Peter Bloom
· Professor of Film and Media StudiesVerifiedUniversity of California, Santa Barbara · Comparative Literature
Active 1981–2025
About
Peter Bloom is associated with the Graduate Center for Literary Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is involved in film and media studies, as indicated by his contact email and the website link provided. His role at UC Santa Barbara includes serving as a faculty member within the College of Letters and Science, contributing to the academic community through his expertise in film and media. Further details about his specific research focus, background, or key contributions are not provided in the available page text.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Computer Science
- Political Science
- Media studies
- History
- Law
- Library science
- Art history
- Philosophy
- Psychology
- Gender studies
- Visual arts
- Anthropology
- Art
- Epistemology
Selected publications
chapter 1 Introduction: Screens and Illusionism: Alternative Teleologies of Mediation
Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2025-01-03
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe Humanitarian Politics of Return and Repair in Tigray
Afterimage · 2025-09-01
article1st authorCorrespondingThe video installation The Return of the Axum Obelisk (2009) by Theo Eshetu, originally commissioned by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), serves as a context for examining the removal of this funerary stele from the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia in 1937, and its return, reinstallation, and unveiling at Axum in 2008. Eshetu’s work deploys a narrative of repair and hope by demonstrating how the return of the obelisk lends itself to a newly found comradeship between Ethiopian and Italian engineers, among others, in association with UNESCO. The discussion culminates with an examination of how the repatriation effort reckons with the recent civil war in the Tigray region (2020–22), and considers the ambivalent nature of techno-scientific archeological projects. It asks whether cultural repatriation associated with the Italian colonial legacy is a meaningful reparative project in relation to deadly ethnic divisions associated with contemporary civil conflicts.
2024-08-29
article1st authorCorrespondingVoicing the Malayan Emergency: Ventriloquizing Subjectivity in British Colonial Film and Radio
positions asia critique · 2023 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Sociology
- Political Science
Abstract British colonial film and radio broadcasting initiatives are described as a foundational context for shaping the Malayan Emergency (1948–60). The development and deployment of counterinsurgency techniques become a means by which to wage war against what came to be identified as the Communist insurgency, previously trained and allied with Anglo-American forces against the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945. Key British figures associated with propaganda tactics during World War II, such as Hugh Carelton Greene, were instrumental in developing a new array of techniques for postwar propaganda. This article considers the extent to which film and radio programming were elemental to managing popular aspirations for independence just as economic and political authority became increasingly consolidated within the terms of Anglo-American economic and political interests. It considers how film and media programs contributed to the construction of the “Communist terrorist” by reference to several radio segments and films that were produced during this period. A significant part of the Malayan Emergency was associated with a large-scale population resettlement program known as the Briggs Plan. It was conceived as an effective population-centric strategy of political control that relied upon a biopolitics of security that became integral to Cold War political objectives. It is within the terms of a Cold War media complex that this discussion addresses the context for “radio-cinema governmentality.”
Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2022-10-12
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAfrican Studies Review · 2022-02-22
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingVictoria Ellen Smith, editor. Voices of Ghana. Literary Contributions to the Ghana Broadcasting System, 1955-57, Second Edition. Suffolk: James Currey, 2018. xx + 276 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $99.00. Hardcover. ISBN: 1847011926, 978-1847011923. - Volume 65 Issue 1
The Biopolitics of Media Currency: Transforming the Ghana Film Unit into TV3
African Studies Review · 2021 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Sociology
Abstract This article is an examination and extension of concepts that Achille Mbembe presented in his 2016 African Studies Association Abiola Lecture. In particular, “cognitive assemblages” are elaborated upon to consider how a shifting understanding of media has become part of a neoliberal digital media platform promoted by the Ghanaian state in association with Malaysia. Mbembe’s invocation of the “injunction to decolonize” is also discussed through information capture and data mining to consider the extent to which the promise of a digital future is a form of neo-colonialism or an opportunity for an expanded digital commons.
International Review of Social History · 2021-11-15
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingAn abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
INTERSECTING LEGACIES OF BANDES DESSINÉES AND BELGIAN COLONIAL INSTRUCTION:
2021-01-19
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe American Historical Review · 2021-03-01
article1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 20 shared
Stephan F. Miescher
- 16 shared
Joanna At
University of the Witwatersrand
- 16 shared
Keyan G. Tomaselli
University of Johannesburg
- 16 shared
Eboe Hutchful
University of the Witwatersrand
- 16 shared
Percy Hintzen
University of the Witwatersrand
- 16 shared
Robert Diaz
University of the Witwatersrand
- 16 shared
Gaye Johnson
The University of Texas at Austin
- 16 shared
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
Education
- 1997
M.A., Ph.D., Critical Studies, School of Theater, Film, and Television
University of California Los Angeles
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