Cultural Producers in Perilous States: Editing Events, Documenting Change

Ten innovative interviews explore how producers of documentary media—filmmakers, journalists, and artists—located in societies considered marginal to the high-tech global centers respond to local and international audiences in creating their works.

We meet a South African playwright who is shaping a distinctive form of activist journalism; a New Guinean producer who manages several media careers; Polish and German filmmakers developing critical documentaries on compromised new orders; a Columbian artist who provides powerful representations of endemic violence in her society; and writers from Martinique and Argentina with varied careers in the arts, media, and politics who provide tragicomic accounts of the marginal situations of their societies.

Cynical, hopeful, ambivalent all at once, these cultural producers in perilous states share a keen awareness of the marginality of their societies in the broader context of global change, and associate integrity in the reporting of local events with a critical politics of representation.

George E. Marcus is professor of political science at Williams College and the author, coauthor, or coeditor of seven books, including, most recently, Political Psychology: Neuroscience, Genetics, and Politics.