[ecrea] Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary - Pooja Rangan

A new publication from Duke University Press

Free postage to UK customers

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/immediations **

**

*Immediations***

*The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary***

/Pooja Rangan///

    "Pooja Rangan's incisive voice brings tremendous critical acumen 
and clarity to the interpretation of the humanitarian documentary 
impulse in global media now. A powerful and timely work, Immediations 
will undoubtedly exert a strong influence on film and media studies and 
will be widely read by those who care about the sentiment of benevolence 
and its mediated impacts for a long time to come."– Lisa Cartwright, 
author of /Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in 
Postwar Representations of the Child/

"Documentary’s apparent generosity toward its most hapless subjects is 
an ambivalent gift. With elegance and precision, Pooja Rangan 
demonstrates that participatory documentary more often than not 
obliterates the others it means to help by forcing them into humanist 
molds of selfhood. Instead, she asks, what if documentary were to yield 
to the beings of the world in their unassimilable singularity? The 
answers she finds will stimulate both documentary makers and scholars."– 
Laura U. Marks, author of /Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving 
Image ///

Endangered life is often used to justify humanitarian media 
intervention, but what if suffering humanity is both the fuel and 
outcome of such media representations? Pooja Rangan argues that this 
vicious circle is the result of immediation, a prevailing documentary 
ethos that seeks to render human suffering urgent and immediate at all 
costs. Rangan interrogates this ethos in films seeking to “give a voice 
to the voiceless,” an established method of validating the humanity of 
marginalized subjects, including children, refugees, autistics, and 
animals. She focuses on multiple examples of documentary subjects being 
invited to demonstrate their humanity: photography workshops for the 
children of sex workers in Calcutta; live eyewitness reporting by 
Hurricane Katrina survivors; attempts to facilitate speech in nonverbal 
autistics; and painting lessons for elephants. These subjects are 
obliged to represent themselves using immediations—tropes that reinforce 
their status as the “other” and reproduce definitions of the human that 
exclude non-normative modes of thinking, being, and doing. To counter 
these effects, Rangan calls for an approach to media that aims not to 
humanize but to realize the full, radical potential of giving the camera 
to the other.

*Pooja Rangan*is Assistant Professor of English in Film and Media 
Studies at Amherst College.

Duke University Press | a Camera Obscura Book | June 2017| 264pp | 34 
illustrations | 9780822363712 | Paperback | £20.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL617IMME**

*Price subject to change.

  **Offer excludes the USA, Canada & South America

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