How are issues related to identity representation negotiated in Middle Eastern and North African museums? Can museums provide a suitable canvas for minorities to express their voice? Can narratives change and stereotypes be broken and, if so, what kind of identities are being deployed? Against the backdrop of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaken the region in recent years, the contributors to this volume interrogate a range of case studies from across the region - examining how museums engage inclusion, diversity and the politics of minority identities. They bring to the fore the region's diversity and sketches a 'museology of disaster' in which minoritised political subjects regain visibility.

This open access book explores the use of visual methods in migration studies through a combination of theoretical analyses and empirical studies. The first section looks at how various visual methods, including photography, film, and mental maps, may be used to analyse the spatial presence of migrants. The second section addresses the processual building of narratives around migration, thereby using formats such as film and visual essay, and reflecting upon the ways they become carriers and mediators of both story and theory within the subject of migration. Section three focuses on vulnerable communities and discusses how visual methods can empower these communities, thereby also focusing on the theoretical and ethical implications of migration. The fourth section addresses the issue of migrant representation in visual discourses. Based on these contributions, a concluding methodological chapter systematizes the use of visual methods in migration studies across disciplines, with regard to their empirical, theoretical, and ethical implications. Multidisciplinary in character, this book is an interesting read for students and migration scholars who engage with visual methodologies, as well as practitioners, journalists, filmmakers, photographers, curators of exhibitions who address the topic of migration visually.

During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.

Difference exists; otherness is constructed. This book asks how important Western artists, from Giotto to Titian and Caravaggio, and from Bosch to Dürer and Rembrandt, shaped the imaging of non-Western individuals in early modern art. Victor I. Stoichita’s nuanced and detailed study examines images of racial otherness during a time of new encounters of the West with different cultures and peoples, such as those with dark skins: Muslims and Jews. Featuring a host of informative illustrations and crossing the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and postcolonial studies, Darker Shades also reconsiders the Western canon’s most essential facets: perspective, pictorial narrative, composition, bodily proportion, beauty, color, harmony, and lighting. What room was there for the “Other,” Stoichita would have us ask, in such a crystalline, unchanging paradigm?

This book addresses cross-cultural representations of ethnic minority peoples by dominant society 'outsiders' and indigenous self-representation in the context of the 'New Media Nation'. In doing so, it explores the role of language, culture, identity and media in liberation struggles and the emergence of new political entities, and opens up issues of colonial oppression to public debate. It is intended to help inform policy in a variety of settings. Grounded in current perspectives on diaspora and homeland and drawing on Alia's work on minorities, media and identity as well as Bull's work on Maori socio-cultural issues and criminalisation of minorities, this volume offers a comparative, international perspective on the experiences of a broad range of ethnic minority peoples. These include Inuit and First Nations people in Canada; Native Americans and African Americans in the United States; Sami in northern Europe; Maori in New Zealand; Aboriginal people in Australia and Roma in Ireland and Britain.

Despite the common belief that art galleries will naturally become more gender equitable over time, the fact is that many art institutions in Canada have become even less so over the last decade, with female artists making up less than 25 per cent of the contemporary exhibitions of several major galleries. In the first large-scale overview of gender diversity in Canadian art exhibitions, Anne Dymond makes a persuasive plea for more consciously equitable curating. Drawing on data from nearly one hundred institutions, Diversity Counts reveals that while some galleries are relatively equitable, many continue to marginalize female and racialized artists. The book pursues an interdisciplinary approach, considering the art world's resistance to numeric data, discourses on representation and identity, changing conceptualizations of institutional responsibility over time, and different ways particular institutions manage inclusion and exclusion. A thoughtful examination of the duty of public galleries to represent underserved communities, Dymond's study bravely navigates the unspoken criteria for acceptance in the curatorial world. Demonstrating how important hard data is for inclusivity, Diversity Counts is a timely analysis that brings the art world up to date on progressive movements for social transformation.

Meet the four misfits living in one HDB flat. One is a Malay–Jew who is trying to get his father to come back as a ghost. Cantona is a promising Bangladeshi artist on the run from a construction company. Tights is a Chinese illegal immigrant with a Forrest Gump obsession. And Shanti is a gifted Indian lab technician hiding from her abusive husband. When a forlorn pontianak begins haunting them, the four friends find themselves embroiled in a surreal showdown that may just upend the world, or at least Singapore. Written in Suffian Hakim's trademark humour, The Minorities is a novel about those living on the edges of society and their soulful bond.