Discussion

From Raymond Williams’ often neglected Television, to Lisa Gitelman’s more recent Always Already New, media scholars have sought to understand the relationship between communication technologies and social formations. This task is ever more treacherous when new communication technologies are situated in the context of social and cultural difference rather than historical change. Over the past decade, for instance, a number of practitioners have attempted to fashion postcolonial digital archives that reflect other modes of sociality or are mediated by them. This talk examines a postcolonial digital media project – a gps/gis based transmedia program – at the edges of Australian Indigenous life within Late Liberalism. It focuses on the productivity of considering the intersection of digital media and other worlds from the perspective of incommensurability and complementarity.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies Columbia University, New York. She is currently German Transatlantic Program Fellow at The American Academy in Berlin. Her recent publications include Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2011), The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Geneology, and Carnality (Duke University Press, 2006), and The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Duke University Press, 2002). Povinelli’s work focuses on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise.