Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with with Dr Wendy Willems, placing transnational activist networks in historical context – and addressing the “short memory of digital media and communication studies”.
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The #BlackLivesMatter protests in 2020 culminated into both a global expression of solidarity with the killing of George Floyd as well as a racial reckoning with the afterlife of histories of slavery and colonialism in different national contexts outside the United States. Digital networked communication via social media was considered crucial in the transnational circulation of these anti-racist protests which took place both online and offline. In their analyses of these protests and other forms of digital activism, digital media scholars often centre the digital network, building on other older foundational concepts such as the ‘network society’ (Castells 1996) or ‘networked publics (boyd 2010) whilst reviving older methods such as ‘network analysis’ to make sense of digital networks. Indirectly, the key question that has shaped these debates is what difference digital technology makes to these forms of activism and how it has changed protest.
Instead of focusing on change, this paper highlights the continuities between older and newer transnational networks. It discusses the case of the “Black Atlantic Communication Network” which emerged in the late 18th and early 19th century, linking up African American (and later Caribbean) sailors with Black South Africans in Cape Town (Atkins 1996). In the 1920s, as a result of these connections, Cape Town became a hub of Garveyism, with its own branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a transnational Black movement set up by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey in New York in 1914. This paper examines the role of UNIA’s successful and globally circulating newspaper, Negro World, which was published weekly and brought to Cape Town by Caribbean sailors. It argues that both Negro World and #BlackLivesMatter could be seen as moments of heightened global Black consciousness part of longer histories of anti-colonial, Black internationalist networks.
Biography
Dr Wendy Willems is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research interests include post/decolonial approaches to media and communication, racialised publics and digital technology, and global knowledge production and intellectual histories. Her work has appeared in journals such as Communication Theory; Information, Communication and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; and Media, Culture and Society. She is co-editor of Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the Twenty-First Century (James Currey, 2014, with Ebenezer Obadare) and Everyday Media Culture in Africa: Audiences and Users (Routledge, 2016, with Winston Mano). She is currently working on a monograph entitled Racialised Publics: Coloniality, Technology and Imaginaries.
Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Dr Alexander Sergeant, resurfacing some hidden Hollywood history.
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Herbert Brenon (1880-1958) is one of silent Hollywood’s most important and forgotten figures. Born in Dublin and raised in London, Brenon emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen, where he became a touring actor working in quality theatre and vaudeville. By his mid-thirties, he had become one of the nation’s most popular filmmakers. He worked for Paramount, MGM, United Artists and RKO at the height of Hollywood’s silent golden age, and was responsible for some of the era’s greatest commercial successes of the 1920s, including lavish fantasies like A Daughter of the Gods (1916) and adaptations of Peter Pan (1924) and Beau Geste (1926). His films pioneered new production methods and served as star-making vehicles for several female producers/actors including Alla Nazimova, Theda Bara, Louise Brooks and Pola Negri. Yet, today, Brenon’s story is largely forgotten. In this talk, Dr. Alexander Sergeant tells the story of Brenon’s life and career, and argues the case for why Brenon’s name deserves to be better remembered by cinema’s aficionados and fans.
Biography
Dr. Alexander Sergeant is a film theorist and historian specialising in popular media. His first monograph, Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021) was nominated for several scholarly awards, including the BAFTSS award for Best First Book. He is the co-founder of Fantasy-Animation.org and co-host of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, a popular blog/podcast providing weekly discussion of the intertwining worlds of fantasy storytelling and the medium of animation. He is a Lecturer in Digital Media Production at the University of Westminster.