just as S and I are dialoguing in relation to representational practices and the DA encounter with a particular documentary maker last November – a further opportunity to elaborate on what we are trying to articulate comes up at
where the following youtube video was placed by curators for viewers to critique and discuss –
_ I did post to the comments section there – and what I posted may very well lead to me being accused of not seeing the liberatory potential of the internet….
but of course the video was placed there for comment and criticism.
What is the “voice” we hear. Bant Singhs have been singing all along – what’s at stake in putting this out there for an unknown audience – obviously it was not Bant Singh who decided to put this up in this way? Even if he did – is this his choice to make – the choice to have his freedom cries out in the forest of the Internet. What about his accountability to those he sings for and with – does he sing alone? Is that possible? Who made the decisions of how his singing is to be framed?
This also reminds me of the discussions we started to have around the “who gaze is it anyway” image (of ethnographer and weaver) that I put up last year for my COMS 640 to comment on…. the semiotic reading of that image was very interestingly de-contextualized and re-situated by the reader into contexts/discourse of linear narratives of development, modernity and post-structuralist and feminist discussions of voice and voicelessness. But the act of capturing image was in actuality pretty straightforward and innocent – it was the placing of it in the context of my class that lead to misreadings. Therefore it was the reader (not the read) who revealed himself/herself in that case – but it is the readers’ retelling of that story that will be taken as the “truth” (my problematizing it in class notwithstanding…)?
