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Cinema of Unfinished Witnessing
This is not a book about films in the conventional sense. It is a book about the conditions under which films become legible, forgettable, weaponised, or necessary.
Across essays that move between review and reportage, festival and platform, myth and documentary, Narendra Pachkhédé reads global cinema as a moral technology of the present. He follows the contemporary attention regime, the coercions of watchability, the choreography of awards and public virtue, and the quiet ways propaganda teaches a society what to feel plausible. The question is not only what we watch, but how we have been conditioned to watch: how viewing is trained by ideological settings, how sensibility is numbed by repetition and spectacle, how attention is corralled into habits that feel like choice.
This is a book about the world of cinema and its assemblages. It attends to cinema’s extended life in media ecologies: streaming interfaces and festival circuits, platform logics and institutional gatekeeping, the politics of narrative and the global circulation of stories. It returns repeatedly to the politics of reception, where a work is domesticated or rejected, where controversy polices a field, where filmmakers bond, quarrel, protect, and betray, and where institutions decide what counts as witness. Cinema, here, is not only an art form but a system of mediation that defines the political terms under which stories are consumed.
The book crosses geographies and film worlds, tracing how nations dream through genre and how history is refashioned into culture, suspended between memory and forgetting. From the seductions of nostalgia to the endurance of Béla Tarr, from Korean modernity’s neutralised ruptures to Palestinian cinema’s custody under pressure, these essays insist that cinema is never only an image. It is an argument about reality, and a rehearsal for what a public can bear to know.
The Cinema of Unfinished Witnessing asks a simpler, harsher question: why do some stories become global vigils while others vanish into the feed? It is a book about how we come to believe what we believe, and what cinema has to do with that failure. It is also a wager that, by looking closely and naming the terms of looking, one can still be a form of care.
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Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War
USD $ 5.00 USD $ 35.00Price range: USD $ 5.00 through USD $ 35.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War
USD $ 5.00 USD $ 35.00Price range: USD $ 5.00 through USD $ 35.00War is never just the war itself, it’s not the event or the epoch. War is the impossible and unending afterlife, the struggle to breathe after being bludgeoned, and the re-situating of one’s self and of one’s place after displacement and fragmentation.
Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War advances a new paradigm of war writing by focusing on gender. War is always fought upon the backs of women, often under the pretense of saving them. Yet, along the way, the brutalities unleashed on women during wartime remain relentless. In this collection, insurgency emerges in the raw and meticulous language of witnessing, and in the desire to render the space of conflict in radically different ways. These feminist and queer perspectives on war come out of regions and positions that disobey the rules of war writing. Comprising reportage, fiction, memoir, poetry, and conversations from over sixty writers, the collection includes contributions by Chika Unigwe, Nathalie Handal, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Suchitra Vijayan, Bélen Fernández, Uzma Falak, Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Lara Pawson, Gaiutra Bahadur, Robtel Neajai Pailey, Sumana Roy and Lina Mounzer, among several others.
Bhakti Shringarpure co-founded Warscapes magazine in November 2011 and it has now transitioned into the Radical Books Collective.
Veruska Cantelli is a writer, translator, editor, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Champlain College in Vermont, USA.
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Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and the Environment
USD $ 6.99 USD $ 21.00Price range: USD $ 6.99 through USD $ 21.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and the Environment
USD $ 6.99 USD $ 21.00Price range: USD $ 6.99 through USD $ 21.00If you’re interested in how powerful forces of marketing & manipulation make the positive change we badly need MUCH harder, read @grantennis.bsky.social’ great book “Dark PR.” – Brent Toderian, Bluesky
“Think global, act local!” “Be the change you want to see in the world!” “Every little bit counts!” We can all get on board with such sentiments, right? That, of course, is exactly what corporate spin-masters across the world are banking on. By weaponizing such seemingly innocuous yet powerful narratives, change becomes a matter of personal choice, something each of us must slave away at day by day: switching off lightbulbs to save the environment or exercising to shed the weight we’ve gained from consuming junk food. All the while, the corporate welfare tap continues to flow, with over $6 trillion worth of annual subsidies dished out to industries that directly contribute to the deaths of over 5.5 million people each year through diabetes, road deaths, global warming, and other crises. But such framing is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the corporate disinformation playbook. This playbook is the dark matter of activist work: the unseeable element shaping harmful spin across all issues. It has never been reverse engineered – until now.
In Dark PR, Grant Ennis – drawing on his decades of experience working in the environmental, philanthropy, and public health sectors – reveals exactly how multinationals go about hoodwinking and manipulating us. In doing so, he lifts the lid on the nine devious frames contained within the cross-industry corporate disinformation playbook: through denialism, normalization, victim-blaming, multifactorialism, and a variety of other tried-and-tested tactics, corporations divert citizens’ attention away from the real causes of global problems, leading them into counter-productive blind-alley “solutions” like ethical consumerism and divestment. Sadly, though, buying Fair Trade chocolate has not and never will save the world. Only by collectively organizing to lobby our governments can we break this destructive cycle of lies and deadly incentives and reclaim control of our lives.
Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment referenced in the UK House of Lords.
“I’m really interested in a piece of work that’s written by a guy named Grant Ennis, and I would advise you to have a look at his book on subsidy. So actually the Government provide an awful lot of subsidy to unhealthy food producers. Actually we could reduce the subsidy that is provided for that food and use the money in a different way to do different things. He is the expert in that”
– Alice Wiseman, Director of Public Health for Gateshead, EnglandLink: https://lnkd.in/e6AnKssm Minute 11:34:24
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The In-Between World of Kenya’s Media: South Asian Journalism, 1900-1992
USD $ 35.00This book, originally published by AwaaZ in Kenya, provides insights into journalists of Indian origin who wrote about the struggles of Kenyan people.
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