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3 Social media, mutual aid and solidarity movements as a response to institutional breakdown Introduction Earlier in this book, we discussed media coverage of wars, and international relations more generally, and how this produces a sense of helplessness, confusion and general distrust for media audiences. Information about global conflicts seems inadequate, biased, and does not give people enough of a conceptual framework to understand or respond. This is connected to a sense that international and national governments are failing to deal with global conflicts
Recalling the insurrectionary violence that descended upon the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, reflecting on the baser instincts left unchecked in America by an absence of common communication and a paradigmatic shift in our media apparatuses, Justin A. Joyce introduces the seventh volume of James Baldwin Review.
James Baldwin might be imagined as reaching his greatest level of popularity within this current decade. With the growth of social media activist movements like Black Lives Matter, which captures and catalyzes off a Baldwinian rage, and the publishing of works directly evoking Baldwin, his voice appears more pronounced between the years of 2013 and 2015. Scholars in Baldwin studies, along with strangers who were turned into witnesses of his literary oeuvre, have contributed to this renewed interest in Baldwin, or at least have been able to sharpen the significance of the phenomenon. Publications and performances highlight Baldwin’s work and how it prefigured developments in critical race and queer theories, while also demonstrating Baldwin’s critique as both prophetic and “disturbingly” contemporary. Emerging largely from Baldwin’s timelessness in social and political discourse, and from the need to conjure a figure to demystify the absurd American landscape, these interventions in Baldwin studies follow distinct trends. This essay examines the 2013–15 trends from four vantages: an examination of a return, with revision, to popular work by Baldwin; identifying Baldwin’s work as a contributor to theoretical and critical methodology; Baldwin and intertextuality or intervocality; and a new frontier in Baldwin studies.
This essay uses Edward Said’s theory of affiliation to consider the relationship between James Baldwin and contemporary artists Teju Cole and Glenn Ligon, both of whom explicitly engage with their predecessor’s writing in their own work. Specifically, Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953) serves a through-line for this discussion, as it is invoked in Cole’s essay “Black Body” and Ligon’s visual series, also titled Stranger in the Village. In juxtaposing these three artists, I argue that they express the dialectical energy of affiliation by articulating ongoing concerns of race relations in America while distinguishing themselves from Baldwin in terms of periodization, medium-specificity, and their broader relationship to Western art practice. In their adoption of Baldwin, Cole and Ligon also imagine a way beyond his historical anxieties and writing-based practice, even as they continue to reinscribe their own work with his arguments about the African-American experience. This essay is an intermedial study that reads fiction, nonfiction, language-based conceptual art and mixed media, as well as contemporary politics and social media in order consider the nuances of the African-American experience from the postwar period to our contemporary moment. Concerns about visuality/visibility in the public sphere, narrative voice, and self-representation, as well as access to cultural artifacts and aesthetic engagement, all emerge in my discussion of this constellation of artists. As a result, this essay identifies an emblematic, though not exclusive, strand of African-American intellectual thinking that has never before been brought together. It also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Baldwin’s thinking for the contemporary political scene in this country.
Conclusion The death of Barry Hines was announced on 20 March 2016, and the tributes in print and on social media were heartfelt and wide- ranging. Hines’s work was lauded by well-known personalities such as the actor Kathy Burke, who likened him to ‘JK’ (Rowling), while the Barnsley-born novelist Joanne Harris noted how she ‘hated and loved him at the same time for writing the world I saw every day, and for giving me hope to escape it’, and the footballer-turned- actor Vinnie Jones referred to A Kestrel for a Knave as ‘the book that changed his life’.1
, and posts to online social media sites, which later becomes housed in a biotechnical body. What begins as a means of offsetting grief and announcing Martha’s (Hayley Atwell) pregnancy to her deceased boyfriend, Ash (Domhnall Gleeson), becomes a persistent, uncanny reminder of her loss. Martha ultimately accuses the embodied ‘performance’ of her dead beloved as ‘not enough
became the founder of the ‘PPSC’, was sufficiently drawn by his investment in BttF to make the journey to London to experience the SC event. In previous publications we have explored the high-profile social media debacle that took place when the opening night was cancelled just hours before it was due to commence. 18 Large numbers of participants who were travelling far from home – without their mobile phones – were, at very short notice, cast adrift in London without an event to attend. Highly textually literate
the in-world microsites; social media accounts; flash mobs and pop-ups; the different places, sites and spaces of the productions; the pre-screening-show; and the screening itself. 3.1 Timeline of the audience's experiential journey in the Secret Cinema format. The aesthetic and creative influence of festivals fell away in this
individuals identify with characters and shows in the complex area of serial television and intermedial spectatorship is offered by Benjamin Brojakowski's ( 2015 ) ‘Spoiler alert: understanding television enjoyment in the social media era’. 6 The Sam and Diane question is how
Eurocentric mainstream media did not 209 How media and conflicts make migrants lead to any sense of empowerment. Our survey respondents felt they were informed but that being informed did not help them to do anything. Instead, they described a media experience of witnessing global horrors but with a sense of helplessness. Social media and solidarity Alongside mainstream media depictions of the refugee crisis as a threat or challenge to Europe and European ways of life, social media has played a key role in the political battles over migration in Italy and Britain. This