In recent years, the discipline of cinema and media studies has greatly expanded the range of objects in its study. Scholars working in areas outside the historically dominant centres of film and media production have introduced rich histories of film production, exhibition, and consumption. This production of knowledge in under-represented areas of film and media history has come with a critique of the dominant methodologies of the discipline. Scholars working in various subfields, such as Allyson Nadia Field (on African-American cinema) and Masha Salazkina (on South-South relationality), have innovated new methodological insights. This work demonstrates that we need to reckon with instances where objects and their analyses command new approaches that put pressure on existing modes of knowledge production.

While the decolonial turn and the use of decolonial methodologies are well known in literary studies, they remain under-explored in terms of their potential for film and media studies. The rationale for organizing a session on decolonial approaches to film and media is to participate in filling this gap.

The session draws on germinal theories of decoloniality, put forward by thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, Maria Lugones, and Catherine Walsh. It also connects this work with recent work in film studies (Allyson Nadia Field) and the humanities (Saidiya Hartman, Kandice Chuh), which argue for new methods of thinking archives, histories, and approaches to texts. One of the key methods of decoloniality is the restoration of knowledges and practices that have been displaced or rendered invisible by the processes of coloniality and modernity.

Each paper presentation will be 15 minutes, which will allow 30 minutes for unstructured discussion.

All three papers are directly related to the topic of the panel. Xuan An Ho's paper, "Floating as Antidote": The Poetics of Movement and Migration in Trinh T. Minh-ha's A Tale of Love (1995) and Forgetting Vietnam (2015)," explores decolonial strategies in Trinh's work, and their potential beyond the realm of documentary. Basuli Deb's paper, New Films Of U.S. Victory In The Marshall Islands: US Militarism and a Planetary Pedagogy," examines shifting understandings of island militarism in the Second World War in film and the subsequent nuclear fallout contaminating Marshall Islanders depicted in media as epistemologies of modernity and conquest give way to epistemologies of environmental racism. Finally, Viviane Saglier's paper, "Delinking Film History: Between Decoloniality and Decolonization," explores the work of Lebanese anticolonial filmmaker Heiny Srour to explore how “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo 2011) and the materialist project of decolonization inspired by Third Worldism can be put into productive tension with one another.