Digital Spaces of Collaboration in Aesthetic Counter Narratives: Hamedullah. The Road Home and The Mirror Project

Abstract

Based on Margaret Somers’s senses of narrative and narrativity by means of which “we constitute our social identities (1992: 600), this study focuses on the scrutiny of two digital “subversive” aesthetic products, namely, British filmmaker Sue Clayton’s documentary Hamedullah. The Road Home (2012) and German philosopher Kevin McElvaney’s The Mirror Project (2017), with the objective of highlighting how the unfolding of verbal and visual narratives can be treated as the principle and “inescapable” (Baker 2006: 9) mode by means of which marginalised subjectivities “experience the world” (Baker 2006: 9) and can render it familiar to the Western gaze. The narratives revealed by the Afghan boy, named Hamedullah, the protagonist in Clayton’s documentary, and by the Arab woman interviewed in McElvaney’s project, Massarra (her narratives are encapsulated within their subtitled versions in English), are viewed as digital narrative spaces, where each character enacts his/her own personal life, where life experiences (i.e. ontological and public narratives) are turned into public words, or where words are turned into visuals (i.e. intersemiotic translating acts). Against this backdrop, digital settings, by giving hospitality to the visual arts as a device for counter acting, contribute to contesting the harmonising pressure of conventional media (e.g. TV and press) and to maximising the visibility of non-hegemonic voices within mainstreamoriented digital audiovisual frameworks (i.e. Vimeo, webpages, blogs, YouTube).