On January 10, 2020, I appeared on Good Morning Texas, WFAA’s morning variety show, to talk about the multiplication of streaming services and how they fared against cable subscriptions. The initial producers’ pitch to my university’s communications team was for someone to talk about subscription prices for streaming versus cable. Fortunately, the producers also allow the guest to submit questions to include in the interview. In the end, I was able to speak more broadly about how to understand different kinds of audiences based on platform, content type, and their consumption relationship to television.
The historical film drama Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi, 2016) depicts how the work at NASA of three black women — Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan — helped launch the first American man into orbit. Although all three women start in the West Area Computing unit, the segregated group of black women computers, Katherine and Mary are soon picked to join the Space Task Group and the space capsule engineering team, respectively. Following these two women’s narratives of extraordinary feats, the film ends up giving Dorothy’s story the least amount of screen time, often relegating it as metonym for the stories of the collective of black women computers.
The Other Hidden Figures is remix short that asks, what narrative might we tell if we focus our attention on the collective over the individual genius? Dorothy’s story arc guides us through this question. She initially asserts that “success for one of us is success for all” yet soon comes to realize that individual success alone does not effect long-lasting, structural change. Instead, she turns her attention to obtaining access to resources and knowledge for the entire group of black women and, during a crucial moment, to leveraging her own position to lift up all her colleagues.
This month marks the publication of my article “The Datalogical Drug Mule” in the Data issue of Feminist Media Histories.
This article had a varied lifetime, first as a final paper for a media theory class, then as an award-winning conference paper for the International Communication Association, and finally as a journal publication.
In short, the article argues that borders have always functioned algorithmically, a feature that has only intensified with the spread of information and communication technologies. Yet, despite this technological sophistication, the functioning of borders still relies heavily on human physical interaction. The article traces these issues by staging a fictional travelogue of a drug mule based on official documents and anecdotal evidence.
Feminist Media Histories editor Shelley Stamp interviewed me and other authors in the issue about our articles for the FMH podcast. You can hear the podcast episode here: https://soundcloud.com/user-161032629/data-vol-3-no-3
This spring I had the opportunity to program a film screening at UC Santa Barbara’s Pollock Theater and chose La Revolución de los Alcatraces (2013), an award-winning documentary by Mexican filmmaker Luciana Kaplan.
La Revolución tells the story of Eufrosina Cruz Mendoza, a native of Santa María Quiegolani, a small indigenous community in southern Oaxaca, Mexico. Eufrosina ran for town mayor in 2007, but her election was invalidated because of a “usos y costumbres” ruling — a legal stature that allows indigenous communities to set their local traditions as law — that dictated women were not allowed to be elected to office. The film follows her subsequent personal crusade not only to overturn such a ruling but also to expand the opportunities for women across Oaxaca’s indigenous communities. By questioning the hypocrisies of a political system that allows indigenous rights only when it is convenient for national parties, Eufrosina soon becomes an icon of gender and indigenous rights in her state, albeit at continuous personal expense.
The impetus for this workshop was to disabuse the notion that graduate school is merely training for a career to come. The allusions to professionalization skills or the impending job market signal that the “job” part of academia lies after grad school. Yet this hides the fact that grad students are already workers in many ways, whether they are working as teaching or research assistants, interning at institutions relevant to their research, or taking on extra jobs to make ends meet. These appointments come with their own set of complications, adding stress to the tasks of meeting program requirements, finishing a dissertation, and networking professionally.
Two trains have commanded significant attention this past summer: the Snowpiercer, the fictional train in Bong Joon-ho’s post-apocalyptic film, and “La Bestia”, the freight train travelling from Mexico’s southern border to Mexico City. The first holds the last survivors of a global climatic catastrophe; the second holds hundreds of Central Americans hoping to immigrate to the United States. For these migrants, like the people at the back of the Snowpiercer, living conditions are deplorable. In his film, Bong introduces us to the passengers in a lineup during a routine check as they sit down, one row at a time, in a seemingly interminable fashion. As the images below show, the passengers of La Bestia are less orderly, huddling together as tightly as possible atop each freight car—after all, they are not supposed to be there. In both cases, the threat of death is nearly unbearable: for the fictional passengers, at the hands of stormtroopers; for the migrants, at the hands of drug gangs. So here they are, these two disenfranchised groups, aboard a train that could very well kill them yet, paradoxically, is saving them from the more dangerous alternative awaiting them if they got off it—inhospitable tundra in one, abject poverty in the other.
Hundreds of Central American migrants huddled atop the freight cars of La Bestia.
When did trains become figures of such precariousness? Although this favored symbol for modernity is not without its inherent sense of doom, as when Paul Virilio claims that the invention of the train is also the invention of derailment, the Snowpiercer and La Bestia are symbols of a crisis even before the potential wreckage of the machine. I suspect that what makes these two such powerful, harrowing figures relates to their allusion to movement devoid of progress, to time without change. Consider this opposing picture of trains invoked by writer Jessica Gross in a recent essay:
There is comfort in the certainty of these arrangements. […] Train time is found time. My main job is to be transported; any reading or writing is extracurricular. The looming pressure of expectation dissolves. And the movement of a train conjures the ultimate sense of protection—being a baby, rocked in a bassinet.
Surely this view is shared not only by writers—especially those signing up for Amtrak’s writer-in-residence program—but also by the thousands of people who prefer trains as their means of transportation. Trains can in fact be endless sources of joy and amusement. Perhaps this is why the Snowpiercer and La Bestia present quite the contrasting image: the movement of these trains does not conjure the ultimate sense of protection, but the constant sense of adversity; train time is not found time, but stolen time; the passengers’ main job is not to be transported, but to survive.
On February 1998, the New York Times decreed that Blockbuster Video had established itself as the main video rental outlet, pushing all other independent video retailers into marginal and niche markets. Fifteen years later, the closure of the last Blockbuster locations still in operation heralded the end of an era, where online streaming services had replaced video stores as the preferred method of film distribution. But this is hardly the whole story.
During the upcoming Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle, I will be chairing a panel that takes a closer look at this narrative and proposes how various video cultures and communities arise, thrive and/or diversify in the 21st century. In his paper “’Are you guys closing?’ – Video-clubs and the ‘Third World of the internet’”, Matthias Mushinski (Columbia University) looks at cinephile consumers and sellers in Montreal, noting how the dual facts of limited content and Canada’s bandwidth caps challenge the notion that “everything is available” online. Similarly, my paper “What is (in) a diasporic video store?” considers how to incorporate informal and unconventional retail points—particularly those that cater to immigrant communities—into scholarship on media distribution and diasporic cinemas.
Finally, Michael O’Brien’s (UT Austin) paper “Limited Release: Online Cine-clubs and Digital Archives” approaches the legacy of video clubs as practices of community building, and tracks how these practices are perpetuated in private BitTorrent trackers. In different ways, all of these papers take concepts such as cinephilia, film communities, and home film cultures, and set them alongside new work on distribution technologies and film consumption practices, to illustrate the myriad ways in which the transition to digital is ongoing—and anything but smooth.
Our panel respondent will be Professor Daniel Herbert (U of Michigan), whose recently released book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store charts the rise and fall of the rental industry between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, when video stores served a vital function in the sustenance of movie culture.
Given last year’s announcement of Blockbuster’s closure, the current discussions about ISP speeds for online streaming, and the continuous consolidation of production studios, I expect there to be a lively discussion not only from the presenters but also with the audience. So if you’re also interested in talking about these topics, come join us on Thursday March 20 at 11:00 AM (session F6)!
juan llamas-rodriguez 