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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.

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.

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.

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.