Browsing by Subject "film and media"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    ‘Do I even belong?' Interrogating Afro-diasporic navigation of identity, race and space in the search for belonging
    (2020) Moragia, Anita Mwango; Chuma, Wallace
    The departure point for this creative project is based on my experience as an African living in diaspora. While I felt many things during my time ‘away' from the African continent, one constant was always this feeling of unbelonging, and this need to find belonging. As such, this project centers around the theme ‘finding belonging in diaspora'. Growing up in Kenya, I had never really come to terms with the politics of my Kenyanness not to mention my blackness. I had simply just been me. While in Kenya, the only real identifiers I had to contend with that carried heavy politics were my gender and my tribal affiliation. After leaving Kenya and arriving in Canada for school at the age of 16, for the first time in my life I felt black and I felt African. Both identities I felt did not belong in this Canadian space. Over the course of 9 years, I lived in both Canada and London and neither ever warmed me like home. In most, if not all the predominantly white spaces I frequented, I always felt too little of something and too much of something else. As such,, I found myself intentionally and unintentionally drawn to those like me, in colour, in language, and culture. It is only today I have realised that those intentional and unintentional unions I formed were a result of my search for belonging, which I came to find is common in the diaspora experience. Ann Hua, a black diaspora scholar, defines diaspora as a community of people who have been dispersed from their homeland to other locations because of genocide, slavery, migration, and war (Hua, 2013; 31). It's important to note that for many, induction into the Afro-diaspora is involuntary. As Hua notes, political unrest, genocide, war, and slavery has forced many to leave their homes and either seek asylum or become indentured laborers elsewhere. We have seen this throughout the eras, from the 15th-century trans-Atlantic slave trade, capturing of Africans, transporting them to the Americas and coercing them into slavery (Gates Jr., 2017), to the 20th-century dispersion of Rwandese nationals fleeing genocide§ (Guichaoua, André & Webster, Don E. 2015). The identity of diaspora comes in both anticipated and unanticipated ways. Fortunately, my induction into the Afro-diasporic community was a voluntary one and the bulk of this project interacts with voluntary Afro-diasporic migrants. During my time in Canada and London, I met many members of the Afro-diasporic community who ended up in these countries in a variety of different ways and for a variety of different reasons. The theme of ‘finding belonging' was omnipresent among my fellow Afro-diasporic community members and it would manifest itself in various ways. For instance, wanting to go to African restaurants to feel more ‘at-home', or wanting to visit African night clubs to listen to more music from ‘home'. Interestingly, I also began to see that this journey towards ‘finding belonging' also manifested in Afro-diasporic communities rejecting assimilation into their new societies and creating spaces of resistance, through organising protests or hosting discussions that centred around issues of race.
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    Entanglements of media and space: an exploratory case study of two public arts projects in Johannesburg and Cape Town
    (2024) Brown, Storm Jade; Irwin, Ronald
    This research presents a spatially and media sensitive analysis of the layers of discourse created by two South African public art case studies between 2017 and 2019. Public art is selected as the research object as it “necessarily explores the very meaning of public space” (Wacławek, 2011:65) and it “can become the central focus for a range of competing discourses related to that domain” (Clements, 2008:19). Furthermore, the concept of public space has changed since the “internet and related technologies have created a new public space for politically oriented conversation…” (Papacharisi, 2002:9). When public art is photographed and re-presented in an online space, its surrounding audience and public sphere also extends. This results in a collapse of physical spaces into online ones, and has transformed contemporary understandings of what it means to be public and what it means to be visible. The emplaced yet fragmented nature of public art could not be more relevant for a South African context where public spaces are increasingly contested in a post-apartheid context. Therefore two specific public art case studies were chosen for this research. These projects first appeared in physical locations before moving into online and mediated spaces. The first project, #ArtMyJozi by The Trinity Sessions, features community public art projects created in and around the Rea Vaya Bus Rapid Transit Terminals on Louis Botha Avenue in Johannesburg. #ArtMyJozi was commissioned by the City of Johannesburg and the Johannesburg Development Agency. It used a placemaking approach to guide the artwork creation process and community engagement. The second case study looks at three iterations of BAZ-ART's International Public Art Festival (IPAF) from its inaugural year in 2017. The IPAF started off as a South African iteration of a global public art festival, and was a commercially sponsored three-day long event where various murals were created in and around Salt River and the surrounding Central Business District of Cape Town. Although both projects are loosely branded as ‘public art', each project underwent a very different project delivery and community inclusion process. Furthermore, there was no shared meaning about the term public space. These differences in approach and process resulted in vastly different public responses and discourse themes for each case study. This discourse emerged in both online news media and Social Network Sites, as well as within the physical spaces that the works occupied. Therefore, in order to study both sites of discourse for each public art case study, this research uses an exploratory case study approach. The approach triangulates various data collection sources including field visits, social media posts, press releases, government policies and interviews. After this, a Critical Discourse Analysis and a Content Analysis are used to discern key interrelated discourse themes. This layered and triangulated approach is informed by Couldry and McCarthy's (2004) conceptual framework of MediaSpace. MediaSpace presents a spatially sensitive approach to examining media objects and the discourse that they create over five distinct levels. Importantly, it highlights how each level is interconnected with all other levels. It also considers the cumulative scale of effects between media and space. This study is a necessary one, as it explores how discourse is created in public art projects in South Africa, and by extension, how discourse around public spaces is amplified, maintained or negated in various spaces including online ones. There has not yet been a localised and digitally inclusive study of this phenomenon in South Africa.
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    Family, archive, and the posttraumatic imaginary: an analysis of the role of archival material in the personal documentaries stories we tell, the Imam and I, and grandpa Ernest speaks
    (2022) Bazil,Madeleine; Cain, Julia; Shamis, Khalid
    My short documentary, Grandpa Ernest Speaks (2021), is the creative research portion of my master's degree submission. The film is heavily influenced by post-structuralist theory regarding the archive as an experiential entity as well as posttraumatic cinema discourse (in particular, Joshua Hirsch's phases of posttraumatic cinema). This critical reflection therefore investigates the intersection of these two theoretical paradigms: looking at how archival materials may specifically be used in personal documentary films dealing with family/ancestral trauma and posttraumatic memory, and positing that these films' engagement with the archive fits into the larger framework of posttraumatic cinema. I reflect on Grandpa Ernest Speaks in conversation with two other personal posttraumatic documentaries, The Imam and I (dir. Khalid Shamis, South Africa, 2011) and Stories We Tell ( dir. Sarah Polley, Canada, 2012). I conduct a semiotic and content analysis of portions of all three films in order to both situate them within the posttraumatic imaginary-specifically, within Hirsch's second phase-and examine the role of the archive and artefacts in each. In doing so, I confront the question of record vs. representation in documentary, and argue that-in the archival-based posttraumatic documentary-the distinction between the two lies in the way that the artefact is interpreted or contextualised via meta-textual captioning. This study demonstrates that posttraumatic memory may be nonlinear and non-chronological. The analysis of my film and the two additional case study films examines how this complication of past and present, archival and contemporary, is articulated onscreen: conveying the transmutation of memory as well as the ongoing and self-reflexive act of contributing to the familial archive.
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    Necessary illusions?: representations of Darfur
    (2006) Tong, Kathryn Louise
    This thesis examined media and NGO representation of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur over an eighteen-month period between January 2004 and June 2005. It concentrated on three key questions. The first question relates to the 'noise' graph of emergencies. What factors - and what actors - were involved in determining the newsworthiness of Darfur? This first key question concerns the graph of media coverage of Darfur, through an escalation phase, an abundant phase, and finally a gradually diminishing phase. Ideally, the diminishing phase of media coverage should correlate with the diminishing stage of the actual emergency. This is rarely the case and so logically other dynamics must exist. The second question examines media representation of the Darfur crisis compared with what was actually occurred. How accurate was the reporting, and what were some of the effects of inaccuracy? The final question is one of perception. To what extent was the crisis in Darfur misperceived; who was primarily responsible for generating that misperception; and was a degree of misperception inevitable? This question encompasses both the representation offered by the international media and that offered by NGO media and public relations departments. The study is framed within the notion of the 'crisis triangle' (UNDP, 1997), which is composed of policymakers, humanitarian actors and the international media. It analyses NGO media functions within the framework of the NGO crisis triangle, composed of internal NGO conflicts between fundraising, advocacy and operational aid. Darfur revealed beyond doubt that the factors involved in determining newsworthiness are complex and, furthermore, not necessarily controlled by any one actor or any one side of the crisis triangle. US political interests significantly contributed to escalating Darfur to the status of 'worst humanitarian crisis in the world', but equally so did the genocide question, and no one actor manipulated the timing of the tenth anniversary of Rwanda to coincide with a campaign of ethnic cleansing taking place in Darfur. One of the most important factors identified was that of simplicity, which explains how media attention was engaged, but not necessarily why. The simplicity also ensured that media and NGO representation of Darfur was unavoidably inaccurate. The media influenced the political will of the international community towards Darfur only indirectly, although it could just as convincingly be argued that the political will of the international community was one of the primary factors influencing the media. There were two identified practical lessons from the examination of the representation of Darfur. The first was that if NGOs were to accept a short-term fall in funding for the longer-term benefit of raising awareness then both a more accurate perception and possibly more sustainable funding could be generated. The second was that if media institutions were to adhere to the Red Cross code of conduct when reporting from disaster situations then a more accurate perception would be generated. This would result in the necessary illusions of disaster reporting not being quite so necessary.