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How did games rise to become the central audiovisual form of expression and storytelling in digital culture? How did the practices of their artistic production come into being? How did the academic analysis of the new medium's social effects and cultural meaning develop?Addressing these fundamental questions and aspects of digital game culture in a holistic way for the first time, Gundolf S. Freyermuth's introduction outlines the media-historical development phases of analog and digital games, the history and artistic practices of game design, as well as the history, academic approaches, and most important research topics of game studies.With contributions by Andre Czauderna, Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman.

Newsreel cinema and television not only served as an important tool in the shaping of political spheres and the construction of national and cultural identities up to the 1960s. Today's potent televisual forms were furthermore developed in and strongly influenced by newsreels, and much of the archived newsreel footage is repeatedly used to both illustrate and re-stage past events and their significance.This book addresses newsreel cinema and television as a medium serving the formation of cultural identities in a variety of national contexts after 1945, its role in forming audiovisual narratives of a biopic of the nation and the technical, aesthetical, and political challenges of archiving and restaging cinematic and televisual newsreel.

How to account for the peculiar attraction of certain photos? How to deal with the specific use of images in particular contexts? Monika Schwarzler presents a variety of photographic case studies exploring visual phenomena from the point of view of media analysis as well as from sociological, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic perspectives. The topics range from a new reading of Thomas Struth's street photographs to CERN photos with their charged rhetoric, from the assault of photographic close-ups to speculations on an anonymous slide collection featuring a woman with an ever-present white handbag. The book is intended for an audience receptive to the analytical appeal of images, prepared to go beyond what can be taken at face value.

Since the introduction of photography by commercial studio photographers and the colonial state in Kenya, this global medium has been intensely debated and contested among Muslims on the cosmopolitan East African coast. This book does not only explore the making, circulation, and consumption of popular photographs, but also the other side, their rejection and obliteration, an essential aspect of a medium's history that should not be neglected. It deals with various social spaces of refusal in the local Muslim milieu and in that of traditional spirit mediums in which (gendered) visibility was (and is) contested in various and creative ways. It focuses on the aesthetics of withdrawal: the various ways and techniques that process the photographic act as well as the photographic image to theatricalize the surface of the image in new ways by veiling, masking, and concealing. In a fragmented historical perspective, Heike Behrend seeks to complement, decenter, and counter the history of photography as it has been told by the West and to narrate another history beginning with preceding local media such as textiles and spirit possession.

(Dis)Orientation appears to be a phenomenon that is connected to media in numerous respects: today, finding your way in the world often means finding your way with the help of as well as within media, which in turn creates new virtual realms of (dis)orientation. This book deals with recent media technologies and structures (navigation devices, databases, transmediality) and unconventional narrative patterns (narrative complexity, plot twists, non-linearity), using the ambivalent concept of (dis)orientation as a shared focus to analyse various phenomena of contemporary media, thereby raising overarching questions about current mediascapes.

From Josephine Baker's performances in the 1920s to the 1970s solidarity campaigns for Angela Davis, from Audre Lorde as mother of the Afro-German movement in the 1980s to the literary stardom of 1993 Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Germans have actively engaged with African American women's art and activism throughout the 20th century. The discursive strategies that have shaped the (West) German reactions to African American women's social activism and cultural work are examined in this study, which proposes not only a nuanced understanding of African Americanizations as a form of cultural exchange but also sheds new light on the role of African American culture for (West) German society, culture, and national identity.

Britain's recent historical culture is marked by a shift. As a consequence of new political directives, black history began to be mainstreamed into the realm of national history from the late 1990s onwards. Black History - White History assesses a number of manifestations of this new cultural historiography on screen and on stage, in museums and other accessible sites, emerging in the context of two commemorative events: the Windrush anniversary and the 1807 abolition bicentenary. It inquires into the terms on which the new historical programme could take hold, its sustainability and its representational politics.

The past 60 years have seen the rediscovery of the immense cultural depth of Confucian humanist thought and its power to shape the way human beings are understood in East Asia. In this volume, renowned Confucian scholar Chun-chieh Huang analyzes various East Asian contexts to identify the central pillars of the Confucian humanist spirit: a continuum between mind and body, harmony between oneself and others, the unity of heaven and humanity, and a profound historical consciousness. Scholars of religion, history, philosophy and Asian studies will find this volume an indispensable guide to the rich tradition of East Asian Confucian humanism.