, 2012), 9–25. Palmira Permata Bachtiar, “Chaotic Statistics of Indonesian Mi­grant Workers,” Jakarta Post, January  26, 2012, http://­www​.t­ hejakartapost​.­com​/­news​/­2012​/­01​/­26​/­chaotic​ -­statistics​-­indonesian​-­migrant​-­workers​.­html. See also Anne Loveband, “Positioning the Product: Indonesian Mi­grant Workers in Taiwan,” Journal of Con­temporary Asia 34 (2004): 336–48; and Nicole Constable, Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Mi­ grant Workers, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). “Combating Forced ­Labour and Trafficking of Indonesian Mi­grant Workers (Phase II),” International ­ Labour Organ­ ization, http://­www​.­ilo​.­org​/­jakarta​ /­whatwedo​/p­ rojects​/­WCMS​_1­ 16048​/l­ ang—en​/­index​.­htm. Citizen Journalists Malaysia, http://­cj​.m ­ y​/­about​-c­ jmy​/­. See “Mi­grant Worker Stories,” EngageMedia, n.d., http://­www​.e­ ngagemedia​.o­ rg​ /­Projects​/m ­ igrant​-­workers. Dhyta Caturani, “Video Production and Distribution Training for Indonesia Mi­grant Workers in Malaysia,” EngageMedia, August  27, 2016, http://­www​ .­e ngagemedia​ .­o rg​ /­b log​ /­v ideo​ -­p roduction​ -­a nd​ -­d istribution​ -­t raining​ -­f or​ -­indonesian​-­migrant​-­workers​-­in​-­malaysia. kunci Cultural Studies Center and EngageMedia, Videochronic: Video Activism and Video Distribution in Indonesia ( Jakarta: kunci Cultural Studies Center/ EngageMedia, 2009). Krisna Murti, “The New Media Culture,” in Essays on Video Art and New Media: Indonesia and Beyond, by Krisna Murti (Yogyakarta: Indonesian Visual Art Archive, 2009), 38. Tod Jones, “Indonesian Cultural Policy in the Reform Era,” Indonesia 93 (April 2012): 147–76. kunci Cultural Studies Center and EngageMedia, Videochronic, 18. Krisna Murti, “New Media: Guerilla Culture to Gadget Art,” in Essays on Video Art and New Media: Indonesia and Beyond, by Krisna Murti (Yogyakarta: Indonesian Visual Art Archive, 2009), 79–80. Marie Le Sound, “The Bandung Center for New Media Arts: Local Commitment and International Collaboration,” Leonardo 39, no. 4 (August 2006): 315–18. kunci Cultural Studies Center and EngageMedia, Videochronic, 18. kunci Cultural Studies Center and EngageMedia, Videochronic, 37–65. kunci Cultural Studies Center and EngageMedia, Videochronic, 40–49. Sam Gregory, “­Human Rights Made Vis­i­ble: New Dimensions to Anonymity, Consent, and Intentionality,” in Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, ed. Meg McLagan and Yates McKee (New York: Zone, 2012), 551–61. PAT R I C I A Z I M M E R M A N N

Robert Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the ­Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 275. 34 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Eu­rope: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2000), 109. 35 Helen De Michiel, “The Lunch Love Community Proj­ect,” paper delivered at the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture Conference, Minneapolis, Minnesota, September 9, 2012. 36 Papuan Voices, EngageMedia, http://­www​.e ­ ngagemedia​.o­ rg​/­Members​/­ricoloco​ /­news​/­papuan​-v­ oices​-­website​-­is​-­now​-­live. 37 ­Human Rights Watch, “Papua New Guinea,” World Report 2013: Events of 2012, http://­www​.­hrw​.­org​/­world​-­report​/­2013​/­country​-­chapters​/­papua​-­new​-­guinea. 38 See “Mining in Papua New Guinea,” CountryMine, n.d., http://­www​.­infomine​ .­com​/­countries​/­papuanewguinea​.­asp. For information on British Petroleum in Indonesia, see bp, “bp in Indonesia,” http://­www​.­bp​.­com​/­en​_­id​/­indonesia​ /­bp​-­in​-­indonesia​.­html. See also Bilveer Singh, “West Papua and Indonesia since Suharto: In­de­pen­dence, Autonomy or Chaos?,” Con­temporary Southeast Asia 27, no. 1 (April 2005): 151–54; and Budi Hernawah, “Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power,” Con­temporary Southeast Asia 34, no. 3 (December 2012): 445–48. 39 “Background,” Papuan Voices, n.d., http://­www​.­papuanvoices​.­net​/­background. 40 Enrico Aditjondro, interview by author, 29 September 2011. 41 Enrico Aditjondro, interview by author, 28 September 2011.

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WEI DIANYING AND XIAO QUEXING T E C H N O L O G I E S O F “ S M A L L ” A N D T R A N S - ­C H I N E S E SCREEN PRACTICES

Chia-­chi Wu

At the Cannes International Film Festival in 2013, three East Asian filmmakers won prizes; all of them have acknowledged the inspiration of Taiwan New Cinema and its prominent figure, Hou Hsiao-­hsien. China’s Jia Zhang-ke received Best Screenplay for A Touch of Sin (Tian zhuding). Japan’s Koreeda Hirokazu was awarded the Jury Prize for Like ­Father, Like Son (Soshite chichi ni naru), and Singapore’s Anthony Chen Zhe-yi took Caméra D’or for Ilo Ilo (Bama bu zaijia). For more than a de­cade, Jia and Koreeda have been considered veteran prac­ti­tion­ers of “Asian minimalism,” the style pioneered by Hou. Both inflecting the identifying tags of Hou’s stylistics (static long takes, long shots, intricate depth staging, and planimetric compositions) and continuing Hou’s thematic emphasis on the quotidian, the street, and the ordinary ­people, Jia and Koreeda have sustained the connection between the discourse of art cinema and that of a reticent, daily-­life realism, a structural connection that has underpinned the global reception of East Asian cinema and is now validating the newcomer Anthony Chen. For the last three de­cades, “minimal” in this strand of Asian filmmaking has denoted stylistic audacity, a triumphant national cinema (with Taiwan New Cinema perceived as a miracle of a small state), and a transnational film modernism varied and finessed by Asian auteurs and continuously programmed

by art h­ ouses and film festivals (Chang Tso-­chi, Tsai Ming-­liang, Hong Sang-­ soo, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul). In Chinese-­language communities in the last few years, however, a growing lexicon of the “mini,” “minimal,” or “small” has developed in multifarious forms with radically dif­fer­ent geopo­liti­ cal and cultural meanings, and the screen practices and narratives based on the “quotidian” or on “nobodies” have indicated revamped assumptions about cinema, too. For one ­thing, the vocabulary thematizing “small” suggests the increasingly strong presence of China’s con­temporary language and popu­lar culture. Xiaozi nühai (literally “small capital girl”), for example, is replacing “working girl” or “office lady” in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and bespeaks the reworking and transnational popularization of China’s socialist argot.1 At the same time, the expanding idioms centered on “small” resonate with the lingo of new technology and virtual media. One new major buzzword suggesting “mini” is wei, meaning micro. Wei zhengxing (micro-­cosmetic surgery) are medical procedures which “fine tune” the face or tone up parts of the body but do not involve an operation. Wei lüxing (microtravel) means one-­day or short-­ distance travel in one’s own city or country. Both terms connote lifeworlds that are enabled by cutting-­edge technologies, where medical procedures and leisurely roving are reconceptualized as pleasures that can be achieved on the basis of daily, local life. Wei is now an in-­word in Chinese-­language new media. Originally as part of the literal translation of Microsoft (weiruan), wei has been applied in weibo (MicroBlog, China’s version of Twitter and Facebook), weixin (WeChat, literally “micromessages,” China’s version of msn or Line), and wei xiaoshuo (microfictions, consumed in the form of text messages). Wei dianying thus means microcinema or “micro film,” a new epithet for what we used to call short film. Yet as a replacement of duan pian (short flick), wei dianying evinces a close affinity to electronic gadgets and virtual media, a screen practice designed primarily for new platforms (physical and virtual), and suitable for moving, handheld, informal, short time, often ­under incomplete viewing conditions. In this de­cade, wei is a meme that relates to multiple levels: format (digital win­dows and small screens), length (fragmented duration), mode (of production, spectatorship and consumption, and governing), trope (for small stories for and by ordinary ­people), tone, affect (“small assured happiness”), lifeworlds (mundane and mobile), and politics (trans-­Chinese or East Asian geopo­liti­cal and cultural imaginary). Undoubtedly, mobile devices have given rise to the rejuvenation of short-­ film culture on a global scale, as evident now in the flourishing of film festivals devoted exclusively to short film, some of which did not exist ­until the W E I D I A N Y I N G A N D X I A O Q U E X I N G   73

3.1  ​A lifeworld that is mundane and features fast travels. Tapei Metro passengers

enclosed by mobile win­dows, both physical and virtual. 3.2  ​A cityscape saturated with screens and images. Taipei’s Ximending district.

new millennium.2 Some of the festivals have also varied, in other languages, the phrase “short film” to infuse a new-­media sensibility into it.3 In this essay I pres­ent Taiwan-­based observations of “shorts” in a trans-­Chinese context. I describe screen practices and narrative tropes of the small: wei dianying and, as a mainstream narrative convention and thematic value, xiao quexing (small ­assured happiness). In the spirit of Foucault, I see ­these “small ­things” as “technologies of the self ”—­discourses, techniques, means, and procedures for 74 

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shaping an autonomous, self-­regulating, and self-­assuring Taiwanese, Hong Kong, or trans-­Chinese subject. Yet rather than the liberal governmental rationality that Foucault takes issue with, I argue wei dianying and xiao quexing embody a po­liti­cal and economic management deeply rooted in an Asian neoliberal, populist rationality in Chinese-­language communities. I view wei dianying,  both the new forms and the existing forms of short film the term encapsulates, as technologies that exploit the small, the mundane, the daily pleasures, and the street, which ensures the production of self-­satisfied and self-­ empowered Hong Kong, Taiwanese, or trans-­Chinese populations, as well as the governing of citizens for optimal life control and cap­it­al­ist capacity. At the same time, in attempting a brief genealogical, transgeneric account of the relations between ­music videos, tv commercials, wei dianying, and its highly commercialized, pan-­Chinese practices (star vehicles, idol dramas, filmmakers’ dabbling in small-­screen video making), I ask questions about Taiwan’s and Hong Kong’s roles as “key minorities” in image making and wenchuang chanye (cultural creative industries) in East Asia and in an emerging world system where the two communities must constantly negotiate with their relegated status as “small” states and markets. PR E D ­ E C­ E S ­S O RS, VARI­O U S ITERATION S, AN D T HE HY P E

The emergence of wei dianying may be traced to several sources. One pre­de­ ces­sor is a commercial mode of short-­film production, a subgenre of Taiwan-­ made Mandarin pop-­music video, and what I tentatively term narrativized ­music video. Narrativized ­music video attempts storytelling that is more detailed and of longer duration than is usually required by the pop song which the video purports to be promoting. Simply put, a narrativized m ­ usic video is a long ­music video, a genre that often features pop idols (if the musicians are not themselves pop idols), pres­ents an elaborate chain of cause and effect, and assumes or tries to convey a filmic quality (associated with high-­definition images, a carefully sculpted mise-­en-­scène, and sometimes an emphasis on the authorship of an established image maker). Narrativized m ­ usic videos boast high production values in a rec­ord com­pany’s m ­ usic and images, and the star status of Taiwan’s pop artists who enjoy an islandwide or all-­Chinese popularity. Examples of narrativized ­music videos abound. The video And I Know (Er wo zhidao, 2004) is a good example.4 Released by Mayday (Wuyue tian), the most popu­lar rock/pop band in the Chinese-­speaking worlds for the last fifteen years, the video stretches a song of 4 minutes and 11 seconds into an W E I D I A N Y I N G A N D X I A O Q U E X I N G   75

8-­minute short film. As if it ­were the soundtrack to the visual narrative, the longer version of the song adds an elongated prelude and epilogue, character/ band member voice-­overs, and a thirty-­second pause in the m ­ iddle of the song, which conveys the turn of story events and an outburst of emotion. For the first years of the twenty-­first ­century, when tv and ­music channels ­were still the main outlet for ­music videos and commercials, narrativized ­music video was the result of the rise of Taiwan’s Mandarin pop in the greater Chinese region and, ironically, the bankruptcy of Taiwan’s film in the domestic market. To survive eco­nom­ically, veteran filmmakers made high-­end, artsy ­music videos and tv commercials, sometimes deliberately showing their trademarked styles in them. Hou Hsiao-­hsien made a series of commercials for the Japa­ nese beer Kirin, one of which starred Hitoto Yo, the leading actress in his Japa­ nese film Café Lumiere (Kôhî jikô, 2003). Around the same time, Hou made a three-­minute tv commercial for Taiwan’s largest banking corporation (China­ trust Commercial Bank, now ctbc Bank) and managed to leave intact his “notorious” stylistics (indirectness, sedateness, slowness), rather than buckling ­under the usual generic demands of a tv commercial (fast cuts, direct pre­sen­ta­tion of the message or product, a r­ unning time of twelve seconds or less). When narrativized ­music videos and lengthy tv commercials became trendy, sponsors often approved higher production bud­gets and longer ­running times. Image makers who already worked in advertising also ventured longer scripts, hoping to improve their prospects for a feature-­film ­career and to become film directors. A tv commercial is considered responsible for the wide ac­cep­tance of the term wei dianying. In 2010, the agency for Cadillac titled its 83-­second commercial Touch and Go (Yichu jifa, Frank Vroegop, 2010) as a wei dianying.5 A replica of action movie à la Mission Impossible, Touch and Go features the Hong Kong film actor and heartthrob Daniel Wu (Wu Yan-zu) as a high-­tech savvy action hero successfully accomplishing his mission of transporting a mysterious suitcase in a Cadillac sedan. When Touch and Go appeared, it was generally felt that the term wei dianying was just “a new ­bottle with old wine in it”—an exaggerated claim of novelty for an existing mode of image production and a ruse to increase the click-­through rate on the Internet.6 Yet considering t­ oday the debate it provoked, one could argue that labeling Touch and Go a wei dianying rather than a tv commercial testified to the advertiser’s targeting of online viewership and their belief that the Internet was taking over from tv as the primary channel for advertising, especially in China. Around the time when Touch and Go was released, it was common for a label or an advertiser 76 

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to air a ­music video or commercial on tv in the form of a “tv cut,” usually for only a few seconds. The tv cut was to entice the audience to the Internet to view its wei dianying—­the complete version, which entailed and ensured a “better appreciation” of the “original” version by the clicking of the mouse. Within three years, wei dianying caught fire. Before anyone could pin down wei dianying in neat conceptual or industrial terms, it had gained such wide currency that now all image makers, established or novice, regularly announce they are making micromovies. While the standard meaning of the En­glish word microfilm refers to miniature reproductions and scale reductions of paper documents for storage, reading, and printing in an archival setting, in Chinese-­ speaking worlds micro film has taken on a completely new meaning and is now extensively used as a literal translation of wei dianying. The neologism has penetrated the nomenclature of short-­film productions and made sweeping changes to it. Most image productions that are not feature films now privilege wei ­dianying over their preexisting and long-­established generic labels. As it has redefined ­music videos and advertisements, wei dianying is now renaming and overlapping mini drama series, in­de­pen­dent filmmaking, student and amateur productions, what used to be auteurs’ episodes in anthology films, government infomercials, ngo advertisements, and university publicity clips. While all t­ hese iterations of wei dianying seem to render the distinctions between professional and amateur and between in­de­pen­dent and commercial largely passé, wei dianying has also largely transformed the categorization of nonfeature productions from “video” practices to “film” practices, in that the use of dianying imbues video making with the aura of cinema and a sense of artistry. In the name of wei dianying, tv commercials and ­music videos that last for minutes have become common, given that the audience is expected to watch the complete version online, w ­ hether or not they see the tv cut first. Wei dianying has spawned its own trailer and “making of ”; the term is occasionally applied even to the “makings of ” for full-­length films. At the time of this writing, a director who was releasing and promoting his full-­length film had made a wei dianying based on his new feature.7 Rather than a short, ­condensed cut of the original film, it is another mini-­scale production ­under the same title, telling a similar story with the same cast. Hence, wei dianying, joining the trailer and the “making of,” serves as a third form of publicity for feature films. As a “cinematic” term, wei dianying has become so au courant that world-­class Chinese-­language filmmakers now do not mind being associated with short films or ­music videos. Younger-­generation filmmakers who have built their names in feature production gladly lend their creator status W E I D I A N Y I N G A N D X I A O Q U E X I N G   77

to the “lengthy commercials” they make to publicize themselves, their wei dianying works, and the merchandise the wei dianying presumably promotes. Arthouse filmmakers retain their status even if their contributions to a portmanteau film are renamed wei dianying. Short films premiered en masse at international film festivals are now seen on Youku (China’s version of YouTube), Sohu (China’s version of Yahoo!), and YouTube in separate win­dows as dashi weidianying (masters’ micro films), with subtitles indicating the director and the original title of each episode, with descriptions such as “A Master’s wei dianying: Ann Hui’s My Way.” As a small-­screen practice deeply embedded in online spectatorship and  mobile win­dows, wei dianying is often produced, financed, sponsored, and premiered by China’s largest news or video-­sharing websites, such as Tudou and Youku.8 ­These Internet companies sometimes show even more enthusiasm for “cinematic” content (coded as original and audacious), film spectatorship (predicated on the idea of the premiere), art status, and festival approval. Ann Hui’s short film My Way is a chapter in an anthology film Beautiful 2012, which includes three other short films: You Are More than Beautiful (Ni hezhi meili), by ­Korea’s Kim Tae-­yong; Long tou, by China’s Gu Chang-­wei; and Walker (Xing zhe), by Tsai Ming-­liang. Produced by Youku Original (a boutique division of Youku), Beautiful 2012 spearheaded the Internet com­pany’s series of pan-­Asian and pan-­Chinese cinematic efforts. When Youku Original proudly announced the debut of Beautiful 2012 at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2012, it stated, “Youku Original and the hkiff invited leading Asian directors Gu Changwei, Tsai Ming-­liang, Ann Hui, and Kim Tae-­yong to direct ‘micro movies’ (‘wei dianying’ in Mandarin) for ‘Beautiful 2012’, a year-­ long Youku Original campaign highlighting selected original content. The internationally recognized, award-­w inning directors represent Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South K ­ orea, respectively. The micro movies ­will premiere at the hkiff before being released exclusively on Youku’s online platform over the course of the year.”9 The viewership enabled by both festival programming and search engines has proven to be promising. At the time of this writing, Tsai Ming-­liang’s ­contribution to Beautiful 2012 had marked a rec­ord 4.5 million viewings on Youku alone, a number that Tsai ­will prob­ably never achieve at the box office. Youku repeated the same pan-­Asian, trans-­Chinese success with Beautiful 2013 and Beautiful 2014.10 The Beautiful series at the same time points to Hong Kong’s and Taiwan’s significant roles in supplying cinematic content, infusing artistic cultural sen78 

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sibilities, or just making wei dianying sound “cool.” Despite the Chinese origin of the term and the current pan-­Asian tendency of its practice, each key moment of wei dianying’s development, as suggested by Touch and Go, the Beautiful series, and many other titles, witnessed videos with Hong Kong and Taiwanese creative talents from pop or cinema as mainstays and trademarks, helping thrust wei dianying to a new level of hipness and popularity. In the same year in which Beautiful 2012 aired, the renowned Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To recategorized his 2005 commercial The Open Road (Zixing wolu) as wei dianying; it starred four Hong Kong and Taiwanese actors and pop ­artists, all at the peak of their ­careers in the first years of the twenty-­first c­ entury: Edison Chen (Chen Guan-xi), Jay Chou (Zhou Jie-­lun), Louis Koo (Gu Tian-le), and Vanness Wu (Wu Jian-­hao). Hence, wei dianying is most potent when it serves as a multiform commercial narrative boasting production value and star power. Accessed mainly through search engines, wei dianying embodies a spectatorship or­ga­nized around key words or phrases, usually googled with the names of pop artists or merchandise; the official title tends to be eclipsed, obscure, or even non-­ existent. Entering the Taiwanese pop idols’ names Luo Zhixiang (Show Lo) and Yang Cheng-­lin (Rainie Yang) in e­ ither Chinese or En­glish gives immediate access to Heartbeat Love, five episodes of wei dianying (ranging from eight to eleven minutes). The series—­a Tudou production that premiered consecutively on a weekly basis on Yahoo! Kimo (Taiwan’s version of Yahoo!) from April to May 2012—­tells the story of a young man and w ­ oman’s romantic encounter, breakup, and reunion in Australia. Presenting an elucidated, smooth, but clichéd flow of story events, the series blatantly serves multiple commercial purposes: as a mini “idol drama” series (ouxiang jü) that capitalizes on the trans-­Chinese or East Asian star currency of the Taiwan-­based pop idols, as a vehicle for both Luo’s and Yang’s ­albums, and as a would-be landmark for their “film ­careers.” Whichever it is, the series promotes tie-­ins and pres­ents them as indispensable pleasures of daily life: tourism in Tasmania and Victoria (Australia), with the characters incessantly eating Lay’s, drinking Pepsi, and flying on DragonAir. As of this writing, Heartbeat has been viewed seventy-­four million times on Tudou; it logged ten million clicks on Yahoo! Kimo for the five weeks of its premiere. Even the Taiwanese state has jumped onto the bandwagon of microcinema. ­After trouncing the Demo­cratic Progressive Party (dpp) in the 2008 presidential election, the Kuomintang (kmt) government picked up dpp’s populist, grassroots cultural policies, and it has shown an unusual knack for W E I D I A N Y I N G A N D X I A O Q U E X I N G   79

tapping into popu­lar culture and virtual media as instruments for governing citizens, promoting itself, and raising Taiwan’s international profile. Renamed as wei di­anying, the government’s video productions range from publicity videos representing Taiwan as a g­ reat state with soft power, to promotional clips for po­liti­cal and even presidential candidates, to advertisements for tourist destinations. Taiwan Bravo: National Flag Girl I and II, Taiwan Bravo: Love Visa, and Taipei: My Microtravel all draw heavi­ly on the conventions of Taiwanese and East Asian idol dramas, emphasizing gratuitous romantic encounters while promoting tourism in Taiwan.11 While ­these videos target both citizens and overseas Taiwanese, government-­contracted infomercials, in the form of pop-­ idol wei dianying, propagate literally “techniques of the city government.” An in­ter­est­ing example is Missed Calls (From Dad) (Baba de weijie laidian), an eight-­ minute video produced by the National Taxation Bureau of Taipei, Ministry of Finance.12 It relates the events a young w ­ oman (played by Meng Geng-ru, considered a rising tv drama idol) experiences in a single day as she strug­gles for in­de­pen­dence in Taipei and keeps missing cell phone calls from her ­father, who has come to Taipei from their hometown on a package tour and wants to see her. In the m ­ iddle of the film, the conversation between the female protagonist and her potential love interest informs the viewer about a minor city-­ government ser­vice: the new online tax-­filing system. A friendly coworker, a good-­looking photographer, delightedly tells the protagonist how hassle-­free and efficient it is to file income tax online, a “technique” that ­will make her life easier and solidify her in­de­pen­dence as an urban working girl. A PO PULI S T GOVERN MEN TALITY: IN VEN TORY I NG T HE SM AL L , THE S TRE E T, TH E G RASSROOTS, AN D TH E DAILY P L EASUR ES

At the other end of the spectrum, wei dianying has also gradually become an overarching label that encompasses both in­de­pen­dent and student productions, as aspiring image makers and majors in visual media giddily discard “the sorry, in­de­pen­dent state” of filmmaking and embrace the new term, uploading their videos on the Internet for social and business networking, bidding for government or private video proj­ects, or competing in numberless wei dianying contests. Wei dianying has almost completely replaced the Mandarin term for movie shorts, duan pian, which now sounds old-­fashioned, if not obsolete. In 2012, the Taipei International Short Film Festival changed its title to the Taipei International Short Film Festival and the First Cross-­Strait Creative Wei Dianying Competition, to make the event more googleable. It is at the lower 80 

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end of this phenomenon that we see more clearly how the politics of daily life, the street, ordinary ­people, and the grassroots are employed as technologies of the self (bringing the self, an individual, or a state into conformity with the ideals of the high-­tech, savvy, self-­managing, and self-­satisfied subject of populist capitalism), or as technologies of governance (directing the be­hav­ iors of the self, o­ thers, or citizens of a Chinese-­language state t­ oward similar ideals; fostering a set of ideas about a state or local government). The logo of Tudou, for example, includes a slogan emphasizing that the videos it streams represent every­body’s daily-­life practices—­“Every­one is the (film) director of life” (Meigeren doushi sheng­huo de daoyan)—­even though it more often serves as a platform for high-­end, commercial wei dianying. Among a variety of wei dianying competitions are ­those that invoke the cultural politics of the street and of “nobody.” A website engineered by Taiwan’s Bureau of Audiovisual and ­Music Industry Development (Ministry of Culture), tavis.tw, has been holding an online wei dianying competition since 2012, in order to “advocate image creation by the ­whole populace [quanmin],” as the website notes in an ambitious announcement.13 The 2012 contest, themed “­People on the Street Corner” (Jiejiao naqunren), called on the competitors to “re-­vision the corners of the street, lane, and alley [jie, xiang, nong],” and to rediscover p­ eople and ­things happening “right around the corner,” all of which “form the fabric of Taiwan’s social, local life.” Wei dianying might be just a hip term for short film. Yet as a renewed film epithet it pins down existing genres and absorbs new ones, both now being hyped on many platforms, such as lcd screens on public-­transportation platforms and vehicles, as well as virtual win­dows on electronic devices. On the one hand, wei dianying fulfills the revolutionary, demo­cratic potential of art. Walter Benjamin’s cele­bration of cinema as art that is reproducible and travels fast finds an illustration in digital video making and online transmission. Insofar as every­one produces, makes, disseminates, exhibits, and even “bends” images by using mobile devices and image-­processing software, digital image making certainly blurs the distinction between the creator and the audience of a work of art. On the other hand, wei dianying’s popu­lar (populist) appeal is underpinned by the retention of the aura of art, of cinema, which persists in the term dianying. In our age of digital reproduction, cinema has been auratic and w ­ ill remain so, for it has gone through a historical pro­cess, eighty years ­after Benjamin’s writing, in which it has been deeply imbricated with art, authorship, and a set of ideas related to originality, creativity, and cool technology. The contests and websites devoted exclusively to wei dianying might wave W E I D I A N Y I N G A N D X I A O Q U E X I N G   81

3.3  ​Public-­transportation platforms characterized by lcd screens and ditou zu

(heads down), a new term that refers to ­people who keep their eyes on their mobile devices. Taipei Metro’s Gongguan Station.

at the amateur, the student, and the in­de­pen­dent firm or workers in visual communication, yet they always gesture ­toward the possibility of making us a Wong Kar-­wai, or at least a Lin Shu-­yu.14 The website tavis.tw’s advertisement for its 2013 wei dianying competition, a micro film itself, is an 83-­second stylistic replica of a Wong Kar-­wai film, si­mul­ta­neously paying homage to and parodying his trademark: voice-­over (conducted conspicuously in Cantonese rather than Mandarin), a quote from a monologue well known to film buffs (“The shortest distance between him or her and me was only 0.01 cm,” from Chungking Express, 1994), tango-­music underscoring, and glaring yellow after­ noon sunbeams in a small alley (Happy Together, 1997). At times, in the form of wei dianying, government infomercials hark back to the ideals of Third Cinema, as part of the institution serving a postcolonial society and fully supported by the state apparatus, recalling a schema of Fanonian themes: popu­lar memory as the subject of repre­sen­ta­tion, cultural traditions in the pro­cess of being renovated and revalorized, and the “mind”—­attitudes ­toward both old and new cultural forms—­being liberated from values of Western and neo­co­lo­nial supremacy. A micro film well known to my students, Hakka Love You, produced by the Hakka Affairs Council and directed by Taiwan’s blockbuster director Ye Tian-­lun, features an “abc” young man—­ “American-­born Chinese,” Taiwan slang designating overseas Taiwanese born in the United States—­returning to his cultural roots, staying with his Hakka 82 

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grand­mother in the countryside, and winning the heart of a Hakka-­Taiwanese girl. Vocalizing Taiwan’s continuous multicultural nationalism as it recognizes Taiwan’s second-­largest ethnic group, the video plays on semantic misunderstandings in the clash of En­glish, Mandarin, and Hakka, juxtaposing the “new” (coded as Los Angeles, iPad, Facebook, disc burning) with the “old” (coded as Hakka mochi, folklore and folk festivals, the traditional Taiwanese enclosed courtyard home or grand­mother’s residence), but cannily showing a postcolonial amalgam of American, Han-­Taiwanese, and Hakka-­Taiwanese idiolects and practices (such as Hakka pop and the grand­mother’s use of Facebook to post photos of a Hakka folk festival). While the director Ye Tian-­ lun was praised for propagating and “passing on Taiwanese culture by use of cinema,” a glimpse at the public discourses on Hakka Love You suggests that wei dianying and its vari­ous avatars attest more to Empire as conceptualized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: capital defined in a very con­temporary sense, of which the structures and logics are entirely immune to the liberatory or radical weapons of politics of difference.15 Taiwan’s Micro Movie Association ranked this video, among nine other videos advertising Citibank, ­Family Mart, Mentholatum, Google, Sakura Taiwan (kitchen hardware), and so on, as a best entry in the category of marketing, that is, one of the best online teaser ads. Considering the increasing capital invested in wei dianying, the association stressed how the micro in microcinema encapsulates larger perspectives (yi xiao jian da) and linked microcinema to national use in “reflecting ­people’s lives and Taiwan’s multifarious facets.” The association stated that this “smallness” could not be underestimated in terms of the potential profit this cinema could rake in and the publicity it could generate for Taiwan as well as for any cultural and commercial product.16 The theoretical import of the wei dianying phenomenon lies not so much in ­whether it embodies the ideals of the “every­body,” a popu­lar memory-­ oriented Third Cinema, or an avant-­garde ideally and fully (re)integrated into social, daily-­life praxis á la Peter Bürger’s formulation.17 If the nation-­state is equated to a cultural or commercial product to be advertised by an entrepreneurial government or public agency, and if it is the smallness of wei dianying that attests to its efficacy (good price-­to-­performance ratio), I believe we can better discern the cultural and po­liti­cal significance of microcinema and tease out its most intriguing aspects by seeing the small films as technologies of governing—­techniques, procedures, ideas, knowledge systems as part and parcel of the production of privatized, populist subjects. ­These technologies enact models of selfhood (ways of understanding and managing an individual, W E I D I A N Y I N G A N D X I A O Q U E X I N G   83

a state, or a nation) and replicate ideas about self-­government and a regime’s governing of citizens: shaping one’s own and o­ thers’ conduct and attitudes, as well as dictating the forms and the scope of a state government’s intervention in citizens’ lives. ­These technologies are bound up with a neoliberal governmentality and a trans-­Chinese imaginary based in cyberpublics and spectatorial discourses. Yet while neoliberal governmentality is understood to induce self-­engineering and to bring f­ree individuals in line with cap­i­ tal­ist princi­ples of discipline, competitiveness, and optimal productivity, in vari­ous Chinese-­language communities, it goes hand in hand with dif­fer­ent versions of pop­u­lism, and often arrives at romanticized affirmations of the (“perhaps-­not-­so-­productive”) individual self and narcissistic valorizations of the (“perhaps-­not-­so-­competitive”) national self (the nation-­state).18 S M A LL ­M ATTE RS?

Unique to our critical inquiry into wei dianying as technologies of governance is a set of allied concepts revolving around “small,” in par­tic­u­lar the idea of xiao quexing, another meme in the trans-­Chinese region that has developed in the twenty-­first ­century. It is said to have derived from an expression coined and pop­u­lar­ized by the Japa­nese best-­selling novelist Murakami Haruki. As “small [xiao] assured [que] happiness [xing],” it refers to small, everyday delights of which we are sure and ­simple ­things that are supposed to sustain our lives. ­Here xing is taken from xingfu (or shiawase in Japa­nese), a synonym for kuaile (happiness) in Mandarin. Xingfu also connotes a blissful state of life, while kuaile sometimes describes only the mood somebody is in, though t­ hese two terms are exchangeable in many cases. Xiao quexing neatly summarizes a narrative convention and a salient thematic value carried from Japan’s torendy dorama (trendy drama, an Asian transnational phenomenon since the 1990s) into Taiwan’s ouxiang jü (idol drama).19 In both genres, the narrational pro­ cess highlights how the characters experience daily small pleasures: a young ­woman gulping an ice-­cold beer in a solitary cele­bration of her move to a single apartment; an office lady taking a lunch break in a café, carry­ing a gracefully designed purse perfect for a lunch break; salariman (salary men, white-­collar workers) chattering in a boisterous after-­hours izakaya (drinking restaurant); a scientist-­professor on a business trip in a small town, sampling local seafood delicacies in the h­ otel’s cozy diner a­ fter taking a hot-­spring bath; or (in a Korean soap opera) a grandmother-­in-­law, crouching in the backyard, giving de-

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tailed instructions on making kimchi while carefully layering vegetables into a jar. Although ­these small pleasures might serve as motifs or narrative information to accentuate the story’s message or facilitate plot progression, quite often they are included for their own sake, in ways that are pre­sen­ta­tional and that do not always involve product placement. Rather than simply portraying aspects of Asian life, they are technologies of the self—­vernacular modes of biopower, indeed—­entailing an attitude ­toward and concern for the self, detailing methods of caring for the self, showing how one should act on oneself and o­ thers. If ­there is a moral in the elaborate pre­sen­ta­tion of unimportant details, it is the idea that the quotidian, ­little ­things make you xingfu (blessed), ­whether or not you are a winner (rensheng shengli zu [life victory group]). Or especially if you are not a winner. In a micro film, small ­things are often crucial to the resolution of the story events, usually the protagonists’ survival in school, at work, in friendships or in a relationship, and in the cap­i­tal­ist society. Be Brave (Rang ai yonggan ba), an amateur video that does not share preoccupations with advertising, zooms in on a college gradu­ate newly hired as a cubicle worker. The video first portrays her frustration with a supervisor and her isolation at work. In a few seconds we witness a miraculous turn of events. Barely establishing causality that explicates such a change, the second half of the video shows her receiving a big, gift-­wrapped box sent by a friendly proj­ect partner from another com­pany. A gigantic bouquet of balloons and colorful decorations pop out of the box as her colleagues surprise her with a birthday cake, exclaiming, “Happy birthday!” A hackneyed birthday cele­bration? But it is an impor­tant technique of life to be picked up by “my” colleagues and friends, a key part in the fantastic production of the self-­affirming subject who is to survive, if not to triumph, in the cap­i­tal­ist order. A cake, birthday cards, balloons, colleagues’ color-­paper notes with words of encouragement, a good-­ looking male friend wearing a teddy-­bear mask, and so on are all now part of the mechanism of life that are brought “into the realm of explicit calculations” and put into meticulous practice, as inventoried and instructed by the video.20 And it works: the video, along with quite a few other student productions, recorded a click rate higher than ­those of many commercial productions featuring trans-­Chinese pop stars. ­Today, xiao quexing dovetails perfectly with wei dianying as a narrative trope and convention. As if sharing Marcus Aurelius’s impulse to u­ nfold everyday life in his letters to Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the meticulous, journal-­ like pre­sen­ta­tion of details in Asian tv dramas easily lends itself to product

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placement in wei dianying. The phrases xingfu and xiao quexing have become frequent tags to wei dianying, as in titles such as (The Xiao Quexing of) Comic Girl (Manhua nühai de xiao quexing), Tide-­Subtle Happiness: Looking for My First Love (Xiao xinggan, China’s advertisement for Tide laundry detergent), Happily Ever ­After (Xingfu zhuibuzhui, a Taipei city government infomercial), and Bring Happiness Home (Bale daihuijia, China’s Pepsi commercial with a “greater Chinese” cast and a blatant “reunion” theme).21 Xiao quexing has been increasingly pres­ent not only in Taiwan government infomercials, but also in journalistic discourses on public affairs and government per­for­mance. In late 2013, Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior used xiao quexing as the title for its call for wei dianying to promote its new population management technique—­“citizen digital certificate” (ziranren pingzheng, an electronic form of citizen identification).22 But for the last two years, Taiwan’s newspapers and tv news have also used the same term to criticize the government and alert the public to Taiwan’s slowing economy, describing how “rising prices chip away at xiao quexing.”23 Other neologisms centering on the concept of small are also popu­lar. Xiaozi nühai (small capital girl), wei zhengxing (micro-­plastic surgery), wei lüxing (micro­ travel), and wei xiaoshuo (micronovel, or fiction in the form of text messages) all exemplify a media-­savvy sensibility incorporating trans-­Chinese, sometimes “China-­accented” slang. All t­hese “­little” ­things resonate with subtle, multilayered meanings about the production of a self-­managing, complacent, and self-­comforting subject, arising from dif­fer­ent combinations of pop­u­lism and neoliberalism in dif­fer­ent geopo­liti­cal contexts. Most of the time, such combinations seem contradictory since, as in Be Brave, they operate on the premise of affirming and romanticizing cap­i­tal­ist production and not so “efficient, competitive, or professional” individuals in order to bring life, options, and individuals in line with market-­driven calculations and optimal productions. At the same time, while Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinemas since the 1980s have often been characterized as “soft power” in official and other discourses, wei dianying and other technologies of small now encapsulate, translate, and articulate efforts to negotiate their micro status in the pan-­Chinese and East Asian technoscape and mediascape, and to configure themselves as key minorities and content nations.24 Indeed, wei dianying bespeaks Taiwan’s and Hong Kong’s continuing desperate strug­gles in the current phase of globalization. When China-­centered, continental thinking increasingly commands the East Asian geopo­liti­cal imaginary and figures larger in Hollywood’s market prospects, Hong Kong and Taiwan seem to have also managed to feature prominently in their significantly small ways, serving this star, that producer, this 86 

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director, or that screenwriter—­mostly roles associated with stardom, professionalism, creativity, and hip sensibilities. Hong Kong stars such as Daniel Wu and Karen Mok first made wei dianying cinematic by lending their star status to high-­budget commercial videos.25 Following them, Taiwan and Hong Kong ­music video makers and aspiring filmmakers have stood out as creative talents, turning out wei dianying as Taiwan or Hong Kong star vehicles. Among ­these image makers are Chang Rong-ji, Arvin Chen (Chen Jun-­lin), Jem Chen (Chen Yi-­xian), Leste Chen (Chen Zheng-­dao), Cheng Hsiao-­tse, Giddens Ko ( Jiu badao), and Moory Ma (Ma Jia-­ying), whose “cute,” slick, mini idol dramas feature Angelababy (Yang Ying), Joseph Chang (Chang hsiao-­chuan), Chen Bo-­lin, Michelle Chen (Chen Yan-xi), Vic Chou (Zhou Yu-­min), Gui Lun-­mei, Alice Ko (Ke Jia-­yan), Jam Hsiao (Xiao Jing-­teng), Ariel Lin (Lin Yi-­chen), Show Lo (Luo Zhi-­xiang), Eddie Peng (Peng Yu-­yan), Rainie Yang (Yang Cheng-­lin), Mark Zhao (Zhao You-­ting), Shawn Yue (Yu Wen-le), and Bryant Chang (Zhang Rui-­jia).26 While ­these talents seem to be staking a claim for Hong Kong and Taiwan as soft powers or key minorities, it should be noted that Hong Kong theatrical films long ago lost their domestic audience, and that Taiwan con­temporary filmmaking has survived almost solely on ­either idol vehicles or what I call “Taiwan-­themed cinema.” Some Chinese actors or pop artists are now repeating the mode of idol production pioneered by Taiwan and Hong Kong. At the same time, some Chinese-­language micro films have also succeeded China’s documentary tradition that started in the late 1980s, yet somehow without always using the epithet wei dianying. It remains to be seen how China’s image makers may mark wei dianying with stronger trans-­Chinese resonance and transnational media clout. Offscreen, citizens of Hong Kong and Taiwan continue to brandish acts of social activism and civic disobedience, protesting against po­liti­cal leaders, corruption, inefficient administration, l­egal injustice, the importation of American beef, and, in par­tic­u­lar, policy changes arising from China’s po­liti­cal or economic demands. ­W hether ­these acts are calls for election-­based democracy (Hong Kong) or results of both a deepened democracy and a populist rationality (the assumption that Taiwan’s government should take full responsibility for citizens’ xiao quexing), t­ hese are “big” acts not tolerable or even imaginable in China. Just as bad can mean good, small can mean big. Size ­matters, but in this context, it is the small screen that m ­ atters. I once asked the Mexican, Puerto Rican, and American students in my Cinema En­glish class why they ­were attending college in Taipei, instead of in Shanghai or Beijing, if their ultimate educational objective was to become “real” Mandarin speakers W E I D I A N Y I N G A N D X I A O Q U E X I N G   87

and writers. They rolled their eyes as if I had asked a rhetorical question, then responded: “You ­can’t do Facebook t­ here!” > NOTE S  ​

Originally, in the 1930s, a translation of “petit bourgeoisie,” xiaozi was one of Mao Zedong’s four classes in the era of the Cultural Revolution and was viewed as antagonistic to the communist state. The term was recuperated to indicate hip economic self-­sufficiency at the beginning of the twenty-­first c­ entury, when China’s capitalization deepened and widened. While the term is no longer fash­ion­able in China, around 2010 it got picked up and revived by Taiwan, with its meanings being adapted to Taiwan’s socioeconomic structure. Li An-yi, Lin Cai-­xun, and Xie Wan-­lun, “Zhichang xinüxing: Xiaozi nühai zhi tantao” [New working girl: Discussing “small capital girl”], www​.­shs​.­edu​.­tw​/­works​/­essay​/­2012​ /­11​/­2012111422110483​.­pdf. 2 See Shortfilmdepot​.­com, an online platform that updates short film festivals around the world. The slogan that accompanies the site title is “Upload and send your films to festivals.” 3 For example, the ShortShorts Film Festival and Asia, held in Japan and now in its thirteenth year, has made a logo of “ShortShorts,” which appears as a single word and pervades the festival’s publicity materials. The festival is a qualifying event for the Acad­emy Awards, with the winner being eligible for nomination in one short-­film category for the Acad­emy Awards. http://­www​.­shortshorts​.o­ rg​/­index​ -­en​.­php. 4 Wuyue tian / Mayday, Er wo zhidao / And I Know (Rock Rec­ords, 2004), YouTube ­music video, posted by “Rock Rec­ords,” April 12, 2012, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​ /­watch​?­v​=G ­ v3HOUMEPiw. 5 See Frank Vroegop, dir., Cadillac—­Daniel Wu (Cadillac Films, 2010), YouTube video, posted by “Frank Vroegop,” February  5, 2013, http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​ /­watch​?v­ ​=4­ 1WedIUOi2Y. 6 The click-­through rate is the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of times the ad is shown (called “impressions”), expressed as a percentage. The click-­through rate is taken as a mea­sure of the success of an online advertising campaign for a par­tic­u­lar website. 7 Fang Wen-­shan, dir., Tingjian xiayu de shengyin [Rhythm of the rain] (jvr ­Music, 2013). 8 Youku and Tudou merged into Youku-­Tudou to become a dominant video-­ sharing website in China. 9 “hkiff to Premiere Youku Original ‘Micro Movie’ Titles from Major Directors,” pr Newswire, March  22, 2012, http://­www​.­prnewswire​.­com​/­news​-­releases​ /­hkiff​-­to​-­premiere​-­youku​-­original​-­micro​-­movie​-­titles​-­from​-­major​-­directors​ -­143788586​.­html. 1

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Also premiered at Hong Kong International Film Festival, Beautiful 2013 features Kurosawa Kiyoshi from Japan, Wu Nien-­jen from Taiwan, Mabel Cheung from Hong Kong, and Lu Yue from China. 11 Huang He-­qing, dir., Taipei—­My Micro Travel (Taipei City Government, 2012), YouTube video, posted by “ebcaddepartment,” September 20, 2012, http://­www​ .­youtube​.c­ om​/­watch​?­v​=w ­ HllGSDYZWU; Chen Hung-yi, dir., Taiwan Bravo: Love Visa (Red Society Films, 2011), YouTube video, posted by “twbravo,” October 6, 2011, http://­www​.­youtube​.c­ om​/­watch​?­v​=­​-­JhUQkuI​_­aM; Wen Chao-­ kai, dir., Taiwan Bravo: National Flag Girl 1 and 2 (Askafilm Production, 2011), YouTube video, posted by “twbravo,” October 12, 2011, http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​ =­OatkmnEiBz0. 12 J. J. Lin, dir., Missed Calls (From Dad) (National Taxation Bureau of Taipei, Ministry of Finance, 2013), YouTube video, http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​ =­hHaxFgqjYDA. 13 See tavis.tw, http://­tavis​.t­ w​/­files​/­14​-­1000​-­13217,r36​-­1.​ ­php. 14 Lin Shu-yu, or Tom Shuyu Lin, is the director of Xing Kong [Starry starry night] (2011) and is considered one of the most promising Taiwan-­based filmmakers with trans-­Chinese box-­office appeal. In 2013, tavis.tw’s announcement of its wei dianying contest mentioned him. See http://­tavis​.­t w​/­files​/­13​ -­1000​-­13869​.­php. 15 “Kejia hao aini: Yetianlun yong dianying chuancheng taiwan wenhua” [Hakka love you: Ye Tian-­lun passes Taiwanese culture on with cinema], NowNews​.­com, June  1, 2012, http://­www​.n­ ownews​.c­ om​/­n​/­2012​/­06​/­01​/­105715; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 142. 16 “Taiwan yilingyi niandu xingxiaolei shida jingxuan wei dianying” [Taiwan’s top ten micro films in marketing for 2012], Micro Movie Association, accessed April 15, 2014, http://­www​.­micromovie​.o­ rg​.­tw​/­​?­p​=4­ 04. Hakka Love You ranked sixth on this list. 17 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-­garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 18 Pop­u­lism is a geopo­liti­cally and historically variable term, with positive or negative connotations depending on the context in which it is used. H ­ ere I take the core sense of the term to denote a po­liti­cal ideology that is anti-­elitist and anti-­ intellectual, and has a basis in direct mobilization of the ­people for po­liti­cal ­causes. Pop­u­lism might operate in democracies, liberal autocracies (such as pre-1997 Hong Kong), or authoritarian regimes. Each of the three Chinese communities is characterized by its own type of pop­ul­ism, as well as by its own combination of pop­u­lism and neoliberalism. For neoliberalism in con­temporary China, see Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). For a useful reference on pop­u­ lism in Taiwan, see Chang Yu-­tzung, “The Mass Bases of Populist Democracy in Taiwan,” Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies, no. 75 (September 2009): 85–113 (in Chinese).

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From the last years of the 1990s to the first de­cade of the twenty-­first ­century, Taiwan-­made Mandarin pop and idol dramas ­were the major contributors to tai liu (Taiwan wave; sometimes subsumed u­ nder the label hua liu, or Chinese wave), circulated in Northeast and Southeast Asia as distinct h­ ouse­hold products and placed next to han liu (Korean wave). Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, [1976] 1990), 143. David Tsui, dir., Bring Happiness Home (Pepsico / Moviola, 2011), YouTube video, posted by “love137v,” December  30, 2011, http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­IZP​ -­qZt6i9Q; Xiaolai and Zhizhi, dir., (The Xiao Quexing of) Comic Girl (Star Clinic, 2012), YouTube video, posted by “starclinic1688,” May  8, 2012, http://­www​ .­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=X ­ QoUTjxeh5M; J. J. Lin, dir., Happily Ever A ­ fter (Taipei City Government, 2013), YouTube video, January 24, 2013, http://­www​.­youtube​ .­com​/­watch​?­v​=3­ ejOXDsdsVk; Jem Chen, dir., Tide-­Subtle Happiness series (Minimax Original, 2012), YouTube video, posted by “MXQ10,” November  8, 2012, http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­70qETSuAWko. See the Meili, xiegou, xiaoquexing [Beauty, encounter, and xiao quexing] videos. Accessed April  30, 2017. https://­www​.y­ outube​.­com​/­playlist​?­list​=P ­ Lmq K1wR8I6PdGj32AaM7wFf​_­​_­WNGh0X52. See “Wanwu jiezhang chidiao xiaoquexing” [Rising prices chip away at xiao quexing], Liberty Times Net, March 6, 2014, http://­news​.­ltn​.­com​.­tw​/­news​/­life​/­paper​ /­759569. See Cindi Sui, “ ‘Soft Power’ Raises Taiwan’s Profile,” bbc News Asia Pacific, ­October 25, 2010, http://­www​.­bbc​.­co​.­uk​/­news​/­world​-­asia​-­pacific​-­11609099. See Frank Vroegop, dir., Cadillac—­Daniel Wu (Cadillac Films, 2010), YouTube video, posted by “Frank Vroegop,” February  5, 2013, http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​ /­watch​?v­ ​=4­ 1WedIUOi2Y; and Anthony Hoffman, dir., Cadillac srx “Route 66” tvc [Mo wenwei 66 hao gonglu] (Cadillac Films, 2011), starring Karen Mok, YouTube video, posted by “Jaemin Kim,” February 1, 2013, http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​ /­watch​?v­ ​=­MCF3FARcMUk. Among innumerable examples are Chen Hung-­I, dir., Sokenbicha [Coca Cola series] (Red Society Films, 2012), YouTube video, posted by “SokenbichaTW,” May  23, 2012, http://­www​.y­ outube​.c­ om​/­watch​?­v​=v­ h5S3Foiqiw; Cheng Hsiao-­ tse, dir., Yongyuan douxiang ni guanwo [FamilyMart: Love me forever] (cy Films, 2012), YouTube video, posted by “LiChih Tsai,” April 13, 2011, http://­www​ .­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­ZnK9kS0ef​_­Q; Jem Chen, dir., Zheyike aiba [Dive in ­series] (Minimax Original, 2012), YouTube video, posted by “MXQ10,” May 19, 2012, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­Pbz5KE0zxng; Chang Rong-ji, dir., Sony-­Xperia Sony Tablet-­Play or Not (production com­pany unknown, 2012), YouTube video, posted by “Sony Taiwan,” September 4, 2012, http://­www​.­youtube​ .­com​/­watch​?­v​=­VpgpNqD250M; Xu Zhao-­ ren, dir., Daike laoshi [Substitute teacher] (REDIRON.films, 2012), YouTube video, posted by “minalee0913,” March 29, 2012, http://­www​.y­ outube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­IHT6uoqZc4s. C hia - ­chi W u

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CONVERGING CONTENTS A N D P L AT F O R M S N I C O N I C O V I D E O A N D J A PA N ’ S M E D I A M I X E C O L ­O G Y

Marc Steinberg

On October  1, 2014, Kadokawa, one of Japan’s largest publishers and aspiring media conglomerates, completed a merger with Dwango, owner and founder of Niconico, Japan’s largest and most culturally significant video platform. Pundits speculated about the reasons for this merger and questioned its ­financial merit. As of late 2014, Kadokawa—­now the subsidiary of Kadokawa Dwango—­had announced voluntary retirements and large-­scale restructuring, and share prices of the merged com­pany have dropped, leading some to view the merger as simply an attempt to bury the publisher’s debt.1 That said, the merger is fascinating for the ways it articulates media strategy that on the one hand reflects changing conceptions of media corporations and on the other hand proposes strategies that grow out of Japan’s media mix ecol­ogy. Two keywords animate the justification for the merger: the transliterated En­glish terms platform and contents. At the May 14, 2014, press conference where the merger was initially announced, the Dwango founder and current Kadokawa Dwango chairman Kawakami Nobuo explained the terms of the merger in the following manner: “Kadokawa and Dwango have both developed contents and platforms—­Kadokawa for the real world, and Dwango for the world of the Net. Having offered both contents and platforms for the net world and the real world, the compatibility of t­ hese two companies united as one is extremely

good.”2 The merger promised to create what Kadokawa Tsuguhiko effused as “the Platform of the Rising Sun” (hi no maru no purattofomu)—­a nationalist code word for what would be a Japa­nese platform. The platform was intended to designate the digital interface, intermediary, and support for the delivery of contents; contents, in turn, is the cultural good consumed (­whether film, book, or ­music) or, simply, intellectual property (ip).3 The terms platform and contents designate transformations in the media sphere that impact the ­future of Japan’s media ecol­ogy, one in which print is experienced as video (and conversely, video as a form of print). The prominence of t­ hese two terms within the explanation of the merger must also be situated within a geopolitics of (threatened) platform domination by North American companies—­Google, Amazon, and Apple, in par­tic­u­lar, whose platform interfaces offer the promise of a transparent delivery of content. The terms platform and contents also denote a thoroughgoing transformation of the nature of video ­today, not least ­because video must be situated as one moment within what in Japan is called the “media mix.” The media mix refers to the quotidian, ubiquitous, and industrially ingrained habit of turning books into moving images and vice versa. Within the media mix, one content is transformatively ported to another platform, with each media incarnation used as advertisement for another, potentially fueling a virtuous circle of consumption that props up the entire franchise. The logic of the media mix informs most commercial media production in Japan, and for this reason ties video together with print, games, comics, and novels in a tightly knit ecosystem. This ecosystem operates through par­tic­u­lar kinds of mediation, relying on the material specificities of each object (comic frame, animation movement, toy form) as well as on the proliferation of a par­tic­u­lar franchise through magazine advertisements, material space, and fan production.4 This materiality is a form of physical mediation that is the motor of the media mix. As with cultural production in other realms, the materiality of the media mix is undergoing significant transformations, the bywords of this change being contents and platform. The terms also draw our attention to the relation between the media mix and the rise of digital delivery of content, a context within which the Kadokawa-­Dwango merger can be understood as both symptomatic of media change and a site of potential re­sis­tance to the increasing global platform hegemony of U.S. transnationals. ­Here I ­will focus on the Niconico platform, known for its video-­sharing function, and hence as Niconico Video (Niconico Dōga). The platform has recently branched into the delivery and mediation of comics and games and created a market for buying 92 

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and selling goods, and it hosts a site for its own Wikipedia-­style user-­produced encyclopedia. Niconico differs from the U.S. platforms in the formal manner in which it mediates content (blurring the distinction between content and platform). As such, Niconico provides a provocative counterpoint to the increasingly homogeneous and unified ecosystem of contents delivered by Amazon, Apple, and Google, whose video and print interfaces emphasize visual transparency and what I call “full-­screen aesthetics” and collectively raise the specter of platform imperialism (a term I borrow from Dal Yong Jin5). Niconico offers a counterpoint to this mode of mediation through its emphasis on user interaction via an on-­screen comment function, developing new connections across contents and platform. The relation between print and video gains significance as Niconico delivers not only video but also manga, novels, and magazines, via the same interface as its videos, and in conjunction with its unique comments function. As such it pres­ents one pos­si­ble model of a counterplatform.6 FR O M “CO NTE N T IS K IN G ” TO “P LATF ORM IS KI NG”

Contents and platforms are the “it” terms of the pres­ent media moment. They usually appear together, often one a­ fter the other. But they have dif­fer­ent lineages, distinct developments, and very par­tic­ul­ ar geographies and geopolitics associated with them. As interdependent as contents and platforms may seem, ­there is a global unevenness in the distribution and use of the terms at the level of both infrastructure and discourse. In the United States, discussions of platforms w ­ ere far more prevalent during the 2000s, a time that also saw the rise of the massive platform ecosystems that now dominate global media spheres. In Japan, on the other hand, the same period was the heyday of contents as a governing concept in media discourse and governmental policy making. The reasons for this difference are complex. Arguably, Japan’s neglect of platform-­ building during the 2000s paradoxically derives from the very strength of Japa­nese mobile providers as the platforms of mobile commerce from the late 1990s ­until the late 2000s, at which point the arrival of the iPhone/iOS and Android broke the hold that telecoms had on the domestic media market and henceforth paved the way for the increasing dominance of U.S.-­based platforms. Platforms ­were as ubiquitous as Internet-­enabled cell phones in early 2000s Japan, but also for this very reason ­were taken for granted, leading companies and the government to focus on the contents side of the equation. Put simply, in the 2000s in the United States, platform was king, meaning C onverging C ontents and P latforms  93

platforms w ­ ere considered the main profit-­driving machines. In Japan during the same period, content was king—­in public discourse, contents continued to be figured as the site for profit making in the digital era. (At a p­ olicy level, the emphasis on contents was also, crucially, part of the “Cool Japan” rhe­toric that advanced the hope that Japa­nese cultural goods would make up for the decline of Japa­nese industrial might.)7 The respective terminological dominance had real industry effects, and t­ hese effects require scrutiny. The terms contents and platform emerged at a par­tic­u­lar moment of digital media consumption, when the material consistency of an informational or audiovisual commodity came unhinged from a par­tic­u­lar medium, becoming mobile and transposable in a way it was not before. Prior to the digital shift, we had books, films, tv shows, and video games. The metamedium of the computer becomes a space where all t­hese forms can be accessed and can coexist, destabilizing the firm bound­aries between media and rendering the very idea of medium suspect.8 The term contents steps into the gap created by the digitization of mediums. As Paul Frosh explains in his analy­sis of the North American “visual content industry,” the term content emerged as a response to “the dismantling of the technical bound­aries between previously distinct media (photography, painting and drawing, film, video) and their convergence and mutual convertibility.”9 In short, the terms contents and platform respond to the need for a new vocabulary that can describe media in a medium-­independent or medium-­neutral manner. In the 1990s, the emphasis in North Amer­i­ca was on the production of media content u­ nder the slogan “Content is king.” The term content was vis­i­ble in newspapers and magazines, and business leaders discussed the importance of content providers. Between 1993 and 1995, t­here was a remarkable increase in the use of the term content business and the standalone, singular form content in the English-­speaking world. By 1995, the Wall Street Journal and the Economist as well as trade publications and even Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development (oecd) reports began using the term with some regularity. In a representative moment, in 1996, former Microsoft ceo Bill Gates famously titled a speech “Content Is King” and said: “Content is where I expect much of the real money w ­ ill be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.”10 In Japan the emphasis on the business of contents—in the plural—­similarly started in 1993 and continued to be strong in Japan during the first de­cade of the 2000s.11 From terminological beginnings of contents in the 1990s onward, Japa­nese writers, politicians, media critics, and the wider public came to 94 

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embrace the loanword contents (kontentsu) as the new catch-­all term for entertainment industry–driven intellectual property in the 2000s, becoming a key term within the “Cool Japan” national strategy, activating on and off throughout the 2000s, and coming back in full force ­under the Abe Shinzo administration in 2013.12 By the 2000s in the United States, however, content was no longer king. Instead, the attention shifted to something e­ lse, something that would come to be called “platform” (repurposing a term previously used to designate computer hardware). Indeed, it would only be once platforms ­were in place in the late 2000s that the ­future of the Internet as broadcasting channel would be secured. The ­future dreamed by Gates and aol Time Warner only arrived in the late 2000s as Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, and other platforms unequivocally announced that platform was king. By the mid-­to late-2000s, Apple, Google, and Amazon ­were engaged in a fight for national and global platform dominance.13 Platforms as sites of content containment, distribution, and management now appear to be king, with the mediators of content—­rather than content producers or o­ wners—­being increasingly celebrated within the media landscape. Google and Apple and Amazon have developed closed platforms as content-­delivery ecosystems that sell and distribute existing content. Emphasis falls on the creation of platforms that offer closed ecosystems of content, with the Internet functioning as an architecture of diffusion and transmission.14 PLATFO RM S : S IX DEF IN ITION S

Nevertheless, despite the considerable amount of attention paid to platforms, and a good deal of programming and planning put into physically building platform ecosystems, ­there ­isn’t yet a consensus on what is meant by the term platform. ­Here I ­will give an overview of six of the most prominent of ­these competing definitions. First, and most commonly, the term platform is used as a stand-in for the older term media. In an era in which we no longer have the technical differences between mediums, what we used to call media we now call platforms. Henry Jenkins, for instance, uses the term this way in his Convergence Culture (2006): “By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms.”15 Second, we can turn to the much narrower definition offered by the Netscape Navigator browser inventor, Marc Andreessen. In an oft-­cited blog post from 2007, Andreessen notes that “ ‘platform’ is turning into a central C onverging C ontents and P latforms  95

theme of our industry and one that a lot of ­people want to think about and talk about. However, the concept of ‘platform’ is also the focus of a swirling vortex of confusion.”16 As an attempt to right the situation, Andreessen offers a seemingly s­ imple definition: “The key term in the definition of platform is ‘programmed.’ If you can program it, then it’s a platform. If you ­can’t, then it’s not.”17 Third, we move from the level of software to the level of hardware. This is in fact a return of sorts, as the term platform was associated with hardware before software or media. The video game scholars Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort suggest in their manifesto “Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers” that platform refers to a video-­game platform, or a kind of computational hardware assemblage, citing the Atari Video Computer System as one of many gaming platforms.18 Fourth, the term can refer to websites that serve as platforms or gathering spaces for user-­generated content, like Facebook and YouTube. As Tarleton Gillespie notes in “The Politics of ‘Platforms’,” corporations like YouTube have used the term platform strategically to claim immunity from prosecution. Deploying the term platform becomes a strategy for corporate positioning in an era of ­battles over copyright infringement in the United States. Gillespie argues that, for better or worse, “the term ‘platform’ has already been loosened from its strict computational meaning.”19 Instead, it has been mobilized to immunize websites that rely on user-­uploaded content from copyright-­related prosecution. The term’s other connotations have the additional benefit of appealing to the general public’s sense of their common owner­ship (our Tube) of ­these other­wise very proprietary sites. Fifth, in The Soul of Anime Ian Condry argues that we should think of animation characters themselves as platforms. Condry moves the term even further away from the realm of computation, while still drawing on the sense of “the common” given to the term by YouTube. He writes, “One can think of platforms not only as mechanical or digital structures of conveyance but also as ways to define and or­ga­nize our cultural worlds. . . . ​Characters offer a way to think about anime as a ‘generative platform.’ ”20 Condry defines both character and worlds as “platforms for creativity,” ­here understood as the spaces where social energies can coalesce around par­tic­u­lar medial entities, and where what he calls “collaborative creativity” can take place.21 Sixth, the former Kadokawa chairman Kadokawa Tsuguhiko’s recent definition of platform characterizes it as the place where money, p­ eople, and commodities meet.22 This has echoes in the Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg’s definition of the term in their How Google Works: “A 96 

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platform is, fundamentally, a set of products and ser­vices that bring together groups of users and providers to form multisided markets.”23 Yet what t­hese definitions elide is the way that most platforms function as closed sites where par­tic­ul­ar commodities meet par­tic­u­lar ­people ­under very regulated and copyright-­protected conditions. In other words, platform refers to something like a closed marketplace (or walled garden, to use a familiar Internet meta­phor from the days of aol), where the selling and buying of products take place u­ nder a very specific set of conditions. I refer to this self-­ enclosed commercial space for delivering formatted content as the platform ecosystem. Platform ecosystems are enclosed and mutually incompatible, but internally consistent and ultracon­ve­nient so long as you stay within the garden walls (and, not insignificantly, have the latest hardware). The formulation of the platform as a self-­enclosed commercial space is influenced by the development of platforms by the so-­called Gang of Four: Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook (though arguably the model for this kind of platform was pioneered by aol in North Amer­i­ca and by the i-mode mobile Internet ser­vice in Japan).24 The Google Store, the Amazon Kindle Store, and the iTunes Store are platforms in this sense: they are closed networks that use Internet infrastructure, software interfaces, and hardware supports to facilitate purchases of online goods. PLATFO RM I M PERIALISM

This sixth definition of platform is the most encompassing one, but also the most eco­nom­ically and culturally ascendant, a push for platform-­enabled digital lockdown. The increasingly global domination of the Gang of Four also suggests we should put the ascendancy of the commercial platform ecosystem into a geopo­liti­cal frame. It also encourages us to reopen the question of cultural imperialism. Cultural imperialism is an analytic framework deployed in political-­economic theories of globalization, wherein critics worried about the erasure of cultural differences u­ nder the sameness of American culture as it was distributed and consumed around the world (particularly via Hollywood films, American tele­vi­sion shows, and fast-­food culture).25 Since the late 1990s, cultural studies and postcolonial theorists have advocated a more nuanced approach to Hollywood and American cultural circulation, acknowledging local difference and cracks in U.S. mass cultural hegemony. Yet now we find ourselves at a juncture where the distribution systems and interfaces, search engines, platform ecosystems, and the ­legal structures that C onverging C ontents and P latforms  97

support all of them are increasingly “made in Amer­i­ca,” even if their hardware supports are not.26 Apart from linguistic translation, t­ hese platforms operate relatively uniformly at the level of physical and software interface. This is vis­ i­ble on an everyday basis in the increasing global dominance of iPhone and particularly Android devices, which monopolize market share and funnel users ­toward their proprietary apps and content ecosystems.27 The de facto infiltration of markets by Apple and Google gives the two companies an unpre­ce­dented reach into the cultural lives of their users—­and this is particularly the case with users in Asia. In Japan, Google Japan and Amazon Japan w ­ ere the second and third most frequented websites in 2014, and Android and ios phones dominate Japan, South K ­ orea, India, and China, and indeed most of the world.28 Platform, interface, and hardware device represent a renewed axis of American media imperialism—­this time as “platform imperialism.” Dal Yong Jin, who originally elaborates this concept, writes: “Accepting platforms as digital media intermediaries, the idea of platform imperialism refers to an asymmetrical ­relationship of interdependence between the West, primarily the U.S., and many developing powers—of course, including transnational corporations. . . . ​Characterized in part by unequal technological exchanges and therefore capital flows, the current state of platform development implies a technological domination of U.S.-­based companies that have greatly influenced the majority of ­people and countries.”29 As global capital smooths the crinkles of local mobile-­phone infrastructure and operating systems, ios and Android have increasingly become the interface and operating systems of choice for mobility and content distribution. The Gang of Four increasingly operate as the global distributors of content through their platforms. This d­ oesn’t lead automatically to a uniformity of culture—­though this cannot be ruled out as an effect—­but given the tendency to create uniform, transparent interfaces across language and region, it does seem to lead to a uniformity of interface. Whereas Jin focuses his analytical attention at the level of owner­ship, I address platform imperialism at the level of interface. For the most part, the interface dis­appears to offer full-­screened and unmediated access to contents (Samsung’s 2017 “Unbox Your Phone” ad campaign surrounding the launch of its Galaxy S8 phones is symptomatic of this emphasis on full-screen aesthetics extending to hardware design). In the case of Japan, this dynamic potentially threatens the ecol­ogy (and economy) of creation around the media mix. The media mix, a­ fter all, is not just a com98 

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mercial strategy; it is also a mode of creative practice supported by a par­tic­ul­ ar deployment of media that includes manga, anime, and games, as well as fan-­ produced works, and the media mix intertexts and paratexts as the tissue that connects them. Platform imperialism threatens the continued existence of the ecosystem of subcultural media by its full-­screen aesthetics, on the one hand, and the domination of channels of dissemination, on the other. Building on ­these concerns, I analyze platforms at three levels—­interface, content generation, and distribution—­focusing on each level of interface as it intersects the prob­lem of content generation. The Gang of Four pose a threat in that they institute too stark a separation of levels, erasing the mediating function of the interface, evacuating the possibility of content generation and fan interaction at this interface, and positioning themselves as the unique distributors of content and as intermediaries between content and consumers. NI CO NI CO V I D EO AN D TH E CON VERG EN CE OF C ONT ENT S A ND PLATFO RM

To better articulate how a dif­fer­ent platform might respond in concrete terms to concerns about the impact of platform imperialism on the continuation of local cultural production, I hone in on Niconico Video, a platform that plays a major role within the subcultural media of anime and games, and increasingly operates as a site from which media mixes emerge. Niconico is characterized by its amenability to the culture of fan production and by its blurring of bound­ aries between the very categories of contents and platforms. Niconico is also fascinating for the ways it sustains both the messiness of the Web—­which is excised from the increasingly app-­based experience of connectivity—­and the communities, cultures, and practices that form around media mix proj­ects, even as it attempts to turn itself into a delivery platform for t­ hese products. Niconico Video is something like the YouTube of Japan, although in terms of sheer number of visitors YouTube ranks as the fifth most visited website in Japan, while Niconico ranks as the eighth.30 Founded in 2007, Niconico claims about eight million visitors per month and has a premium paid subscription base of two million members. It is also possibly the only user-­generated video site whose operating costs are covered by premium users’ subscription fees. ­After transitioning from its initial in­ carnation as a site for uploading unlicensed videos, it became known as a hub for three par­tic­u­lar kinds of user-­generated contents—­virtual idol Hatsune Miku songs and videos made using Vocaloid software, videos made using the C onverging C ontents and P latforms  99

Idolmaster game, and videos using the fan-­produced Toho Proj­ect—­and is known for its close ties to Japan’s anime, manga, and game subcultures.31 In recent years, it has also launched subsections for the website, featuring video on demand (by both subscription and one-­off purchase) and an interface to read novels and comics—­both professional and amateur—­called Niconico Still Images (Niconico Seiga). It has also launched a Niconico Live (Niconico Nama) section where it has broadcast exclusive speeches by politicians during election campaigns, as well as less official, user-­made live broadcasts. Unlike YouTube, Niconico is not only a site where you upload and view user-­generated contents; it also features an interface that operates as a means of transforming such contents, namely the video-­overlay comments function—­ arguably Niconico’s most defining feature.32 As such, Niconico is a unique video-­streaming site: it is a platform that also transforms and even creates contents.33 It allows for contents to be uploaded and shared, but the pro­cess of commenting creates new contents. Dramatic sections of videos are adorned by stars and emoted by series of w’s designating laughter, and hermeneutic interpretation unfolds in the comments. Comments write affective tonality and interpretive gestures into the fabric of the video itself. In brief, the comments are the source of innovation, media connection, and community formation, and the origin of a language shared by users about media that in turns informs media. Sasaki Toshinao, in his popu­lar account of Dwango, writes, “In other words, the comments flowing on screen are not simply ‘add-­ons’ or freebees. The comments and video merge to generate new content. This is a new world where moving image content and social media have converged.”34 Niconico develops the convergence of contents and platforms, where the platform’s affordances—­the comments function—­allow for the transformation of the moving image itself. Perhaps ­because of Dwango’s history as a contents producer for mobile phones—­games and ringtones predominantly—it creates a fascinating hybrid between platform and content, something of a feedback loop between a site for contents circulation and the contents circulated. This stands in stark contrast to platforms like YouTube, where the uploaded videos are by comparison static, unchanged by user interaction, with the platform operating as a transparent interface to the video content. It is in this sense that Niconico operates as both contents producer and a platform. Niconico is not just a platform-­as-­delivery mechanism of content in the Amazon-­ Google-­Apple vein; it is a space of interactive creation where contents are transformed by their pro­cess of distribution. Distribution becomes the site of 100 

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active co-­creation, a node where contents and platforms converge. Of course, this could be the object for a critique of fan l­abor.35 However, I would like to emphasize something e­ lse, offering a redemptive reading of Niconico as a site of potential re­sis­tance to platform imperialism and its transparency of content delivery and display, occurring at the surface level of interface—or intraface. In his useful discussion of interfaces, Alexander Galloway suggests the term intraface, which he defines as “an interface internal to the interface.”36 The intraface offers Galloway something of an intermediary term between transparency and foregrounding as found in debates around po­liti­cal cinema—­a binary ­between erasure of mediation and its disintegration that Galloway usefully seeks to complicate. As an example of the intraface, he points to the image-­ text of World of Warcraft, about which he writes: “It is no longer a question of a ‘win­dow’ interface between this side of the screen and that side . . . ​but an intraface between the heads-­up-­display, the text and icons in the foreground, and the 3d, volumetric, diegetic space of the game itself—on the one side, writing; on the other, image.”37 This internal interface, Galloway continues, indicates the presence of “the social” within the frame.38 Adopting Galloway’s useful formulation of the intraface—­which describes perfectly the text-­video (or writing-­image) environment of Niconico—­I nonetheless shift from an analy­sis of the social (transnational capital, ­etc.) to a social: the very par­tic­u­ lar social and medial externality to Niconico that points, on the one hand to Japan’s net culture, and, on the other, to the connectivity of the media mix. Rather than move from the social to an allegorical reading of a text (World of Warcraft), I instead move from a social to its medial and historical context—­ deuniversalizing the web space in a manner that echoes Michelle Cho’s critique of “the rhe­toric of the idealized, global Internet” in her contribution to this volume. Emphasis must naturally fall on the comments, the communities that emerge around them, and the way t­ hese become part of the tissue of the media mix. This ­will require a focus on the par­tic­ul­ar form of opacity that Niconico both relies on and further develops. ­Here I use the term opacity to contrast the emphasis on transparency and full-­screen aesthetics prevalent in American platforms such as Google, YouTube, and Amazon, for ­either video or text. Shunsuke Nozawa first developed the concept of opacity in relation to the par­tic­u­lar forms of anonymity specific to Japa­nese online bulletin boards, whose culture Niconico inherits. He suggests that “crucial to the structure and experience of Japa­nese virtual communication are acts of opacity: the pre­sen­ta­tion of the self–­in–­disguise.”39 C onverging C ontents and P latforms  101

Daniel Johnson further develops the concept of opacity to refer in par­tic­ u­lar to the illegibility of text in Niconico videos—­what he calls the “non-­ denotational, counter-­ transparent typography of deliberate mistype and production of sprite-­like images in Nicovideo commenting.” 40 To ­these two types of opacity—­anonymity of the author of a post and illegibility of the comments—­I would like to add a further level of opacity: the opacity of the image and the illegibility of the distributed content itself. Moving from the  po­liti­cal modernist dualism of transparency-­foregrounding (a dualism that hinges on the distinction between hiding versus showing the apparatus of production) to nontransparency and opacity allows us to sidestep the eitheror logic of ideology critique and unveiling that is embedded in ­these terms, a logic that is of limited use for thinking about the par­tic­ul­ar consequences of the opacity of Niconico. A ­ fter all, Niconico’s opacity is not about deconstructing commercial media and the media mix, but rather about ­doing the media mix differently. This puts it squarely in line with the aesthetics and unruly politics of Japan’s Net culture. Situating the form of nontransparency of Niconico’s intraface requires some attention to the local culture of the Japa­nese Internet, as both Nozawa and Johnson suggest. Specifically, we must note the platform’s ties to Japan’s infamous 2 Channeru (2ch​.­net), known as 2ch or nichan. A ­simple bulletin-­ board site launched in 1999 by Nishimura Hiroyuki, 2ch quickly became one of the most significant and sometimes scandalous sites in the Japa­nese Net. It was and continues to be anonymous and completely text-­based, with threads limited to a thousand posts. Its imageboard imitator Futaba Channeru (Double Leaf Channel; 2chan​.­net) is in turn the model for the infamous English-­language site 4chan, from whose anonymous threads the hacker collective Anonymous takes its name. Like the boards of 4chan, which anthropologist Gabriella Coleman describes as being “unique for its culture of extreme permissibility,” 2ch developed its own language (or linguistic détournements) and aroused much controversy.41 In par­tic­u­lar, 2ch became known as a hub for the Net-­Right (netto uyoku), or right-­wing expression on the Internet. While it is impossible to ignore the disconcerting rightward swing of Japa­nese politics over the last decade—­and 2ch and Niconico bear some ­responsibility for this shift—­perceptive analyses of the Net-­Right phenomenon have sought to lend complexity to the sometimes kneejerk condemnations by the mainstream press and the Left. The media theorist Kitada Akihiro has offered a nuanced analy­sis of 2ch that emphasizes its communicative dimension or “connective rationality” in 102 

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par­tic­u­lar. Kitada writes, “The most typical communication style on 2ch is trading snarky commentary on specific kinds of source material. The communication is intimate but harsh; the harshness is itself a kind of intimacy.” 42 Kitada continues, “From a so­cio­log­i­cal point of view, 2ch marks a departure from an instrumental rationality that supports the existing social order. Instead, it is a social space that produces an extreme form of connective rationality that supports ongoing communicative actions and reactions that maintain the community.” 43 Kitada proposes that the Net-­Right’s communicative utterances be seen in part as a cynical reaction to the mainstream mass media (whose literal-­minded condemnations of 2ch provide fuel for their fire), which involves simply saying what should not be said, and in part as a function of the first order of communication according to Niklas Luhmann: keeping communication ­going (­under which princi­ple Net-­Right speech functions as an effective means of provoking further communication, much in the same way trolls instigate flame wars and enjoy the communicative burn).44 Kitada hence situates 2ch within the emergence of the kind of expression in which communication is more impor­tant than content, “where media content is a servant to the maintenance of this par­tic­u­lar form of communication.” 45 I linger on 2ch in part b­ ecause its founder and iconic figure, Nishimura, was a board member of Niconico’s parent com­pany, Nwango (a subsidiary of Dwango), and influential in the development of Niconico. Nishimura was somewhat responsible for the initial popularity of the site, as 2ch inhabitants flowed over to Niconico Video on his recommendation. If Nishimura’s recommendation initially pushed 2chanellers to the site, the stickiness of Niconico can be explained by its similarities to the quasi-­live feel of 2ch. The creators of Niconico—­a small group of programmers, along with Kawakami and Nishimura—­took the jikkyō (live coverage) bulletin board on 2ch as a model. The live-­coverage board is a place where users congregate and exchange live commentary on par­tic­u­lar tele­vi­sion programs airing at that time. Using this as a model, Niconico programmers deci­ded that commentary should scroll on top of the image. Following 2ch, Niconico limited the number of individual comments to one thousand.46 Unlike 2ch comments, Niconico comments are not “live” or in real time. Instead, Niconico deploys what Hamano Satoshi and o­ thers have dubbed “pseudo-­simultaneity,” where the position of a given comment on the timecode of a video remains constant.47 (For instance, a comment I make at the 3:05 timecode mark w ­ ill be replayed ­there for anyone who subsequently watches the video, u­ ntil the thousand-­ comment limit is reached and new comments cycle in to replace mine.) C onverging C ontents and P latforms  103

Comments are seemingly simultaneous in relation to the par­tic­ul­ar moment of viewing the time-­shiftable, replayable video. This allows conversations to develop across time but around a par­tic­u­lar timecode mark, and provides incentives for commentators to revisit videos: to see what other ­people have said in the meantime; to see if their comment remains; and perhaps to leave another comment. In keeping with the structure of 2ch, the comments are anonymous, and the site operates through pseudonyms. Niconico’s initial affinity with 2ch and proximity to the 2ch community has endured, even as the user base for Niconico has expanded; the platform is characterized by par­tic­u­lar forms of vocabulary, idioms that emerge and are replaced over time, and by shared cultural codes that are used in video comments. Unlike the tone of 2ch (or 4chan), Niconico’s tone is not uniformly snarky or cynical. Indeed, users are often very encouraging to video uploaders, especially inexperienced ones. The limits to hospitality can be found in videos about politics, especially videos sympathetic to or defending resident Koreans in Japan, where the Net-­Right’s litany of insults returns in full fury—­giving it a reputation for being at times (and on certain topics) a racist or troll-­heavy platform not too far removed from 2ch. Yet sometimes despite and sometimes ­because of its very unpredictability and rudeness, Niconico pres­ents a site of creation, response, and re-creation that harnesses, on the one hand, the unruliness of Net culture coming from 2ch and, on the other hand, the culture of creation and re-creation that has emerged from the famous physical site for the exchange of so-­called secondary production of manga, anime, and game culture: the Comic Market. To t­hese 2ch’s comments culture and the culture of fan creativity around the Comic Market, Niconico Video brings legally streamed official content, from anime shows to tv dramas to po­liti­cal speeches, all of which are fodder for further comments. Niconico offers itself as a prime candidate to examine the potential effects of a site that literally flaunts mediation on its nontransparent, opaque intraface. Nontransparency as I use it designates the addition of ele­ments to the image, rather than an unveiling of ele­ments within the image. The non-­is a transformative addition, an additive opacity rather than a revelatory subtraction. And what is added, of course, is in part the community of commentators and the affective tone of comments. Niconico as a platform creates (or, more modestly, modifies) contents as it hosts them, and it sustains a community of commentators who participate in the co-­creation of its videos. As such, it offers itself as one answer to the question central to engaging with the f­uture of platform-­delivered media: 104 

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what kind of ecosystems does the media mix require in order to persist? Assuming walled gardens are the way of the ­future, what configurations of ­these platform ecosystems would lend themselves to the cycle of official media to informal media at the heart of the media mix? As media production increasingly becomes mediated by concentrated, paid-­for platforms, how can the provider of online video—­and, increasingly, manga, novels, and games—­ also help foster the media mix? This is a question, then, about how a platform could be more than a site of distribution, a quasi-­transparent point of access to what—in a variation of Gilles Deleuze’s formulation—we might call “any-­content-­whatever.” 48 Niconico highlights the potential of having a platform that develops a concern for smaller, regional, subcultural contents networks whose preservation depends on their filiation with appropriate platforms ecosystems.49 Niconico develops an ecosystem of fan-­based production that can more porously evolve into new forms of the media mix. The media mix operates through a series of mediations, encounters with contents, as well as transformations of t­ hese contents, ­whether this be novel, film, anime episode, magazine special issue, online game, and so on. Insofar as Niconico and its community of contributors and commentators are structured around the continual engagement and modification of media objects, Niconico pres­ents itself as a platform optimized for the continuation and evolution of the media mix. The more open architecture of Niconico reflects the active model of fandom at the core of the subcultural media of anime, manga, and games in Japan. Moreover, the smaller scale of the community also brings to the site the sense of common participation in the distribution, mediation, and interpretation of cultural forms called contents. Niconico as a platform operates as a form of marked mediation (through on-­ video comments) that permits further creation. A crystallization of Niconico’s function as media mix generator is evident in the recent phenomenon of the Kagerou Proj­ect. KAGE R O U PR O J E­ CT: P LATF ORM-­B ASED MEDIA M I X

The Kagerou Proj­ect initially debuted as a series of songs uploaded to Niconico. The songs w ­ ere created by the previously unknown producer Jin, who used Vocaloid software (sometimes using Hatsune Miku, sometimes other software) to make songs that each tell part of a larger narrative. Jin wrote the songs, and his visual collaborators Shidu and ­later Wan’nyan-­pū created the visuals and character design in a series of informal collaborations that would C onverging C ontents and P latforms  105

become central to the development of the Kagerou Proj­ect. The songs themselves act as micronarratives, and Jin ­later wrote a series of light novels, illustrated by Shidu, using the songs as the basis for an expanded narrative. This expanded narrative eventually served as the basis for both the manga and the anime series, all of which draw on the world created in the songs and novels.50 The use of a song cycle to unfold a larger narrative was relatively unique (albeit not unpre­ce­dented), and the increasingly popu­lar songs quickly evolved into a media mix that included light novels, manga, and an anime series, all of which Jin was closely involved in as author or producer. The Kagerou Proj­ect itself became the basis for official and unofficial secondary fan works, published by the Kadokawa imprints Media Factory and Enterbrain. Jin created the songs and wrote the novels (published by Enterbrain), and is credited with the original work for the comics and the anime. The anime series—­titled Mekakucity Actors (2014)—­was produced by the noted arty animation production unit Shaft and overseen by Shinbo Akiyuki. Known collectively as the Kagerou Proj­ect, this is one example of a media mix that develops across media, but where most points of the mix are accessible from within the Niconico platform. In short, the Kagerou Proj­ect represents a new model of the media mix that emerges out of Niconico-­mediated, user-­generated content, which is then harnessed and developed by Kadokawa and Dwango. It is the prototypical form of a media mix that starts in informal networks fostered by the Niconico site and expands into a formalized media mix whose constituent parts are also accessible (some b­ ehind paywalls, ­others not) on the site. We can watch the original videos, pay to watch the anime, read the comics, and even read the novels—­all without leaving Niconico. And ­here we begin to see the endgame of Niconico as a platform: it has moved from being a site that predominantly hosts videos to one that also hosts its own manga and novel bookstores and offers an e-­reader on which to read them. In line with the comment culture of the video, Niconico Still Images adopts the same interface as Niconico Video. Comments stream across the manga or novel page as one reads, allowing viewers and viewing-­commenting habits, dispositions, interpretive dialogues, and emotive responses to migrate from one part of the site to another. In keeping with the main feature of the site—­over-­image comments—­books and manga can be read both for the existing content and for the social content of the comments. This is social reading, mediated by an interface that encourages the smooth passage from ­free video, to paid anime streaming, to paid manga reading, back to ­free amateur manga. 106 

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4.1  ​Screenshot from the Kagerou Daze video Niconico Dōga.

Jin and the Kagerou Proj­ect offer something of a roadmap to how Kadokawa and Dwango presumably seek to synergistically operate to harvest content and unfold media mixes across their vari­ous properties, from video to books to manga to anime—­and a clue to the practical side of their touted contents-­platform alliance. Perhaps the press releases around the merger of Kadokawa and Dwango hint at a greater truth: that Niconico is involved in the creation of both contents and the platform, a hybrid contents-­platform that enables the creation and transformation of content.51 This alliance also suggests that the tissue of interface that Niconico-­as-­platform provides is congruent with the tissue of relations that make up the media mix ecol­ogy. If media mixes work in part through the mediating and connecting function of the character, Niconico raises the prospect of a media mix working through the connecting function of the comments themselves. The site of surface mediation—­the intraface—­becomes the place from which communities are built and media mixes develop. As with all communities, t­ hese communities are by no means unambiguously good. Indeed, while Niconico is to some extent an oppositional force to the global platform imperialism of the Gang of Four, it is also very much an attempt to secure market share within a still predominantly domestic Japa­nese media sphere, where it is touted as a “platform for the rising sun.” C onverging C ontents and P latforms  107

4.2  ​Screenshot from first pages of the Kagerou Daze novel Niconico Seiga.

Still, Niconico serves as a useful model for a counterplatform, in that it functions as a platform whose emphasis falls on the transformation of content through visual and semantic commentary, and on the creation of a nontransparent intraface that actively promotes the development of medial and social relations around video and text. The tissue of relations between ele­ments of the media mix and between interpretive communities of all kinds is precisely what the platform superpowers efface. For this reason alone, Niconico stands as a useful example of what a counterplatform can do. > NOTE S  ​ 1

2

3

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“Dwango wa ōhaba zōshū zōeki, Kadokawa wa akagi” [Dwango expands income and profit, Kadokawa is in the red], IT Media News, November 13, 2014, http://­ www​.­itmedia​.­co​.j­ p​/­news​/­articles​/­1411​/­13​/­news136​.­html. “Kadokawa​-­Dowango keiei tōgō” [The Kadokawa-­Dwango Merger], Huffington Post, May  14, 2014, http://­www​.­huffingtonpost​.j­ p​/­2014​/­05​/­14​/­kadokawa​-­dwango​ -­kawakami​_n­ ​_­5321576​.­html. My thoughts on this merger are influenced by Ōtsuka Eiji’s early critique of it, also framed in terms of the platform. Ōtsuka polemically suggests that despite their statements to the contrary, both Kadokawa and Dwango ­were platform or “infrastructure” companies, not content companies. See Ōtsuka, “Kigyō ni kanri sareru saiteki na posutomodan no tame no essei” (An Essay for the Postmodern

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Optimization of Control by Companies), http://­sai​-­zen​-­sen​.­jp​/­editors​/­blog​ /­sekaizatsuwa​/­otsuka​-­%20essay​.­html, republished as the introduction to Ōtsuka Eiji, Media mix ka suru nihon (The media mix-­ization of Japan) (Tokyo: East Shinsho, 2014), 14–38. 4 I advance this argument in more detail in Marc Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 5 Dal Yong Jin, “The Construction of Platform Imperialism in the Globalization Era,” tripleC 11, no. 1 (2013). 6 With counterplatform I invoke Peter Wollen’s propositions on countercinema and Alexander Galloway’s subsequent formulation of countergaming. The argument against transparency in both pieces informs my development of the counterplatform h­ ere, but my emphasis on the nontransparency or opacity of the interface differs from their emphasis on foregrounding as the conceptual opposite of transparency. The argument in brief is that the counterplatform does not operate in the modernist mode of foregrounding the apparatus, but rather internalizes the messiness of comment culture on the Web within the visual function of new distribution platforms. In its opposition to a dominant paradigm of transparent distribution, the transformative distribution developed by Niconico arguably makes it a model of a counterplatform. Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter-­Cinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 120–29; Alexander R. Galloway, “Countergaming,” in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, by Alexander R. Galloway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 107–26. 7 On Cool Japan, see Kukhee Choo, “Nationalization ‘Cool’: Japan’s Government’s Global Policy t­ owards the Content Industry,” in Popu­lar Culture and the State in East and Southeast Asia, ed. Nissim Otmazgin and Eyal Ben-­Ari (London: Routledge, 2011), 83–103. 8 This is expressed most explic­itly in the oft-­quoted opening pages of Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young and ­Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 9 Paul Frosh, The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry (London: Berg, 2003), 196. 10 This speech is often cited as the origin of the phrase, though in fact it appears to have entered into circulation earlier. Bill Gates, “Content Is King,” Internet Archive, January 3, 1997, http://­web​.a­ rchive​.­org​/­web​/­20010126005200​/­http://­www​ .­microsoft​.c­ om​/­billgates​/­columns​/­1996essay​/­essay960103​.­asp. 11 Fujitsu appears to have been the first com­pany in Japan to use the term with some regularity as of 1993, and in 1995 Fujitsu’s ceo declared contents to be the “term of the year,” in an interview with a tech columnist. “Kīwādo de kiku 1995 jōhō tsūshin sangyō” [The information and communications industry in 1995: Asking by keyword], Nikkei sangyō shinbun, January 1, 1995, 6.

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12

See the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s description of the Cool Japan Fund, http://­www​.­meti​.­go​.­jp​/­policy​/­mono​_­info​_­service​/­mono​/­creative​/­file​ /­1406CoolJapanInitiative​.­pdf. 13 Fred Vogelstein’s popu­lar account of the b ­ attle between Android and ios offers a useful account of this competition, focusing on their smartphone divisions. Fred Vogelstein, Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). For popu­lar accounts of the platform strategies of Apple and Amazon, see Walter Isaac­son, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011); and Brad Stone, The Every­thing Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: ­Little, Brown, 2013). 14 This is also the subject of academic study, such as Jennifer Holt and Kevin Sanson, eds., Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming and Sharing Media in the Digital Era (New York: Routledge, 2014). 15 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 2, emphasis added. 16 Marc Andreessen, “The Three Kinds of Platforms You Meet on the Internet,” Internet Archive, September 16, 2007, http://­web​.­archive​.­org​/­web​/­20071018161644​ /­http://­blog​.­pmarca​.­com​/­2007​/­09​/­the​-­three​-­kinds​.­html. 17 Marc Andreessen, “The Three Kinds of Platforms You Meet on the Internet,” Internet Archive, September 16, 2007, http://­web​.­archive​.­org​/­web​/­20071018161644​ /­http://­blog​.­pmarca​.­com​/­2007​/­09​/­the​-­three​-­kinds​.­html, emphasis in original. 18 Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, “Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned ­Answers,” paper presented at the Digital Arts and Culture 2009 conference, December 12–15, 2009, Irvine, California, http://­www​.b­ ogost​.­com​/­downloads​/­bogost​ _­montfort​_­dac​_­2009​.­pdf. See also Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2009), 2. 19 Tarleton Gillespie, “The Politics of ‘Platforms,’ ” New Media and Society 12, no. 3 (2010): 351. 20 Ian Condry, The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 58. 21 Condry, The Soul of Anime, 57, 113. 22 Kadokawa Tsuguhiko, Google, Apple ni makenai chōsakuken [Copyright Laws that ­can’t be defeated by Google and Apple) (Tokyo: E-­pub shinsho, 2013), 37. 23 Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works (New York: G ­ rand Central, 2014), 78–79. Both Kadokawa’s and Schmidt and Rosenberg’s definitions are indebted to theories of the platform developed within the fields of management studies and microeconomics, namely the multisided market or “platform-­ as-­intermediary” analyses by Japa­nese, French, and U.S. academics. Prominent works in this vein include Jean-­Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole, “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets,” Journal of the Eu­ro­pean Economic ­Association 1, no.  4 ( June  2003): 990–1029; David  S. Evans, Andrei Hagiu, and Richard Schmalensee, Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006); Thomas R. Eisenmann, 110 

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Geoffrey Parker, and Marshall W. Van Alstyne, “Strategies for Two-­Sided Markets,” Harvard Business Review (October 2006): 92–101; and Negoro Tatsuyuki and Ajiro Satoshi, “An Outlook of Platform Theory Research in Business Studies,” Waseda Business and Economic Studies, no. 48 (2012): 1–29. 24 While I cannot address this longer history h ­ ere, I refer the reader to Natsuno Takeshi’s account of i-mode. Natsuno Takeshi, The i-­Mode Wireless Ecosystem, trans. Ruth South McCreery (London: Wiley, 2005). 25 A strong statement of this thesis is found in Fredric Jameson, “Notes on ­Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 54–77. 26 Tarleton Gillespie reminds us that while copyright may be protected by hardware and software specifications, it is also always reliant on ­legal strictures that enforce it. Tarleton Gillespie, Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2007). 27 Approximately 84 ­percent of smartphones shipped globally in the third quarter of 2014 w ­ ere Android phones, and 63 ­percent of t­ hese include the Google store and ser­vices installed. “Google Reaches Détente with Third-­Party Android Firms,” Globe and Mail, November 3, 2014, B7. 28 “Top Sites in Japan,” Alexa, accessed January  7, 2015, http://­www​.­alexa​.­com​ /­topsites​/­countries​/­JP. See “App Annie Index, Market Q3 2014,” App Annie, http://­go​.a­ ppannie​.c­ om​/­app​-­annie​-­index​-­market​-­q3​-­2014​/­. 29 Dal Yong Jin, “The Construction of Platform Imperialism in the Globalization Era,” tripleC 11, no. 1 (2013): 154. Jin elaborates the concept further in his monograph, Digital Platforms, Imperialism, and Po­liti­cal Culture (New York: Routledge, 2015). 30 “Top Sites in Japan,” Alexa, accessed January  7, 2015, http://­www​.­alexa​.­com​ /­topsites​/c­ ountries​/­JP. 31 Sasaki Toshinao provides a very useful account of the development of Niconico, in Niconico dōga ga mirai wo tsukuru: Dwango monogatari [Niconico Video is creating the ­future: The Dwango story] (Tokyo: Ascii Media Works, 2009). 32 Daniel Johnson offers a rich consideration of the comments function, in “Polyphonic/Pseudo-­synchronic: Animated Writing in the Comment Feed of Nicovideo,” Japan Studies 33, no. 3 (December 2013): 297–313. 33 Describing it as unique may be a misnomer at this point; Chinese websites AcFun and Bilibili have deployed the comments function and in the case of Bilibili the very interface of Niconico. The very peculiarity of the Niconico interface is thus in the pro­cess of being generalized into a new form of viewing experience. See Jinying Li, “The Interface Affect of a Contact Zone: Danmanku on Video-­Streaming Platforms,” Asiascape: Digital Asia 4:3 (Summer 2017). 34 Sasaki, Niconico dōga ga mirai wo tsukuru, 272. 35 Of the massive lit­er­a­ture on the topic, I note Mark Andrejevic’s useful overview and expansion of the argument to include data mining. Mark Andrejevic, C onverging C ontents and P latforms  111

“­ Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of User-­Generated L ­ abour,” in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), 406–23. Perhaps of more immediate import is the overlap between communities of commentators and the so-­called neets (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) who make up a large portion of Japan’s netizens. 36 Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 40. 37 Galloway, The Interface Effect, 42. 38 Galloway, The Interface Effect, 42. 39 Shunsuke Nozawa, “The Gross Face and Virtual Fame: Semiotic Mediation in Japa­nese Virtual Communication,” First Monday 17, no. 5 (March 5, 2012), http://­ firstmonday​.­org​/­ojs​/­index​.­php​/­fm​/­article​/­view​/­3535​/­3168. 40 Daniel Johnson, “Polyphonic/Pseudo-­synchronic,” 309. 41 Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistle­blower, Spy: The Many ­Faces of Anonymous (London: Verso, 2014), 41. 42 Kitada Akihiro, “Japan’s Cynical Nationalism,” in Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World, ed. Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Izumi Tsuji (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 70. 43 Kitada, “Japan’s Cynical Nationalism,” 77. 44 Niklas Luhmann, “What Is Communication?,” Communication Theory 2 (1992): 251–59. 45 Kitada, “Japan’s Cynical Nationalism,” 80. The figuration of the Web as a space of communication for communication’s sake is shared by Kitada’s colleague Azuma Hiroki, one of the most prominent media theorists of the 2000s, as well as by Jodi Dean. See Azuma Hiroki,  Gēmu-­teki riarizumu no tanjō: Dōbutsukasuru posutomodan 2 [The birth of gameic realism: The animalizing postmodern 2] (Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 2007), 143–52; and Jodi Dean, Blog Theory (London: Polity, 2010), 102. 46 The account of Niconico’s development ­here is based on Sasaki, Niconico dōga ga mirai wo tsukuru, 234–69. 47 Hamano Satoshi, Ākitekucha no seitaikei: Jō kankyo wa ikani sekkei sarete kita ka [Ecosystems of architecture: How do information environments come to be planned?] (Tokyo: ntt Shuppan, 2008). Sasaki also uses the term in Niconico dōga ga mirai wo tsukuru, 259. 48 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 5. 49 By regional I refer to the communities of participation; while Japan is the principal place from which the site is accessed, the site also offers Taiwan and the United States as other regions through which to access the site. It is also increasingly making inroads into Eu­rope where communities of fandom around anime-­manga-­games from Japan are particularly strong. The region ­here is defined by affective communities of fandom rather than by geography per se. For an extended consideration of the intersection of the media mix and regionalism, 112 

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see Thomas Lamarre, “Regional tv: Affective Media Geographies,” Asiascape 2 (2015): 93–126. 50 For an analy­sis of the Kagerou Proj­ect from the perspective of the Vocaloid phenomenon, see Shiba Toshinari, Hatsune Miku wa naze sekia wo kaetanoka? [Why did Hatsune Miku change the world?] (Tokyo: Ota Shuppan, 2014), 218–25. 51 Kawakami Nobuo himself developed the term contents-­platform, or platform for contents, which he applied to all video-­hosting sites. I convert it h­ ere to the par­ tic­u­lar sense of a hybrid platform that combines both contents creation and hosting, in the par­tic­ul­ar context of Niconico. See Kawakami Nobuo, Suzuki-­san ni mo wakaru netto no mirai [The f­ uture of the Net that even Mr. Suzuki can understand] (Tokyo: Iwakanami, 2015).

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IN ACCESS D I G I TA L V I D E O A N D T H E U S E R

Nishant Shah

July 2014 was a month of bad press for the mobile phone in India. Shakuntala Shetty, heading the Karnataka Legislature Committee for W ­ omen and Child Development, announced that mobile phones ­were “responsible for rapes” and tabled a report before the state assembly, recommending a ban on access to mobile phones in schools and colleges across the state. Shetty argued that mobile phones are used to “lure girls to remote places where they are raped.”1 The report suggests that access to the mobile phone makes accessible to criminals ­those who are vulnerable and whom they might prey upon. Completely un­ related to Shetty in po­liti­cal affiliation or area of governance, Binay Bihari, the minister of art, culture, and youth affairs in Bihar, announced to the reporters outside the state assembly that mobile phones (and also nonvegetarian food) ­were responsible for a surge in rapes in India, and he demanded that youths’ access to mobile phones be controlled.2 He narrated a personal anecdote—he found two young students accessing “blue films” on their mobile phones at a school he visited—­and warned that a quick check of young ­people’s chat histories would reveal the exchange of “dirty smses.” He announced that he planned to recommend that the Education Department impose a ban on all access to mobile phones in schools and colleges, and conduct surprise inspections of student phones. Equating the mobile phone with guns, he said that

giving the students mobile phones was like “issuing license for a revolver to individuals in the name of self-­defence, but misused for criminal purposes”—­a comment that has since gone viral. While both incidents invited derision on social media, strong critique from intellectual circles, and even censure from the country’s po­liti­cal leaders, they embodied a par­tic­ul­ ar obsession with “Access to Technology” (a2t) that has marked the growth of digital information and communication technologies (icts) in India. Across the spectrum, in emerging information socie­ties like India, access has been fetishized as the aspired-to end of all technological infrastructure and also as the point of danger that allows for criminal and pathologized practices to proliferate in the underbelly of the connected Web. Access to technology remains embedded in ICT4D portfolios, which concentrate on building ubiquitous access infrastructure. It persists in communication concepts, like “the last mile,” that focus on creating pervasive technology applications.3 It remains central in governance practices that recognize lack of access to digital technologies as an axis of discrimination. Within academic scholarship and discourse, access becomes the central motif of mapping production, circulation, distribution, reception, and meaning making in the digital world. Access carries a double bind of anxiety. It first generates anxiety about the need to grant access, then triggers concern about the control and regulation of practices that emerge once access has been established. Access-­centered discourse reduces the gamut of human-­technology relationships to usage, adoption, penetration, and patterns which can be recognized in the development of matrices and structures around ict growth. The realm of Internet and digital governance in India is therefore highly conflicted: on the one hand is a huge emphasis on getting the entire country connected, and on the other is a continued demand to censor activities, ban access, and control the proliferation of gadgets.4 As is evident in Shetty’s and Bihari’s declarations, youth are often celebrated as making “India Shine” with their participation in the digital world, yet they are si­mul­ta­neously viewed as dangerous to the country and to themselves.5 This paradox is particularly vis­i­ble in the fields of digital cultural production. The celebratory nature of user-­generated production, of new movements of participatory cultural pro­cesses, of peer-­to-­peer sharing and distribution, and of remixed and reused genres that mark the social and cultural digital Web have foregrounded the potentials and promises of the digital turn.6 At the same time, ­there is growing concern that the off-­the-­shelf nature of digital I n A ccess  115

tools that do not require the kind of precision or training that older technologies of cultural production required, coupled with the ahistorical flattening of content and form online, w ­ ill lead to a decline of quality, to be replaced by quantity in the age of information overload.7 Similarly, in the areas of activism and outreach, access to the digital remains a primary concern, with massive investment being made to enable civil-­society nongovernmental organ­izations and collectives with digital literacy for change. Yet many lament that digitally mediated activism—­dismissed as hacktivism, clicktivism, or even armchair activism—­lacks the aesthetic and po­liti­cal promises of older forms of media, producing only short-­term tactics as opposed to long-­term strategies. So unfathomable and irresolvable does this paradox appear that analyses eventually take the predictable route of concentrating on access, adoption, circulation, usage, and penetration—­quantifiable and enumerated points that shy away from the messier questions of textual per­for­mance, form, affect, and desire which mark the libidinal surplus of digital cultural production and are not factored into access-­centered conversations around digital technologies.8 In this essay, I focus on digital-­video-­culture practices in India as representative of the conflicts and paradoxes that abound in digital cultures in emerging information socie­ties. Coupling access with infrastructure offers a better set of questions to ask about the text and nature of the digital object. I look at two case studies to assess how the complication of access can further arguments around subjectivity and agency as embedded in popu­lar visual digital cultures. Through this, I propose that instead of concentrating on access, we start looking at the “conditions of access” which allow for a better understanding of the logics, logistics, and mechanics of digital video cultures. Instead of thinking of digital video through the expected approaches of form, formats, functions, and consumption, we need to locate it at intersections of governance, aesthetic, and everyday cultural practice to understand how it shapes the “user” and his or her “access” in our information and data socie­ties. ACCE S S A ND I N F RASTRU CTU RE

One of the biggest lacunae in cultural theory around digital objects is that questions of infrastructure are often sidestepped. It is not in the scope of this essay to list the complex, complicated, and often convoluted aspects of infrastructure, which include hardware, software, wetware, policy, regulatory apparatus, and the larger nexus of production and ­labor that is at the heart of neoliberal globalization. However, drawing from the discourse around the 116 

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so-­called ict revolution, I show how we need to understand ­these other­wise trendy words like access as rooted in and catalyzed by massive movements ­toward infrastructure building. This allows a conceptual distinction between access as an action and access as a condition. Emphasis is largely placed on the moment of access, the point of access, and the actions generated once access has been successfully achieved—on access as a verb, which finds its fruition in the bridging of the last mile, the connectivity to the underserved, and the production of the connected subject. The primacy of access as action makes the infrastructure, which is the condition of access, invisible. Infrastructure is treated as neutral material or as a set of static objects upon which the po­liti­ cal scaffolding of a2t can be mounted. Infrastructure becomes a noun, and its generative actions as it informs material choices, design protocols, interface designs, and the potentials and limitations of what can and cannot be seen generally get put on the back burner. Consequently, questions of access become centered around the human-­technology interaction and interface, often ­shaped by repre­sen­ta­tional politics of inclusion and presence, but not always paying attention to the larger systems of control and regulation that are implicitly pres­ent in infrastructure building. Thinking of infrastructure as “the conditions of access” allows us to look at the other actions—­planning, design, regulation, distribution, and circulation—­that are a part of the conditions of access but do not find immediate visibility or presence in the a2t discourse. Especially in the digital world, where we are still not sure what software ­really is, most of our accessed real­ity is only a way of disguising the connectivity infrastructure that supports it. The decisions of control and containment which are critiqued at the point of access remain located in speech, content, and repre­sen­ta­tion. However, the conditions of access, which are about the basic structures and infrastructures of the digital, are not easily accommodated in the narratives. When context is invoked, it is generally granted to the ­human subject in question, but the technologies remain uninflected by the historicity and policy of technogovernance. The conditions of access, however, foreground the technological context of infrastructure, which receives much attention in the design and building environments discourse, but does not necessarily enter the digital cultures space. Further, given the accelerated rate of innovation and development in technology applications, code, and architecture, it is difficult to think of the technological apparatus as constituting a finite system that can be easily defined and studied. Indeed, the speed and pace that the digital brings is not just about ­human communication but about a new temporality. The time lag between the promise of a potential, its I n A ccess  117

realization, and its replacement by something new is so small that being out of control is almost a defining characteristic of the digital, rather than an exception to the rule. Drawing selectively from the rich lit­er­a­ture that exists in the field of icts, I examine how intersections between questions of infrastructure and logistics (the conditions of access) and concerns of connectivity, usage, and adoption (the point of access) might open our frameworks for understanding the digital within cultural and social sciences. For example, in the Indian national government’s Tenth Five-­Year Plan, access was the primary focus in building India as a smart (­Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsible, and Transparent) state.9 In the same period, 2002–2007, the government sought to strictly control access to technology via the Information Technologies Act, which was intended to manage the burgeoning and alarming world of digital cultures practice, which challenged existing information and broadcast publics in India. Erwin Alampay suggests that the centrality given to access to information in systems of governance is among the most dramatic characteristics of our times.10 Alampay argues that as we increasingly work ­toward creating access, we produce a condition called “quantiphilia”—­a narrow focus on the quantity and infrastructure of access, rather than on the quality and conditions of access. The overemphasis on infrastructure, Alampay notes, reduces the rich world of the visual, the affective, and the experienced to mere data, which needs to be managed and governed. This has dire consequences in the realm of cultural production and creative industries, where the concentration on access si­mul­ta­neously explodes and implodes the visual and the cultural artifact—on the one hand, ­there is an unpre­ce­dented amount of visual production online, and on the other hand, the visual becomes flattened and abstracted from its historical and po­liti­cal contexts. Richard Ling presses the question, suggesting that the focus within digital technology studies has been so singularly on questions of adoption, integration, and circulation that we have failed to develop temporal frameworks for the life and meaning of the cultural object.11 Drawing from James Beniger’s ideas in The Control Revolution, Ling suggests that instead of emphasizing the frameworks that mea­sure and quantify the proliferation and promulgation of the cultural product, we must start “radically investigating what it means to live with technologies.”12 The idea of living with access helps illuminate access as not merely the first-­point encounter, but as a complex pro­cess that brings into focus the universe of governance and control that often hides beneath the seductive virality of the digital visual. 118 

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Larissa Hjorth, Jean Burgess, and Ingrid Richardson argue compellingly that the emphasis on access, especially within the world of mobile and located media, has reduced the depth and the influence of the image and the visual.13 The sociality that was once a part of the visual has been extracted and relegated to the realm of data mining and data governance, thus flattening and reducing the image to an empty signifier that gets replaced and reified into gadgets of opaque fetishization like the iPhone. Th ­ ese insights are echoed in the work initiated by Dan Sheng, Jean-­Francois Doulet, and Michael A. Keane, which looks at urban dwellers in China and how they integrate mobility into their everyday lives with the help of icts.14 In par­tic­u­lar, they focus on how access to information provides p­ eople with new spatial strategies that allow them to become more mobile. However, “since the new mobilities produce and develop extensive and far-­flung social connection,” it becomes necessary to reinvestigate the visual and the digital image to see “the topologies of sociality and the pattern of weak ties that generate ‘small worlds’ amongst t­ hose apparently unconnected.”15 Such calls to critically examine the idea of access and the condition of access with the digital video are few and far between. From mainstream movie industries to user-­generated content on video-­sharing sites like YouTube, access remains the primary concern, bolstered both by state initiatives to encourage participatory cultures of production as well as by the “Open Every­thing” movements that seek to grant more public-­domain licensing to proprietary and closed infrastructure and content. In fact, so central is access to ­these interactions of the digital and the ­human, the visual and the social, that it changes the very conceptualization of the body politic: formerly passive audiences are re­imagined as active users with a legitimate interest in cultural production. From this point of view, access needs to be “granted,” thus opening up a range of questions about who might be deemed worthy and how their access privileges might be revoked ­were they to act against the logic of ­those who control access infrastructure and regulation. Access also becomes a mea­sure of itself—­digital access is considered an end in its own right, which distracts from the technosocial conditions of access and emerging relationships that are often marked by pathology, control, and censorship. Thus, coupling access with infrastructure as conditions of access and focusing on dif­fer­ent kinds of digital infrastructure, ranging from hardware and logistics to policy and regulation, offer a g­ reat entry point into dislocating the concentration on access that is so prevalent in media, communication, and development studies, as they look at digital cultural production in general and I n A ccess  119

digital video in par­tic­u­lar. The quantiphilia of access resurfaces most noticeably in the study of digital video, as the replicable, viral, remixed, reused, and re-­everything nature of digital video defies older conceptions of visual and the video. For example, it would be difficult to apply older notions of text, context, production, and consumption to the Harlem Shake global viral video meme. When we talk of Harlem Shake videos, where is the origin? Do we refer to the one original video or the thousands of mimic videos that have emerged? How do we account for response videos? Given the exhaustive generation of videos bearing the same name, how do we ever say anything about one video that ­will also hold across the o­ thers, many of which we might not even be able to see? When faced with such tough questions in studying digital video, scholars default to the framework of access—­how many views a video has, what routes it took to travel across the global Web, how many times it was accessed, and how it allows access to the mysterious networks that work their won­ders to perform. D E LHI PUBLI C SCH OOL MMS: ACCESS AN D AG ENC Y

Among the most controversial digital-­video events that more or less inaugurated the public discourse around online cultural productions in India is what is known as the dps mms (Delhi Public School multimedia messaging ser­vice) case. A short, grainy, low-­resolution clip that showed two students, allegedly studying at the Delhi Public School in New Delhi, went viral in 2004. The ­incident involved a pornographic clip, shot by the male student using his camera-­enabled phone, showing the female student, whose face was vis­i­ble, performing fellatio while he moaned and encouraged her; the male student leaked the video a­ fter he was dumped. The clip originally was distributed among the closed networks in the school, then through the friend-­of-­a-­friend logic of the social web, it went viral on the Internet. It was arguably one of the first instances of user-­generated pornography in India, and it established a genre that continues to proliferate on websites that specialize in par­tic­ul­ar formats like Hidden Cam, Spy Cam, Point of View, and other amateur pornography conventions that mark the landscape of digital cultural production in repressed regimes like India, where public access to adult sexual material is still not only taboo but strictly regulated by the law. The dps mms, when it emerged on the digital landscape of smutty social media in India, took the country by storm. As Namita Malhotra points out in

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her landmark monograph examining the intersections of law, plea­sure, video, and porn in India, every­body was looking for it.16 On the pervert-2-­pervert network, ­there was a buzz about how “real ­people” with “real bodies” having “Indian sex” had been caught on video, resulting in spikes on search engines as well as on intranet and local sharing networks. The clip was copied and sold in the grey market, along with “imported pornography,” as the “real ­thing.”17 Ravi Raj, an enterprising student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, deci­ded to make good use of the huge demand for the clip and put it up for sale on Bazee​.c­ om, where it appeared as an e-­book, u­ nder the scintillating title “Item 27877408—­dps Girl having fun!!! Full video + Bazee points,” priced at INR 125. The emergence of this clip as an object of sale alerted the authorities to its presence. As Malhotra argues, the presence of the clip on a public site like Bazee​.c­ om offered the first point of intervention for the state, which had no way to intervene in its circulation in the “nether spaces of p2p networks” or to regulate “covert exchanges on mobile phones.”18 Once the clip was identified as offensive, a bizarre court case followed: a crime was detected, all the bodies in the criminal case ­were identified, yet nobody was found culpable. Ravi Raj was taken into custody for possession of and intention to sell pornographic material. However, along with the male student who was the clip’s “producer/actor/distributor,” he was acquitted in juvenile court, and both ­were suspended from the school. The presiding judge proposed that the crimes of t­ hese two young men ­were crimes of a society that was rapidly changing as it accessed technologies and Western culture. The female student, who was the most vis­i­ble body in the video—as well as the body that was being packaged, sold, desired, and consumed—­was recognized as a victim of “revenge porn,” who therefore deserved more to be pitied and protected than censored and punished.19 Eventually, when none of the usual suspects could be held accountable for the video, the state sought a “symbolic resolution,” whereby Avnish Bajaj, the ceo of Bajee​.­com, was extradited from the United States and arrested.20 As the “foreign-­educated man who had been touched by the spread of such sleaze,” Bajaj was an easy target, in whose body the case was resolved, at least for the public eye.21 However, Bajaj won the case, pitting “Terms of Ser­vice” against the Information and Broadcast Law of India. Eventually, the Delhi court proposed that what was to blame, in all this blame-­roulette, was the technology itself. The court judgment argued that the true culprits in this phenomenon ­were “the gadgets . . . ​which make pos­si­ble certain kinds of technological

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conditions.”22 The case was eventually brought not against Avnish Bajaj the person, but against Avnish Bajaj the representative of the website which was responsible for “causing obscene material to be published,” enabling the eight transactions that had taken place in the thirty-­eight hours since the listing of the video.23 In other words, the judgment suggested that to blame was technology itself, which offered access to a “listing which informed the potential buyer that such a video clip that is pornographic can be procured for a price.” Hence, the ensuing regulations addressed the control of technology and access, which equated to possession. ­Those found in possession of the clip could be fined and prosecuted. The concern was not about obscenity or pornography, but about the fact that the digital was now producing ways to sidestep the state’s authorial positions and producing mutable, transmittable, and transferrable products which could be accessed without regulation or control. The “user,” who in having access was always considered responsible for usage, was suddenly rendered as a set of practices, as traffic, as merely a node within a network, without fixity and easily dissolved in the larger matrices of information and data. The user was no longer a sociopo­liti­cal identity, but a computational node, produced by the intersections of traffic and movement of data, created only in temporary practices of digital virality, and impossible to be pinned down as having ­actual intention, agency, or w ­ ill. The user in the network was like any other node within the network—­ generic, replaceable, and inheriting the characteristics of all the other nodes in the network, which facilitates the repetitive conditions of network traffic. Thus, if ­there was a culprit in this case, it was the entire country: in the act and fact of access, the entire country was participating in the proliferation and consumption of a video that had become a national wet dream. Access, an avowed goal of the state’s Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ict4d) visions, suddenly seemed to produce the user as a potential criminal, a transgressive subject. And the technologies of development, which w ­ ere to make India shine, started to seem threatening, as having agency beyond the user, as performing actions which make criminals of us all, without holding us responsible for our actions. At the same time, ­there was the specific question of what access means when agency of access is no longer enshrined just in the user and its actions. Locating access as a condition which facilitates and ascribes agency to the users, as well as to the gadgets and technologies they live with, reminds us of the wide range of actions that technologies perform on us, that as we gain access to technologies, we also make ourselves accessible to them. 122 

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THE LUCKNOW IN CIDEN T: TH E SU B JECT OF AC C ESS

Opening access to questions of infrastructure immediately invokes the notion of a digital subject. In all the dif­fer­ent p­ eople involved in the dps mms video, ­there is a growing ambiguity about what constitutes the subject of access when it comes to digital objects. I have argued elsewhere that digital technologies write us as subjects even as we are subjected to the configurations that they provide.24 In looking at what gets represented and what gets made invisible in the interface spectacles of the new digital, I have suggested that becoming a digital subject is a complicated pro­cess that allows only certain kinds of bodies and identities to claim that subjectivity. As the digital networks unfold, rendering us legible, intelligible, and accessible, they change the ways in which we understand the relationship between access, subjects, and agency. Especially in countries like India, where the modern national subject has often been framed at the intersection of postcolonial modernity and develop­ mental technologies, it becomes even more impor­tant to understand that the subject, often i­magined as an agential embodiment of the do-­it-­yourself rhe­toric of the digital Web, is often constructed by structures of governance and technology regulation.25 ­These mechanics are hidden in the production of the user or in appropriation of older categories like “spectator” in discussions about digital cultural production and digital video. The idea of a “reluctant subject”—­created through access but scripted and configured by the larger nexus of power and control that is exercised in the digital world—­can be best illustrated by a case known as the “Lucknow Incident” in scholarly and popu­lar discourse.26 The Lucknow Incident refers to a fairly straightforward case of entrapment, where a group of policemen made online profiles on a gay dating site in India, contacted ­others listed on the website, called them for dates, and then arrested them, invoking the penalization of homo­sexuality that is enshrined in the archaic Unnatural Sex Act, which constitutes Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. On January 3, 2006, t­ hese policemen, masquerading as gay men, lured one of their victims to a public park popularly used as a cruising spot by the local queer community. When the man arrived, they arrested him and intimidated him into calling his cell phone contacts.27 When three of ­those summoned by the phone calls turned up, they ­were also arrested, and the event was reported as a sensational coup which unearthed a “gay ring” in the country. This story, while the first of its kind in India, is not new. And such stories continue to be newsworthy as dif­fer­ent “sting operations” and “uncoverings” I n A ccess  123

happen across the country. For instance, the local news and entertainment channel tv9 attended an underground gay party in Hyderabad and captured footage of men dancing together, without worrying about issues of privacy or verifying the sexual orientation of the ­people it outed as gay.28 In both this case and the Lucknow Incident, access to ­these spaces was considered proof enough to brand the ­people involved as gay. While much can be and has been written about the morally reprehensible activities of ­these cops and their abuse of power, of interest ­here is the way in which this complicates the notion of the digital subject. The digital ­subject, in the ict4d imagination, is one that is online and able to leverage the dif­fer­ent conditions of connectivity and networking to restitch the nation in its developmental dreams. However, the kind of networking that the pseudonymous space of the social web offers clearly involves activities that the state does not condone. This begs the question of what constitutes a desirable digital subject. The subjects flooding the Internet with pornographic production and consumption are obviously not the subjects that the state had in mind. Similarly, subjects who, with access to the digital, are able to collect, mobilize, and form communities which can be identified as criminal are also not subjects to be encouraged. In fact, the digital subject, formed ­because of its access to the digital, seems to be using the very infrastructure and agency in which the state invests to circumvent the authority of the state. Additionally, the legibility of a digital subject also seems to be inextricably tied to questions of legitimacy. The policemen who lured men ­toward an arrest had projected fantasies similar to the ones of ­those arrested. However, their fantasies, being authored in the ser­vice of the state, w ­ ere supported rather than disciplined and punished. In the per­for­mance of the same digital practices, then, some subjectivities are deemed legitimate, whereas o­ thers are pathologized. Access, in the case of the disguised cops and the gay men caught unawares, brands every­body the same way, but it is in the marking of legitimacy and power that the condition of access is defined. The Lucknow Incident further complicates understanding of the production of the digital subject and access. Access to the websites, to each other, marked the participants as gay. Even though the physical evidence in the case was incidental—­the men w ­ ere not caught in acts of sodomy, t­here was no indecent or obscene be­hav­ior—­and countered by other f­actors—­the men ­were in the closet, two of them had straight marriages and biological­ ­children—­access was still foregrounded as the incriminating point of forming 124 

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their digital ­subjectivity. Their online access marked their offline bodies. While none could be charged with physical criminal activities—­and indeed, even with online digital crimes as defined by the Information Technology Act 2003, which was applicable at that time—­they ­were punished for their per­for­ mances on, presence on, and access to the queer dating site, which can only be read as fantasy. ­These fantasies, which ­were also authored by the policemen, spilled over into “real life,” and the men ­were punished for their avatars rather than for actions that could be ascribed to their physical bodies. The spectacles which could not be recorded in real life, as evidence, ­were ­imagined through their access to the digital networks, and a punishment was suggested based on an act which had not occurred. If the dps mms case was about an act that actually happened but that could not be attributed to a culpable body and was therefore deemed a technological prob­lem, then the Lucknow Incident falls on the opposite side of the spectrum, where no act occurred, but technological access and presence constituted the offline bodies as criminally responsible. The digital subject, in its access to the digital networks that are potentially smutty and criminal, render the subject in a condition of pathology. Especially for the men who ­were arrested, even when they tried to delink their identities from their online avatars, the very fact of access wrote them as digital subjects that took pre­ce­ dence over their own agency in writing themselves as subjects and bodies of par­tic­u­lar kinds. When we think of the digital subject, we need to understand it as a technosocial subject and to recognize access to the digital in the context of the sociocultural and po­liti­cal pro­cesses in which the subjects and the technologies are located.29 FR O M ACCE S S TO CON DITION S OF ACCESS

So how do we deal with access in our approach to digital video cultures and to the larger landscape of cybercultures? By triangulating access through infra­ structure, agency, and subjectivity, I have demonstrated why the notion of access, even as it becomes a predominant trope in con­temporary analy­sis of digital objects, needs to be complicated. Access, as it emerges in the ict4d and in policy and regulation debates, glosses over the much larger pro­cesses of control, containment, and configuration of bodies, actions, and desires. Quantification of access can make invisible the complex questions of where agency lies, where the points of control are, and what protocols determine the legitimacy of our actions online. I n A ccess  125

Especially when applied to the world of digital video, this relationship between quantification of access and the emergence of regulation helps us unpack the relationship between spectator and user. The spectator, with its rich history, has specific critical under­pinnings in its relation to the video and the visual. The user, robbed of that optical agency, is often not accorded the same theoretical and po­liti­cal significance, and it therefore needs to be constructed anew in our study of digital video and how it gets produced, circulated, distributed, and stored in the relentlessly unforgiving archives of the Internet. When faced with the formulation of “access as usage,” we must complicate not only the notion of where access resides, but also what usage can mean; we must examine how the user is not always an agential subject who makes a choice as an actor within a network, but is also written and used, accessed and made accessible by the technologies with which it engages. The shift from access to conditions of access also questions the seamless global narrative continuity that is often offered in analy­sis of the spectator or user of media objects. The global reach of digital objects and the accelerated rate of distribution that they embody often lead to the perception that access is uniform and equal across the globe. A commonsense understanding of a social-­media network like YouTube, for instance, would suggest that ­because YouTube looks the same across the globe, the technological contexts of ­access do not ­matter. The geopo­liti­cal otherness of the digital often supports this formulation, such that even when faced with issues of censorship, control, or lack of access, the prob­lems of the digital object are treated as social and po­liti­cal but not technological. The response is generally the easy solution of infrastructure building instead of recognizing the materiality and polity of the digital in its interaction with older technological forms. Within academic analy­sis, this separation of the technological from the po­liti­cal, the favoring of the semantic and the contextual over the material and the architectural structures of digital objects gets mirrored when the digital user in Asia gets mediated, articulated, and inflected by theoretical and conceptual frameworks that do not belong to the region. Drawing from media theory and digital cultures analy­sis from another context interpellates the subject into a conversation to which it does not belong or respond. This approach produces this subject as what the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha calls “a subject of mimicry.”30 It invokes the location and specificity of the subject’s access only to mark its indigeneity, and it always locates the conditions of access through global reference points, constructing them as discursive and po­liti­cal mea­sures that this subject and its access must live up to. 126 

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Access, in cultural analyses of digital video, takes too many ­things for granted. It posits the user as the replacement for the spectator. It reduces questions of infrastructure to gadgets and devices, while remaining oblivious to the im­mense development machinery of the state that informs and supports such infrastructure building. It marks the subject in the double bind of locally unique and globally similar. Shifting our attention to conditions of access reveals that access is a condition of privilege which cannot be taken for granted and that cannot be addressed merely by creating infrastructure of access. Infrastructure cannot be treated as a value-­neutral production, but must be contextualized within the huge field of development expectations and intentions. Access is often equated with agency, whereby having access to a technological structure presumes willingness and agency. However, as is evident in the dps mms case, agency is not only a ­human value. Especially within digital cir­cuits, agency is scripted and performative, and is often the onus of the technological. We need to think of action, agency, responsibility, and ethics in a new way, when we think of digital videos, for instance, which, in the quantified databases of the social web, are robbed of all po­liti­cal intention or affective desire. Complicating notions of agency also has a parallel set of prob­lems in defining the digital subject. The Lucknow Incident shows that the digital subject is not just defined by access to technology, but is embedded in a conflicted dynamics of legitimacy and legibility in the digital world. Access, despite its active connotations, is a passive signifier. Even as it promises incessant connectivity, it reduces human-­technology engagement to a series of actions, points of encounter, and quantified data sets. Access creates a matrix that mea­sures engagement with digital video objects as nothing more than a set of transactions, without pointing to social, cultural, and po­liti­cal histories and contexts. Access to technology remains historically removed, ­because it uses the global history of media, communication, and information as its only reference points, denying the specificity that accompanies the emergence and spread of digital technologies in emerging information socie­ ties like India. Rather than remain focused on access as a finite and static form of mea­ sure­ment, we need to start thinking about “conditions of access” as a way of unpacking the world of digital and online cultural production. Conditions of access reminds us that in the other­w ise “fun and games” world of digital cultures, filled with memes, viralities, replications, remixes, and flash-­in-­the-­ pan fads, a much larger pattern of power and control is at play. Examining the geopo­liti­cal location of access, the dif­fer­ent intersections of identities I n A ccess  127

that accompany the digital subject other­wise reduced to “user,” the nexus of modernity, technology, and development offers a rich framework by which to analyze and understand digital cultural artifacts as more than just cultural practice. Conditions of access refers to a concatenation of practice, policy, politics, and play that is just below the surface of glossy and seductive graphical user interfaces, which often hide the mechanics of agency and subjectivity in digital cultures. A focus on conditions reveals access as both tenuous and nonuniversal. While the case studies in this essay might have a global resonance with other such instances, the local cultural practices, the landscapes of policing and regulation, the politics of infrastructure development, and the presence of the nation-­state as it reconfigures itself to become a technosocial state are crucial to understanding the significance and implications of our everyday digital practices. We must locate digital videos not only in the traffic of their digital networks, subject to aesthetic analyses and cultural decoding, but as producing and being produced by data subjects, quantified selves, reluctant actors, and technologies with their own logic and intentions. > NOTE S  ​ 1

2

3 4 5 6

128 

Sudipto Mondal, “Karnataka mla Blames Mobile Phones for Rape,” Hindustan Times, July  12, 2014, http://­www​.­hindustantimes​.­com​/­india​/­karnataka​-­mla​ -­blames​-­mobile​-­phones​-­for​-­rapes​/­story​-­GOB3NuNG4qYUw3AfghjvIJ​_­amp​ .­html. Press Trust of India, “Non-­veg Food, Mobiles Responsible for Increasing Rape Cases: Bihar Minister,” Indian Express, July  15, 2014, http://­indianexpress​.­com​ /­article​/­india​/­india​-­others​/­non​-­veg​-­food​-­mobiles​-­responsible​-­for​-­increasing​ -­rape​-­cases​-b­ ihar​-­minister​/­. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, The Last Cultural Mile: An Inquiry into Technology and Governance in India (Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society, 2011). Nandan Nilekani, Imagining India: Ideas for the New ­Century (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2010). Smitha Radhakrishnan, Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a new Transnational Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). See, respectively, Clay Shirky, ­Here Comes Every­body: The Power of Organ­izing without Organ­izations (New York: Penguin, 2008); Ashwin Punathambekar, From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tcakz, “The ‘C’ in cpov: An Introduction to the cpov Reader,” in Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, ed. Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tcakz (Amsterdam: Institute of N ishant S hah

Network Cultures, 2010), 9–13; Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008). 7 Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-­first ­Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). 8 Ash Achuthan, Re-­wiring Bodies (Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society, 2011.) 9 The government of India’s Tenth Five Year Plan, effective from 2002–2007, posits the vision of making India into a ­simple, moral, accountable, responsible, and transparent state by implementing technology-­driven governmental practices. Planning Commission, Tenth Five Year Plan, 2002–2007, 3 vols. (New Delhi: Planning Commission, Government of India, 2002), http://­www​.­planningcommission​.­gov​.­in​ /­plans​/­planrel​/­fiveyr​/­welcome​.­html. 10 Erwin Alampay, “Introduction,” in Living the Information Society in Asia, ed. Erwin Alampay (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009), 10–14. 11 Richard Ling, “What Would Durkheim Have Thought? Living in (and with) the Information Society,” in Living the Information Society in Asia, ed. Erwin Alampay (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009), 9–27. 12 James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 18. 13 Larissa Hjorth, Jean Burgess, and Ingrid Richardson, Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone (London: Routledge, 2012). 14 Dan Sheng, Jean-­François Doulet, and Michael  A. Keane, “Urban Informatics in China: Exploring the Emergence of the Chinese City 2.0,” in Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-­time City, ed. Marcus Foth (London: igi Global, 2009), 379–89. 15 Sheng, Doulet, and Kean, “Urban Informatics in China,” 382. 16 Namita Malhotra, Porn: Law, Video, Technology (Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society, 2011). 17 Bharath Murthy, The Jasmine of Mysore (New Delhi: nhk, 2009.) 18 Murthy, The Jasmine of Mysore, 140. 19 Paula Todd, Extreme Mean: Troll, Bullies and Predators Online (New York: Signal Books, 2014). 20 Todd, Extreme Mean, 143. 21 Todd, Extreme Mean, 141. 22 Todd, Extreme Mean, 157. 23 Todd, Extreme Mean, 143. 24 Nishant Shah, “Subject to Technology: Internet Pornography, Cyber-­terrorism, and the Indian State,” Inter-­Asia Cultural Studies Journal 8, no. 3 (2007): 349–66. Nishant Shah, Whose Change Is It, Anyway? T ­ owards a F ­ uture of Digital Technologies and Citizen Action in Emerging Information Socie­ties (The Hague: Hivos Knowledge Programme, 2013). 25 Ashish Nandy, Return from Exile: Alternative Sciences, Illegitimacy of Nationalism, Savage Freud (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2003). I n A ccess  129

26

27

28 29

30

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Alok Gupta, “Section 377 and the Dignity of the Indian Homosexual,” Economic Po­liti­cal Weekly, November 18, 2006, 4815–23, http://­www​.­iglhrc​.­org​/­binary​-­data​ /­ATTACHMENT​/fi­ le​/­000​/0­ 00​/1­ 5–1​.­pdf. Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, India: Situation of Homosexuals: Availability of Support Groups and State Protection (June 2004–­April 2009), Refworld, April 29, 2009, http://­www​.­refworld​.­org​/­docid​/­4b20f02ec​.­html. Siddharth Narrain, “ ‘Exposing’ an Expose,” The Alternative, March  21, 2012, http://­www​.­thealternative​.­in​/­society​/­exposing​-­expose​/­. More analy­sis is warranted for technology-­mediated police states and how states gain access to us through our access to the digital, especially in the National Security Administration age, but that lies outside the scope of this essay. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

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6  ​>

M I C R O S D - ­I N G “ M E WAT I V I D E O S ” C I R C U L AT I O N A N D R E G U L AT I O N O F A S U B A LT E R N - ­P O P U L A R M E D I A C U LT U R E

Rahul Mukherjee and Abhigyan Singh

In the villages of Mewat (land of Meos), a region southwest of Delhi, maulavis (religious preachers) prescribe a strict objection to consumption of visual images by restricting newspaper readership, Bollywood film watching, tele­vi­ sion viewing, and digital editing.1 Within this visual censorship regime, supposedly notorious Mewati videos have gained considerable popularity. Th ­ ese videos, ­going by names such as Salaheri ka bodyguard (Salaheri’s bodyguard), Karina ka Toofan (Karina’s storm), and Chori tera gaal rasgulla (Girl, your cheeks are like syrupy sweets) often feature Meo youths dancing alongside “C-­film” actresses. While nothing apparently illicit seems to unfold visually in ­these videos, Meo villa­gers consider the lyr­ics of the songs lurid. A Meo local in Salaheri, a village in the Mewat district, opined about the lyr­ics of the videos in the following manner: “Inki jo language hai na sare sexy gaane main . . . ​galat matlab hi hain is gaane main . . . ​Saare ulte matlab hain . . . ​sab double meaning ke hi hote hain” (Their language is entirely sexy . . . ​all wrong meanings are ­there in the songs . . . ​all inverted meanings . . . ​all double meanings are ­there in this). The mobile phone is the most popu­lar medium for consuming and circulating the videos. It affords privacy, discretion, unpre­ce­ dented sharing capabilities, and omniscience.

Our research participants, a group of Meo men, quizzed us as to why we ­ ere interested in ­these “bad” and “disgusting” (gande) songs, which ­were w bringing disrepute to the Meo community. During fleeting moments within the same conversation, however, they group voiced their appreciation for the pun, wit, timing, and beauty of connections made in the same m ­ usic videos. They maintained that the humor and associations constructed, while innovative, ­were often far-­fetched, excessive, even exaggerated. How do such videos circulate within a community despite its strict censorship regime and tight prescriptive regulations? Nuh (a town) and Salaheri (a village) are places where if middle-­age and el­derly men are spotted frequenting the public spaces of cinema halls, their social respectability gets hurt. However, easy, discreet access to Mewati videos is pos­si­ble with cell phones. The most prevalent way to circulate ­these videos within the villages is through microsd (msd) cards, which are procured from street mobile-­phone vendors. The inconspicuous size of mobile-­phone screens and msd cards ensure portability and help youth to privately consume (and disseminate) the videos. Therefore, msd cards alleviate the risk of getting caught by village elders and/or religious men. Some of the research participants demonstrated how they wrap their msd cards in small plastic bags so as to safely keep them in their shirt pockets rather than plugged into their phones. The cards are just one component in the radically relational media ecol­ogy that sustains Mewati video circulation and consists of heterogeneous ele­ments such as cds, software converters, mobile phones, and vari­ous h­ uman actors like mobile walas (mobile store ­owners and attendants) and truck ­drivers. In our study of the Mewati video network, a medium is not merely an object with affordances or a representative screen, but part of pro­cesses and events of mediation that gather a community and its fields of knowledges, practices, and experiences. The central argument of this essay is that both the aesthetics of repre­sen­ ta­tion and the technologies of circulation (which facilitate access to such videos) are key for understanding the popularity of t­ hese m ­ usic videos and their po­liti­cal impact. Drawing from scholarship on “po­liti­cal socie­ties,” “cultures of informality,” and the “subaltern-­popular,” we investigate how informal economies based on emerging media technologies provide ways to circulate popu­lar ­music videos that represent the identity and po­liti­cal claims of a marginalized community.2 Studying repre­sen­ta­tions and circulations together helps to explain the par­tic­u­lar production practices, reception contexts, and viewing experiences of Meos.

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We investigate what happens when (studies of) technocultural networks overlap with marginalized regions (subaltern studies). What happens when relatively marginal communities such as the Meos are studied as part of “po­liti­ cal socie­ties,” not necessarily in the theoretical vocabulary of negotiating welfare benefits, but as active prosumers and innovators of con­temporary media technologies?3 Instead of getting drawn into the technological determinism (attributed to Marshall McLuhan) vis-­à-­vis cultural determinism (associated with Raymond Williams) debates prevalent in media studies, we propose examining media and media technologies as part of cultural practices. We attempt to comprehend “cultures of informality” that remain understudied ­because they are e­ ither dismissed as inconsequential for cultural policy making or considered tasteless and wayward.4 Such informal economies have developed in regions that have historically suffered from governmental neglect and public apathy. The region of Mewat consists of a significant rural population living amid acute poverty and lack of basic infrastructure.5 By expressing aspirations and desires in their own idiom, Mewati videos potentially invite theorizing the subaltern with the popu­lar as one comprehends video cultures.6 The subaltern-­popular framework enables understanding of how marginalized communities use access to popular-­media repre­sen­ta­tions to challenge hegemony. We begin by tracing the varied paths involved in circulation of Mewati videos, the role of key mediators like the mobile-­shop o­ wners, and the dif­fer­ent spaces and screens of consumption of t­ hese videos. Following this, we engage in a detailed analy­sis of videos based on our interviews with Meo men, then fi­nally draw out the translocal connections between Mewati videos and Bhojpuri and Bollywood creations. ­There are three impor­tant limitations of our research. First, although we did talk to a variety of ­people in Mewat—­teachers, mobile-­shop ­owners, maulavis, young and middle-­age men, village elders and community leaders, photog­raphers, marriage-­video editors—­the bulk of our interviewees ­were consumers of such videos, not producers. Second, our interviewees comprised only men; being male and “outsiders,” we had limited opportunity to speak to local w ­ omen. The gendered unevenness of our ethnographic encounters, however unavoidable, is a severe short­coming. Fi­nally, both of us strug­gle to comprehend the nuances of the Mewati language, and thus in appreciating the linguistic sophistication of the lyr­ics in the videos, we have deferred to the analy­sis and interpretations offered by our interview participants.

M icro S D - ­ing “ M ewati V ideos ”   135

CI RCULATO RY ASSEMB LAG E

The video-­circulation network consists of actors with varied roles and responsibilities. It begins with the producer, who invests money to generate Mewati video cds. Each cd includes two to four videos. Producers have connections with “dealers,” who purchase and distribute the cds. In a month, a dealer may buy five hundred cds to deliver to local mobile shops. Mobile walas (mobile store ­owners and attendants) explained that ­these videos first come to peri-­ urban markets in Nuh, and ­later reach villages such as Salaheri. The mobile walas ­will copy a cd onto their laptops, desktop computers, and hard disks—­ which they only need to do once—­paying the dealer anything between INR 20–30 to do so. ­Every month, the mobile walas copy about fifty new cds. The cds are popularly referred to as “cassettes.” The mobile shops in Nuh can be found in the local market area, where a cluster of them indulge in the same business of selling msd cards, sim cards, Mewati cinema, Mewati videos, videos of stage shows (­music and dance) from Pakistan, and “pirated” Bollywood and Haryanvi songs and movies.7 They also offer mobile repair ser­vices, upload digital files on usb sticks, and sell mobile hardware, including batteries and chargers. If the circulatory network is considered in terms of Bruno Latour’s actor-­ network theory, the mobile shop (and the mobile wala) is a key node, a “mediator” and not just an “intermediary.” 8 In Latour’s famous delineation, an intermediary “transports meaning or force without transformation,” while mediators “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the ele­ ments they are supposed to carry.”9 Mediators could help expand the network into new areas in uncertain ways, while faithful intermediaries would aid in sustaining existing networks. Earlier, the video market was restricted to cds and dvds sold in video shops, but when the medium of video consumption shifted from cds to mobile phones, the mobile shop and the mobile wala emerged as mediators. This led to the expansion of the Mewati video network. According to Latour, “translation” induces “two mediators into co-­ existence.”10 The mobile wala did not become a mediator unto himself, but in relation to the affordances provided by mobile phones. Thus, transformations in a network are brought about by the “translation” pro­cess set forth by the association or concatenation of a set of mediators, in this case, mobile phones and mobile walas. The mobile wala makes a crucial format conversion using video converter software that transform mpeg files to mp3, mp4, or 3gp files, which can then 136 

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6.1  ​Mobile shop in Mewat. 6.2  ​A mobile wala in a mobile shop in Mewat. Note the YouTube win­dow open on

the computer screen.

Advertisement

Producers CD Advertisement

Dealers

Local Businesses

Advertisement

Local Shops

CD CD

Cinema Halls

microSD/CD

microSD/CD

CD

microSD sharing/ Bluetooth

Mobile Walas

CD Trucks/Lorries

YouTube/ other website

microSD/CD

CD/YouTube/ other website

CD

Other Viewers (India)

Villagers

Taxis

International Viewers Web uploads

Actors

Spaces

Modality

6.3  ​Actors, spaces, and modalities in local circulation of Mewati videos. Note that

this figure is an approximation; ground realities would manifest in much more ­complex feedback loops.

be played in mobile phones via msd cards, colloquially called “chips.” A mobile shop attendant explained that the video file resolution as received from a cd is large and incompatible with mobile screens. The shop­keep­ers convert the files into dif­fer­ent formats suitable for dif­fer­ent types of mobile handsets. For them, the mp4 format indicates better video and song quality, which is compatible with the high-­end mobiles that are popu­lar in Mewat, while 3gp is compatible with older mobile phones. Referring to the mp4 format, the shop attendant stated, “Yeh chote mobile par nahi chalega . . . ​Samsung type ke mobile par chalega” (This ­will not work for small mobiles, but ­will work for Samsung-­type mobiles). Mobile walas must therefore also transcode and compress videos. However, the mobile wala as the ­human actor is not the sole mediator; the act of mediation performed is a complex “intra-­action” among 138 

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6.4  ​A microsd card

and a usb connector at a local mobile shop in Mewat.

6.5  ​A desktop

c­ omputer connected to a microsd card using a usb connector at a local mobile shop in Mewat.

6.6  ​A laptop connected

to a microsd card using a usb connector at a local mobile shop in Mewat.

mobile walas and vari­ous video converters, cds, and msd cards, involving a set of discursive-­material entanglements.11 Many local Meo men work as ­drivers in taxis and lorries, and they carry the Mewati video cds and loaded msd cards with them. Our research participants explained that ­because of ­these lorry or truck ­drivers, Mewati Video cds are available as far away as Mumbai and Goa. ­These d­ rivers listen to the audio part of Mewati videos, as many of ­these vehicles do not have screens. One of our interviewees noted that many new “taxis” (cars, jeeps) now have a small (lcd) screen, and it is pos­si­ble to play videos using msd (through usb connector). Thus, some taxi d­ rivers can combine video with audio entertainment. Many ­drivers do not keep cds or dvds, but just video files on msd cards. The Meo youth exchange msd cards among themselves. Bluetooth is also ­commonly used to share files across mobiles in friend circles. W ­ hether it be the truck ­drivers or the Meo youth, ­there is no strict end user in this circulatory network, as ­every user is a potential transporter or circulator. As a sociotechnical network gets reconfigured, the components of the network enter into new relations with each other, and their functions transform. Karen Barad terms this pro­cess “iterative intra-­activity,” whereby each reconfiguration is a reiteration of the earlier configuration, with slight shifts in arrangements leading to dynamic intra-­actions.12 We observed similar reconfigurations in the Mewati-­video circulation network. Seeing the popularity of msd cards, the local electronic equipment shops are selling new China-­made dvd players that play videos from both dvds and msd cards. An msd card inserts into a usb adapter, which in turn plugs into the usb slot offered by the new dvd player. Thus, dvd players no longer support just dvds, and msd cards do not remain exclusive to mobile phones (and their users). Furthermore, to make the msd card compatible with new dvd players, vari­ous cheap usb adapters have flooded the local market in the Mewat district. This pro­cess of temporal emergence through iterative intra-­activity is crucial for the dynamism of the circulatory assemblage of Mewati videos, which continuously shifts from one contingent stable configuration to another. Brian Larkin provides a lively account of g­ oing to the Marhaba cinema in Kano, a city in Northern Nigeria.13 Frequenting the open-­air cinema spaces is considered un-­Islamic among the Hausa community in Northern Nigeria. ­Going to the cinema becomes a visceral event as audiences experience contradictory feelings of danger and excitement, moral anxiety and desire. Such a cinemagoing experience has parallels with ­those in the Mewat region, but we are more interested h­ ere in the possibilities of viewing events that occur 140 

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6.7  ​A dvd player equipped to play content from both microsd cards and dvds.

in other private, semi-­public, and public spaces b­ ecause of the use of cd and msd technologies. In local cinema halls, Mewati videos are shown before the screening of Mewati cinema and during the intermission. Mewati cinema tends to be longer than Mewati videos, containing dialogues and storylines as opposed to just song-­and-­dance sequences. Cinema halls in Nuh screen Mewati cinema and Bollywood movies; but, as Shafiqur Rahman points out, Mewati audiences find Mewati cinema more endearing, owing to its local sensibilities and M icro S D - ­ing “ M ewati V ideos ”   141

concern for local issues.14 Mewati videos are shown on tele­vi­sion in men-­only spaces such as local hair salons where tv sets are installed and connected to dvd players. Tele­vi­sion sets are also pres­ent in some Meo ­house­holds, and Meo youth do get together to watch videos on tv at home in the absence of female f­ amily members. One interviewee confidently stated that watching videos on tv and using cd players for home entertainment have steadily declined with the rise of mobile phones: “Jyada famous filhal phone ho raha hai. Har log phone zyada use karte hain. Bacche bacche ke pass phone hain. Ab toh bade phone khareedne lage hain. Pehle Chinese aaye the. Ab to shauk khatam ho gaya. Ab toh bade bade phone Samsung, Nokia le rahe hain” (Mobiles are becoming more famous presently. Every­body is using phones. ­Every kid has it. Nowadays, even adults have started buying it. Initially, Chinese [phones] came. Now that interest has died. Bigger phones are coming. They are buying Samsung and Nokia.) The demand for mobiles with expanded screens suggests, among other aspirations, a desire for screen spaces that can better accommodate collective viewing. Watching videos on cell phones is not always a private affair. Young men can get together, away from the eyes of prying f­ amily members and relatives, insert an msd card into the mobile phone, and entertain themselves. Even mobile phones they co-­own or co-­use with other f­amily members can be deployed for this purpose b­ ecause the videos remain on the msd card. Moreover, once the card is removed, ­there is no remaining trace of the viewing activity, so one is thus spared the l­abor of adding or deleting files within the video library of the mobile phone. Middle-­age men reluctant to visit cinema halls now increasingly carry msd cards. Local gossip suggests that Mewati videos are watched by young married ­couples a­ fter midnight, when every­body ­else in the h­ ouse is asleep. ­These viewing instances, ambient and tactical encounters, may not be total events, not so much distinct interruptions to, but contingent moments in the flow of everyday life. They offer an opportunity to grasp the phenomenological sensorium that emerges from the intersections of new media technologies and cultures of regulation and censorship. CRE ATI VE PUBLICITY DRIVIN G IN F ORMAL EC ONOM Y

Publicity seems to be the central accelerator in propelling the production and circulation of Mewati videos. Money for the production of a video comes from willing male participants who want to be featured in the video. ­There are tiers of participation, framings, and screen time: INR 5,000 for a short 142 

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screen time (usually ten to thirty seconds) and to dance around female dancers with no physical contact; INR 10,000–30,000 for longer screen durations. The money due also varies according to the manner in which a youth is shown onscreen. It costs more, for example, to appear with one’s hands around the waist or touching an actress such as Asmeena, a locally popu­lar actress. ­There are some male dancers, but it is the female dancers whose popularity tends to be the topic of conversation. The actresses earn their living through ­these videos, which enables them to attain local fame and garner invitations to perform in local parties; money is showered on them at such parties, and the party tips they receive are estimated to amount to more than they earn from dancing in the ­music videos. The publicity component of the m ­ usic videos does not end h­ ere: money also comes from local shop­keep­ers of second­hand computer stores, mobile shops, tea stalls, tailor shops, and printing presses that specialize in wedding cards and the like. Th ­ ese local entrepreneurs (and some established businessmen) contact video producers with details about what needs to be advertised: their address, phone numbers, and so on. Producers forward this information to lyricists (who also often perform as singers), who write promotional lyr­ics in the form of couplets called dohas. The lyr­ics are plugged into the musical flow and narrative of Mewati videos. The shop’s contact information is also presented in ­running subtitles along the bottom of the screen. The shop­keeper ­will pay around INR 3,000 for this ser­vice. Thus, two dif­fer­ent kinds of publicity coexist and are interrelated: publicity in the form of advertising for mobile shops and mobile walas, and publicity in the form of self-­promotion for Meo youth. The Mewati videos are not produced with any formal certification. We did observe labels and names of production companies such as “Saajan Audio,” “Asmeena vcd,” and “Ronak Cassette Com­pany” on dvd covers, on production-­house log­os in video frames, and as saved file names on computers. Our interviewees suggested that t­hese companies ­were operating without formal licenses. Locals opined that anyone with the money and the ­will can appear in and help finance a video. The producers and the artists cover the cost of production and earn their profits by providing video space for advertisements and promotions. They do not have to worry about so-­called illegal copying of their cds ­because they do not calibrate their profits based on how many copies they sell. The “pirate” or “viral” circulation of cds or loaded msd cards helps the producers to promote their work and make themselves famous. In the business model of Mewati videos, dance performers are required, but the M icro S D - ­ing “ M ewati V ideos ”   143

money spent to hire them is recovered by sponsoring slots of screen time for ­people to occupy in the video. Ravi Sundaram has reasoned that the pirated “cd/cover remains a slot below that of the official mass release deliberately . . . ​to mark the object as pirate.”15 Conceptualizing the practice of cd cover packaging for regional ­music genres with a predominance of local star systems wherein the artists’ phone numbers and addresses are inscribed on the cover, Sundaram remarks, “CD cover is the medium through which the artist and the fan imagine and recognize each other.”16 The Mewati video cds we saw in the mobile shops retained a similar pirate aesthetics and regional character. Pictures of leading dancers and actresses occupied the center of the covers, with stamp-­size photo­graphs of directors, dealers, singers, and lyricists along with their phone numbers printed at the bottom. Sundaram’s analy­sis hints at par­tic­u­lar forms of address that are required in the acts of publicizing and advertising to the audience, the fan, or the community. How are Mewati video audiences addressed within the videos? How do the music-­video directors and lyricists target audiences as potential customers who might like to appear in the videos in the ­future and as potential consumers who might frequent the mobile shops advertised within the videos for “chip loading”? This requires an understanding of how publicity components get (re)mixed and made part of the Mewati videos alongside the per­for­mance of dancers. Let’s look at the ­album Subin sher Chandanki ke (Subin, the lion of Chandanki). Chandanki is a village in the Mewat district, and Subin is a locally popu­lar lyricist. Both the singer and his ­album are advertised using his name. In the introduction to the ­music video (or the opening credit sequence), a narrational voice-­over (most likely by the singer himself) notes: “Yeh a­ lbum Mata com­pany Dilli ke driveron ve unke mechanikon ke sahyog se paish ki gayi hai” (This a­ lbum is presented in cooperation with the Mata com­pany of Delhi’s ­drivers and mechanics). This advertisement (of Mata com­pany of Delhi) appears in the m ­ usic video in all likelihood b­ ecause some of the com­ pany’s ­drivers and mechanics come from Mewat. Another entrepreneur, a mobile wala, is thanked for his contribution in the following manner: “Aapke apne shahar main, bhai Sharma Electronics Badkali chip loading ka kaam bade pyaar se kiya jaata hai”(In your town, ­brother Sharma Electronics Badkali does “chip loading” work with love). As this announcement is made, N. K. Jagir Sharma is framed (along with his assistant) in his shop, sitting in front of a

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6.8  ​Mewati video cds in a mobile shop in Nuh, Mewat. A wide range of dvds share

space with Mewati videos in such shops. ­Here, the Mewati dvd Sexy Chori (Sexy girl) shares cover with the religious cd Mahakumbh 2010. 6.9  ​Mewati video cds in a mobile shop in Nuh, Mewat.

desktop computer, with stacks of cds, cassettes, and electronic equipment vis­i­ble in an open cabinet ­behind him. ­These gratitude-­filled introductory promotions in their public address have the feel of the thanks given by a master of ceremonies before or a­ fter a live program. The poetics of such an immediacy-­oriented rhetorical pre­sen­ta­ tion should not be missed: the narrator is talking to the fans and community as if he (Subin) and Asmeena are performing onstage, live in front of them as part of a public function. This communicative intimacy brings the lyricists and singers close to their fans and also increases their chance of being invited to perform. This form of verbal delivery also echoes invocation practices prevalent on religious and devotional cds. The constitution of publics by ­these videos resembles the idea of “publics” put forward by Michael Warner, who argues that the erroneous idealization (or perception) of “public discourse as conversation” fails to recognize its poetic function and hence its constitutive circularity.17 In the forms of public address espoused by the Mewati ­music videos, what is clearly apparent is that affect, poesis, and expressivity ­matter ­because they influence the circulatory fate of the propelled discourse. Subin advertises himself and his production com­pany. Th ­ ere is a noticeable synching of sound and subtitles: the digits of his phone number pop onscreen as he enunciates them. At one point, Subin himself appears and points t­oward the audience. In another instance, Asmeena appears in close-up, then almost winks (or briefly closes her eyes), and from her eyes emerge the words “Shayer Subin” (Poet Subin), which slowly advance ­toward the audience. Such stylizations of public address via video-­editing tools constitute audiences through which videos seek to flow and circulate. Subin sher Chandanki ke begins with an explosive song and rapidly edited shots of Asmeena matching steps with the female dancer Jyoti Alwar, then with the male performer Salim, and then again with Jyoti, but in a dif­fer­ent costume and location. Eight minutes into the video, Salim kneels on one knee holding Asmeena’s hand as she dances in a circle, and we hear Subin singing, “Barah-­battis-­baavan gaadi duniya main mashoor, com­pany Mata hain pyaari” (12-32-52 vehicle is popu­lar in the w ­ hole world, Mata com­pany is lovely). As ­these lines are sung, the sequence alternates between low-­angle shots of a board with the registration number 12-32-52, of the Mata truck com­pany, and of Salim and Asmeena dancing. On the audio track, we hear praise of the truck “hawah main poochi lehrari,” suggesting that the vehicle moves like waves in the wind. The next shot cuts from the dancing c­ ouple to a truck weaving on the road, thereby enacting the wavelike motion sung in its praise. The female 146 

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6.10  ​Salim and Asmeena. Still from the video Subin sher Chandanki ke.

voice of Madam Chanchal from Delhi, croons, “Fakru aur Sirazzuddin donu masti leeyera, Chandanki ka kama ke diyeda” (Both Fakru and Sirazzuddin [two males] are having fun [and] earning and giving to Chandanki). This portion of the lyr­ics prob­ably implies that Mata truck com­pany is a dependable employer that guarantees a satisfying work experience and good wages to the youth of Chandanki. Promotions keep reiterating, somewhat like the looping phenomena in dj tapes or remixed videos. When we began seeing the videos, we could not always understand how to read t­hese pointers to truck companies and electronic storeowners; we had to be trained into video literacy by our interviewees. Warner explains that a “public” is able to maintain its unity “by containing its potentially infinite extension.”18 As outsiders, our initial incomprehension about the publicity strategies deployed in ­these videos also indicates that the Mewati video public, through par­tic­u­lar choices of language, genre, medium, and address, is able to create a contingent social closure. The Mewati video public cannot be easily transposed upward to be linked to national Indian public opinion. Why ­were ­there numerous shots of young men posing with their mobile phones or riding bikes interspersed with song-­and-­dance per­for­mances? We posed this question to many of our research participants. One, a teacher, noted that the men had paid for their self-­promotion slots, and they liked to be seen with expensive and fash­ion­able mobiles and motorbikes; t­ hese trendy M icro S D - ­ing “ M ewati V ideos ”   147

6.11  ​Young man driving a motorbike. Still from the video Subin sher Chandanki ke.

consumer goods added to their self-­brand, their prestige. As t­ hese men w ­ ere promoted, the rhythm of the song would not change, nor would the structural grammar of the lyr­ics. The trick was to maintain a sense of continuity, the teacher explained, and this was achieved by putting a line together and making a slogan out of it: “Mewati bhasha main jod diya tukka . . . ​slogan bana diya uska.” The teacher referred to the following lines from a video: “Chora aa jaa re tu Pulsar per baith, Meena chalegi tere saath” (Boy, come riding on Pulsar, Meena ­will go with you). Pulsar is a locally popu­lar brand of motorcycle, and Meena is the female protagonist in that par­tic­u­lar Mewati video. Following this example, the teacher showed another video that connected the interactions between the romantic dancing pair and the mobile shop: “Chora aa jaa re, [Meena] chalenge uski [shop­keep­er’s name] dukan per” (Boy, come ­here, Meena ­will go with you to that shop). This way, the teacher said, “Dukan ka naam jod diya toh advertisement hogayi uski” (He [the singer] associated the narrative with the shop, and this way the shop’s advertisement got made). The ability to effortlessly insert witty juxtapositions and associations into romantic songs comes from the training of Mewati artists in folk theater (Nautanki) and in stage shows in which during live per­for­mances they habitually weave together contingent happenings and rehearsed narratives. Posing (identifying) or not posing (not identifying) with t­ hese products carries an “affective charge”: coolness, youthfulness, moral degradation, pro­ gress, normalcy, and hilarity.19 Motorbikes and mobile phones are desirable 148 

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possessions for the con­temporary youth. Our interviewees offered conflicting views about the relation between motorcycles and social status in the community: some said that a Meo youth needs a motorcycle before he can get married. Motorcycles are associated with a degree of maturity and with the attainment of adulthood. Other elders complained that the undue importance given to motorbikes added to the community’s woes. Many young men do not work or earn, but they aspire and spend f­ amily’s savings to get a bike. Another group resented that such materialistic desires w ­ ere giving rise to thefts in nearby districts. An el­derly gentleman noted that the community’s name was being compromised, explaining that the existing popu­lar perception outside the community was such that if a bike w ­ as stolen in the city of Delhi, the police would suspect a youth from the Mewat region. In Subin sher Chandanki ke, as the male protagonist is driving a Bolero jeep, we hear ­these lines: “Arey kitna paisa wallon Hamid mera yaar, Bolero ghar ki leeye raakhi” (So rich is my friend Hamid that he uses Bolero of his own ­house). The male voice continues to praise Hamid by communicating to his female co-performer that Hamid is rich but not profligate, ­because he is sensible with finances. The female performer acknowledges this by noting: “Baikhera gaon ka launda Mubin kehlereve, Chora hai dilawar saari duniya kehve” (Mubin says that [Hamid is] a young guy from Baikhera, the w ­ hole world says that the guy has a big heart). We can construe the repetitive posing with bikes, jeeps, and mobile phones (and sometimes with dancers) as a coming-­of-­age event: lads publicly declaring that they are men now and that their days of innocence are past. More significant, the obvious aspirational undertone in ­these videos—­and in the face of social censure—­suggests the emergence of a new cultural identity. This new identity is in part a regional one that comes from staying in the Mewat region, which has suffered from the apathy both of the state and among fellow Indian citizens. The new identity also has markers of “vernacular identity”: the emergence of such has been conceptualized by Ratnakar Tripathy based on his extensive fieldwork of the vernacular musical industry operating in the languages (and dialects) of Bhojpuri, Maithili, and Magahi in parts of Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh.20 Like ­these vernacular languages, Mewati also differs from mainstream Hindi, but the difference is limited enough that the Meo p­ eople are able to speak Hindi, and Hindi speakers from other regions can comprehend Mewati to some extent. The deployment of innuendo and suggestive lyr­ics in songs and the circulation of such through cell phones, both considered misdemeanors or mild M icro S D - ­ing “ M ewati V ideos ”   149

wrongdoings, are as much a part of the Bhojpuri and Haryanvi music-­v ideo scene as are Mewati videos.21 Tripathy categorically refuses to equate the “vernacular” with the “traditional,” arguing instead that the term vernacular stands for a “shifting combination of the traditional and the non-­traditional forms and practices employed by the ­music industries.”22 Both in terms of the circulatory assemblage and the publicity strategies, Mewati video culture combines the old with the new. ­Here again, the similarities of Mewati video culture with the vernacular m ­ usic culture elaborated by Tripathy are evident. We read the emergence of vernacular identities alongside the speculative heuristics of the subaltern-­popular to explore certain questions. Why express desire and aspiration when they are socially censured? The risks of such assertions—of desire, of being seen with female performers in videos—­could make it exceedingly difficult for young men to get married in their community. So why transgress? Why indulge at all? The analytical category of the subaltern, in the Gramscian vein, considers marginalized classes on their way to acquiring hegemony through collective strug­gle. However, the hyphenated concatenation of the subaltern and the popu­lar is not without its set of generative tensions.23 The “Gramscian assumption” that the “subaltern is defined by insufficient access to modes of repre­sen­ta­tion” makes it difficult to imagine how access to popu­lar media might help the subaltern. Furthermore, some subaltern studies scholars suspect ­whether popular-­media repre­sen­ta­tions could help forge collective agency. For Chattopadhyay and Sarkar, it might be useful “to think of the popu­ lar as the subaltern on its road to hegemony (and therefore repre­sen­ta­tion).”24 Meos are a marginalized community who use popular-­media repre­sen­ta­tions (­music videos) to make po­liti­cal and identity claims challenging hegemonic forces, and further publicize them through circulation networks. Hence, the applicability of the subaltern-­popular framework. The Meos living in the Mewat region may not get ­water due to the government’s structured infrastructural failures, but the community members have mobile phones and access to repre­sen­ta­tion. The Meos may not be able to “always” represent themselves, but they certainly can see their repre­sen­ta­tions or ­those of their community. We read the conceptualization of “repre­sen­ta­tion” in Swati Chattopadhyay and Bhaskar Sarkar’s essay on the subaltern and the popu­lar to encompass both po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion and media repre­sen­ta­ tion.25 The Mewati “boys” (choras) featured in the videos are from a relatively subaltern community. Some of them have come into a bit of money, due to which they now have access to media repre­sen­ta­tion (if not po­liti­cal repre­ 150 

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sen­ta­tion, though it is difficult to characterize the circulation of moving images and sounds in the popu­lar realm as utterly devoid of politics). The choras who appear in the videos might be rich within their own communities, but they (along with other members of their group) feel the hurt that their communities have suffered. And they would like to force a comparison between themselves and their vernacular identity on one hand and the elite ­middle class living in urban locations like Delhi on the other. Hence, the figuration of the Pulsar motorbike or the Bolero jeep, which asks the Mewati audience to aspire, to imaginatively travel from Mewat to Delhi, and at the same time invites the rebuke that the bike, or the jeep, just might have been stolen from Delhi. The subaltern-­popular becomes a framework by which to understand the aspirational forces unleashed by informal media circulations (based on new digital technologies) that inaugurate aspirational politics. Such an aspirational politics feeds on the tensions between regional vernacular identities and elite, urban, middle-­class social groupings. TRA NS LO CA L CON N ECTION S

Meos also reside in Pakistan and M ­ iddle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. Many Meo families migrated to Pakistan a­ fter Partition, in 1947, and this period also marked an increase in Muslim orthodoxy among the Meos of Mewat.26 An interviewee informed us that some of his friends had moved to the M ­ iddle East for “chote-­kaam” (low jobs), that is, to work as d­ rivers, carpenters, and laborers. Th ­ ese narratives of earlier Partition-­related and relatively con­temporary employment-­focused migration also explain the translocal viewership of Mewati videos. We found comments on Mewati videos uploaded on YouTube posted by Internet users who identified themselves as Meos living in Pakistan or the ­Middle East. Meo relatives who visit Mewat tend to bring back cds of Mewati cinema (and maybe, more discreetly, Mewati videos). While we ­were ­doing fieldwork in 2012, our research participants uniformly noted that Salaheri ka Bodyguard was a popu­lar recent release in Mewat; it was based on Bodyguard (2011), a popu­lar Bollywood film starring Salman Khan. The localization of the Bollywood film often begins with renaming, ­here by adding to the title a reference to “Salaheri,” a village in the Mewat region. Reappropriation of Bollywood songs occurs in vari­ous ways in ­these videos, and entwines both “negation” and “negotiation.”27 “Munni badnam hui, darling tere liye” (Munni has become notorious b­ ecause of you, darling) M icro S D - ­ing “ M ewati V ideos ”   151

was a popular song from another film featuring Salman Khan, Dabangg (2012). Mewati video singers keep the tune of the original Bollywood number, but impose their own lyr­ics and singing style. Such a remixing finds unique local appeal. In this par­tic­u­lar Mewati rendition of the song, a young man expresses lustful feelings for his sister-­in-­law, and she reciprocates. male character [a young man]: Main to badnam hua o, bhabhi tere liye. . . . ​Bhabhi ke honth rasile, naiyan katile, ang rangile re [I have become notorious ­because of you, sister-­in-­law. . . . ​​ ­Sister-­in-­law’s lips are juicy, eyes are perfectly s­ haped, and body parts are colorful] female character [the man’s sister-­in-­law]: Kya . . . ​sach . . . ​aan . . . ​ main bhi badnaam hui o dewar tere liye . . . ​Dewar ki nazar katili, umar rasili, chail chabili re [What, ­really! I also have become notorious b­ ecause of you, brother-­in-­law. Brother-­in-­law’s eyes are perfectly ­shaped, age is savory, and he is a flamboyant dandy] In the original movie, we are not sure of the female protagonist Munni’s relationship with the male protagonist, Chulbul Pandey, played by Khan in Dabangg; however, in the Mewati video version, the female protagonist has no name; but only the relationship is defined, that is, of a young man and his sister-­ in-­law, who are attracted to each other. It is precisely t­ hese rather explicit attacks on the sacredness of familial and marital relations in the videos to which our interviewees objected—­they found it in “bad taste” (gande). Cherished societal values are ­violated through such transgressive lyr­ics.28 The numerous comments posted on YouTube give further pointers about how Meos feel their culture is threatened by ­these ­music videos. Sample this online comment by Oasim Khurni: “Mewati has their own culture so become a mewati that have good tradition. Songs are symbol of a culture so please do not spoil the name of mewaties.” What are the historically specific and geo­graph­i­cally defined tasteful aesthetics upheld in Mewat that t­hese ­music videos violate? Several locals explained that the songs are unusually blunt for the ideas expressed, such as love, physical promiscuity, and illicit relationships. In Mewat, p­ eople speak Hindi, Urdu, Haryanvi, and Mewati. Urdu, locally considered the language of the educated and learned, is known for its poetic nature and sophistication. The lyr­ics of Mewati videos come across as too unsophisticated for a population that aspires to dip in the essence of Urdu; ­here, sophistication also gets associated 152 

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with ambivalence, with manners. Many locals to whom we talked associated the lyr­ics’ tendency t­ oward bluntness with the deleterious influence of Haryanvi. While Haryana is the state within which Mewat district falls, the Mewati community continues to maintain its liminal identity with a sense of hurt and pride. Several locals ­were quick to differentiate the “sweetness” of their Mewati dialect from the “coarseness” of Haryanvi. Such linguistic discrimiation serves as a marker of taste—it also indicates an ambivalence t­oward translocal connections, and still further perhaps, functions as a form of cultural regulation of translocal media borrowings. CO DA

Our intervention has three key foci. Like Ramon Lobato, we are interested in informal distributive networks; furthermore, widening his research canvas, we believe that textual strategies and circulatory practices cannot be separated while studying video cultures.29 Mewati videos as texts not only address their potential publics, like truck ­drivers and Mewati youth, but also anticipate the circulatory practices of their own distribution by prescribing actions to be undertaken as part of sustaining the distribution assemblage. Salim and Asmeena’s romantic duet in the m ­ usic video for Subin sher Chandanki ke has bridging lines about getting one’s chip loaded in Sharma’s electronics store. Studying the repre­sen­ta­tional tactics and circulation practices in Mewati videos helps one grasp the aspirational politics of vernacular identities, but po­liti­cal mobilization is not the central purpose of ­these videos. The key effect of such videos has been the creation of a Mewati video public held together by affective resonances and technocultural circulation practices. The songs do not always carry explicit po­liti­cal messages, but rather their politics lies in bringing a community together, in being able to imagine an intimate public gathered—with Meo youths and ­people like them. Second, both the video-­making experiences inspired by live folk theater (Nautanki) and the video-­viewing experiences marked by risks of getting caught have a performative dimension. Inspired by media anthropologists, we have explored such media practices as moments of conjuncture between “the prescriptive and the spontaneous.”30 However, this poststructuralist performative move is incomplete without a posthuman affirmation of the dynamism of technological objects like msd cards and dvd players, whose iterative intra-­ activity we have studied following Barad.31 M icro S D - ­ing “ M ewati V ideos ”   153

As outsiders to Mewati culture and language, we have walked the tightrope between recognizing reservations against the videos—­comprehending why classifications of tastes are what they are in the community—­and emphasizing some of the aspirational and liberating potentials of ­these videos. The publicity strategies deployed during the production and circulation of the videos need to be appreciated for both their rhetorical poesis and their entrepreneurial acumen. Therefore, third and most significant, our effort has been to unearth the epistemological productivity of ­these publicity strategies within a constellation of media technologies and their cultural reappropriations. > NOTE S  ​

The authors would like to thank Multimedia Computing Group at Delft University of Technology and stitpro Foundation for funding part of this research; ibm Research India and the srf Foundation for providing support in the field; and vari­ous Mewati for actively participating in this research. We sincerely thank Martha Larson of the Multimedia Computing Group (tu Delft), and Nitrendra Rajput of ibm Research India, for supporting and encouraging our field research. Suggestions from participants at the Asian Video Cultures workshop at Brown University, October 24–26, 2013, w ­ ere helpful. We are highly indebted to the coeditors of this volume for their patient guidance. ­Later research was supported by the Mellon-funded Humanities + Urbanism + Design forum at University of Pennsylvania. 1

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Spread across the states of Haryana and Rajasthan, the Mewat region lies southwest of Delhi. The historic Mewat region roughly covers the districts of Mewat; the city of Gurgaon, in Haryana; and the districts of Alwar, Bharatpur, and Dholpur, in Rajasthan. In 2005, the government of Haryana created a district of the same name. The Mewat district located in the state of Haryana is around seventy kilo­meters from New Delhi. This essay is based on field research done in villages of the Mewat district in 2012. As a cultural community, Meos maintain a distinctly liminal identity as they are erstwhile Hindus (Gujjars, Meena, and Raj­ puts) who converted to Islam centuries ago yet continue to preserve their beliefs and practices from the pre-­Islamic past. See Yoginder Sikand, “Meonis of Mewat,” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly, 11 March 1995. Meos have been subjugated throughout medieval and con­temporary history by successive state regimes due to a variety of socioreligious issues, including the Meos’ unique identity, which fails to fit into the modern Hindu-­Muslim binary divisions. See Shail Mayaram, Against History, Against State: Counterperspectives from the Margin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). On po­liti­cal society, see Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popu­lar Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). R A H U L M U K H E R J E E A N D A B H I G YA N S I N G H

On cultures of informality, see Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). On the subaltern-­popular, see Swati Chattopadhyay and Bhaskar Sarkar, “Introduction: The Subaltern and the Popu­lar,” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 4 (2005): 357–63. 3 Chatterjee, 2004, The Politics of the Governed. 4 Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema; Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron, Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2013). 5 ­There is a severe scarcity of ­water—­many times, when our interviewees hosted us for lunch, conversations emerged about how they had to deal with an uneven ­water supply on an everyday basis. The large portion of the rural population in Mewat lives in utter poverty and is plagued by a lack of basic infrastructure. Many Meo men in Salaheri complained that development funds allocated for the eco­ nom­ically backward region of Mewat ­were siphoned off by corrupt officials or used to further develop the already developed districts of Haryana. 6 Chattopadhyay and Sarkar, “Introduction.” 7 It is impor­tant to note the difference between msd and sim (Subscriber Identity Module) cards. An msd card is a removable flash memory card used for storing data in mobile phones and other electronic devices (like digital cameras and audio players). A sim card is used for storing a mobile subscriber’s identity and telephony. A significant channel of Mewati video distribution starts with flow of vcds, that is, mobile walas receive Mewati videos in vcd format from the production com­pany. Mobile walas then use the vcd to generate other file formats (3gp, mp4 . . . ​) that make the videos viewable for memory cards and mobile phones. Furthermore, Peter Manuel has updated his work on vernacular ­music practices in India by discussing the shift from cassette culture to vcd culture. We do think that since 2009, the memory card culture also needs to be seen as interweaved with the vcd culture. See Peter Manuel, “Popu­lar ­Music as Popu­lar Expression in North India and the Bhojpuri Region, from Cassette Culture to VCD Culture,” South Asian Popu­lar Culture 10, no. 3 (2012): 223–36. Fi­nally, much of our study on memory cards in Mewat was conducted in 2012, and t­ hings are changing ­there as well with many of our interview participants nowadays using WhatsApp for sharing songs to some extent. That said, our recent research in peri-­urban Delhi and Gaya suggests wide use of memory cards on feature phones for ­music sharing/listening among working-class populations in many parts of India. 8 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 9 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 39. 10 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 118. 11 Karen Barad differentiates “interaction,” which assumes “­there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction,” from the notion of “intra-­action,” which “recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge M icro S D - ­ing “ M ewati V ideos ”   155

through, their intra-­actions.” Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of ­Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 33. 12 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. 13 Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 14 Shafiqur Rahman Khan, “Mewati Blockbusters Capturing Local Culture through Cinema,” Bring to an End (blog), January 7, 2009, http://­bringtoanend​.­blogspot​ .­com​/­2009​/­01​/­mewati​-­blockbusters​-­capturing​-­local​.­html. 15 Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (New York: Routledge, 2009), 126. 16 Sundaram, Pirate Modernity, 127. 17 Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–90. 18 Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 84. 19 Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 73. 20 Ratnakar Tripathy, “­Music Mania in Small-­town Bihar: Emergence of Vernacular Identities,” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 47, no. 22 (2012): 58–66. 21 Jeffrey and Doron, Cell Phone Nation. 22 Tripathy, “­Music Mania in Small-­town Bihar,” 58. 23 See Chattopadhyay and Sarkar, “Introduction. 24 Chattopadhyay and Sarkar, “Introduction,” 360. 25 Chattopadhyay and Sarkar, “Introduction.” 26 Pratap C. Aggarwal, “A Muslim Sub-­caste of North India: Prob­lems of Cultural Integration,” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 4 (September 10, 1966): 159–61. 27 Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 28 Again, songs like “Munni badnam hui” cannot be considered pure Bollywood imports, for such songs have been circulating in Nautanki and vari­ous vernacular idioms for four de­cades, with the original version, “Launda badnam hua naseeban tere liye,” sung by Raziya Begum in 1971. ­Later improvisations have been rendered in Bhojpuri, and other remixes have also flourished in Jabalpur and parts of Pakistan. Refer to Paromita Vohra’s documentary Partners in Crime (2011) for details. 29 Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema. 30 Ursula Rao, “Embedded/Embedding Media Practices and Cultural Production,” in Theorizing Media and Practice, ed. Birgit Brauchler and John Postill (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 147–68. 31 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Espousing a Baradian framework (rather than a Latourian framing), we want to keep our research open to new empirical findings that complicate perceived gendered agencies and that are able to describe how ­women in the Meo community interact with ­these videos, how do they use their phones and memory cards, and in what ways do they interpret 156 

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t­hese videos. ­Women in the Mewat district may not frequent the masculinist bazaar spaces of mobile shops, but that does not imply that they do not watch ­music videos on their phones or with their partners on DVD players. Neha Kumar’s work on mobile phone usage by ­women in India suggests that gender technology divide might be a m ­ atter of perception rather than real­ity. See Kumar, “The Gender Technology Divide or Perceptions of Non-­use,” First Monday 20, no. 11, November 2015, http://­journals​.­uic​.e­ du​/­ojs​/­index​.­php​/­fm​/­article​/­view​/­6300​/­5133.

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DOCUMENTING “IMMIGRANT B R I D E S ” I N M U LT I C U LT U R A L TA I WA N

Tzu-­hui Celina Hung

A “M A I NS TRE AM” TAIWAN ESE DOCU MEN TARY?

For avid followers of Taiwanese documentaries, the new millennium has ushered in an era that at once promises greater visibility and sparks debate for local productions.1 Not only did Gift of Life (2003), Jump! Boys (2004), and Let It Be (2004) make rare headway into commercial theaters and join a few local fiction features in securing moderate box-­office success, but from 2010 to 2014 documentaries continuously won Taipei Film Festival’s coveted ­Grand Prize.2 However, for all ­these bursts of energy, Taiwanese critics like Li-­hsin Kuo have expressed concern about the rise of a “mainstream” documentary mode.3 In an article that critiques the aforesaid documentary titles, Kuo cautions against the industry’s turn to sappy cultural politics.4 He notes that instead of exposing the malfunctioning social structure, mainstream documentaries often capitalize on sentimentalist images of joy and grief and, in ­doing so, reduce subaltern strug­gles for rights and recognition to depoliticized commodities for the multicultural market.5 Although recent critics are quick to follow Kuo in identifying this repre­ sen­ta­tional prob­lem, most fail to address it in relation to the industry’s overall stakes. As Daw-­Ming Lee notes, Taiwan lacks a core documentary viewership,

and rarely do local documentaries break even on production costs.6 Despite several successful cases, theater releases are generally uncommon and unprofitable, as are tele­vi­sion broadcasts, dvd distribution, video-­on-­demand ser­vices, and Web postings.7 Interpreting local documentaries’ admission to mainstream spheres of consumption on the basis of a few box-­office exceptions is thus misleading, since viewership is by and large scant. In addition, encountering images overflowing with saccharine emotions, critics tend to attribute the style solely to documentary filmmakers; without considering the structural circumstances shaping the production pro­cess, such an analy­sis often inadvertently fixes documentary’s diverse social roles on an impossible moral high ground. Insofar as the critique of sentimentalism and depoliticization aims to expose how some documentaries fail to yield meaningful public debates on minority issues, it necessitates a simultaneous account of the industry’s practical constraints and the wider media culture. Indeed, it requires an account of how documentary not only reflects but also actively responds to the symptoms of the dominant multiculturalist paradigm in Taiwan, as the public demand for civil recognition and participation built up quickly at the turn of the new millennium.8 NE W I M M I GRA N T DOCU MEN TARIES IN TH E CONT EX T O F NE O LI BE RA L MU LTICU LTU RALISM

In this essay I respond to ongoing debates surrounding the development of Taiwanese documentary in the new millennium. My inquiry pivots on the argument that the current stakes of documentary practices serve to illuminate the structural contradictions under­lying state policies and popu­lar rhe­toric regarding multiculturalism as Taiwan has come u­ nder the influence of neoliberal marketization across Asia Pacific since the 1990s. Rather than reiterating documentary’s recent association with commercial cinemas, I examine its social engagement and practical challenges at the much more common but underfunded and unevenly developed sites of production and circulation—­ namely, tele­vi­sion broadcast, community outreach, and social activism—so as to understand what Paola Voci calls documentary’s “smaller-­screen” realities.9 Since tele­vi­sion is the primary and longest-­running local platform that uses documentaries to circulate middlebrow ideas of multiculturalism, I draw examples from Tsung-­lung Tsai’s landmark tele­vi­sion video trilogy in 2003, about female marital immigrants, or new immigrant w ­ omen, from China and Southeast Asia. Through the trilogy, I show how the constraints of tele­vi­sion D ocumenting " I mmigrant B rides "   159

and its related media environment shape the ways documentarians portray minority strug­gles in response to the incongruous demands of the volatile multicultural market. A snapshot of marriage migration to Taiwan in the late twentieth ­century explains why documentary repre­sen­ta­tion of this phenomenon elucidates the entanglement of the neoliberal logic and the local politics of recognition. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, Taiwan has witnessed an increasing rate of marriage between local men, mostly from a working-­class background, and ­women from China and Southeast Asia, with the numbers reaching a rec­ord high of 32 ­percent of the total marriages in 2003.10 This phenomenon corresponds to Taiwan’s shifting political-­economic position since the 1970s, when the country, ­under significant state intervention, followed Japan and South ­Korea in becoming a robust part of the U.S.-­led global neoliberal market by way of its labor-­intensive, export-­oriented light industries.11 Over the next three de­cades, Taiwan was swept up in the rise and ­trembles of Asia-­Pacific economies. As domestic ­labor dried up, both internal and foreign capitals began to respond vigorously to what Aihwa Ong calls the Chinese axis, which describes the large-­scale changes of investment practices following China’s 1978 economic reform, especially with its capital-­attracting zoning technologies and, ­after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, growing influence on neighboring Asian economies.12 Struggling to adapt to this fiercely reconfigured market, since 1993 the Taiwanese government has proposed several versions of the Southbound Economic Policy, with the goal of encouraging business investments to Southeast Asia and balancing the outflow of capital to China.13 Crucial to this initiative, notes Kristin Surak, is the guest-­worker program.14 Since the beginning, the program has aimed to draw cheaper Southeast Asian ­labor into the areas of public infrastructure and domestic ser­vice, meanwhile outsourcing the risks and duties of management to the competitive market itself, involving recruiters, employers, and employees. The value of foreign ­labor increased consequently, but so did practices of exploitation.15 Transnational marriage brokerage bloomed in like manner, as the lack of eligible local w ­ omen pushed low-­income Taiwanese bachelors and divorcés to seek partners from developing countries like China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. Unfortunately, while the new immigrant ­women provided non­­ remunerable domestic l­ abor for the Taiwanese families they married into, they ­were also frequently subjected to l­ egal discrimination and cultural chauvinism for their gender, religions, nationalities, and ethnoracial profiles.16 Transna-

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tional gendered and racialized l­ abor, in short, is a crucial instrument and product of the Taiwanese economy in the late twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, as the country adapts strenuously to bulldozing global capitalism. The Taiwanese market’s growing reliance on transnational ­labor coincides with the society’s emerging politics of multicultural recognition, in the budding form, and guise, of liberal democracy, especially regarding national and ethnic identities. With Kuomintang’s one-­party martial-­law rule ending in the late 1980s, activists and legislators began to push for minority rights and civil participation. For example, calls for aboriginal civil rights and the re­introduction of the long-­disparaged Hoklo and Hakka folk cultures resulted in several nationwide multicultural provisions through the 1990s and early 2000s.17 As Charles Taylor and Elizabeth Povinelli contest, however, the ­actual practices of the modern liberal state often produce an ossifying, sleight-­ of-­hand concept of difference.18 In Taiwan, the nominal recognition of the four major ethnic groups—­Hoklo, Hakka, Mainlander, and aboriginal—­has not translated to adequate po­liti­cal agency or public debates about class and other differences within each, much less about the evolving nature of ­these ethnic categories.19 Differences are accommodated in a superficial and “cunning” way, to borrow from Povinelli, by the multiculturalist paradigm, which thrives on public rhe­toric of a feel-­good but fake consensus.20 Even as localism and Taiwanese-­ness crystallized into a distinct national identity, ­labor mi­grants and marital immigrants from developing countries have remained largely excluded from the Taiwan-­centric imagination of upward mobility and cosmopolitanism, despite their contribution to the country’s economic development and culture. It is this ironic combination of neoliberal inclusion and sociopo­liti­cal exclusion of difference that has conditioned Taiwan’s decades-­ long media repre­sen­ta­tion of new immigrant w ­ omen. As Hsiao-­Chuan Hsia shows, although media interest in new immigrant ­women surged in the 1990s, most coverage at the time consisted of sensationalist tele­vi­sion and newspaper reports typecasting ­these ­women as social prob­lems and second-­class citizens with ­little social standing other than that of a “foreign bride.”21 As the new immigrant population peaked in the early 2000s, they entered the multicultural curricula of pretertiary education and became the keenly sought-­after subjects of local documentaries: some as in­de­pen­dent productions and some commissioned by Public Tele­vi­sion Ser­vice (pts). Indeed, pts’s regular documentary program, Viewpoint, has become the most common broadcasting venue since its launch in 1999. Exhibiting greater

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warmth and subtlety, documentary and other repre­sen­ta­tional endeavors of this recent period frequently utilize firsthand testimonies to create an integrationist tone for the ideal middle-­class viewership. The effect is double-­edged: transnational families as such are often portrayed as inferior, undesirable, but worthy of compassion. For example, in 2003, the influential CommonWealth magazine published a controversial issue, “New Taiwanese ­Children,” which discusses how ­children of new immigrants, what with the adversities they face, may thwart the society’s competitiveness and cultural well-­being. In what Yen-­Ling Tsai describes as a “discourse of crisis” rooted in the neoliberal restructuring of Taiwan’s international status, the magazine wrapped prejudice in the language of tolerance and paternalistic concern, calling this new population a h­ uman wave “creeping up on Taiwan” and an “impact” to be “dealt with.”22 As new immigrant documentaries mushroomed in response to the demand of multicultural recognition, further contradictions began to grip the industry. For instance, most of the existing productions take f­ amily as the pa­ram­e­ter of repre­sen­ta­tion and the primary locus of dramas and prob­lems; few have ventured to offer critical accounts of global capitalism or comparison between Taiwan and other involved Asian economies. To echo Kuo’s criticism of sentimentalism, despite rising public curiosity about ­these sympathy-­ winning immigrant stories, t­ here is an embarrassing lack of concurrent reforms in immigration and international l­abor laws. This is aggravated by the perpetual lack of funding and other concrete support from the government and private sectors that could have brought minority discourse beyond pleas­ur­ able consumption, such as of food culture, and beyond token instruments of electoral campaigns. Tsung-­lung Tsai’s tele­vi­sion trilogy, as one of the best-­ known new immigrant documentary videos produced out of t­hese contradictions, therefore is well positioned to shed light on the thorny realities that the neoliberal multiculturalist paradigm imposes on industry practices: how documentarians, especially ­those relying on the tele­vi­sion system and erratic platforms like the Internet and local community centers, juggle between the market’s incommensurate promises and demands in issues like staffing, funding, viewership, artistic ambition, and educational goals; what kind of multicultural mediascape is being s­ haped thereof, when documentary, despite its potential to steer public debates, remains at the margin of Taiwanese media culture; and how filmmakers ally with one another or avail themselves of vari­ ous venues of expression other than commercial theaters, in order to foster critical conversations with the public. 162 

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D O CUM E NTA RY VIDEOS: F ROM P O L­ ITI C­ AL OP P OSI T I ON TO THE TE LE V ­ I S­ ION SY STEM

State-­promoted documentaries for news and propaganda had been featured on Taiwanese tele­vi­sion long before the 1980s. However, it was not u­ ntil the mid-1980s that a distinct history of New Taiwanese Documentary took shape. Grassroots video collectives, primarily Green Team and Third Image, engaged documentary in politics by recording oppositional movements in the inexpensive, easy-­to-­copy video format and by using unofficial outlets like campaign venues and night markets for fast video distribution.23 In the 1990s, as tele­ vi­sion opened up to vari­ous in­de­pen­dent and state-­or corporate-­sponsored documentaries, community-­based cultural work made a parallel contribution by taking documentaries to the streets and community centers. ­These efforts kept the industry characteristically multisited, mobile, and individualized. An example was the video Moon C ­ hildren (1990), initially planned for a twenty-­ five-­minute tele­vi­sion broadcast, but eventually staged as an island-­wide roadshow in its entire sixty-­three minutes by the director Yi-­feng Wu and his production team, Full Shot.24 From 1995 through 1998, as V8 cameras became increasingly affordable, the team used the state funding to run the Community Documentary Filmmaker’s Training Program, teaching amateurs how to rec­ord vanishing histories of families and communities. Documentary thereby transitioned from an instrument for po­liti­cal opposition into one for community building. In­de­pen­dent productions as such would go on to gain official recognition and find a more stable circulation platform and funding source, albeit meager, when Taiwan’s sole in­de­pen­dent documentary program, Viewpoint, launched in 1999, one year ­after its channel, pts, was established.25 The liberalization of media, however, is not value-­free. The growing number of channels on cable and broadcast tele­v i­sion guarantees fiercer, if not dirtier, competition. Although public-­television broadcasting provides necessary balance to consumer culture, ­running service-­oriented programs ­under the threat of co-optation and marginalization by the market logic is an onerous task. Following other avant-­garde and pop-­culture products, documentary was brought onto the shelves of bookstore corporations, like Eslite, in the new millennium. Documentary consumption has thus become a sign of chic and sophistication, regularly cemented by filmmakers, writers, and critics who grace the art-­loving hipsters at bookstore-­run cultural events.26 Nevertheless, the industry’s overall production environment did not benefit much from ­these ceremonial praises, and the tele­vi­sion system is a particularly vexD ocumenting " I mmigrant B rides "   163

ing example. In 2002, Chaowei Chang (co-­founder and currently chief producer of cnex) expressed concerns about the morass of shortsightedness, amateurism, poor execution, and lack of stable viewership and bud­getary support, which have perennially trapped the industry.27 This is in spite of the increased cross-­fertilization between programming, sponsorship, and talents across con­temporary East Asian small-­screen industries.28 At Viewpoint, bureaucratic concerns over cost-­effectiveness, viewer ratings, recruits, and so on are everyday realities, and public-­television broadcast is a regular reminder that media productions are rarely born of one in­de­pen­dent mastermind. Instead, they reflect the toil of teamwork and the hope for the ideal of multicultural recognition to reach enough viewers and remain financially ­v iable.29 Consider the bud­getary constraint presented in Daw-­Ming Lee’s statistical study: at pts, a one-­hour documentary by ju­nior documentarians normally receives a bud­get of NT$800,000–1,000,000 (US$26,500–33,000), or up to NT$1,200,000 (US$39,700) if by se­nior ones. Ten ­percent is usually the director’s salary, which, if divided by the average production time of one year, is lower than the official minimum monthly wage.30 While some better-­known directors may receive special subsidies from government and corporate sponsors, like the National Culture and Arts Foundation and the Business Weekly Group, ju­nior ones generally strug­gle to make ends meet. Chang also laments the station’s subcontracting tradition: besides using its limited in-­house directors, pts frequently commissions documentary proj­ects to external production teams. In ­either case, the proj­ect must follow the rigidly controlled one-­hour broadcast duration. Preliminary research is commonly conducted by young gradu­ates who are inexperienced, undertrained, and underpaid.31 Lacking professionalism and long-­term planning, pts is frequently criticized for reducing documentary to contract-­based journalism and for being more interested in purchasing foreign documentaries than investing in local talents.32 Even though Viewpoint remains the primary venue of documentary viewing, it is rare, according to Lee, for any episode to reach a viewer rating of 0.21 (equivalent to 42,000 viewers) or higher.33 In recent years, the volatility of viewership worsened as the emerging film-­festival culture diverted public attention from the longstanding interaction between Taiwan’s evolving tele­vi­sion network and documentary making. When pts was launched, in 1998, the Taipei Film Festival and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival w ­ ere also held for the first time; the South Taiwan Film Festival soon joined the scene, in 2000. Although some local documentaries, 164 

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like Let It Be, are notable film-­festival winners, rarely are they known for being a public-­television product to begin with. THE “NE W I M MIG RAN T W ­ OMEN ” MEDIASCAP E

Such are the conditions u­ nder which new immigrant documentaries have captured the public eyes since 2000. Among t­ hese works is Tsung-­lung Tsai’s “immigrant brides” trilogy (2003), which represents the contradictions of this mediascape as it joins other fictional and documentary works in responding to the racialized and gendered market of inter-­Asian encounters. The trilogy appeared at a propitious time, when civil-­rights groups had gathered significant momentum to both challenge policy makers and prelude a sea of education-­ motivated repre­sen­ta­tions. In 2003, when the country’s record-­breaking demographic shift in transnational marriages caused a media stir, at least seven in­de­pen­dent documentaries on the subject of new immigrants w ­ ere released. ­These include Tsai’s trilogy, which pts commissioned and broadcast. In a mix of fly-­on-­the-­wall observation, interviews, and direct participation, Tsai’s videos have since become the best known, although not the first, of local documentaries that chronicle the troubled w ­ aters of commercialized transnational marriages. The first episode, My Imported Wife (我的強娜威), focalizes the communication prob­lems between Nai-­hui Huang, a man who suffers physical disadvantages from ce­re­bral palsy and who is an activist for marital immigrants himself, and Navy, his much younger wife from Cambodia. The second episode, My Imported Bride (黑仔討老婆), rec­ords the pro­cess of marriage brokerage in Vietnam and the isolated, infantilized life of Ah-­luan, the Viet­ nam­ese immigrant, since her arrival in Taiwan. In the last episode, Marriages on the Borders (中國新娘在台灣), Tsai turns his camera to Chinese marital immigrants fighting for their rights in Taiwan, as divorcees, m ­ others, and citizens. This budding ethnographic interest has quickly expanded into a multisited, multimedia frenzy: at film festivals, in tele­vi­sion dramas and variety shows, in picture books, and in government pamphlets. Over the next few years, professional documentary workers ­were further joined by l­ abor mi­grants and marital immigrants alike who w ­ ere ­eager to explore digital video technology’s portability and affordability to rec­ord their own stories. Some notable collaborations include Let’s Not Be Afraid! (2010), produced by TransAsia S­ isters Association, and Out/Marriage (2012), produced by Tsai and directed by his Viet­nam­ ese immigrant wife, Kim Hong Nguyen. Nguyen, for example, draws on her D ocumenting " I mmigrant B rides "   165

unhappy first marriage to unfold her immigrant friends’ experiences as divorcees and single parents residing in both countries.34 But this multicultural fervor was only part of a mix of jarring phenomena, of which My Imported Wife is an example: available on tele­vi­sion and the Internet, the documentary is also often screened at the community centers of immigrant-­populated townships and taught at universities in programs like media studies, sociology, and education. Although the variety of public spaces generated thereof seem at first like signs of nationwide multicultural awakening, the trilogy’s title, Immigrant Brides, betrays the ongoing pattern of societal prejudice against w ­ omen from developing economies. Also in 2003, the local feminist organ­ization Awakening Foundation protested with immigrant groups against the widespread derogatory label “foreign brides” (or “mainland brides” in the case of Chinese immigrants) and urged ­people to use terms like “new immigrants” or “new residents” instead. Although the government has now a­ dopted ­these new terms, the “foreign brides” image persists in popu­lar media such that, in 2007, pts produced a drama series, ­Don’t Call Me Foreign Bride, precisely to make this criticism explicit. All in all, although pts and its satellite stations, like Hakka tv and Taiwan Indigenous tv, continue to produce educational programs featuring ­ethnic minority cultures, the umbrella public-­television system never manages to bring viewer ratings, production bud­gets, and revenues on a par with the much more aggressively commercialized stations. New immigrants and other foreign residents have instead become tele­vi­sion favorites in popu­lar entertainment shows, where they mostly serve the superficial function of exhibition and entertainment, and are grouped almost invariably on the basis of skin color, gender, and country of origin. TS UNG-­LUNG TSAI’S I M M I G RA NT BRI DES TRIL OGY

It is not by accident that the release of Tsai’s trilogy coincided with ­these socioeconomic, po­liti­cal, and cultural shifts on the cusp of the new millennium. Although by then the Southbound Economic Policy had brought considerable ­labor force from transnational mi­grants and had indirectly contributed to civil debates of multicultural inclusion as well as to controversial acts like the Foreign Spouse Care and Consultation Fund (2005–­pres­ent), overall it has provided Taiwan with ­little defense against the changing neoliberal market framework in Asia Pacific. For local documentary workers like Tsai, then, the strug­gle of carving a repre­sen­ta­tional space for social critique, be166 

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tween the upsurge of media voyeurism and the scarcity of tangible resources, becomes one of exposing the unwanted results and public anxiety left ­behind by the machine of global neoliberal marketization. But the outcome is fraught with contradictions. In the case of the trilogy, not only is its achievement contingent on Tsai’s mixed styles of narration and his intricate relation with the filmed subjects, but it also ambivalently reflects pts’s bud­getary and programming limitations, as well as the market value of an ingrained middlebrow imagination of cultural difference. “BEST ACTO R” I N A R E AL S TOR Y

Produced for Viewpoint ­under the supervision of pts’s News Division, the Immigrant Brides series aims to undo the problem-­based pattern of demonization in news media, and to provide the h­ uman story with depth, complexity, and first-­person points of view. But instead of lining up positive, corrective repre­sen­ta­tions to combat ste­reo­types, the series takes a bolder route. Take, for example, the explosive verbal fights and other domestic frays between Nai-­hui Huang and Navy in My Imported Wife: with arguments based on language barriers, gendered ­labors, financial strug­gles, communication with in-­laws, child rearing, xenophobia, and disability issues, the assemblage of the married c­ ouple’s jarring views renders this minority repre­sen­ta­tion not only dramatic but also disturbingly candid. At vari­ous moments, the episode even pres­ents the c­ ouple as being flawed with regard to their own biases. The effect is that, rather than being stock characters in news headlines, the married c­ ouple emerge as real, complex individuals who use their own means to manage prob­lems as do any average families. Although the trilogy attempts to go beyond the s­ imple villain-­victim dichotomy, it employs no shortage of middlebrow, melodramatic gestures. Indeed, the traction gained by the trilogy’s new immigrant families builds on the ­voy­eur­is­tic, novelty-­seeking logic of documentary epistephilia. The first episode, for instance, gains cachet partly from Huang’s profile as a physically challenged immigrant activist and a camera-­ready, wittily articulate, sometimes overbearing public figure, who works several jobs and strug­gles to be the head of the h­ ouse. The second episode, similarly, sets focus on the clandestine scenes of marriage brokerage and the sad spectacle of A-­luan’s isolation in Taiwan. In ­these two cases, the condition of multicultural recognition is inseparable from the trilogy’s curiosity value and its rendering of new immigrant families as “dif­fer­ent.” This logic of difference creates a two-­edged effect. Although the usual criticism is commodification and objectification, whereby new immigrant families D ocumenting " I mmigrant B rides "   167

may be portrayed as lacking in agency, this assumption proves simplistic when placed alongside moments in which the filmed characters speak out on their own “roles.” In a humorous outtake during the final credits of My Imported Wife, Huang jokes that he feels like a “best actor”; Navy, likewise, says she wants to show the video to her friends. Similar displays of the filmed characters’ self-­ assurance and ease abound in the episode, such as when Huang emphatically instructs his friend to “say nothing but plain truth” when the latter is interviewed. Tsai commented that, unlike other average documentary characters, Huang knew what and how he wanted to be shot. For Tsai, the shooting pro­cess therefore required careful exercise of directorship to ensure that his narration would remain in­de­pen­dent of the characters’ tendency to coach.35 Additionally, by making explicit the married c­ ouple’s playful interaction with the camera, Tsai dislodges the popu­lar assumption that minority individuals are weak and incapable of prob­lem solving. THE VA LU E OF DIFFE R E N C E

Nonetheless, the series’ focus on the characterization of foreign “brides” and its sequencing of episodes by country of origin ultimately fortify the exotic appeal of superficial cultural difference more than redefine what difference ­really means. On more than one occasion, Tsai expressed disquiet regarding his awkward insertion into Taiwan’s official multiculturalist establishment: that his trilogy is frequently labeled as a standard multicultural text, that he is considered a minority advocate, and that some viewers jokingly liken the trilogy to an immigrant-­bride cata­log.36 On the ­whole, the videos’ ethnographic draw eclipses the very prob­lems they intend to expose. That the videos are known primarily for the exotic contents and not for their embedded debates continues to dominate the manner in which the new immigrant issue is treated in local entertainment and news media. This is despite the recent appearance of a few documentary videos on similar subjects—­such as Lesbian Factory (2010), by the Taiwan International Workers Association, and Dream Hair Salon (2012), by pts—­that are sharper in their socio-­activist focus. Pitting documentaries of activist and investigative goals against ­those of ethnographic ones would be an unfair comparison. The question, rather, is ­whether the repre­sen­ta­tion can activate a genuine critique of intersecting phenomena and power structures other than offering itself as a specimen of cultural difference. From this perspective, the trilogy’s narrative recourse falls short of explaining why new immigrants and other disadvantaged communities, at home and abroad, become entangled u­ nder the shadow of global 168 

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capital, or why they ­matter. Inter-­A sia marriage and l­abor migrations are notable outcomes of the cap­i­tal­ist market’s uneven distributions of resources and benefits. The circumstances that drive working-­class Taiwanese bachelors and divorcees to turn to marriage markets abroad are interlocked with the socioeconomic pressures in the mi­grants’ sending countries. They drive migration as such as a form of global ­labor outsourcing. Chinese and Southeast Asian immigrant ­women in countries like Taiwan, South K ­ orea, Japan, and Singapore are frequently expected to perform vari­ous forms of ­labor. For the families they marry into, they are wives, ­mothers, and maids, all at the same time; for their birth families abroad, they are usually the most impor­tant breadwinners.37 For all three videos, Tsai travels to shoot the immigrant ­women’s birth families; however, t­ hese scenes vary in their capacities to probe the sending socie­ties’ socioeconomic circumstances or to engage the families. Although the first episode captures the f­amily gathering and the sumptuous feast that the ­couple provided for Navy’s Cambodian villa­gers, never at any point does the camera pres­ent the perspective of the Cambodian nationals. In the introduction and wedding scenes of the second episode, although A-­luan’s Viet­nam­ese ­sister acts as the translator, her Viet­nam­ese m ­ other, who receives the dowry, remains uneasily ­silent most of the time; a­ fter moving to Taiwan, A-­luan’s inability to communicate in Mandarin or Taiwanese further obstructs the documentarian’s access to her side of the story. The last episode ostensibly promises a contrast to the first two’s limited depth, for Luan, the interviewed immigrant from China, is expressly articulate in her criticism of patriarchy and Taiwan-­centrism. During a scene in which Luan discusses choosing between f­amily and c­ areer, the viewers see that the ­family’s nanny, a brown-­skinned foreign national, is baby­sitting at her side. The momentary juxtaposition of the two ­women is a telltale of what Pei-­chia Lan describes as the transnational chain of reproductive ­labor.38 This scene would have provided a propitious occasion to contextualize and critique the crossed paths of female transnationals from developing Asian economies, but the issue is left undeveloped, and the episode hardly probes beyond the story­ telling framework of the heteronormative Taiwanese f­ amily. STY LISTIC MI X TUR E

Aside from pts’s traditional preference for news-­style documentaries, Tsai’s shift between issue-­and character-­based narrative styles is a likely explanation of the series’ repre­sen­ta­tional limitations. Tsai was trained in law at National D ocumenting " I mmigrant B rides "   169

Chengchi University and in mass communication at Fu Jen Catholic University before he commenced film studies at the University of East Anglia. During the 1990s, he worked for the In­de­pen­dent Morning Post, Super tv, and Formosa tv as a feature journalist in law, l­ abor, human-­rights, minority, criminal-­justice, and environmental issues. From 1999 to 2004, while he worked for pts’s Viewpoint, he directed several award-­winning documentaries, including ­Behind the Miracle (2002) and Killing in Formosa 1, 2, and 3 (2001 and 2010), where he developed his news style, investigative approach, and an emphasis on balanced reporting and rational analy­sis. The Immigrant Brides series, on the other hand, showcases Tsai’s mix of investigative and character-­centered approaches as he seeks to understand the reason b­ ehind the population’s statistical growth. Balanced between paralleled interviews, contrasting viewpoints, ­silent observation of Huang and Navy’s daily life, and direct participation in the ­couple’s trip to Cambodia, the characterization in My Imported Wife is the most complex and drama-­laden of all three episodes. In two interviews that Tsai conducts with Huang and Navy individually and then crosscuts, the spouses each give vent to their stress. Without adding voice-­over comments, Tsai simply juxtaposes Huang’s complaints about his mother-­in-­law during her stay in Taiwan with a well-­measured cutaway of her eating and fetching dishes. This discerning but open-­ended character sketch is then followed by an interview with Navy and her Taiwanese interpreter, both refuting Huang’s charge that Navy refuses to take care of him in old age. While Tsai’s stylistic mixture in the first episode works effectively to build tensions between the c­ ouple, it tends to blur the focus in the second and the third. Narratives in the last two episodes are frequently divided between the personalized characterization of immigrant w ­ omen and the detached, news-­ like recordings of occurrences like the brokerage operation, community educational sessions, quarrels at the police station, and street protests, without an evident line of argument. Tracking the brokering pro­cess, the camera’s gaze in My Imported Bride reflects only the patriarchal, Taiwanese perception of Viet­ nam­ese ­women. This perspectival bias continues through the second half of the episode, when A-­luan is visibly placed ­under the film crew’s paternalistic gaze and care. The focus of Marriages on the Borders is no less skewed: while the ambition is to juxtapose Luan’s perspective with other immigrants’ experiences like divorce, domestic vio­lence, and street protests, in ­doing so the story lapses into a series of cursory snapshots of individual grievances without examining Chinese w ­ omen as a distinct presence among vari­ous new immigrant populations. 170 

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Tsai shot all three episodes si­mul­ta­neously over the course of a year. This included separate trips to Cambodia, Vietnam, and China. In light of the proj­ect’s ambitious scope, it is not surprising that pts’s restrictive bud­get and turnaround time may have caused the trilogy’s new immigrant repre­sen­ta­tion to appear flattened. As Tsai himself acknowledged, the time he spent with his immigrant interviewees had an impact on their willingness and ability to open up to the camera; for example, in the case of the second episode, A-­luan rarely speaks freely, and this has evidently limited the story’s depth.39 CO DA : THE E VOLVIN G SOCIAL EN GAG EMEN T OF NEW I M M I GR A NT D OCU MEN TARY

Although the repre­sen­ta­tional limitations of the Immigrant Brides series reflect the uneasy encounter between the restrictive public-­television system, the superficial multicultural market, and the role documentary plays in minority advocacy, this structural incongruity has not fundamentally diminished Tsai’s overall contribution to the country’s new immigrant discourse. With the completion of the series, Tsai left pts to become an in­de­pen­dent documentarian. In 2008, he directed Surviving Evil, another of his human-­rights and environmental-­hazards documentaries. In 2012, he produced two more in­ de­pen­dent works—­The Other Side and Out/Marriage—­which deepened his commitment to the repre­sen­ta­tion of mi­grant lives. ­These productions illustrate the vitality of the immigrant documentary mediascape across intersecting public spaces and civil spheres. Together they make power­ful claims about the lateral interaction, and minor transnationalism, between vari­ous mobile or immobilized minorities, in and out of Taiwan.40 The Other Side is Tsai’s three-­year proj­ect in collaboration with cnex. It explores the counterdiscourse of upward mobility in the context of cross-­ Strait socioeconomic relations since the era of Taiwan’s economic miracle and China’s economic reform. It does so by comparing mobile individuals on both sides: on the one hand, a Chinese w ­ oman married to a Taiwanese farmhand; on the other, a Taiwanese expat in China who becomes unemployed and debt-­worn ­after ten years of unfruitful strug­gles.41 Out/Marriage, directed by Nguyen with Tsai’s help, adds to the new immigrant discourse an autoethnographic voice with a fresh emphasis on bedroom and kitchen conversations—­ scenes typically less accessible to male documentarians—­between immigrant ­women and their closest female friends and f­ amily members. While scenes outside Taiwan in Tsai’s trilogy serve mainly to supplement the story with a D ocumenting " I mmigrant B rides "   171

distant background, Nguyen’s video, in contrast, moves the perspectives of new immigrant w ­ omen’s overseas friends and birth families onto the center stage and pres­ents their voices in their own native tongues. Nguyen was a novice documentarian at the time, yet her marital and professional partnership with Tsai brought the new immigrant mediascape to a fresh terrain. Not only has Out/ Marriage participated in several film festivals in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but it also has enabled Nguyen to become an immigrant-­rights activist over the years. A recent incident involving Taiwan, China, and Vietnam further illustrates how Tsai’s new immigrant documentary continues to participate in the evolving minor-­transnational network of social activism. Between May and July 2014, a series of protests erupted in Vietnam against China’s oilrig deployment in the South China Sea and against its alleged influence on the local government’s economic and censorship-­related policies. As protests escalated to implicate the already strained capital-­labor relations, over three hundred foreign-­owned factories and industrial parks—­including approximately a dozen Chinese and Taiwanese corporations—­were looted and destroyed. Waves of racist cybernationalism soon flooded the Internet, as Chinese and Taiwanese netizens attacked what they called the Viet­nam­ese “mobs.” In Taiwan, racist invectives targeted local Viet­nam­ese immigrants and blamed the rioters for mistaking the “innocent” Taiwanese corporations for Chinese ones. The crisis was such that Taiwan’s local activists, community-­service groups, and educational institutions r­ ose to criticize the riling language of hatred. Among them ­were Tsai and Nguyen, who wrote articles on online social media. Tsai also joined a Taiwan-­Vietnam lecture series at National Taiwan University as an invited speaker to comment on the topic of marriage migration and discuss My Imported Wife. A de­cade ­after its release, the trilogy had acquired a renewed layer of relevance to Taiwanese society: revisited through Vietnam’s recent unrest, it became an explicit outcry against Taiwan’s xenophobic politics of cultural difference ­under the shadow of global capital. I have examined the changing mediascape of Taiwan’s growing immigrant population, as documentarians and activists contribute to public discourse on mobile cultures in a demographically diverse and increasingly neoliberal society. Focused on the stakes of small-­screen and, in par­tic­ul­ar, tele­v i­sion networks, this essay calls critics’ attention to the understudied interstices between the industry’s bureaucratic constraints and the growing demand of the multicultural market for minority repre­sen­ta­tion, at which documentary productions emerge to shape the Taiwanese politics of recognition in contradictory ways. As Tsai’s trilogy shows, in Taiwan the repre­sen­ta­tional 172 

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and activist potential of documentary is in part conditioned on the bureaucratic vision and operation of the public-­television system, and in part on an expanding web of dialogues between filmmakers, activists, and educators across media platforms and civil-­political spheres. For documentary critics and prac­ti­tion­ers alike, ­these structural circumstances are crucial ­factors to parse before making an assessment of the industry’s overall restrictions and trends. In spite of the rising neoliberal multiculturalist paradigm, Taiwanese documentary is seeking to carve out a space for demo­cratic negotiations and attitudinal shifts, and thus to open up the possibility for greater social equity. > NOTE S  ​

Special thanks to Howard Chiang, Joshua Neves, Bhaskar Sarkar, Alvin Wong, Lily Wong, and Jamie Zhao for their incisive feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Carlos Rojas and Eileen C. Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 157–58. 2 Examples of ­these fiction features include Cape No.  7 (2008) and Seediq Bale (2011). The respective winners of the ­Grand Prize from 2010 to 2014 are Let the Wind Carry Me; co-­winners Taivalu and A Gift for F ­ ather’s Day: The Tragedy of Hsiao-­lin Village Part 1; Hometown Boy; A Rolling Stone; and Unveil the Truth II: State Apparatus. Also see Daw-­Ming Lee, “A Preliminary Study of the Market for Documentaries in Taiwan,” Asian Cinema 20, no. 2 (2009): 79. 3 This section critiques Kuo’s term mainstream; hence my use of scare ­quotes. 4 Li-­hsin Kuo, “Sentimentalism and the Phenomenon of Collective ‘Looking Inward’: A Critical Analy­sis of Mainstream Taiwanese Documentary,” in Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries, eds. Sylvia Li-­chun Lin and Tze-­lan Deborah Sang (London: Routledge, 2012), 183–203. 5 Kuo, “Sentimentalism and the Phenomenon of Collective ‘Looking Inward,’ ” 187–90. 6 Lee, “A Preliminary Study of the Market for Documentaries in Taiwan,” 70–72, 76–77. 7 Lee, “A Preliminary Study of the Market for Documentaries in Taiwan,” 72–76. 8 Kuo, “Sentimentalism and the Phenomenon of Collective ‘Looking Inward,’ ” 186 and 196. 9 Paola Voci, China on Video: Smaller-­screen Realities (London: Routledge, 2010). 10 “Department of Statistics: Survey Data Ser­v ice,” Ministry of the Interior, http://­ www​.­moi​.­gov​.t­ w​/­stat​/­english​/­surveydata​.­asp​.­ 11 Chal­mers Johnson calls this state-­led economic planning the “developmental state,” in miti and the Japa­nese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982). 1

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Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 114–16. 13 Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception; Kuan-­Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: ­Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 14 Kristin Surak, “States and Migration Industries in Taiwan, Japan and South ­Korea,” Eu­ro­pean University Institute Working Paper, Max Weber Programme, 2011, 1–11. 15 Surak, “States and Migration Industries in Taiwan, Japan and South K ­ orea,” 2–3. 16 Nicole Constable, Cross-­Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Hsiao-­Chuan Hsia, “Imaged and ­Imagined Threat to the Nation: The Media Construction of the ‘Foreign Brides’ Phenomenon’ as Social Prob­lems in Taiwan,” Inter-­Asia Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2007): 55–85; Hyuk-­R ae Kim and Ingyu Oh, “Foreigners ­Cometh! Paths to Multiculturalism in Japan, K ­ orea and Taiwan,” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 21, no. 1 (2012): 105. 17 Tak-­Wing Ngo and Hong-­zen Wang, “Cultural Difference, Social Recognition, and Po­liti­cal Repre­sen­ta­tion in Taiwan,” in Politics of Difference in Taiwan, eds. Tak-­Wing Ngo and Hong-­zen Wang (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1–11. 18 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 16–33; Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1994). 19 Ngo and Wang, “Cultural Difference, Social Recognition, and Po­liti­cal Repre­sen­ ta­tion in Taiwan”; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Allen Chun, “The Coming Crisis of Multiculturalism in ‘Transnational’ Taiwan,” Social Analy­sis 46, no. 2 (2002): 102–22. 20 Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition, 16–17. 21 Hsia, “Imaged and ­Imagined Threat to the Nation.” 22 Yen-­Ling Tsai, “Encountering Southeast Asia: ‘New Taiwanese C ­ hildren’ and the Geography of Population Quality,” Cultural Studies Monthly 73, 2007, http://­hs​ .­nctu​.­edu​.­tw​/­lau7​_­su1​_­tiau5​_­bok8​_­uploads​/­13889907612424ef​.­pdf. 23 Robert Chi, “The New Taiwanese Documentary,” Modern Chinese Lit­er­a­ture and Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 146–96; Sylvia Li-­chun Lin and Tze-­lan Deborah Sang, “Introduction,” in Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries, eds. Sylvia Li-­chun Lin and Tze-­lan Deborah Sang (London: Routledge, 2012), 1–10; Weitsy Wang, “Development and Social Change of Taiwanese Documentary from 1960 to 2000,” A Retrospective Collection of Documentary Films from Taiwan, ed. Weitsy Wang (Taipei: Tosee, 2006), 10–32. 24 Lee, “A Preliminary Study of the Market for Documentaries in Taiwan.” 25 Chi, “The New Taiwanese Documentary”; Wood Lin, Outside the Frames: Portraits of Taiwanese Documentaries (Taipei: Yuan-­Liou, 2012), 108–49. 26 Xuan Yi, “Humanitarianism and Sentimentalism: The Studies of Taiwanese Mainstream Documentary Film in the Early Twenty-­first ­Century” (master’s thesis, National Cheng Kung University, 2010), 58–61. 12

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27

A nonprofit organ­ization formed by a group of professionals from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, cnex promotes documentary productions in the Chinese-­speaking world. See Chaowei Chang, “The Production Environment of Taiwanese Tele­vi­sion Documentary as a Cultural Industry: A Preliminary Observation and Reflection through Participation,” Film Appreciation Journal 111 (2002): 28–34. 28 Ying Zhu and Chris Berry,  tv China (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 2. 29 Chang-­De Liu, “Cultural Production, Consumption, and L ­ abor: The Influences of ‘Being the Public Sector’s Subcontracting Works’ on Taiwanese Documentaries,” Mass Communication Research 107 (2011): 47–87. 30 Liu, “Cultural Production, Consumption, and ­Labor”; Li-­jun Xiao, “The ‘Viewpoint’ Program in the Crisis of Public Tele­vi­sion Ser­vices,” Coolloud, January 11, 2009, http://­www​.­coolloud​.­org​.­tw​/­node​/­33659; Lee, “A Preliminary Study of the Market for Documentaries in Taiwan,” 70. 31 Chang, “The Production Environment of Taiwanese Tele­v i­sion Documentary as a Cultural Industry,” 30; Xiao, “The ‘Viewpoint’ Program in the Crisis of Public Tele­vi­sion Ser­vices”; Liu, “Cultural Production, Consumption, and ­Labor.” 32 Xiao, “The ‘Viewpoint’ Program in the Crisis of Public Tele­v i­sion Ser­v ices”; Liu, “Cultural Production, Consumption, and ­Labor.” 33 Lee, “A Preliminary Study of the Market for Documentaries in Taiwan,” 74; Tsung-­lung Tsai, in discussion with the author, July 2013. 34 Xiao-­wen Chen, “An Interview with Tsung-­lung Tsai, Producer of Out/Marriage: New Immigrant W ­ omen’s Self Perception and Growth,” Lihpao Daily, October 8, 2013, http://­www​.­lihpao​.­com​/­​?­action​-­v iewnews​-­itemid​-­133943, accessed on January 18, 2014. 35 Tsung-­lung Tsai, in discussion with the author, July 2013. 36 Tsung-­lung Tsai, in discussion with the author, July 2013; Yu Fu, “Interview with Tsung-­lung Tsai 2,” Taiwan Documentary E-­Paper 24 (blog), November 24, 2012, http://­docworker​.­blogspot​.­com​/­2012​/­11​/­blog​-­post​_­24​.­html. 37 Constable, Cross-­Border Marriages; Hsia, “Imaged and ­Imagined Threat to the Nation”; Pei-­Chia Lan,  Global Cinderellas: Mi­grant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 38 Lan, Global Cinderellas, 4. 39 Tsung-­lung Tsai, in discussion with the author, July 2013. 40 Françoise Lionnet and Shu-­mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 41 “The Other Side,” cnex, 2012, http://­www​.­cnex​.­org​.­tw​/­cnex​_­en​.­php​?­id​=­138.

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B O L LY W O O D B A N N E D A N D T H E E L E C T R I F Y I N G PA L M A S U T R A SENSORY POLITICS IN NORTHERN NIGERIA

Conerly Casey

In 1995, more than six hundred Muslim secondary-­school girls in Kano and Jigawa states of Northern Nigeria developed the classic signs of spirit possession—­eyes rolling back, foaming at the mouth, crying, shouting, and paralysis down one side of the body. Yet most remarkably, the girls’ paralyses alternated with “dancing like they do in Indian masala film.”1 This new ele­ ment drew widespread attention from Muslims of all sectors of society. Reformist Qur’anic scholar-­healers, t­ hose who professed to follow a strict, literal interpretation of the Sunna, immediately forbade Bollywood videos, the most popu­lar genre in Northern Nigeria. They suggested the girls’ mimetic renderings of masala ­music and dance drew spirits to them, endangering the entire community. Muslims in Kano and Jigawa States began to pay closer attention to their bodies and affects, to media and sensations, and to religious doctrines and states of consciousness, all of which produced new sensory possibilities and competing religious interpretations. Reformist Sunni scholar-­healers sought to facilitate par­tic­ul­ar sensory apprehensions, placing heavy emphasis on their unique abilities to identify ­human and spirit sources of danger, and to exorcise spirits from the body. Musical language (aural, kinesthetic, and tactile), in concert with the imagery and the advertising languages of religious orthodoxies and the market, drew

converts and consumers into what I consider a sensory politics of love and pornography. This sensory politics became central to the broader po­liti­cal sensoria that I refer to as danger and deliverance—an affective politics in postcolonies such as Nigeria that is amplified by global and neo­co­lo­nial vio­lence. In the late 1990s, reformist Sunni Muslims drew on anticolonial, antiglobalization sentiments to underscore the “dangers” of secular Western education, health care, and law, in a regional campaign to implement shari‘a criminal codes. A year ­after the 2000 implementation of shari‘a in Kano State, reformist government officials placed a ban on Bollywood videos, suggesting they ­were to blame for myriad societal prob­lems, stemming from their erotic, romantic, mixed-­gender song-­and-­dance sequences.2 The state censorship of Bollywood galvanized the electrifying popularity of the Palmasutra (a PalmPi­lot version of the Kamasutra) and instigated a warning about circulating cell-­phone sms “love messages” from unidentified sources that would “shock” ­those who responded. What emerged in Nigeria was a politics of love, sex, and pornography that coalesced not with technonarratives or technologies of shock, nor in the case of the Palmasutra, with the theft of intellectual property, but with the person possessed by the felt knowledge of love—­possessed by spirits associated with South Asian video sensoria. Thus, the phenomena that I address in this essay do not fit into the standard epistemological conduits along which scholars approach the circulation of South Asian popu­lar cultures. Media practices in Northern Nigeria erode geographic assignations such as “South Asian” or “Asian.” They extend beyond the temporal and spatial bounds of “Asian” cultural industries and “Nigerian” or “Muslim” viewing contexts. In Northern Nigeria, Bollywood culture industry’s multimedia onslaught extends beyond video and digital iterations such as the Palmasutra. It ventures out of the cinema, away from the cds of home viewing and smartphone encounters, into the sensory experiences of spirit possession, mimicry, and the affective politics of state. I offer an analy­sis of the spiritual-­material interfaces mediated by Bollywood, the Palmasutra, and Kannywood video films, the latter produced in the Northern Nigerian city of Kano. I am particularly interested in synesthetic affect—in how mediated sensations of movement, sound, and image interact with intersensory clusters and embodied emotions to produce accumulations of affect in the body, expressed socially and spiritually. My analy­sis is based on long-­term ethnographic research in Northern Nigeria, between 1991 and 2008, and two follow-up trips to Kano in 2011 and 2014. It articulates with affect B ollywood B anned  177

theories and attention to increased self-­reflexivity in information and communication feedback loops that extend beyond the body.3 But my research differs from conceptual studies that rely on Eu­ro­pean and North American categories and affective pro­cesses, in that it is derived from close studies of archiving affect in bodies, in Muslim Hausa society of Northern Nigeria. My analy­sis thus requires an understanding of circulations of affect in the media, expressive arts, and social relations of Northern Nigeria, of how and why young Muslim Hausa select and attend to par­tic­u­lar affectivities, but also of how and why intersensory assemblages, durations, and intensities of affect produce sensory overloads. In the 1990s, Nigerians found themselves at the crossroads of reformist Muslim and Pentecostal politics, and evangelical religion and global capitalism. Affective embodiments of “love” via interactions with Bollywood, the Palmasutra, and Kannywood signaled, mediated, and amplified felt dangers in transgressions of love, as well as felt possibilities for new love and affective forms of knowledge. This sense of danger, and dangerous possibilities for love, suggests two analytic perspectives. One perspective captures the informational and relational aspects of experiencing Bollywood, the Palmasutra, and Kannywood, while the second presumes a priori realms of sensory experience and understanding that affect the trajectories of par­tic­ul­ ar sensoria, such as the song-­and-­dance sequences of Bollywood, adapted by Kannywood, and the cultural, po­liti­cal forms Muslim Hausa draw on to make sense of such experiences. By attending to t­ hese two perspectives, I indicate some of the real-­ virtual, spiritual-­material remappings of self and self-­other relations, as well as newly forming intersubjective assemblages of self-­reference that generate novel experiences, such as possessed “dancing like they do in Indian masala film.” S PI R I T A ND M ­ ATTER IN W EST AF RICA

In the years preceding the 2000 implementation of shari‘a criminal codes, widening gaps between the rich and poor coincided with the emergence of new media and technologies through which to communicate po­liti­cal perspectives on what w ­ ere considered major public crises: endemic poverty, insecurity, the mass spirit possessions marked by Bollywood dancing, and a meningitis epidemic that killed thousands. Heavi­ly funded Sunni reformist “training” of affective registers through educational campaigns and f­ ree spirit exorcisms heightened par­tic­u­lar apprehensions of spiritual and material dangers, linking spirit possession with the bacterial pathogen of meningitis.4 The connection between 178 

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spirit and m ­ atter became a central focus of Salafi, Sufi, and Bori interpretations of the concurrence of t­hese events.5 But, Salafi, Sufi, and Bori perceptions of autoimmunity from the dangers of spirit-­matter entailed very dif­fer­ent configurations of spirit and ­human contact. Also, new media technologies of self-­control, particularly audiotapes of Qur’anic suras widely available in the market, became popu­lar in modulating the magnitude and frequency of sensoria associated with human-­spirit contact. Thus, the meanings of possessed Bollywood dancing rendered in the rhe­toric of evangelical Islam and the market w ­ ere the surface of a compelling, albeit more elusive, sensory politics, in which self-­relations and the sensory heterogeneity of self-­other relational experiences became contentious and revelatory. Heightened reformist rhe­toric, in the 1990s, about the spiritual-­material bound­aries of so (in Hausa, to love, desire, or want) commingled fear and love, desire, or want for near and distant beings and t­ hings, manifest in bodily forms of knowing and remembering. The frequent use of masala registered both as  descriptions of fantasized, essentialized notions of Indian womanhood and as mixed-­genre ­music that reformist Muslims considered “indecipherable,” and therefore dangerous. Among Muslim Hausa, embodiments of cultural ­others, ­human and spirit, and the material practices associated with ­these relations have long histories of duration. The feeling of being “tied” or “bound” by spirits may reference fleeting forms of subjugation, or longer durations of it such as experiences of colonization, but they may also produce volition through the affective knowledge, power, and freedom that comes with knowing ­others intimately. Working in Niger with Hauka, Songhay possessed by French colonial spirits, Paul Stoller shifted scholarly attention away from symbolic sensory systems and individual senses, as compartmentalized and recognized in Eu­rope and North Amer­ic­ a, to synesthetic, intersensory dynamics and the sensuality of “embodying memories.” Stoller termed the aesthetic, rhe­toric, and embodiment of Hauka spirit possession “horrific comedy,” since Hauka produced in their possessed states the horrifying and hilarious associated with French colonial domination. Rather than mere catharsis, the intimacy of terrifying and comic sensory experiences—­whether painful beatings or the stiff, jerky movements of French colonial administrators—­produced embodied memories of colonialism and reenactments of sensoria that continue to reverberate in the living.6 Placing a similar emphasis on intersensory relations, Achille Mbembe’s “aesthetics of vulgarity” refers to the grotesque self-­aggrandizement and B ollywood B anned  179

self-­referentiality of postcolonial autocrats, the spectacle of vulgarity emerging in the intimacy and conviviality of ruler and ruled, as the lifeblood is literally sucked out of the population. Mbembe suggests that, in postcolonial autocratic regimes, “the night, witchcraft, the invisible, the belly, the mouth, and the penis became sites of power, of life and death, of excessive consumption and elimination, of penetration and farting sounds, the obscene and grotesque inherent to all forms of domination, but that also allow a certain amount of play.”7 Mbembe’s spotlight on the ludic obscenity of autocratic vio­lence and populist critique also diverts attention from the multiple forms of everyday vio­ lence that Nigerians began to experience in the mid-1990s. From this period onward, the sensoria of “danger and deliverance” as it registered with Muslims living in Northern Nigeria, in bodies, in time, and across localities and populations, was stark, horrific to be sure, but devoid of the humor or playful re­sis­tance of previous years, instead reifying the bound­aries of identity, of subjugation and re­sis­tance, harm and help, perpetrator and victim. New technologies, such as the Internet and the digital cell phone, and mediated forms of the horrific and the vulgar appeared to magnify and amplify felt danger in Nigeria’s burgeoning Pentecostal and reformist Sunni communities, whose members place a heavy emphasis on locating evil within the body and exorcising or expelling it. In Nigerian expressive cultures, such as in m ­ usic or cartoons, the aesthetic of danger and deliverance takes shape in the mimicry of autocratic po­liti­ cal elites and wealthy Christians and Muslims who enjoy life at the expense of o­ thers. Elites, whom Nigerian talakawa (commoners, the poor) associate with po­liti­cal and religious corruption, are, through mimicry, in relations of similarity and multiplicity to spirits, witches, and vampires, other beings who have the capacity to enhance life or to drain the lifeblood and life-­force from individuals and communities; they produce similar sensoria and potential meanings to Nigerians, and as feelings-­cognitions cluster, each may (de)amplify the other, producing the force of affective trajectory or blockage. But this does not mean that spirit possession or witchcraft has mere functionality in the po­liti­cal dramas of Nigerians. The inwardness and felt qualities of witchcraft affliction, with the tensions of spirit and possessed, witch and bewitched, condense a range of associated sensations, violent histories, and shifting meanings that require a way of thinking about them outside of narrow rationalisms. Synesthetic sensory experiences are common in Nigeria and many other West African contexts, and what ­people define as sensory experiences are redefined and re-­embedded with technological and societal changes over time.8 180 

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THE M E D I ATI O N OF RELIG ION

Weighing into debates about Nigeria’s worsening po­liti­cal economy and morality, a power­ful reformist Sunni movement popularly known as Izala used new media to publicize their stated purpose: tajdid (reform and rejuvenation) realized through the day-­to-­day strug­gle against what they perceived as the bid’a (innovation) of Sufi brotherhoods and Bori.9 Conflicts emerged between Izala, Sufis, and Bori over the ritual use of ­music, dance, perfumes, and amulets, visiting the tombs of Sufi saints, and excessive feasting—­practices that draw spirits to ­humans. Though the girls who moved in ways resembling Bollywood dance w ­ ere unconscious during ­these states, on conscious reawakening, they claimed to feel “tied” or “bound” to the spirits responsible. The girls’ perceptions of ­these human-­spirit ties varied, articulating closely with sectarian interpretations that circulated in their social networks of friends and families. To augment the girls’ perspectives on the affects of media circulating in Kano, I introduce a young man, pseudonym Musa, who gave me a hundred pages of his diary. Musa carefully recorded his strug­gles to remain religiously “pure.” I have the Dev­il’s alter-­nature in front of me now. . . . ​I ­don’t think one can reach spiritual alrightness in this world of ­today. . . . ​I am ­going to listen to the ­music I like, hoping that it w ­ ill not be a source of my ruin. It seems to be a paradox, but for the meantime, it seems, I ­can’t help it. Yes, I stopped watching tv, reading some novels. But some of t­ hese ­things give one more experience in life. Th ­ ere is no point in stopping t­ hese when the inner self yearns for them. ­Because of ­r unning from unnecessary materialism [zuhudu gudun duniya] by the false self, I became apparently disconnected from my surroundings—­externally. I did not realize what was happening around me. . . . ​I must come back to life. I must unveil my ignorance and open my eyes and learn t­ hings about this world to some extent. . . . ​I must overcome my identity prob­lem. My relations with ­people have to be truthful and not casual and deceptive. No one is an ­enemy.10 Musa’s self-­monitoring and intrapsychic imbalance was relative to interpersonal, Islamic reformism and censorship, and to new, sensorial apprehensions of otherness, the abundance of which Michael Taussig terms “mimetic excess,” when the “mimicking self, tempted by space, spaces out,” in what Félix Guattari called “zones of historical fracture,” a scanning that Louis Sass linked B ollywood B anned  181

8.1  ​ Spirit Possession. Watercolor by Abdulhamid

8.2  ​ Witchcraft. Watercolor by Abdulhamid

Yusuf (1996).

Yusuf (1996).

8.3  ​ Evil Eye. Watercolor by Abdulhamid

8.4  ​ Evil Words. Watercolor by Abdulhamid

Yusuf (1996).

Yusuf (1996).

to the pro­cesses of modernity itself.11 This mimetic excess in the hyperreflexive, affective turn of young Muslim Hausa such as Musa was not simply conscious appraisal of danger, or ambivalent fear and desire, but vigilant attunement to a range of sensory apprehensions and their effects on lafiya (health and wellness), a balance and rhythm in all realms of life. In artistic renderings of potentially dangerous spiritual-­material relations, another young man, Abdulhamid Yusuf, my neighbor in Kano, painted watercolors of spirit possession, witchcraft, evil eye, and evil words, some of the leading ­causes of rashin lafiya (loss of health). Abdulhamid’s repre­sen­ta­tions of synesthetic sensoria in experiences of spirit possession, witchcraft, evil eye, and evil words, of what is seen and unseen, the world of the living and the world of spirits are linked by relations of similarity in two ways. They express the relational, communicative power to affect the “inwardness” of danger from outside and the reverse—­what Mbembe terms “simultaneous multiplicities,” the image and the i­magined as one and the same—­but they also reveal realms of intersensory experiencing that mediate potential dangers and the cultural, po­liti­cal forms Muslim Hausa draw on to make sense of them.12 The radicality of simultaneous life and death, and the multiplicity of life in witchcraft, spirit possession, evil eye, and evil words are strengthened further in their associative sensorial references to life and death, ­human and spirit, the seen and unseen, across all of ­these forms, and in the apprehensions that precede knowledge of them. Within ­these contexts, South Asian video culture was extended to the body as affective overload. Reformist Muslims attached moral valence to Muslims who prayed for closure, human-­ spirit bound­aries, and thus protection from spirit possession and witchcraft, and to t­ hose who did not. THE RE A L- V ­ I RTUAL IN TERFACES OF SEN SORY P OL I T I C S

The 1995 mass “dancing like they do in Indian film” began with just five Muslim Hausa secondary-­school girls at a federal government college on the outskirts of Kano. The girls ­were celebrating the end of their exams by holding a late-­ night party with loud m ­ usic and dancing. Suddenly, a haggard old w ­ oman with disheveled red hair appeared to them, to complain about their noise, and she asked them to end the party. The girls ignored her and called her cus (a disrespectful name). In response, the w ­ oman pointed at them, angrily telling them they would dance ­until the end of their lives for the spirit Sumbuka, and then she dis­appeared. The next day the five girls began foaming at the mouth B ollywood B anned  183

and holding their arms like Inna, a Fulani spirit who ­causes paralysis. Within several weeks, the possession spread to over six ­hundred girls at two federal government colleges in Kano and Jigawa States, but only to girls who identified as ethnic Hausa and girls whose families ­were from Kano. While Sumbuka was a spirit widely known in Kano to admonish young ­women for immoral be­hav­ior, paralysis that alternated with spontaneous Bollywood dancing was entirely new. Moreover, the involuntary, contagious quality of the girls’ dancing emerged alongside a meningitis epidemic that swept through Northern Nigeria the same year, with more than 15,800 deaths by the end of the epidemic.13 Qur’anic scholar-­healers, reformist Sunni who self-­identified with Salafi and Sufi sects, nonreformist Sufi, and Bori leaders considered Sumbuka and spirits from distant lands, like India, or new configurations of known spirits and witches as likely ­causes of both devastating crises. The linking of foreign culture, spirits, and biological pathogens had not emerged so powerfully since the early colonial period when so-­called mass hysterias ­were common. The concurrency of mass spirit possessions and the meningitis epidemic prompted among Qur’anic scholar-­healers a reevaluation of the spiritual, communal security of Nigerian Muslims. The crises increased the numbers of ­people receiving spirit exorcisms and stirred new forms of exorcism based on the medieval scholarship of Ibn Taymiyyah, a controversial Sunni theologian and reformer who is credited with inspiring Salafi, Wahhabi, and jihadist movements across the globe. In his essay, “The Jinn,” widely cited by scholar-­healers in Northern Nigeria, Ibn Taymiyyah cautioned against ­human relations with spirits that might evoke sensuous desires. Ibn Taymiyyah wrote, “The occasional possession of man by the Jinn may be due to sensual desires on the part of the Jinn, capricious whims, or even love, just as it may be among h­ umans. Jinns and ­humans may also have intercourse with each other and beget c­ hildren. This is a frequent occurrence, which is well known to many.”14 Malams Amar and Aminu (pseudonyms), associated with an Izala da’wah (proselytizing movement), exorcised many of the secondary-­school girls, but said they w ­ ere but a small proportion of ­those affected by changing spirit-­human relations. Malam Amar said, “During the time of the Prophet, t­ here was no computer and nowadays every­thing is changing. So that is why we are getting prob­lems. We interact with many prob­lems that d­ on’t concern us. That is why we are destroying the demarcation Allah built between the spirits and us.”15 Malams Amar and Aminu advised young ­people to read the Qur’an and to avoid m ­ usic or sound that was “unauthorized,” that is, difficult to comprehend 184 

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and therefore dangerous: “Sumbuka came ­because the girls ­were celebrating their success on their qualifying exams so they stayed late in the night beating drums and dancing. Th ­ ese are all what attracts the attention of the spirits, so they came and joined the girls.”16 In line with his interpretation of the life and words of the Prophet Mohammed, Ibn Taymiyyah advised ­people to expel possessing spirits, re­orienting ­humans and spirits to love interests within their own realms. Malams Amar and Aminu also used verses from the Qur’an (30: 21) as support for this division: “Among His signs is [the fact] that He has created spouses for you from among yourselves so that you may console yourselves with them. He has planted love and mercy between you; in that are signs for p­ eople who reflect.” Reformist fear of otherness, and of the diminishing boundary between ­humans and spirits, was in sharp contrast to Bori concerns that Hausa musicians ­were losing the creative ability to play the songs of spirits. Followers of Bori worried that they w ­ ere losing the musicianship and the power of m ­ usic, the artistry through which to communicate danger to spirits in a way that would capture their attentions and affectionate care. Bori adherents have, for centuries, played specific songs for each spirit and spirit f­ amily who live familiar domestic lives similar to ­those of ­humans, cooking, eating, falling in love and fighting, yet who come from dif­fer­ent backgrounds, delineated by ethnicity and animal f­ amily. The Bori pantheon of spirits reflects a lengthy history of spirit-­human contact, with internalizations of otherness through music-­and dance-­induced possession, having the capacity to strengthen one’s lafiya, as well as to endanger it. LOV E , NI GE RI AN STY LE

In the 1990s, the Internet, digital cell phones and other new media extended culturally diverse sensory experiences of love, desire, and sex to young Muslim Hausa who described novel sensations such as “tingling” from a “Chinese kiss” and provocative “dancing like they do in Indian masala film.” Th ­ ese experiences, and their particularities of individuality and situatedness, w ­ ere in dynamic tension with the growing po­liti­cal importance of communal identities and spirit-­human bound­aries. Newly mediated sensations of love from Chinese or Indian films—­their tingling touches and alluring movements—­mapped into changing relations—­human, spirit, and machine—­variably guided, and intensified in frequency or force, by Allah, by one’s qalb (heart), by spirits or witches, or by intimate relationships in one’s social, religious networks. While Muslim B ollywood B anned  185

Hausa girls unconsciously danced in ways that resembled scenes from Indian film, feeling tied or bound by spirits, boys complained that a jealous female spirit prevented them from having romantic contact, by slapping them ­until they fell out of bed, marked across the face with a red hand imprint. ­These feelings of constraint articulated with dominant, heavi­ly funded reformist Sunni perspectives on spirit possession as “­human oppression,” brought about by associations with non-­Muslims whose actions eroded the spirit-­human boundary. This sensory politics and the reformist emphasis on personal responsibility for maintaining bodily bound­aries to ensure freedom from oppression further projected into marital and social relations. When talking about their spousal relations, young, married Muslim Hausa men frequently described experiencing conflicts between what they desired and the kind of men Muslims in their religious networks insisted they be. Somebody who is newly married may like to stay with his wife most of the time for the initial period. You do honeymoons in your culture. Though ­there is not a honeymoon ­here, for the first few weeks, you w ­ ill like to stay with your wife ­every day and you are ­free with each other, you understand. But you ­will find out that the society ­will not expect you to be staying with her all the time during your marriage. They w ­ ill say it is a kind of weakness to this man. ­Because he is newly married, we ­don’t see him now. His wife has dominated him. This kind of t­ hing. But he w ­ ill stay with her ­because of the love they have. The society expects that you ­shouldn’t give in so much. . . . ​He is so weak. He is succumbing to the wife. She w ­ ill soon dominate him. He ­will find himself in a conflict between what he wants to do and what he should do according to the society.17 Failing to maintain what is considered proper control of one’s love, including marital and familial relations, erotic desires, and sexual be­hav­ior, is considered a religious lapse, a falling into non-­Muslim patterns of indulgence and romanticism.18 ­Because erotic desire and sexual urges are deemed “natu­ral” and inevitable, moral virtue is relative to one’s be­hav­ior within the ­family, the guardian and container of eros and sex. Unmarried ­women and w ­ omen who live alone are commonly referred to as “prostitutes,” bound to men only through sex and money, potential sources of communal betrayal. Th ­ ere is also widespread sentiment among Muslim Hausa that ethnic o­ thers, spirit and h­ uman, and members of the opposite sex, men and ­women, are “uncontrollable”—­that, without volition, their erotic desires and sexual activities inevitably overflow the bound­aries of marriage. 186 

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Safia, a young ­woman in her mid-­twenties, sought a spirit exorcism from Malams Amar and Aminu. Safia explained that she was unable to have ­children, causing her constant worry, a lack of energy, and frequent nightmares. Malam Amar read the Qur’an loudly into Safia’s ear, and she began to cry, to shake and shiver, indications that the spirits w ­ ere “­under pressure” and felt as if “something [was] heating them.”19 Malam Amar asked, “Mutumin ko aljannu?” (­Human or spirit?), repeatedly, ­until the spirit answered. Then, he clarified the spirit’s name, “Are you Muhammadu Lasisi? From where do you come?” spirit: I come from the Sudan. malam: You come from far away. What language do you speak? spirit: I am Yoruba. malam: You are Yoruba? How did you go to the Sudan? spirit: God’s wish. malam: Why did you enter into this ­woman? spirit: ­Because I love her. malam: You love her and you are from the Sudan? From when did you enter her body? spirit: It was long ago. malam: How many years ago? spirit: Twenty-­five years ago. malam: Twenty-­five years ago. How old are you? spirit: Sixty-­seven years old. malam: Muhammadu Lasisi, are you a Muslim? spirit: Yes, I am a Muslim. malam: Can you speak Yoruba to us? spirit: [Replies in a language that sounds like Yoruba.] malam: You said you are Yoruba. What are you ­doing in the Sudan? spirit: I am just roaming about ­there. malam: Can you speak Arabic? How many of you are in this ­woman? spirit: Me and Abba. malam: Who is Abba? spirit: The leper. malam: So despite her pres­ent illness, the leper never leaves this w ­ oman alone? Where is he now? From where is he coming? spirit: He used to come. malam: Where is he? spirit: He is not around. B ollywood B anned  187

malam: Apart from the leper, then who? spirit: Then Bafulatana.20 malam: Where is she? spirit: She used to come. malam: Then who? spirit: ­These are all. malam: Are you the only one pres­ent? spirit: Yes, they are not around. malam: What are they ­doing to her when they come? spirit: They used to come when she is angry. malam: What of you? spirit: I am together with her. malam: You are always together with her? spirit: Yes. malam: Are you a true Muslim? Are you praying? spirit: Yes, I am praying. ­ fter several more questions to verify the spirit’s knowledge of Islam, Malam A Amar confronted him with his be­hav­ior ­toward the ­woman: “Muhammad, I am advising you to fear God, and you know God forbids injustice between man and the spirits, and now you see how you are cheating this w ­ oman? I want for us to make an agreement. You are to leave her alone and stop making her suffer. Do you know any teachers among the spirits? Who is your teacher? Or do you not have one? If you are Muslim, tell us one of the teachers you know? Or are you just roaming about?” During exorcisms, Malams Amar and Aminu confirmed the ethnicity and religions of offending spirits, essentialized identities that signified a level of intersubjective risk. Converting spirits to reformist Islam, Malams Amar and Aminu intended to create an umma (community) of Muslim spirits who would re­spect the bound­aries between ­humans and spirits, particularly romantic ones. Malams Amar and Aminu advised young ­people to read the Qur’an and to avoid ­music or sound and nudity. ­ ecause the spirits cannot always be trusted, we must follow the teachings of B the Holy Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet if we want to escape from the evil of the spirits. Make sure you read the Qur’an e­ very day and before you sleep in the night, perform your ablutions. . . . ​This w ­ ill prevent spirits from touching you, and it ­will prevent you from having nightmares. . . . ​You 188 

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must take care of all ­these ­things. If you d­ on’t, they might come back. Do not listen to sounds like ­music or any sound that is not impor­tant ­because the spirits are always where sound or m ­ usic is. That is why you find that before ‘yan Bori call their spirits, they beat drums and then l­ater call the attention of the spirits. Another major prob­lem is love. The spirits used to fall in love with h­ uman beings, especially w ­ omen when they see them. That is why ­there is a way that is set according to the tradition of the Prophet on how you undress, b­ ecause if you undress just any way the spirits may look at your body and they may like it. They ­will come near you. But if you follow the tradition of the Prophet, they ­will never come near you.21 Reformist Izala and Sufis considered “unauthorized” visuals, such as nudity, and sensoria that are difficult to comprehend, such as “sounds” and “voices,” to be potential dangers to one’s spirituality and health. They suggested that unauthorized and ambiguous sensoria in film and m ­ usic require personalized Qur’anic scholarship and guidance to reveal under­lying meanings. Conflicts between Izala, Sufi, and Bori adherents hinged on the role of prophets who predated the Prophet Mohammed and on ­whether ­humans should experience any contact with spirits, even if the contact is meant to comfort, to love, or to aid humankind. This reformist prohibition of social, spiritual possibilities came at a time of expanding mediated images of erotically enticing Indian ­women, beautiful, in­de­pen­dent, and courageous enough to run away with their lovers regardless of familial or social protest. Young men fantasized and ­imagined essentialized Indian ­women as dutiful wives adding masala (spice) to the food and sex of everyday life, and as the pornographic objects of arousal who, once subjugated, would provide unlimited spicy plea­sure.22 ­These fantasies played out in Nigerian politics and media when the de facto president, General Sani Abaca, dropped dead ­after a late-­night visit with two “Indian prostitutes.” RE LI GI O N A ND MEDIATED SU B JECTIVITIES

Increased media interconnectivity in the 1990s and affective attunements to near and distant forms of “danger and deliverance” began to significantly alter self-­identifications, qualities of affect, and emotional significance and meanings in global postcolonial politics. Charles Hirschkind, working with young Muslims in Egypt who listened to cassette sermons, found a well-­crafted sermon “to evoke in the listener the affective dispositions that underlie ethical conduct and reasoning, and which through repeated listening, may become sediment B ollywood B anned  189

in the listener’s character.”23 Cassette sermons, circulating outside of mosques and other prescribed places of ritual practice, created new contexts for public deliberation about ethics and civic virtue that cut across national, generational, and gendered lines of communication. In Kano, cassette sermons and new-­media technologies had similar effects of breaking down national, generational, and gendered communications, but also had strong effects on spirit-­human relations and expressive participation. Cassette-­taped Qur’anic sura became a popu­lar form of self-­help in expelling spirits or maintaining the spirit-­human bound­aries established ­after spirit exorcisms. Listeners and viewers began to cultivate new perceptual capacities of the body with the use of technologies that allowed mobility, replay, and discontinuous listening and viewing in reforming public and private settings of spiritual-­political endeavor. Bollywood video culture was similarly extended to the body, creating an interface where the cultural was played out corporeally and technologically. The enormous popularity of Bollywood videos drew scholarly attention to the transcultural meanings, values, and aesthetics of Bollywood, associated with themes that resonated with Muslim Hausa audiences, for instance, romantic love or arranged or forced marriage.24 The use of new video technologies produced mixed-­gender singing and video frames that challenged conventional gender norms in Muslim Hausa society. Debates arose over transcultural intellectual property, cultural meaning, and authenticity in the synergies of Bollywood and soyyaya (Hausa romance novels) and of Bollywood and bandiri (songs praising the Prophet Mohammed set to Bollywood video ­music).25 In the late 1990s, Brian Larkin proposed that Bollywood offered a “parallel modernity”—­a way of being “modern” without the heavy ideological loads associated with British colonialism and Nigerian postcolonial identity politics. Roughly a de­cade l­ater, Larkin was “interested in moving beyond film, to the cinema as a total event, a mode of association that includes flirting, bantering, hearing, and yelling.”26 Such affective experiences, Larkin argued, inform a local, variegated valuing and pricing system in urban Kano that run ­counter to the technological and social isolation that underpin most Euro-­American cinematic theories of attention and the mass production of desire. Larkin focused on the experience of media and media events as productive of media infrastructure and urban culture. But what exceeded articulations about the themes, meanings, and genres of South Asian videos and their marketability in Nigeria, the bound­aries of intellectual property or meaning, and the modes of production, distribution, and blockage that w ­ ere strategic in global cultural

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economies, ­were affective-­sensorial attunements to videos such as possessed dancing in ways that resembled Bollywood film and embodiments of media that operated outside of media events and infrastructure. THE “M AGI C- A ­ RT” OF SH ARI‘A CRIMIN AL COD ES A ND THE M A RK ET

With the implementation of shari‘a criminal codes, in 1999–2000, across twelve northern Nigerian states, sensory experiences in everyday life—­the beards of Muslim orthodoxy, the m ­ usic of Bollywood films, and romantic traditions favored by non-­Hausa Muslims and Christians—­became linked to perceptual and somatic contact avoidances. Moral aesthetics of love, and the power of their typifications, ­were strengthened by the inseparability of what was seen from what was unseen, or the world of spirits. Reformists, while condemning sensorial love’s transgressions of ­human and spirit bound­aries, nonetheless reinforced the power of this relationship; they employed realist interpretations of Qur’anic scripture as “truth,” to proj­ect profiles of unacceptable ­people and love sensory and emotive forms into popu­lar consciousness. Reformists focused their preaching and surveillance on youths who watched Indian or American film, on mixed-­gender gatherings, and on non-­Hausa Muslims and Christians, spirit or h­ uman, threats to the reenchantment of orthodoxy and its ability to function as political-­spiritual unity.27 The implementation of shari‘a in Kano State brought a focus in government on public morality. Kano State government officials put into operation campaigns to marry all unmarried ­women and to eliminate “prostitution” and the sale and consumption of alcohol.28 Religious approaches to governance during this period had a strong impact on public consciousness and affect. Reformist hisbah (shari‘a law enforcers) vigilantly profiled Muslims living in ethnically plural spaces, Muslim ethnic minorities, and ­people who, by virtue of their region of origin, religion, or ethnicity, they deemed “marginal Muslims” or polytheists and thus “out of place.”29 Gender and the control of ­women’s bodies and Hausa ethnic identity and an ethnic rendering of the morality of forms of aesthetic, rhe­toric, and embodiment became primary foci of reformist Islamic censorship. It is within t­hese contexts that Bollywood was banned in 2001, and groups of men switched their attentions from Bolly­ wood song and dance and the com­pany of “prostitutes” to the Palmasutra love postures and movements, typically viewed in private homes and clubs where

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arousal was more easily hidden. Men viewing the Palmasutra informed me that it was a religiously “allowed education.” It is also within t­hese contexts that video filmmakers in Kano introduced Islamic “conversion on screen,” aimed at “religious reversion of nominal Muslims, rather than at conversion of non-­Muslims.”30 This film industry known as Kannywood competed with Bollywood and Nollywood for audiences and market share. Matthias Krings describes several genres of Kannywood conversion film: “Within the epic, set in precolonial times, Muslim mujahids fight against pagan tribes and convert them to Islam, thus only vaguely relating to the nineteenth ­century’s jihads. Within the framework of the romantic melodrama, pious Muslim boys have to choose between a pagan and a Muslim girl, and in a genre crossover of Western vampire, science-­fiction, and police films, a poor pagan has to be cured from vampirism before he can convert to Islam and return to his tribesmen on a proselytizing mission.”31 Krings suggests that inventing successful jihads and conversions on video “may have helped to assert northern Muslim identities at a time when—on the national level—­large segments of the northern society felt po­liti­cally and eco­nom­ically deprived” at the hands of President Olusegun Obasanjo, a born-­again Christian.32 He considers the Muslim Hausa conversion video films a reaction to southern films that propagate Chris­tian­ity. Yet one of the most distinguishing features of ­these conversion films was adapted from Bollywood film and placed Muslim reformist identities in jeopardy—­the frequent use of song-­and-­dance sequences. In 1995 reformist Sunni scholars forbade Muslim secondary-­school girls to watch Bollywood films, as spirits attracted by the girls’ mimetic renderings of Indian ­music and dance would possess them. A de­cade ­later, reformists proclaimed the moral legitimacy of song-­and-­dance sequences in Kannywood films, which they suggested enhanced the films’ marketability, extending fa’dakarwa (religious admonition) or wa’azi (religious preaching) to a wider public.33 The uneasy juxtaposition of spirit-­attracting song-­and-­dance sequences and reformist teachings created danger and provided deliverance, in power­ful word-­sound rituals of evocation and expulsion, embodiment and disembodiment, life and death. The dangers and potential vio­lence of evil from witches and spirits, felt spiritual insecurities, ambiguities about what was helpful or dangerous, and the realities of danger converged in sensorial apprehensions of spiritual and material victimhood, residues of past vio­lence, and strug­gles for power in global evangelical networks and markets. Synesthetic affects, in Nigeria, en-

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veloped times, places, and ­people, evolving into ontological questions about humanity, not merely as a result of h­ uman po­liti­cal, religious, or social conflicts, nor simply as a “cultural mode” of intersensory experience, but in perceptions of the inseparability of life and death, the world of the living and the world of spirits—­the invisible in the vis­i­ble and vice versa. The simultaneity of life and death, h­ umans and spirits, created associative, intersensory references to excessive life and death that multiplied with global cultural relations, and newly emerging and reforming webs of sensorial reference—­new clusters, as it ­were, of potentially dangerous, potentially revolutionary signs. The mimetic excesses of witchcraft, spirit possession, evil eye, evil words, the consumption and elimination of po­liti­cal and religious elites, the excesses of filmmakers who challenged excess with immoderation—­the way they spilled over into and multiplied the sensorial affects of excitement and danger, all scaffolded “danger and deliverance.” This was a constellation of aesthetics, rhe­toric, and embodiment in which spirit and ­matter ­were inseparable. Embodiments of Asian video cultures via Bollywood and the Palmasutra created interfaces where overloads of the cultural w ­ ere played out corporeally, technologically, and spiritually, sifting into the affective politics of state. Kano State government officials banned Bollywood videos in 2001 not merely ­because dancing bodies, read discursively, produced the social rupture, the re­sis­tance, or the subversion necessary to warrant “discipline,” but ­after synesthetic accumulations of sensation began to alter memories, perceptions, and anticipated ­futures, changing the capacities and power, in Northern Nigeria, to affect and to be affected by South Asian sensoria—to be “open” to the magic of Bollywood and the Kamasutra. > NOTE S  ​

I am grateful to the Nigerian healers, patients, and neighbors who allowed me into their lives. For reasons of confidentiality, they remain unnamed, but I appreciate my experiences with them. My thanks also go to colleagues at the Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, especially Aminu Inuwa, Aminu Taura Abdullahi, Mustapha Gudaje, and Istvan Patkai. I would like to thank Douglas Hollan and Paul Stoller, who have sparked my thinking about spirit possession and embodied memory, and Brian Larkin and Rudolph Gaudio for their respective insights about media and language in urban Kano. Fi­nally, special thanks go to Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar, and to my fellow contributors, who helped me connect my research in Nigeria to novel studies of Asian video cultures.

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A few witnesses described the girls’ movements as “American break dancing.” They focused on “jerky movements” they deemed “masculine” and outside of Muslim Hausa gender norms. Kano State government officials also closed all cinemas in 2001 as part of their approach u­ nder the newly implemented shari‘a system to control public space, segregate genders, and delineate Muslim and non-­Muslim areas and p­ eople. They also closed “cool spots” for drinking beer in mixed-­gendered com­pany and brothels. See, for instance, Patricia Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo­phre­nia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnessota Press, 1980); Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Uli Linke, “Fantasizing Vio­lence,” City and Society 9, no. 1 (2008): 135–58; Nigel Thrift, Non-­representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge, 2007). British colonial administrators presented media health campaigns across Nigeria in which they attempted to suggest a link between bacterial pathogens and the cultural practices of Nigerians. Though its origins are contested, Bori is widely regarded as animism or a spirit-­ possession cult that predated Islam, or a fusion of animism and Islam. Scholars describe the Bori spirit-­possession rituals, practiced in Kano State, as religious opposition to Islam, an alternative form of Islam, or oppositional gender experience and expression. See Fremont Besmer, Horses, Musicians and Gods: The Hausa Cult of Possession-­Trance (Boston: Bergen and Garvey, 1983); Susan O’Brien, “Spirit Discipline: Gender, Islam, and Hierarchies of Treatment in­Postcolonial Northern Nigeria,” in Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism, ed. Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 273–302; Michael Onwuegeogwu, “The Cult of Bori Spirits among the Hausa,” in Man in Africa, ed. Mary Douglas and Philip Kaberry (New York: Tavistock, 1969), 279–306; L. Louis Wall, Hausa Medicine: Illness and Well-­being in a West African Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988). Through my work with Bori sarakuna (leaders, kings) and malamai (Qur’anic scholar-­healers), I have found a link between the beliefs and practices of Bori and a sect of Islam that diverged during the 1400s over the use of magic or shirk (polytheism; associating partners such as ­humans or jinn with the work of Allah). This sect believed that Allah gave the Prophet Sulayman the power to tie or bind spirits to ­humans, thus legitimating con­temporary Bori spirit-­possession practices. In con­temporary writings about Bori, the jinn Sulayman is the spirit king or leader of spirits, but Bori adherents also say that Sulayman took over leadership from Danko, a snake spirit. For t­ hese reasons, I refer to Bori as a fusion of animism and Islam. I am not attempting to address the origin of Bori, but rather the historical power and contentiousness of con­temporary narrations about Bori C onerly C asey

adherents and practices. Followers of Bori consider themselves Muslims, while Kano reformist Muslims variably refer to them as “fallen Muslims,” “marginal Muslims,” or “pagans.” 6 Paul Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power and the Hauka in West Africa (New York: Routledge, 1995). 7 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 131–32. 8 It is impor­tant to note that we have strong evidence that what p­ eople count as their senses varies crossculturally, as do experiences of synesthesia. See Kathryn Geurts, Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Dorothea  E. Schulz, Muslims and New Media in West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); and Paul Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). We also know that what p­ eople regard as sensations are redefined and re-­embedded with technological and societal changes. See David Howes, A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age: 1920–2000 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); and Thrift, Non-­representational Theory. My research builds on ­these insights, but also suggests impor­tant ways of understanding the ontological resonances of synesthetic, culturally taken-­for-­granted modes of sensing the world in Northern Nigeria with culturally foreign mediated sensoria and affective forms of knowledge. 9 Izala is the popu­lar name for the Society for the Eradication of Innovation and the Establishment of the Sunna. Adherents of Izala cite Salafi and Wahhabi sources of inspiration, but often claim to be “Nigerian Orthodox Muslims.” See Abubakar Gumi with Ismaila Tsiga, Where I Stand (Ibadan: Spectrum, 1992). 10 This is taken from a personal diary entry written in 1994. 11 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Peculiar History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 34; Félix Guattari, “Regimes, Pathways, Subjects,” in Incorporations (Zone 6), ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 16–35; Louis Sass, The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 12 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 145. Mbembe uses the concept of “simultaneous multiplicities” to explain the relations of image and imagination in the postcolony, stating that “the invisible was in the vis­i­ble, and vice versa, not as a m ­ atter of artifice, but as one and the same and as external real­ity si­mul­ta­neously—as the image of the ­thing and the ­imagined ­thing, at the same time.” 13 Reformist Muslim use of antiglobalization sentiments gained further momentum ­after the Pfizer Corporation’s 1996 trial of an experimental meningitis drug left eleven ­children dead: five from the experimental antibiotic Trovan, and six from an older antibiotic used for comparison. Other c­ hildren suffered meningitis-­ related symptoms such as blindness, deafness, seizures, and, in one case, brain damage that left the child unable to walk or talk. Estimates of the total number of ­people who died during the epidemic vary. See Joe Stephens, “Where Profits B ollywood B anned  195

and Lives Hang in Balance,” Washington Post, December 17, 2000. The Washington Post published a series of articles about the Pfizer trial. 14 Abu Philips, Ibn Taymeeyah’s Essay on the Jinn (Demons) (Riyadh: Tawheed 1988), 31–32. 15 Malams Amar and Aminu, interview by author, Kano, Nigeria, August 12, 1996. ­These malams (Qur’anic scholars) participated in Da’wah, a proselytizing movement associated with Izala. 16 Malams Amar and Aminu, interview by author, Kano, Nigeria, August 12, 1996. 17 Newly married Muslim Hausa man, age twenty-­six, interview by author, Kano, Nigeria, May 15, 1994. 18 Barbara Callaway, Muslim Hausa W ­ omen in Nigeria: Tradition and Change (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1987). 19 Excerpt from an observation and recording of a spirit exorcism by author, Kano, Nigeria, August 12, 1996. 20 Bafulatana are Fulani spirits, often associated with mental ill health and paralysis. 21 Excerpt from an observation and recording of a spirit exorcism by author, Kano, Nigeria, August 12, 1996. 22 ­There is a close link between food and sex in Hausa language and culture. Ci is a Hausa term used both for “to eat” and “to have sex.” It is customary in Muslim Hausa ­house­holds with more than one wife for the husband to divide his time between wives, rotating the days that he eats the food cooked by each wife prior to having sex on the same day or night. 23 Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 113. 24 See Abdalla Uba Adamu, “Islam, Hausa Culture and Censorship in Northern Nigerian Video Film,” in Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-­first ­Century: Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution, ed. Mahir Saul and Ralph Austen (Cleveland: Ohio University Press, 2010), 56–73; Abdalla Uba Adamu, Yusuf Adamu, and Umar Faruk Jibril, eds., Hausa Home Videos: Technology, Economy and Society (Kano, Nigeria: Center for Hausa Cultural Studies / Adamu Joji Publishers, 2004); Brian Larkin, “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities,” Africa 67, no. 3 (1997): 406–40; Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 25 Larkin, “Bandiri ­Music, Global Art and Urban Experience in Nigeria,” Social Text 81 (winter 2004): 91–112. 26 Larkin, “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers”; Larkin, Signal and Noise, 161. 27 I use the phrase “reenchantment of orthodoxy” b ­ ecause reformist Salafi and Sufi Muslims considered this period a revival of earlier Nigerian reform movements, particularly of the nineteenth-­century Sheikh Usman ‘dan Fodio. They often referred to themselves as “Nigerian orthodox Muslims.” 28 See Conerly Casey, “ ‘Marginal Muslims’: Authenticity and the Perceptual Bounds of Profiling in Northern Nigeria,” Africa ­Today 54 (2008): 67–94; and Conerly 196 

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29 30 31 32 33

Casey, “Mediated Hostility: Media, ‘Affective Citizenship,’ and Genocide in Northern Nigeria,” in Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Repre­sen­ta­tion, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton and Kevin Lewis O’Neill (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 247–78. Casey, “Marginal Muslims.” Matthias Krings, “Conversion on Screen: A Glimpse at Popu­lar Islamic Imaginations in Northern Nigeria,” Africa ­Today 54 (2008): 44–68. Krings, “Conversion on Screen,” 46. Krings, “Conversion on Screen.” Krings, “Conversion on Screen.”

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9  ​>

T H E A S I A N I Z AT I O N O F H E I M AT MING WONG’S ASIAN GERMAN VIDEO WORKS

Feng-­Mei Heberer

In Lerne Deutsch mit Petra von Kant (Learn German with Petra von Kant, 2007), a reference to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972), the Singaporean artist Ming Wong takes on the role of the German female protagonist. Specifically, he reenacts the original key scene of von Kant’s ner­vous breakdown as she declares her love for another ­woman and turns against the w ­ omen supposedly closest to her—­her m ­ other, ­daughter, and cousin—to insist on the legitimacy of her feeling. As her words clarify, “Crazy? I’m not crazy, Sidonie. I love her.” Wong reenacts Petra von Kant’s coming-­out scene in a blond curly wig and is dressed in an emerald-­green dress similar to that of the original character. He downs gin like von Kant, turns around when she does, smashes a porcelain set with his silver-­glowing high heels, throws himself onto the floor, and raises and lowers the volume of his voice in concert with the original. The artist’s racial, gender, and sexual drag does not aim at reproducing an identical scenario, however. Instead, Wong uses his gender identity and his racially and ethnically marked body to ventriloquize recognizable film roles and to occupy a subject position he seems originally and naturally excluded from. Without any prior knowledge of German, and in deliberately using his thick accent when repeating von Kant’s lines, Wong further plays with his foreignness to disturb familiar narratives of

9.1  ​Drunk and loud. Still from Ming Wong’s Lerne Deutsch mit Petra von Kant (April 8, 2007). Image provided by the artist.

national identity that are based on racial and ethnic purity, patriarchal gender roles, and heterosexual desire. His reenactment not only offers a critique of normative scripts and per­for­mances of German belonging, but also intimates the possibility of a playful affiliation between differently minoritized subjects both within and beyond the national realm. Born shortly ­after the in­de­pen­dence of Singapore as a former British colony, Japanese-­occupied territory, and part of Malaysia, Ming Wong studied art in London and has made Berlin his home since completing a one-­year artist residency ­there in 2007. The transient nature of his birth country and the volatile question of national belonging as s­ haped by multiple migrations and colonizations are reflected in his own ­family history. Wong recounts, My paternal grandparents migrated to Singapore from Guangdong in Southern China, and they and their ­children went through the Japa­nese Occupation during [World War II]. My m ­ other was born in Malaysia, and came to Singapore to work where she met my ­father. I was born in the 70s, T H E A S I A N I Z AT I O N O F H E I M AT   199

a few years ­after Singapore became in­de­pen­dent in 1965. I went to a catholic missionary primary school, then ­later to a “good” state school where a lot  of the alumni would go on to work for the government. My parents learnt Malay in school, the national language at the time, whereas I learnt Mandarin as a second language.1 Informed by his upbringing in a postcolonial, multicultural, and multiethnic society, and by his subsequent move to Britain and then Germany, Wong’s engagement with the performativity and hybridity of identities has gained approbation from t­ hose representing Singapore’s national interests, as well as from critics and connoisseurs of the global art market alike. The two videos I discuss ­here, Lerne Deutsch mit Petra von Kant and Angst Essen/Eat Fears (2008), both refer to the films of the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.2 They comprise part of Wong’s larger proj­ect of reenacting iconic film melodramas from vari­ous continents, to play with and critique normative expectations about which bodies, feelings, and identities belong together and which are deemed incompatible.3 In par­tic­u­lar, the artist channels his misfit in famous cinematic scenes into a continuous displacement. In so d­ oing, Wong repurposes a cultural canon into the repertoire of shared though distinct experiences of marginalization. His reenactments intervene directly into the ways the genre of melodrama acts as a “sense-­making machine” that, as E. Ann Kaplan and Lauren Berlant have convincingly elaborated, both addresses and rehearses the intimate life of viewers as normative citizens.4 In this essay, I turn t­oward Wong’s appropriation of a now established work of German film culture to initiate discussion about an overlooked Asian diasporic population: Asian Germans. My aim is twofold. First, I employ the videos to interrogate the ambivalent treatment of Asian Germans as a seemingly non­ex­is­tent, yet also desirable minority population in an increasingly diversified German nationscape. Second, I ask what kinds of Asian diasporic sociality Wong’s work allows us to discern, imagine, and theorize that offer ground for Asian German subjecthood without thereby reiterating state and market logics? To some, the story of Asian German repre­sen­ta­tion might sound familiar (think Asian American model minority): Asian Germans find themselves consistently ignored as a constitutive part of the German national environment, which, ­until recently, regulated citizenship by means of the “real­ity” of blood relations. At the same time, the ­little public repre­sen­ta­tion they do gain is restricted to the image of an eco­nom­ically successful, socially assimi200 

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lated, and apo­liti­cal “model minority.” However, as the poster c­ hildren for trouble-­free minority life and living proof of the good, white, demo­cratic nation-­state (where every­one is represented), Asian Germans are deprived of alternative life paths, of the right to fail, to dream, to protest, and to invent. Instead, they become illegible as embodied, affective, and cognitive subjects—­that is, in their own respective personhood. I want to know how the peculiar hypervisibility of a model-­minority identity—­“ hyper” not in a quantitative or qualitative sense, but rather in the form of quiet per­sis­tence and domination that get read as “truth”—­coincides with the silencing of Asian Germans as complex ­human beings, and how it forecloses a critique and even recognition of racism itself.5 Indeed, the German condition is marked by a historical eradication of racial discourse following World War II, a consequence of which has been the absence of a lexicon to name and see racial injustice.6 Where in the United States, civil-­rights movements, multicultural neoliberalism, and antiracist attitudes as new capital have forged established outlets for racial critique—­where, to be more precise, ongoing physical and epistemological vio­lence against ­people of color and other minoritized groups intersect with new economies of value and inclusion—­the German state and German public remain utterly ­silent. Local antiracist activism, in turn, has prioritized negative and hateful repre­sen­ta­tions against Germans of color over the seemingly benign view on Asian Germans; not a “topic” at home, ­these latter have remained outside overseas diasporic discourse, too.7 In this essay I mobilize Ming Wong’s video work in response to the lack of racial discourse in the wider German public, with a par­tic­ul­ar eye to the liminal place of Asian Germans. To be clear, I do not believe the artist to speak for an entire Asian German population, which consists of vari­ous ethnicities, citizenship statuses, and self-­conceptions. Nor do I claim that he deliberately represents even a part of it. Rather, my discussion is a modest approach to locate the possibility of Asian German subjecthood in an era of global identity politics, asking how Asian Germans can gain recognition without becoming a mainstream token for betterment and transformation. Within this context, I submit that the videos serve as repository for the negative feelings of minority subjects whose discrimination is continuously denied and insulated also from larger social-­justice movements. ­Here, Wong’s racial and gender drag provides a language—­verbal, physical, and affective—to mourn the absence of Asian German subjecthood in dominant fictions of belonging. Yet Lerne Deutsch and Angst Essen are not only means to recognize and name. In their explicit use of drag, misfit, and transnationality, they si­mul­ta­neously deflect Asian German T H E A S I A N I Z AT I O N O F H E I M AT   201

subjectivity, refusing to essentialize and instead opening it up to unanticipated minoritarian affinities. To then attend to the real­ity of disprized Asian German lives and to the need for agency beyond a single name, I engage Wong’s per­ for­mance videos as an “archive of feelings.” 8 FR O M PO L­ I TI ­C AL RACELESSN ESS TO H Y STERIC R AC I AL DR AG

Lerne Deutsch was produced around the time of Wong’s move from London to Berlin in the midst of public debates about the failure of multiculturalism and integration in Western Eu­rope and the repeated denial of any related “race prob­lem” by politicians.9 While much of Eu­rope’s self-­conception has been ­shaped by the norms of whiteness and Chris­tian­ity, ­these very ideological foundations have barely been subject to further debate.10 Fatima El-­Tayeb employs the term “po­liti­cal racelessness” to designate this “form of racialization that can be defined as specifically Eu­ro­pean both in its enforced silence and in its explicit categorization as not Eu­ro­pean of all ­those who violate Eu­rope’s implicit, but normative whiteness.”11 To this day, like many other Eu­ro­pean countries, Germany neglects its colonial legacy and is hesitant to recognize the structural discrimination minority populations face in their daily life. Similarly, the state continues to downplay its responsibility for the aftermath of its migrant-­labor regime post–World War II, of which the presence of so-­called ­others is certainly a consequence.12 Instead, migration and diversity are identified as one-­sided (“They are invading our home and using up our resources”) and more recent phenomena of a historically and po­liti­ cally neutral globalization.13 The so-­called refugee crisis starting in the fall of 2015 is just the newest threat to demo­cratic Eu­rope and the giving German welfare state specifically. While the prevalent image of Asian Germans is still that of a homogenous model minority—­for instance, Viet­nam­ese Germans are publicly celebrated as “Asia’s Prus­sians”: hard-­working, noncomplaining, and gifted learners— this par­tic­ul­ar branding is strategically pitted against p­ eople with ­Middle Eastern background, especially Turkish and Arab Germans.14 In fact, the model minority becomes living proof that socioeconomic success is a ­matter of personal investment alone. As such, it turns into a site of humanist and civic education, where the distinction between valuable and nonvaluable life is taught through norms of race and self-­cultivation.15 Interestingly, the mea­sur­ ing of “model” versus “nonmodel” identities comes with a distinct divide of “Asianness,” mentally mapping who and what count as the latter, too. 202 

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The feelings of frustration, anger, and despair Wong so dramatically enacts through drag reflect the concrete effects of a “po­liti­cal racelessness,” in El-­Tayeb’s phrasing, on the bodies and minds of racialized Germans. By using a fictional character’s frustration about a dysfunctional and discriminating German postwar society, Wong angrily refutes the myth of a postracist Germany that si­mul­ta­neously blames “immigrants” and by extension “refugees” for betraying the proj­ect of blissful coexistence.16 He also draws on the affective vocabulary of a drunk, loud, and offensive white, German woman-­loving woman to defy the image of the productive and obedient model-­minority subject, which is then used to discipline other racialized populations. In sum, Wong uses the camp aesthetic of drag to voice an Asian German’s suffering from, and stage his disagreement with, a dominant racial and gender hierarchy that poses as unquestionable truth.17 A compelling body of ethnic studies scholarship has conceptualized feelings that are commonly regarded to be “negative,” including feelings of sadness, anger, melancholia, hysteria, and depression, as symptoms of social discrimination.18 This scholarship has elaborated how ­people of color in par­tic­u­lar carry with them histories of vio­lence, exploitation, and devaluation that often remain unaddressed by the larger public and continue to impact them in oppressive ways. In Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian Amer­i­ca, for instance, David Eng theorizes racial hysteria as a response to past and pres­ent wounds of social discrimination that are frequently dismissed and, indeed, actively repressed by the state. Eng detaches his definition of hysteria from its common perception as a female sexual pathology, reframing it instead as the expression of both social trauma and protest that informs the subjectivity of racialized ­others. He writes, “It is ­because language fails the hysteric—­fails, that is, to give adequate expression to t­hese reminiscences—­that the body must speak instead.”19 Reading Lerne Deutsch through the lens of racial hysteria can help us frame Wong’s racial and gender drag as an Asian German’s arduous attempt to come to terms with an environment that perpetually dismisses his experience. Where the benign image of Asian Germans as the “new Prus­sians” makes it especially difficult to detect ongoing racist practices and “justify” bad feelings, Wong enacts a crisis of sovereign subjecthood to suggest the gravity of historical eradication. Similar to Eng’s discussion of racial hysteria as the visceral reaction to a social wrong, drag ­here takes on the role of both self-­maintenance and social protest. Yet it goes even more specific. Stripped of the qualities of rationality and emotional control that characterize white patriarchal manhood, T H E A S I A N I Z AT I O N O F H E I M AT   203

the protagonist appears, in Eng’s words, “hysterially impotent,” reminiscent, too, of the prevalent image of lacking Asian masculinity.20 However, Wong’s hysteric drag resists symbolizing male Asian insufficiency by suspending an original norm of mea­sure­ment. Concretely, he orients himself t­ oward von Kant, not to confirm the ste­reo­type of the effeminate and docile Asian man, but to mimic a white female character whose unruly desire for another ­woman already complicates traditional ideas of femininity. ­Here, drag circulates hysteria to interrupt oppressive categorizations, including racial, gender, and sexual, and the sticky value distribution that comes with them. In so ­doing, Wong’s per­ for­mance suggests not least another form of sociality, linking two differently discriminated subjects over the shared refusal to assimilate into the social role they are supposed to live. The video Angst Essen/Eat Fear further elaborates how hysterical drag can work to build supportive co­ali­tions. This time, Wong’s drag still represents a form of racial hysteria in the politicized sense that Eng discusses it, namely as self-­maintenance and social protest; but it also becomes itself hysteric in the colloquial sense of excess and exaggeration. A N A RCHI V E O F F EELIN G S

In Angst Essen, Wong takes drag per­for­mance to a further extreme, this time via the tale of a socially taboo romance between the German female se­nior citizen Emmi and the much younger Moroccan male guest worker Ali. Similar to Lerne Deutsch, Angst Essen consists of selected key scenes from the original through which we follow Ali’s objectification as a man of color and Emmi’s discrimination as a white, older ­woman desiring him. Except for a few cases where two characters appear in close physical proximity, Wong plays all the characters, ­women and men of dif­fer­ent ages, races, citizenships, social backgrounds, and body sizes. In one scene, he appears as Emmi presenting her newly wedded husband’s muscular body to her colleagues in an attempt to overcome their hostile attitude t­oward him. “Mach mal! Fass ihn mal an!” (Go ahead! Touch him!), she encourages the two w ­ omen, who immediately begin to circle around the “model” Ali, exclaiming, “Toll. Und die Haut ist so zart” (Terrific! And the skin is so soft). While the original film, Angst Essen Seele Auf, shows Ali trapped in the liminal, violent space between racial abjection and hypersexualization, Angst Essen/Eat Fear utilizes drag to enact an Asian German subject’s subversive mobility. H ­ ere, it is not the person of color who fails to pass as German. Rather, it is the white subject who fails to pass as authentically German. By highlighting his use of body makeup and fake 204 

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9.2  ​The makeup of whiteness. Still from Ming Wong’s Angst Essen/Eat Fears ( July 5, 2008). Image provided by the artist.

appendages to reenact the “veritable” German characters of Fassbinder’s film, Wong makes whiteness the target of our laughter and disrupts its status as the invisible norm. The performer’s failure to pass as white—­after all, the comic relief relies precisely on the fact that the artist never fully coincides with the original—­becomes the questioning of whiteness as incontestable origin. As Cherise Smith puts it likewise in her definition of gender drag, “In contrast to the cross-­dresser, the drag artist does not aim to pass as the assumed identity. Rather, drag relies on the camp ­factor to amplify gender conventions in a parodic way that calls attention to the ʻartifice, exaggeration’ and ʻstylization’ of gender and other identities. Camp is characterized by incongruity and humor, and it delights in ʻthings-­being-­what-­they-­are-­not.’ ”21 While Smith’s statement focuses on drag’s relationship to the dominant gender binary, I advance her suggestion of drag as a lingering on “things-­being-­what-­ they-­are-­not.” For me, the value of Wong’s videos lies precisely in the unruly vision of what minoritized subjects can do if they refuse to stay put. It lies not only in “being-­what-­they-­are-­not” but in daring to inhabit what is not yet. I suggest seeing the artist’s excessive absorption of subject positions in the videos as a search for pos­si­ble alliances beyond the dominant fictions of white hegemony. Unlike the racial hysteric of Eng’s account, which is defined by social withdrawal, Wong’s Asian German subject boldly explores other subjectivities to push t­ oward a collective minoritarian world. Such “worlding” allows him to T H E A S I A N I Z AT I O N O F H E I M AT   205

try out new self-­presentations in dialogue with ­others; it offers moments of laughter when, or precisely b­ ecause, t­hose pre­sen­ta­tions fail to fully satisfy; and it becomes a way to overcome the oppressive feeling of his racial insulation. However, the pro­cess of becoming with and through o­ thers is not a quick path to recovery and community building. A ­ fter all, Wong’s per­for­mance and the act of working through retain their ephemerality in the a­ ctual absence of ­others. But if we recall, for the moment, that the naming of Asian German subjectivity and its per­sis­tent racialization is rendered impossible in the dominant language, that the two are in this sense always already ephemeral, t­ hese forms of self-­enactment and worlding are, perhaps, the best and only ones we have. Diana Taylor calls them “repertoire,” describing informal and institutionally “invalid” practices of knowledge transfer that are distinct, albeit inseparable, from official archives.22 I also consider Lerne Deutsch and Angst Essen part of an Asian German “archive of feelings” that sits uncomfortably with national knowledge discourses and gathers the embodied and affective experiences of socially abandoned subjects. In her discussion of lesbian trauma cultures, Ann Cvetkovich employs the term “archive of feelings” to describe how intimate experience can function as a knowledge source for the creation of minoritarian public cultures. Specifically, an archive of feelings refers to the collection of cultural objects that hold on to ­those parts of our lives that are commonly excluded from official histories—­ feelings, sexual encounters, and other personal memories. The archival objects themselves, from textual and visual narratives to material artifacts, are not always directly linked to the experiences they preserve. Rather, they become imbued with the feelings and memories of o­ thers and continue to negotiate their meaning in encounters with subsequent audiences. This means that, while relying on concrete cultural texts and objects, an archive of feelings is also constituted via an ongoing interaction with, and the simultaneous releasing and absorbing of, ­people’s affective histories. Moreover, it hereby knits together lives, both past and pres­ent, that might have never crossed each other’s path. Like an archive of feelings, Wong’s videos become a repository for the vari­ous affects around the silencing of Asian German subjecthood, including so-­called negative feelings as well as the curiosity and excitement that come with discovering new pos­si­ble socialities. For Lerne Deutsch and Angst Essen not only gesture to the untold story of Asian German impossibility. In bringing together subject positions that are usually not thought of side by side but can connect over the experience of exclusion, the visual works also creatively in206 

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vent alternative possibilities of being and being-­with ­those that might grow out of transcommunal and transnational affinities. CHE CK YO UR PRIVILEG E: W H AT REMAIN S U N FI X ABL E

What about ­those ephemeral social worlds that Wong’s drag produces yet seems unable to sustain? The artist’s slipping in and out of roles not only enables a physically and affectively shared world of seemingly incompatible subjects and relationships. It also raises the question of who has access to a playful appropriation of masquerades and who is deprived of such mobility and choice. In the end, the minoritarian plea­sure drag evokes is the experience of one subject alone, and the cross-­racial sociality the per­for­mance gestures ­toward remains unfulfilled. Moreover, what allows Ming Wong to mobilize Asian German subjecthood is also what distinguishes him from the majority of Asian Germans and many other persons of color: as a well-­educated, gay Singaporean artist living in Berlin, Wong’s transnationality gives him privileged access to prompting a dialogue on racism and racialization that is other­wise barely recognized from within “multikulti” Germany. However, as public and appreciated as such dialogue becomes within the context of art practice, it draws on the ­labors of daily experience by Asian Germans who ­don’t partake in its very arti­ culation. In contrast to them, the self-­defined “guestartworker,” whose work shows in museums, art exhibits, and festivals worldwide, brings just the right worldliness (professional, racial, and queer) to “fix” the lamented failure of multiculturalism in the German nationscape.23 From this perspective, Wong appears much more like an updated model-­minority subject whose diligence, containability, and po­liti­cal disinterest continue to support the image of white pro­gress. Given the artist’s access to vari­ous forms of capital ­under neoliberal multiculturalism, including his racial and ethnic-­majority status as Han Chinese in Singapore, how useful are his videos to inquire about the difficult place of Asian Germans? Clearly, the subjectivities emerging around Wong’s work demand that we continuously ask how minoritarian subject positions and alternative sites of knowledge are always already implicated in or folded into hegemonic power relations. Yet I move away from repre­sen­ta­tional paradigms that place Wong and his work along a compliance-­resistance divide where white hegemony and global capitalism remain the exclusive scales of mea­sure­ment. Instead, I opt for taking seriously the videos’ ambiguous situatedness and using it as a prism for understanding the conflictual governance of minoritized life ­today. T H E A S I A N I Z AT I O N O F H E I M AT   207

For one, Asian Germans—­never a uniform group to begin with—­are subject to a hierarchy of ­human value that si­mul­ta­neously excludes and capitalizes them against differently valued groups inside the nation. At the same time, the ongoing differentiation of power and exploitation in the global era, how its vari­ ous axes including gender, sexuality, class, and able-­bodiedness intersect and combine into and across national territories, also insulates the members of a heterogeneous Asian diaspora from and against each other. Against this backdrop, Wong’s videos open themselves to a dif­fer­ent reading, specifically one that strives to turn around the competition of Asian diasporic voices and that opens them up instead to new relationalities. What if we read Wong’s video per­for­mances as simultaneous utterances of Singapore’s racial politics, of institutionally separating and mea­sur­ing against each other differently ethnicized communities, that point to global arcs of racial governance and shared, if unevenly distributed, experiences of minoritization?24 While this reading requires spinning and elaboration beyond the scope of this essay, h­ ere is the point I want to make: Wong’s shifting, staging body might relay diasporic affinities and affiliations that are not yet thought through by nationalist logics and global capital. The discursive openness of Wong’s hybrid per­for­mance videos—­thus far discussed in their affective and ideological dimension, now to be expanded ­toward their formal composition—­enhances this point. From activist interventions, to intimate self-­recordings, to the professional channels of millennial YouTubers, the medium of video is inherently open to po­liti­cal, aesthetic, and market experimentation.25 Lerne Deutsch and Angst Essen are without question firmly embedded within a global art market, with limited exposure to a few culturally interested, rather than being stuff for the masses. Yet Wong’s work offers itself to multiple responses not only by mixing and messing with identities and expectations, but by converging dif­fer­ent cultural genres and art practices. For instance, both videos bridge elite with popu­lar material, deliberately reversing how each is commonly perceived. Specifically, Lerne Deutsch and Angst Essen draw heavi­ly on cinematic melodrama, per­for­mance art, and experimental film, while also incorporating less expected formats. Besides employing many kinds of drag, Lerne Deutsch is si­mul­ta­neously a do-­it-­yourself language course—­Learn German with Petra von Kant. Furthermore, Angst Essen contains valuable lessons on costume and makeup, and it is funny, too. In fact, the works’ fluidity across cultural genres, formats, and artistic practices make their circulation across vari­ous institutions and po­liti­cal fields that much easier, explaining their simultaneous

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presence at film and theater festivals, art exhibitions, grassroots-­led centers, and on YouTube. Rather than risk the impression of dehistoricized flexibility, however, I claim that the videos’ discursive mobility is also what affords the opportunity to reimagine Asian German subjecthood, by making the latter available to a much wider cultural space and relating it to an unaccounted repertoire of Asian diasporic presences. Indeed, by situating Asian German subjecthood within the transnational cir­cuits of Asian diasporas, Wong’s work makes palpable the ultimate unfixability of Asian German subjectivity—­ unfixable in both senses of the word, that is, not to be recovered and not to be contained in the midst of institutional embrace. This might make Angst Essen and Lerne Deutsch the cultural objects par excellence for an Asian German archive of feelings, one whose elusive mobility, strategic positioning, and systemic exploitation of Asian German subjecthood makes impossible not the fact of Asian German life, but its full-on rationalization into a state and market product. Perhaps we need the help of artists and other creative archivists like Wong to carve out the potential for critical analy­sis, mockery, and reappropriation, and for minoritarian and diasporic alliances when all t­ here seems to be is silence. > NOTE S  ​

I thank the editors, Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar, for their generous feedback on this essay. My gratitude goes as well to Anikó Imre for commenting on an earlier draft and to Ming Wong for sharing the images included h­ ere. The participants of the Asian Video Cultures conference at Brown Universty in the fall of 2013 offered further substantial input. 1 2 3

4

Ming Wong and Selina Ting, “Interview: Ming Wong: Interview,” initiart Magazine, November 1, 2010, http://­www​.­initiartmagazine​.­com​/­interview​.­php​?­IVarchive​=1­ 2. Künstlerhaus Bethanien subsidized Angst Essen, whereas the costs for Lerne Deutsch mit Petra Von Kant ­were borne by the artist himself. Other works of reference include Cantonese opera and Chinese science fiction, and the films Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959), Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971), and Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974). I draw from E. Ann Kaplan’s definition of melodrama and from Lauren Berlant’s approach to the same genre and its contribution to affective citizenship. E. Ann Kaplan, “Theories of Melodrama: A Feminist Perspective,” ­Women and Per­for­ mance 1, no. 1 (1983): 43; and Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 3.

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To this end, I employ the identity label Asian German with par­tic­u­lar reference to ­people who are identified as an Asian “model minority.” I do so not to reproduce a problematic ste­reo­type that collapses “Asianness” into a moralizing tale of docility and diligence in supposedly postracist times, but to interrogate how it serves to discipline p­ eople of color in Germany. See also Feng-­Mei Heberer, “Existential Surplus: Affect and ­Labor in Asian Diasporic Video Cultures” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2015). As of 2015, 7 million foreign citizens are living in Germany. About 1.5 million are from Asia, including the M ­ iddle East (717,000), East and Central Asia (300,000), and South and Southeast Asia (385,000). Statistisches Bundesamt, Bevölkerung und Erwerbstätigkeit. Ausländische Bevölkerung. Ergebnisse des Ausländerzentralregisters [Population and occupation: Foreign population: Results of the Central Register of Foreigners] (Wiesbaden: Statistisches Bundesamt, 2015), https://­www​.­destatis​.­de​/­DE​ /­Publikationen​/­Thematisch​/­Bevoelkerung​/­MigrationIntegration​/­AuslaendB evoelkerung2010200157004​.­pdf​?­​_­​_­blob​=­publicationFile. A historical overview of their migration still needs to be written, however, and the numbers of t­ hose naturalized and born in Germany have been insufficiently documented only. See Nanna Heidenreich, V/Erkennungsdienste, das Kino und die Perspektive der Migration [Practices of mis/recognition, cinema and the perspectives of migration] (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015). To my knowledge, only a handful of academic publications have explic­itly engaged with the topic of Asian German identity as of t­oday. Among them are Mita Banerjee, “Travelling Theory, Reshaping Disciplines? Envisioning Asian Germany through Asian Australian Studies,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 27, nos. 1–2 (2006): 167–86; and Veronika Fuechtner and Mary Rhiel, eds., Imagining Germany Imagining Asia: Essays in Asian-­German Studies (Rochester: Camden, 2013). However, neither of t­ hese two addresses the experience of Asian Germans, the documentation of which has become the task of activist and community publications. Two recent noticeable works ­here include Kien Nghi Ha, ed., Asiatische Deutsche: Vietnamesische Diaspora and Beyond [Asian Germans: Viet­nam­ ese diaspora and beyond] (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2012); and the special issue “Auftauchen” [Surfacing], Freitext 21 (2013). Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (London: Duke University Press, 2003). Exacerbated by the advent of the so-­called Eurozone crisis in 2008, the German chancellor Angela Merkel’s infamous announcement that the attempt to “live side by side and be happy about each other—­this attempt has failed, utterly failed” was followed shortly by similar statements in Britain and France (and was also preceded by an announcement from the Netherlands). Each time, the culprits of the failure of blissful multiculturalism w ­ ere so-­called immigrants unwilling to integrate. See “Angela Merkel and die Muslime und Türken Multi Kulti Ist Tot” [Angela Merkel and the Muslims and Turks multiculti is dead], KabelEins News report, YouTube video, uploaded by “pommescurry1,” October  16, 2010, F eng - ­M ei H eberer

10

11 12

13

14



15 16

https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=X ­ uq0Bnw1DzQ. All translations from German to En­glish are my own. See Fatima El-­Tayeb, Eu­ro­pean ­Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Eu­rope (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); and David Theo Goldberg, “Racial Eu­ro­pe­anization,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29, no. 2 (March 2006): 331–64. El-­Tayeb, Eu­ro­pean O ­ thers, xxviii. See Sebastian Conrad, “Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 4 (2013): 543–66; Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenbach, “Introduction: What’s Race Got to Do with It? Postwar German History in Context,” in ­After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Eu­rope, ed. Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 1–29; and Oliver Schmidtke, “Einwanderer als Ware” [Immigrants as commodities], Blätter für Deutsche und internationale Politik 10 (2010): 51–57. See Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley, “The Crises of Multiculturalism,” openDemocracy, July  18, 2011, http://­www​.­opendemocracy​.­net​/­ourkingdom​/­alana​ -­lentin​-­gavan​-­titley​/­crises​-o­ f​-­multiculturalism. On Viet­nam­ese Germans, see Martin Spiewak, “Das Vietnamesische Wunder” [The Viet­nam­ese won­der], Zeit Online, January 1, 2009, http://­www​.z­ eit​.­de​/­2009​ /­05​/B ­ ​-V ­ ietnamesen. While reports on the Viet­nam­ese minority population usually distinguish between the two major groups of immigrants—­students and contract workers who came to the German Demo­cratic Republic ­under the country’s cooperation with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and boat p­ eople who fled from the Vietnam War to the Federal Republic of Germany—­both are characterized by the same ste­reo­types outlined ­here. Although Turkish Germans represent Germany’s largest Asian German population, they are never addressed as Asians. Instead, Turkey embodies the precarious position of belonging to, yet also demarcating, the outside border of Fortress Eu­ rope, with its proximity to the dangerous ­Middle East. The recent protests on Istanbul’s Taksim Square, which began in May 2013 and quickly spread throughout the country and t­ oward Turkish minority populations worldwide to oppose the government’s conservative religious turn ­under Prime Minister Erdoğan, and which ­were violently beaten down, only seem to justify the West’s continual mistrust of the Turkish neighbor. Kerem Oktem, “Turkey, From Tahrir to Taksim,” openDemocracy, June  7, 2013, http://­www​.­opendemocracy​.­net​/­kerem​-­oktem​ /­turkey​-f­ rom​-­tahrir​-­to​-­taksim. Compare Jin Haritaworn, “Beyond ‘Hate’: Queer Metonymies of Crime, Pathology and Anti/Violence,” Jindal Global Law Review 4, no. 2 (2013): 44–78. As El-­Tayeb comments on the German notion of “(im)mi­grants”: “Key to the ability to define minority populations as nonmembers of the nation is the racialized Eu­ro­pean understanding of the concept of ‘(im)mi­grant,’ which contrary to the U.S. use of the term implies a strictly temporary presence . . . ​but at the same T H E A S I A N I Z AT I O N O F H E I M AT   211

time indicates a permanent state across generations. That is, whoever is identified as racial or religious Other is necessarily conceptualized as a mi­grant, that is, as originating outside of Eu­rope” (Eu­ro­pean O ­ thers, 180n4). On the misrepre­ sen­ta­tion of Syrian refugees in Germany, see Paul Mecheril, “Flucht, Sex, Diskurs” [Escape, sex, discourse], public speech, January 13, 2016, http://­www​.­fb12​ .­uni​-­bremen​.­de​/­fileadmin​/­Arbeitsgebiete​/­interkult​/­Aktuelle​_­Diskussion​/­rede​ .­bremen​.­pemcheril​_­0116​.­pdf. 17 While a deeper engagement with theories on drag and camp goes beyond the scope of this essay, some insightful references include Judith Butler, “Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,” in Bodies That ­Matter: On The Discursive Limits of “Sex,” by Judith Butler (London: Routledge, 1993), 121–42; José Esteban Muñoz, “ ‘The White to Be Angry’: Vaginal Creme Davis’s Terrorist Drag,” in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Per­for­mance of Politics, by José Esteban Muñoz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 93–115; Brett Farmer, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); and Kathrin Sieg, Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 18 For some of ­these writings, see Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: ­Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); David  L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), specifically the chapter by David L. Eng and Shinee Han, “A Dialog on Racial Melancholia”; José Estaban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs 31, no.  3 (2006): 675–88; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Lisa Marie Cacho, “But Some of Us Are Wise: Academic Illegitimacy and the Affective Value of Ethnic Studies,” Black Scholar 40, no.  4 (2010): 28–36; Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 19 David Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian Amer­i­ca (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 172. 20 Eng, Racial Castration, 195. 21 Cherise Smith, Enacting ­Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian ­Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 15. 22 Diana Taylor, The Archive and The Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Amer­i­cas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 193. 23 Ludwig Seyfarth, “Ming Wong: Portrait,” vonhundert, November 2009, http://­ www​.v­ onhundert​.d­ e​/­indexe3b8​.­html​?­id​=2­ 26. 24 See Beng Huat Chua, “The Cultural Logic of a Cap­it­al­ist Single-­Party State, Singapore,” Postcolonial Studies 13, no.  4 (2010): 335–50. For the simultaneous disciplining and exploitation of racial and sexual “diversity” in Singapore, see Eng-­Beng Lim, Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Per­for­mance in the Asias (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 212 

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See Ming-­Yuen S. Ma and Erika Suderburg, eds., Resolutions 3: Global Networks of Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Alexandra Juhasz, aids tv: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video, videography by Catherin Saalfield (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); and Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

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POLITICS IN THE AGE OF YOUTUBE D E G R A D E D I M A G E S A N D S M A L L - ­S C R E E N R E V O L U T I O N S

S. V. Srinivas

YouTube is for the most part a site of consumption where users are likely to ­either repost what they find in­ter­est­ing or produce remixes that Lawrence Lessig usefully designates as “crap”: “The vast majority of remix, like the vast majority of home movies, or consumer photo­graphs, or singing in the shower, or blogs, is just crap. Most of ­these products are silly or derivative, a waste of even the creator’s time, let alone the consumer’s.”1 Lessig goes on to argue that the issue is not the poor aesthetic or intellectual quality of the product but the opportunities it provides to users to acquire the competencies to use the medium. It would be pointlessly rhetorical to ask if the crap on YouTube has analytical and po­liti­cal significance. I would like to steer clear of assertions of transformative possibilities of media consumption and the capacity of “popu­ lar culture meta­phors and analogies to refresh po­liti­cal rhe­toric,” and stay with a more mundane fact of life in our times: that media consumption is now a necessary condition for po­liti­cal mobilizations.2 ­These mobilizations need not always be e­ ither refreshed or significantly transformed by the deployment of popu­lar cultural resources. So what might the study of media forms and their consumption tell us about modes of po­liti­cal participation? My case study is the mobilization centered on the moderate demand for the formation of Telangana State within India. This was no uprising against a

dictatorship or the first baby step t­ oward a demo­cratic government. The duration and scale, however, was impressive even by Indian standards. For a variety of reasons that I ­will not go into ­here, the agitation lasted well over a de­cade (from roughly 2001 to 2014) and frequently involved tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of agitators. The mobilization coincided with large-­scale digitization of “content” and rapidly increasing levels of access to the Internet in India. Most impor­tant, it was accompanied by a spurt in online activity that was for the most part generative of a lot of crap. S UM M A R Y I NTRODU CTION S TO TELAN GAN A A ND YO UTUBE , RESP ECTIVELY

The demand for the formation of a separate state of Telangana by bifurcating Andhra Pradesh, where Telugu was spoken by the majority, can be traced to the late 1960s.3 Renewed calls for statehood began in the 1990s, primarily by forums of intellectuals and students, and w ­ ere supported by the radical Left 4 Naxalite parties. With the formation of Telangana Rashtra Samithi (trs), the po­liti­cal party launched in 2001 with the sole agenda of statehood for Telangana, the scale of the agitation increased exponentially. The demand was ­fi­nally conceded by the ruling United Progressive Alliance, in late July 2013, but only ­after prolonged and numerous shutdowns, strikes, and several hundred suicides allegedly committed in support of statehood. Telangana State was established on June 2, 2014. The scale and intensity of the agitation apart, Telangana is impor­tant for students of media and cultural studies for two reasons. First, the agitation was the subject of wide coverage by old and new media. Second, culture was an impor­tant focus of po­liti­cal mobilization in the past de­cade, even the raison d’être of the demand for statehood. Diverse resources from lit­er­a­ture, folk songs, and performative forms that ­were often mediated by Telugu film, ­music, and tele­vi­sion industries ­were mobilized to actively “culturalize” the movement, which had in earlier de­cades focused on underdevelopment and regional economic disparities. According to Jagan Begari, trs was at least partly responsible for the cultural turn of the movement: “He [the trs leader K. Chandrasekhar Rao] campaigned all over the Telangana and explained the . . . ​importance of local gods and goddess[es] and explained how their culture and language [­were] being undermined by the leaders of Andhra from all the po­liti­cal parties.”5

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According to Anant Maringanti, the po­liti­cal proj­ect was generative of what he calls a “cultural region”: “The bottom line of the current mobilization is that a significant and vis­i­ble section of the population has come to believe that ­there exists a distinct cultural region called Telangana.” 6 YouTube became one of the sites for carry­ing out this proj­ect. The formation of trs, and the subsequent cultural turn in the agitation for statehood, was coeval with and facilitated by the sharp rise in satellite tele­vi­ sion channels beaming messages in the Telugu language. A key development was the establishment of twenty-­four-­hour news channels, the first of which was tv9 in 2004. ­There ­were seventeen Telugu news channels by March 2014. ­These include three pro-­statehood channels which w ­ ere launched from Hyderabad in 2009, when the movement intensified on the ground.7 Two related ­factors contributed to the intensification of the agitation from late 2009. First was the hunger strike undertaken by the trs leader K. Chandrasekhar Rao (kcr) on November 29, 2009, which was withdrawn in a few days but resumed in response to a groundswell of popu­lar support. It resulted in the announcement by the u­ nion minister of home affairs on December 9, 2009, that the pro­cess of state formation would be initiated.8 The second was the spate of suicides from November 2009—­running into several hundred by 2013—in support of statehood. The po­liti­cal scientist H. Srikanth holds satellite tele­vi­sion and YouTube alike directly responsible for the spread of the agitation: “Easy access to the internet, the growth of online social networks and newspapers, the popularity of websites such as YouTube, and the proliferation of 24×7 tele­vi­sion news channels have come in handy for the politicians and ideologues of Telangana.”9 Notwithstanding the author’s instrumental view of media-­cultural forms, this observation marks something of a watershed in the analy­sis of Indian politics ­because it is among the very few instances, if not the first, when a mainstream social scientist acknowledged the po­liti­cal significance of YouTube. How did YouTube achieve the (dubious) status of po­liti­cal actor in India? According to an industry estimate, in 2014 India’s Internet users w ­ ere ­expected to outnumber their counter­parts in the United States and ­were second only to China.10 Interestingly, most of t­ hese users accessed the Internet via mobile phones. In early 2015, it was estimated that by the ­middle of the year ­there would be some 213 million mobile Internet users (­those who access the Internet via mobile phones).11 That is roughly a quarter of India’s population. An earlier report, dated June 2013, stated that India’s 137 million Internet users

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consumed 3.7 billion online videos. Between March 2011 and March 2013, online video viewership grew by 69 ­percent, to reach 54 million. By 2014, YouTube alone had 60 million unique visitors per month from India.12 Since most of t­ hese videos are consumed on inexpensive phones, the capacity of consumers to modify content or even to edit their own videos is highly limited. Further, while t­hese numbers are impressive enough, they do not quite indicate the extent to which the Internet has become the default source of content even for users who ­don’t often go online or have limited access to data on their phones. In large parts of urban India, users can pay to have content copied onto their microsd cards. According to Rashmi M, pirated content costs only about INR 50—­much less than US$1—­per gigabyte in Bangalore.13 “Online” content, including video, therefore has a far wider circulation than the already impressive Internet penetration figures would suggest. The issue therefore is not why YouTube, but what sense we can make of its po­liti­cal work. THE A RCHI V E : TELU G U - L­ AN G UAG E CON TEN T ON YOUT UBE A ND “TE LA NGAN A VIDEOS”

Following the global trend, YouTube has rapidly emerged as the most accessible archive of public life in India.14 With reference to Telugu-­language materials, film and tele­vi­sion content has had a considerable presence on YouTube in the past five years or more. Increasingly, YouTube’s status as the official repository of the local media industry has come into sharp focus. ­Today, major Telugu-­language tele­vi­sion news channels, including tv9, tv5, and abn Andhra Jyothi, beam live on YouTube. All major Telugu tele­ vi­sion channels upload content to their official YouTube channels. For their part, film production and packaged-­media (vcd/dvd/Blu-­ray) distribution companies have posted hundreds of film titles on their YouTube channels. More recent titles are available in hd with En­glish subtitles. Almost all Telugu YouTube content is freely accessible from Indian ip addresses. Interestingly, two key players in the Telugu packaged-­media segment of the entertainment industry, Aditya Video and Volga Videos, have l­ittle online presence beyond their YouTube channels (http://­www​.­youtube​.c­ om​/­user​/­adityacinema and http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­user​/­newvolgavideo). In March  2016, t­hese channels had around 280,773 and 663,500 subscribers, respectively; subscriptions had tripled in the two years that I was tracking them. Geetha Arts, the production com­pany closely associated with the c­ areers of the star-­turned-­ 220 

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politician Chiranjeevi, his actor-­politician ­brother, Pawan Kalyan, and his son, Ramcharan Tej, had in March  2015 a more modest 40,000 subscribers and streamed a total of thirty-­one films on its YouTube channel (http://­www​ .­youtube​.­com​/­user​/­geethaarts), including Magadheera (S. S. Rajamouli, 2009), one of the most commercially successful Telugu films ever made. The content on official YouTube channels—as with all content on YouTube—is not ­really “­free.” Films, songs, and news clips come with advertisements for Indian and international brands. YouTube channels are also used to promote existing content and f­uture releases of the companies concerned. Further, content that is f­ ree in India may be available only with payment of a modest viewing fee in other places. As with content uploaded by users from other parts of the world, “straightforward copy of existing footage from news, current affairs, . . . ​and other professionally produced audiovisual material” is quite common.15 Reposts of content available for f­ ree on the YouTube channels of the major media and entertainment companies are plentiful. My search queries often turned up both official and unofficial uploads of the same video, ­whether this be a news capsule, a song, or an entire film. “Telangana videos” is the term that I use to describe content that either is tagged by uploaders as being related to Telangana or pops up in searches when the keyword is a part of the query. Understandably, this content has no single point of origin and is often sourced from YouTube itself. It includes standalone audio files and slide shows of still images overlaid with a soundtrack, entire feature films and film songs, amateur recordings of events and testimonies, professionally produced videos of cultural per­for­mances, po­liti­cal rallies, sound bites of politicians, entire episodes of tele­vi­sion real­ity shows, and so on. Of interest h­ ere are the users who perform a variety of actions that can be read as an expression of solidarity or commitment to the cause—in other words, videos that would qualify beyond reasonable doubt as instances of the po­liti­cal use of YouTube. A question that then emerges is how the protocols of YouTube over­ determine po­liti­cal communication. The range of activities and responses that YouTube permits are rather limited. Telangana videos on YouTube suggest that Telangana users do pretty much the same set of ­things that other users across the world do. While the material is not uniformly poor in quality or entirely unoriginal, rather than mine this archive for hidden gems, I examine in some detail the work of a few users to ask what issues might be presented by YouTube videos in sites of intense “real-­life” or offline po­liti­cal action. P olitics in the A ge of Y ou T ube  221

­GO I NG PO­LI TI­CAL

Kris Allam (Krishna Chaitanya Allam YouTube user name “Street Hawk”), who joined YouTube on February 2, 2007, had 2,661 subscribers and his 162 videos had generated over five million views as of January 19, 2015—­impressive stats for Telugu-­language material (http://­www​.­youtube​.c­ om​/­user​/­krishnaallam). He is among the earliest users to have used YouTube to express solidarity with the Telangana statehood mobilization. Allam is an information-­technology professional who is a nonresident Indian.16 His first post, on February  2, 2007, was a video of the college where he studied.17 As he himself noted, the quality is rather poor, and the footage was shot when he “­didn’t even know what hd was.” On the face of it, ­there is nothing po­liti­cal about the content of this nostalgic video. However, it is entitled “S R Engineering College, Warangal, Telangana State”; the state itself came into existence only in 2014, and it was not u­ ntil a few years ago that activists began repainting signboards to replace all references to Andhra Pradesh with Telangana. Allam’s post adds a po­liti­cal twist to an other­wise innocuous upload by drawing our attention to the undercurrent of the statehood discourse and his own, perhaps “unconscious,” investment in it. Nevertheless, he does not appear to have seen YouTube as a forum for articulating po­liti­cal views ­until much ­later. The next set of videos, posted between two and three years ­later, are mostly film songs, live musical per­for­mances from India and abroad (evidently sourced from the Web), and a ­couple of videos of himself and his friends. Interestingly, his most watched video, with over 950,000 views, is a professional recording of a live per­for­mance of the Irish band Celtic ­Woman singing “You Raise Me Up,” uploaded in July 2008.18 The band had posted the video in 2007 on their official YouTube channel, CelticLadies.19 Allam’s Celtic W ­ oman upload is a fan video of the most banal kind. Th ­ ere is no value addition in the repost, no attempt to locate it in the context of Telangana or India even. An overwhelming majority of comments are by users who do not appear to be Indian. And in Allam’s case, it is also “prepo­liti­cal” in that he had not yet begun using YouTube for expressing po­liti­cal views. The discovery of the po­liti­cal uses of YouTube by Allam and ­others appears to have been driven by local f­actors and in fact preceded the Arab Spring. Allam’s first overtly po­liti­cal video is a comic, abusive hymn that plays in the background of slides ridiculing the industrialist-­politician Lagadapati Rajgopal.20 Lagadapati was then a member of parliament representing Vijayawada 222 

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and was among the few politicians openly opposed to the formation of Telangana. Uploaded on December  14, 2009, “Lagadapaati hd Video” coincides with the rapid scaling up of the Telangana agitation due to the hunger strike of the trs president K. Chandrasekhar Rao that began in late November 2009. YouTube had evidently emerged as a po­liti­cal platform among users who found themselves in a period of heightened po­liti­cal activity. Allam’s evolution as an activist vlogger on YouTube is coeval with his blog postings on blogger​.­com (“Voice: Maalo Pratikanam Telanganam,” http://­www​ .­telangana​.­2freedom​.­com​/­). ­Here, too, we notice a dramatic increase in his posting activity between 2009 and 2010. His first and only blog post before his po­liti­cal turn was a series of charcoal sketches apparently dating back to his college days (posted on November 28, 2007). His next blog post, dated December 19, 2009, is a poem on Telangana “honouring e­ very soldier who was martyred” for the Telangana cause since statehood agitation began, in 1969. His play­lists include forty-­three videos ­under the title “Telangana Movies,” which are a collection of documentaries, tele­vi­sion news clips, and full-­length Telugu feature films; several of the full-­length films are also available on the official YouTube channels of media companies. On other play­lists are several videos unrelated to Telangana, including mashups of film songs in which the soundtracks or visuals are changed. His channel thus evinces an easy cohabitation between fan videos and ­those of varying degrees of explic­itly expressed po­liti­cal intent. This, as it turns out, is the typical pattern of YouTube usage among ­those who upload Telangana videos. Take, for example, Nishanth Dongari, who had a presence remarkably similar to that of Allam on YouTube, but was more prolific (http://­www​.­youtube​ .­com​/­user​/­nishanthuk​/­). Dongari was also a nonresident Indian and began with posts that w ­ ere not po­liti­cal. His YouTube uploads w ­ ere initially offshoots of his blog posts, which began in 2010 (https://www.blogger​.­com​ /profile/07123570308117193001). On September  17, 2010, Dongari began posting on the channel that was called Prof Jayashankar (­after the prominent pro-­Telangana intellectual Kothapalli Jayashankar). The first post was a video titled “Dinner at ­Castle—­Chicken.”21 As with Allam’s early work, ­there was no obvious link between support to Telangana statehood, evident from the name of the channel, and the initial uploads, which ­were not po­liti­cal in any self-­evident way. On 16 September  2011, some months ­after K. Jayashankar’s death, Dongari posted a news clip aired by a pro-­Telangana tele­v i­sion channel T News on an ongoing strike (http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=X ­ 9FUZou8gV0; P olitics in the A ge of Y ou T ube  223

url no longer active). This ­industrial action was a part of the Sakalajanula Samme, a massive pro-­statehood general strike in the Telangana region that began on September 13, 2011, and was called off on October 24, 2011. As of January 2014, Dongari had 2,557 subscribers and had generated 1.93 million views. His play­lists included speeches by Telangana ideologues and politicians, but also videos appearing ­under a play­list titled “Organic and Rooftop Farming” (http://­www​.y­ outube​.c­ om​/­user​/­nishanthuk​/­playlists). At some point between January 2014 and January 2015, the channel was terminated by YouTube ­because of “multiple third-­party claims of copyright infringement regarding material the use posted.” ­D O I NG PO LI TI CS 2. 0

An examination of Allam’s and Dongari’s vlogging ­careers suggests that the ­activist turn notwithstanding, they are both YouTube users who, like an overwhelming majority of digital-­media consumers, only occasionally “create” new content or even actively modify what they consume. How, then, is YouTube po­liti­cal? Can a copy-­paste aesthetic ever tell us something about democracy? Where do we locate the interface between politics and consumption, if we ­were to move beyond the context-­specificity of content (“­There are Telangana videos out ­there”)? Aggregation and archiving of content, at times by making the crucial intervention of converting it from the analog format, are among the key contributions of the users I examined. Take the case of the feature film Maa Bhoomi (Gautam Ghosh, 1979), based on the Communist-­led armed uprising in Telangana (1948–1952) and now celebrated as a pathbreaking Telangana film. The film was not available commercially in video formats (and, in all likelihood, is still not available for purchase). Allam posted a truncated version of the film (112 minutes of 152 minutes) in 2011, possibly sourced from a poor-­quality vhs tape, effectively rereleasing it for a public that had only heard of it (https://­www​.y­ outube​.c­ om​/­watch​?­v​=k­ Hav9VlTOUk). As Lovink would have it, we are indeed witnessing the “database turn” of media consumption and production.22 Allam’s contribution to the emerging discourse on Telangana cinema is a fallout of fairly standard fan practice, insofar as digitization and distribution of film and media texts are concerned. ­There are several other examples of the intersection of fan practice and po­liti­cal activism, including the YouTube channel of the ­little-known Telangana Public Charitable Trust (http://­telangana​ 224 

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-­public​-­charitable​-­trust​.­blogspot​.­in​/­), which is titled Telugu Email List and goes by the h­andle “justice4telangana” (https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­user​ /­justice4telangana​/­). This channel has over 1,000 uploads, mostly reposts.23 Its videos are tagged “telangana movies,” “telangana songs,” “telangana tv,” and so on.24 In addition to this impressive archive of recycled content, ­there are nearly 200 short but original videos in the 3gp format, evidently shot on mobile phones. ­These are in the form of depositions: subjects are asked their names, places of residence, and w ­ hether they support Telangana (they all do) and why. ­Toward the end of each video, they are prompted by the off-­camera interviewer to say “Jai Telangana” (Hail Telangana), which they do with raised fists. Most of t­ hese 3gp videos have well ­under a hundred views. How does this dump, with its exasperatingly high redundancy, work po­liti­ cally? The pro­cess of endless reposting is one in which a variety of objects are repositioned and resignified as related to Telangana. Power users of YouTube like Kris Allam ­don’t appear to be particularly concerned about the creation of original content but are aware of their roles as mediators and interpreters. In response to my question about the originality of his videos, Allam wrote, “If you are referring to the videos of Telangana most of them [­were] reproduced. As I am not a direct activist in the field I mostly depend on pictures I get from Internet, and interpreting them with my point of view and adding a track based on the context. I d­ on’t say copied at the same time I d­ on’t say they w ­ ere original based on the fact that roots of the videos are based on the available content which exists online. I only take the opportunity of interpreting them in my voice.”25 ­There is l­ittle doubt that this user is acutely aware of the possibilities of YouTube. Reflecting on his mediation that was driven by po­liti­cal intent from late 2009, when he began posting what we may call po­liti­cal videos, Allam added, “When I started ­there was not much of an online voice to raise anywhere” (emphasis added). The meta­phor of the voice recalls the title of his po­liti­cal blog, which he started around the same time: “Voice: Maalo Pratikanam Telanganam.” The Telugu phrase in the title roughly translates as “our ­every cell is Telangana,” but could also mean “our ­every cell is a song of Telangana.” This missing voice/song had to be found or produced in order to gain wider circulation for issues “that [­were] not new to any Telanganite” but remained in the private domain, discussed within ­family circles. Allam goes on to say that the situation has now changed, no doubt due to the efforts of ­those like him, which has, paradoxically, rendered him somewhat irrelevant: “Nowadays the Telangana issues [are] wide spread, every­thing [is] known to P olitics in the A ge of Y ou T ube  225

[the] public, and p­ eople have a ­great exposure, so my involvement in the same has become very less.” The voice has carried. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that this is entirely or even primarily due to YouTube and other online forums, they no doubt played a modest part. LI S TE NI NG TO VOICES ON YOU TU B E

Allam’s meta­phor of the voice offers valuable insights into his own work and other online activity related to Telangana. In a manner of speaking, the Telangana issue is all about the voice. An impor­tant marker of distinction or difference between ­people of this region and ­others in the pre-­bifurcation Andhra Pradesh (who also spoke Telugu) is dialect. Moreover, songs w ­ ere a crucial po­liti­cal resource and singer-­performers a constant presence at po­liti­cal rallies. Much of this ­music is in a con­temporary folk idiom traceable to the work of radical Left propagandists, the most prominent of whom is Gaddar. The political-­performative form known as Dhoom Dham, song-­and-­dance per­for­ mances fashioned ­after Naxalite propaganda but focused on statehood, was assembled circa 2003. Dhoom Dham dovetailed into real­ity tele­vi­sion even as song-­and-­dance per­for­mances came to accompany po­liti­cal rallies.26 The recovery of the embodied voice, which was in fact a voice that was performing cultural distinctiveness, was an integral part of a much larger po­liti­cal proj­ect. In Telangana videos, this act of recovery occurs in the practices and phenomena that thrive in the YouTube ecosystem. On YouTube, it is a common knowledge that the remix rules: users find an object, disaggregate sound, image, and text, and then replace one or the other with a dif­fer­ent track. In the pro­cess, “foreign” videos (and therefore cultures) are rendered accessible. They can also do the opposite, foregrounding the incomprehension of language and culture with the aid of meaningless subtitles, and thereby facilitate another kind of engagement with the object or culture. Both practices can be illustrated with Telugu-­language material, which has ended up becoming the resource for hugely popu­lar Internet phenomena that have nothing to do with Indian contexts. Toshio Akai and Naoko Ataka, Japa­nese researchers interested in Indian cinema, discovered that Japa­nese creators of Anime ­Music Videos (mads) had begun to use videos of Telugu film songs, about which the creators knew nothing at all. They had evidently sourced t­ hese videos from the Internet to create hybrids in which the Telugu soundtracks ­were replaced with the tracks from Japa­nese anime serials. ­These hybrids ­were then uploaded on the popu­lar video-­sharing site 226 

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Niconico (http://­www​.­nicovideo​.­jp​/­) and to YouTube. Notable, too, is a variant of ­these videos that retains the original soundtrack but provides Soramimi or mondegreen Japa­nese subtitles (“misheard” subtitles created from words that are close to phonetic transcriptions of the original).27 It is likely that this practice is traceable to the work of the king of mondegreen, Mike Sutton, ­after whose YouTube ­handle “buffalax” the Internet phenomenon called buffalaxing is named. Among the most popu­lar of buffalax’s creations is a song from Donga (A. Kodandarami Reddy, 1985) featuring the Telugu film industry’s biggest star, Chiranjeevi. ­There is ­little doubt that Chiranjeevi’s stardom was lost on buffalax, who named the video “Indian Thriller with En­glish ­Lyr­ics” ­because of the obvious similarities the dance had with Michael Jackson’s ­music video Thriller. Buffalax nevertheless made the Telugu superstar an Internet sensation of sorts when his video went viral.28 For the most part, the creators of Telangana videos ­were neophytes who ­were poorly equipped to play with the voice and image tracks. Their mediation was largely limited to retagging videos rather than disembedding and reembedding the voice. Even so, we can see the intersection of a globalized Web 2.0 remix aesthetic of play and manipulation, on the one hand, and a grounded and localized po­liti­cal movement, on the other. The voice that went public via YouTube in Telangana videos is accented (Telangana Telugu), and its authenticity is often derived from the folk and the idiomatic. In the domain of mass politics proper, charismatic individuals embodied this voice, which spoke for the ­people who ­were mobilizing in large numbers. Uma Bhrugubanda argues that the trained voice and diction of the film-­star-­turned-­politician N. T. Rama Rao—­elected chief minister of Andhra Pradesh in 1983, ­after a phenomenal electoral campaign that was powered by his theatrical speeches in a classical-­sounding Telugu—­played a critical role in his emergence as a spokesperson of the Telugu nation: “And further embodied in that voice ­were memories of the forceful monologues and dialogues from his earlier films where as both king and commoner he had opposed the oppression of the poor and the tyranny of the rich and power­ful.”29 Bhrugubanda flags the link between media consumption and the capacity of po­liti­cal representatives to, quite literally, speak to and for the populace in con­ temporary socie­ties, where almost all po­liti­cal communication is mediatized. Our representative, in addition to every­thing ­else, embodies a voice that is evocative of something we recognize as valuable. With reference to Telangana, the most prominent among t­ hose claiming to give voice to the demand for statehood on behalf of inarticulate masses was P olitics in the A ge of Y ou T ube  227

10.1  ​Screenshot of K. Chandrasekhar Rao from “kcr Punch Dialogues,” uploaded

by the Telugu satellite news channel abn Andhra Jyothi on its official YouTube channel, abn Telugu (September 19, 2013).

K. Chandrasekhar Rao, the brilliant public speaker who gave speeches in the Telangana dialect, which was considered nonstandard Telugu only a c­ ouple of de­cades ago. Further, kcr’s speeches in accented Telugu ­were both witty and abusive and ­were therefore eminently qualified for transmission across airwaves and in print alike. Well over a thousand YouTube videos of kcr’s speeches can be found by searching for his “punch dialogues,” the En­glish phrase used by Telugu tele­vi­sion channels to flag the emergence of a new genre of public speaking that is centered on con­temporary po­liti­cal leaders’ ability to speak in sound bites (see figure 10.1).30 The YouTube presence of Gaddar, who is marginal to electoral politics but has played a crucial role in the movement as the eternal outlier, is more crucial h­ ere. Gaddar is the pseudonym of Gummadi Vithal Rao, the Dalit poet and singer who began his c­ areer as a performer for the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. He went on to establish the Jana Natya Mandali, the ­cultural front of the Naxalite party ­People’s War (­later the Communist Party of India [Maoist]). He has been the face of the revolutionary Left for de­cades and was among the intermediaries in the negotiations between the 228 

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Maoists and the government of Andhra Pradesh in 2004. He has been at the forefront of virtually e­ very radical mobilization in Andhra Pradesh since 1990 and survived an assassination attempt in 1997, allegedly by plainclothesmen.31 Gaddar occupies a unique place even among radical Left performers of India, whose popularity often surpasses the influence of the parties and ideologies they propagate. Embarrassing as it may be for the radical Left, Gaddar’s growing stature as a public figure is inseparable from his status as a mass cultural icon. Coinciding with the period described by the civil-­liberties activist and po­liti­cal commentator K. Balagopal as the “Chenna Reddy’s Spring,” in 1990, when Naxalite groups ­were allowed to conduct public meetings, audio recordings of Gaddar’s work became widely available in the form of cassettes, which ­were sold in shops but also at his own rallies and ­others or­ga­nized by an assortment of oppositional groups.32 In this period, some of his public meetings w ­ ere attended by hundreds of thousands of p­ eople. According to P. Kesava Kumar, Gaddar has some three thousand songs to his credit and thirty-­five audiocassettes of his work have been released.33 Gaddar has an in­ter­est­ing film connection, too. In the 1970s, he was closely associated with B. Narsing Rao and played a cameo role in Maa Bhoomi, which Rao produced and which Kris Allam distributed on YouTube more recently. From the 1980s, Gaddar’s lyr­ics made their way into popu­lar films, at times though acts of outright plagiarism, but also ­because he was commissioned by producers to write for a genre locally known as the “red film” or the Naxalite film.34 Gaddar himself noted that the songs of Jana Natya Mandali w ­ ere copied and altered by film producers, commercial cultural producers, other Naxalite parties, “revisionist” parties, and the Bharatiya Janata Party and its parent, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, as well as by the two largest po­liti­cal parties of the state, the Congress Party and the Telugu Desam Party.35 In 1996, he was briefly suspended from his party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-­ Leninist) ­People’s War, whose cultural front he had cofounded. Among the reasons stated by the party for its action was his work for the film industry.36 In the more recent past, he headed the Telangana Praja Front (formed in 2010), a po­liti­cal party which sought to provide a radical alternative to trs. So much for Gaddar in the real world. In media worlds, Gaddar was a meme long before the Internet became accessible in ­these parts. Most impor­tant for YouTube, he made a spectacular guest appearance in the film Jai Bolo Telangana (N. Shankar, 2011), dancing to “Podustunna Poddu,” a song which is perhaps best described by recourse to cliché: it is the anthem of the Telangana strug­gle. Gaddar himself composed and sang the song. P olitics in the A ge of Y ou T ube  229

10.2  ​Film still of Gaddar playing himself in N. Shankar’s Jai Bolo Telangana (2011).

Gaddar’s stage persona—­shirtless, dhoti-­clad, and with a coarse rug flung over a shoulder—is sourced from the folk performers of the Telangana region. His performing body engendered numerous screen adaptations from the 1980s, even as the tunes he and other radical propagandists pop­ u­lar­ized began to be heard in films. All this when the Naxalite movement ­itself came ­under state repression whose severity only grew ­until the Maoists ­were virtually wiped out in the united Andhra Pradesh, around 2006.37 With the growing popularity of Dhoom Dhams in the past few years, Gaddar-­like performers appeared everywhere. Even without the aid of YouTube, Gaddar’s performative idiom, costume, lyr­ics, and tunes—­all of which had complex links with folk culture via the radical Left—­had come to be detached from his body, and they floated in and out of the cinema, tele­vi­sion, and other media-­ cultural forms. Gaddar’s voice, in the more limited sense of the term, was also heard far and wide: at protest meetings or­ga­nized by vari­ous oppositional and marginal groups, and on the airwaves. Gaddar allows us to approach the voice as a complex signifier of claim making of dif­fer­ent kinds. With de­cades of activism b­ ehind him, Gaddar was a major public figure long before the statehood demand grew into a mass movement. He had always voiced the concerns of the poor, their strug­gles and life stories. He spoke for them, hailing them by caste and occupation. As Kesava Kumar notes, Gaddar composed numerous songs highlighting the prob­lems specific to par­tic­ul­ar oppressed castes and occupation groups.38 Not only was he from the Telangana region, but his speech and his songs ­were always already accented. His is a voice that speaks for the masses, 230 

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defined in the broadest and most inclusive sense pos­si­ble. It also speaks as the au­then­tic po­liti­cal subject. The folk, as Gaddar and his comrades refashioned it, is at the heart of the authentication pro­cess. Following the cues of communist cultural activists before him, Gaddar makes a clear distinction between what he called the “prajala janapada paata” (­people’s folk song) and the “viplava janapada paata” (revolutionary folk song). He identified as many as sixteen differences between the two, including the former’s “feudal culture and superstitions” and, more impor­tant, its ghettoization in regions where the oppressed lived in feudal conditions. On the other hand, revolutionary folk songs symbolized the ­people’s strug­gles and lived among p­ eople of all kinds, particularly where ­there ­were ongoing strug­gles.39 Implicit in Gaddar’s elaboration of the difference between the extant and new was the travel of song well beyond its immediate context. THE M O BI LE VOICE

The operative meta­phor is movement: po­liti­cal movement and the movement of song are coeval, reinforce each other, and involve a radical break between source and adaptation. Gaddar’s adaptations repositioned “folk” as a con­temporary form that could, and should, be deployed in po­liti­cal communication. In the pro­cess, a caste-­or community-­specific, premodern form—­“feudal” is Gaddar’s term for it—­became the raw material for creating a completely dif­fer­ent kind of po­liti­cal community, one united not by primordial ties but by its re­sis­tance to oppression. In the course of the Telangana agitation, con­temporary folk became the art form of the entire region, regardless of internal differences, b­ ecause it was already detached from places and identities a­ fter the communist intervention. The voice that holds the tune, ­whether this is Gaddar’s or that of the army of Dhoom Dham performers, has become public and indeed has constituted a public that is unified by shared cultural traits, tastes, and most impor­tant, ­will. The rarely watched 3gp videos posted on the Telugu Email List YouTube channel are expressions of precisely this ­will, which finds voice in the simplest and most power­ful of statements: I am pres­ent and I want Telangana. Gaddar’s song “Podustunna Poddu” is a string of meta­phors of Telangana: the region is a song that walks on the breaking day, the life of millions, the dream of martyrs, and so on. Saturated by anger and sorrow, emotions that mark much of Gaddar’s work, the song was uploaded several times on YouTube P olitics in the A ge of Y ou T ube  231

10.3  ​A snapshot from a “Podustunna Poddu” mashup posted on YouTube’s Street Hawk

channel by Kris Allam highlights the importance of folk practices for the movement ( January 14, 2011). 10.4  ​A snapshot from a “Podustunna Poddu” mashup posted on YouTube’s Street

Hawk channel by Kris Allam draws attention to activist suicides ( January 14, 2011).

and was subject to multiple remixes. The extent of mediation as well as po­ liti­cal intent varies considerably from one remix to the next. What they share is, quite literally, a voice that has been si­mul­ta­neously disembedded from the “original” context and reembedded in found objects from other contexts and lifeworlds that YouTube now touches. Kris Allam himself uploaded three versions of the song, and ­there are several mashups with stunning images accompanying the soundtrack).40 The most strikingly inappropriate, at first glance, is a video in which the song plays against an assortment of Michael Jackson clips from dif­fer­ent stages of his ­career. It is pos­si­ble that this assemblage of visuals was a part of another YouTube video. The video in question is titled “Podustunna Poddumeeda Song by Michael Jackson,” uploaded by “krishna kishore.” 41 This user’s other uploads indicate that he is a wildlife (snake) enthusiast and an admirer of the actor Pawan Kalyan and the politician Y. S. Jaganmohan Reddy. From his YouTube activity, it appears that he is neither from the Telangana region nor particularly invested in statehood agitation, ­either as a supporter or opponent. The Jackson-­Gaddar mashup is not just a juxtaposition of two very dif­fer­ent popu­lar icons, but also the fusion of two genres of YouTube video. Considering that t­ here are numerous mashups of Michael Jackson videos with Indian-­ language songs including ­those in Tamil and Hindi, the mixing of Jackson and Gaddar or Telangana videos is not surprising. This was waiting to happen. The voice of Gaddar and the very pro­cess of “giving voice” to popu­lar ­will is now is truly mobile. It can be disengaged from its original context to become pure play, which is best responded to by clicking on like and dislike buttons. Si­mul­ta­neously, it carries localized politics—in the form of comments by Telugu speakers from both sides of the regional divide abusing each other in roman script but in their respective accents of the ­mother tongue—to the museum of moving images from everywhere. As krishna kishore’s masterpiece would suggest, it is not even necessary for users to belong a camp or ideology. The video does its work regardless. Telangana videos are thus acts of minor appropriation in which claims are made through captioning (tagging). One step further, they are the consequences of what Gulam Mohammed Sheik called “mobile vision,” as distinct from a gaze that is fixed on a single, framed object of art. Some of Sheik’s examples of mobile vision are drawn from religious art, where the viewer moves from image to image, which he or she does not confront as much as be surrounded by (as in the Ajanta Caves, where images cover all surfaces except the floor): “His stride is thus directed by pictorial movement. And as he meanders from P olitics in the A ge of Y ou T ube  233

10.5  ​Screenshot of the visual accompanying the opening notes to a “Podustunna

Poddu” mashup posted on YouTube’s krishna kishore channel ( June 28, 2011).

one story to another, often overlapping, he performs a pradakshina [circumambulation] of the hall unawares. In the meantime, he has also completed his appraisal of the murals.” 42 The acts of viewing and worship are thus fused. Sheik also points to other instances of mobile vision, as when an image (part of a series) is brought to life by the voice of a narrator. Sheik’s idea of mobile vision and the spectatorship of YouTube videos are strikingly analogous. In the latter, too, the spectator’s “vision” is no longer fixed by a single frame such as the big (cinema) screen. On the contrary, the YouTube win­dow is meant to facilitate a mobile vision: t­ here are always already endless streams of videos coming “up next.” As with the words in a dictionary, any random point of entry is related to every­thing ­else. It is not remarkable that Gaddar ­will meet Michael Jackson in such a space, which is designed for mobility and distraction. One can of course read meanings into the juxtaposition of propaganda and pop culture, of caste and race, and so on. What is of interest h­ ere, however, is the disembodied voice of Gaddar, which brings Jackson and other found objects home and, in parallel a maneuver, captions the visual. 234 

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The crap on YouTube not only tells us a ­great deal about its own materiality and something about the offline lifeworlds that produce. More impor­tant, it throws light on the nature of po­liti­cal participation in this part of the world. Liesbet van Zoonen, Farida Vis, and Sabina Mihelj note that YouTube functions as a demonstrative rather than deliberative space: users may not engage in discussion and debate of the kind that we expect from a (properly Habermasian) public. Instead, they are more likely to stop with declaring their position and move on, regardless of ­whether anyone is listening.43 Cultivation of public value is unlikely in such a space. YouTube’s public—or for that ­matter the larger one “out t­ here” that ­wills Telagana as po­liti­cal geography and po­liti­cal community into existence—­raises challenging questions. Insofar as the voice is an expression of popu­lar ­will, it is demo­cratic. However, as Ernesto Laclau notes in his discussion of the migration of communist supporters to the right-­ wing National Front in France, For any demo­cratic demand, its inscription within an equivalential chain is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, that inscription undoubtedly gives the demand a corporeality which it would not other­wise have. It ceases to be a fleeting, transient occurrence, and becomes part of what Gramsci called a “war of position”: a discursive/institutional ensemble which ensures its long-­term survival. On the other hand, the “­people” (the equivalential chain) has strategic laws of movement of its own, and nothing guarantees that t­ hese laws would not lead to sacrify, or at least substantially compromise, the requests involved in some of the individual demo­cratic demands.44 Sure enough, the mobilization culminated in the massive victory of a populist po­liti­cal party (trs) in the election to the legislative assembly of a nascent Telangana State. Allam’s work, as well as the minimal responses of a large number of Telangana supporters on YouTube who limit their comments to the single phrase “Jai Telangana,” suggests that the deployment of the voice reinforces a politics of enumeration: in a functioning electoral democracy, it is not necessary for every­one or even a majority of subjects to be engaged in debate. However, it is essential for po­liti­cal subjects to be counted. It is not as if YouTube is unique in facilitating such supposedly thin demo­cratic practices. On the contrary, studies of film audiences in India and elsewhere point to the long years of enumerative publicness preceding YouTube. It would benefit both media researchers and social scientists if we ­were to recognize that media P olitics in the A ge of Y ou T ube  235

consumption and po­liti­cal participation are, and have been for a while now, analogous to each other. The moving pictures are all about the bums on the seats and in the streets anyway. > NOTE S  ​

I am grateful to the editors of this volume for feedback and suggestions, but also for their infinite patience. I would also like to thank Kris Allam for his detailed email response to my questions about online activism in support of Telangana and his own YouTube ­career. I thank Nishanth Dongari for his prompt response to my email query on his work. This essay grew out of lectures and papers presented at the Centre for Con­temporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, in August 2013, and at “The Long Indian C ­ entury: Historical Transitions and Social Transformations” international conference, or­ga­nized by the South Asian Studies Council and held at Yale University, in April 2014, and at the University of Hyderabad, in October 2014. I thank the participants at ­these events for their questions and observations. 1 2

3 4

5

6 7

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Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 92. Henry Jenkins, “ ‘Cultural Acu­punc­ture’: Fan Activism and the Harry Potter Alliance,” in “Transformative Works and Fan Activism,” ed. Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures 10 (2012), http://­journal​.­transformativeworks​.­org​/­index​.­php​/­twc​/­article​/­view​/­305​/­259. Duncan Forrester, “Subregionalism in India: The Case of Telangana,” Pacific Affairs 43, no. 1 (spring 1970): 5–21. Keshav Rao Jadhav, “­Towards a History of the Telangana movement,” in Telangana: Dimensions of Underdevelopment, ed. S. Simhadri and P. L. Vishweshwer Rao (Hyderabad: Centre for Telangana Studies, 1997), 5–14. Naxalites are splinter groups of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-­Leninist), which represent the ultra Left of the Indian po­liti­cal spectrum. Andhra Pradesh was home to some of the largest and most militant Naxalite groups in India during the 1980s and 1990s. Jagan Begari, “Separate Telangana Movement in India: Demo­cratic versus Territorial,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the the Law and Society Association, ­Grand Hyatt, Denver, Colorado, May 25, 2009, 17–18, http://­citation​.­allacademic​ .­com​/­meta​/­p​_­mla​_­apa​_­research​_­citation​/­3​/­0​/­4​/­8​/­8​/­pages304887​/­p304887–​ 1­​.­php. Anant Maringanti, “Telangana: Righting Historical Wrongs or Getting the ­Future Right?,” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 45, no. 4 ( January 23, 2010): 34. Padmaja Shaw, “Profit for Power or Power for Profit? The State of Tele­vi­sion Industry in Andhra Pradesh,” paper presented at the symposium on “The Indian Media Economy: New Perspectives from New Zealand,” Faculty of Arts and

S . V. S rinivas

Sciences, University of Waikato, Centre for Culture Media and Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia University and Centre for Study of Culture and Society, Raglan, New Zealand, February 25–26, 2014. 8 Telangana Rashtra Samithi has repeatedly claimed that the turning point in the movement for statehood was kcr’s fast. For an elaboration of this claim, see Special Correspondent, “kcr’s Fast a Defining Moment: trs,” The Hindu, November  30, 2013, http://­www​.t­ hehindu​.­com​/­todays​-­paper​/­tp​-­national​/­tp​ -­andhrapradesh​/k­ crs​-f­ ast​-­a​-d­ efining​-­moment​-­trs​/­article5406775​.­ece. 9 H. Srikanth, “Construction and Consolidation of the Telangana Identity,” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 48, nos. 45–46 (November 16, 2013): 41. 10 Arun Prabhudesai, “India Crosses 300M Internet Users Milestone: iamai,” Trak​ .­in, November  19, 2014, http://­trak​.­in​/­tags​/­business​/­2014​/­11​/­19​/­india​-­300m​ -­internet​-­users​-­2014​/­. 11 Internet and Mobile Association of India, “Mobile Internet Users to Reach 213 Mn by June ’15” (press release), January  13, 2015, http://­www​.­iamai​.­in​/­media​ /­press​-­releases​/­2015​-­01. 12 Yuthika Bhargava, “YouTube Sets Eyes on Indian Mobile Users,” The Hindu, June 16, 2014, http://­www​.­thehindu​.­com​/­business​/­Industry​/­youtube​-s­ ets​-­eyes​-o­ n​-­indian​ -­mobile​-­internet​-­users​/­article6120220​.­ece. 13 Rashmi M, “Mobile Phones and Multimedia Consumption among Users of Limited Technological Access,” paper presented at the international conference on “India at Leisure: Media, Culture and Consumption in the New Economy 2,” Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, India, and School of Arts, University of Waikato, New Zealand, February 10–11, 2015. 14 By 2008, “YouTube had become the default online moving-­image archive.” Rick Prelinger, “The Appearance of Archives,” in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), 269. 15 Liesbet van Zoonen, Farida Vis, and Sabina Mihelj, “Performing Citizenship on YouTube: Activism, Satire and Online Debate around the Anti-­Islam Video Fitna,” Critical Discourse Studies 7, no. 4 (2010): 254. 16 Krishna Chaitanya Allam’s biographical details and information related to his online activity is sourced from his email to the author, February 16, 2014. 17 “S R Engineering College, Warangal, Telangana State,” YouTube video, uploaded by Street Hawk, February 2, 2007, https://­www​.­youtube​.c­ om​/­watch​?­v​=­NWz04​-­fzzKM. 18 “Celtic ­Woman—You raise me up hq Lyr­ics (Best Version Ever),” YouTube, uploaded by Street Hawk, July  24, 2008, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​ =­6IbRQEsVhzA. 19 “Celtic ­Woman—A New Journey—You Raise Me Up,” YouTube, uploaded by CelticLadies, May 18, 2007, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­faKFcfytlxU. 20 “Lagadapaati hd Video,” YouTube, uploaded by Street Hawk, December 14, 2009. http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­tA6DcCpgSFo; url no longer active.

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“Dinner at C ­ astle—­Chicken,” YouTube, uploaded by Prof Jayashankar, September 17, 2010, http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=f­ IVuaC​-­chIY; url no longer active. 22 Geert Lovink, “The Art of Watching Databases: Introduction to the Video Vortex Reader,” in Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, ed. Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), 9–12. 23 I could not ascertain the exact number of videos uploaded to this channel. 24 Alas, not a single feature-­length movie remains, ­because three of the six videos have been deleted. The remaining videos include a 32-­second clip from a movie and a ­couple of tele­vi­sion programs. 25 Email to author, February 16, 2014, emphasis added. 26 S. V. Srinivas, “Maoism to Mass Culture: Notes on Telangana’s Cultural Turn,” Bio-­Scope 6, no. 2 ( July 2015): 191. 27 I am grateful to Toshio Akai and Naoko Ataka for drawing my attention to Niconico videos of Telugu film stars. Among the in­ter­est­ing videos I have access to are variants of the song “Gola gola” from Ashok (Surender Reddy, 2006). Compare, for instance, the post of the original video by a Japa­nese user (“【高画質・高音質】Gola Gola -­ Ashok【インド】,” YouTube, uploaded by岩崎優治, August 14, 2012, https://­www​ .­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=R ­ dj5cIbGftU) and the version with Soramimi subtitles (“Gola Gola Ashok 【ニコニココメント付き】,” YouTube, uploaded by EVector23, June 8, 2011, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=5­ bAIeFbfDjI&sns​=­tw). In the latter, almost the entire frame is covered with subtitled added by dif­fer­ent users. 28 The original link, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=T ­ tJRNyPK​-­lc, is no longer active ­because buffalax was evicted from YouTube due to “multiple third-­party claims of copyright infringement regarding material the user posted” (https://­ www​.­youtube​.­com​/­user​/­buffalax). However, several of his videos have been ­reposted by his admirers. See “Indian Thriller -­Girly Man (En­glish Lyr­ics),” ­YouTube, posted by Pajeromini, May 2, 2007, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​ ?­v​=­zDKcevMFUCo. So famous was buffalax that reports on his work even appeared in Wired magazine. See for example, Monty Phan, “Buffalax Mines Twisted Translations for YouTube Yuks,” wired​.c­ om, November 6, 2007, https://­archive​ .­wired​.c­ om​/­entertainment​/­theweb​/­news​/­2007​/­11​/­buffalax; and Lewis Wallace, “Buffalax Roars Back with More Twisted Translations,” wired​.­com, April 17, 2009, https://­www​.­wired​.­com​/­2009​/­04​/­buffalax​-­is​-­bac​/­. 29 Uma Bhrugubanda, “Genealogies of the Citizen-­Devotee: Popu­lar Cinema, Religion and Politics in South India” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011), 80. 30 “kcr Punch Dialogues” (news report), YouTube, uploaded by abn Telugu, September 19, 2013, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=r­ t8lFozABE0. 31 For a more detailed discussion of Gaddar’s life and work, see P. Kesava Kumar, “Popu­lar Culture and Ideology: The Phenomenon of Gaddar,” Economic and Po­ liti­cal Weekly 45, no. 7 (February 13, 2010): 61–67. 32 K. Balagopal, “Chenna Reddy’s Spring,” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 25, no. 12 (March 24, 1990): 591–95. 238 

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33

P. Kesava Kumar, “Popu­lar Culture and Ideology: The Phenomenon of Gaddar,” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 45, no. 7 (February 13, 2010): 61–67. 34 Notably, ­these are commercial productions and have no direct links with communist or Maoist parties or groups, although some filmmakers and producers have leftist sympathies or even membership in parties. 35 Gaddar, Taragani Gani (Hyderabad: Jana Natya Mandali Prachuranulu, 1992), 96. 36 M. S. Shanker, “Revolutionary Poet Gaddar Survives Murderous Attack,” Rediff on the Net, April 2007, http://­www​.r­ ediff​.­com​/­news​/­apr​/­07gaddar​.­htm. 37 K. Srinivas Reddy, “The Maoist Challenge” (Seminar 569), in India 2006: A Symposium on the Year That Was, ed. Raj Tapar and Romesh Thapar (New Delhi: Seminar, 2007), http://­www​.­india​-­seminar​.­com​/­2007​/­569​/­569​_­k​_­srinivas​_­reddy​ .­htm. 38 P. Kesava Kumar, “Popu­lar Culture and Ideology: The Phenomenon of Gaddar,” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 45, no. 7 (February 13, 2010): 64. 39 Gaddar, Taragani Gani, 2–4. 40 “Jai Bolo Telangana Video Song podustunna poddu meeda. By gaddar,” YouTube, uploaded by Vamshi Allam, January 14, 2011, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​ /­watch​?­v​=Z ­ S5EWSFXfw8. 41 “Podustunna Poddumeeda Song by Michael Jackson,” YouTube, uploaded by krishna kishore, June  28, 2011, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=​-­­vMIad5wDHM. The same video was reposted, with minor text inserts claiming authorship, as “Telangana Songs-­Podustuna podu-­Micheal [sic] Jackson,” YouTube, uploaded by www​.­TelanganaDosti​.­com, April 2, 2012, http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​ =­fm3ettTBk​_­E. 42 Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, “Mobile Vision: Some Synoptic Comments,” Journal of Arts and Ideas, no. 5 (October–­December 1983): 48. 43 Van Zoonen, Vis, and Mihelj, “Performing Citizenship on YouTube,” 250–52. 44 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 88–89.

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POP COSMOPOLITICS A N D K - ­P O P V I D E O C U LT U R E

Michelle Cho

VI S I BI LI TY A ND (N ATION AL) ALLEG ORIES OF EM ER GENC E

According to a Los Angeles Times article from August 2012, the Korean-­pop (K-­pop) rapper PSY’s video “Gangnam Style” was “taking over the world.”1 What “world” was the reporter referring to, and what w ­ ere the circumstances of this takeover? What anxiety fueled this ironic pronouncement of the South Korean entertainer’s ability to captivate? The same month, a video segment posted on the digital edition of the Wall Street Journal, wsj Live, purported to explain “How ‘Gangnam Style’ Went Viral” by staging an interview between a reporter from the publication’s U.S. headquarters and its Seoul correspondent. The awkward conversation that the correspondents conduct pres­ents a scene of misapprehension projected on not only the Korean cultural arena at large, but also its vexing mediascape, to underscore the geopo­liti­cal anx­i­ eties raised by massive popu­lar appeal. To conclude the interview, the reporters attribute the magnetism of the m ­ usic video to its humorous dance and its generic pop beat, shifting from their earlier declarations of the m ­ usic video’s befuddling cultural difference to a claim of the putatively universal affectivity of twenty-­first-­century commercial pop m ­ usic.2 A similar universalist impetus motivates the exaggerated praise for the video from pop-­culture sites like

11.1  ​Screenshot from wsj Live, “How ‘Gangnam Style’ Went Viral” (August 8, 2012).

Gawker​.c­ om, which speculates on ­whether the Korean entertainer’s ­music video might be “The Best ­Music Video of the Year.”3 This ambivalence encapsulates a common reaction to PSY’s video and K-­pop at large—­the assertion of the supposed transparency of global consumer culture, declared superficial and homogenizing despite its ability to elicit spontaneous affective and often bodily responses, and a fascination with the enigmatic and exotic appeal of K-­pop, which triggers uncontrollable Internet consumption (as evidenced by PSY’s billion-­and-­a-­half YouTube views). While we may now be in a post-­PSY moment, the genre of popu­lar ­music called K-­pop has established a vis­i­ble presence on the Web both as a corporate pop-­culture commodity and as a rich and complex participatory video culture that centers on the “reaction video.” This video culture is a sign of a “reactive” impetus in global K-­pop reception, to assert that K-­pop is less a pop-­music genre than a per­for­mance culture. The variety of video “reactions” display a common concern with consumption captured by video and, thus, with the indexicality of the reaction video as a transcultural spectacle that moves or affectively touches the viewer through its pre­sen­ta­tion of reception as corporeal event. Examining a spectrum of video reactions to K-­pop, I question how reception is represented, why the re-­presentability of reception is appealing, and what this may indicate about the circulation of encounters with difference on the Web. Pairing the K-­pop reaction video with a corollary fan-­produced genre—­the K-­pop dance cover per­for­mance video—to compare P op C osmopolitics  241

multiple forms of video making within the K-­pop videosphere, I consider how t­hese videos si­mul­ta­neously commodify empathy and document the nature of spectator identification and, further, how the visualization of ­K-­pop commodities’ infectiousness offers insight into the medium of Internet video itself.4 Against this fascination with generalized consumer affect, what also emerge are the contours of geopo­liti­cally differentiated and racialized consumption. Therefore, video of K-­pop’s seemingly deterritorialized, global consumption underscores, instead, its context-­specificity, belying the cosmopolitan fantasy reiterated in spectator reactions, and thus calling for the examination of geopo­liti­cal and transcultural contexts to understand Internet video’s subjectivating influence. PSY’s “Gangnam Style” is a cultural artifact whose intertextuality can be read very precisely in the South Korean cultural context, but which, for that very reason, is particularly illegible outside of it.5 Lampooning the culture of the nouveau riche in the Gangnam area of Seoul borne out of the combination of late twentieth-­century neoliberal economic policies and the aggressive development of corporate infrastructure by the state-­directed campaign of globalization, “Gangnam Style” targets every­thing from health fads to fetishized heritage culture to the ostentatious display of material wealth. Commodifying slick surfaces and sexualized bodies, the video embeds its critique of K-­pop in the latter’s own form; yet this satirical gesture is often invisible to viewers unfamiliar with PSY’s oeuvre or his reputation as a rock comedian and entertainment-­ industry gadfly in South ­Korea. Filmed reactions to the video, such as ­those compiled in a video entitled “[Very Funny] PSY Gangnam Style ­Music Video Reaction Collection,” involve viewers dissolving into laughter and speechlessness, highlighting inscrutability as a source of plea­sure in consumption and the close relationship between illegibility and reification.6 In an essay entitled “Framing the Original: ­Toward a New Visibility of the Orient,” Rey Chow describes what she deems a paradigm shift in the trans­ national image repertoire by which “the Orient” has come to be represented in the last fifteen years. In her assessment, what was once ethnographic spectacle now “talks back fluently and stares back proudly in languages and images of high-­tech futuristic architecture and finance capital.”7 Chow calls this shift an “economic-­semiotic transfer,” which has been “corroborated in the first de­ cade of the twenty-­first ­century by blockbuster films . . . ​with bestselling con­ temporary ingredients like naturalized heterosexuality, fetishized female body parts, computer-­enhanced cinematography, and special effects.” 8 While for Chow this economic-­semiotic transfer preserves the pro­cess by which images 242 

M ichelle C ho

11.2  ​Screenshot from PSY’s “Gangnam Style” ( July 15, 2012): PSY performs his

humorous dance against the backdrop of “high-­tech futuristic architecture and finance capital.”

reify culture and history as fixed signifiers or ste­reo­types, she nevertheless describes this as a paradigm shift, that is to say, a qualitative change in the power structures that make pos­si­ble the “prevalent mode of approaching the cultural productions of China, the rest of Asia, and other non-­Western areas.” For Chow, what t­hese hypervisible regimes of commercial culture convey is no longer national allegory, but allegories of “the event of emergence,” an event that Chow claims is generally “configured in relations of visibility.”9 The explosive popularity of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” and the emergence of K-­pop as a video phenomenon seem to exemplify this “event” of a new regime of the orient’s visibility, underscoring the double-­bind of visibility and intelligibility and helping to clarify the stakes of K-­pop’s claim to global pop-­cultural relevance. K-­pop’s visibility now recommends it as a ­viable source of global popular-­culture standards and conventions, yet its sudden ubiquity sustains an imaginary orient, to be deemed fascinatingly unintelligible. PSY’s status as a viral video phenomenon, as well as an ambassador of national cultural industries (as he is regarded in South K ­ orea), demonstrates the intricacy of the “event” of South Korean pop culture’s emergence, suggesting that Chow too quickly dismisses a dif­fer­ent sort of national allegory read into con­temporary East Asian popular-­culture texts. If the economic-­semiotic transfer by which the rise of South ­Korea’s geopo­liti­cal status (based on economic indicators) translates into a pop-­cultural imaginary “taking over the world,” what sort of transfer or translation between systems of P op C osmopolitics  243

reference can we attribute to K-­pop’s semiotics of visibility rather than intelligibility, ubiquity rather than distinction? Further, does K-­pop’s video culture challenge or confirm recent discussions of the transnational circulation of popu­lar culture and the importance of Internet video as both a medium and a genre that facilitate cultural contact and demo­cratic participation? Embedded in the celebratory rhe­toric of new media as an accessory to liberal democracy is the assumption of the universality of Internet-­mediated cultural citizenship—­this presumption undergirds the notion of the Internet as “global commons” and disavows the existence of multiple internets that are determined by language, regulatory mea­sures, software interfaces, and communications infrastructures. The case of K-­pop exposes the Web as an uneven engine of mass identity formation by revealing the po­liti­cal stakes of transposing cultural commodities across vari­ous localities. Discourses of Internet connectivity that reframe localized forms of pop culture into signifiers of “pop cosmopolitanism” shore up the identificatory mechanisms of commodity consumption; K-­pop’s “reactive” video culture both facilitates and interrupts this smooth assimilation of pop-­culture artifacts, by demonstrating how moving, familiar, and intimate the experience of noncomprehension is in the con­temporary moment. Despite the syncretism of K-­pop’s visual and musical styles, K-­pop’s marketing strategies focus on regional and national specificity, consisting of multilingual versions of songs and a­ lbums. K-­pop’s broad appropriation and adaptation of aspects of Japa­nese and American popu­lar ­music unequivocally express its hybridization strategy, enveloped by colonial discourse regimes. But increasingly, the Internet reception of K-­pop videos is shifting K-­pop’s economic structures, which are already a combination of private and public investment and individual and collective achievement—­for instance, K-­pop’s corporate infrastructure leverages its status as a public and commercial endeavor, using the public-­relations claim of boosting tourism and the national economy. K-­pop’s Internet reception is read in South K ­ orea in terms of national development, despite the lack of specificity of the Internet audience’s interpretation of K-­pop as a cultural commodity—­analyzing what attracts viewers around the world to K-­pop videos is less impor­tant than capitalizing on its mere visibility, ­whether the attention gained abroad by K-­pop is positive or negative. At the same time, K-­pop has engendered a particularly concrete ­imagined community of fans whose agency as consumers (made more demanding and insatiable by the anonymity of the Internet) has an undue discursive and economic influence over Korean pop-­culture industries.10 244 

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Thus I analyze the specificity of K-­pop’s video culture in considering the diagnostic function and the “cosmopo­liti­cal” potential of popu­lar culture, to use a term theorized by scholars of economic and cultural globalization, including Pheng Cheah, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Ulrich Beck, and Bishnypriya Ghosh. Cosmopolitics more than cosmopolitanism refers to the continuing interdependence of the national and the global, and can elucidate the objects and practices that lead to the coalescence of something ­imagined as the global popu­lar qua “pop cosmopolitanism.” I offer a medium-­specific investigation, positing the Internet as the space in which such a global popu­lar culture takes root, fostered by technological innovations that are changing the texture of everyday life, systems of reference, modes of subjectivity, and communicative practices. K-­pop’s video culture knits ­these concerns together, to demonstrate that affectivity, identification, and questions of media are inseparable. Following the central contention of the pres­ent volume, I treat video as a medium in the fullest sense of its multiple modes of mediation: material, conceptual, ideological, and practical. THE PE R FO R M ATIVITY OF VIDEO

Sam Anderson’s essay “Watching ­People Watching ­People Watching” offers one of the earliest discussions of the phenomenon of the reaction video, deeming the genre to be “one of the more fascinating entries in Amer­i­ca’s ongoing anthropology of itself.”11 Although he begins with a culturally specific position—­ Americans’ interest in “footage of ­people reacting to ­things”—­Anderson quickly expands the purview of his comments, writing, “My favorite reaction videos—­the subspecies that strikes me as the purest expression of the form—­are . . . ​­people reacting, in videos on screens, to other videos that ­they’re watching on screens. It seems, in its potentially infinite regression, to contain the fundamental experience of the Internet.”12 Anderson’s conflation of “Amer­i­ca’s” self-­observation and the very phenomenology of the I­ nternet itself is not surprising, as this metonymic substitution occurs often, even in scholarly treatment of digital media. But beyond cultural chauvinism, Anderson’s comments more tellingly reveal a humanist fantasy of globalization through common bodily response that serves as the major impetus of the reaction-­video genre. According to Anderson, reaction videos emphasize commonality: “They allow us to experience, at a time of increasing cultural difference, the comforting universality of ­human nature.”13 Anderson interprets the reaction videos’ focus on involuntary response and corporeal reaction as a P op C osmopolitics  245

means of suturing cultural difference, to arrive at “comforting universality” as the genre’s raison dêtre. To reverse the directionality of Anderson’s conclusions, I suggest that the claim for the Internet’s universality has led to the development of the reaction video’s generic conventions and its performative function, as evidenced in the uniformity of the reactions compiled in “[Very Funny] PSY Gangnam Style ­Music Video Reaction Collection.”14 The premise and aesthetic of ­these reaction videos is deceptively ­simple: viewers sit in front of their computers and rec­ord their viewing experience of “Gangnam Style.” ­These reactions foreground the involuntary, somatic character of K-­pop consumption—­hysterical or dumbfounded viewers are reduced to shock, laughter, sighs, and exclamations. The intense bodily response indicated in ­these videos suggests a par­tic­u­ lar capacity of the medium and the continuing persuasiveness of indexicality, captured by the specific framing of the reaction video, which embeds the reaction shot into the screen image and thus refocuses attention precisely on the reaction rather than on the image itself. Not only is video central to the affective dimensions of the Internet, but also to the ways in which the Internet functions as both a simulacrum of public space and a forum of intimate, confessional exposure. Reaction videos render bodily sensation hyperexposed, at the same time that ­these bodies are remote and distant, and visualize the kinds of exchanges and expressive gestures by which K-­pop’s seemingly ineffable cultural energy is manifested, monetized, and distributed. Moreover, precisely ­because of the simplicity and rigidity of reaction video’s rapidly standardizing genre conventions, which create a surface upon which to register the primary activity of reception, the main attraction of the reaction video is said to be the capture of ostensibly unmediated affective response. Th ­ ese minute modulations of affect then become available for reading, as a feature of the figure-­ground distinction produced by the generic frame. Anderson centers his analy­sis on the involuntary reaction as event, “that moment when the world breaks, when it violates or exceeds its basic duties and forces someone to undergo some kind of dramatic shift,” calling this the source of the genre’s appeal. Invoking an i­ magined universal space of Internet-­ mediated cultural citizenship, Anderson writes, “In a culture defined by knowingness and ironic distance, genuine surprise is increasingly rare—­a spiritual luxury that brings us close to something ancient. Watching a reaction video is a way of vicariously recapturing primary experience.”15 Digitizing Race, Lisa Nakamura’s study of the con­temporary visual economies of the Internet, offers a key to the discursive frame of Anderson’s fantasy 246 

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11.3, 11.4, 11.5, 11.6  ​Screenshots

from “[Very Funny] PSY Gangnam Style ­Music Video ­Reaction Collection,” a YouTube video that compiles excerpts of user-­ uploaded “Gangnam Style” reaction videos.

of the “primary experience” made available by the reaction video and its supposed universality.16 Nakamura overturns stubborn assumptions about the subjectivating influence of the Internet that have carried over from late-1990s discussions of its medium-­specificity, in par­tic­ul­ar, the proposition that the Web is linguistic rather than visual. In contrast, Nakamura stresses the importance of visual signification on the Internet, where vis­i­ble difference, coded as racial or cultural, is produced, reinforced, modified, and challenged. While Nakamura, like Anderson, extrapolates a deterritorialized, global culture of the Web from the U.S.-­specific contexts of its use as a visual technology for producing racialized perception, her scholarship nevertheless offers a necessary critique of the ways in which the metadiscourse of the Internet operates by scotomizing the latter’s visual culture, in the interests of preserving its “comforting universality.” Nakamura’s analy­sis is most persuasive in its account of the Internet as a mass visual form, a view that, brought into dialogue with critiques of tech-­driven cosmopolitanism, provides a framework for investigating K-­pop video culture’s image politics. As a mass visual form and a protocol for seeing and not seeing, the Internet has produced vari­ous mechanisms by which race, culture, and nation are conflated in forms of vis­i­ble difference and in modes of affectivity. For further elaboration of this point, I return to Anderson’s discussion of the reaction video’s inception in 2007, in filmed reactions to a Brazilian fetish-­porn clip, “2 Girls 1 Cup,” a video that is said to have spawned the genre as a solution to the prob­lem of the video’s supposed unwatchability. The video in question portrays coprophagia as erotic spectacle, which Anderson describes as an act so foul, so blatantly in violation of basic mammalian taboos, that it forced a kind of psychological schism. It was unwatchable, and yet it had to be watched. ­People solved this paradox by “watching” it: performing their spectation, via Web cam, as a public ser­vice. The resulting videos ­were like a social periscope. They allowed ­people to watch this taboo ­thing by proxy, to experience its dangerous thrill without having to encounter it directly—­like Perseus looking at Medusa in the reflection of his shield.17 Anderson explic­itly posits the reaction-­video genre as one that solves the prob­lem of watching that which is evocative in the extreme and, thus, incomprehensible. To describe this category of phenomenon, Anderson uses the memorable phrase “psychological schism,” by which is meant the incommensurability of understanding and experience—­a sort of dynamic sublime—­overcome by 248 

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the intervention of the reaction video’s mediated seeing. This genealogy of the reaction video, its pre­sen­ta­tion of “spectation as public ser­vice,” inflects the purpose and function of K-­pop reaction videos by revealing the genre’s overdetermined heritage of colonial visual politics, linking it to Freud’s phyloge­ ne­tic Eu­ro­pean imaginary and the proj­ect of decoding primitive be­hav­ior, particularly for t­ hose who identify the spectacle of K-­pop as a foreign object that requires the mediation of o­ thers’ responses to understand or to collectively neutralize, or both. The appeal, Anderson notes, of the reaction video’s mediation, whereby watching “by proxy” helps protect the viewer from the blunt force of direct viewing, becomes in the case of the PSY reaction videos a further source of entertainment. The video reaction thus serves as a paradigm of the digital index, a sign that functions as both trace and deixis, by which Mary Ann Doane debunks claims of the obsolescence of the index in the increasing prevalence of digital over analog image making, that is, the paranoia that digital culture does away with the relationship between real­ity and repre­sen­ta­tion that the photo­graph as indexical sign has been understood to preserve. Doane cites Rosalind Krauss, who calls the index “sheer affirmation of an existence, the emptiness of a ‘meaningless meaning,’ ” to underscore the index’s distinction from realism.18 The index does not claim to copy the world, but “only purports to point, to connect, to touch, to make language and repre­sen­ta­tion adhere to the world as tangent— to reference a real without realism.”19 Doane thus emphasizes the performative rather than the mimetic function of the index, specifically the photo­graph as a sign of “what is ­there,” and in the pro­cess intimates that the mimetic capacity of photography and film may have perpetuated a misapprehension of the index that persists in the melancholic conflation of realism and the real.20 In the reaction video’s capture of the explosive affect elicited by the event of K-­pop’s emergence, video is the medium specific to the performative index, which seeks not to specify the meaning of the spectacle, but simply to affirm the event of video’s evocative force. Yet the indexical quality of the reaction video cannot prevent the reauthorization of enjoyment of illegible spectacle, despite positioning eventness, the “meaningless meaning” conferred by the performative index, on both sides of the spectatorial relation. Watching ­others watching becomes an occasion for aesthetic appreciation through the transubstantiation of incoherence into entertainment. Moreover, and to complicate m ­ atters, watching o­ thers moved by watching both pres­ents and enacts the erotics of identification and projection, rather than unfamiliarity and unassimilability, as modeled by extreme P op C osmopolitics  249

fan reactions. Most of the videos compiled in “[Very Funny] PSY Gangnam Style ­Music Video Reaction Collection” feature an unexpected moment of revelation that undercuts the semblance of the onscreen viewers’ encounter with a completely unfamiliar object: when the K-­pop performer Hyuna, from the pop-­idol group 4 Minute, makes a cameo appearance in “Gangnam Style,” the spectators in the reaction videos call out her name. This shifts the register of the reaction video spectacle into the realm of fandom, in the enjoyment of citational reference and intertextuality, and outs the reaction-­video authors as consumers of other K-­pop acts and artists.21 This unanticipated moment changes the situation from one of completely decontextualized response to that of intertextual reading: Hyuna’s “­Bubble Pop” video was itself a YouTube phenomenon in 2011–2012 (with over 62 million YouTube views as of September 2013).22 Does this shift in spectatorial position, from ignorant to knowing, recode the entertainment value of the reaction video? If so, how? How do we approach the impulse to mediate the reception of K-­pop online, by viewers who variously self-­identify as fans, early adopters, or armchair anthropologists, “performing spectation as a public ser­vice”? Through the persuasive indexicality of the video reaction, fans not only consume K-­pop, but fashion it into a media apparatus that facilitates participation across cultural contexts and geo­graph­i­cal space. This mirroring structure of relationality recasts the operations of video, via the cultural transit points of reflected voyeurism.23 In the case of K-­pop, video determines the rubrics of intimacy and ostensibly universal affective dimensions of the consumption of difference. However, the po­liti­cal and economic value of this activity goes beyond numbers of views, even though producers and consumers seek to quantify popularity—­a potent form of cultural capital—in this way. More can be gleaned by examining the fantasy of moving other fans and spectators—­interpellating them as a decentered audience—­that gives form to the desires embedded in the participatory nature of K-­pop. The fantasy of the Internet as a space of transcendence is evident in K-­pop video culture, as spectators, producers, and fans co-­create a popu­lar imaginary of the global Internet. PO P A S I A NI S M AN D CON SU MER COSMOP OLITANI SM

Many assessments of user-­generated content and participatory media shore up a view of the Internet as demo­cratizing, especially to lend support to the claim that popu­lar self-­documentary uses of digital video facilitate transcul250 

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tural traffic and an alternative, mediated public sphere. Against this techno-­ optimism, critics of this view of the Internet as a global, demo­cratizing force have emphasized the dialectic of control and freedom engendered by growing immersion in cybertechnologies as well as the illusory notion of the Internet as public sphere.24 Contributing to this metadebate on the Internet as facilitating or foreclosing au­then­tic ­human connection, Alexander Galloway writes in The Interface Effect, Objects are never h­ umans to a computer, nor are they ­faces or bodies. In this sense, the computer breaks with ­those arts (painting, photography, cinema) that fixate upon the embodied ­human form. . . . ​ Maybe this is why we do not cry at websites like we cry at the movies. Maybe it is why ­there is no “faciality” with the computer, why ­there is no concept of a celebrity star system (except ourselves), no characters or story (except our own), no notion of recognition and reversal.25 Revealing a nostalgic longing for more “au­then­tic” mediation, Galloway’s comparison falters on the basis of a faulty parallelism between “the cinema,” a social matrix, and “the computer,” but one example of the physical hardware by which individuals access digital content. Moreover, Galloway asserts a spectator-versus-user binary that cleaves an i­magined relation to the image from an instrumental one, as though the “computer” forecloses imaginary relations. Reaction videos easily refute Galloway’s claim of the computer’s lack of faciality, Deleuze and Guattari’s term for the signifying function of the face as the territorialization of ­human expressivity. For what ­else is a reaction video but a demonstration of faciality—­the concatenation of the affective experience of consumption as a universal and defining capacity of the h­ uman?26 Galloway’s suspicion about the autoaffective register of the Internet, the concern that in it one is merely dealing with one’s own ego, speaks instead to the territorialization of affect by the Internet’s visual culture. As reaction videos demonstrate, we do indeed cry at websites like we do in the movies, in a reduplication of the latter’s corporeal and psychological modes of identification. To extend the analogy of cinema and the Internet’s shared modes of affectivity, we not only cry at the Internet, but we are also moved to perform our identifications by reenacting our favorite scenes. ­Here, I turn to the second type of K-­pop reaction video—­K-­pop dance cover videos—­that features prominently among K-­pop fandoms across the globe and especially in the industry’s target Asian markets. The K-­pop dance cover video captures the territorialization of bodies through performative mimicry, offering us a more specific example of P op C osmopolitics  251

the politics of transcultural consumption of pop culture, over the rhe­toric of the idealized, global Internet. Displaying a solicitous relationship between K-­ pop producers and consumers, K-­pop dance covers are produced by groups of fans who reenact K-­pop ­music videos’ dance choreography. K-­pop entertainment companies encourage the production of ­these videos through a repertoire of fan-­service strategies that includes the production and distribution of “behind-­the-­scenes” and “making-of ” videos in which K-­pop performers practice their routines to teach fans their choreography. For example, yg ­Entertainment, PSY’s label and one of K-­pop’s largest talent-­management companies, hosts video contests to motivate the production of fan-­produced per­for­mance videos. The practice not only tethers fan l­ abor to official marketing but also propagates a fantasy relation in which the fan and the idol are co-­performers on the Internet’s larger stage. Advancing the triumphant rhe­toric of K-­pop’s global reach, yg’s contest for fan-­performed routines of their girl group 2NE1 was a veritable multicultural pageant, in which entrants w ­ ere required to identify themselves by 27 nationality. Using Facebook and YouTube to publicize the contest, yg set its sights primarily on fans outside of K ­ orea, to propagate the group’s single online and to foster K-­pop’s image as an emblem of globalized urban youth culture.28 The contest invited fans to actualize their dreams of cosmopolitan mobility, on the condition that they perform their globality by acting as national representatives—­the very strategy perfected by K-­pop and, arguably, by “cool Japan” a generation earlier. The winners of the contest ­were L.Y.N.T., a Viet­nam­ese dance crew whose video restages the dance routine for 2NE1’s hit single “I’m the Best.”29 Styled in a similar manner to professionally produced K-­pop videos, L.Y.N.T.’s dance cover is composed of cross-­cutting shots that alternate between an outdoor lot, filled with spectating extras, and a sleekly mirrored dance studio. The members of L.Y.N.T. convey not just devotion to their favorite idol group, but also affiliation with urban youth culture and what in Asian cultural studies has been critiqued as an Asian, pop-­modern consumer identity. Scholars of the Korean Wave and Korean culture industries have studied the chain effect by which Korean popu­lar culture draws the individual to learn about the culture through food, tourism, and language instruction, leading to a desire for fuller immersion in the culture that involves consuming other Korean products, from electronics to automobiles. If K-­pop consumption helps boost national brands like Samsung and Hyundai, t­ here is a direct link between pop-­culture consumption and capital flows that goes beyond 252 

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11.7, 11.8, 11.9, 11.10  ​Screenshots

from the ­Viet­namese dance group L.Y.N.T.’s winning dance cover video, which restaged 2NE1’s hit single “I’m the Best” for yg Entertainment’s fan-­video contest.

the commodification of pop-­culture content itself. The talent agency yg Entertainment shows no hesitation to give away content for ­free on YouTube, knowing that the sort of devotion that marshals the resources evident in the dance cover videos leads to acts of consumption far greater than the purchase of pop singles as commodities. In other words, making spectacular the sort of embodied consumption of K-­pop as a lifestyle leads to a saturation of brand awareness that triggers a desire for the “­Korea” brand; K-­pop is thus a marketing device for a consumable form of branded national identity, available to customers all over the world. This is precisely the type of cosmopolitanism suggested by critiques of Asian capitalism, which claim that the commodity cultures arising in Asian cities demonstrate to extreme levels the operations of commodity fetishism. In her introduction to the volume Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia, Youna Kim calls this “pop Asianism,” a form of regional identity based on consumer practices.30 Emphasizing the importance of fandom and online fan communities to “pop Asianism,” Kim calls this cultural sensibility a “virtual Asian-­ness” that, in her estimation, serves as “a common identity between the online participants living in cultural environments as dif­fer­ent as Thailand, Indonesia, [and] China.”31 In an essay on Thai youths’ consumption of Asian pop culture, Ubonrat Siriyuvasak more strongly indicts the equation of Asian­ ness and “capitalist-­consumerist modernity,” decrying the consumption of K-­pop and J-­pop as “exotic and modern trends” that result in middle-­class Thai youths’ internalization of class distinctions.32 According to Ubonrat, although Thai K-­pop fans alternate between the roles of producer and consumer in their engagement with online fandoms, their rebelliousness t­ oward mainstream, conservative national culture is “subsumed” by forms of media consumption that maintain a cap­it­al­ist developmental trajectory that ultimately results in the formation of a class of “apo­liti­cal consumers.”33 What Ubonrat and Kim find troubling about the modus operandi of ­K-­pop is that it transforms the desire for a regional group identity, a self-­ initiated and localized pro­cess of “Asianization,” into the consolidation of a consumer identity complicit with the exploitative dimensions of global capital. This critique of K-­pop’s association with consumer identity rightly indicts the ways in which the plastic aesthetic of K-­pop bodies has been promoted through the alibi of self-­transformation and individualism.34 The state and industry discourse that promotes K-­pop as a triumphant national culture industry can be attributed to a liberal ideology of self-­invention via consumer choice, which reduces cultural politics to “imaginary freedom in popu­lar cul254 

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ture consumption.”35 However, Ubonrat discounts the Thai youths’ appeal to “semiotic subversiveness” in their preference for nonnative cultural production, claiming that this prevents identification with the “ ‘working-­class other’ from within.”36 For Ubonrat, a genuine solidarity is being bypassed for what she emphasizes is an “imaginary act,” by which Thai middle-­class youth achieve their cosmopolitan desires. That Ubonrat’s final analy­sis falls back on the valorization of ethnonational solidarity to shore up its critique of consumer cosmopolitanism is not surprising, as one could argue that this tendency comes from the binary structure pitting the foreign against the domestic in discourses of cultural and economic globalization and transcultural consumption. Ubonrat’s urgings t­ oward an au­then­tic cultural consciousness “from within,” which links the Thai middle-­ class youth to the “working-­class other,” is ironically also beholden to the logic of willed, rational choice attributed to the Eurocentrism of Kantian cosmopolitanism. While critics like Kim and Ubonrat helpfully demystify the neo­ co­lo­nial operations of corporate culture industries, the cosmopolitan call for rational choice tethered to the nation form reduces the transferential relations established by K-­pop’s reaction and dance cover videos to false consciousness. Instead, while K-­pop consumption serves as cultural branding, the performative dimensions of K-­pop video culture also visualize the very experiences of emplacement and displacement in the encounter with pop-­culture texts. ­These encounters, recorded and distributed online, spectacularize not a univocal cosmopolitan transcendence of cultural and geographic constraints, but rather the politics of emplacement, displacement, and encounter. In other words, the performativity of video frames and stages the multiple and contested worlds of the cosmopo­liti­cal. ­ OP ’S COSMOP OLITIC S “ GI V E N CULTURE” AN D K- P

To clarify the distinction between the cosmopolitan and cosmopo­liti­cal, I offer a brief gloss of the cosmopo­liti­cal in postcolonial studies and constructivist social theory. In addition to Pheng Cheah’s invocation of the cosmopo­liti­cal, which emerges from his critique of the concept of culture that continues to define the cosmopolitan in idealist philosophical terms, I draw on Bruno Latour’s articulation of the cosmopo­liti­cal as a corrective to not only Eurocentric but also anthropocentric epistemologies constrained by scientific orthodoxy. Latour writes, “It’s impossible for us now to inherit the beautiful idea of cosmopolitanism since what we lack is just what our prestigious ancestors possessed: P op C osmopolitics  255

a cosmos. Hence, we have to choose, in my view, between cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics.”37 Further, Latour defines cosmopolitics as the pro­cess by which common worlds are co-­constructed: “A common world is not something we come to recognize, as though it had always been ­here (and we had not ­until now noticed it). A common world, if t­ here is g­ oing to be one, is something we ­will have to build, tooth and nail, together.”38 I extend this definition to argue that the building of pop-­culture worlds is often premised on irrationality and consumer affect, rather than on rational deliberation. Fantasy has a politics, as evidenced in both the reaction videos and the ­imagined transcultural web. In the cosmopolitics of K-­pop video culture, fantasies of dematerialized consumption entwine with ­those of emplacement—of the “given” versus the transcended, as the K-­pop dance cover videos demonstrate. Cheah takes the default move to nationalism, of the sort expressed by Ubonrat, as a paradigm of what he calls “the aporia of given culture,” and repeatedly questions the relationship, if any, between the philosophical concept of culture and its expression in uneven con­temporary pro­cesses of globalization. Cheah notes a “hybrid revival of cosmopolitanism” rooted in an “antilocalist/antinationalist argument” and a corresponding argument that transnational mi­grant cultures and the transnational mobility engendered by twenty-­first-­century globalization already constitute “radical cosmopolitanisms that subvert national culture.”39 His evaluation of the diverse a­ ngles from which the discourse of cosmopolitanism arises makes it pos­si­ble to address the prob­lems signaled by the revival of the concept, which K-­pop renders vis­ i­ble in the vari­ous ways in which its video culture signifies the primitive, on one hand, and the capitalist-­modern, on the other. For Cheah, the aporia of given culture consists in the understanding of culture as both what constitutes ­human nature and yet what also affords the ­human the means of overcoming nature through reason. The “givenness” of culture in Cheah’s formulation refers to ways in which culture entails forces that are enacted by but radically exceed the h­ uman.40 Culture is both axiomatic and constructed. As such, the aporia of given culture is the very root of the failures of cosmopolitanism, fantasized as the willed divestment or transcendence of one’s epistemological and material conditions. To resist a reductive condemnation of postcolonial nationalism, Cheah calls the latter a “double-­edged stricture” made necessary by neo­co­lo­nial globalization and argues that this double bind reveals the prob­ lems of cosmopolitanism’s ideal of “normative ­human action” across disparate contexts and cultures.41 Thus, rather than simply lamenting the conundrum of a global-­local binary, Cheah calls instead for “a certain responsibility to the 256 

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given,” that is, the material and epistemological situatedness entailed by culture, which persists despite a reflexive relationship to cultural norms.42 In coming to terms with the opposing ele­ments of K-­pop’s video culture, and the ways in which they seem to map onto uneven racialized and geopo­liti­ cal dynamics, I reconsider the cosmopolitan fantasy apparent in the appeal to the transcendence of given culture. Cheah theorizes given culture in response to the frenzy of appeals to transnational identity positions invoked by the discourse of globalization, from ­those premised on a new global community of rights to the consumer cosmopolitanisms criticized by Kim and Ubonrat. The current demonstration of consumer nationalist, cap­i­tal­ist modernity is another form of given culture. Thus, the aporia of given culture—­the fact that culture is both intransigent and malleable—­still overdetermines Internet-­ mediated transnational imaginaries. For one, a closer examination of K-­pop cover videos reveals an alliance between fan groups across nationally identified and diasporic axes. This is a North-­South community in which fans who define their consumption in contrast to their localized hegemonic cultures come together via affective bonds, in the face of the Internet’s dissemination of racialized epistemologies. Although the polished per­for­mance of L.Y.N.T. rivals that of the members of 2NE1, especially in the latter group’s choreography practice video, in which the pop idols assem­ble in a practice studio in what look like street clothes (but are, on closer inspection, Adidas training outfits—­part of the prize package), what breaks the cover video’s veneer of professionalism is a fan message prelude in which members of L.Y.N.T. speak directly to their pop idols, emphasizing their ardent fandom of 2NE1.43 ­There are three differentiated frames of per­for­mance within the dance cover video, in which the performers (1) play “themselves,” (2) impersonate 2NE1 in front of vis­i­ble onlookers in staged street scenes, and (3) perform exclusively for the Internet audience in the dance studio. The sophisticated layers of per­for­mance, production, and play are a key feature of many dance cover videos, despite the seriousness of intent that is also apparent in their production and the affective l­abor they perform for the benefit of yg Entertainment.44 In another cover video contest entry, two Asian-­American 2NE1 fans perform their cover dance in vari­ous locales across New York City.45 The two ­women stage their dance cover in spaces that symbolize New York’s identity as a site of international cultural exchange. They emphasize their Americanness in a metropolis that proudly claims a global identity, as a hub of media, migration, and global finance. Set against the other dance cover videos making ­similar P op C osmopolitics  257

11.11  ​Screenshot of 2NE1’s dance practice video, which has over 18 million views.

appeals, the New York video expresses par­tic­u­lar ambivalence: the ­women speak both to 2NE1 and to other global K-­pop fans, offering their ser­vices as tour guides to their global city, subtly expressing a certain First World arrogance as New Yorkers, but at the same time making vis­i­ble their in-­between status and their marked bodies. The per­for­mance’s complex fields of negotiation demonstrate how K-­pop reveals the cosmopo­liti­cal stakes of convergence phenomena and the appeal to video as the medium by which the grip of given culture is highlighted, even in its momentary transcendence. CO NCLUS I O N: POP - C­ U LTU RE WORLDIN G

Given capital’s instrumentality, the key tension in the concept of the cosmopolitan, as ­imagined as an ideal form of global community, is the problematic tendency to pres­ent commodity fetishism as a form of rational cultivation of knowledge. Not only is Asianism another form of what Cheah has theorized as given culture, but also, if the Web is increasingly i­magined as the “world,” the ­human experience of difference is territorialized by the model of con258 

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11.12 and 11.13  ​Screenshots of L.Y.N.T.’s video introduction, in which they directly address their idol group 2NE1.

sumer relations. Ubonrat’s inquiry over w ­ hether an “emerging ‘Asian pop generation’ shares a pan-­East Asian identity or a trans-­Asian identity” expresses concern over both the specter of colonial fascism in a pan-­Asian ideology with ethnocentric premises, and the question of pop-­Asianness as a v­ iable identity, in an age of regionalisms over nationalisms, by which the cosmopolitan dream can be sustained by pro­cesses of “Asianization.” 46 This conception of the cosmopolitan-­cum-­cosmopolitical deviates from that of enlightenment cosmopolitanism and its con­temporary invocation in discourses of h­ uman rights and international law, but still relies on the common substrate of mutual P op C osmopolitics  259

11.14, 11.15, 11.16, 11.17  ​Two

Asian-­American 2NE1 fans performing a “marked” cosmopolitan identity in their cover dance video for yg Entertainment’s fan-­video contest.

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legibility. The very claim for a type of cosmopolitanism based on consumption—in par­tic­u­lar, its fetishistic or irrational dimensions—­underscores the cosmopo­liti­cal contestations vis­i­ble in the mediated spectacle of pop-­culture consumption. In the case of K-­pop reception, exemplified in the reaction-­video genre, what is projected is the spectacle of displacement, the self-­evacuation that accompanies the act of encountering as-­yet illegible worlds. The reaction video and the dance cover video should be understood not in opposition, but as conjoined examples of performing the consumption of “global” cultures in the pres­ent moment. The per­for­mance of worlding allows us to see that the conscious per­for­mance of plea­sure always also makes vis­i­ble an unconscious dimension—­that ­there is something ­else ­going on besides the self-­conscious spectacularization of consumer cosmopolitanism as a form of rational, global identity. This sort of cosmopolitan-­identity-­under-­construction is no longer the deluded projection of the putatively universal, rational subject, but rather an acknowl­edgment of the multiplicity of worlds and the activity of worlding that global media and transcultural identity entails. K-­pop reaction videos are produced and shared by subjects who must navigate multiple worlds, ­whether they live in New York, Seoul, Saigon, or Manila; their membership in cosmopolitan youth culture is just as dependent on displacement and disorientation as i­magined universality and consumer identification. In the dance cover ­videos, the reaction to K-­pop is turned into a form of physical practice, captured by video as an appeal to an i­magined, intimate community of fans, while in the reaction videos, the affective impact of K-­pop consumption is projected as both singular and generic. K-­pop video reactions focus on the phenomenology of consumption to build ­imagined community, in cosmopolitan spaces of code-­switching appropriation. Through the persuasive indexicality of the video reaction, K-­pop traffics in fantasies of popu­lar appeal and self-­ transformation, of escaping immanence, which is also the fantasy of the cosmopolitan—­a form of given culture—to which we are all susceptible. Thus, K-­pop is not pop cosmopolitan but rather cosmopo­liti­cal, as demonstrated by the reaction videos’ and the dance cover videos’ parallel investments in mimicry and repetition. K-­pop shows us the centrality of affect to the Internet’s globalizing operations, that affect is itself a highly prized f­ actor in light of encounters with cultural difference, as a form of supposedly universal ­human experience. K-­pop reaction videos connote the desire to capture the affective dimensions of pop-­culture consumption, thus revealing Internet video’s complex dynamics of intimacy and incommensurability, which trigger P op C osmopolitics  261

the impulse to scotomize difference. The reaction video’s conception of common susceptibility to K-­pop reinforces the reaction videos’ appeal to emotional transference, the fantasy that K-­pop’s attractions are irresistible. Thus, the reaction videos express a desire for scenes of self-­dissolution. Understanding the appeal of K-­pop as a function of this desire addresses its disconcerting pleasures, as an access point to incongruous, imbricated, and contested worlds. > NOTE S  ​ 1 2

3

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Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times, August 4, 2012, http://­www​.­latimes​.c­ om​ /­business​/t­ echnology​/­la​-­fi​-­tn​-­psy​-­gangnam​-s­ tyle​-­20120803,0,6842309​.s­ tory. Deborah Kan and Evan Ramstad, “How ‘Gangnam Style’ Went Viral,” wsj Live, August  8, 2012, http://­www​.­wsj​.­com​/­v ideo​/­how​-­gangnam​-­style​-­went​-­v iral​ /­3CB028D8​-­C18E​-­4B93​-­A214​-­7E6EFF43E1A1​.­html. Neetzan Zimmerman, “Did This Underground Hip Hop Artist from South ­Korea Just Release the Best M ­ usic Video of the Year?,” Gawker​.­com, July 30, 2012, http://­gawker​.­com​/­5930283​/­did​-­this​-­underground​-­hip​-­hop​-­artist​-­from​-­south​ -­korea​-­just​-r­ elease​-­the​-­best​-­music​-­video​-­of​-­the​-­year. The K-­pop videoscape also includes parody videos; ­these are an impor­tant form of “reaction,” ranging across many levels of critique, appreciation, and appropriation, an analy­sis of which I’m unable to include in the pres­ent essay. Particularly in­ter­ est­ing examples include “Mitt Romney Style,” posted on October 8, 2012, by the comedy site College Humor at http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­yTCRwi71​ _­ns. Another well-­documented “Gangnam Style” parody is that of Chinese artist and po­liti­cal dissident Ai Weiwei, whose video parody, called “Cao Ni Ma Style” (“Grass Mud Horse Style”), in which the artist appears in handcuffs while dancing to “Gangnam Style,” was removed from Chinese video-­sharing sites by Chinese authorities hours a­ fter it was posted. See Max Fisher, “Explaining Ai Weiwei’s ‘Grass Mud Horse’ Obsession,” World Views Blog, WashingtonPost​ .­com, October  24, 2012, http://­www​.­washingtonpost​.­com​/­blogs​/­worldviews​ /­wp​/2­ 012​/­10​/2­ 4​/e­ xplaining​-­ai​-­weiweis​-­grass​-­mud​-­horse​-­obsession​/­. For an incisive analy­sis of PSY’s video, identifying its many cameo appearances by South Korean tv and K-­pop celebrities as well as its references to Seoul development history, see Jea Kim, “korean ­music: Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ and ‘Gangnam Oppa’ in ‘Architecture 101,’ ” My Dear ­Korea, August 9, 2012, http://­ mydearkorea​.­blogspot​.­com​/­2012​/­08​/­korean​-­music​-­psys​-­gangnam​-­style​-­and​ .­html. See “[Very Funny] PSY Gangnam Style M ­ usic Video Reaction Collection,” YouTube, posted by “johomako,” August 30, 2012, http://­www​.y­ outube​.­com​/­watch​ ?­v​=­GW7sP5OLWxE.

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8 9 10

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21

22

Rey Chow, “Framing the Original: ­Towards a New Visibility of the Orient in the 21st  ­Century,” Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 172. Chow, “Framing the Original.” Chow, “Framing the Original.” For an informative discussion of the double valence of the discourse of the Korean pop culture wave or hallyu—as industry strategy and as participatory media phenomenon—­see JungBong Choi’s essay “Hallyu versus Hallyu-­hwa: Cultural Phenomenon versus Institutional Campaign,” in Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media, ed. Sangjoon Lee and Abé Mark Nornes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015): 31–52. Sam Anderson, “Watching ­People Watching ­People Watching,” New York Times Magazine, November  25, 2011, MM60, http://­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2011​/­11​/­27​ /­magazine​/r­ eaction​-v­ ideos​.­html​?­pagewanted​=a­ ll&​_­r​=­0. Anderson, “Watching P ­ eople.” Anderson, “Watching P ­ eople.” “[Very Funny] PSY Gangnam Style.” Anderson, “Watching P ­ eople.” Anderson, “Watching P ­ eople.” See also Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Anderson, “Watching P ­ eople.” Quoted in Mary Ann Doane, “Introduction,” in “Indexicality: Trace and Sign,” special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007): 3. Doane, “Introduction,” 4. Emphasis added. Doane, “Introduction.” In this, Doane follows on analyses of medium specificity (and promiscuity) and the ostensible “threat” of the digital by Phil Rosen and Tom Gunning, among ­others. Notably, all of the viewers mispronounce Hyuna’s name, in accordance with its romanized spelling rather than its Korean pronunciation, which suggests that their knowledge of Hyuna comes from her status as a YouTube phenomenon, rather than from a broader familiarity with her within the South Korean domestic mediascape. Hyuna’s “­Bubble Pop” was ranked ninth on spin magazine’s “spin’s 20 Best Songs of 2011.” This news quickly spread among K-­pop fans via sns sites as a sign of the genre’s emerging global dominance. K-­pop forums soompi, allkpop, and omonatheydidn’t helped establish an Internet echo chamber through which ­K-­pop’s “global” achievement was cemented via its recognition by the clearing­ house of American pop-­music journalism. See, for example, http://­www​.­soompi​ .­com​/­2011​/­12​/­12​/­hyunas​-­bubble​-­pop​-r­ anked​-n­ inth​-­on​-­spin​-­magazine​/­. However, the editorial copy in Spin described “­Bubble Pop” in terms that are tongue-­in-­ cheek at best, calling the song “K-­Pop’s ultimate fizz geyser. Also, how Robyn’s ‘Konichiwa Bitches’ was always meant to sound.” See Charles Aaron, “spin’s

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20 Best Songs of 2011,” spin, December  9, 2011, http://­www​.­spin​.­com​/­articles​ /­spins​-­20​-b­ est​-s­ ongs​-­2011​/­. 23 Some of the most popu­lar YouTube K-­pop reaction videos are reposted by Korean users and subtitled in Korean to allow Korean viewers to react to the overseas audiences’ reactions. See, for example, http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​ =­jEEF​_­50sBrI&feature​=y­ outu​.b­ e (accessed June 18, 2012). 24 See, for example, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2008); Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 25 Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 12. 26 I’ve written elsewhere about faciality as a signification system with culturally and historically specific par­ameters. I link faciality and celebrity to issues of South Korean national identity, history, and media publics in “Face Value: The Star as Genre in Bong Joon-­ho’s ­Mother” in The Korean Pop Culture Reader, eds. Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014): 168–93. 27 Among the many national origins stated by video submissions are Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Germany, France, and the United States. 28 2ne1“i am the best” dance cover contest!!!, Facebook, July 7, 2011, https://­ www​.­facebook​.­com​/­notes​/­2ne1​/­2ne1​-­i​-­am​-­the​-­best​-­%EB%82%B4%EA%B0%80​ -­%EC%A0%9C%EC%9D%BC​-­%EC%9E%98%EB%82%98%EA%B0%80​-­dance​ -­cover​-­contest​-­​/­189441577780003. 29 “Winner of 2ne1 Dance Cover Contest—­I’m the Best by L.Y.N.T. (Vietnam Ver),” posted by pinjisun, YouTube, July 31, 2011, http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​ ?­v​=k­ xXcuqPUIdI. 30 Youna Kim, “Introduction,” in Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia (New York: Routledge, 2008), 14. 31 Youna Kim, “Introduction.” 32 Ubonrat Siriyuvasak, “Consuming and Producing (Post) Modernity: Youth and Popu­lar Culture in Thailand,” in Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia, ed. Youna Kim (New York: Routledge, 2008), 169–88, 180. 33 Ubonrat, “Consuming and Producing (Post) Modernity,” 178, 181, 184. 34 On transgender per­for­mance and the South Korean beauty industry, see Patty Jeehyun Ahn, “Harisu: South Korean Cosmetic Media and the Paradox of Transgendered Neoliberal Embodiment,” Discourse 31, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 248–72. 35 Ubonrat, 184. 36 Ubonrat, 184. 37 Bruno Latour, “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 450–62, 453. Beck, in response, clarifies his appeal to a realist cosmopolitanism stripped of an unexamined moral value against philosophical cosmopolitanism, asserting that a pragmatic, consensus-­based cosmopolitanism, deflated of its philosophical zeal, 264 

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can effectively forestall conflict. See Beck, “Neither Order nor Peace: A Response to Bruno Latour,” Common Knowledge 11, no. 1 (winter 2005): 1–7. 38 Latour, “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?,” 455. 39 Pheng Cheah, “Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopo­liti­cal Freedom in Transnationalism,” boundary 2 24, no. 2 (summer 1997): 167. 40 Cheah, “Given Culture,” 179. 41 Cheah, “Given Culture,” 186. 42 Cheah, “Given Culture,” 188. 43 “2ne1 ‘i am the best’ Choreography Practice (Uncut Ver.),” posted by 2ne1, YouTube, June 30, 2011, http://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­fl19JYqW6MI​.­ 44 Nolza, or “Let’s Play,” is the contest tag­line, which resonates with cosplay practices and nori (play, collective sport)—­amusement and a youthful, ludic sensibility. 45 2ne1 ‘i am the best’ Dance Cover,” posted by Sarah Yunni, YouTube, July 30, 2011, http://­www​.­youtube​.c­ om​/­watch​?­v​=​-­ ­7IplA4Vb6U. 46 Ubonrat, “Consuming and Producing (Post) Modernity,” 184.

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V I D E AT I O N TECHNOLOGICAL INTIMACY AND THE POLITICS OF GLOBAL CONNECTION

Joshua Neves

What composes a ­human social world may be anything but proximate to it, let alone ­human. —­elizabeth povinelli Part of your life had waned and waned, but to whom do you beautifully belong? —­my ­future is not a dream (factory band)

An unnamed worker at a Wintek subsidiary that assem­bles touch-­screen interfaces in Suzhou, China, describes the repetitive task of finishing iPhones: “I used my left hand to hold the iPhone screen when it came down the work line, and with my right hand I used a cotton cloth dipped in hexane to wipe the screen.”1 N-­hexane has since been linked to neurological damage, causing sweats, dizziness, and paralysis in hundreds of workers. The shockingly mundane scandal, acknowledged by corporations like Apple in a Supplier Responsibility Pro­gress Report (2011), signals the crucial role of emerging interface intimacies—­interfaces that sit at the edge of aspiration and exposure, life and death.2 Emblematic of ­these contact zones are the much-­reported eigh­ teen attempted suicides—­resulting in fourteen deaths—at Foxconn’s south-

12.1  ​A worker leaps from a factory dormitory. Still from the final chapter of Jia

Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin (2014).

ern China plants in 2010 alone.3 Indeed, the Foxconn suicides have emerged as an index of globalization’s violently uneven sway, capturing what scholars like Elizabeth Povinelli have termed “economies of abandonment,” or, alternatively, the peculiar “freedoms” that undergird life in so-­called special economic zones.4 The tensely mundane textures of factory living—­and, in par­tic­u­lar, “dormitory ­labor regimes” and long hours on the factory line—­animate new and old forms of risk, incessant ­labor protests, and shifting conditions of (il)legality, (im)mobility, and (non)citizenship that are at the very heart of the just-­in-­time economy and its entangled imaginaries of connectivity.5 Beyond the spectacular image of workers leaping from dormitory balconies, or the antisuicide netting that surrounds factory buildings, assembly-­line production is entangled with other forms of technological cohabitation and “technomobility.” 6 Numerous recent ethnographic studies and journalistic accounts describe the ways such media forms seep into the everyday life of factory mi­grants, among so many o­ thers, animating routine ­labor, clandestine activities “on the line,” and the habits and intimacies that take place ­after clocking out.7 ­These workers/residents spend long hours in Internet cafés, in public tv rooms, and on personal mobile devices, chatting, text­ing, browsing, gaming, watching. They use screens to find new jobs, learn about eve­ning courses, or­ ga­nize walkouts and protests, date and maintain personal connections, watch ­music videos, tv dramas, and movies, and take their own photos and videos—­ including the many viral music-­video covers featuring mi­grants or less innocent media pursuits, as in the recent scandal broadcast on Guangdong Public tv describing factory workers disciplined for taking pictures and videos of middle-­school girls from their factory dormitory win­dows.8 V I D E AT I O N   267

As such, forms of technological production and consumption do not simply exist side by side but are woven together to constitute the fabric of the everyday—­from the touch of screen assembly or the synesthesia of m ­ usic on the factory line to the intimate hours passed with videos and entangled screen media. This interlacing of making and using, hazard and hope, brings into view new forms of social subjectivity that the anthropologist Lisa Rofel calls “desiring China”—­a pun that refers to both the importance of desire to becoming a transnational citizen-­subject and the multiple fascinations with or desires for China that drive such affective economies. As Rofel argues, new “hopes, needs, and passions” are at the center of postsocialist po­liti­cal experiments, social allegories, and understandings of what it means to be a ­human being.9 In this essay I offer some speculations about ­these new and old technological intimacies. I refer to ­these forms of material and imaginary proximity as videation—­signaling video cultures’ unique mediations, as well as its overlooked actions, habits, or results (as indicated by the suffix -­ation). In this sense, videation describes a thick field of “new” media practices that are consistently occluded in understandings of digital modernity and global emergence. It builds on conventional understandings of video as a format of capture, copy, and playback and emphasizes intimate practices and infrastructures beyond content. In par­tic­u­lar, I focus on ­those instances or actions of screen economies that are limited neither to “productive ­labor” in the economic sense nor to the often valorized acts of “producing consumers” associated with fans or other popu­lar cultural practices. Touch and screen intimacy are linked to media consumption and to ­those users who purchase and use au­then­tic products in the global metropolis—­rendering the close, tactile, and detailed habits of ­labor, and of living laborers, illegible. Anna Tsing’s theorization of the fricative shuffle of commodities offers one useful entry point into this analy­sis of technological production: “Commodities seem so familiar that we imagine them ready made for us throughout ­every stage of production and distribution, as they pass from hand to hand ­until they arrive at the consumer. Yet the closer we look at the commodity chain, the more ­every step—­even transportation—­can be seen as an arena of cultural production. Global capitalism is made in the friction in t­ hese chains as divergent cultural economies are linked, often awkwardly. Yet the commodity must emerge as if untouched by friction.”10 This friction, the passing from hand to hand, suggests impor­tant and shifting forms of interface intimacy—­engagements that are at once exhausting and exhilarating.11 Extending such queries to include factory ­labor and living as cultural production, we can ask how making interfaces 268 

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joins up with making them intimate, how such notions constitute an alternate sphere of engagement and desire, and how this alternative geopo­liti­cal framing might open up beyond self-­referential guilt narratives that continue to undergird the dominant “melodramas of globalization” discourse—­where modernity always arrives “too late.”12 NE O LI BE RA LI S M AN D “REMAIN DERED LIF E- T­ I M ES”

This shift in perspective allows us to recalibrate influential notions like the “social factory,” “cognitive capitalism,” and the 24/7 economy—­concepts that are integral to interpreting digital modernities across the Global North (even when the North is South). Such notions emphasize how “work pro­cesses have shifted from the factory to society,” transforming basic understandings of ­labor, time, and self-­regulation, or what Donna Haraway, in her manifesto on cyborgs, presciently termed an “informatics of domination.”13 Th ­ ese critiques tell us a ­great deal about the sorts of general patterning—or the new dominant—­associated with pro­cesses like globalization, financialization, and the information age.14 But such technoglobal discourses too often take on a prescriptive character that represses lifeworlds across the South in ­favor of frenzied and familiar cultures of clicking, and the fetishization of knowledge sectors and the creative industries. Interestingly, they also mirror anx­ie­ ties in North Amer­ic­ a and Eu­rope over “outsourcing” (itself a unidirectional imaginary), where ser­vice work, unemployment, and never-­ending reeducation replaces jobs at the factory, port, and similar bastions of industrialism. New digital habits like ­those required by high-­bandwidth Internet cultures, mobile devices, and social media, as well as the shifting forms of precarity tied to the much-­touted tech and design sectors, are no doubt significant. But this diffusion of tasks and touching offers only a single vision of con­temporary information socie­ties. This is to say: it is out of sync with emergent media cultures in much of the world. Indeed, rigid frameworks for understanding technomodernity, largely derived from idealized Western metropolitan practices, are unable to account for on-­the-­ground practices elsewhere (including the heart of northern capitals). In China alone, the migratory population exceeds 250 million ­people. A large percentage of ­these rural-­to-­urban mi­grants exist outside the ­house­hold registration system (hukou), in a state of perpetual migration for factory work and related heavy ­labor jobs, constituting a massive and mobile “floating population” (liudong renkou)—­with their own “floating” media cultures.15 V I D E AT I O N   269

The divisive gap between North and South—­often articulated as a gap between West and East—is also tied to new disposabilities engendered by global neoliberalism(s). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics, among other texts, numerous theorists have taken up the wager that u­ nder neoliberalism, market rationality is generalized throughout the social body, inaugurating an entrepreneurial subject: “an entrepreneur of himself . . . ​being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer.”16 An extreme iteration of privatization and the protestant ethic, this new homo economicus relies on the assumption that ­labor as ­human capital is a kind of (potentially risky) investment—­configuring a subject that bears the burden of that risk and therefore has to be both self-­innovative and self-­responsible. In this context, the state exists to ensure market “freedom” and as an algorithm managing the population.17 Angling such debates t­ oward the non-­West, the anthropologist Aihwa Ong has theorized this relationship as one that shores up tensions between “neoliberalism as exception” and “exceptions to neoliberalism”—­a connection that hinges on what the assumed normative order is at a given site. Ong focuses on East Asian and Southeast Asian locales where neoliberalism is not the normative mode and is thus an exception to governing as usual. In this context, she argues, neoliberalism is a technology of government that is a “profoundly active way of rationalizing governing and self-­interest” and can also be “invoked, in po­liti­cal decisions, to exclude populations and places from neoliberal calculations and choices,” such as erasing safety nets, po­liti­cal rights, subsidized housing, or the standards of living and opportunity associated with new economic policies like special economic zones.18 In other words, the play of “exceptions” describes the insides and outsides of market-­driven criteria where individuals and groups strug­gle not only for legibility, for the right to play, but also against residual, often highly centralized and paternalistic forms of statecraft—­a fact that also reminds of the continued importance of the national within this economy of global connection. Thus, in addition to Maurizio Lazzarato’s assertion that neoliberalism establishes “a threshold, a vital minimum, above which the individual can become an ‘enterprise,’ ” we must add that neoliberalism is a malleable or “mobile technology” that can be ­adopted and adapted by dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal regimes for dif­fer­ent ends.19 This, of course, includes asking—as do Ong and Li Zhang—­how marginalized actors take up neoliberal techniques within their own social proj­ects.20 Emblematic of such exceptions to and as neoliberalism, not to mention the crucial role of the nation-­state, are the emergence of new “dormitory ­labor 270 

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regimes.” ­These regimes embrace modes of social organ­ization that are central to the management and profitability of global factories. The sociologist Pun Ngai argues that dormitory ­labor regimes in con­temporary China produce a more or less permanent reserve army of mi­grant workers by utilizing the socialist-era hukou (house­hold registration) system—­which strictly divides rural and urban registration and leaves millions as aliens in their own country.21 The h­ ouse­hold registration system limits peasant access to the city as well as to basic amenities like education, health care, and housing, creating liminal forms of citizenship that both entice workers with economic opportunity and can be revoked at any time. As Pun Ngai and Jenny Chan argue, “In this po­liti­cal economy, employers need not pay a living wage ­because they provide workers with minimal necessities of life within the enclosed world of factory complexes. Maintaining dormitories, in which a dozen young ­people may share a single room jammed with bunk beds only a few feet apart, costs the employer far less than wages necessary for workers to find their own housing. The same goes for the notoriously low-­quality food provided in employee cafeterias. Employers reduce their costs even more by deducting food and housing from workers’ wages.”22 With factory compounds like t­ hose operated by Foxconn and its subsidiaries, which employ between 50,000 and 400,000 workers at dif­fer­ent sites, the social fabric of such ­labor regimes are crucial. It shapes the structurally constrained pathways open to China’s “floating” population, as well as the textures of everyday life for the millions who migrate to the city and enter the factory gates—­giving a new meaning to “gated community.”23 In her essay “Life-­Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” Neferti X. M. Tadiar sums up this biopo­liti­cal turn as a shift from discourses of rights and property to one of risk and security—­a move that is understood to have basically altered “lived subjectivities and feelings and transformed modalities of social experience and imagination.”24 Tadiar draws on a range of theorists, including Foucault, Lazzarato, Wendy Brown, and Melinda Cooper in order to examine how the financial logic of personhood shapes a new distribution of the social. Crucial ­here are the “new temporal protocols” engendered by neoliberal philosophies of the self. Such protocols ask which individuals inhabit and qualify for the investor model of subjectivity and its structure of temporal experience, as well as which fall away as nonsubjects— as bad investments.25 In her analy­sis of the gap between “risk capable” and “at risk” populations, Tadiar suggests a useful critique of certain tendencies in the lit­er­a­ture on V I D E AT I O N   271

h­ uman capital and inhuman disposability. She argues that this influential model of subjectivity qua speculation—­which relies on the “colonization of the f­ uture as a mean of pres­ent realization”—­confines itself to only the most “advanced” and familiar forms of capitalism, itself constituting a threshold of intelligibility. ­These now routine frameworks elide an “entire arena of production pro­cesses” wrongly presumed to have been supplanted by a shift from industrial to postindustrial capitalism and related modes of accumulation.26 What are occluded are ­those “remaindered life-­times” tangential to the modalities of everyday production ­under neoliberalism, including its exceptions. Tadiar writes, “Such life-­times consist of a diverse array of acts, capacities, associations, aspirations in practice, experiential modes, and sensibilities that p­ eople engage in, draw upon, and invent in the strug­gle to make and remake social life u­ nder conditions of their own superfluity or disposability.”27 Tadiar turns our attention to the penumbral practices and modes of social existence that are blocked by dominant discourse but integral to the formation of the con­ temporary world. MEMES

The 2008 “iPhone girl” meme captures instances of Anna Tsing’s “­every stage” of production, as well as “superfluous” capacities, and an intertwined politics of victimization and guilt that buttresses dominant notions of global connectivity—­and especially links to Asia.28 The meme spread widely on the Internet in the fall of 2008, ­after a user in the United Kingdom found several images of a young female factory worker on a newly purchased handset. Pictures of the smiling young w ­ oman provided a rare glimpse of Hon Hai Precision Industrial Com­pany (Foxconn Technology Group’s parent com­pany) assembly lines—­including her soft pink uniform, rubber-­tipped gloves, and seemingly relaxed, even creative, work space and colleagues. In a post on MacRumors​.­com on August  20, 2008—in the midst of the final days of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing—­the user “markm49uk” wrote, “Not sure if this is or is not the ‘norm’ but I just received my brand new iPhone ­here in the UK and once it had been activated on iTunes I found that the home screen (the screen you can personalise with a photo) already had a photo set against it!!!! It would appear that someone on the production line was having a bit of fun—­has anyone e­ lse found this?”29 The thread quickly generated thousands of responses and was recirculated across both En­glish and Chinese print, broadcast, and Web media, includ272 

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12.2 and 12.3  ​Images of the “iPhone Girl” that w ­ ere “found” on a handset by a user

in the United Kingdom became an international sensation in the fall of 2008.

ing thousands of Google and Baidu search results, and a call by netizens for a “­human flesh search engine” to locate the real iPhone girl.30 Numerous bloggers even labeled the event a promotional hoax, suggesting that it was manufactured to draw attention to Apple’s new iPhone 3g, then unreleased in China, highlighting the camera and video functions and, for consumers, a guilt-­free supply chain. The influential Chinese and En­glish blog 东南西北 (EastSouthWestNorth) suggestively referred to the contagious pictures as the latest “Internet fairy tale”—­signaling the Cinderella-­like entrance of a marginalized young ­woman (known as “­Little Plum,” or Xiao Li, in Mandarin posts) into global visual registers.31 Regardless of the story’s veracity, the iPhone Girl’s “selfie” shores up the everyday and intimate uses of screen technologies by factory workers. From the repetitive acts of assembly to the care of quality control and even, perhaps, the playful testing of cameras, the pictures challenge the routine invisibility of laboring bodies in understandings of media politics and economies—­bodies with complex and multisited technological intimacies. While creative l­abor and design rhe­toric figure centrally in discourses about Apple products—­and high tech in general—­the repetitive, menial, and fragmented tasks of technolabor are generally viewed as insignificant: merely the mindless execution of a par­tic­u­lar action (like wiping a glass screen). This discourse does significant V I D E AT I O N   273

po­liti­cal work by differentiating valuable sites of creativity and low-­value imitative tasks, a fact captured by Apple’s “designed in California” ethos and underscored by understandings of China as a site of assembly for components that are designed and built elsewhere, its role as a menial ­middle(wo)man. Mirroring debates about intellectual property and rip, mix, and burn culture, the aspects of this supply chain not understood to creatively “add value” through their productive capacities are of ­little individual or specific value, and rather function as a dividual mass of potential ­labor to be slotted in or out of production as necessary. It is the laboring body’s presumed insignificance that renders it disposable. Indeed, this ste­reo­typical view consolidates notions of “mindless ­labor,” which themselves reaffirm routine disposability and are, in part, what the memes ­counter. In the mainstream U.S. context, Leslie Chang, journalist and author of the best-­selling ethnography Factory Girls, offers a useful if limited description of this split and, in par­tic­u­lar, of exploited laborers.32 Chang argues that Euro-­ American understandings of factory l­abor are rooted in a guilt narrative and based on the assumption that Asian factories are oppressive and that it is the Western desire for goods that makes them so. It is a s­ imple narrative that connects Western demand to Chinese or Asian suffering. It is moreover a narrative, she observes, that smacks of self-­obsession.33 Chang suggests that “by focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets,” “we” have rendered workers’ actions and desires “as menial and replaceable as the parts in the screens they make.”34 Such discourses have the additional effect of erasing diverse local specificities and the world-­making capacities of the non-­West—or, at the very least, making them vis­i­ble only in relation to the hegemonic language of globalization. In other words, this self-­referential logic ascribes dif­fer­ent geopo­liti­cal locations and time zones to the assembly and consumption of media hardware (where technological objects are made in one place and used in another). Such dominant logics subsume larger questions of who can be a desiring and technological subject. Echoing the l­ egal activist Lawrence Liang’s critiques of piracy discourse—­ which, in one variation, he describes as relying on a model of piety and the “ ‘poor third world’ figure, and fundamentally dependent on . . . ​‘catching up with the West’ accounts of global relations”—­the image of the iPhone Girl also asks us to reconsider the common distinctions between sentient and menial ­labor.35 The former signifies creativity, design, and the knowledge economy, and the latter is imitative, mindless, and highly replaceable; the former is savior of the global economy, the latter a modern-­day pirate. Instead, 274 

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what does it mean to place factory l­abor and living, among myriad everyday and informal media cultures, at the center of critical studies of global emergent media? How are understandings of the cultural and creative industries, and the growing fields invested in production cultures, transformed by taking the habits and intimacies of penumbral users and makers as capacities in reshaping technology and sociality? The narrative of the “poor third world figure” is crucial ­because it animates a familiar imaginary through which the politics and ethics of global relationships are understood and lived out.36 Challenging such familiar relationships, I reconsider the routine thresholds through which we understand social capacity—­Northern creativity on one side, Southern imitation on the other—­and critique the role that “third world figure” is made to do in buttressing the good capitalism and the benevolent North. TE CHNO LO GI CAL IN TIMACY

Debates about industrial l­abor and alienation or dehumanization are hardly new. Crucial to such discourses is the Marxist idea of l­ abor pro­cesses as a kind of alienation from the physical knowledge and capacity to make ­things. In the vulgar reading, technology is understood to materialize the interests of capital by maintaining control over l­abor and wages, turning workers into mindless bodies.37 As Fordist assembly lines both spread transnationally (e.g., across Asia and Latin Amer­i­ca) and incorporated w ­ omen into the workforce in new ways, a new generation of feminist scholars sought to make gender crucial to understandings of l­abor pro­cesses.38 One influential area of research, for example, centers on the relationship between l­abor, imperialism, and patriarchy, capturing the imposition of “first world” technology on “third world” subjects, especially w ­ omen.39 While this work inaugurated crucial new areas of research, activism, and policy, critics also worried about its determinism: factories materialize social relations, and both work and ­women workers recede from view. Put other­wise, such discourse very often consolidates understandings of ­women as “sites” of strug­gle, rather than as contesting “subjects.” Writing of similar gender slippages in postcolonial studies, Ania Loomba argues that while such issues capture the role of gender itself as a kind of po­liti­cal currency, as well as how ­women are subordinated by discourses “about” them, “such a formulation also implies that gender politics is only a meta­phor for the articulation of other issues.” 40 Extending this productive debate—­where gender is shown to be integral to ­labor processes—­feminist scholars of Asia like Aihwa Ong, and more V I D E AT I O N   275

recently, if with some hesitation, Pun Ngai and Ching Kwan Lee, have continued to recalibrate prevalent discourses of technical instrumentality by focusing on the re­sis­tance of w ­ omen workers on the factory line.41 Ong’s influential examination of microelectronics factories in Malaysia’s export manufacturing zones, in par­tic­u­lar, is seen as a corrective to accounts where “machines subordinated an essentialized category ‘­women’ to the interests of transnational capital.” 42 Her work illustrates how the microelectronics ­assembly line acted to “disassemble” and “reassemble” gender, serving as a contested space where technology is both a form of power and site of excess. Ong describes ­women workers who intentionally jam machines or suffer spirit attacks as “expressions of both fear and re­sis­tance.” 43 While Pun Ngai’s study Made in China (2005) emphasizes how factories in Shenzhen function as disciplinary machines designed to turn workers into “mindless bodies,” she, too, observes how young dagonmei (female workers) act to resist the speed of the assembly through coordinated slowdowns and collective illness. I mention ­these two well-­known accounts ­here in order explore an alternative framing of “technological intimacy” developed by the anthropologist Jamie Cross in his factory work in one of India’s special economic zones. Cross extends and critiques the valuable contributions of Ong, Ngai, and ­others, pointing out that ­these impor­tant ethnographies continue to rely on a theory of technology as power—­one-­way and deterministic—­and further, that pres­ent technology as a “stable external force.” As Cross puts it, “In [such] cases re­sis­tance is formulated in spite of and not through technology: acts of re­sis­tance all involve cutting, limiting or severing ties with tools and machines, ­either by turning them off, slowing them down, or walking away from them. In accounts like t­hese, technology remains materially and symbolically unchanged through use.”44 Complicating the technology-­as-­power model, Cross draws on science and technology studies to advance an alternate account of technolabor. He notes that if researchers have given short shrift to embodied relationships with technology, it is precisely b­ ecause the global factory worker is “rarely conceived of as a sentient, practicing, tool wielding body”—or, further, a body with her own dreams and desires. Cross argues that to gain proficiency at a par­tic­u­lar repetitive task is to “acquire technological intimacy with tools and machines, a kind of ‘carnal knowledge’ or ‘material consciousness.’ ” In this context, even the most mundane assembly-­line actions are “constantly attentive, perceptual engagement with the material environment involving qualities of care, judgment, and dexterity.” 45 Put other­wise: technological intimacy—in 276 

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contrast to the menial-­innovative binary—is transformative. This s­ imple shift in perspective accentuates human-­machine intimacies as a technological per­ for­mance that works on the materiality of the work space, the body, and social relationships. The distinction between sentient and robotic bodies is also consolidated by influential discourses describing the new global economy and the ascendency of affective l­abor. One variant of so-­called immaterial ­labor, affective ­labor is defined by ­human contact and interaction, such as “in-­person ser­vices or ser­v ices of proximity” and the production of affects like ease, well-­being, satisfaction, passion, community, and so on.46 Michael Hardt argues that the “affective face” of immaterial ­labor is perhaps best understood by returning to what “feminist analyses of ‘­women’s work’ have called ­labor in the bodily mode.” This ­labor is at once corporeal or somatic, but its affects are nonetheless “immaterial.” As with a ­mother’s love, Hardt adds, affective ­labor animates “pro­cesses whereby our laboring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself.” 47 Hardt describes changes in the nature of ­labor pro­cesses as a result of the becoming dominant of the information economy. What is new in the creative economy is that affects are capitalized and constitute new logics of “biopo­liti­ cal production” that are generalized throughout the economy.48 Or, as Lazzarato puts it, it is about a shift in understanding whereby “capitalism is not only a mode of production but a production of worlds.” 49 My interest h­ ere is to critique a certain tendency in affective ­labor’s world picture. To limit affective ­labor to only certain kinds of ­human proximities and ser­v ices, and to emphasize its immaterial transmission en route to certain consumers, is merely to reproduce dominant geopo­liti­cal cartographies. But what of the technological intimacies of factory life, among many entangled zones? By this I mean both the crucial relationship between ­human and nonhuman actors (such as a worker and an iPhone) and the affective exchange among workers and multiple publics. Indeed, what top-­down views of immaterial ­labor make apparent, including its affective registers, is the crucial role it plays in shoring up Apple’s brand (viz. Apple showrooms and how the brand signifies the creative economy itself)—­that is, precisely in disappearing the iPhone’s material assemblage. As Helen Grace puts it, “That the object . . . ​cannot be made without being made of material and by a pro­cess involving manual ­labor—is disavowed in the language of magic which characterizes the marketing pro­ cess, where the empty shell of the generic product gains the fullness of the brand’s meaning.”50 In contrast to this delimited affective scenario, how might V I D E AT I O N   277

social and po­liti­cal theories take seriously the affective and sensuous activities bracketed as machinic, laborious, or imitative? How might we understand the “affective face” of the screen as it is conveyed hand to hand, down the line, as culturally and po­liti­cally transformative? This modest twist opens up useful registers for what Hardt terms “biopower from below”—­registers sensitive to the “remaindered life-­times” and technological subjects foregrounded by the “social factory” of the factory itself. FLOATI NG M E DIA

Approaches to video cultures and entangled media assemblages have neglected a range of intimate and haptic technological habits—­like ­those associated with the workers who literally produce (assem­ble, test, package, ship, ­etc.) global electronics. Such workers spend their days and nights with screen technologies—­ and in ways not accounted for by limited imaginations of digital culture as articulated by high-­tech convergence and high-­bandwidth networks. This separation is consolidated by discourses of immaterial ­labor and creativity as well as an orientalizing fascination with global supply chains—­chains that move t­ hings in a single direction and keep every­one in their place. Put other­w ise, this elision is epistemological and categorical and does not reflect the a­ ctual existing practices in China and in much of the world. By opening up understandings of the transformative subject, of who gets to be a producer/produser, we can not only add impor­tant sites and subjects to media and cultural theory but also rework our theories of media and social reproduction in the penumbra of the global. This is an impor­tant task for numerous reasons, not the least of which is the mundane point that China is no longer merely a site for export pro­cessing en route to the metropole. Instead Apple’s China stores, among many similar corporations, are the tech ­giant’s most profitable outlets globally—­recasting the idea of a West-­East-­ West supply chain. I add texture to this discussion by turning to what we might call “floating media”—­after the forms of videation that encapsulate and are carved out by migratory media practices. Floating refers to the masses of p­ eople unmoored by postsocialist-­cum-­neoliberal economies, as well as diverse technologies and practices that constitute digital cultures in such contexts. Video is a key form and platform within this floating media assemblage. It draws our attention to the crucial role played not only by content but also by distribution—­ that distribution itself produces something. What it produces, Thomas 278 

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Lamarre argues in a parallel context, are “affective media geographies.”51 Thus, alongside and in contrast to clouds, data centers, and the fiber-­optic sublime of con­temporary media infrastructures, floating media are animated by their capacity to jump formal and informal infrastructures—­making up technological and affective networks among the presumably disconnected (hence the importance of dvds, sd cards and hard drives, and the mobile phone). Of par­tic­u­lar interest ­here is the savvy of workers and their social partners (workmates, friends, families, activists, journalists, artists and filmmakers, sectors of po­liti­cal society) in using micro and mainstream technologies and infrastructures to proj­ect their dreams and desires, and make claims on the ­future of the social. Outside coverage of factory workers and marginal media cultures emphasize giving voice or forms of petitioning and policymaking on their behalf. In contrast, we also encounter myriad and sophisticated uses of media by floating populations to advance personal and po­liti­cal proj­ects that exceed state-­corporate channels. The iPhone Girl selfie captures such creative sophistication and attentiveness to the currency of con­temporary visual forms and infrastructures by workers and other illegible populations. The images can be understood as not merely unerased but created—­the clever employment of a prepackaged handset as a form of projected virality. Such small, personal, even poor visualities drive micro and local communications, suggesting crucial forms of transmission and contact. Th ­ ese connectivities rely on and reanimate the technological intimacies left out of factory lifeworlds: the routine care and dexterity of assembly and quality control, the furtive use of screens on the factory line or in bathrooms, and more familiar text­ing, chat, and short-­form messaging like qq or Weibo, photo and video posts, and other forms of nested distribution in the city (e.g., video on sd cards, public screens, or the Web). Much more than an accident or intractability, the iPhone Girl meme instead captures an emergent performativity that Michelle Cho, in her contribution to this volume, identifies as crucial to videomedia’s specificity. The idea of the technologized and (im)mobile self has been explored by numerous recent ethnographic studies of mi­grant media practices. Critically, such work remains to be digested by “mainstream” media studies, with its tendency to label them as exceptions—­even when such practices constitute technomodernity in much of the world. We have a lot to learn from popu­lar ethnographies like Chang’s Factory Girls as well as from academic studies of mobile mi­grants and technologies in factories, retail, construction, call centers, tourism, and the sex industry. Such work offers crucial specificities V I D E AT I O N   279

and descriptions that refashion our very understandings of video culture, Asia, and the global. Cara Wallis’s monograph Technomobility in China: Young Mi­grant W ­ omen and Mobile Phones (2013) is a good example of the explosion of research on mobile telephony and mi­grant workers, among other entangled practices. Phones serve as a crucial object precisely b­ ecause of their personal nature and what Wallis terms “necessary convergence.”52 That is, rather than the convergence of phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and tv and cinema screens, for many across the South ­these contents and practices converge on a single device—­ the mobile phone—­out of economic necessity. While not explic­itly focused on the factory, Wallis’s account delineates the impor­tant vectors shaping con­ temporary “technomobility” for mi­grants and ­those in the make-do economy. In par­tic­u­lar, she argues that mobile technologies animate new forms of “immobile mobility.” She defines this as “a socio-­techno means of surpassing spatial, temporal, physical, and structural bound­aries.”53 Technomobility drives both new forms of control within spaces like the factory (such as the ability for workers to be constantly tracked by their bosses) and as marginal capacities or emergences within the limits of postsocialist-­cum-­neoliberal modernity. In this sense, floating media signals variability and fluctuation, on the one hand, and states of suspension or of endurance (e.g., floating on the surface of ­water), on the other. CO NCLUS I O N

Discourses of robotic workers and media incapacity are not only a way for the global to manage the national (as in North Atlantic anx­ie­ ties over China’s “rise”) but is also an impor­tant part of national and subnational developmental regimes in China and beyond. It points to vibrating forms of “overlapping sovereignty,” as well as elite-­subaltern relations that exceed inter-­national contact zones.54 A key example in this context is the proliferation of discourses over the suzhi (or quality) of populations in postreform China. The idea of suzhi has taken on a range of new meanings in recent years, especially as it becomes linked to the idea of the renkou (population) and prolonged economic reforms. As Ann Anagnost argues, the idea shifted from its early proj­ect of educating beleaguered peasants and managing births to a proj­ect pitched at the population as a whole—­a shift from an emphasis on quantity to quality.55 Suzhi thus signals the specificities of biopo­liti­cal mechanisms in China’s postsocialist modernity. This recalibrated focus on the quality of the population 280 

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drives a range of new imaginaries about the transfer of value—­eerily reminiscent of fears over counterfeit purses or fake dvds—­especially investments in education, training, etiquette, and the like. As Anagnost notes, the power of suzhi as an ideological formation signals a shift from a model of surplus extraction to a model of investment, where bodies, like t­hings, must be improved and reutilized—­and where recouped investments drive ever harsher forms of exposure and abandonment.56 What I tease apart in this coda are the disparate politics of aspiration and desire—­and their relation to floating video—­that are conflated by such visions of the corpus and its qualities. H ­ ere we can return to Lisa Rofel’s argument about role of desire in the construction of new h­ uman beings in China—­a logic, she points out, that at once captures aspects of neoliberal transformation and shores up the unruliness of desire: the difficulty of channeling it in a par­tic­u­lar direction. Following Bhaskar Sarkar, I want to extend Rofel’s somewhat loose configuration of aspirational politics to suggest an impor­tant analytical distinction between desire and aspiration (even if ­these impulses cannot be isolated in practice).57 ­Here, we can understand aspiration as the official modalities of ambition and development, including explicit targets for transformation, ranging from education and city plans to anti-­spitting campaigns and middle-­class consumption. Desire, while basically entangled with aspiration—­and this, indeed, is part of the point of neoliberal self-­regulation—­suggests modes of experience and repertoires of actions that necessarily exceed postsocialist-­cum-­neoliberal blueprints. Desire is what spills over from aspirational politics, including the “sensibilities that p­ eople engage in, draw upon, and invent in the strug­gle” to remake themselves and inhabit the pres­ent.58 ­Because such habits and imaginaries are largely incommensurate with aspirational targets, hence the need for constant pedagogical intervention, they drive forms of life that are both occluded and devalued by sanctioned modes of personhood, development, and global timeliness—­not to mention the disciplinary concerns and categories of media and cultural-­ studies research. As a final example, I consider the visual artist Cao Fei’s 2006 video proj­ect Whose Utopia. Whose Utopia is a partnership with workers at the Osram China Lighting factory in Guangdong—­including six months of filming, interviews, and collaborative proj­ects in the factory. Divided into three parts, the video explores the intimate and mechanized tasks of workers. It includes a section, “Factory Fairy­tale,” with per­for­mances by workers in costumes and street clothes, and a section, “My F ­ uture Is Not a Dream,” that pairs the m ­ usic of a V I D E AT I O N   281

12.4  ​A worker dances in the factory. Still from “Factory Fairy­tale,” the second

­section of Cao Fei’s collaborative documentary Whose Utopia (2006).

factory band of the same name with video portraits of workers at their posts, staring directly into the camera. A cata­log description of the proj­ect notes that “the poetic, dreamlike vision of individualism within the constraints of industrialization illuminates the other­wise invisible emotions, desires, and dreams that permeate the lives of an entire populace in con­temporary Chinese society.”59 Promising to capture invisible “emotions, dreams, and desires,” the video thus suggests a peculiar form of affective ethnography. Beyond capturing and staging intimate acts of factory life, and listening to young men and ­women articulate their motivations, Whose Utopia illustrates how vari­ous actors utilize video to proj­ect themselves—­from the factory floor, local exhibitions, and international galleries to dvds, film festivals, and viral videos (such as the easily accessible mp4 file I downloaded to watch the video). The audiovisual field inaugurated by such interactions is not limited to the videographer and spectator but rather suggests a space of po­liti­cal relations that includes the look and aims of the videographed subject. Beyond Web 2.0’s understanding of participation as the capacity to alter media content, the image of a young worker looking through the camera in “My F ­ uture Is Not a Dream,” among 282 

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12.5  ​A young worker looks through the camera. Still from “My ­Future Is Not a

Dream,” the final section of Cao Fei’s Whose Utopia (2006).

many such images, instead registers the insistent refusal to accept the disposability or fractured citizenship assigned to her by the state. Such forms of videation, following Ariella Azoulay’s delineation of the civil contract of photography, expresses a “demand for participation in a sphere of po­liti­cal relations in which [her] claims can be heard and acknowledged.” 60 What is crucial about such videos is how they constitute, alongside a range of new and old media, a remaindered media assemblage. Put other­wise: video floats. It drifts across analog and digital forms, social classes, and global spacetimes—­ enabling penumbral capacities that are dis­appeared by dominant epistemological horizons and discourses of global emergence. > NOTE S  ​ 1

2

Jeffrey Kaye, “In China, Factory Workers Allege Poisoning from iPhone Production,” pbs Newshour, April  13, 2011, http://­www​.­pbs​.­org​/­newshour​/­bb​/­world​ -­jan​-j­ une11​-­china​_­04​-­13​/­. Apple Supplier Responsibility: 2011 Pro­gress Report, https://­www​.­apple​.­com​/s­ upplier​ -­responsibility​/­pdf​/­Apple​_­SR​_­2011​_­Progress​_­Report​.­pdf. V I D E AT I O N   283

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Jenny Chan and Pun Ngai, “Suicide as Protest for the New Generation of Chinese Mi­grant Workers: Foxconn, Global Capital, and the State,” Asia-­Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 8, issue 37, no. 2 (September 13, 2010): 1–33, http://­japanfocus​.­org​/­​ -­Jenny​-­Chan​/­3408. Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Aihwa Ong, ­Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Pun Ngai, “Chinese Mi­grant W ­ omen Workers in a Dormitory ­Labour System,” AsiaPortal, May 11, 2009, http://­infocus​.a­ siaportal​.­info​/­2009​/­05​/­11​/­maychinese​ -­migrant​-­women​-­workers​-­a​-­dormitory​-­labour​-­system%EF%80%AA​-­pun​-n­ gai​/­. Cara Wallis, Technomobility in China: Young Mi­grant ­Women and Mobile Phones (New York: New York University Press, 2015). See, among many o­ thers, Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (New York: Random House, 2008); Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey through China from Farm to Factory (New York: HarperCollins, 2010); Pui-­Lam Law, ed., New Connectivities in China: Virtual, A ­ ctual and Local Interactions (London: Springer, 2012); Pun Ngai, Made in China: ­Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Hong Xue, “Local Strategies of ­Labor Control: A Case Study of Three Electronics Factories in China,” International L ­ abor and Working-­Class History, no. 73 (spring 2008): 85–103. Guangdong public TV, “DV xianchang: March  19, 2013, Dongguan: Nvsheng sushe duimian jingxian toukuinan,” Kalvin.cn, March 20, 2013​,­ http://­kalvin​.c­ n​ /­video​/­play​/X ­ NTI5NTMwMzQ4​.­html. Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public ­Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Prince­ ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2005), 51, emphasis added. I develop the idea of “interface intimacy” from a discussion with Nishant Shah. It was originally developed by Namita Malhotra in her master’s thesis, “Interface Intimacies,” and cited by Shah in his “When Machines Speak to Each Other: Unpacking the ‘Social’ in ‘Social Media,’ ” Social Media + Society, no. 1–3 (April–­June, 2015), 1. Bhaskar Sarkar, “Melodramas of Globalization,” Cultural Dynamics 20, no.  1 (2008): 31–51. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Australian Feminist Studies 2, no.  4 (1987): 1–42. On how work pro­cesses have shifted from the factory to society, see Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013); Tiziana Terranova, “­Free L ­ abor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 63 (summer 2000): 33–34; and Yann Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). J oshua N eves

Michael Hardt, “Affective ­Labor,” boundary 2 26, no. 2 (1999): 89–100. 15 Thomas  D. Armstrong, “China’s ‘Floating Population,’ ” Southern California International Review, October  12, 2013, http://­scir​.­org​/­2013​/­10​/­chinas​-­floating​ -­population​/­. The article notes that 160 million mi­grants are without hukou (house­hould registration) and thus are effectively illegal residents in their own country. 16 Quoted in Neferti X. M. Tadiar, “Life-­Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” Social Text 115 (summer 2013): 20; Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 226. 17 Tadiar, “Life-­Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” 20–21. 18 Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 3–4. 19 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Neoliberalism in Action: In­equality, Insecurity and the Reconstitution of the Social,” Theory, Culture, Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 128. See also Aihwa Ong, “Boundary Crossings: Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology,” Royal Geo­graph­i­cal Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (2007): 3–8. 20 Li Zhang, “Afterword: Flexible Postsocialist Assemblages from the Margin,” positions 20, no. 2 (2012): 660; Aihwa Ong and Li Zhang, “Introduction: Privatizing China; Powers of the Self, Socialism from Afar,” in Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar, ed. Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 1–19. 21 Pun Ngai, “Chinese Mi­grant ­Women Workers in a Dormitory ­Labour System,” AsiaPortal, May 11, 2009, http://­infocus​.a­ siaportal​.­info​/­2009​/­05​/­11​/­maychinese​ -­migrant​-­women​-­workers​-­a​-­dormitory​-­labour​-­system%EF%80%AA​-­pun​-n­ gai​/­. 22 Pun Ngai and Jenny Chan, “The Spatial Politics of ­Labor in China: Life, ­Labor, and a New Generation of Mi­grant Workers,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 1 (2013): 181. 23 The German musician and video-­essayist Christian von Borries plays on this parallel between corporations and states in his iphonechina (2014). The video is based on encounters where von Borries asks p­ eople in China, “Imagine Apple is a state. Would you rather live in Apple or live in China?” See, for instance, the 2015 Transmediale Festival program, http://­www​.­transmediale​.­de​/­content​ /­iphonechina. 24 Tadiar, “Life-­Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” 19. 25 Tadiar, “Life-­Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” 21. 26 Tadiar, “Life-­Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” 22. 27 Tadiar, “Life-­Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” 23. 28 For other essays on the iPhone Girl phenomenon, see Helen Grace, “iPhone Girl: Assembly, Assemblages and Affect in the Life of an Image,” in Public Space, Media Space, ed. Chris Berry, Janet Harbord, and Rachel Moore (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 135–61; Seth Perlow, “On Production for Digital Culture: iPhone Girl, Electronics Assembly, and the Material Forms of Aspiration,” Convergence 17 (2011): 245–69.

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See markm49uk, “iPhone 3g—­Already with Pictures! (aka ‘iPhone Girl’)” (forum post), MacRumors, August 20, 2008, http://­forums​.­macrumors​.­com​/­threads​ /­iphone​-­3g​-­already​-­with​-­pictures​-­aka​-­iphone​-­girl​.­547777​/­. Ma Jun, “Was iPhone Girl a Phony?,” EastSouthWestNorth, September 4, 2008, http://­www​.­zonaeuropa​.­com​/­20080905​_­1.​ ­htm. Ma Jun, “Was iPhone Girl a Phony?,” EastSouthWestNorth, September 4, 2008, http://­www​.­zonaeuropa​.­com​/­20080905​_­1.​ ­htm. Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls. That this book can be a best-­seller is itself indicative of a certain fascination with Chinese productivity. For instance, a story about iPhone l­abor and suicides asks, “When 17 p­ eople take their lives, I ask myself, did I in my desire hurt them? Even just a ­little?” See Joel Johnson, “1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?,” Wired, February 28, 2011, http://­www​.­wired​.­com​/­magazine​/­2011​/­02​/­ff​ _­joelinchina​/a­ ll​/­1. Leslie  T. Chang, “The Voices of China’s Workers” (ted talk), tedGlobal, June 2012, https://­www​.­ted​.­com​/­talks​/­leslie​_­t​_­chang​_­the​_­voices​_­of​_­china​_­s​ _­workers. Lawrence Liang, “Porous Legalities and Ave­nues of Participation,” In Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, ed. Monica Narula, Shuddhabarta Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, Geert Lovink, and Lawrence Liang (Delhi: Sarai, 2005), 13. Indeed, several scholars have already contributed to this area of research, including Vicki Mayer, Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Tele­vi­sion Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), among many ­others. Jamie Cross, “Technological Intimacy: Re-­engaging with Gender and Technology in the Global Factory,” Ethnography 12 (2012): 120. See, for instance, Marianne H. Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan, eds., Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Re­sis­tances (London: Routledge, 2000); and June Nash and Maria Patricia Fernandez-­Kelly, eds., ­Women, Men and the International Division of L ­ abour (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983). Cross, “Technological Intimacy,” 120–21. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 222. Cross, 120–22; Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Re­sis­tance and Cap­i­tal­ist Discipline: Factory W­omen in Malaysia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); Pun Ngai, Made in China; Ching Kwan Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory ­Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Cross, “Technological Intimacy,” 121. Aihwa Ong, “Disassembling Gender in the Electronics Age,” Feminist Studies 13, no. 3 (1987): 621. Cross, “Technological Intimacy,” 122. Cross, “Technological Intimacy,” 120, 123. J oshua N eves

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Hardt, “Affective ­Labor,” 89. 47 Hardt, “Affective ­Labor.” 48 Hardt, “Affective ­Labor,” 89–93. 49 Maurizio Lazzarato, “From Capital-­Labour to Capital-­Life,” Ephemera 4, no.  3 (2004): 187. 50 Grace, “iPhone Girl,” 148. 51 ­Here I draw on Thomas Lamarre’s discussion of how distribution platforms and infrastructures drive “affective media geographies.” See Thomas Lamarre, “Regional tv: Affective Media Geographies,” Asiascape 2 (2015): 93–126. 52 Wallis, Technomobility in China, 7–8. 53 Wallis, Technomobility in China, 6. 54 Saskia Sassen, “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Ele­ments for a Theorization,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 215–32. 55 Ann Anagnost, “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi),” Public Culture 16, no. 2 (2004): 190. 56 Anagnost, “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi),” 191. 57 I borrow the distinction between aspiration and desire from Bhaskar Sarkar’s forthcoming work on “cosmoplastics.” 58 Tadiar, “Life-­Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” 20. 59 Nat Trotman, “Cao Fei: Whose Utopia,” Guggenheim​.­org, n.d., http://­www​.g ­ uggen​ heim​.­org​/­new​-­york​/­collections​/­collection​-­online​/­artwork​/­22047. 60 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone, 2008), 19.

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S TAY I N G A L I V E I M P H A L’ S H I V / A I D S ( D I G I TA L ) V I D E O C U LT U R E

Bishnupriya Ghosh

S CE NE O NE : THE VISIT

It is the sweltering month of August. I am riveted by Deepak Singh’s story about founding the Manipur Network of Positive ­People (mnp+) with five friends who “came out” as intravenous-­drug users in 1997. One of “us” has passed, he tells me, pointing to a photo­graph, but four have survived, still ­living in Manipur’s hiv/aids health emergency. Bordering Myanmar, the State of Manipur in northeast India falls along the busy drug-­trafficking routes of the Golden Triangle (Thailand, Laos, Vietnam) through which heroin enters Indian markets. Many Manipuri youth get their first hit as adolescent revelers at Myanmar’s Moreh markets, which are as popu­lar for acquiring cheap consumer goods (clothing, electronics, furniture) as they are for illicit trade in drugs and guns.1 Injecting the crude form of heroin named “No. 4” through homemade devices (a rubber stopper and a needle), Deepak explains, a large percentage of the youth that visit Moreh for kicks are quickly addicted—­ some, infected. As we talk, a brusque knock interrupts the interview; a man rushes hurriedly into the room and whispers in Deepak’s ear. A quick exchange ensues—­gesticulations, worried glances—as I studiously play with my tape recorder. ­After all, I am from the “mainland” (meaning India), some Manipuris

tell me, signaling their distance from the nation-­state responsible for Manipur’s fifty-­eight-­year-­old state of emergency. The moment frames my research into a border-­town video culture that is critical to that state’s informal public-­ health infrastructure. The hiv/aids epidemic in Manipur remains at “high crisis” levels ­because of the fifty-­eight-­year-­old po­liti­cal emergency.2 Invoked to eliminate radical secessionist tendencies in the provinces bordering China and Myanmar, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (afspa) was imposed in 1958, providing ­legal immunity to Indian Army mea­sures to restore order in the state. The most draconian mea­sures of the act ­were put in place in 1980, ­after a particularly bloody period, and Manipur was declared a “disturbed region.”3 For more than half a c­ entury, Manipur has remained in a perpetual state of exception. The chronic low-­intensity war has reor­ga­nized social relations, generating a culture of exceptionalism across all aspects of life. Everyday life falls ­under the shadow of both the Indian military and around thirty insurgent groups: days are punctuated with eight-­to ten-­hour blackouts; the major highways between towns and cities are periodically shut down; open drains fester in the capital; and the supply of goods (from grains to medical supplies) to local markets remains a g­ amble. The pres­ent health crisis—­the reason Deepak has been called away—is the news that that a truck carry­ing Highly Active Anti-­Retroviral Therapies (haart) shipments has been diverted. With a network of more than a thousand hiv+ ­people dependent on mnp+, the potential disturbance in therapeutic regimens is an alarming possibility. Not only has the government rollout of second-­line antiretroviral therapies in Manipur been abysmally slow,4 but t­ here is evidence of growing drug re­sis­ tance to antiretroviral therapies among ­those whose regimens are habitually interrupted. As Deepak returns to the ­table, preoccupied and distracted, I am acutely aware of taking up his valuable time—­indeed the time of several grassroots organ­izations that had mushroomed in Manipur ­after the first case of hiv/aids in 1989–1990. S CE NE TWO : MR.   I NDI A

The triumphant close of the filmmaker Haoban Paban Kumar’s Mr.  India (2009) is unforgettable. The protagonist of the documentary, the hiv+ “out” bodybuilder Kunrakpan Pradipkumar steps onstage painted in gold, bending and flexing, muscles bulging, as he ­faces the jury at an all-­Manipur bodybuilding competition. S taying A live  289

13.1  ​Kunrakpan Pradipkumar at a bodybuilding meet. Still from Haoban Paban

Kumar’s Mr. India (2009).

This fulsome display of a superbly conditioned metabolic machine marks the state icon’s memorable rise to health ­after his seroconversion in 2000. The documentary is devoted to Pradipkumar’s journey, culminating with his win of the World Bodybuilding and Physique Sports Federation trophy, in 2007. Depressed and ­house­bound ­after his diagnosis, Pradipkumar turned to heavy weight training against doctor’s o­ rders, and against the hope for a f­ uture cure. Boldly foregrounded in the last 8 minutes of the 47-­minute film, the tightly edited footage of his spectacular per­for­mance at a bodybuilding competition documents his success in regaining health. And yet the soundscape ensures audiences do not forget the hiv/aids health emergency that frames this heroic tale. The wittily diegetic score, a “girl” rock band rendition of the Queen track “We ­Will Rock You,” undercuts the celebratory footage, recalling the unforgettably glam Freddie Mercury, who died of aids in 1991. Even as the resplendent golden muscles defy what Pradipkumar once saw as a death sentence, the tune hovers around the image as a melancholic trace. The rest of this prize-­winning documentary is quiet, tracking the mundane regularity of Pradipkumar’s life. Despite po­liti­cal disturbances that include curfews, closed highways, and the loss of jobs, the camera follows Pradipkumar’s quotidian pursuits: tending plants, bathing, praying, eating, taking his meds, 290 

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and—­most often—­training for the heavyweight championship at his local gym in Imphal, the capital of Manipur. In sharp contrast to two other documentaries that eulogize the middleweight icon—­the renowned Manipuri filmmaker Aribam Syam Sharma’s Mr. Manipur (2008) and Bachaspatimayum Sunzu’s melodramatic Shingnaba/The Challenge (2008)—­Mr. India modestly focuses on his slow pro­gress ­toward health. As such it is my point of departure for this essay on a vibrant video culture that has emerged around “living with aids”—­a politics of survival against failed state protections for its citizens. Centered in Imphal, this hiv/aids video culture serves as bulwark against the daily precarity and vio­lence of a border town just one hundred kilo­meters from Moreh. Against this chaotic backdrop, Mr. India pres­ents creative health strategies for staying alive. Thus, the film made not only the standard national and international venues for in­de­pen­dent documentary but also the health film festival cir­cuit.5 As a rising star director’s flick on a state celebrity, no doubt Mr. India is a singular achievement. Yet it is equally paradigmatic of the collective enterprise that is Imphal’s hiv/aids video culture, one that offers contingent immunological solutions to the state’s health emergency. RE A D I NG HI V/AIDS VIDEO CU LTU RES

A local short-­feature and documentary filmmaker, Haobam Paban Kumar became a national luminary when the National Film Development Corporation (nfdc) promoted him as one of the six “emerging talents” from India at Cannes, 2011, just a year ­after Mr.  India (2009) was voted the Best Non-­Feature film at the 57th National Film Awards 2010.6 Earlier, in 2006, his 77-­minute short film on human-­rights violations u­ nder the afspa, A Cry in the Dark (2006) had won the International Critics’ Prize at the Mumbai International Film Festival (miff) and a jury award at the Ismailia International Film Festival, Egypt.7 Most importantly, Paban Kumar was involved in pressing for the inclusion of video and digital film entries at the National Film Awards. His lawsuit compelled that organ­ization to start a new category for digital cinema in 2004. In this re­spect, Paban Kumar serves as spokesperson for Manipur’s digital video cultures. No doubt the story ­behind the flourishing local independent-­film-­production scene makes fascinating history: about contingent exhibition practices a­ fter the closing of major movie theaters in the city; about small bud­gets and limited distribution; about lightweight cameras, postproduction sound equipment, and desktop-­editing software; about video formats and aesthetics. Such a history would follow scholarly footsteps S taying A live  291

that include comprehensive single-­authored accounts (ranging from Michael Rush’s Video Art [2003] to Michael Newman’s Video Revolutions: The History of a Medium [2014]) and a range of field-­making essays (in collections from Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg’s Resolutions: Con­temporary Video Practices [1995] to Sean Cubbitt and Paul Thomas’s Relive: Media Art Histories [2013]). ­These engagements with the notoriously slippery practice of video could inspire a quixotic media history beginning with the ban on Hindi commercial cinema by insurgent groups in 2000.8 Manipuri cinema (shot on film and digital video) rushed to fill the vacuum, producing sixty to seventy feature films a year on tight bud­gets of INR 400,000–700,000 (US$6000–12,000), even as the closing of major theaters screening Hindi films in the state led to new distribution (mostly on dvd) and exhibition practices (in small venues with lcd projectors).9 But while ­these technological and industrial developments are directly responsible for Imphal’s hiv/aids video culture, the cultural phenomenon cannot be understood in ­these terms alone. For one, the hiv/aids video culture arises from contingent alliances between short-­feature and documentary filmmakers, health-­care workers, and hiv-­affected persons. For another, it relies on the distributed relations between digital video production, body-­building cultures, the chronicity of hiv/aids, insurgent vio­lence, military surveillance, and the influx of heroin. Hence, only a nonlinear approach to media history could elaborate this video culture’s distinctive origins, growth, and historical significance. The conceptual frame of an “emergence”—an ever-­renewing, multileveled occurrence that bucks scholarly attempts at linear causal narration—­captures not only the multiplicity of actors (muscles, drugs, viruses, guns) involved in the hiv/aids video story, but also the scales (cellular, planetary, regional) at which this culture thrives.10 Such a transmedial approach to media history illuminates an Asian video culture that might not be other­wise distinguished as a historical formation. It further renders legible the crucial role of hiv/aids digital video production, distribution, and exhibition in consolidating Manipur’s informal health infrastructures. This historically significant role does not come into focus in ­legal, financial, or technological histories of Manipur’s digital video industry—­some of which are also relevant to the video culture in question. Only a reading of this video culture as one dimension of a broader immunological solution is adequate to the task, establishing this video culture as strategic survival in an unabated health emergency. From its inception, Imphal’s hiv/aids video culture mobilized against the state’s mismanagement of the hiv/aids epidemic, a health crisis incit292 

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ing heavi­ly militarized responses from public-­health institutions. That public health is increasingly militarized is a commonplace, and, in this re­spect, Manipur is no exception. Yet the specificity of the crisis in Manipur deserves some elucidation, ­because it has a bearing on the hiv/aids videos as immunological solution. In recent years, a range of scholars has drawn our attention to “biosecurity interventions” into public health that marshal technological resources against potential microbe armies, often bypassing civil-­legal jurisdictions over a citizenry.11 The po­liti­cal implications of immunizing populations against microbes as well as against infected or potentially infected populations has become a general preoccupation of po­liti­cal theory, attracting thinkers of dif­fer­ent cloth. Of their writings, Michel Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population is possibly most relevant h­ ere, since Foucault is directly concerned with the governance of epidemics and therein of vital circulations (blood, plasma, hormones, microbes, toxins, proteins, or lipids) during the earliest state-­run inoculation campaigns.12 Distinguishing a third mode of power that is dif­ fer­ent from sovereign juridical power that punishes or kills and disciplinary power that surveys, observes, and corrects, Foucault explains how this mode calculates and intervenes in the vital circulations of ­human life; its locus is not this subject of law or that docile body but our very biological existence. Following Foucault, Stefan Elbe argues that all three modes of power articulate the prob­lem of “emerging diseases,” which are the obvious loci of “national security” imperatives to protect soldiers, civilian populations, and sovereign territories.13 But since such diseases also threaten “­human security,” insofar as they lay waste to individual lives and livelihoods, emergent diseases further motivate the disciplining of be­hav­iors, habits, and lifestyles so as to ensure a productive citizenry. Working alongside t­ hese two security regimes (national and ­human), “health security” regulates vital circulations, statistically quantifying populations into risk groups according to their vital states and promoting pharmacological intervention. Th ­ ese three security regimes constitute biosecurity interventions that calculate internal borders within populations, separating one social aggregate (high-­risk “cases” such as the el­derly) from another (low-­risk groups, often prized for reproductive ­futures), and make way for a biopolitics of “making live and letting die.”14 The identifying, sorting, and segregating of ­human (potential terrorists, illegal border-­crossers) and nonhuman (technologies, microbes) agents so as to target populations for risk management constitute the state-­sponsored immunological solution to Manipur’s hiv/aids health crisis. An extreme instance of this immunization paradigm, Manipur is a spectacular theater of “letting S taying A live  293

die” ­those who are considered “nonproductive” citizens of the Indian state. This perception was greatly compounded by the fact that, unlike other Indian states with high infection rates, Manipur’s infected communities are primarily injectible-­drug users. Of 2.38 million Manipuris, 8 ­percent are hiv+, and 72 ­percent of the infected are drug users.15 Unable to contain insurgencies in Manipur, military personnel often regard anyone who makes frequent trips to the border with suspicion. Drug users are widely regarded as irresponsible citizens who are potential threats to national security, for they can be eco­nom­ ically persuaded to run guns for the insurgents. The constant surveillance of hiv/aids-­affected populations made many who would other­wise seek treatment retreat from health-­care resources, scarce as they are. It is in this context that Imphal’s hiv/aids video culture appears as a countervailing force to state repression. This hiv/aids video culture embraces an “immunologic of affection” that runs c­ ounter to the prevailing immunologic of antagonism that underlies bio­ security regimes. Eschewing antagonistic relations between the ele­ments of a network, the immunologic of affection attends to the dynamic incorporative relations between them; instead of partitioning ele­ments (­humans, microbes, drugs), such logic recognizes, even fosters, dynamic relations between them. From other hiv/aids high-­crisis contexts (notably, the well-­documented instance of the United States in the pre-­antiretroviral era), the story of how health prac­ti­tion­ers, activists, and hiv-­affected communities mobilized against the immunologic of antagonism—­most expressive in the macabre biopolitics of “letting die” of nonproductive citizens—is so well known that Iw ­ ill not rehearse it ­here. More to the point is what came out of that po­liti­cal debacle: robust social strategies for “living with aids” ­under conditions of duress and scarcity. Set against this ongoing story of the hiv/aids epidemic, Manipur’s countervailing immunological solutions resistant to immunizing state imperatives are of global importance. Proposing creative medical strategies and consolidating social-­technological health infrastructures, Imphal’s hiv/aids video culture effectively reaches the hiv-­affected who fear state violations of their ­human rights. M A NI PUR ’S D I GITAL VIDEO SCEN E

One of the motors of Imphal’s hiv/aids video culture is rise of Manipur’s digital video industry. Anticipating growth in digital video production, the head of Legend Studios in Imphal, Mohen Noarem, backed the first Mani294 

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pur International Short Film Festival in 2012—an indicator of the thriving digital video scene. Emphasizing support for experimental filmmaking, festival organizers offered thirty to forty short-­film awards to participants. And with an eye on the digital ­future, Legend Studios set up ­sister companies for generating digital content and increasing distribution in in Singapore, Seoul, and Moscow. Such enterprise indicates the transregional Asian location of Manipur’s digital cinema. While t­ here is pride in a visit to Cannes or a screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, industrial networks such as Legend Studios increasingly look eastward for the f­ uture of digital video. Experimental filmmakers riding the wave espouse a “mobile cinema” in which digital videos circulate on dvd formats, online distribution systems, and portable lcd-­projection screenings, even as they collectively invest in small-­ scale physical and technological production facilities. For instance, Shallow River Studios, an air-­conditioned haven with generators to ameliorate the daily power cuts, is clearly a popu­lar haunt for the experimental digital video crowd. Sporting desktop editing and postproduction sound facilities alongside storage space for filmmaking equipment, it provides the kind of physical and technological capacity necessary to foster in­de­pen­dent productions; indeed, Imphal’s hiv/aids video culture would not exist without such spaces. The creative media prac­ti­tion­ers who come and go are mostly experimental filmmakers, a community of artists who habitually work on each other’s productions. Haobam Paban Kumar is celebrity among them, admired as much for his film-­school credentials (a postgraduate degree from the Kolkata-­based Satyajit Ray Film and Tele­vi­sion Institute [srfti]) as his international visibility.16 His artistic biography brings into view Imphal’s hiv/aids video culture like no other. On the one hand, as Paban Kumar is part of a strong but informal network of filmmakers and technicians, his accomplishments direct the researcher’s eye to ­those of his collaborators, and consequently to hiv/ aids digital videos whose limited distribution and virtually non­ex­is­tent archives might not make them readily vis­i­ble to media historians. On the other, his avowedly “socially conscious cinema” illuminates the situated activism of the experimental digital video crowd that engenders Imphal’s flourishing hiv/aids video culture. In 2004, during his second year at srfti, Paban Kumar was back in Imphal when the Assam R ­ ifles (state military) raped and killed Thangjam Manorama Devi, a thirty-­two-­year-old activist branded a member of the separatist P ­ eople’s Liberation Army. Outrage against the rape prompted civil-­disobedience actions demanding the repeal of afspa. In interviews, Paban Kumar marked S taying A live  295

the 2004 events as a watershed moment for him, one which underwrote his turn to documentary digital video production: “Manorama Devi was the first ­woman ever to be killed in custody by the armed forces. With the help of a journalist friend [Sunzu Bachaspatimayum, also a filmmaker himself], I began to rec­ord the events as they unfolded and the public anger that spilled over on to the streets. It was like a video diary. I did not have a full-­fledged film in mind at that point.”17 And ­there was no turning back. The result of the video diary was the prize-­winning A Cry in the Dark (2006, also circulated as AFSPA, 1958); in the same period, Paban Kumar’s diploma film, Ngaihak Lambida (2006) set against the backdrop of Manipur’s po­liti­cal turmoil was screened at the Indian Pa­norama section of the 2007 International Film Festival of India (iffi). Paban Kumar shot to fame with AFSPA, 1958, a success ­later topped by Mr. India (2009). A ­ fter Mr. India, Paban Kumar continued to focus on Manipur’s hiv/aids crisis: in 2013, he completed a documentary on hiv-­affected c­ hildren entitled Ruptured Spring. More importantly, his oeuvre points to a distinctive hiv/aids digital video production scene, notable for Sunzu Bachaspatimayum’s early The Rude Awakening (1995) and Shingnaba (2008), as well as Leichil Luwang’s Real (2004), documentaries that have regional or national visibility. Lesser-­known documentaries like David Thoudam’s Faith in Change (2009) and Bobby Wahengbam’s Roshni (2009) are harder to access. I was able to view ­these only ­because more than one of the experimental filmmakers that I met in Imphal hurriedly and generously ripped a dvd for the researcher from the mainland. Hence, one assumes a wider array of hiv/aids videos than meets the eye. A focus on the production teams for the videos shores up a small but strong network of media prac­ti­tion­ers committed to each other and to documenting Manipur’s multiple crises: Leichil Luwang, who made Real (2004), a landmark documentary on seven hiv+ protagonists, also made Punish (2007), a documentary on the drug trade; Sunzu Bachaspatimayum, trained at the Film and Tele­vi­sion Institute of India, made two films on hiv/aids, the aforementioned Shingnaba and The Rude Awakening; Bona Meisnam, whose work screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, photographed both Shingnaba and Real, while Chaoba Thiyam, another documentarian of afspa violations, edited Shingnaba.18 All ­these films exemplify a small-­scale, translocal, socially conscious digital cinema that distances itself from regular “mainstream” Manipuri boy-­meets-­girl fare. Such willed distinction is apparent in Mr. India’s deadpan realism and lean editing styles; shot in crisp color, the documentary refuses visual antics and

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aesthetic flamboyance. Its departure from the sentimental or the melodramatic is evident in the title, a tongue-­in-­cheek reference to a Hindi-­language blockbuster. The wry humor signals Paban Kumar’s revisionist idea of what a ­people’s cinema should be: a strong engagement with local collective experiences, both prob­lems and aspirations. The fantasy fare of commercial Manipuri cinema has failed to undertake such a proj­ect, argue the experimental filmmakers; and so have state-­funded Manipuri documentaries that fetishize the folkloric Manipur. Both cultural forms are disconnected from what experimental filmmakers in Imphal perceive as the pressing issues of the emergency context: detention and shootings, drug addiction, and the hiv/aids epidemic. If ­these calamities mandate bearing witness, ­these film-­savvy prac­ ti­tion­ers have the collective chutzpah to do it. Beyond critique, they propose strategies for surviving a pathological milieu. The formal grammar of Mr.  India underscores pos­si­ble survival on meager resources (a modest home, a scooter, a low-­budget gym) and abundant social networks (friends, young men that he teaches at the gym, and fellow competitors). ­There is quiet discipline, firm resolve, and strong social ties. The film narrates the tending of plants, bathing, praying, eating, taking meds, and training at the gym as events, but not Pradipkumar’s biography (as biopics are wont to do). Footage of his everyday activities, and especially of his repetitive exercise regimen, immerses the spectator in the world of habit, indeed in his search for regularity. The editing establishes an order, duration, and frequency of the daily activities as events, and the consequent even tempo enacts an offbeat regularity despite disruptions of the routine. Three sequences in this 47-­minute documentary repeat his daily rituals more or less in the same order. The duration of each activity (the bath or the meal) depends on external interruptions ­either from f­ amily members or friends or from emergency situations. The exercise routine, however, is maintained to the count as far as pos­ si­ble: on the days that he cannot go to his beloved gym, Pradipkumar trains at home, improvising to stretch, flex, and build muscle mass. The disciplined routine disturbs the periodic disturbances that punctuate Pradipkumar’s life. The insistent reappearance of the routine a­ fter each disturbance returns the spectator to a temporal equilibrium. Such control of the temporal order shores up a phenomenological experience of regularized lifestyle therapies. Mr.  India performs an immunologic of affection: the possibility of staying alive with microbes, with the hiv-­affected, in a newfound equilibrium amid radical disturbance.

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13.2  ​Tending plants.

Still from Haoban Paban Kumar’s Mr. India (2009).

13.3  ​Makeshift

training at home. Still from Haoban Paban Kumar’s Mr. India (2009).

13.4  ​Gym pedagogy.

Still from Haoban Paban Kumar’s Mr. India (2009).

HI V /A I D S D O CUMEN TARY AS B IOMEDICAL P R AX I S

In its per­for­mance of lifestyle therapies, Mr. India is clearly part of Manipur’s emerging “hiv bioscapes” as Regula Valérie Burri and Joseph Dumit name the mediascapes that patients inhabit in order to make informed medical decisions.19 Even as they testify to personal losses and social neglect, hiv/aids documentaries made a­ fter the arrival of antiretroviral therapies often function as media platforms for reflection on health strategies, medical decisions, and protocols.20 Such an impetus comes from the de­cades of patient activism around the hiv/aids crisis. Attending to consequent changes in the medical production of health, Burri and Dumit maintain that patients now consistently seek, collate, and or­ga­nize their own biomedical data. In part, this turn is a response to increasing uncertainties about ge­ne­tic testing, about high-­tech knowledge, and about corporate medical and scientific infrastructures, as well as the number of medical options available in the individualized health care of resource-­rich contexts. As numerous, often consecutive, decisions must be made, the medical situation has become increasingly stratified. The ensuing uneven terrain means that “health” has become a negotiable horizon for hiv-­ affected patients, friends, lovers, families, doctors, health workers, and other medical personnel. Hence, hiv/aids printed, audiovisual, and digital media no longer serve as prescriptive pedagogy, secondary lit­er­a­ture, or repre­sen­ta­ tions of infected states. They aim to solve medical prob­lems and to propose solutions. Even in resource-­poor contexts, low-­budget media play a central role in debating the consequences of the quick pharmacological fix. Thus, a documentary like Mr. India is not just an inspiring story about an hiv+ survivor but “primary” medical information on a specific immunological strategy that has been central to chronic hiv infection: building the metabolic machine. In recent years, the strategy has gained new prominence: hiv/aids health activists insist on more sustained monitoring of seriously deleterious, even dangerous, hiv metabolic disorders (cholesterol, blood sugar, lipid profile changes), and not just the mea­sur­ing of viral loads and T-­cell counts. They advocate a multipronged health strategy (exercise, diet, hygiene) that regulates endrocinal constants, warding off opportunistic infection and combating fatigue and depression.21 Thus, it is no surprise that iconic athletes who surpass ordinary ­human vital capacities, such as Magic Johnson (United States), Girro Josamu (Zimbabwe), and Pradipkumar (India), are often subjects of hiv/ aids documentary. But Mr. India differs from most celebratory biopics that turn muscles into mere spectacle in that it performs how to regulate the ­human S taying A live  299

metabolic machine: it offers an ordinary regimen of regularized of diet, hygiene, social interactions, drug adherence, and, above all, working out ­under exceptional circumstances. As such, it participates in consolidating strategies for living with hiv/aids as a chronic condition. Of course, the fact that the “life-­saving drugs” w ­ ere once inaccessible in resource-­constrained countries made the long-­term management of hiv infection a secondary issue in ­those contexts. The resulting “antiretroviral globalism,” argue scholars of social medicine, has only exacerbated state-­run public-­health disinvestment in long-­term health-­care strategies.22 In Manipur, not only is the interruption of drug regimens a real possibility, but also state-­run agencies make ­little effort to manage endocrinal systems damage (or hiv metabolic disorders) or to ameliorate neuropsychological effects such as fatigue and depression. Responsibility for the complexities attendant on chronic illness falls to activist networks like care and mnp+, informal networks that ensure regular clinic visits, monitor compliance with drug regimens, advise patients on diet and exercise, and offer social support in forums, camps, screenings, and meetings.23 In Imphal’s hiv/ aids video culture, understood as part of Manipur’s hiv bioscapes, we find biomedical praxes as the videos perform tried and tested lifestyle therapies. As Pradipkumar trains the young men at his gym, the documentary becomes pre­sen­ta­tional maintenance of the ­human metabolic machine against abiding medical uncertainties. No doubt the metabolic machine celebrated in Mr.  India addresses the visual crises accompanying hiv/aids epidemics all over the world. Much has been said about ­those repre­sen­ta­tional crises, especially in North American and Eu­ro­pean contexts.24 And t­ here are many well-­documented histories of the muscle cultures that emerged as response to hiv/aids mediascapes flooded with emaciated, wasting bodies.25 In the case of Manipur, the wasting hiv-­infected body further signifies drug-­addicted emaciation. Yet Pradipkumar’s conditioning of the metabolic machine in Mr. India moves beyond hiv/ aids image management. The cele­bration of the masculine body, albeit low-­key in tenor, is integral to the film’s creative pedagogy of “living with aids” u­ nder adverse circumstance. At first glance, the slow buildup to Pradipkumar’s becoming a Manipuri masculine icon can be read as a rebuttal to po­liti­cal emasculation, historical and pres­ent. If in the British colonial imagination Indian masculinities of the eastern (famously embodied in the effete Bengali babu) and the northeastern states ­were always the negative pole in relation to the hardy virility of northwestern masculine subjects, the ensuing compensatory logic of protecting “our ­women” of the colonial era persists into postcolonial 300 

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Manipur.26 This time the historically urgent task is to address the Indian Army’s egregiously sexual vio­lence against Manipuri w ­ omen. We might remember it was Manorama Devi’s rape that first spurred the young filmmaker Paban Kumar into documenting Manipur’s biopolitics of letting die—­first ­under afspa-­related atrocities and then u­ nder state neglect. So Mr.  India’s narrative progression ­toward national recognition for Pradipkumar’s muscular masculinity certainly speaks to regional aspirations. Beyond compensatory masculinity, however, Mr.  India portrays a fluid eroticism in documenting Imphal’s delightfully homosocial gym culture. The young men who admire Mr. Pradipkumar and eagerly exercise u­ nder his tutelage play a critical role in abating the social isolation deadly to the stigmatized hiv-­infected. In the talking-­head sections of the documentary, Pradipkumar is quite frank about the depression that accompanied his initial withdrawal from the social milieu and the medical consequences (including weight loss) of that depression. The documentary thus suggests that the homosocial gym culture in which young men learn about weights, drugs, muscles, and viruses from their guru provides the social contact—an unassailable immunologic of affection—­necessary to surviving the epidemic. VI D E O CULTUR E AS H EALTH IN F RASTRU CTU RE

In an interview, Tomalsena Rajkumar, the head of care, recounted a macabre story.27 In the earliest phase of the epidemic in Manipur, prisoners ­were forcibly tested for hiv without their consent and consequently segregated.28 Sorting through the general population, the army began to run random checks on Manipuri youth u­ nder the afspa provisions for arrest without trial on “reasonable suspicion.” ­Those with needle marks on their arms ­were unceremoniously thrown in jail before testing and h­ oused in the hiv cells. In the meantime, insurgent groups took up the “cause,” since some of the groups saw themselves as the de facto government of Manipur (the larger groups even have a parallel tax structure); they threatened to shoot addicts at a time when, Tomalsena notes, eight out of e­ very ten families had a regular drug user in the ­house­hold. Caught between arrests, imprisonment, and death threats, drug users refused testing and went underground. Rates of hiv infection among them jumped from 1–2 ­percent in 1990, to 50 ­percent in 1994, and to as much as 80.7 ­percent in 1997. It is in this context that activist networks began to evolve, contacting drug users in secrecy (in gyms, eateries, market hangouts, Narcotics Anonymous S taying A live  301

meetings). Distributing generics from the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal companies cipla and Ranbaxy, t­hese groups followed up testing viral loads without formally registering patients. Instead of looking to the Indian state, four or five fledgling organ­izations made contact with individuals, regional agencies, and nongovernmental organ­izations for funding and resources. Among the success stories are care and mnp+; in fact, care is legendary for acquiring one of the six cd4 testing machines in a state where most tests are still sent to Kolkata or Delhi, making it difficult to closely monitor the haart therapy. Crucially, ­these activist networks eschew the media initiatives of the National aids Control Organisation (naco), which has exhorted “at risk” groups to get tested and to disclose their serostatus to friends, lovers, and families. Instead of joining naco’s “talking about it” media campaign, Manipur’s self-­organizing activist networks launched small-­scale media with controlled distribution: from word-­of-­mouth alerts to local documentary screenings and hand-­delivered pamphlets.29 So when I asked Rajkumar about care’s media production, I got a wry smile. The organ­ization had a stable communication network, he said, but it was an open network contingent on its “users,” periodically appearing, languishing, and reconstituting; always virtual, it operates ­under the radar of both military and multinational humanitarian groups in the state. This infrastructure (where infra-­signals underground circulation) is fairly robust, since traffic to care and mnp+ continues to grow.30 As my conversation with Rajkumar continued, it became clear that both care and mnp+ had enduring relations with Imphal’s experimental filmmakers, mostly documentarians, many of whom are invested in a socially conscious cinema. Given crippling fears around seropositivity, the interruptions in antiretroviral shipments, and the high cost of the therapies, ­these media prac­ti­tion­ers rallied around the hiv/aids health crisis.31 The capillary networks that care and mnp+ had built over the years provided ready distribution cir­cuits for hiv/aids digital videos, cir­cuits that had the advantage of remaining illegible both to the state and to the insurgent groups. And so Imphal’s hiv/aids video culture began to emerge, a hazy penumbra gathering around the state’s digital video production. By now, steady collaborations between grassroots bodies such as care and mnp+ and hiv/aids digital video producers, distributors, and exhibitors have built an enduring informal health infrastructure, always open-­ended, sometimes underground. The sprouting of such informal, sometimes illegitimate, video cultures with scarce resources is hardly a new phenomenon in the Global South. What is distinctive about Imphal’s hiv/aids video culture is that it forges medical 302 

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and social solutions for staying alive u­ nder emergency rule. If the state made any pro­gress in rolling out antiretroviral therapies, it did so only b­ ecause it could count on exiting the informal health infrastructure. Read in this light, this video culture is true emergence, unpre­ce­dented and multileveled, contingent and constantly adapting to changing circumstance, obtaining across scales of ­human and nonhuman action. In that emergence, we catch the gleam of muscles, glistening and contracting, living the chronic condition against mounting odds. > NOTE S  ​

I would like to thank Chaoba Thiyam, Oinam Doren, and David Laishram for their generous support and direction during my research trip to Imphal, and Bhaskar Sarkar for sharing his research materials and resources on the Manipur digital video industry. 1

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Moreh is to Imphal what Tijuana is to Los Angeles, a border town with all the trappings of plea­sure and danger. As India’s gateway to Southeast Asia, the town has been growing in size and importance, fueling talk of increasing security. Every­one I talked to in Imphal, Manipur’s capital city, emphasized how easy it was to get to Moreh by bus, as opposed to “mainland India.” “High crisis” can be defined as both a quantitative (statistical incidence of new cases) and qualitative (experience of extreme precarity) threshold in the intensity of the epidemic. High-­crisis pockets exist among disadvantaged or ­disenfranchised hiv-­affected communities worldwide; they create spatiotemporal disjunctures in the prevailing timeline of the hiv/aids pandemic. In 1949, the princely state of Manipur was annexed to the newly in­de­pen­dent Republic of India, and secessionist groups sprouted in the region. About a de­cade ­later, the Indian Parliament passed the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act—­whose extreme provisions derive from a British ordinance of 1942, designed to quash the historic Quit India Movement—­ushering in a perpetual state of emergency in the region. Attempts to bring the “exceptional” region into the fold of mainstream India via developmentalist mea­sures are always halfhearted and myopic: disbursement of monies panders to electoral vote banks, economic plans get hijacked by counterinsurgency imperatives, and disproportionately large funds are dedicated to securing rebel surrenders and buying back illegal arms. See Phanjoubam Tarapot, Bleeding Manipur (New Delhi: Har Anand, 2007). With the help of existing local and nongovernmental organ­izations, naco began the first ­free rollout of antiretroviral therapies in 2004. See https://­ manipurhealthservices​.­wordpress​.­com​/­tag​/­hivaids​-­scenario​/­. http://­w ww​.­healthfilmfestival​.­gr​/­modules​/­movies​/­ArticleViewFormBlank Window​.­php​?­ArticleId​=­167&CategoryId​=1­ 68&lang​=e­ n​.­ S taying A live  303

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The filmmakers did not get to screen their films at the festival but presented their work in a dvd format at the Indian Pavilion at Cannes. http://­www​.­telegraphindia​ .­com​/­1110509​/­jsp​/­northeast​/­story​_­13956021​.j­ sp. See also http://­dearcinema​.­com​ /­article​/­film​-­bazaar​-­to​-­promote​-­six​-­directors​-­at​-c­ annes​/­5032. A Cry in the Dark also circulated as afspa, 1958. http://­www​.­fipresci​.­org​/­festival​ -­reports​/­2006​/­mumbai​-­documentary​.­ See Bhaskar Sarkar’s talk on the resurgence of Manipuri cinema presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Boston, 2012; “Manipuri Cinema and the Plasticity of Re­sis­tance”; and Rashmi Devi Sawhney, “Through the Lens of a ‘Branded Criminal’: The Politics of Marginal Cinema in India,” in South Asia Media Cultures: Audiences, Contexts, Repre­sen­ta­tion, ed. Shakuntala Banaji (London: Anthem Press, 2010), 201–20. See also Priyanka Pereira on exhibition difficulties in Imphal. http://­blogs​.­wsj​.­com​/­indiarealtime​/­2014​/­09​/­10​ /­manipuri​-­theaters​-­why​-­we​-­cant​-­show​-m ­ ary​-­kom​/­. Calculated with the current exchange rate of INR 60 = US$1. Emergence was first used in the ecological context by the French-­born American microbiologist René Dubos in his classic The Mirage of Health: Utopias, Pro­gress, and Biological Change (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, [1959] 1987). New conjunctions between cybernetics and molecular biology have revived the concept that now underscores an ontological irreducibility born of interactions between agents and their milieu. Emergences are typically difficult to predict (from the Latin root emergere or “to appear,” the term is an etymological cousin to emergency). Andrew Lakoff and Stephen J. Collier investigate the emergence of “biosecurity” in their introduction to Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). See also David Fidler and Lawrence Gostin, Biosecurity in the Global Age: Biological Weapons, Public Health, and the Rule of Law (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); and Andrew Lakoff, “Preparing for the Next Emergency,” Public Culture 19, no. 2 (2007): 247–71. See Michel Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population: Collège de France lectures, 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2009). Stefan Elbe, Virus Alert: Security, Governmentality, and the aids Pandemic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). This memorable phrase has become axiomatic in discussions on race, biopolitics, and globalization. See Michael Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador 2003). See Rasheeda Bhagat, “In a Vicious Circle,” Frontline 19, no. 15 ( July 20–­August 2, 2002), http://­www​.­frontline​.­in​/­static​/­html​/­fl1915​/­19150420​.­htm. Haobam Paban Kumar, in an interview with Utpal Borpujari, “We Got the National Awards to Go Digital: Haobam Paban Kumar,” Utpal Borpujari (blog), March 26, 2012, https://­utpalborpujari​.­wordpress​.­com​/­2012​/­03​/­26​/­we​-­got​-­the​ -­national​-­awards​-­to​-g­ o​-­digital​-­haobam​-­paban​-­kumar​/­. B ishnupriya G hosh

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http://­civilsocietyonline​.­com​/­Archive​/­apr11​/­apr111​.­asp. 18 Like A Cry in the Dark, Thiyam’s Nungee Mit/Eye of an “I” (2010) poetically narrates emergency rule as subjective trauma; shot as hallucinogenic nightmare, the film references con­temporary trauma studies and is representative of the theoretical orientation of Manipur digital shorts and documentary. 19 See “Epilogue: Emergent Bioscapes,” Regula Valérie Burri and Joseph Dumit, in Biomedicine as Culture: Instrumental Practices, Technoscientific Knowledge, and New Modes of Life, ed. Regula Valérie Burri and Joseph Dumit (Routledge, 2008), 225–28. 20 See, for instance, Roger Hallas’s meticulous analy­sis of the modes of documentary witnessing illness, loss, and social neglect. Roger Hallas, Reframing Bodies: aids, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 21 In “Understanding Lipids Proj­ect,” a pi­lot study undertaken in 2003–2004 at a specialized clinic for hiv+ ­people experiencing cholesterol, blood sugar, and morphological changes, Cindy Patton demonstrates the difficulty patients have in reconciling the clinical markers of their “lipids profile” with ­those of the viral load and cd4 tests. The pharmacological turn, Patton maintains, was an epistemological one in the hiv/aids bioscope, privileging virological assessment over any other—in this case, endocrinological data. Cindy Patton, “Bullets, Balance, or Both: Medicalization in hiv Treatment,” Lancet 369 (2007): 706–7. 22 See Vinh-­Kim Nguyen, “Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship,” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Prob­lems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005): 124–44. 23 ­After the announcement of the combination therapies at the XI International aids Conference, held in Vancouver in 1996, t­ here was the large-­scale institution of prescription-­based therapy in resource-­rich contexts. But the effects of that therapy continue to be a source of debate in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Site observation, interviews, and surveys of hiv patients on combination therapies for as long as twenty years routinely reveal discomfort, dissension, and willed noncompliance as a part of personal ongoing medical negotiations of health. See Asha Persson, “Incorporating Pharmakon: hiv Medicine and Body Shape Change,” Body and Society 10, no. 4 (2004): 49; and S. Kippax and K. Race, “Sustaining Safe Practice: Twenty Years On,” Social Science and Medicine 57 (2003): 1–12. 24 A host of art criticism analyzed the wasting images of aids patients in the pre1995 era. See, for instance, Simon Watney, Practices of Freedom: Selected Writings on hiv/aids (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); and Sander Gilman’s “aids and Syphilis: An Iconography of Disease” among other essays in Douglas Crimp, ed., aids: Cultural Analy­sis, Cultural Activism (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1987), 3–16. 25 See, for instance, Perry N. Halkitis, “Masculinity in the Age of aids,” in Gay Masculinities, ed. Peter Nardi (New York: Sage, 1999), 130–51. S taying A live  305

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The groundbreaking scholarly treatise on the subject remains Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly En­glishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth ­Century (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1995). Tomalsena Rajkumar, interview by author, August 16, 2011. At the earliest phase, as part of the Indian government’s surveillance policy, Manipur was immediately targeted on grounds that it was a state with considerable illicit drug traffic. The program chose 635 “high risk” subjects for blood tests in Manipur (including sex workers, blood donors, and intravenous-­drug users); elisa test kits ­were supplied by the Indian Council of Medical Research and the Ministry of Health. None of the subjects w ­ ere found to be hiv+. The first case was reported in 1990, from samples taken from intravenous-­drug users in ­October 1989; what was not divulged was that the samples ­were forcibly taken from prisoners, with the full cooperation of the council and the ministry. See discussion in Ghosh, “Proximate Truth: Reenactment in Pandemic-­Era hiv/ aids Documentaries,” BioScope 3.1 (2012), 78–79. For an elaboration of the “infrastructure” in this sense, see the art historian Swati Chattopadhyay’s Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). The therapies cost INR 5,585 (US$93) per month in a state where the average income in the state is roughly INR 1,686 (US$28).

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“ E V E R Y­O N E ’ S P R O P E R T Y ” V I D E O C O P Y I N G , P O E T R Y, A N D R E V O L U T I O N IN ARAB WEST ASIA

Kay Dickinson

A major interchange within the Palestinian city of Ramallah, Manara Square is a regular assembly point for protests against Zionist occupation and territorial expansion. During the period of relative peace and autonomy brought into play by the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority had a monumental set of sculptures designed for the square (which is, in fact, a roundabout). And ­there, to this day, four sizable marble lions face outward along its radii, unremarkable relative to sanctioned public statuary elsewhere in the world. Save for the fact that one lion sports on his raised front left paw a con­spic­u­ous wristwatch. Rumors abound, ever unsubstantiated, about the lion’s sartorial pronouncement. The most prevalent is that the designer, frustrated (as freelance artists so often are) by their commissioners’ sluggish scheduling of payment, had sardonically sketched in the timepiece ­after a prolonged and unrewarded period of waiting. The illustrations w ­ ere then dispatched to stonemasons in China, who dutifully replicated them without query. Beloved by many inhabitants of Ramallah, the lion drolly announces how leaky the circuitry of attribution and reparation is within the regimes of creativity. By choosing to remain as anonymous as the copyists would always have been and by not lodging a straightforward public claim for personal recompense, the watch’s

“author” instead ushers this flourish into common lore as a topic for collective debate. Such discussions about contribution and compensation, recognition and anonymity, adding and subtracting content and context pervade the politics of another order of copy culture in the region. It should now go without saying that the so-­called Arab Spring was distinguished by the educational and mobilizing responsibility assumed by citizens uploading videos to sites like YouTube. Necessarily, questions circulated about how the revolution’s wider ­battles against unequal balances of owner­ship and control (of which intellectual property rights form just one part) might encourage more ethical reproductions and redeployments of primary footage. In large part, t­hese videos ­were expressly made to be distributed as widely as pos­si­ble, frequently without authorial acknowl­edgment or remuneration, all in the name of consciousness-­ raising. The uprisings ­were often even cajoled into crediting their success to Web 2.0 facilities and, ultimately, to the unpaid revolutionary l­abor—or ­shall we say, the participation (a keyword for the social-­media ­giants)—of countless videographers, bloggers, Facebookers, and tweeters, with exchange largely conducted within the ambits of multinational profit.1 Moving away from such dubious reverence for a par­tic­u­lar infrastructure, I  instead divulge how the movement of video material beyond social-­ networking sites, beyond its management by global corporations, often radically reimagines copying in ways that diverge from corporate logics of monetization and rights infringement. The first three examples I address in this chapter hail from the quarters of art, yet complicate that sector’s aggrandizement of liberal, bourgeois, individualist-­artistic agency so as to foreground solidarity, tradition, and collective lineage: Ventriloquism (2013), Pipe Dreams (2012), and Pixelated Revolution (2014), the first two “by” Ali Cherri, the latter (partly) attributable to Rabih Mroué, both Beirut-­born artists. All three pieces pivot energetically around YouTube-­sourced clips from the Syrian uprisings against the Bashar al-­Assad regime. I then turn to some of the more physical possibilities of copying from corporate portfolios: the reenactment and incantation of video culture, played out as direct-­action po­liti­cal protest. Since 2005, the Palestinian West Bank village of Bil‘in has or­ga­nized weekly protests against Zionist annexation of their lands. As the years have rolled by, certain themes have enlivened the proceedings. On Friday, February  12, 2012, for example, activists donned pointy ears and long black wigs, painted themselves blue, and thus transformed themselves into the immediately recognizable Na’vi ­people

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from the hit film Avatar ( James Cameron, 2009)—­save for the activists’ Palestinian flags and kufiya loincloths.2 With the verve, wit, and bite of the Manara lion intact within them, Ventriloquism, Pipe Dreams, Pixelated Revolution, and the Bil‘in Avatar protest play a role in the ongoing revolutions through explicit and politicized inscriptions of copying. On one hand, they plot out how inextricable the ties are between colonization, resource pillage, and property rights, and do so in ingenious and surprising ways through the act of imitation. On the other, they acknowledge that revolutions are never entirely new and thus draw motivation from prior insurrections, which they honor by reviving ­those very tactics. This indebtedness functions beyond the languages and practices of the purely monetary and might perhaps be better thought of as inheritance, rather than indebtedness.3 The circulation and recycling of a (video) cultural lineage proves essential not only for starting such movements but also for sustaining them. A CO PYI NG O F P OETICS AN D A P OETICS OF COP Y I NG

To elucidate t­ hese endeavors, I turn now not to an expected academic lit­er­a­ ture on creative commoning but instead to the po­liti­cal possibilities that Arab practices of and regard for poetry recitation might lend to our understanding video copying. It is typical practice for Arab poetry to draw explic­itly from established reservoirs, rather than declare its contents newly sprung. Historical continuity and pro­cess prevail over new and neatly curtailed product, thus also dissolving any black-­and-­white claims of intellectual property. No won­der, then, that it is traditionally considered shameful for an individual to accept cold, hard cash in direct exchange for poetic l­abor.4 If poetry at first seems to you the last place to look for a divergence from possessive authorship, that may be due to its peculiar configuration in much of the Global North. The notion of poetry writing as a personal act carries far less purchase in the Arab region. Accordingly, Ali Cherri and Rabih Mroué immediately acknowledge that the footage they forage from YouTube functioned as poetry prior to their own reworking of it as hallmarked art. In his own words, Cherri cherishes t­hese clips’ “poetic language, their capacity to suggest the po­liti­cal, not to represent it. Images from the Arab uprising should be treated as found footage, and not as documents.”5 Both artists refuse to consign ­these videos to the ser­vice of transparent rec­ord or reportage, deferring instead to poetry’s birthright to

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open up speculative vistas less beholden to the domination of presumed authorial or generic intention. By recognizing poetic agency prior to “their own,” Cherri and Mroué slot themselves into a prevalent creative system that customarily works from sets of preexisting formulae and citations.6 Originality, the desperate zenith of intellectual-­property rationality and product propagation, comes second within Arab poetry to, and ultimately through, integrity to emulation. How at odds with the marketplace’s stress on novelty, academic niche specialization, too. The aim is less to bow down to a hierarchy of influence moving from innovator to imitator, but instead to acknowledge how uniqueness—­implausible as it already is—­alienates one from the meaningfulness of heritage, prior wisdoms, and community. For Lila Abu-­Lughod, an anthropologist of Bedouin w ­ omen’s poetry use, such repetition “allows individuals to frame their experiences as similar to ­those of ­others and perhaps to assert the universality of their experiences.”7 Just as the uprisings in which the following case studies involve themselves are not new, so the streams of ideas that nourish them should be made usefully and widely accessible. ­There are clear pre­ce­dents for this in the history of revolutionary image making, too. Think, for instance, of the sizable portions of previously existing footage and quotations welded together to power­ ful effect by films such as The Hour of the Furnaces (Grupo Cine Liberación/ Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 1968) and Handsworth Songs (Black Audio Film Collective/John Akomfrah, 1986). ­These citations summon colleagues, comrades, and siblings in arms, insisting that creativity, including po­ liti­cal creativity, is unrelentingly communal. In so ­doing, ­these movies make an archive of resources freshly available through a pro­cess of exchange that is deeply compromised if dominant intellectual-­property legislation is allowed the rights and regulations it demands and globally polices. For Adonis, one of the region’s most translated poets and literary critics, borrowings are evocative, carry­ing, through their familiarity, the capacity to bond communities: “Poetical speech . . . ​is a living energy binding the self to the other . . . ​the encounter between poet and listener was not only an act of participation in life and the emotions: it was also a collective festival.” 8 Not simply through careful word choice but also courtesy of involving rhythms, like ­those common to video editing, that can move, even transfigure, us physically. Quotation and allusion meet the rote learning of poems, enabling their forces to be imbibed. Recitation can s­ ettle into place the tenets of revolution, including its rhythms and lyricism, within the very core of the body. Trans310 

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posing ­these ideals to video, we can learn how to act through repeating its gestures, as editors, as viewers, as re-­posters, and even as physical mimics. If I quote from Cherri, Mroué, or anyone ­else to underscore this sentiment, it is less to endow them with the authority of artist-­initiator and more to sustain the chain of allusions and allegiances in which they (and I) exist. I seek not to definitively interpret t­ hese works, then copyright my meager ideas, but instead to try my best to transmit onward certain princi­ples and possibilities amassed within poetic form. This is no rarefied or fanciful effort for us, thanks to established Arab poetry’s embrace of the everyday and what we might term “the amateur” (Cherri and Mroué’s footage is predominantly nonprofessional), and, more so, to poetry’s ubiquity within everyday Arab culture. To outsiders, the fact that the Arab world has commercial tv channels dedicated to poetry, or that poets accompany commentators in suvs to provide live coverage of sporting events, may come as quite a surprise.9 Poetry plays a significant role in state proceedings, particularly in Gulf cultures, but is also open to all. Its languages are as much idiomatic as they are the starting point for idiom. The Palestinian writer Fawaz Turki stresses that poetry declines to be the preserve “of the educated elite. . . . ​R ather, the opposite is true. Poetry to us is a currency of everyday exchange, a vital starting point to meaning. . . . ​­People define themselves and their environment in verse. That is why [Arabs] forget, outside their own milieu, how affected they seem, how rhetorical; and how hard it is for outsiders to understand that a ­people’s national anguish, or personal grief, can be best articulated in poetry.”10 Integrated into both special and commonplace discourse, poetry functions as a form of coding and subterfuge understood by ­those who have taken the time to learn it properly; as a pedagogy; as a purposefully shared lexicon that therefore eschews individualism and lone, acquisitive creativity; as an anchor to tradition and the wider community; and as an immediate call to creative, nonliteral, meta­phorical registers that are, si­mul­ta­neously, physically performed. We would do well to learn from some of the work poetry undertakes, above and beyond how an article like this might defer instead to canonical cultural theory as a means of intellectually exploring urgent concerns. Arab poetry’s proximity to the machinations of social and po­liti­cal power, even when it is outwardly immersed in romance or merriment, is unparalleled by theory’s capabilities.11 So ­great is the traction poetic rhe­toric enables that per­for­mances of poetry have long played a prominent role in conflict resolution.12 The “ E very­one ’ s P roperty ” 

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anthropologist Steven C. Caton asserts that, in a very conscious sense, “­every poem is at heart a po­liti­cal and social act.”13 A RT/HI S TO RY: IN SIG H T, CITATION , AN D IN CI TAT I ON

But what sort of po­liti­cal and social act? The international art market, through which Cherri and Mroué travel and earn their livelihoods, scarcely aspires to ­wholesale abandon property rights or the cult of the individual. At the same time, what enormous license art provides for intellectual-­property infringement, due to its persuasive historical investment in the readymade and the copy. Likewise, the scholarly lecture and its reliance on illustrative examples, the mode that Pixelated Revolution irreverently emulates and which allows Mroué, without fearing to be accused of theft, to weave together a collection of footage he did not himself shoot. Of the three pieces, Ventriloquism stands as the most deliberately derivative. Accordingly, it mobilizes a history of artistic endeavor to crystalize revolutionary conceptions of history more broadly. In form, Ventriloquism recapitulates Berthold Brecht’s War Primer, a book of quatrains, each itself a response to a World War II photo­graph clipped from a newspaper or magazine, then reprinted. Cherri selects eleven of ­these verses and maintains the sepia-­grey coloring of the original pages but replaces the photos with short loops of video uploaded from the Syrian uprisings.14 To pick up on the work’s title: voices are cast, characters are spoken through, agency dwells not where first impressions presume. The correlations are si­mul­ta­neously barbed and proximate, immediately dialectical. Take Ventriloquism’s final “video-­epigram,” which is both. Startlingly similar in pictorial composition to Brecht’s point of departure, a black-­clad ­woman combs the rubble for lost loved ones. Dif­fer­ent war, same horrors, same repre­sen­ta­tional conventions. Yet the interchange does more than wring its hands at the tragic repetitions of history. By jolting us appreciably back and forth through time and space, it aims, for Cherri, to engender “a third, self-­ aware subjectivity.”15 No merely teleological gesture, within this new more Arabic-­centered setting, the tight, four-­line verse form, whose perhaps most famous variant is the ­Middle East’s Rabaiyat of Omar Khayyam, re­orients for our geopo­liti­cal consideration Brecht’s own frames of reference from where Western academia typically presumes them to lie. Poetic referentiality displaces the domineering insistences of intellectual property in ­favor of acknowledging interpretative license and encouraging historical inquiry and learning. 312 

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14.1  ​ Ventriloquism’s closing video-­epigram (source: http://­www​.­ibraaz​.­org​

/­projects​/6­ 3).

The disassembling and reassembling dialectics we encounter ­here echo through the second Ali Cherri–compiled video enfolded into this chapter. Pipe Dreams is a 7 minute work that interposes a YouTube video of the Syrian regime’s own protective removal of a monumental statue of former president Hafez al-­Assad with state tv footage from 1987 of that same leader talking via live feed to Mohammad Faris, the first (and only) Syrian in space. This opportunity came through the Soviet Union’s Interkosmos program, which selected its astronauts from aligned Second and Third World countries. In an interview about Pipe Dreams, Cherri acknowledges his indebtedness to (or perhaps his points of intersection with) Walter Benjamin, that celebrated proponent of citations that refuse to steer interpretation, of journeys through fragments, rather than revelations propounding truth. To quote Cherri quoting Benjamin, a theory of “historical knowledge . . . ​is intimately related to that of montage.”16 Historically attuned placement, dexterous poetic per­for­mance, and video editing all call for “the art of citing without quotation marks,” which melts the rigid tethering of provenance (also the way of copyright) so that the past and pres­ent are instead seen to move into and out of each other, haunting each other in ever-­mutating fashions never quite finished.17 Within the context of this essay and the connections Pipe Dreams forges for it, the stalwartly relational, intergenerational, and dialogical precepts of Arabic poetry practices swing boisterously closer to Benjamin than perhaps they usually appear to. When asked by al-­Assad the standard question of what he can see from space, Faris replies in the by-­the-­day-­superseded language of Arab nationalism and global communism. Then, “I see the country that I love. I see it as it truly is.” A list of wondrous geo­graph­i­cal features ensues, incorporating “our beloved Golan,” a typically Syrian reference to Israel’s then (and ongoing) occupation of their territory, which refuses to give name and thus legitimacy to the ­enemy. As the subtitles roll like a credit sequence up the screen, t­ hose of us more comfortable with En­glish would be forgiven for concentrating on the written text and failing to notice a slow dissolve into the YouTube footage of a deposed al-­Assad statue being winched onto a truck. The montage—­filmic and historical—­noticeably stages the making and unmaking of authoritarian iconography, voicing the trauma of transitioning out of state socialism (as conjoining Brecht with the Syrian uprisings also might), so often sidelined by mainstream news coverage. In so ­doing, Pipe Dreams also cata­logs the shifting bound­aries of the media landscape. In retreat, local state tv, along with the Soviet capacity to broadcast live from outer space to 314 

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14​.­2  ​An Al-­A ssad statue is winched away while the former president broadcasts

into space in Pipe Dreams.

the president and outward to the rest of the nation. Stern ideology and a curtailment of certain freedoms, for sure, but also a now radically challenging definition of cultural owner­ship from ­those of dominant cap­i­tal­ist norms. The nationalized and the internationalist, although gasping for breath around the world, still murmur suggestions about other models of sharing information and resources. If we refrain from reading heritage as residues to be shaken off, however cloying and constraining they might first appear, we might find ways to benefit from a more transformative, rather than purely reactive, galvanization of history. UNO FFI CI A L COP IES: U N DOIN G AU TH ORITY

In ­today’s liberalized media environment, where Google subsidiary YouTube dominates, serving as the primary portal for nonstate video material dispatched from the country, a depiction of Syria profoundly dissimilar from “ E very­one ’ s P roperty ” 

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Faris’s prospers. It is engaged and “nonprofessional” (in the narrow terms of earning money for filming, that is). All three art works are drawn to ­these characteristics, with Cherri reasoning that “­because YouTube footage d­ oesn’t carry the weight of authenticity and authorship, nor is it subject to a curatorial authority, it liberates us.”18 Pixelated Revolution, a live lecture-­performance in which Mroué interacts with and analyzes vari­ous revolutionary footage and texts, speaks also in the language of freedom. Mroué declares, “As soon as ­these videos are uploaded on the Internet, they become every­one’s property and proliferate without any inhibitions, irrespective of borders or limitations.” Wishful, perhaps, but the claim works hard to repudiate the ethos of owner­ship that underpins, say, the Israeli occupation of the Golan and Palestine, or the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programs, which have privatized vari­ous of the countries involved in the Arab Spring into intolerable iniquities of wealth. Beyond ­these noble aims, Pixelated Revolution’s narration and much of its video stimuli also propose that the “invasion” of the mainstream media by low-­resolution images questions, or reconstitutes, the accepted formal composition of veracity. The point is made through quotation, the Dogme 95 manifesto appearing on one of the two screens that sandwich Mroué as he pres­ents. Dogme 95’s allusion to fiction filmmaking, realist or other­wise (dialectics undo this certainty), creates space for the Syrian clips away from the strictures of reportage that are “too heavy” to allow for certain more existential or psychological questions to be asked.19 As Mroué states, “Syrian p­ eople are recording their own deaths. . . . ​How could they be recording their own deaths when t­ hey’re struggling for a better ­future? When they are revolting against death itself, both moral and physical death?”20 The other screen places words of advice culled and compiled from social networks on how best to film in the ­middle of protests. Through their startling similarities to and differences from Dogme 95, the Syrian discussions transform into a manifesto in their own right. Miscellany becomes an emphatic, collective unity where it is no longer so easy to reduce creativity into traceable and contractual organ­izations of financial attribution, e­ ither practically or hegemonically. Making good on this gesture, the manifesto collated for Pixelated Revolution is professed open to all to supplement, transmogrify, and utilize: “It is pragmatic and very malleable, and anyone can modify it however they wish.”21 ­Later, the pre­sen­ta­tion explores the formal and technological materiality of the unofficial voice, pitting the handheld against the tripod, the insurgent 316 

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14.3  ​The Dogme 95 manifesto queries the Al-­A ssad regime’s iconography in

Pixelated Revolution (source: Berlin Documentary Forum 2, http://­vimeo​.­com​ /­63916014).

against the, quite literally, institutionally supported. Only a fraction of the former stories make it out alive, largely incognito, and with a wholly other imperative than monetization. Encountering such footage with a poetic or Benjaminian sensibility (and not forgetting the need for guerilla anonymity), the authoritative and the authorial are undermined, not tout court but as a set of pressing questions with which to grapple. Mroué’s per­for­mance of Pixelated Revolution as a mock “non-­academic” lecture, complete with that (often embarrassingly drab) mainstay of higher-­education software, Power­Point, is justly deconstructive of the delivery format. Mroué pirates institutional scholarly discourse, not as an “official” professor but e­ very bit as someone who has experienced armed strug­gle (the Lebanese Civil War) more than many of its endorsed intellectual commentators. We might thus ask whose “job” it is to deliver ­these pronouncements.

“ E very­one ’ s P roperty ” 

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PAYI NG D UE S AN D SH ARIN G TH E (U P )LOAD

Let it not go unsaid that certain figures do make a living from this footage, however unreliably—­namely the two artists u­ nder discussion. Certain o­ thers generate ­these images unpaid, in jeopardy of incarceration or of losing their lives in the telling. Add to this how the YouTube milieu forces a bleed-­through of the revolutionary compulsion to speak without monetary reward into the widespread volunteer ­labor of posting, promoting and reposting that so many of us contribute to keep social networks afloat financially.22 To usefully catalyze the distinction between often pseudonymous insurgent videographers and the artists who creatively incorporate the fruits of their ­labor, we have much to gain from turning to the propositions of the Moroccan phi­los­o­pher Abdelkebir Khatibi. Khatibi strongly cautions against the compulsion to divorce seeming opposites, in this instance the paid and the unpaid, the at-­risk and the more privileged. Instead, Khatibi’s “double critique” asks that, without ever annulling the inequities at stake, we see the potential within what is shared, remnant, and imprinted of the other within us, however unfairly.23 Pixelated Revolution itself fittingly asks, “What price t­ hese images?” And it does so in a manner that trumps copyright law’s presumption that unsanctioned replication is the paramount immorality at stake h­ ere by stressing more fundamental h­ uman rights to safety and freedom of expression. It is not only easy but also necessary to plainly examine where the freedoms and funds are stacked in ­these exemplars of video borrowing, yet should our conclusions preclude outcomes bearing other values? ­There are princi­ples of dissemination, advocacy, and solidarity to consider. ­There is also the essential work of cultural translation to credit, including ­financially. How many within Mroué and Cherri’s audiences can search YouTube in Arabic or watch footage like this without their adroit subtitling? How many more might benefit from the two of them coaxing us to expand beyond a stripped-­down reading of this material as bare, on-­the-­ground recording and to open up to the capabilities of poetry? Who knows how long clips w ­ ill remain active on YouTube or what the “hit” rates are within the global cir­cuits of art? I do not wish to excuse t­ hese pro­cesses of commodification, simply to begin interrogating, as Khatibi would, why some articulations are more legible than ­others. If quotation involves a self-­placement that is driven by and shores up conviction, it is also an aspiration, as a belief in solidarity is, for the energies of the 318 

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quoted and the quoter to unite. The polyphony of a citation-­heavy practice does not simply underscore how collaborative creativity actually is but also awakens a multifaceted, often collective consciousness that can be highly efficacious for social change. With a sense of continuity and affinity, ideas and resources can be pragmatically pooled to decrease the exhausting and unpaid toil of revolution or the tyranny of wage ­labor that often operates to its disadvantage. Syria, Palestine, Lebanon: neighboring countries no stranger to the word revolution in everyday language. Not now, and not for at least the last eighty years. Like poetry, this history, which makes genuine action more imaginable, becomes a vital reserve of strategies for renewed (we might say, resourcefully recycled) strug­gle. This surely has to be a group endeavor; it cannot be personal property, although individuals tap into it in often unique ways. Symbols, slogans, popu­lar media, including video. If Eric Selbin is to be believed, then “in socie­ ties where revolution is considered a v­ iable response to oppression—­due to long-­standing history of rebellious activities being celebrated in folk culture or to revolutionary leaders having created, restored, or magnified such traditions in the local culture or some combination of t­ hese—­revolutionary activities are more likely to be undertaken, more likely to receive broad popu­lar support, and more likely to conclude successfully when such traditions are invoked.”24 No degraded replica or retro-­sparkle to frost a new commodity, ­these three works of citation reference responsibly so educational tracking can be conducted. One can read Brecht on war, find out about tricontinental space initiatives. Pixelated Revolution invites us to partake of its research when Mroué says, “It could be applied in [add the name of the city where the per­ for­mance is taking place].” Make sure to film protesters from ­behind so they cannot be recognized, ask them to position banners so they face you. Register the date and place. Shoot in long takes with direct sound. Avoid staging. Should you lose your camera-­phone, take care that none of your comrades’ real names are listed. This is all vital information for video activists and much less dangerous to learn outside of perilous experience. Revolutions seem new ­because they aim to overthrow, but they also need to be sustainable. If, in ­these precarious economic times of unstable salaries, someone can gain funding to conduct this research l­abor for a greater good, then might that arrangement suffice? When time is of the essence, the power of efficacious repetition and reuse should be given the opportunity to triumph above and against owner­ship claims. “ E very­one ’ s P roperty ” 

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­ O I NG UP AGAIN ST G U N SH IP S W ITH BOWS “ ­W E ’R E G A ND A RROWS ”

This essay’s final inspiration does exactly that, drawing not, however, on a closed cir­cuit of known revolutionary output but instead on the very substance and debris of a most prevalent form of mediatized life. While Pixelated Revolution concentrates on the relationship between shaky, handheld camerawork and the physical and psychological impact of war, Bil‘in’s turn to video culture via Avatar has its eye more on mise-­en-­scène. Wry costumed replay joins the creative and repre­sen­ta­tional ­labor of freedom fighting, placing it within the useful remits of committed discussion, camera-­friendly consciousness-­raising, research, and physical preparation. Avatar ­will have almost certainly debuted in Bil‘in in pirated form, and it is imperative to ask why before moralizing about lost revenues. Regular Israeli curfew dictates render travel to cinemas, and the financial viability of theaters themselves, near impossible. The plentiful supply of bootlegged dvds in the West Bank allows activists to take video citation to a ­whole new level, a plagiarism carried out on the body, sans official merchandise. How deeply ironic, ­these demonstrations point out, to think of cultural property theft within the context of a violent and expanding military and civilian occupation of Palestinian territory. If intellectual-­property-­rights legislation figures itself through the language of protection, such rights are clearly denied the inhabitants and allies of Bil‘in who, ­every Friday, have put themselves in the direct line of tear gas and rubber-­coated bullets in order, simply, to assem­ble within their own village. On the most direct level, recourse to Avatar speaks in the plain, shared terms of a global blockbuster, which piracy has certainly helped make a widespread point of commonality. This much we learn from the media scholar Henry Jenkins, who, early on, coined the term “Avatar activism,” a subset of a “participatory culture” which “has allowed many more consumers to take media in their own hands, hijacking culture for their own purposes.”25 Avatar is now a part of Palestine’s cultural heritage (and therefore its arsenal of resistant iconography), just as it can be for many p­ eople around the world. Their engagement therefore sets itself apart from how per­for­mance is frequently framed in the academies of the Global North. Per­for­mance’s modes of distancing or of questioning ontological truth-­ claims stand as a common touchstone in English-­language scholarship, so no need for that rerun ­here. Instead, Bil‘in’s Avatar recapitulates or inculcates 320 

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14​.­4  ​ Avatar protestors in Bil‘in (source: Haitham Khatib Bilin Reenacts Avatar Film 12-02-2010, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­Chw32qG​-­M7E).

what the theater theorist Diana Taylor, quoting Joseph Roach, terms “mnemonic reserves.”26 Her interest in the preservation of use-­value from the past and its much-­needed eruption within the pres­ent is similar to how, through continuity, poetry has ­shaped and aided the Arab world for centuries, emboldening vari­ous somatic formulations. The per­for­mance becomes a tool for po­liti­cal analy­sis and action si­mul­ta­neously, not so much Promethean as a critical return to preexisting media. The reference to a scripted repre­sen­ta­tion of combat—­a film—­divulges just how symbolic, ceremonial, ritualistic, and rehearsed all b­ attles are, even when they are not reenactments. If the mass media provides a space for proxy and propaganda war, then this per­for­mance draws attention back to ­actual war zones, where real ­people are directly wounded as a consequence. Encountering the Bil‘in protest, we become beholden to register the complex ways in which video culture encourages, or might be used to fight, ­these iniquities, and not just on the repre­sen­ta­tional level. The hegemonic and financial placement of cinema within the military-­industrial complex, whose testing ground is as much Palestine as it is sci-fi, cannot be ignored, nor can Hollywood’s per­ sis­tent and pervasive configuration of the flesh. Anything but stale replicas, ­these dynamic invocations of globally dominant video culture enabled history and fiction to be felt. This was surely the case with the reenactment that produced perhaps the Arab world’s most famous “ E very­one ’ s P roperty ” 

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po­liti­cal movie, The ­Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966), wherein many of the original fighters revivified their roles, e­ ither as script con­sul­tants or actors. Certainly, no Palestinian needs to dress up to experience environmental aggression or resource plunder. Yet spectacular vulnerability for camera that humorously draws parallels and entices empathy is still a useful tactic. So, too, might the implicit casting of Israeli soldiers as avatars, who, ­behind all their heavy artillery and protective clothing, are asked to pro­cess their casting as the ­enemy in a film they would have surely watched with opposite allegiances. Given ­these imputed physicalities, it makes sense to draw in experience garnered by Augusto Boal during his work with the Theatre of the Oppressed in his native Brazil and elsewhere. Boal promotes techniques for unveiling “the rituals which reify all ­human relationships, and the masks of behaviour that ­those rituals impose on each person according to the roles he plays in society and the rituals he must perform.”27 In essence, ­these exercises promote awareness of the sociopo­liti­cal loading of movements arrived at by acting them out physically. Every­one involved, including any audience, is invited to intervene and reposition t­ hose “onstage” so as to explore alternative trajectories within the given scenario. Of note is the fact that Boal frequently refers to this as a “poetics of the oppressed.”28 Bil‘in’s Avatar stunt honors this experiment by resituating a counterfeited narrative into a space where it undertakes valuable dialectical (and photo op) work, above and beyond pacifying and criminalizing the video consumer. Boal sidesteps the merely deconstructive proclivities of how per­for­mance is frequently understood with his deeply politicized conception of the “spect-­actor,” who “by transforming fiction . . . ​ transform[s] into himself. This invasion is a symbolic trespass. It symbolises all the acts of trespass we have to commit in order to ­free ourselves from what oppresses us. If we do not trespass (not necessarily violently), if we do not go beyond our cultural norms, our state of oppression, the limits imposed upon us, even the law itself (which should be transformed)—if we do not trespass in this we can never be ­free.”29 Such compulsions could strive to recast not only the mimetic predilections of cinema and the supposedly passive activity of viewing that ossify the capacity of video into the conventions of “leisure” but also the infringement of copyright rulings as legitimate, rather than ­illegitimate, “trespass.” What e­ lse ­these engagements might enable is training. By watching, and, more so, by copying the choreography of insurgency, we can learn to act appropriately, translating video footage into muscle memory for re­sis­tance. If we choose to understand the Avatar reenactment as, among other ­things, a “re322 

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hearsal for the revolution” (to use Boal’s phrase), then it is crucial to acknowledge that the Bil‘in (and Bil‘in-­allied) Na’vi are acting on behalf of ­others. They are not merely interpreting characters but representing a community.30 Although he is not discussing specifically citational acts like ­these, the global-­ movements scholar Kevin McDonald puts it eloquently when he affirms how po­liti­cal factions constitute groups by assuming “embodied, experiential grammars of action . . . ​the musicality of embodied intersubjectivity . . . ​an expression of a pro­cess of rational deliberation . . . ​­these movements are involved in ­doing, where the senses are at the heart of action.”31 How similar, then, to the re­spect for an oral delivery of poetry, pulsing and propulsive, which exists at once as expressive and sensual voice, melding enunciator to receptive listener in an accelerated feedback loop. Within Arabic poetry and m ­ usic, the state of tarab—or a shared ecstatic transcendence for anyone in earshot—is highly prized, much studied, and often used to po­liti­cal ends.32 ­These si­mul­ta­neously liberating and embodied possibilities are rare within a standard reading of video culture, but why not? Could not a cinematic tarab, stirring up incantation through the montage of images and histories, stimulate the power of our medium to link bodies across time and space and actually move ­people?33 To this reinvigoration of active spectatorship, I would also like to add the discipline and training that actings out can enable. Through an understanding of recitation, repetition, heritage, and revolutionary sign systems that all of the above video recapitulations carry, we appreciate that revolt is never entirely so spontaneous. It requires developed community and collective l­abor in order to disavow the sorts of individualistic precepts that help instate unfair inscriptions of property—­intellectual, commercial, or territorial. Interventions such as ­these, like the lessons learned by heart from poetry, instill through duplication the ­causes and princi­ples of revolution. The thirst for novelty, the market’s tireless invention of new commodities, distracts us from this purpose, as, indeed, does academia’s complicity with individualistic innovation and discombobulated niche specialisms. By crediting sustained communal investment over time, as the types of poetry discussed above do, we come closer to feeling freedom as a practice, rather than a possession, an ongoing pro­cess, not a goal, revolution as lived experience and a mode of production over and above a speedy ousting. Poetics, videographic or other­wise, are quotidian, practical, and direct. At the same time (and herein lies much of their power), they dwell beyond the prosaic, enabling ambiguity, multiplicity, creativity, allusion that binds across time and space, and sheer exhilarating sensation. I ­shall end with a quotation “ E very­one ’ s P roperty ” 

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b­ ecause, with all conviction, I do not wish to suggest I have said anything new. This excerpt directs us to reconfigure epistemology, not as a philosophical quest but as a critique of how access to art and information is corralled by capitalism, how we might turn to the already existing without paying (homage to) t­ hose who would claim a toll for our visit. Why? Not solely to claim what we might cogently argue as “not just theirs” but to undo the very social relations of injustice ­those suppositions lock into place. The last line of War Primer, brought so poignantly into discussion with the Syrian uprisings by Ventriloquism, is: “But learn to learn, and try to learn for what.”34 > NOTE S  ​ 1

For further discussions of the debates around participatory video culture, see Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, “The Entrepreneurial Vlogger: Participatory Culture beyond the Professional-­Amateur Divide,” in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), 89–107. 2 Subtitled footage of the event can be viewed online. See, for example, Haitham Khatib, “Bilin Reenacts Avatar Film 12–02–2010,” YouTube video, posted by “Haitham Khatib,” February 12, 2010, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­Chw32qG​-­M7E. 3 For a nuanced reading of the hierarchies set in place by citation, see Clare Hemmings, Why Stories ­Matter: The Po­liti­cal Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 170. 4 Steven  C. Caton, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 251 and 54. 5 Sheyma Buali, “Image and Imagination: Ali Cherri in Conversation with Sheyma Buali,” Ibraaz, November 6, 2013, http://­www​.­ibraaz​.­org​/­interviews​/­111. 6 Lila Abu-­Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1996), 180. 7 Abu-­Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, 239. 8 Adonis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans. Catherine Cabham (London: Saqi Books, 1990), 30–31. 9 This is the case with camel racing in the United Arab Emirates. See Sulayman Khalaf, “Poetics and Politics of Newly In­ven­ted Traditions in the Gulf: Camel Racing in the United Arab Emirates,” Ethnology 93, no. 3 (summer 2000): 243–62. 10 Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile: Lives of a Palestinian Revolutionary (New York: Monthly Review Press 1988), 45. 11 Caton, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon,” 53. 12 Caton, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon,” 71–76. 13 Caton, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon,” 41. 14 The venture has been made viewable via http://­www​.­ibraaz​.­org​/­projects​/­63. 324 

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Ali Cherri, “Ventriloquism: A Proj­ect by Ali Cherri,” Ibraaz, November 6, 2013, http://­www​.­ibraaz​.­org​/­projects​/­63. 16 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Proj­ect, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 473, cited by Ali Cherri, in Sheyma Buali, “Image and Imagination: Ali Cherri in Conversation with Sheyma Buali,” Ibraaz, November 6, 2013, http://­www​.­ibraaz​.­org​ /­interviews​/­111. 17 Benjamin, The Arcades Proj­ect, 458, cited by Ali Cherri, in Sheyma Buali, “Image and Imagination: Ali Cherri in Conversation with Sheyma Buali,” Ibraaz, ­November 6, 2013, http://­www​.­ibraaz​.o­ rg​/­interviews​/­111. 18 Sheyma Buali, “Image and Imagination: Ali Cherri in Conversation with Sheyma Buali,” Ibraaz, November 6, 2013, http://­www​.­ibraaz​.­org​/­interviews​/­111. 19 Rabih Mroué, question-­and-­answer session ­after per­for­mance of Pixelated Revolution, Théâtre J. Armand Bombardier, Musée McCord, Montreal, June 5, 2014. 20 Rabih Mroué, Pixelated Revolution, Théâtre J. Armand Bombardier, Musée ­McCord, Montreal, June 7, 2014. 21 Rabih Mroué, “The Pixelated Revolution: Interview with Rabih Mroué” (pamphlet for Festival Transamérique, Montreal, 2014), n.p. 22 For a rigorous discussion of this practice, see Mark Andrejevic, “Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of User-­generated L ­ abor,” in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), 419. 23 Abdelkebir Khatibi, “Double Critique: The Decolonization of Arab Sociology,” in Con­temporary North Africa: Issues of Development and Integration, ed. Halim Barakat (London: Croon Helm, 1985), 9–19. 24 Eric Selbin, “Agency and Culture in Revolutions,” in Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies, ed. Jack A. Goldstone (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003), 78. 25 Henry Jenkins, “Avatar Activism,” Le Monde diplomatique, September  2010, http://­mondediplo​.­com​/­2010​/­09​/­15avatar. 26 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-­Atlantic Per­for­mance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 26, quoted in Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Amer­ic­ as (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 5. 27 Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-­Odilia Leal McBring and Emily Fryer (London: Pluto, 2000), 134. 28 See his entire chapter with this as its title, Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, 95–135. 29 Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, xxi–­x xii. 30 Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, 98 and 112. 31 Kevin McDonald, Global Movements: Action and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 214. 32 For further extrapolation, see Adonis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, 27.

15

“ E very­one ’ s P roperty ” 

325

33

While such objectives are not alien to the understanding of video culture—­ think, for instance, of the practices of Antonin Artaud or Kenneth Anger (himself no stranger to the power of the purloined film)—­there is l­ ittle of this compulsion in how moving-­image media are theorized by academics. Jane M. Gaines’s article “Po­liti­cal Mimesis” is of the few film studies exceptions to this rule. Gaines, “Po­ liti­cal Mimesis,” in Collecting Vis­ib­ le Evidence, ed. Jane  M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 84–102. 34 Berthold Brecht, War Primer, Epigram 85, trans. John Willett (London: Libris, 1998), led to, but not quoted by, Ali Cherri, “Ventriloquism: A Proj­ect by Ali Cherri,” Ibraaz, November 6, 2013, http://­www​.­ibraaz​.­org​/­projects​/­63.

326 

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C O N T R I B U TO R S

CONERLY CASEY is associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Dr. Casey’s long-­term ethnographic research in northern Nigeria and Kuwait offers critical perspectives on media and sensory affect, perception, memory, and emotional and social vitality. Her work has recently appeared in the edited collection Genocide and Mass Vio­lence: Memory, Symptom, Recovery and in the Journal of International and Global Studies.

is assistant professor of anthropology at Emory University and co-­editor of Visual Anthropology Review. Her research and publications explore the cultural politics of mobility, minority subjectivities, and vernacular media practices in con­temporary rural China. She is the author of A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China, director of 农家乐 Peasant ­Family Happiness (winner of the 2013 David Plath Media Prize), and co-­editor of Mapping Media in China: Region, Province, Locality (with Wanning Sun). JENNY CHIO

MICHELLE CHO  is  the

K ­ orea Foundation  Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and World Cinemas at McGill University. She has published on Asian cinemas in The Korean Popu­lar Culture Reader, Cinema Journal, Acta Koreana, and  Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinemas.  Her  research on Korean wave tele­vi­sion, video, and pop m ­ usic appears in Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media and the International Journal of Communication. She is currently completing a book on South Korean genre cinemas ­titled Genre Worlds: The Politics of Form in Millennial South Korean Cinema. KAY DICKINSON is professor of film studies at Concordia University. She is the au-

thor of Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond and, with Glyn Davis, Lisa Patti, and Amy Villarejo, Film Studies: A Global Introduction.

BISHNUPRIYA GHOSH teaches in the Department of En­glish at the University

of California, Santa Barbara.  She has published two monographs on global elite and popu­lar cultures,  When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Con­temporary Indian Novel  and  Global Icons: Apertures to the Popu­lar. Her current proj­ect is in environmental media studies: The Virus Touch explores “epidemic media” from post-­antiretroviral-­era South Africa, India, and the United States that materialize potentially sustainable multispecies ­futures. is assistant professor in cinema studies at New York University. Her research explores the intersection of media and migration, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on Asian and Asian diasporic media works and practices. In addition, she has curated programming for several Asian diasporic film festivals, including the Asian Film Festival, Berlin. FENG-­M EI HEBERER

is assistant professor of lit­er­a­ture at New York University, Shanghai. Her research focuses on inter-­Asia migration and diaspora, interethnic imaginations in Sinophone and Anglophone literary and media cultures, the discourses of creolization and multiculturalism, and critical theory. While completing her first book, Creolizing the Sinophone Pacific, a historically informed analy­sis of culture making among the creolized communities of Chinese origins hailing from Southeast Asia, she has also begun a second book proj­ect, supported by the Luce/acls Program in China Studies, that compares the cultural politics of indigeneity and new immigrants in twenty-­first-­century Taiwan. TZU-­H UI CELINA HUNG

is assistant professor of tele­vi­sion and new media studies in the cinema studies program (Department of En­glish) at the University of Pennsylvania. Drawing on the conceptual lenses of media anthropology, infrastructure studies, and environmental humanities, he has been studying public cultures of uncertainty about disruptive technologies by attending to frameworks concerned with affect, media practices, and relational ontologies. He has been part of two collaborative proj­ects, one exploring platform jumping practices in Zambia, and another investigating mobile media assemblages that enable circulation of vernacular ­music in India. RAHUL MUKHERJEE

is assistant professor and Canada research chair at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University. He is the director of the Global Emergent Media (gem) Lab, a research hub that combines digital

JOSHUA NEVES

350 

C ontributors

media research and practice, cultural and po­liti­cal theory, and transnational research proj­ects and partnerships. His research focuses on global media, Chinese/Asian screen cultures, cultural theory and po­liti­cal theory, media anthropology, and urbanism. His work has appeared in Social Text, Discourse, Film Quarterly, Sarai,  Cinema Journal,  and the  Media Fields Journal,  among ­others. He is currently completing a book manuscript, Faking Globalization, examining the production of legitimacy in con­temporary China. BHASKAR SARKAR is associate professor of film and media studies at the Univer-

sity of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition, as well as a wide range of articles published in collections and journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Rethinking History, positions: asia-­critique, Cultural Dynamics, and Frameworks. He is also the co-­editor of Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering, The Routledge Handbook of Media and Risk, and two journal special issues, “The Subaltern and the Popu­lar,” Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and “Indian Documentary Studies,” BioScope. He is currently working on two monographs, on the plasticity of con­temporary cultural nationalisms, and on media piracy. is the dean of research at ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands, and a visiting professor at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University, Germany. His work is at the intersections of technology, governance, cultural theory, and identity politics. NISHANT SHAH

is a doctoral candidate at Faculty of Industrial Design ­ ngineering at Delft University of Technology (tu Delft) in a proj­ect collaboE ration with nhl University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands. He completed his master’s degree in new-media design at Aalto University School of Art and Design, Finland (formerly known as University of Art and Design Helsinki). His research interests include energy studies, economic anthropology, new-media studies, and ethnography. ABHIGYAN SINGH

is a professor at the School of Liberal Studies, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. He has been associated with the Bengaluru-­based Centre for the Study of the Culture and Society in vari­ous capacities since 1998 and is now one of its trustees. He has held visiting positions at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (2004–2005), Centre for Con­temporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science (2013–2015), and the DeS. V. SRINIVAS

C ontributors  351

partment of Communication, University of Hyderabad (2014). He was the iccr Chair Professor of Indian Culture and Society at Georgetown University (2012–2013). His research focuses on the intersections between popu­lar culture and mass politics. He is the author of two books on cinema and politics in south India: Megastar and Politics as Per­for­mance. He has also written on Hong Kong cinema and on creative and cultural industries in Asia. He is one of the editors of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. is associate professor of film studies at Concordia University. He is the author of the books  Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan and Naze Nihon wa “media mikkusu suru kuni” nano ka (Why Is Japan a “Media Mixing Nation”?). He is also the editor of the collection Media Theory in Japan. MARC STEINBERG

is assistant professor in the Department of En­glish at National Taiwan Normal University. Her areas of research include the festival reception of Chinese-­language cinemas in the twentieth ­century, con­temporary East Asian or Taiwan queer images, and the history of post-­war Hong Kong martial-­arts cinema. She is currently working on trans-­Chinese martial-­arts images of the twenty-­first ­century in the media-mix environment. CHIA-­C HI WU

is professor of screen studies at Ithaca College and codirector of the Fin­ger Lakes Environmental Film; Festival. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film; States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies; Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (with Dale Hudson); and Open Spaces: Openings, Closings, and Thresholds of In­de­pen­dent Public Media. She co-­wrote The Flaherty: Sixty Years in the Cause of In­de­pen­dent Film (with Scott MacDonald) and coedited Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. PATRICIA  R. ZIMMERMANN

352 

C ontributors

INDEX

abandonment, 206, 267, 281 Abu-­Lughod, Lila, 310 access, 6, 8,15, 24, 35–36, 38, 61–62, 64, 67–68, 94, 98, 105–6, 114–28, 130n29, 134–35, 150, 218–20, 226, 229, 251, 262, 282, 296, 324; Access to Technology (a2t), 115, 117. See also participation; platform activism, 7, 9–10, 16, 19, 23, 30n14, 45, 49, 54–55, 57–63, 65–68, 87, 116, 159, 161, 165, 167–68, 172–73, 201, 208, 210n7, 222, 229–32, 275, 308– 9, 319–320; and hiv/aids, 294–95, 299–302; and YouTube, 223–25. See also EngageMedia actor network theory, 136 Adonis, 310 address, 144, 146 advertising, 56–57, 76, 98, 143–44, 148 aesthetics, 3, 8, 41, 44, 46, 49, 101, 110, 116, 128, 134, 152, 179–80, 190–91, 193, 203, 208, 217, 224, 227, 246, 249, 254, 291, 297; aesthetic movements, 22; “aesthetics of vulgarity” (Mbembe), 179–80, “full-­screen aesthetics” (Steinberg), 93, 98–99, 101; pirate aesthetics, 144; techno-­ aesthetics, 17, 26 affect, 15, 57, 73, 100, 104, 146, 153, 176–81, 183, 189, 190–91, 193, 251, 278, 287n51; affective economies, 268; affective knowledge, 179; affective ­labor, 277; affective politics, 177, 193 affordance, 3–4, 22, 57–58, 60, 63, 100, 134, 136 agency, 4, 19, 21–22, 61, 116, 120–28, 150, 161, 168, 202, 308, 310, 312; and access, 120–22; of fans as consumers, 244; of produsers/prosumers, 22, 135, 278 Alampay, Erwin, 118 alienation, 275 Amazon, 92–93, 95, 97–98, 100–101, 110n13 Anderson, Sam, 245–46, 248–49

Andreessen, Marc, 95–96 anime, 96, 99–100, 104–7, 112n49, 226 anonymity, 101–2, 244, 308, 318 Apple, 92–93, 95, 97–98, 100, 266, 273, 277–78, 285n23. See also Foxconn; iPhone Arab Spring, 22, 308, 316 archive, 64, 126, 295, 310; “archive of feelings” (Cvetkovich), 202, 204–7, 209; and repertoire (Taylor), 206; and Telugu-­language content on YouTube, 220–21, 225; and YouTube, 237n14 area studies, 16 asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), 56, 61 Asia, 1–2, 4–6, 8–9, 11–12, 14, 16, 18, 26–27, 56, 60, 62, 98, 126, 202, 243, 254, 272, 274–75, 280; Asianism, 254, 258; “Asianization,” 254, 259; Asia Pacific, 54–55, 59–60, 65, 68, 159–60, 166; and authoritarianism, 8; and the global, 14, 16, 27–28, 280; trans-­Asia, 1, 259. See also East Asia; South Asia; Southeast Asia aspiration, 25, 142, 149, 150–51, 153–54, 281; aspirational politics, 151, 153 audience, 7, 38, 41, 43, 47–48, 57, 77 81, 87, 140, 144, 146, 151, 190, 192, 206, 235, 244, 250, 257, 264n23, 318, 322 authorship, 8, 49, 75, 81, 308–9, 311, 316–17. See also user-­generated media Avatar (dir. James Cameron, 2009), 308–9, 320–23 Barad, Karen, 140, 153, 155–56n11, 156n31 Benjamin, Walter, 81, 314, 317 biopolitics, 11, 18, 270–71, 277, 280, 293–94, 301. See also governmentality; neoliberalism biopower, 85, 278 Boal, Augusto, 322

body, 18, 80, 121, 125, 176–78, 190, 277, 300; and affect, 178; bodybuilding, 18, 289–90; ecologic of, 16–17; and per­for­mance, 251; of the worker, 17, 273 Bollywood, 15, 18, 62, 133, 135–36, 141, 151–52, 156n28, 176–79, 181, 184, 190–93 Cambodia, 18, 58, 160, 165, 170–71 camp, 203, 205, 212n7 Cannes International Film Festival, 72, 291, 295, 304n6 capital, 6, 83, 98, 160, 172, 201, 207–8, 242, 252, 258, 270, 272, 275, 280; cultural capital, 250; global/transnational capital, 5, 18–19, 57, 98, 101, 168, 172, 208, 244, 276; history of, 29n3; and the state, 15 capitalism, 11, 27, 29n11, 75, 81, 84–86, 169, 254, 256–57, 269, 272, 275, 277, 315, 324; Asian capitalism, 254 censorship, 9–10, 15, 18, 30n13, 59, 62, 115, 119, 121, 126, 133–34, 142, 172, 177, 181, 191. See also regulation Chatterjee, Partha, 25. See also “po­liti­cal society” (Chatterjee) Chattopadhyay, Swati, 150, 155n2, 306n30 Cheah, Pheng, 245, 255–58 Chen, Kuan-­Hsing, 4 Cherri, Ali, 308–16, 318 China, 18, 35–53, 56, 58, 68, 73, 78, 86–89, 98, 119, 140, 159–60, 171–72, 199, 219, 243, 254, 266–69, 273–74, 276, 278, 280–81, 286n32, 289; ethnic minorities in, 35–53; Internet in, 36, 76, 78, 219; mobile phones in, 7, 17–18; modernity/ modernization in, 35–37, 39, 50; and postsocialism, 268, 278, 280; rural, 35–36 China Village Documentary Proj­ect, 39–40 Chow, Rey, 16, 242–43 cinema, 3, 10, 72–73, 77, 79, 81, 83, 86–87, 101, 190, 224, 226, 230, 251, 291–92, 295–97, 302, 321–22; as art, 81; countercinema, 109n6; micro­ cinema, 10, 73, 77–87 circulation, 4, 7–8, 21, 24–26, 28n2, 30n16, 38, 63–64, 67–68, 97, 100, 115–16, 133, 136, 140, 143, 146, 149, 151, 153–54, 156n28, 159, 177, 309; and piracy, 143; technologies of, 134 citizen journalism, 60–61 citizenship, 19, 44–45, 84, 165, 200–201, 204, 267–68, 271, 283, 294; affective, 4; cultural, 244, 246 354 

I ndex

civil society, 9–10, 13, 25, 27, 55, 116; global civil society, 12. See also “po­liti­cal society” (Chatterjee) community, 15, 17, 21, 27, 100–101, 103, 107, 144, 146, 149, 153, 277, 311 Condry, Ian, 96 consumption, 92, 116, 134–35, 162, 177, 180, 224, 252, 268, 274, 281; as basis of cosmopolitanism, 261; and community, 261; of documentary, 163 content, 8, 78, 98, 103–4, 113n51, 224–25, 282, 295; business of, 94; comments as, 100–101, 103–4, 106; delivery of, 92, 95, 99–101; distribution of, 98–99. See also interface; platform: as delivery mechanism of content; user-­generated media control, 10–12, 23–24, 75, 115, 117–19, 122–23, 125, 127, 191, 275, 280, 297, 308; “control socie­ties” (Deleuze), 19, 24; and emergence, 12; and freedom, 10–11, 251. See also regulation copying, 307–24. See also piracy copyright, 12–14, 96–97, 111n26; Indian Copyright Act of 2012, 13; infringement, 20, 96–97, 224, 238n28. See also intellectual property; piracy cosmopolitanism, 10, 161, 242, 244–45, 248, 250, 252, 254–59, 261, 264n37; based on consumption, 261; “pop cosmopolitanism,” 244, 254, 258, 261; in relation to cosmopolitics, 256, 259, 261 cosmopolitics, 18, 245, 255–58; K-­pop as cosmopo­liti­cal, 261; in relation to cosmopolitanism, 256, 259, 261 counterfeit. See piracy creative economy, 25, 277 creative industries, 13, 75, 118, 269, 275 creativity, 4–5, 8, 10–12, 22–27, 79, 81, 87, 96, 98–99, 104, 107, 209, 217, 224, 250, 273–74, 278–79, 295, 300, 307, 309–11, 318–19, 320, 323; and piracy, 12; in pro­cess of content distribution, 100–101 cultural studies, 3, 97, 218, 281; Asian, 252; Birmingham School of, 3 culture, 22, 98, 256–57; as civilizing force, 10; and participation, 22; as pedagogical tool, 10; in relation to the h­ uman, 256; techno-­, 6 dance, 10, 18, 41–42, 44, 124, 133, 141, 143–44, 146–49, 176–77, 183, 191–92, 194n1, 226–27, 229, 240–41, 243, 251–61, 261n4, 282 data, 19, 24, 111n35, 116, 118–19, 122, 127–28, 220, 279, 299

decolonization, 3 Deleuze, Gilles, 19, 251 Delhi, 121, 133, 144, 147, 149, 151, 154n1, 155n7, 302 democracy, 9, 19, 56, 87, 244 desire, 186, 268, 281–82; mass production of, 190 development, 8, 55, 122, 173n11, 254, 280, 303n3; in China, 36–37, 39, 280–81 diaspora, 4, 30n16, 200–201, 208–9, 257 difference, 83, 161, 167, 168 digital, the, 1, 6, 16, 19, 21, 29–30n13, 94, 115–19, 122, 124–26, 263n20; and the global, 29–30n13 digital humanities, 28 digital literacy, 29n13, 116 disposability, 270–72, 274, 283 distribution, 8, 24, 26, 38, 49, 54, 59–63, 67–68, 95, 97–99, 105, 109n6, 115, 117, 120–21, 126, 136, 153, 155n7, 159, 163, 190, 220, 224, 229, 246, 252, 255, 268, 287n51, 291–92, 295, 302, 308; networks, 3, 14, 153; as productive of “affective media geographies” (Lamarre), 278–79; as site of co-­creation, 100; of the social, 271. See also circulation; content; infrastructure; piracy; platform documentary, 14, 35–53, 63, 159, 281–83, 289–92, 296–97, 299, 301–2, 305n18, 305n20; micro­ documentary, 64, 66–67; subjects of, 282–83; in Taiwan, 158–73, 175n27 drag, 198, 201–5, 207–8, 212n17 drug: addiction and use, 297, 301; regimens, 300; trafficking, 288, 306n28; treatment of hiv/aids (see: hiv/aids). See also health; illness dvd (digital video disc), 8, 13, 37–38, 279, 281–82, 295 Dwango, 91–92, 100, 103, 106, 108n3 East Asia, 12, 73, 75, 86, 210n5, 270 East-­West, 1, 5, 270, 278 embodiment, 4, 123, 177–79, 191–93 emergence, 5, 12, 16, 19, 21–22, 240–245, 268, 283, 304n10 Eng, David, 203, 205 EngageMedia, 54–71. See also Papuan Voices Enlightenment, 21, 32n46, 259 entanglement, 7, 21, 28, 140, 267, 277 environment, 55–59, 65–68, 170–71, 322 erotics, 177, 186, 189, 248–49, 301 ethnographic film, 66, 168 exhibition, 140–41, 194n2, 292, 302

“exit” (Virno), 23 experimental filmmakers/filmmaking, 295–97, 302. See also video art faciality, 251, 264n26 Factory Girls (Chang), 274, 279 fan, 144, 146; communities, 261; fandom, 57, 105, 112n49, 250–52; labor/production, 18, 99–101, 104–6. See also participation; user-­generated media Fanon, Frantz, 11, 82 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 17, 198, 200, 205, file sharing, 55, 59, 115, 140, 155n7 film festivals, 35, 39, 47, 73–74, 88n3, 164–65, 282, 291 first world, 27, 258, 275 Fordism, 275 Foucault, Michel, 11, 74–75 found footage, 309 4chan, 102, 104 Foxconn, 266–67, 271–72 freedom, 179, 186, 254, 267, 315–16; and control, 10–11, 251; of expression, 62, 318; fighting, 320; of market, 270; as practice, 323 From Our Eyes, 39–40, 43–50, 51n12 gado gado, 55–56, 59, 64–65, 68 Galloway, Alexander, 101, 251 “Gangnam Style” (PSY), 18, 240–43, 246–47 gender, 4, 156–57n31, 160, 166, 177, 190–91, 194n1, 204–5; and ­labor, 167, 169, 275–76. See also camp; drag; masculinity Germany, 4, 200, 202–3, 207, 210n5, 211n14, 211–12n16 Getino, Octavio, 3, 310 Glissant, Édouard, 22–23 global, the, 4–5, 16, 27, 29–30n13, 208; and the local, 256; and the national, 245, 280; as speculative proj­ect, 21 global: capitalism, 15, 161–62, 178, 207, 254, 257, 268; community, 258; cultural economy, 190, 200, 208, 241–42; economy, 160–62, 167, 169, 270, 274, 277–78; governance, 8, 12; popu­lar culture, 241, 243, 245, 248, 252, 258, 261, 263n22; postcolonial politics, 189 globalization, 5, 22–23, 55–56, 59, 86, 116, 242, 245, 255–57, 267, 269, 274, 304n14; antiglobalization, 177, 195n13; as historically and po­liti­cally neutral, 202; “melodramas of globalization” (Sarkar), I ndex  355

globalization (continued) 269; outposts of, 10; theories of, 97. See also cosmopolitanism; modernity; neoliberalism global media, 1–2, 7, 26–27, 68, 93, 261; phenomenology of, 1–2 Global North, 5, 56, 257, 269–70, 275, 309, 320 global-­popular, 12, 28, 245; local-­popular, 26 Global South, 1–2, 5–7, 10, 12, 17, 22–23, 24–25, 27, 28, 28n1–2, 30n14, 257, 269–70, 275, 280, 302 Google, 66, 83, 92–93, 96–98, 100–101, 111n27, 273, 315. See also YouTube governmentality, 10–11, 19–20, 75, 80–81, 84. See also biopolitics; Foucault, Michel; neoliberalism governance, 9, 11, 115, 118, 123, 191, 207–8, 293; data, 119; digital, 115; techno-­, 117; technologies of, 81, 84, Gramsci, Antonio, 3–4, 28n1, 150, 235 Guattari, Felix, 181, 251 Guha, Ranajit, 4, 29n8 Guizhou Province, 39–40. See also Kaili hallyu, 263n10 haptic, 278; video haptics, 17 Hardt, Michael, 277–78 hardware, 95–98, 111n26, 116, 119, 136, 251, 274, 279; and platforms, 96 Hausa ­people, 140, 178–79, 183–86, 190–91, 194n1 health, 19, 54–56, 59, 177, 183, 189, 194n4, 242, 271, 288–94, 299–303, 305n23, 306n28. See also hiv/aids hegemony, 2–5, 20, 23, 26–27, 61, 63, 97, 135, 205, 207, 257, 274, 321; in platforms, 92; and the subaltern and the popu­lar, 135, 150 Highly Active Anti-­Retroviral Therapies (haart), 289, 302–3 historiography, 64 history, 64, 203, 292, 312, 314; official, 206; and racial discourse in Germany, 201; subject of, 18, 21; “zones of historical fracture” (Guattari), 181 hiv/aids, 288–303, 303n2, 305n21, 305n23; in art, 305n24; media/video culture of, 15, 291–95, 299–300, 302 Hollywood, 13, 20, 86, 97, 321 Hong Kong, 47, 53n27, 60–62, 73, 75, 78–79, 172, 175n27; cinema, 86–87 Hou Hsiao-­hsien, 72, 76 ­human, 19, 32n46, 117, 119, 176; relationship to technology, 115, 117, 127; and spirits, 176, 179, 181, 183–91 356 

I ndex

­human rights, 54–56, 58, 61–65, 67, 170–71, 259 hysteria, 184; racial, 203–5 ict (Information and Communication Technology), 117, 119; in China, 36; in India, 115 ict4d (Information and Communication Technology for Development), 122, 124–25 identification, 48, 148 identity, 38, 122–23, 125, 127, 134, 149–53, 154n1, 155n7, 180–81, 185, 188–89, 192; cards, 19; ethnic, 161, 191; global, 257, 261; national, 161; pan-­Indonesian, 62–63; politics, 190, 201; vernacular, 149–51, 153 illness, 187, 194n5, 276, 300, 305n20. See also health; hiv/aids image, 177, 242, 251 immigrants: in Taiwan, 159–72 Imphal, 291, 294, 301, 303n1. See also Manipur immunology, 291–94, 297, 299, 301 indexicality, 8, 19, 241, 246, 249–50, 261, India, 13, 15, 19, 68, 98, 114–16, 120–22, 127, 288, 291. See also Mewat indigeneity, 126 indigenous media, 43, 51n11, 65, 67–68, 166 Indonesia, 54–68 informality, 6, 10, 25, 28n2, 105, 134, 151, 153, 279, 302; cultures of, 134–35, 155n2 information economy, 277 information society, 116, 269 infrastructure, 2–3, 8, 20, 27, 28n2, 97, 115–16, 150, 155n5, 160, 190, 268, 279, 287 intellectual property, 11–13, 95, 177, 190, 308, 310, 312 interaction and interactivity, 21–22, 93, 99–100, 117, 119, 126, 156n31; and creativity, 100, 206, 277, 282; versus “intra-­activity” (Barad), 140, 155–56n11 Inter-­Asia Cultural Studies Proj­ect, 4 interface, 17, 20, 65, 92–93, 97–101, 106–7, 111n33, 117, 123, 128, 177, 183–85, 190, 193, 224, 244, 251, 266, 268; The Interface Effect (Galloway), 251; “interface intimacy” (Neves), 268, 284n11; nontransparency of, 109n6. See also “intraface” (Galloway) Internet, 8, 30n14, 36, 61–63, 76–78, 80, 93–95, 97, 115, 120, 124–25, 151, 162, 172, 180, 185, 225–27, 229, 241, 245, 248, 250, 257, 261, 269, 272–73, 316; and affect, 251; cafés, 63, 267; culture in Japan, 101–2, 112n49; as demo­cratizing force, 250–51; as global commons, 244; in India, 115, 218–20; universality of, 246; video, 242, 244

intimacy, 1, 21, 27, 103, 146, 153, 179–80, 185, 200, 206, 246, 250, 261, 267–69, 273, 275, 282, 284n11; “technological intimacy” (Cross), 268, 273, 275–78 “intraface” (Galloway), 101–2, 104 iPhone, 266; “iPhone Girl,” 272–74, 279 Islam, 140, 154n1, 179, 181, 188, 191–92, 194n5 Japan, 91–95, 97–102, 104–5, 111–12n35 Jenkins, Henry, 6–7, 29–30n13, 58, 95, 320 Jian Yi, 40 Jia Zhangke, 35, 72 Jigawa State, 176, 184 Kagerou Proj­ect, 105–8 Kaili, 39–41 Kannywood, 178, 191 Kano State, 176–77, 184, 191, 193 Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 318 Kitada Akihiro, 102–3 knowledge(s), 49, 134, 206–7, 258; and affect, 178–79, 183, 195n8, 276; economy, 23, 274; historical, 314; production, 13; sectors, 269; systems, 83 Kolkata, 295, 302 K-­pop, 18, 241–62, 262n4–5 Krings, Matthias, 19 Kuo Li-­hsin, 158 ­labor, 15, 18, 23, 116, 151, 160–61, 165, 169, 266–83, 318–19; “­free ­labor” (Terranova), 23; and gender, 167, 169, 275–76; and intimacy, 277 Laos, 288 Larkin, Brian, 51n8, 190 Latour, Bruno, 136, 156n31, 245, 255–56 law and legality, 5, 11–14, 25, 97, 121, 259 legitimacy. See law and legality; piracy Liang, Lawrence, 10, 274 lifeworld, 3, 73–74, 233, 235, 269, 279 Ling, Richard, 118 Lobato, Ramon, 25, 153 love, 177–78, 185, 190–91 Mandarin Chinese, 41, 75–76, 82–84, 87, 90, 169, 200, 273 Manila, 28, 261 Manipur, 15, 288–89, 292–97, 299–303 marketing, 57, 83, 244, 254 masculinity, 3, 157n31, 194n1, 203–4, 300–301 Mazzarella, William, 15

Mbembe, Achille, 179–80 media: activism, 54; amateur, 21, 35, 85; analog, 9, 283; assemblage, 6, 140, 153, 283; consumption, 57; convergence, 6–7, 94–95, 100, 278, 280; digital, 1, 7, 9; ecol­ogy, 19, 57, 68, 92, 98, 107, 134; events, 190–91; “floating media” (Neves), 278–81, 283; flows, 24; formats, 8, 116, 295; geographies, 112–13n49, 250, 279, 287n51; history, 292, 295; industries, 13, 25–26; literacy, 39; “media mix” (Steinberg), 91–92, 98–99, 101–2, 105–8, 112n49; old, 7, 283; ontologies, 5; owner­ship, 98; phenomenology, 27, 142; practices of mi­grants, 279–80; reception, 15, 54; “spreadable media” ( Jenkins, Ford, and Green), 58–59; studies, 135; technologies, 20, 38, 54–55. See also circulation; distribution; infrastructures; network; new media; participatory media; permeable media; platforms; “spreadable media”; user-­generated media; video mediation, 2, 4, 16–17, 19–21, 26, 92–93, 101, 104–5, 107, 136, 251, 268 Meo ­people, 133–35, 140, 149–50, 154n1 merdeka (Papuan in­de­pen­dence movement), 65 Mewat, 144, 149, 152, 154n1; Mewati (language of), 135, 149, 152, 154; video culture of, 133–54 Miao ­people, 39–40 Microsoft, 73, 94 microterritories, 55, 57, 64, 67 ­Middle East, 7, 60, 191, 211n14, 312 mi­grant workers, 60–61, 267, 271. See also media: “floating media” (Neves) migration. See immigrants “mimetic excess” (Taussig), 181, 183 “mnemonic reserves” (Taylor), 321 mobile device, 267, 269 mobile phone, 7, 8, 15, 61–62, 98, 100, 114–15, 121, 123, 133–34, 136–38, 140, 142, 147–50, 155n7, 156–57n31, 177, 180, 185, 219, 225, 279–80 modernity, 10, 13, 22, 36, 38–39, 43, 50, 51n5, 128, 183, 190, 254, 257, 269, 280; and capitalism, 254, 256–57; colonial, 3; digital, 28, 268–69; global, 5; postcolonial, 123; rural, 37; techno-­, 2, 6–10, 24, 26, 32n46, 269, 279 Mr. India (dir. Haoban Paban Kumar, 2009), 18, 289–91, 297–99, 301 Mroué, Rabih, 308–12, 316–20 multiculturalism, 14, 56, 62, 83, 158–62, 164–68, 172–73, 200–202; recognition and, 160–62, 164, 167 I ndex  357

“multitude” (Virno), 23 ­music, 15, 41, 46, 52n18, 136, 143–44, 149–50, 56, 75–76, 155n7, 176, 179, 180–81, 183–85, 188–92, 218, 226, 240–41, 244, 268, 281, 323. See also K-­pop ­music video, 15, 18, 75–77, 87, 133–35, 143–44, 146–47, 151–54, 227, 240–47, 249–262, 262n4–5, 264n23, 267; production of, 136, 143. See also “Gangnam Style” (PSY); K-­pop Myanmar, 9, 288–89 Nakamura, Lisa, 246, 248 nationalism, 83, 208, 256–57, 259, 314 nation-­state, 4, 19, 201, 270, 289 neoliberalism, 6, 9, 16, 18, 22, 27, 75, 84, 86, 89n18, 116, 159–62, 166–67, 172–7, 201, 207, 242, 269–72, 278, 280–81; and Asia, 9. See also globalization; governmentality network, 3, 6, 7–8, 20, 27, 29n13, 55–56, 60–64, 67–68, 97, 105–6, 120–26, 134, 136, 172, 278–79; circulatory, 60–63, 136, 140, 150; technocultural, 135; traffic, 122 New Delhi, 120, 154n1 new media, 6–7, 49, 54–56, 61, 63, 73–74, 142, 178–79, 181, 185, 190, 218, 244, 268; studies, 8, 24 ngos (nongovernmental organ­izations), 15, 54–55, 57–58, 67, 116, 303n4 Niconico, 91–93, 99–108, 111n31–111n33, 227, 238n27 Nigeria, 140, 176–93 Nozawa, Shunsuke, 101–2 obscenity, 122, 124, 180 Ong, Aihwa, 160, 270, 275–76 opacity, 104; of interface, 109n6; Johnson, 102; Nozawa, 101 Paban Kumar, Haoban, 18, 289–91, 295, 298, 301 Pakistan, 136, 151, 156n28 Palestine, 8, 308, 316, 320–21 Pang, Laikwan, 13 Papua, 59, 65–68 Papuan Voices, 65, 67 participation, 6–7, 9–10, 15, 21–26, 104–5, 112n49, 119, 142, 159, 161, 165, 190, 217, 235–36, 241, 250, 282–83, 308, 320; “ave­nues of participation” (Liang), 10; in relation to media content, 282; and ­labor, 22–26. See also access; democracy participatory media, 35–50, 56–59, 68, 119, 241, 250, 263n10, 324n1 peer-­to-­peer sharing. See file sharing 358 

I ndex

penumbral, 2–3, 5, 6, 23, 25, 28, 283; in relation to the global, 5, 8, 278 per­for­mance and performativity, 15, 146–49, 153, 245–50, 317, 321 permeable media, 54, 56–59, 68 Pipe Dreams (dir. Ali Cheri and Rabih Mroué, 2012), 314–15 piracy, 9, 12–13, 31n24–27, 62, 143, 274, 281, 320; and aesthetics, 144 Pixelated Revolution (dir. Rabih Mroué, 2014), 316–19 plasticity, 5–6, 10, 16–17, 254; “cosmoplastics” (Sarkar), 287n57 platform, 7, 9, 57–58, 91–102, 104–8, 109n6, 110–11n23, 113n51; as commercial space, 97; counterplatform, 108, 109n6; as delivery mechanism of content, 95, 100; of distribution, 287; as hardware versus as software, 96; imperialism ( Jin), 93, 97–99, 101, 107, 111n29; as stand-in for “media,” 95. See also content; infrastructure; Niconico “po­liti­cal society” (Chatterjee), 25, 134 popu­lar, the, 3, 21–26, 28, 150. See also global-­ popular; subaltern: “subaltern-­popular” (Chattopadhyay and Sarkar) popu­lar culture, 4, 57–59, 217, 243 pornography, 120–22, 124, 177, 189, 248 postcolonial, 4–5, 11–12, 22, 82–83, 97, 180, 189–90, 230; globalization, 256; modernity, 123; studies, 97, 126, 275; subject, 22 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 161, 266–67 Pradipkumar, Kunrakpan, 289–90, 297, 301 precarity, 18, 269, 291, 303n2, 319 production, 5, 7, 10–11, 13, 15, 20, 23–26, 30n16, 60, 62–64, 67, 73, 75–77, 80–81, 83, 86, 92, 94, 99, 102, 104–5, 122–24, 128, 134, 136, 159, 163, 190, 224, 257, 267–68, 270, 272, 274–75, 277–78, 291–92, 295–96, 302, 323; cultural, 11, 39, 92, 99, 115–20, 127, 243, 255, 268. See also consumption; distribution; ­labor; video: production professionalism, 35, 257, 311, 316 protocol, 2, 8, 19, 125, 221, 248, 271, 299 public: culture, 38, 49, 206; domain, 25, 119; interest, 60; life, 220; rural public culture in China, 37–39, 43–44, 47–50; ser ­vice, 248–50; space, 58, 62–63, 123, 134, 141, 166, 194n2, 246; sphere, 19, 49, 58, 251 publicity, 77–78, 80, 142–55, 150, 154; “mass publicity” (Mazzarella), 15

publics, 15, 17, 25, 27, 84, 118, 146, 153, 192, 201, 203, 224, 264n26, 277; constitution of, 146, 231; of YouTube, 235 Qur’an, 179, 184, 187–91 race, 66, 172, 198–209, 234, 246, 248, 270; racism, 56, 201, 207. See also multiculturalism rape, 114, 295, 301 recognition, 44, 202, 207, 308; multicultural politics of, 160–62, 164, 167, 172; strug­gles for, 158 reenactment, 308, 322 reformasi (post-1998 Indonesian period of reform), 56, 59, 62–63 regulation, 54, 115, 119, 123, 142. See also censorship; global governance; law and legality; legitimacy; piracy; surveillance remix, 7–8, 58, 64, 115, 120, 127, 144, 147, 152, 156n28, 217, 226–27, 233, 274 repre­sen­ta­tion, 4, 19–20, 26, 32n50, 43–45, 47–50, 60, 62, 64–67, 80–82, 117, 123, 134–35, 150, 153, 158, 160–62, 165–69, 171–72, 201, 207, 211–12n16, 222, 227, 241–42, 252, 299–300, 309, 312, 321, 323; aesthetics of, 134; relationship to real­ity, 249; self-­representation, 15, 38, 43; and subalternity, 4, 150, 158; technologies of, 20 risk, 267, 270–71, 293, 302, 306n28 Rofel, Lisa, 268, 281 Said, Edward, 11 Samsung, 138, 142, 252 Sarkar, Bhaskar, 150 sd cards, 2, 8, 279; micro sd cards, 15, 134, 138–42, 153, 220; micro sd cards vs. sim cards, 155n7 self, 43, 81, 83–84, 101, 178, 181, 270–71; and nation, 5, 84; and other, 11, 178–79, 310; self-­brand, 148; self-­dissolution, 262; self-­documentary, 250; self-­expression, 21; self-­presentation, 101, 206; self-­regulation, 75, 269, 281; self-­transformation, 254, 261; “technologies of the self” (Foucault), 74, 81, 83, 85. See also anonymity; identification; identity; repre­sen­ta­tion; subject selfie, 273, 279 sensorium, 142, 176–193 “sensory politics” (Casey), 176, 186 Seoul, 242, 261, 295 sex, 121, 123, 177, 185–86, 189, 196n22; industry, 279; workers, 306n28. See also erotics; pornography shari‘a law, 177–78, 190–93

Singapore, 207, 212n24, 295 social, the, 22, 101, 279 social media, 8, 15, 21, 38, 54–68, 69n8, 100, 115, 120, 126, 172, 269, 308. See also content; file sharing; network; participation; platform; user-­generated media software, 81, 96–99, 105, 111n26, 116–17, 134, 136, 244, 291, 317. See also hardware; infrastructure; platform Solanas, Fernando, 3, 310 song, 20, 40, 44, 48, 75–76, 99, 105–6, 133–34, 141, 144, 146–49, 151–52, 156n28, 177, 185, 190–92, 218 sound, 41–42, 46, 64, 146, 177, 184, 188–89, 192, 226, 290, 319 South Asia, 12 Southeast Asia, 9, 15, 19, 55–56, 59, 61, 67–68, 159–60, 210n5, 270, 303n1 sovereignty, 12, 14, 16, 203, 280, 293 spectatorship, 73, 78–79, 242, 249–50, 282, 297, 323; active, 57, 323; spectator vs. user, 126–27, 251, and YouTube, 234 speculation, 1, 27, 150, 272, 301; and the global, 21 Spivak, Gayatri, 4 subaltern, 10, 15, 45, 135, 158, 280; “subaltern-­ popular” (Chattopadhyay and Sarkar), 4, 134–35, 150–51, 155n2 subaltern studies, 4, 22, 135 Subaltern Studies Collective, 4 subculture, 3, 22, 99–100, 105. See also fan subject: of access, 123–25; Asian German, 198–209; citizen-­, 10, 19, 21, 268; “data subject” (Shah), 19, 128; digital, 125–28; of history, 21; intersubjectivity, 178, 188, 323; mediated, 189–91; po­liti­cal, 231, 235; postcolonial, 22; subjectivating influence of Internet, 242, 248; subjectivity, 18–19, 38, 48, 49, 75, 81–83, 85–86, 116–17, 122, 207, 245, 261, 268, 270–72, 275, 277–78, 282, 293, 300, 312; “subject of mimicry” (Bhabha), 126 Suharto, 56, 59, 62–63 Sundaram, Ravi, 144 surveillance, 17, 19, 24, 191, 292, 294, 306n28 Syria, 20, 308, 312, 314–15, 319, 324 Tadiar, Neferti X. M., 271 Taiwan, 73–76, 78–84, 86–90, 158–75; government media production in, 79–80, 86; Taiwan New Cinema, 72 taste, 10, 15, 152, 154 I ndex  359

technology, 3, 5, 8, 14, 17, 20, 23, 27, 45, 54–55, 59–64, 67–68, 73, 75, 81, 83–84, 86, 115–18, 121–28, 134–35, 142, 151, 154, 177–78, 180, 190, 248, 251, 268, 270, 273–80, 293, 295, 316; and gender, 157n31; and power, 276, and the state, 129n9, 130n29; technological determinism, 55, 135; “technomobility” (Wallis), 267, 280; video, 9, 37–38, 44, 165. See also access; ict (Information and Communication Technology); ict4d (Information and Communication Technology for Development); infrastructure; new media; self: “technologies of the self” (Foucault) Telangana, 217–31, 231, 235 tele­vi­sion, 7, 17–18, 35, 37–38, 40, 57, 59, 76–77, 85, 94, 104, 142, 181, 267, 280, 311, 314; commercials, 76–77; in Indonesia, 62; in Taiwan, 86, 159, 161–73 terror/terrorism, 12, 14, 293 Thailand, 160, 254, 288 Theatre of the Oppressed, 322 Third Cinema, 3, 82 third world, 274–75, 314 tourism, 40–41, 56, 79, 279 Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (trips), 2, 13 translocal, 151–52 transmedia, 57–58, 292 trauma, 203, 206, 305n18, 314 Tsai Ming-­liang, 73, 78 Tsai Tsung-­lung, 159, 165–72 2 Channeru (2ch), 102–4 Ubonrat Siriyuvasak, 254–55, 259 universalism(s) and universality, 2–6, 12–13, 250, 261, 310; and access, 128; in approaches to the global, 6, 21; of consumption as capacity of the h­ uman, 251; of the Internet, 244–46; of twentieth-­century commercial pop ­music, 240; of web space, 101; of YouTube, 55 user-­generated media, 54–56, 58, 60, 68, 69n8, 93, 96–100, 106, 115, 119–20, 224–26, 233, 247, 250–51, 308, 325n22. See also content: comments as; fan value, 13, 24, 26, 37, 48, 74, 82, 84, 127, 152, 160, 163, 167, 190, 201, 204–5, 208, 222, 235, 281, 318; as generated by piracy, 12, 274; of

360 

I ndex

K-­pop reaction videos, 250; use-­value, 321. See also capital; circulation; consumption; production vcds (video compact discs), 8, 37–38, 136–38, 140–41, 145, 155n7 Ventriloquism (dir. Ali Cherri, 2013), 312–13 vernacular, 85, 149–51, 153, 155n7 video: activism, 62, 66–67; assemblages, 10; culture, 1–2, 14, 16–17, 20, 23, 30n14, 116, 125, 135, 150, 153, 183, 190, 193, 300–302, 308, 320–21, 323, 326n33; digital production, 35; and the digital, 16; forms, 6, 8–9; haptics, 17; literacy, 147; poeisis, 20–21; practices, 8–9; production, 21, 35–40, 43–44, 46–50, 60–61, 65, 80, 126, 142–43, 154, 252, 292, 294–96, 302; resolution, 63, 138, 316; technologies, 8–9; theory, 9; viral, 120, 227, 240–41, 243, 267, 282 video art, 8, 16–18, 20, 30n14 Vietnam, 8, 18, 160, 165, 171–72, 211n14, 288 village videos, 40–41, 51n11 virality, 118, 120, 122, 127, 143, 279 Virno, Paolo, 23 voyeurism, 167, 250 Wallis, Cara, 7, 280 Wang, Shujen, 13 Warner, Michael, 146–47 Web, 99, 109n6, 272, 279; Web 2.0, 8, 24, 227, 282, 308; websites, 9, 78, 81, 96, 98–99, 111n33, 120, 122–24, 251. See also EngageMedia, Niconico, YouTube wei dianying (microcinema), 72–90 Whose Utopia (dir. Cao Fei, 2006), 281–83 Wong Kar-­wai, 82 Wong Ming, 17, 198–209 worldmaking, 16, 21, 274 Wu Wenguang, 39, 45 xiao quexing (small assured happiness), 84–87 Youku, 8, 78 youth, 115, 133, 140, 142–43, 153, 191, 252, 254–55, 301; youthfulness, 148 YouTube, 6, 8, 15, 20, 54–55, 57, 78, 96, 99–101, 119, 126, 137–38, 151–52, 209, 217, 219–35, 238n28, 241, 247, 250, 252, 254, 263n21, 264n23, 308–9, 314–16; as moving-­image archive, 237n14