Immediations

"Documentary’s apparent generosity toward its most hapless subjects is an ambivalent gift. With elegance and precision, Pooja Rangan demonstrates that participatory documentary more often than not obliterates the others it means to help by forcing them into humanist molds of selfhood. Instead, she asks, what if documentary were to yield to the beings of the world in their unassimilable singularity? The answers she finds will stimulate both documentary makers and scholars." - Laura U. Marks, author of Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image

"Pooja Rangan's incisive voice brings tremendous critical acumen and clarity to the interpretation of the humanitarian documentary impulse in global media now. A powerful and timely work, Immediations will undoubtedly exert a strong influence on film and media studies and will be widely read by those who care about the sentiment of benevolence and its mediated impacts for a long time to come." - Lisa Cartwright, author of Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child

“Rangan moves diagonally across disciplinary boundaries and media forms, tracing the past and future of theory and practice concerning participatory documentary. Immediations offers substantial theoretical matrices for scholars to contend with going forward, and new challenges for interdisciplinary practitioners.” - Joel Neville Anderson, Visual Studies Workshop

“Immediations marks an important contribution to documentary and anthropology studies, making exemplary use of multidisciplinary research to explore more deeply the human power structures and their relationship to the politics of representation.” - Almudena Escobar López, Film Quarterly

"A good critical source for both authors and activists, but also for readers in cultural and film studies interested into ethical perspectives." - Ana Peraica, Leonardo Reviews

“Pooja Rangan provides a precise and accessible theory of the aesthetic and political implications of the audiovisual tropes mobilized when documentary is in emergency mode.” - Genne Speers, InVisible Culture

"Pooja Rangan’s Immediations is a provocative, polemical, and vital book for thinking through the often problematic humanitarian impulse to give the camera to the Other. . . . Immediations is a bold, refreshing book that I simply cannot stop thinking about." - Ryan Watson, Cinema Journal