Description
Book SynopsisPooja Rangan interrogates participatory documentary's humanitarian ethos of "giving a voice to the voiceless" in documentaries featuring marginalized subjects, showing how it reinforces the films' subjects as the "other" and reproduces definitions of the human that exclude non-normative modes of thinking, being, and doing.
Trade Review“Rangan moves diagonally across disciplinary boundaries and media forms, tracing the past and future of theory and practice concerning participatory documentary.
Immediations offers substantial theoretical matrices for scholars to contend with going forward, and new challenges for interdisciplinary practitioners.” -- Joel Neville Anderson * Visual Studies Workshop *
“
Immediations marks an important contribution to documentary and anthropology studies, making exemplary use of multidisciplinary research to explore more deeply the human power structures and their relationship to the politics of representation.” -- Almudena Escobar López * Film Quarterly *
"Pooja Rangan’s
Immediations is a provocative, polemical, and vital book for thinking through the often problematic humanitarian impulse to give the camera to the Other. . . .
Immediations is a bold, refreshing book that I simply cannot stop thinking about." -- Ryan Watson * Cinema Journal *
Table of ContentsIllustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary 1
1. Feral Innocence: The Humanitarian Aesthetic of Dematerialized Child Labor 23
2. Bare Liveness: The Eyewitness to Catastrophe in the Age of Humanitarian Emergency 61
3. "Having a Voice": Toward an Autistic Counterdiscourse of Documentary 103
4. The Documentary Art of Surrender: Humane-itarian and Posthumanist Encounters with Animals 151
Conclusion. The Gift of Documentary 191
Notes 197
Bibliography 223
Index 241
