In the special section

1. Novotny Lawrence reads the 2017 Jordan Peele film Get Out as a powerful critique of colorblind post-racial fantasies in the United States in the post-Barack Obama era as well as a commentary on the history of depiction of slavery in Hollywood and independent cinema. Lawrence begins by looking at the Lost Cause tradition which had as a primary aim to reunite the North and the South in a revision of Civil War history while downplaying the foundational role of slavery in the formation of the United States. The Lost Cause tradition played down the effects of slavery by portraying the South’s efforts as honest nation-building against all odds. In Hollywood, the Lost Cause tradition manifested itself in Reunion films claiming to represent the perspective of the South; such films recast white slave-owning characters as benign, honorable, chivalrous characters evoking feelings of empathy for the South, and defined and policed the “right ways to be Black.” The article then looks at how Get Out mirrors and critiques the Reunion films by taking all the familiar tropes of such films and subverting them. The article also develops a history of how independent films, in contrast to mainstream Hollywood, have critically looked at the institution of slavery and presented a powerful critique of the Panoptic plantation—a horrific construct built for surveillance and control of Black bodies especially for the cotton trade. Get Out uses the Panoptic plantation structure in a contemporary setting as a living metaphor for contemporary racism.
   
   
2. Gloria Negrete-Lopez shows that the “border” is constantly created and maintained as a source of problems in the public view by the state to justify its policing. The state regularly constructs an entire regime of visual imagery that constructs the “border” as the problem, either through criminalizing people of color by showing them crossing the border illegally or by showing harrowing images of victimhood, the blame implicitly being put on the victims. This reinforces a sense of need for policing and surveillance of the US-Mexico border which is then circulated by 24-hour news cycles of mass media. Negrete-Lopez’s article on the made up “necessity” of the border points out the importance of the border in the global capitalist order. At a time when there is unparalleled global mobility of finance capital, the violent policing of the borders makes sure that the global community of labor is kept separated, which severely weakens their position with respect to capital which has the state and its coercive apparatus, such as the police, at its disposal.
   
   Border policing along with detention and deportation, Negrete-Lopez shows, are dehumanizing practices that separate families and result in the “slow death” of communities. These practices also follow racial lines as the entire edifice of the territorially bounded nation-state of the United States with borders to protect, was built on slavery and racial capitalism. Thus, the work of the US-Mexico border police is premised on locking up black and brown bodies. However, there is resistance to this inhumane practice through art and Negrete-Lopez highlights the abolitionist work of artists like Melanie Cervantes who not only counter this narrative through their artwork, but also provide imaginative radical alternatives to the border and border policing. She shows that such artists do the very important work of imagination that shows people “…other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” These artistic practices are rooted in the theory and practice of feminism that foregrounds community safety without othering or exclusion or criminalization of communities. The essay also makes the connections between the prison system and national borders by showing how a punitive state machinery criminalizes and keeps the communities of color under repressive control.
   
   
3. Writing about the “Women, life, freedom” movement in Iran, Tania Ahmadi explains that Iran has had a long history of feminist activism going back to the nineteenth century, fighting on the issues of women’s literacy and access to public education, hygiene, vocational training, women’s seclusion from public life, polygamy and domestic violence, unequal inheritance laws. While the instating of the Islamic Republic in 1979 reversed much of the progress made by those feminists, such a reminder about the existence of this feminist history situates the contemporary protests against the current patriarchal Islamic state within a glorious feminist tradition.
   
   The current protests started in 2022 when 22-year old Mahsa Amini was murdered by Iran’s Morality Police for wearing an improper hijab. Soon, the movement became characterized by the use of self, body, media and symbolism. Iranian women not only subverted formal Internet censorship by using VPNs but also stereotypical, Orientalist images of them in the West. Ahmadi points out in her article that some of the rebellious gestures adopted by the women were directly drawn from earlier such gestures, thus adding to an inherited feminist tradition. Ahmadi also shows that while on the one hand, the patriarchal, extremist Islamic police state used different oppressive measures such as sexual harassment, homophobic censure, poisoning of schoolgirls etc., the protestors fought back on every single issue, adopting innovative tactics. What stands out is the way the women used media (particularly social media) and the circulatory power of the image to their advantage to construct their own narratives, and counter the misogynist narratives of the state as well as the racist narratives of the West that reduces them to the status of mere victims.
   
   
4. In Brett Hack’s article reading of two Japanese anime series—Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Psycho-Pass—in the context of Japan’s experience of neoliberalism, he looks at the fictional representations of police institutions and personnel as “techniques of imagination” that make it possible to “visualize large-scale systemic forces beyond the perception of ordinary citizens.” Since neoliberalism is characterized by the undermining of non-authoritarian institutions, and authoritarian institutions that are largely inaccessible to the general public, Hack argues that “police characters are sometimes the only plausible vessels for depicting large-scale forces.” Even though the fictional police characters themselves reiterate the authoritarian, institutional perspective, reading them as “a repertoire of imaginative techniques” opens up the possibility for viewing the police institutions in their proper social context and thus, subject to critique. The history and development of animation in Japan takes on an important role here as political realities, such as the role of postwar police in annihilating leftist movements, appear as a particular aesthetic in anime. Hack shows how anime’s techniques of “limited animation” and compositing of different layers renders itself viable to a referential style that manages to depict different, often opposing, political and historical forces. The anime depiction of police thus becomes an imaginative technique woven into “anime’s techniques of image creation.” But complexly, if on the one hand, a social critique is rendered through police visuality and its accompanying contextualization, on the other hand, this world made visible through police eyes “reifies a given social order as inevitable.”
   
   
5. Sasha Crawford-Holland’s reflective essay, “Documenting State Violence,” borne out of his class at the University of Chicago, responds to a persisting lack of non-theatrical media in mainstream pedagogy and to the potential “pragmatic insights that film and media studies can lend activists.” The class aims to equip students, who come from a wide mix of academic backgrounds, with academic, pedagogic and practical tools to respond to a “contemporary conjuncture of power, technology, and activism.” The classroom process eschews simplistic binaries (like technophilia vs technophobia), and allows nuance and ambivalence while dealing with media. The article highlights that an openness of pedagogy means acknowledging that while examples of police atrocities from across the world are structurally connected through capital and the state, there is no one size fits all as far as activism is concerned. Embrace of ambivalence is central to this pedagogical exercise because opinions and approaches that are contradictory to each other are often simultaneously true. Crawford-Holland shows how social media, for example, is the site of both anti-police or anti-authoritarian media activism as well as the domain of insidious and far-reaching state propaganda. The fundamental ethos of the class and the article combines both creation and critique, as it acknowledges that the media is not only influencing reality but in actually making it. At a time when state domination through police control is at an all-time high, this educational process gives hope to and encourages media activists to go out and create media, and imagine and lay the foundation of a more egalitarian reality in the process.
   
   
6. Heath Schultz examines the post-Ferguson police technologies in the light of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s history of visuality to theorize about the Policing Complex. Schultz theorizes that the modalities of Mirzoeff’s concept of the ideological construction of “visuality” namely, classification, separation and aestheticization of separation specifically operate in the Police Complex as racialization, policing and legitimation of policing. Racialization/ classification divides humanity into humans and feral subjects, policing violently organizes the subjects along racial lines, and the legitimizing of policing occurs through a logic of the “thin blue line.” That ideology of the thin blue line comes from the idea of a “civilizational crisis” where the line, representing the police, protects civilization from perpetual threats to it, thereby necessitating its presence at all times.
   
   Schultz deftly situates policing within the structures of contemporary finance capitalism in which the focus of capitalism has shifted from production to circulation, thus shifting the primary mode of protest from strikes to riots. In the US context, riots are racially coded as Black (where White represents order) and the police are essential for the protection of order (or capital). He shows with examples that contemporary policing is just organized plunder in the service of finance capital.
   
   Schultz closely reads two works of art to demonstrate how the ideology of the thin blue line is constantly recreated and maintained—Secret Santa Saves Christmas, a 2014 a pro-police television segment for the CBS program Sunday Morning, and a 2019 work of installation art, My Blue Window, by American Artist that is critical of the institution of police. The article shows that the CBS segment is a fluff piece in praise of the police that showcases all that is good and needs to be protected, while the installation piece demonstrates the feralization of subjects that are then deemed to be threat to civilization. Thus, while one operates from “above” the thin blue line on the side of civilization, the other shows that the police operates from “below” to contain the perceived threat of the feral subjects threatening civilization.
   
   
7. Maren Feller points out that the murder of George Floyd cannot be found on the Minneapolis Police Department’s Crime Location Map and thus, if the department considers its former colleagues as beyond the law, it ought to be deemed a criminal organization. As the police is silent on its own crime and Floyd’s murder is invisibilized, it’s the symbols used by activists that register this heinous crime. Drawing from these contrasting approaches, Feller asks if cartography can go beyond discrimination and containment, and whether maps can generate imaginations of togetherness, sharing space and world building, or in other words, a “map of the commons.” The role of the map as a means of control has been central to the bureaucratization of police departments in the 19th and 20th centuries. Police mapping is now used to predict crime based on past events. With the advent of algorithms and artificial intelligence, the maps replicate and compound the existing hierarchies of racism, bigotry and discrimination. They fundamentally transform geographies into racialized, class-based lines of segregation and discrimination, and enable the interpellation of subjects into the overarching structures of racial capitalism.
   
   On the other hand, activists were able to rename the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue (the site of Floyd’s murder) as George Floyd Square (GFS) on the map and by the dint of being on maps, GFS became real. By projecting acts of sharing and addressing the commonality of labor onto GFS, people have begun to imagine a counter-cartography. These competing ideas of cartography represent power of life (activists and common people) in contrast to power over life. While the police’s cartography represents and enforces classification for the sake of coercion and domination, the counter-cartography makes space possible for community organizing around principles of care and freedom. In a sense, the counter-map becomes an “infrastructure of sharing.”
   
   
8. Zachariah Anderson problematizes the uncritical use of police body cam footage by documentary filmmakers of the “true crime” genre and challenges the “true” in “true crime.” By extension, he provides a critique of the regime of surveillance used by the contemporary police state. Anderson looks at the 2020 Netflix documentary film American Murder: The Family Next Door to prize open the seemingly obvious connection between the “true crime” genre and veracity. Anderson applies here Elizabeth Cowie’s arguments on the documentary form as enacting a process to satisfy audience’s desire to encounter and know the real. In the context of the “true crime” genre, this desire is satisfied by making the audience inspect evidence, which Anderson calls the “jurification” of the audience. This means the audience is made to identify with the police in a way that such shows amplify the normalization of police work. Moreover, Anderson shows how body cam footage, devoid of the institutional contexts in which it is filmed and reproduced, can reinforce the sense of threat as perceived by the police; alternatively, by showing non-violent police work, the footage can gloss over serious threats posed by the police. Either way, these perceptions legitimize even more surveillance and an increased presence of the police in social life. This essay thus shows how even documentary, apart from popular fiction, can contribute to police propaganda.
   
   
9. Catherine Saunders shows in her short article that the carceral system is a totalizing system for Black people in the United States because a Black life is earmarked as a potential life of crime even before birth within the mother’s womb. The Black woman’s womb as the site of birthing the labor force to be exploited, has been instrumentalized as the site of social reproduction since the days of slavery, and it continues to play the same role in the modern day carceral United States. In this system, black lives are, to use Althusser’s term, “overdetermined.” This can lead to a mode of destructive self-expectation as more and more black people are imprisoned unjustly and seeing more black bodies in the prison system reinforces the belief that black people are more prone to crime. Socially, the idea of a loop of criminality ultimately reinforces the perceived need for an even more robust and strict prison system. However, Saunders also posits that the Black woman’s womb can also be the site of the death of the carceral state if it does not reproduce at its command, which, in turn, proves the highly political status of the Black maternal womb in carceral United States.
   
   
10. Maya Ranganathan and Selvaraj Velayuthan look at the concomitant histories of policing in society in Tamil Nadu and policing in Tamil cinema. Policing in Tamil Nadu began as private policing introduced by the East India Company which was later reorganized into centralized state policing that acted as a state arm. Existing caste hierarchies were reproduced in the police as caste expertise made the task of a small number of policemen easier and recruitment to the police force was itself caste based. Looking specifically at cinema, Ranganathan and Velayuthan apply CRW David’s categorization of the genre of Indian “socials” to Tamil cinema and track an evolution of films from being about the dilemma of the individual at home at a time of intercultural exchange, then to being about the struggle of the individual against an unjust system, and finally to becoming “authentic socials” that draw from serious problems and events in society. As part of the last category, the authors look at the films Karnan and Jai Bhim, both based on real-life events, as examples of films that take a critical look at the institution of policing and how the completely partisan way it operates holds up and reinforces the caste hierarchy. The cinematic analyses show that contrary to commonsensical understanding, the police do not react to “crime” but their actions, i.e. policing of oppressed communities, are premeditated. The article shows that the police station is a “spatio-carceral” state of exception—one that materially manifests and embodies state power and authority over deviants, alleged offenders, victims of crime and ordinary citizens, especially from the marginalized communities.
    
    
11. Through a reading of the video game Disco Elysium, Seunghyun Shin indicates how scholarship on video games has emphasized concepts, such as interactivity and the sense of agency that players experience, in an overstated way. Shin focuses on the game’s garrulous protagonist cop Harrier Du Bois to both extend and challenge the “interactive experience” argument. That is, opting for different choices does not matter in the end because a video game’s consequences are the same (and limited). A better model for understanding the player’s sense of agency along with an illusion of choice is that of “interpassivity.” Interpassivity, while feeling like interactivity, relieves the subject (video game player) from actually experiencing emotions, feelings, or the burden of taking decisions etc. without them realizing it because their identification is with outer agents (characters in the game). In Disco Elysium, the players are required to choose distinct political alignments as the cop protagonist Harry Du Bois, but Du Bois and other non-playing characters make those choices on behalf of the players, making the relationship between the players and the game an interpassive one. However, of the four available political alignments in the game, communism is the only active and anti-status quo one which offers the promise of change from the current capitalist system, in line with the game’s developers’ ideology. The experience of playing Disco Elysium is a combination of interactivity and interpassivity which reveals the nature of experience under capitalism by revealing who someone is in the dominant capitalist culture through their political choices.