Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Mediascapes: Vlogging the Self (and Others) in Contemporary Caribbean and U.S. Latina/o Cultures

Mon, May 30, 4:15 to 5:45pm, TBA

Abstract

This paper is an analysis of racial images as echo-chambers or “resonance ports” as they look at racialized bodies as markers, translations and signs of capital and global consumption. My main thesis is that contemporary media and new media productions in transnational Caribbean cultures have incorporated the language of the stereotype to create what I define as “Caribbean mediascapes.” There is a clear influence of new-media discourse and visuals in these portrayals that is streamed to television and vice-versa. In my project I would like to engage with these questions of invisibility, binaries and dichotomies around race, racialization and racism as well as the spectacle created by them. Mediascapes converge these uses of media technologies derived from film, television, the Internet and YouTube, and the ways they engage are used and read in contemporary Caribbean cultures. I will look at the convergence of those media spaces (television, Facebook and YouTube); to discuss one comedy skit from “El Show de Alexis Valdés” from the now cancelled Mega TV, one YouTube clip made in the Dominican Republic, and one made in Orlando, Florida, by performer and YouTube star, LeJuan James. Along with laughter, they frame the hierarchies of what it means to “watch race” as they represent forms of “being black” or brown that create forms of humor, violence, visibility and exoticism that are necessary for understanding the role of the local-transnational imaginaries in contemporary Caribbean cultures.

Author