Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Agastya Gaya

@agastyagaya.com

210 followers 1.2K following 610 posts

🎓 Murakami : Mémoire d'une masculinité à ressort – Ludicité narrative, crise identitaire, érotisme de la différence 🪔 Advaitin 🙋🏽 Trans Amazigh 🪫 #MECFS patient 👁️‍🗨️ Artist-researcher & designer 🔍 Postcolonial/queer/media/game studies 🇫🇷 Paris 🔗 agastyagaya.com

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 1d

I’m working on power dynamics in mentorship and the performativity of intellectual masculinity, inspired by academic experience and Haruki Murakami’s male figures — now shaping it into a videogame prototype.
→ Murakami & Games : nielsthooft.com/murakami-and...
→ Soundtrack : youtu.be/NUnXxh5U25Y

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 9h

I heard: "Wait... You, the Moroccan, chose a Hindu name for your French citizenship?!"
Yes, Jean-Jacques, I'm a Hindu Arab. Get over it.

Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 3d

I had one audition as Krishna Bhanji & they said, 'Beautiful audition but we don't quite know how to place you in our forthcoming season.' I changed my name, crossed the road, and they said when can you start?

- Ben Kingsley on his change of Indian name to a white name.
Nefarious whiteness at work.

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 10h

#postcolonialstudies #bookmark

Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 2d

Highly recommended. Whenever you hear me dropping ‘cultural whiteness’ that occupies all public spaces in the global north, you’ll know I’m referencing this ode to dismantling monumentality.

Book cover of Dan Hicks’s Every Monument will Fall.

and catalogued in his book The Mismeasure of Man back in 198L.
Gould debunked the fake 'race science' in nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropology, exposing the misrepresentations built into the racist craniometry, phrenology, polygenism, eugenics and hereditarian theories that sought to correlate intelligence with physical features, from the legacies of Louis Agassiz at Harvard and Samuel Morton at Penn to the enduring forms of biological determinism that ran from the American Civil War through the Jim Crow era and long into the twentieth century? That's one part of it, you replied. But this isn't just about natural history and ideas of biological determinism; it's also about cultural history and ideas of cultural determinism. Ideas of Whiteness to some extent, yes - but cultural Whiteness. Ethnosuprem-acısm, legacy militarist ideologies of barbarism and 'primitiveness" as distinct from a solely fake-scientific racial supremacism. It's about patriarchal infrastructures interdigitating not just with science and laboratories but with ideas of heritage, museums, the arts, the humanities, inherited through statues, gallerie, libraries, lecture rooms - monuments of all kinds.

"The most terrible thing about war, I am convinced, is its monuments,
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 193I.* He was talking about the warping of truth through the Contederate monuments which had been built in their hundreds in public spaces across the American South in the previous halt-century. It you were to plot the places and dates of their erection on gridded paper as a seriation graph, it would take the form of a battleship curve - an armoured grey mass that probably reaches its maximum width sometime around 1910. And that's not to mention the naming of public squares and parks. Practices of commemoration were brought from the military cemeteries into the streets and transformed in the process, in the name of the Confederacy as a living tradition. The war memorial as we know it today took form here, the historian Kurt Savage has argued - memory was inscribed into physical space in this new manner decades before such monuments were built in Europe. I want to think that argument through, and consider what it means for the modern transatlantic histories of racism, violence and memory culture, and debates about preservation, heritage and monumentality.

An astonishing tour de force... Every Monument Will Fall will inspire scholars, writers, artists and activists to challenge the monumental institutions of modernity - the university, the museum and history itself' Isaac Julien, artist and Distinguished Professor of the Arts, University of California, Santa Cruz
Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, colonialism and memory, Dan Hicks joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the acquisition of stolen art and ancestral human remains.
Part history, part biography, part excavation, Every Monument Will Fall pulls at a thread that runs through this history - from country houses in the Yorkshire Wolds to Caribbean plantations. The book holds the memorialisations of men like Cecil Rhodes and General Augustus Pitt-Rivers up against the writing of Sylvia Wynter, Stuart Hall and Ursula Le Guin, drawing together open secrets about dehumanisation and the redaction of public memory.
What emerges is a speculative history of inheritance, loss, collective mourning, and the possibility of a reconciliation that has not yet begun. This is a story about who gets named and who doesn't, who is remembered and who is forgotten, who has been treated as human and who has not.
Refusing to choose between pulling down every single statue, or holding onto every last vestige of a past that future generations could never change, Every Monument Will Fall makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while. The result is an urgent appeal to reassemble the fragments, listen to the silences, value life and humanity above material things - and to rebuild a new kind of memory culture.

1 1

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 11h

#postcolonialstudies #genderstudies #mediastudies #cinemastudies

The real problem with "Wokeness" in Hollywood

YouTube video by Signified B Sides

youtu.be

Reposted by Agastya Gaya

Video Games Out of Context 🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸 @indiegamesooc.bsky.social · 2d

Night in the Woods

4 43 260

Reposted by Agastya Gaya

cécile @haraiva.bsky.social · 21h

'indie game devs' thinking making games is somehow like making movies when really at our level making games is exactly like being in a band

7 20 180

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 1d

#gamedev

Shizukuya @shizukuya-office.bsky.social · 1d

Unleash the cyberpunk vibes with our latest background footage! 🌆✨ Perfect for game development, MV, or VJ loops.

Grab it here: https://shizukuya.jp/shop/sz-d-00009/

#Cyberpunk #VideoProduction #GameDev #Shizukuya

サイバーパンク都市背景映像素材 / Cyberpunk City Background Video Vol.2

ネオンが瞬く近未来都市を表現した背景映像素材です。CRT風ノイズやグリッチを加え、サイバーパンクな雰囲気を演出。映像制作、ゲーム背景、MV、VJループなど幅広い用途で活用できます。ループ再生に適しており、SF・サイバー演出の世界観を引き立てます。

shizukuya.jp

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 1d

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 2d

#postcolonialstudies #bookmark

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 2d

Diversity was a dangerous setup! medium.com/space-anthro...

Diversity is a Dangerous Set-up

Recreational antiracism won’t change anything: a review of Jonathan Kahn’s critique of implicit bias discourse.

medium.com

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 2d

#gamestudies #postcolonialstudies #bookmark

brendan coke @brendancoke14.bsky.social · 2d

just wondered..when people play games like "the last of us", red dead redemption II and god of war..(ragnarök - or otherwise) do they actually see colour..?

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 2d

I recommend @laderfouf.bsky.social's "Racisme et jeu vidéo" (Racism and video games – not translated).

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 2d

"Companies" offered me "jobs" there — NSFW propositions. When did "graphic designer" become "sxx worker"? If you’re not white, if your name is considered "exotic", you’re not taken seriously. Tattoo shop owners treated me better — with professionalism and respect for my boundaries. 🤦🏽

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 2d

I was torn between pursuing a religious path in the Ramakrishna Order and continuing my Haruki Murakami project at the Paris Biennale’s art school. Dr. Alok Kanojia (aka HealthyGamerGG) enlightened me.
Source: youtube.com/post/UgkxlBk...
#sanatanadharma #ego

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 4d

#postcolonialstudies #bookmark

Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 4d

I referenced this Stuart Hall essay 👇🏽to pinpoint the arbitrariness of pre/colonial. Indigenous thinking has oft considered Eurocolonialism as solely *one* episode in their existence.
Anyhow, Hall’s essay exemplifies that we can articulate substantive disagreements 1/2
readingtheperiphery.org/hall/

When was ‘the post-colonial’? Thinking at the limit by Stuart Hall

Necessarily, we must dismiss those tendencies that encourage the consoling play of recognitions. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ When was ‘the post-colonial’? What should be…

readingtheperiphery.org

1 1

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 5d

This year was hard. Here's where I'm gonna spend next year:
#acnh #animalcrossing #gamestudies #therapy

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 5d

Finally 🥲

Ruth Ann Crystal @drruth.bsky.social · 6d

In a proof-of-concept study, EpiSwitch®CFS blood test (3D DNA folding patterns) identified severe ME/CFS (vs healthy controls) with 96% accuracy. buff.ly/EyzOq11

Immune and inflammation pathways (e.g. IL-2, TNF) are key.

Larger studies on other inflammatory diseases are needed.

#medsky #MECFS 😷

Man with black hair is sleeping in bed with a blue pillow and comforter. Next to him is a hand with a blue glove holding up a blood sample. EpiSwitch CFS test.

Reposted by Agastya Gaya

Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 5d

Game studies conference CFP in case you didn’t see it elsewhere

gamestudies.ca/conference-c...

Conference // Conférence

Version française ci-dessous The 2026 CGSA/ACÉJ annual conference will be a hybrid event co-hosted by the Technoculture, Art and Games Lab (TAG) at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec&nbs…

gamestudies.ca

3 4

Reposted by Agastya Gaya

lronlacy.bsky.social @lronlacy.bsky.social · 5d

#Fortune for #OCTOBER 1954
Cover illustration by S. Neil Fujita (1921-2010 👉ALT)
*Fortune*, October 1954
#FortuneCover #illustration #illustrationart #illustrationartists #SNeilFujita #graphicdesign #design

‘[Fujita] was born in Waimea, Hawaii. He attended a boarding school in Honolulu, where he adopted the name Neil. He enrolled in Chouinard Art Institute, but his studies were interrupted by WWII & his forced relocation in 1942, first to the Pomona Assembly Centre outside Los Angeles & later to the Heart Mountain Relocation Centre in Wyoming. During his confinement, he worked as the art director of the camp newspaper, the Heart Mountain Sentinel. He enlisted in the United States Army in 1943. Fujita joined a prominent Philadelphia ad agency after completing his studies. He worked for Ayer for three years & during his tenure was awarded an Art Directors gold medal. Columbia Records hired him in 1954 to build a design department to build on the work of Alex Steinweiss who established the concept cover art. In 1957, Fujita left Columbia in order to broaden his portfolio. He taught design at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, ...'
https://poulwebb.blogspot.com/2021_01_10_archive.html

1 6

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 5d

#gamestudies #bookmark

Unofficial Guardian (UK) Bot @guardian-uk-rss.bsky.social · 5d

The non-profit helping people from all over the world to become successful game developers

The IGDA Foundation broadened its reach by attending the world’s biggest video games event this summer – but faces challenges funding its work helping underrepresented developers

www.theguardian.com

Reposted by Agastya Gaya

Tanat Boozayaangool 🔜 MIGW @tanatb.housefuckinggame.com · 5d

highlight of my professional game dev career

a twink in mesh green shirt on stage with slides in the back that says "I'm a fa***t and this is a game for fa**ots" with pictures of said twink pole dancing

35 170 1.1K

Reposted by Agastya Gaya

KidzBoptotenlieder @theodramatist.com · 6d

Goose meme with text of “Who were the Antifascists fighting in Weimar Germany?”

6 110 430

Reposted by Agastya Gaya

Ces chefs d'établissement au dessus-des lois. @nhabouzite.bsky.social · 6d

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUxs...

Le pouvoir érotique de la lecture : décryptage d’un plaisir selon Roland Barthes 📚 | INA Culture

YouTube video by Ina Culture

www.youtube.com

3 6

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 6d

#gamestudies #bookmark

Bleeding Cool @bleedingcool.com · 6d

The old man casual life simulator game The Bench has been given a launch date, as we'll see it released for PC via Steam this month. #Indiedev #indiegame

The old man casual life simulator game The Bench has been given a launch date, as we'll see it released for PC via Steam this month

dlvr.it

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 6d

#gamestudies #bookmark

Stephen Totilo @stephentotilo.bsky.social · 6d

SCOOP: Last year, Ubisoft cancelled an Assassin's Creed game set during Reconstruction. Was to feature a Black Assassin who, among other things, fought the rise of the Klan

Sources: Leadership nixed it over concerns re: U.S. political climate, backlash to Yasuke

www.gamefile.news/p/scoop-ubis...

Scoop: Ubisoft cancelled a post-Civil War Assassin’s Creed last year

Company leadership deemed the project too controversial for the moment, sources tell Game File

www.gamefile.news

Reposted by Agastya Gaya

Willett @agamemnonpress.bsky.social · 6d

The Pastel House by Tim Molloy. You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy! This is our version of "you start in a tavern" pre-order The Quest Unpronounceable and Mr Unpronounceable Omnibus at AgamemnonPress.com #DnD #DnDArt #TTRPG

3 22

Reposted by Agastya Gaya

Louis Römer @lromeranth.bsky.social · 6d

This reminds me of the fragments in the archives I have encountered of slaveowners, overseers, and colonial officials working themselves into paranoia and panic about colonized and/or enslaved people playing music or dancing.

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 6d

#WarRavagedPortland

5 16 96