Newspaper cartoons are significant because their inherent ambiguity withstands scrutiny as historical and anthropological texts. This article focuses on Gandhi's writings and analysis of newspaper cartoons published in the South African press. Addressing the Indian community in a period of growing resistance, Gandhi situated cartoons as a part of the necessary vocabulary for understanding the British mind. Serving a pedagogical role, through his translation and interpretation, Gandhi also urged his readers to see what the whites were already seeing. Engaging Gandhi as an interlocutor in the colonial visual milieus he inhabited shows the newspaper cartoons’ intimate connections with colonialism and resistance.

In Syria, official portraiture depicting members of the Asad regime has long been used as a tool to produce and uphold authoritarian power. Following in his father's footsteps, Bashar al-Asad generated a wide range of billboards, banners, posters, and stickers in his own image meant for both public and private consumption. Rather than treat this visual regime as a monolith of interchangeable and mass-produced imagery, I argue in this article for the examination of Asad portraits on smaller and more intimate scales. I discuss the display of these cult images within the domain of small-scale shops in Damascus, looking at both how these images are embedded in other visual and symbolic contexts, and how they become individually relevant as they are materially embellished and marked.

In the summer of 1966, seven Navajo community members from Pine Springs, Arizona, were the subjects of one of the most provocative experiments in cognitive and visual anthropology yet completed, the Navajo Film Project, resulting in Sol Worth and John Adair's seminal work Through Navajo Eyes, as well as seven short films produced by Navajo filmmakers that garnered worldwide attention in their own right. In 2011, the films were repaired and returned to the Navajo Nation for public screenings, the first step in a process of repatriation and resignification that mirrors the repatriation of other visual media to Navajo and indigenous communities. The return of the films offers a unique opportunity to reexamine the meanings of the films and the project itself, reframing the discussion around issues of visual sovereignty, community reengagements, and “reclaiming” Diné/Navajo histories.

In Indonesia, national broadcasting in the 21st century has been characterized by increasing Muslim normativity across the spectrum of commercial programming, along with sectarian clashes that have further marginalized religious minorities. This article investigates the case of a small, regional television station in one of the country's Christian-majority provinces to explore the ways that such minorities have exploited a relaxation of broadcast regulations to form distinctive and insular micromediascapes within the larger field of Indonesian media culture. I suggest the need for a more graduated articulation of Arjun Appadurai's “mediascape” concept that foregrounds the import of local, small-scale production and broadcasting, particularly to marginalized groups. Based on an ethnographic study in Manado, North Sulawesi, I argue that local TV has risen to the foreground of the province's public culture in a manner that mobilizes its religious, ethnic, and historical identity narratives to reterritorialize audiences and reify the region's distinction from the state.

This article examines the various roles played by photographers and photographic images in the grassroots memorials to the victims of the March 11, 2004 Madrid bombings, as spontaneously displayed by anonymous citizens in public spaces. For purposes of comparison, parallels are drawn with similar memorials to the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York. Although photographic depictions of the pain and suffering caused by the massacres seem to predominate in both cases, photographs served another—and at least in local terms—socially significant purpose, as this article will try to show, through its material anchoring in collective remembrance photographs contributed to the public memorialization of the events.