Page - 12 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

12 | Philippe Bornet, Stefanie Knauss, and Alexander D. Ornella www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 7–14 Castro’s analysis of the cinematic reimagining of Rāvaṇa as a positive figure of identification for the oppressed and social outcasts, which shows that traditional religious narratives can become a resource to articulate critique or resistance with regard to socio-cultural issues. With this attention to diverse sites of media production and consumption, it is critical to account for changes in linguistic practices and values – albeit sometimes “transparent” and invisible. English has become the de facto lin- gua franca, the dominant language for communicating across borders and cultural contexts, both in media and in their academic study. This raises the question of how the dominance of one particular language shapes knowing the world through its specific concepts and structures, and the forms of (visual and textual) communication of this knowledge. As Patil shows, the question arises of what these linguistic developments imply for creators and recipients of media in non-English cultures in terms of production and dis- tribution, as well as in terms of worldviews or expectations associated with a given language. Are digital media, which have primarily been created with- in a western English linguistic framework and its respective technologies, for example, able to account for the diversity of the world’s languages, al- phabets, and cultures? What kinds of linguistic “hybridizations” are at work, how are they influenced by social and religious values, and how do they affect social and religious communities? Are we witnesses to a worldwide cultural and linguistic uniformization, or are new media providing ways for minorities to express their own views in their own idiom? These questions open up numerous avenues of research on the relation- ship between media and religion in the context of postcoloniality. The con- tributions gathered in this issue of JRFM address some of them without, of course, exhausting the subject. Attending to a wide range of temporal and cultural contexts, as well as media and religious traditions, the articles investigate the complex relationships between people, religion, and media – continuously reworked and renegotiated – under the conditions of postco- loniality. In the exclusive interview, “Playing with Words, Worlds, and Images”, Patil discusses her multifaceted work with the editors of this issue. Through the medium of the graphic novel, she creates powerful narratives that are also visually beautiful artworks. Attentive to aspects such as gender, so- cial inequalities, and the environmental crisis, she turns old stories that had been “fossilized” in the past into living mythologies for contemporary times.