Can indigenous media provide people with true agency or not?

To begin with, 'true agency' is probably an inadequate term, connoting some 'all or nothing' view of post-colonial subjects' life experiences. I seem to be stuck between two poles in my way of viewing such citizens- either as revolutionary individuals who appropriate colonial artifacts for their own purposes or as self-deluding individuals who speak the vocabulary of free markets and independent media and so on, but are really trapping themselves in what Ginsburg calls a 'Faustian Contract'. The reason is that I am personally vested in viewing bourgeois Indian citizens as the latter- less because of my academic background and more because I grew up in India.

This reminds me of Tomlinson- all leftists critiques and polemical writers have their own axes to grind. Being aware of it will hopefully prevent the bias from creeping too far into my papers and B.A.

I just read Prins, Ginsburg and Turner, about the indigenous media. Some notes on Ginsburg:


Ginsburg makes an argument that indigenous media for Aboriginal community leaders in Australia has been positive in terms of the agency felt by the group, giving them ways to reenvision their role in the community, and agitate for a stronger place politically. She suggests that newer Aboriginal films, by urban, sophisticated 'border crossers' like Frances Peters, have a political voice that resonates with existent Aboriginal notions of socially "embedded aesthetics". At the same time, such filmmakers have the knowledge of Western-based and mainstream media that enables them to frame their films in a way that white audiences can appreciate.

I dont really buy Ginsburg's argument.

1. I appreciate her decision to use Appadurai's model of a mediascape as a way to begin her analysis, it represents a refreshing break from older, linear, binary ways of thinking about globalization and indigenous populations.

2. I appreciate her assertion that there is something to be learnt from the activities, social organization, and conscious choices of the filmakers and production crew involved. These things make her argument stringer. However,

3. I dont understand how these producers are so successful in speaking to their communities as well as the broader national (white) culture. How can these two target audiences result in the same work being produced? Ginsburg says that this is exactly the challenge for producers (312). But the article does not explore whether these films succeed or not, they do not follow the films post-production into their interpretation and reception within these spaces.

Ginsburg suggests that they provide “complex commentaries” that resonate with white audiences and Aboriginals- but I think this is assumed, from the text and intention of the makers. Im not so certain it works in that way. This really raises a question Gorbman asks: Can you assume that x form of media will really speak to people that don’t have cultural knowledge about x? How can you control what it says to different people?

4. I think Ginsburg overestimates the possibilities of identity politics withoiut considering the limitations.

According to Frances Peters, she cannot remove herself from responsibility to represent a larger number of people. Ginburg points out further, that Peters' decision to use the ‘embedded aesthetic’ is strategic and consious (ie driven by agency and self-determination). We also know that Peters occupies an unstable realm in terms of Aboriginal identity as a 'border-crosser'. This choice hence, may serve to help her show her loyalty to an Aboriginal cultural ethos. Ginsburg describes this ‘responsibility to represent’ as a “complex and embedded sense that indigenous media producers bring to their work, never seeing it as existing apart from the mediation of social relationships”. It is partially un-understandable to the Western-trained mind and partially to be silently respected, even when confusing or obscure.

One always has to represent something, there is no way to go ‘unmarked’. Representation already indicates the white audience who must understand her work, since political power is at stake. And here if it is not one trapping dialectic of consumer capitalism (where the subject always wants something of the modern they can never fully have), its another type of problem- that of a minor literature (Deleuze and Guattari) or author-functioon (Foucault). The counter-argument is that powerful discourses still have a way of classifying indigenous media production as inextricable from its historical circumstance of subject position, in a way that reiterates that subject position as the “other”, because this has value for the Western notion of the self.

I would suggest that it is this desire to go 'unmarked' as a postcolonial 'spokesperson' that motivates authors like John Coetzee to refuse to discuss their work. This also reminds me of Fanon’s issues with Negritude- that embracing 'Blackness' was still entrapment, because they were using the vocabulray of the modern imperialist project. It is this contradiction that Charles Taylor points to in “The Politics of Recognition.”

So she says that the Western obsession with self-expression counters this type of community identification and political expression. However she emphasizes that the decision to be 'political' and 'community oriented' is a conscious, intentional one for people like Frances Peters, so she is leaving the door open, even within an identity-politics-riddled world, for individual identity and satisfaction.