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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
F. Stadtler and O.B. Laursen (eds.), Networking the Globe: New Technologies and the Postcolonial Routledge, London and New York 2016, pp. 126
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2017-03-01
2021-09-06
2017-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Lorenzo Marmo
2017/03/01
University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’
2036-461X
28
en
F. Stadtler and O.B. Laursen (eds.), Networking the Globe: New Technologies and the Postcolonial Routledge, London and New York 2016, pp. 126
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16299/17182
17
F. Stadtler and O.B. Laursen (eds.)
Networking the Globe: New Technologies and the Postcolonial
Routledge, London and New York 2016, pp. 126




   Networking the Globe: New Technologies and the Postcolonial is a collection
of essays edited by Florian Stadtler (Lecturer in Global Literatures at the
University of Exeter) and Ole Birk Laursen (Postdoctoral Research Fellow at
the University of Copenhagen). The book investigates the many deployments
of the postcolonial issue in a contemporary context: while focusing mainly
on the role played by technology in reflecting, mediating and shaping
globalization, the wide-ranging scope of chapters ambitiously opens up the
discussion towards often uncharted and unexpected territories. The result of
a truly interdisciplinary outlook, the collection addresses a variety of topics
and contexts, ranging from online forums to films, and from art practices to
poetry. Such a diversified array of materials may at times produce the feeling
of a lack of internal coherence. Overall, however, the book benefits from this
multiplicity of voices and points of view.
   The project originated as a postgraduate conference, and it had already been
published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.1 Because the
quality of the contributions is uniformly high, the editors opted to publish this
group of essays in the form of a book. The collection profits from the freshness in
approach of the scholars involved, who successfully balance focus on single case
studies and reflection on over-arching theoretical questions.
   In its search for an alternative to the unilateral and problematic dynamic between
center and periphery that informs the postcolonial world, the books deals with
issues of scale and space, of longing and belonging. While of course valuing the
potential offered by communication technologies to connect the whole world,
the authors never allow this discourse to assume an ingenuously idyllic inflection.
On the contrary, the account of the erosion of boundaries (national as well as
mental) favoured by digital forms of culture is always counterpoised by an equal
attention to the enduring importance of location in shaping the contemporary
context, and to the role played by technology in conveying such a sense of place.
It is hence more than apt for the book to open with Hilde C. Stephansen’s essay
on the use of the internet in connection with the annual meetings of the World
Social Forum. While emphasizing the positive role of the web in providing the

1
 Special issue Networking the Globe: New Technologies and the Postcolonial, Journal of Postcolonial
Writing, 49.5 (2013).

                                                     Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 28, Spring 2017
                              Reviews/Comptes-rendus


infrastructure for the effective organization of the conferences, the article does
also caution against a certain disembodiment of transnational activist networks,
and underlines the potential for the web to help construct an alternative and
resistant sense of globality.
   Neither utopian nor nihilistic in their approach to the issues at stake, and very
aware of their political implications, the essays consistently try to offer nuanced
reflection on the topics they address. The resulting remarks may at times sound
too cautious or too obvious, but in the end they attest to a shrewd understanding
of both the virtues and the drawbacks of (digital) media and its functions.
For example, in Herbert, Black and Aly’s essay on the exchanges of opinions
regarding religion and politics on different Internet forums in English and
Arabic (BBC World Service, Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabyia), it is clearly stated that ‘the
consequences of deploying these technologies in this context are ambivalent’: on
the one hand, they enable conversation among individuals from such different
backgrounds that would be impossible in embodied form, on the other they
still work according to exclusionary, albeit partially masked, power relations.
Similar conclusions are found in Maruta Herding’s article about information
technologies and Islamic youth culture in France, Germany and Britain: the use
of such networks has a powerful influence in the life of the postcolonial subjects,
yet at the same time it remains strongly embedded in local contexts and everyday
life, so there is little interaction or awareness of similar trends of expression
across national borders.
   One of the most riveting essays is the one dedicated by Paula Blair to Willie
Doherty’s video installations. Using Foucault’s theory of the panopticon
as well as Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘colonial mimicry’, Blair reflects on
issues of surveillance and the gaze. The author successfully presents the case
of Northern Ireland as an explicit theoretical challenge, underscoring the
region’s inherent ambiguity, suspended as it is between both colonial and
postcolonial positions.
   Gaze theory is also crucial to both Sandra Annett’s analysis of issues of gender
and exoticism in cartoons from different eras and Vivien Silvey’s article on
contemporary ‘network cinema’. Silvey focuses on two films (A.G. Iñárritu’s Babel
and R. Lawrence’s Lantana) that share a polyphonic structure yet come from
very different production contexts. While unfortunately failing to deal with the
texts on a stylistic level, the article is nonetheless convincing when it challenges
any clear-cut distinction between Hollywood films and more independent art-
cinema products.
   The final two essays are concerned with literature: Ahmed Gamal analyses
the post-9/11 writing of Anglo-Pakistani novelists Mohsin Ahmid and Kamila
Shamsie, arguing for their inclusion in the new ‘post-migratory’ (rather than
simply ‘migrant’) subgenre — a label that is better placed to underscore the
problematization of ‘the binarism of home and the world’ that characterizes
this literature. Finally, Anjali Nerlekar focuses on the use of maps by post-
independence Indian poet Arun Kolatkar. Nerlekar observes that the author’s

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               F. Stadtler and O.B. Laursen (eds.), Networking the Globe


contradictory desire to achieve both a documentation of the periphery of Mumbai
and to shield the place from the eyes of the world perfectly encapsulates the
perpetual suspension between local and global that underlies the contemporary
postcolonial situation: a paradoxical yet inescapable positioning that this
collection of essays successfully outlines in its many facets.

                           [Lorenzo Marmo, University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’]




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