Fwd: CFP "Media Cultures of the (Inter/Anti) Imperial Pacific" — DEADLINE EXTENDED

Apologies for cross-posting:


The Media Fields Editorial Collective at the UC Santa Barbara Department of
Film & Media Studies is currently accepting submissions for *Media Fields*
Issue 15, "Media Cultures of the (Inter/Anti)Imperial Pacific," co-edited
by Xiuhe Zhang and Tyler Morgenstern. Submissions are now due April 30,
2019. Full CFP and submission details are below, and can also be found
online at http://mediafieldsjournal.org/call-for-submissions/. Please
circulate to any students, colleagues or lists you see fit. Your help in
distributing this CFP is sincerely appreciated!

Recent controversies—from protracted battles over international tariff
structures to renewed nuclear sabre rattling between the United States and
North Korea, and from the brutalities of offshore migrant detention in
places like Nauru to the construction of artificial islands in the South
China Sea—have thrust the Pacific theater to the forefront of global
geopolitical attention. But while these disputes often appear in the guise
of crisis, as urgent, largely unanticipated outbreaks of acrimony, they are
in many ways historically implicated. As Kornel Chang writes, the Pacific
has long been a deeply vexed geopolitical and cultural domain, a vast
theater of “interimperial” encounter striated by the violences of colonial
settlement, neocolonial retrenchment, capitalist exploitation, racial
domination, and military conquest. But if these are political and cultural
histories, they are at the same time media histories. Indeed, since at
least the mid-19th century, media and communication technologies have
played a central role both in the consolidation of imperial ambitions
across the Pacific, as well as in the manifold ways these ambitions have
been sabotaged, undermined, and refused. Seeking to thematize these complex
and ongoing histories, issue 15 of Media Fields Journal will explore the
media cultures of the (inter/anti) imperial Pacific.

In recent years, scholars of media and technology have turned often toward
the Pacific, showing how the region’s overlapping histories of colonization
and imperial expansion have fundamentally shaped global communication
infrastructures, and vice versa. Nicole Starosielski, for instance, has
shown the remarkable degree to which contemporary undersea cable networks,
particularly those that connect the west coast of North America with the
Asia Pacific, retrace nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial trading
routes, transposing the lineaments of territorial empire into a fiber optic
register. Ruth Oldenziel, similarly, has read the Pacific as a
techno-imperial palimpsest, uncovering the surprising geographic and
logistical continuities between colonial coaling stations, early electric
telegraph networks, and the shortwave communications infrastructures that
proliferated across the Pacific in the Cold War years. Dwayne Winseck and
Robert Pike, finally, have reconstructed in painstaking detail the
emergence of coherent communications markets in and around the Asia Pacific
after about 1860—a project that played out through a baffling choreography
of interimperial negotiation and corporate shell gaming.

In the hopes of extending these important contributions in new directions,
we seek original scholarship that explores how media have functioned as
tools of imperial governance in the Pacific since the 19th Century, as well
as their involvement in struggles for otherwise Pacific worlds and
decolonial futures. To this end, we invite contributions that bring media
history, theory and analysis into sustained conversation with such fields
as Native American and Indigenous studies, postcolonial theory, critical
race and ethnic studies, island and ocean studies, and archipelagic
American studies (see Roberts & Stephens, 2017). However, we encourage
submissions from all those whose work explores the richness and vitality of
Pacific media cultures—whether historical, contemporary, or
emergent—through the lenses of imperiality, coloniality, and/or
decolonization. Moreover, even as we acknowledge the abiding hegemony of
the United States across much of the Pacific theater, we strongly encourage
submissions that provincialize US- and Anglo-centric perspectives, and
approach the question of Pacific imperiality from alternative national
and/or geopolitical contexts.

Potential topics for papers include but are not limited to:
●      Indigenous media theory, history, and critique
●      Comparative and differential Indigeneities
●      The technopolitics of imperial administration
●      Activist media: anti-imperialism, decolonization, Indigenous
sovereignty
●      The aesthetic and representational politics of (de)colonization
●      Piracy, hacking, and sabotage
●      Trauma, memory, and the archive
●      Oceanic media infrastructures
●      Colonial and imperial nostalgia
●      South-South/East-East solidarities
●      Critical political economy: tariffs, trade, intellectual property,
informality
●      Gender, sexuality, and desire
●      Past futures: Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement, Nuclear
Non-Proliferation
●      Environmental disruption and resource extraction (seafloor dredging,
artificial island construction, mining, dumping, pollution, sea level rise)
●      Media policy and regulation in/of colonial states
●      Media, technology, and discourses of development
●      (Mili)tourism
●      Techno-orientalism
●      (Revisiting) the cultural imperialism thesis
●      Analytics of migration and settlement: the settler, the ‘coolie,’
the arrivant, the ‘free laborer,’ the indentured, etc.
●      Asian settler colonialism (see Okamura & Fujikane, 2008; Saranillio,
2013)
●      Empire and/as media distribution
●      Media and scalarity: locality, regionality, nationality, globality,
and the hemispheric

For any inquiries, please contact issue co-editors Tyler Morgenstern (
[email protected]) and Xiuhe Zhang ([email protected]).
Submissions should be approximately 1500–2500 words, and should include at
least one image or audio or video clip related to the essay topic. Email
submissions to [email protected]. For more information and
complete submission guidelines, please visit
http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org

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