Global Media Cultures

In this week's episode, guest Lorena Alvarado discusses her article "Never Late: Unwelcome Desires and Diasporas in Chavela Vargas’ Last Works" which analyzes how the last two albums of musical performer Chavela Vargas, Cupaima (2006) and ¡Por mi Culpa! (2010), continue making aesthetic choices that de-form the classic repertoire of rancheras and boleros. These musical works represent a "late style" formulated by an older subject that refuses to retire quietly and with docility. Alvarado argues that the mix of beloved, familiar lyrics and melodies with sonic details that evoke the experiences of migrants and Indigenous communities result in an unexpected, repellent musicality that speaks to the contemporary struggles of those unwelcome, despised, and outside neo-liberal chronology.

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In this week's episode, guest Laurena Bernabo discusses her article "Progressive Television, Translation, and Globalization: The Case of Glee in Latin America" which analyzes the behind-the-scenes production process to dub the TV show Glee into Spanish for Latin American audiences. Bernabo demonstrates how managerial choices, talent availability, and narrative particularities shape the creative decisions for a show's dubbing. In the specific case of Glee, these creative decisions significantly impact the translation of the show's attempts at representing various identities, such as gender, race, and sexuality. Bernabo argues for the importance of studying production processes and translated texts together to account for how ideologically rich representations circulate across linguistic and national contexts.

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In this week's episode, guest Camilo Diaz Pino discusses his article "Weaponizing collective energy: Dragon Ball Z in the anti-neoliberal Chilean protest movement" which analyzes how the 2011 student-led protests in Chile borrowed icons from the popular anime show to foster a sense of collective struggle. The mobilization of the "genki dama" captured the need for solidarity among various protest groups as they fought the continued privatization of public services in the country. Diaz Pino argues that this case study illustrates the powerful influence of Japanese media in Latin America and the need to study transnational media flows that do not intersect with Anglo-American perspectives.

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In this week's episode, guests Aswin Punathambekar and Sriram Mohan discuss their article "A Sound Bridge: Listening for the Political in a Digital Age" which analyzes how catchy sounds become sonic cues for political participation. In their analysis of the popular refrain “Why This Kolaveri” (“Why This Murderous Rage”), the authors demonstrate how a sound's availability, performativity, and resonance enable it to be picked up by a variety of journalists, politicians, and citizens engaged in popular protest movements. Punathambekar and Mohan argue that understanding politics in the digital age requires attending more closely to sonic modes of participation.

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In this week's episode, guest Bianka Ballina discusses her article "Juan of the Dead: Anxious Consumption and Zombie Cinema in Cuba," which analyzes the complex material and ideological transformations in Cuban film over the past two decades. Ballina argues that Alejandro Brugués's film Juan de los muertos offers an opportunity to explore the circulation of anxieties around global consumption within the island. While the film contributes to the continued reformulation of Cuban and genre cinemas, it also reproduces conservative ideologies about race, gender, and sexuality in Cuba.

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In this week's episode, guest Michelle Cho discusses her article "Genre, Translation, and Transnational Cinema" which analyzes Kim Jee-woon’s Korean western film The Good, the Bad, the Weird as emblematic of both the transnational adaptation of popular genres and the international rise of South Korean cinema in the early 21st century. Cho proposes a theory of genre translation that does not require audiences to know all textual references in a film and that accounts for the embodied pleasures and therapeutic sensations of globally popular genres, such as westerns.

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In this week's episode, guest Karrmen Crey discusses her article "Screen Text and Institutional Context: Indigenous Film Production and Academic Research Institutions" which analyzes post-secondary institutions and the intellectual traditions that shape how Indigenous filmmakers engage the politics and ethics of representation. By comparing two documentaries by Indigenous women, Navajo Talking Picture (Arlene Bowman 1986) and Cry Rock (Banchi Hanuse 2010), Crey argues that we must consider how Indigenous artists contend with sources of funding and formal tropes enmeshed in Western traditions when attempting to tell Indigenous stories in visual media.

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In this week's episode, guest Laura Beltz Imaoka discusses her chapter "Rain with a Chance of Radiation: Forecasting Local and Global Risk after Fukushima," which traces the news coverage of the fallout of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Imaoka analyzes how the distinct organizations of the Japanese and U.S. news industries contributed to vastly different public perceptions of local risk and global atmospheric interconnections. She also notes an early moment when, in the absence of reliable data from official institutions, civilians turned to social media to obtain their information, often with disastrous effects.

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In this week's episode, guest Jason Farman discusses his article "Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Postmodern Cartography" which analyzes how the political and social implications of cartography take on new significance in the digital age, with the proliferation of interactive maps and geographic information systems (GIS). Farman argues that, by incorporating a social network that engages users as embodied interactors rather than disembodied voyeurs, Google Earth is able to present user-generated content spatially within the very object that such content critiques.

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Welcome to the Global Media Cultures podcast! In this brief episode, I explain the origin of the series and what I hope listeners take away from these conversations over the next three months.

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