Page - 8 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

8 | Philippe Bornet, Stefanie Knauss, and Alexander D. Ornella www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 7–14 (non- western) colonized during the historical period of colonialism and in “coloniality”, a term introduced by Aníbal Quijano to describe the ways in which colonial dynamics of othering and difference, as well as western epis- temologies, continue to shape the cultural, economic, political, and religious forces within and between communities.2 The studies published here focus on these very continuities and ruptures between historical colonialism, postcolonialism, internal colonialism within a society, and neocolonialism: Amruta Patil introduces us to her work with graphic novels as a space of subversion and critique; Genoveva Castro discusses cinematic reimaginings of Indian mythology; Philippe Bornet directs our attention to 19th-century visual representations of India; Héctor Varela Rios offers a decolonializing theological reading of an influential work of 19th-century Puerto Rican art; and Sakina Loukili analyzes the ways in which self-identified Muslim parties in the Netherlands use social media as “third spaces”. In media studies, postcolonial theory, on which the contributions in this issue draw substantially, has provided a helpful frame for the analysis of dy- namics of power and resistance, in both the past and the present.3 Yet this theoretical framework also has come under some critique since the turn of the century, partly because of its tendency to reduce the complexity of colonial encounters to simplistic binary patterns. As Wendy Willems argues, attempts to “de-westernize” academic media studies have often perpetu- ated rather than subverted dominant eurocentric structures and cultural assumptions.4 Raka Shome also emphasizes that media, their uses and users, have played a major role in maintaining colonial power imbalances and imposing western structures of knowing,5 and they largely continue to be dominated by the west in postcolonial times, both in popular culture and in the academic study of it. Instead, Shome argues, media studies need to find new and different ways of “engaging how very different geopolitical and colonial contexts in the South (and the non-West more generally) have pro- duced media practices, cultures, and objects that may challenge what we understand by media, its history of development, its possible uses, effects, and so on”.6 2 Quijano/Ennis 2000. 3 Rajagopal 2011; Merten/Krämer 2016. 4 See Willems 2014. 5 See Shome 2019. 6 Shome 2019, 306.