Form and Content
of Third Cinema may become a book, but it will begin here as a
digital edited collection of scholarship, reflections, and analysis
about the archival material it makes available. Its target audience is
scholars, students, media-makers, activists, and organizers interested
in histories and theories of political media, contemporary deployments
of new media in the service of on- going movements for social and
economic justice, and critical theories of film and media. It will
include an online archive of the documents, videos, and other media
generated by Third World Majority. These will be the source material and
focus of a variety of essays by scholars and activists. The archive
will be foregrounded within a “reader”-driven organizational structure
that allows “readers” to learn by exploring the archive and reading the
collected essays, about the history and theory of Third Cinema (an
influential, politicized, film movement that started in Latin America in
the late 1960s); the relationship of Third World Majority to that
history and theory; and, what an analysis of Third World Majority offers
to existing scholarship and activism about the relationships between
digital media production, people of color, and social movements.
Ideally, a “reader’s” process of engagement with the project will be
productive of additional insights about the possibilities and
limitations of digital media for popular education, social and economic
justice movement building, critical theory, and academic scholarship.
Because one of the project’s animating questions is about the
relationship between new media technologies and social change, the form
of the project itself strives to function as a mode of praxis at the
nexus of the digital and the political.