Since the 1990s, the knowledge, culture, and entertainment industries have found themselves experimenting, not altogether voluntarily, with communicating complex information across multiple media platforms. Against a backdrop of competing national priorities, changing technologies, globalization, and academic capitalism, these industries have sought to reach increasingly differentiated local audiences, even as distributed production practices have made the lack of authorial control increasingly obvious. As Katie King describes in Networked Reenactments, science-styled television-such as the Secrets of Lost Empires series shown on the PBS program Nova-demonstrates how new technical and collaborative skills are honed by television producers, curators, hobbyists, fans, and even scholars. Examining how transmedia storytelling is produced across platforms such as television and the web, she analyzes what this all means for the humanities. What sort of knowledge projects take up these skills, attending to grain of detail, evoking affective intensities, and zooming in and out, representing multiple scales, as well as many different perspectives? And what might this mean for feminist transdisciplinary work, or something sometimes called the posthumanities?
Since the 1990s, the knowledge, culture, and entertainment industries have found themselves experimenting, not altogether voluntarily, with communicating complex information across multiple media platforms. Against a backdrop of competing national priorities, changing technologies, globalization, and academic capitalism, these industries have sought to reach increasingly differentiated local audiences, even as distributed production practices have made the lack of authorial control increasingly obvious. As Katie King describes in Networked Reenactments, science-styled television-such as the Secrets of Lost Empires series shown on the PBS program Nova-demonstrates how new technical and collaborative skills are honed by television producers, curators, hobbyists, fans, and even scholars. Examining how transmedia storytelling is produced across platforms such as television and the web, she analyzes what this all means for the humanities. What sort of knowledge projects take up these skills, attending to grain of detail, evoking affective intensities, and zooming in and out, representing multiple scales, as well as many different perspectives? And what might this mean for feminist transdisciplinary work, or something sometimes called the posthumanities?
In this feminist cultural study of reenactments, Katie King traces the development of a new kind of transmedia storytelling during the 1990s, as a response to the increasing difficulty of reaching large audiences at a time where entertainment media and knowledge production were both being restructured. King ties this development to political and economic changes that have come with globalization and the affordances that have come from new media. In a series of chapters addressing specific forms - from television shows through museum exhibits to new media games and representation - she follows the shape of reenactments as they offer increasing affective and imaginative possibilities.
Foreword / Donna Haraway ix
Preface. What Are Reenactments in This Book? xv
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction. A Thick Description amid Authorships, Audiences, and
Agencies in the Nineties 1
1. Nationalities, Sexualities, and Global TV: Highlander, Xena, and
Meanings of European Union 21
2. Science in American Life: Among the Culture Warriors 59
3. TV and the Web Come Together 129
4. Scholars and Intellectual Entrepreneurs 203
Conclusion. Toward a Feminist Transdisciplinary Posthumanities
273
Notes 301
Bibliography 335
Index 351
Katie King is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Theory in Its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. Women’s Movements.
"Networked Reenactments is an extraordinary book that explores how to inhabit with seriousness and pleasure the many discomforts that we experience when trying to do work that matters to us and maybe to others... Because any serious person is obliged to 'traverse knowledge worlds in terms not of our own making,' King shows her readers how to 'befriend transdisciplinary movements' with all of our vulnerability and power, capacity and incapacity, hope and worry. It is all about learning to play, or, as King writes, 'learning to be affected.'" Donna Haraway, from the foreword "In this lively, thoughtful, and provocative book, Katie King traces the multiple layers and complex intertwined 'communities of practice' that assemble around such diverse discursive sites as television programs, academic classes and conferences, museum exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Networked Reenactments leaves the reader with a heightened sense of the possibilities, as well as the limits and dangers, of contemporary knowledge production, of the ways that we collectively make meanings and understand the heritage of the past in the present." Steven Shaviro, author of Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society
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