Browse

In the American world, the presence of African culture is sometimes fully embodied and sometimes leaves only a trace. This book explores this presence, examining Mattel’s world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and Disney World, each of which repackages African visual culture for consumers. Because these cultural icons permeate American life, they represent the broader U.S. culture and its relationship to African culture. This study integrates approaches from art history and visual culture studies with those from culture, race, and popular culture studies to analyze this interchange. Two major threads weave throughout. One analyzes how the presentation of African visual culture in these popular culture forms conceptualizes Africa for the American public. The other investigates the way the uses of African visual culture focuses America’s own self-awareness, particularly around black and white racialized identities. In exploring the multiple meanings that “Africa” has in American popular culture, the book argues that these cultural products embody multiple perspectives and speak to various sociopolitical contexts: the Cold War, Civil Rights, and contemporary eras of the United States; the apartheid and post apartheid eras of South Africa; the colonial and postcolonial eras of Ghana; and the European era of African colonization.

In 1966, a year after the Voting Rights Act began liberating millions of southern blacks, New Yorkers challenged a political system that weakened their voting power. Andrew W. Cooper (1927–2002), a beer company employee, sued state officials in a case called Cooper vs. Power. In 1968, the courts agreed that black citizens were denied the right to elect an authentic representative of their community. The 12th Congressional District was redrawn. Shirley Chisholm, a member of Cooper’s political club, ran for the new seat and made history as the first black woman elected to Congress. Cooper became a journalist, a political columnist, then founder of the Trans Urban News Service and the City Sun, a feisty Brooklyn-based weekly that published from 1984 to 1996. Whether the stories were about Mayor Koch or Rev. Al Sharpton, Howard Beach or Crown Heights, Tawana Brawley’s dubious rape allegations, the Daily News Four trial, or Spike Lee’s filmmaking career, his City Sun commanded attention, and moved officials and readers to action. Cooper’s leadership also gave Brooklyn—particularly predominantly black central Brooklyn—an identity. It is no accident that in the twenty-first century the borough crackles with energy. Cooper fought tirelessly for the community’s vitality when it was virtually abandoned by the civic and business establishments in the mid-to-late twentieth century. In addition, scores of journalists trained by Cooper are keeping his spirit alive.

This book probes the difficult relationship between the press and organized labor in the South from the past to the present day. Written by a veteran journalist and first-hand observer of the labor movement and its treatment in the region’s newspapers and other media, the text focuses on the modern South that has evolved since World War II. In gathering materials for this book, the author crisscrossed the region, interviewing workers, managers, labor organizers, immigrants, activists, and journalists, and canvassing labor archives. Using individual events to reveal the broad picture, the book is a personal journey by a textile worker’s son who grew up in North Carolina, worked on tobacco farms and in textile plants as a young man, and went on to cover as a reporter many of the developments described in this book. The author details the fall of the once-dominant textile industry and the region’s emergence as the “Sunbelt South.” He explores the advent of “Detroit South” with the arrival of foreign automakers from Japan, Germany, and South Korea. And finally he relates the effects of the influx of millions of workers from Mexico and elsewhere. The book shows how, with few exceptions, the press has been a key partner in the powerful alliance of business and political interests that keep the South the nation’s least-unionized region.

This book reveals how Mississippi journalists both expressed and shaped public opinion in the aftermath of the 1955 Emmett Till murder. Combing small-circulation weeklies as well as large-circulation dailies, the authors analyze the rhetoric at work as the state attempted to grapple with a brutal, small-town slaying. Initially coverage tended to be sympathetic to Till, but when the case became a clarion call for civil rights and racial justice in Mississippi, journalists reacted. Newspapers both reported on the Till investigation and editorialized on its protagonists. Within days, the Till case transcended the specifics of a murder in the Delta. Coverage wrestled with such complex cultural matters as the role of the press, class, gender, and geography in the determination of guilt and innocence. The book provides an examination of the courtroom testimony given in Sumner, Mississippi, and the trial’s conclusion as reported by the state’s newspapers. It closes with an analysis of how Mississippi has attempted to come to terms with its racially troubled past by, in part, memorializing Emmett Till in and around the Delta.

From Madea to Media Mogul examines multi-hyphenate media mogul Tyler Perry’s unique role in contemporary media culture. Unlike the discordant, popular, and limited range of academic responses to Perry’s work, the essays here are engaged with neither celebrating nor condemning Tyler Perry. This collection demonstrates that there is something inherently political about the intersection between understanding the pleasure as well as displeasure surrounding black popular cultural expression. This intersection is crucial not only to understanding Tyler Perry but also to how we think about race and identity in the 21st Century. The collection is organized around a core set of key concepts, because Perry’s image and productions are an invitation to interrogate and transform some of our most familiar disciplinary terms, such as affect, cinephilia, platforms, mogul, rebrand, and niche. Other concepts that Perry prompts us to reconsider, like the politics of respectability, centrality, exceptionalism, and disguise are informed by cultural studies traditions, while new perspective on terms like chitlin and gospel broaden our grasp on thematic concerns from black cultural traditions. Above all, what this collection aims for in offering this rubric for reading Perry are paradigm-shifting approaches that embrace the unexpected. This is a collection that deliberately brings these diverse approaches and disciplinary traditions together by arguing that Tyler Perry’s productions are unintelligible without them and that these critical perspectives reveal Tyler Perry as perhaps one of the most important figures in American media history.

During the civil rights era, Mississippi was cloaked in the hateful embrace of the Closed Society, historian James Silver’s description of the white caste system that enforced segregation and promoted the subservient treatment of blacks. Surprisingly, challenges from Mississippi’s college basketball courts brought into question the validity of the Closed Society and its unwritten law, a gentleman’s agreement that prevented college teams in the Magnolia State from playing against integrated foes. Mississippi State University was at the forefront of the battle for equality in the state with the school’s successful college basketball program. From 1959 through 1963, the Maroons won four Southeastern Conference basketball championships and created a championship dynasty in the South’s preeminent college athletic conference. However, in all four title-winning seasons, the press feverishly debated the merits of an NCAA appearance for the Maroons, culminating in Mississippi State University’s participation in the integrated 1963 National Collegiate Athletic Association’s National Championship basketball tournament. Full Court Press examines news articles, editorials, and columns published in Mississippi’s newspapers during the eight-year existence of the gentleman’s agreement, the challenges posed by Mississippi State University, and the subsequent integration of college basketball within the state. While the majority of reporters opposed any effort to integrate athletics, a segment of sports journalists, led by the charismatic Jimmie McDowell of the Jackson State Times, emerged as bold and progressive advocates for equality. Full Court Press highlights an ideological metamorphosis within the press during the Civil Rights Movement, slowly transforming from an organ that minimized the rights of blacks to an industry that weighted the plight of blacks on equal footing with their white brethren.

George Benjamin Luks (1867-1933) is renowned for the oil paintings, watercolors, and pastel drawings he created as an acclaimed member of the artists’ collective known as the Ashcan School. His professional development came, however, from his apprenticeship as a newspaper and magazine artist. Luks spent his early career drawing cartoons, spot illustrations, political caricatures, and comic strips for the New York World and other papers. These early portraits and stories of street urchins, peddlers, shopkeepers, and other ordinary New Yorkers would all be revisited in his later painting. He achieved fame when he took over drawing Hogan’s Alley for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World after the strip’s originator Richard F. Outcault defected to William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. This book explores the roots of the artist’s career drawing turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York City. The city’s vital popular press served as a crucible in which a number of American artists honed their talents and learned how to communicate ideas to a broad popular audience. The resultant work, both popular and controversial, challenged notions of good art and proper subject matter. This study brings Luks’s early work to light and reveals the funny, often edgy, and sometimes prejudicial creations that formed the base upon which Luks built his later career.

This book explores the media experiences of the dual disasters to hit the Gulf Coast within five years, Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster. The disaster journalism is compared and contrasted as the authors explore the media-fed experiences, visuals, and narratives. The Katrina journalists have reluctantly grown into Oil Spill journalists. The book will look at this process of growth from the viewpoints of not only the journalists, but the public, the science community, and through an analysis of the journalists’ own content. This book explores the quality of journalism within these two events and the effects it may have on the public. Crisis media coverage affects the interpretation and the experience of an event. The premise is that it all leads back to the fundamentals of solid journalism and the importance of following these tenets consistently in an enduring crises atmosphere – especially when the crises are just years apart.

Over the past forty years, American film has entered into a formal interaction with the comic book. Such comic book adaptations as Sin City, 300, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World have adopted components of their source materials' visual style. The screen has been fractured into panels, the photographic has given way to the graphic, and the steady rhythm of cinematic time has evolved into a far more malleable element. In other words, films have begun to look like comics. Yet, this interplay also occurs in the other direction. In order to retain cultural relevancy, comic books have begun to look like films. Frank Miller's original Sin City comics are indebted to film noir while Stephen King's The Dark Tower series could be a Sergio Leone spaghetti western translated onto paper. Film and comic books continuously lean on one another to reimagine their formal attributes and stylistic possibilities. This book examines this dialogue in its intersecting and rapidly changing cultural, technological, and industrial contexts. Early on, many questioned the prospect of a “low” art form suited for children translating into “high” art material capable of drawing colossal box office takes. Now the naysayers are as quiet as the queued crowds at Comic-Cons are massive. The book provides a nuanced account of this phenomenon by using formal analysis of the texts in a real-world context of studio budgets, grosses, and audience reception.

The past decade or so of media promotion has seen a recurring trope of Fanboy to the Rescue—have no fear, it says, this revered franchise is being taken over by a writer, director, or producer who is a “fanboy.” In this trope—which, following Suzanne Scott, the book discusses in terms of the “fanboy auteur”—the fan credentials of writers, directors, and producers are presented as a guarantee of quality media-making. This is a strategy of marketing and branding; it is a claim, from the auteur himself or industry PR machines, that the presence of an auteur who is also a fan means the product is worth consuming. Such claims that fan credentials guarantee quality are often contested, with fans and critics alike rejecting various auteur figures as the true leader of their respective franchises. That split, between assertions of fan and auteur status and acceptance (or not) of that status, is key to unravelling the fan auteur. A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy examines the contemporary ascendance of the fan auteur through a series of case studies. We consider both thoroughly mainstream fan auteur figures like Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon and more offbeat ones like Kevin Smith. We examine those who explicitly identify as fans of the source material they engage, like Steven Moffat, E L James, and Patty Jenkins, and those who don’t but engage in fannish ways nonetheless, like Taika Waititi and J. K. Rowling.

This volume collects essays that explore the variety of satiric productions in contemporary African American culture. Often dubbed “Post-Soul,” the artists of this period mark a change in political and aesthetic concerns from those embraced by artists of the Civil Rights period. Building off of Bertram Ashe’s notion of “blaxploration” – or the troubling of African American identity – this volume investigates the variety of means that African American artists have used to trouble the understanding of what it means to be black in contemporary America. The chapters in this collection offers the first interdisciplinary approach to the study of satire in contemporary African American literature, film, television, theatre, music, visual arts, and internet culture. The essays in this collection work to discern the means by which “Post-Soul Satire” addresses both in-group and external satiric critique of many aspects of contemporary African American cultural production.

This book explores the tensions between cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle and representations of African American identity staged in five plays between 1959 and 1969 during the civil rights era. Through close readings of the plays, their popular and African American print media reviews, and the cultural context in which they were produced, the book shows how these representations complicate narrow ideas of blackness, which often limit the freedom struggle era to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest and cast Malcolm X's black nationalism as undermining the Civil Rights Movement's advances. These five plays strategically revise the rhetoric, representations, ideologies, and iconography of the African American freedom struggle, subverting its dominant narrative. This revision critiques racial uplift ideology's tenets of civic and moral virtue as a condition of African American full citizenship. The dramas also reimagine the Black Arts Movement's restrictive notions of black authenticity as a condition of racial identity, and their staged representations construct a counter-narrative to cultural memory of the freedom struggle during that very era. In their use of a “postblack ethos” to enact African American subjectivity, the plays envision black identity beyond the quest for freedom, anticipating what blackness might look like when it moves beyond the struggle. Finally, the book discusses recent revivals, showing how these 1960s plays shape dimensions of modern drama well beyond the decade of their creation.

Rebirthing a Nation unmasks how white nationalist women refine racism through colorblind values, ideologies, and classifications to validate, promote, and sustain a white identity politic. Analyzing web rhetorics of white nationalist, alt-right, and conservative white women, Wendy K. Z. Anderson reveals how white women sustain institutional white supremacy through coded language and digital design. The close textual analysis of GUI texts and instruction sets, organization of digital infrastructures, and easter eggs hidden within digital code offer critical, procedural, and infrastructural insight as to how white women facilitate whiteness. Contributing to conversations about agency and privilege, Anderson clarifies how gendered rhetoric and infrastructure is used to protect and preserve the centrality of whiteness. Rebirthing a Nationenriches discussion about institutional and infrastructural racism by engaging how white women perpetuate racism. Anderson argues that once we understand how white privilege functions through white women’s voices, we can better advocate for strategies that resist problematic agencies and white privilege.

This book includes chapters on Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Curt Flood, Paul Robeson, Jim Thorpe, Bill Russell, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos. The chapters here talk about twentieth-century athletes whose careers were affected by racism and whose post-career reputations have improved as society’s understanding of race changed. The chapters attempt to clarify the stories of these sports stars and their places as twentieth-century icons by analyzing the various myths that surround them. When media, fans, sports leagues, and the athletes themselves commemorate sports legends, shifts in popular perceptions often serve to obscure an athlete’s role in history. Such revisions can lack coherence and trivialize the efforts of some legendary competitors and those associated with them. Adding racial tensions to this process further complicates the task of preserving the valuable achievements of key players.

This book analyzes how films and video games from around the world have depicted slave revolt, focusing on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). This event, the first successful revolution by enslaved people in modern history, sent shockwaves throughout the Atlantic world. However, despite its historical significance, this revolution is less well-known—and appears less often on screen—than most other revolutions; its story, involving enslaved Africans liberating themselves through violence, does not match the suffering-slaves-waiting-for-a-white-hero genre that pervades Hollywood treatments of Black History.  Despite Hollywood’s near-silence on this event, some films on the Revolution do exist—from directors in Haiti, the U.S., France, and elsewhere. Slave Revolt on Screen offers the first-ever comprehensive analysis of Haitian Revolution cinema, including completed films and planned projects that were never made.  In addition to studying cinema, the book breaks ground in examining video games. It scrutinizes video game depictions of Haitian slave revolt that appear in games like the Assassin’s Creed series which have reached millions more individuals than comparable films. In analyzing films and games on the Revolution, this book calls attention to the ways that economic legacies of slavery and colonialism warp pop-culture portrayals of the past and leave audiences with distorted understandings. It also contributes to important conversations about how Hollywood depicts Black History, as well as to research on slavery and memory, Haitian Studies, France, French colonialism, the French Revolution, Film and History, Cinema and Media Studies, Africana Studies, Caribbean literature, American culture studies, Francophone cinema, and Game Studies.

Stand-up comedians have a long history of walking a careful line between serious and playful engagement with social issues: Lenny Bruce questioned the symbolic valence of racial slurs, Dick Gregory took time away from the stage to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr. , and—more recently—Tig Notaro challenged popular notions of damaged or abject bodies. Stand-up comedians deploy humor to open up difficult topics for broader examination, which only underscores the social and cultural importance of their work. Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals draws together essays that contribute to the analysis of the stand-up comedian as public intellectual since the 1980s. The chapters explore stand-up comedians as contributors to and shapers of public discourse via their live performances, podcasts, social media presence, and political activism. Each chapter highlights a stand-up comedian and their ongoing discussion of a cultural issue or expression of a political ideology/standpoint: Lisa Lampanelli’s use of problematic postracial humor, Aziz Ansari’s merging of sociology and technology, or Maria Bamford’s emphasis on mental health, to name just a few. Taking a Stand offers a starting point for understanding the work stand-up comedians do as well as its reach beyond the stage. Comedians influence discourse, perspectives, even public policy on myriad issues, and this book sets out to take those jokes seriously.

In chapters devoted to individual television programs, adult and young adult literature, and comics, the authors collected in The Woman Fantastic in Contemporary American Media Culture discuss feminist negotiation of today’s economic and social realities through the image of the fantastic female. Senior scholars and rising academic stars address figures from Wonder Woman and She-Hulk to Talia Al Ghul and Martha Washington; from Battlestar Gallactica’s female Starbuck to Game of Thrones’ Sansa; and from Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville to Cinda Williams Chima’s The Seven Realms.