Over the past decade, the media ecology has been dramatically shifting with the advent of online “overthe-top” streaming services, the streaming wars that followed, and the platformization of the web. As the distance between big tech companies and legacy media players rapidly dwindles, rippling effects can be felt across industries, audience practices, regulatory frameworks, and more. Simultaneously, the rise of streaming services also continues to provoke further theorizations on topics that have concerned media scholars for decades regarding the asymmetrical dynamics of power and influence as it relates to globalization processes, representation, identity, politics, cultural and national mediations, and economic development.

In Sensory Experiments (2020), Erica Fretwell argues that “literature is a sensitizing mechanism, not merely a representation but an amplification of experience,” positing literature as “a technology […] that has the potential to reproduce—not copy but produce more—feeling and […] to create more connections to the world by registering more differences in it” (28-29). Fretwell makes that claim in the context of her transatlantic study of the relations between American literature and the failed science of psychophysics as it developed in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century.

NeMLA Annual Convention - Baltimore, MD - 10-13 March, 2022

How does one resist the systems of subjugation that prey on the marginalized and seek to dissolve and consume them within this white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy? While for some resistance takes the form of confrontation and battle, for Black feminist thinkers like bell hooks and Audre Lorde, resistance comes in the form of the practice of love. It is in the embrace of the erotic, of initiating the quest of mutual self-fulfillment, in seeking value in the relationships we have with each other, that we resist. In other words, for hooks and Lorde, we resist through care.

call for proposals for a special issue of Transnational Screens

“From Yesterday’s Margins to Today’s: Towards Decolonizing Curricula, Pedagogy, and Research in Transnational Screen Media”

edited by Sheetal Majithia and Dale Hudson