Ghosts and Media Futures: Sovereignty, Memory, and Afterlives of Property

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel brings together papers that explore questions around sovereignty, memory, afterlives of property and colonial infrastructures within the realm of media, including virtual reality (VR). The papers engage with the ways in which contemporary media technologies are both shaped by and actively shape the colonial legacies of violence, dispossession, and erasure. By interrogating the ways in which various media apparatus such as VR and film are deployed to either reinforce or undermine coloniality and late-capitalism, they offer a reimagined understanding of how space, time, and belonging are mediated in the aftermath of violence and in anticipation of new frontiers of exploitation. The panel, therefore, speaks to the urgency of rethinking both the temporalities and spatialities of coloniality, foregrounding a need to consider what it means to decolonize memory and technology in the face of ongoing forms of dispossession and violence.
In the first paper, Sovereign Media: Memory Work in the Wake of Perpetual Genocide, Latipa argues for a re-envisioning of media praxis within Indigenous futurisms. By rejecting colonial paradigms of visibility and authorship, Latipa’s work emphasizes the importance of sovereign media, advocating for practices that resist the foreclosures of colonialism and align with indigenous struggles for land-back. This intervention speaks directly to the central question of how memory is mediated in the wake of genocide, where the temporal and spatial realities of violence must be remediated through a collective remembering. The second paper, by Jinah Kim, extends these concerns by addressing the temporal and sensory dimensions of memory in the context of military violence. Through their analysis of Gina Kim’s VR trilogy—Bloodless, Tearless, and Comfortless—they examine the use of immersive technologies to transgress conventional representations of wartime violence and to interrogate how militarism is lived in the everyday. Neda Atanasoski and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer’s Virtual Reality and the Afterlives of Property on Mars critiques the symbiotic relationship between virtual property regimes and the burgeoning fantasies of extraterrestrial colonization. By situating VR as a testing ground for future property relations on Mars, the paper highlights the continuity between the legal and capitalist structures of exploitation on Earth and their extension into outer space. Through the seemingly neutral veneer of educational technologies, the paper reveals how VR’s promotion as a tool for democratizing knowledge is deeply entangled with the production of new frontiers for capital accumulation. In “Countering “Resiliency” in Visual Media from Post-Katrina New Orleans and Post-Maria Puerto Rico” Elizabeth Steeby offers a study of recent documentary films and music videos that center on Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Maria. Her paper closes our panel by offering a comparative insight into how disaster capitalism, memory, and visual media are operating in related ways across late-stage empires in New Orleans and Puerto Rico.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Sovereign Media: Memory Work in the Wake of Perpetual Genocide - Latipa .

• Sensory Witnessing: VR, Memory, and the Politics of Military Violence - Jinah Kim, University of California Merced

• Virtual Reality and the Afterlives of Property on Mars - Neda Atanasoski, University of Maryland-College Park; Felicity Amaya Amaya Schaeffer, University of California-Santa Cruz

• Countering “Resiliency” in Visual Media from Post-Katrina New Orleans and Post-Maria Puerto Rico - Elizabeth Steeby, University of New Orleans

Chair

• Michael James Harrington, New York University

Biographical Information

Latipa is a media artist, film director, publisher, professor, and the founder and director of the Memory and Resistance Laboratory. For the past 25 years, Latipa has worked across the poetics of cinema, transmedia art installation, the book form, and grassroots organizing to facilitate intergenerational healing, archival futurisms, and sovereign mediatic forms.
Latipa’s more recent projects include Gaza Before the Law, a film about failure of the US legal system in matters of justice for Palestine, The Archive’s Fold, a multi-image slide installation that posits ancestral healing by reading the violence of the US colonial archive through past and future ancestors, and White Gaze (with Việt Lê), an artist’s book and photographic installation that poses a decolonial counterpoint to National Geographic and its legacy of imperialist visuality. Latipa's work across art and organizing contexts led her to start the Memory and Resistance Laboratory, an exploratory media lab that unravels settler paradigms of what we think media is, what media does, and what it can be. Latipa is the director of two forthcoming feature-length films grounded in indigenous futures. The first film is titled White Owl Green Star and grows out of a pedagogical module Latipa developed in collaboration with Mark Minch-de Leon and Cj Jackson as part of the Carrying Our Ancestors Home initiative that deals with rematriation issues across California Tribal communities. White Owl Green Star weaves a collective narrative of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation's (OCEN) reclamation of land, culture, and healing and with the intimate story of Chairwoman Louise Miranda Ramirez, the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation's Tribal Chairwoman who has worked tirelessly to fight for her tribe's future for the past two decades. Latipa is also working on a second feature-length film that offers stories from the native Antelope Valley where she worked with the Nüwa, Tataviam, Nüwu, Vanyume, Paiute and Kitanemuk alongside a 2024 exhibition Latipa co-curated (Room IV: Recovery and Resilience) with Dr. Bruce Love at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster entitled This Valley is Sacred: The Ancestors are Speaking.
In addition to media and exhibition production, the Memory and Resistance Laboratory has developed a collective publishing imprint, Communities of Memory, a grassroots initiative to publish uncompromising books that shatter and differently envision the bounds of form, feeling, concept, and politics. In the book form, Communities of Memory seeks a poetics of relation, a spaciousness in knowing and telling, communal reparation and healing, and radical dialogues on how to build futures otherwise. Recently published books have included Bloodlines by meital yaniv, Brewing Memories: an archive yet to come, a conversation with Ángeles Donoso Macaya and Carolina Saavedra about Archives in Common, and Chaos of Memories, a conversation with Gabriel Solís and Mark Menjívar about their work in the Texas After Violence Project.
Latipa has lectured and exhibited across the Americas, Europe, and Asia in significant cultural and educational institutions such as the Center for Feminist Studies (Zagreb, Croatia), School of Oriental and African Studies (London, UK), SalaSab (Bogota, Colombia), Caixaforum (Barcelona, Spain), Jeu de Paume (Paris, France), The Cooper Union (NYC, NY), Vargas Museum (Manila, Philippines), Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong), and the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (Gothenburg, Sweden). Latipa gave the keynote address for the 2019 Singapore Biennale (curated by Patrick Flores) on the legacy of Filipina revolutionary Salud Algabre. Latipa has received grants from the University of California Humanities Research, the Human Rights Center, Art Matters, and the Fulbright Foundation. She was awarded a 2017-18 Master Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, a 2021 Mellon Arts Fellow at Stanford's Center for Comparative in Studies Race and Ethnicity, and a 2024 Herb Albert UCROSS Fellowship. Latipa earned an MFA in Art with a specialization in Interdisciplinary Studio from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric with designated emphases in Film and Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley where she studied with Trinh T. Minh-ha. She is currently Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Jinah Kim is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication Studies at the California State University Northridge, where she is also affiliated with Asian and Asian American Studies. Her scholarship centers transpacific feminist activism as it intersects with racial justice projects across sites of US military empire. She is the author of Postcolonial Grief and the Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2019) and co-editor of an issue of Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Center-to-Center Relationalities: At the Nexus of Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies (2022). She is currently working on two book projects: Against Forgetting: Transpacific Redress for the Comfort Women and Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea.

Neda Atanasoski is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and Associate Director of Education for the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM). Atanasoski’s interdisciplinary research has focused on feminism and AI, feminist and critical race approaches to science and technology studies, AI and the future of work, militarism, and human rights and humanitarianism. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (2013), co-author of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019), and co-editor of Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution (2022) and Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen (2025). She was the editor of the journal Critical Ethnic Studies, the flagship journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, from 2018-2024. Prior to UMD, Atanasoski was professor of Feminist Studies and founding co-director of the Center for Racial Justice at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is Chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department and Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSC. Her research and teaching interests include: Latinx and Indigenous decolonial studies, migration, and border surveillance and feminist and critical race STS (Science and Technology Studies). She has written two monographs: Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas (2013) and Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land (2022) which received honorable mention from the John Hope Franklin award at the 2023 ASA. She also co-edited Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Non-citizenship (2021) (with Catherine Ramirez, Sylvanna Falcon, Steve McKay, Juan Poblete) In December of 2022, she participated as a UN Expert Seminar Participant on the Impact of Militarization on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Geneva, Switzerland. Currently, she is working on a co-edited special issue journal called “The Indigenous Borderlands” and a co-authored book with Professor Neda Atanasoski tentatively titled, “Otherworldly Commons” that contests the international space race to extract resources in zones uninhabited by humans, and especially Indigenous peoples, zones considered “non-life”: outer space voids, asteroids; the moon, virtual reality, and Indigenous lands. Throughout the book, they counter these apocalyptic industries to center Indigenous cosmologies of earth and sky that allow us to imagine and remember otherworldly planetary futures.

Elizabeth Steeby is an Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator for the English Department at the University of New Orleans. With Lynnell Thomas, she is currently co-authoring A People’s Guide to New Orleans (University of California Press), which aims to revise dominant tourism narratives that deny or distort the lives and experiences of those whose labor and culture have helped to build and sustain the city. Steeby has also published articles on the cult of the American sniper in the age of the imperial security state (Interventions), Black feminist literary collectives in post-Katrina New Orleans (Women’s Studies), radical intimacy in the era of Jim Crow fascism (Mississippi Quarterly), prisons in Southern literature (Routledge), and the autobiographical narratives of political prisoners. She co-directed a creative writing and literacy program at the Orleans Parish jail as part of the Louisiana Prison Education Coalition from 2014 until the start of the pandemic.