Decolonial Imaginaries in Palestinian Experimental Film and Video focuses on an underexamined group of female Palestinian filmmakers, highlighting their relevance for thinking through a diverse set of issues relating to decolonial aesthetics, post-nationalism and gender, non-Western ecologies, trauma and memory, diasporic experiences of space, biopolitics, feminist historiography and decolonial temporalities. Positing that these filmmaker-artists radically counter dominant media images of Palestinians, deessentializing Palestinian identity while opening up history and the present to new potentialities and ways of imagining Palestinian futures, Decolonial Imaginaries in Palestinian Experimental Film and Video argues that Palestinian experience is urgently relevant to all of us. As the works address issues of food availability and land use, environmental collapse and forced displacement, Hole explores how such films generate hope, imagine impossible possibilities and offer inspiration and wisdom when it comes to losing and rebuilding. Addressing a fundamentally transnational and understudied area, this book will resonate with readers working in the areas of film and media studies, Palestinian cultural studies, historiography, Middle East studies and experimental film.

"Decolonial Imaginaries in Palestinian Experimental Film and Video focuses on an underexamined group of female Palestinian filmmakers, highlighting their relevance for thinking through a diverse set of issues relating to decolonial aesthetics; post-nationalism and gender; non-Western ecologies; trauma and memory; diasporic experiences of space; biopolitics; feminist historiography; and decolonial temporalities. Positing that these filmmaker-artists radically counter dominant media images of Palestinians, de-essentializing Palestinian identity, while opening up history and the present to new potentialities and ways of imagining Palestinian futures, Decolonial Imaginaries in Palestinian Experimental Film and Video argues that Palestinian experience is urgently relevant to all of us. As the works address issues of food availability and land use, environmental collapse and forced displacement, Hole explores how such films generate hope, imagine impossible possibilities and offer inspiration and wisdom when it comes to losing and rebuilding. Addressing a fundamentally transnational and understudied area, this book will resonate with readers working in the areas of film and media studies, Palestinian cultural studies, historiography, Middle East studies and experimental film"--

Cinema and Surveillance: The Asymmetric Gaze shows how key modern filmmakers challenge and disturb the relation between film and surveillance, medium and message. Assembling readings of films by Harun Farocki, Michael Haneke, and Fritz Lang, the book considers surveillance in such different domains as urban life, religious doctrine, and law enforcement. With surveillance present in the modern world as both a technological phenomenon and a social practice, the author shows how cinema, as a visual medium, presents highly sophisticated analyses of surveillance. He suggests that “surveillance” is less an issue to be tackled from a secure spectatorial position than an experience to be rendered, an event to be dealt with. Far from offering a general model of spectatorship, the book explores how narrative moments of surveillance are complicated by specific spectatorial responses. In its intersection of well-known figures and a highly topical issue, this book will have broad appeal, especially, but not exclusively, among students and scholars in film studies, media studies, German studies, European studies, art history, and political theory.

In Insurgent Aesthetics Ronak K. Kapadia theorizes the world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East. He traces how new forms of remote killing, torture, confinement, and surveillance have created a distinctive post-9/11 infrastructure of racialized state violence. Linking these new forms of violence to the history of American imperialism and conquest, Kapadia shows how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists force a reckoning with the US war on terror's violent destruction and its impacts on immigrant and refugee communities. Drawing on an eclectic range of visual, installation, and performance works, Kapadia reveals queer feminist decolonial critiques of the US security state that visualize subjugated histories of US militarism and make palpable what he terms “the sensorial life of empire.” In this way, these artists forge new aesthetic and social alliances that sustain critical opposition to the global war machine and create alternative ways of knowing and feeling beyond the forever war.

This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past. Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology in relation to other key media studies debates including software studies, German media theory, imaginary media research, new materialism and digital humanities. What is Media Archaeology? advances an innovative theoretical position while also presenting an engaging and accessible overview for students of media, film and cultural studies. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary ties between art, technology and media.