Heading south, screening the South

Reflective Subjectivity in Audiovisual Nonfiction: Empowering Global South Media Makers and Decolonizing Storytelling

“…This paper endorses the application of reflective subjectivity in audiovisual nonfiction storytelling as an empowerment tool for media practitioners from the Global South to counteract prevailing Western-centric portrayals, which "continue to represent the Global South in negative terms, as a place where poverty, corruption, disease and famine reign" as stated by Willems [1]. The focus on the "Global South" in this essay stems largely from the observation that, within the contexts of audiovisual storytelling and media theorizing, the "Global South" has historically been subaltern to its oppositional entity known as the "Global North" as mentioned by Shohat & Stam [2]; Willems [1] and Traverso [3]. Regarding both terms, "Global South" and "Global North" are geopolitical concepts that have respectively replaced the notions of the "Third World" and the "First World" following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.…”

Introduction: Cinema at the End of the World

“…The above initiatives clearly evoke the sense of a cinematic culture invested in theoretical projects increasingly identified with such concepts as "southern theory" (Connell 2007;Connell 2013), "south of the West" 2 (Gibson 1992), "epistemologies of the South" (Santos 2007;Santos 2012), "aesthetics of decolonisation" (Mignolo 2005;Mignolo and Gómez 2012), and "decolonising pedagogies" (Palermo 2014;Palermo 2015), as some of these were considered in the introduction to the 2015 Southern Screens special issue of Critical Arts (Traverso 2015). It is important to avoid the temptation of announcing yet another turn in theory, namely a "southern turn", as such a homogenising declaration would deplete the decolonising potential of the creative and critical endeavours considered here.…”