Ten innovative interviews explore how producers of documentary media—filmmakers, journalists, and artists—located in societies considered marginal to the high-tech global centers respond to local and international audiences in creating their works. We meet a South African playwright who is shaping a distinctive form of activist journalism; a New Guinean producer who manages several media careers; Polish and German filmmakers developing critical documentaries on compromised new orders; a Columbian artist who provides powerful representations of endemic violence in her society; and writers from Martinique and Argentina with varied careers in the arts, media, and politics who provide tragicomic accounts of the marginal situations of their societies. Cynical, hopeful, ambivalent all at once, these cultural producers in perilous states share a keen awareness of the marginality of their societies in the broader context of global change, and associate integrity in the reporting of local events with a critical politics of representation.

In PAPER TANGOS, classically trained dancer and anthropologist Julie Taylor examines the poetics of the tango, while recounting a life lived crossing the borders of two distinct and complex cultures. Drawing parallels among the violence of the Argentine Junta, tango dancing, and her own life, Taylor weaves the line between engaging memoir and cultural critique. The book's design includes photographs on every page that form a flip-book sequence of a tango. 89 photos.

In An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy offers an engaging overview of an important trend--the filmmaking of postcolonial, Third World, and other displaced individuals living in the West. How their personal experiences of exile or diaspora translate into cinema is a key focus of Naficy's work. Although the experience of expatriation varies greatly from one person to the next, the films themselves exhibit stylistic similarities, from their open- and closed-form aesthetics to their nostalgic and memory-driven multilingual narratives, and from their emphasis on political agency to their concern with identity and transgression of identity. The author explores such features while considering the specific histories of individuals and groups that engender divergent experiences, institutions, and modes of cultural production and consumption. Treating creativity as a social practice, he demonstrates that the films are in dialogue not only with the home and host societies but also with audiences, many of whom are also situated astride cultures and whose desires and fears the filmmakers wish to express. Comparing these films to Hollywood films, Naficy calls them "accented." Their accent results from the displacement of the filmmakers, their alternative production modes, and their style. Accented cinema is an emerging genre, one that requires new sets of viewing skills on the part of audiences. Its significance continues to grow in terms of output, stylistic variety, cultural diversity, and social impact. This book offers the first comprehensive and global coverage of this genre while presenting a framework in which to understand its intricacies.

In the 1980s, George Marcus spearheaded a major critique of cultural anthropology, expressed most clearly in the landmark book Writing Culture, which he coedited with James Clifford. Ethnography through Thick and Thin updates and advances that critique for the late 1990s. Marcus presents a series of penetrating and provocative essays on the changes that continue to sweep across anthropology. He examines, in particular, how the discipline's central practice of ethnography has been changed by "multi-sited" approaches to anthropology and how new research patterns are transforming anthropologists' careers. Marcus rejects the view, often expressed, that these changes are undermining anthropology. The combination of traditional ethnography with scholarly experimentation, he argues, will only make the discipline more lively and diverse. The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, Marcus shows how ethnographers' tradition of defining fieldwork in terms of peoples and places is now being challenged by the need to study culture by exploring connections, parallels, and contrasts among a variety of often seemingly incommensurate sites. The second part illustrates this emergent multi-sited condition of research by reflecting it in some of Marcus's own past research on Tongan elites and dynastic American fortunes. In the final section, which includes the previously unpublished essay "Sticking with Ethnography through Thick and Thin," Marcus examines the evolving professional culture of anthropology and the predicaments of its new scholars. He shows how students have increasingly been drawn to the field as much by such powerful interdisciplinary movements as feminism, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies as by anthropology's own traditions. He also considers the impact of demographic changes within the discipline--in particular the fact that anthropologists are no longer almost exclusively Euro-Americans studying non-Euro-Americans. These changes raise new issues about the identities of anthropologists in relation to those they study, and indeed, about what is to define standards of ethnographic scholarship. Filled with keen and highly illuminating observations, Ethnography through Thick and Thin will stimulate fresh debate about the past, present, and future of a discipline undergoing profound transformations.

How religion, gender, and urban sociality are expressed in and mediated via television drama in Kinshasa is the focus of this ethnographic study. Influenced by Nigerian films and intimately related to the emergence of a charismatic Christian scene, these teleserials integrate melodrama, conversion narratives, Christian songs, sermons, testimonies, and deliverance rituals to produce commentaries on what it means to be an inhabitant of Kinshasa.

Responding to calls to focus on postcolonial literature's literary qualities instead of merely its political content, this volume investigates the idiosyncrasies of postcolonial poetics. However, rather than privileging the literary at the expense of the political, the essays collected here analyze how texts use genre and form to offer multiple and distinct ways of responding to political and historical questions. By probing how different kinds of literary writing can blur with other discourses, the contributors offer key insights into postcolonial literature's power to imagine alternative identities and societies.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media provides an accessible and comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research in media linguistics. This handbook analyzes both language theory and practice, demonstrating the vital role of this research in understanding language use in society. With over thirty chapters contributed by leading academics from around the world, this handbook: addresses issues of language use, form, structure, ideology, practice, and culture in the context of both traditional and new communication media; investigates mediated language use in public spheres, organizations, and personal communication, including newspaper journalism, broadcasting, and social media; examines the interplay of language and media from both linguistic and media perspectives, discussing auditory and visual media and graphic modes, as well as language and gender, multilingualism, and language change; analyzes the advantages and shortcomings of current approaches within media linguistics research and outlines avenues for future research. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media is a must-have survey of this key field, and is essential reading for those interested in media linguistics.