For the past twenty-five years, American culture has been marked by
an almost palpable sense of anxiety about the nation's inner
cities. Urban America has been consistently depicted as a site of
moral decay and uncontrollable violence, held in stark contrast to
the allegedly moral, orderly suburbs and exurbs. In Urban
Nightmares, Steve Macek documents the scope of these alarmist
representations of the city, examines the ideologies that informed
them, and exposes the interests they ultimately served. Macek
begins by exploring the conservative analysis of the urban poverty,
joblessness, and crime that became entrenched during the
post-Vietnam War era. Instead of attributing these conditions to
broad social and economic conditions, right-wing intellectuals,
pundits, policy analysts, and politicians blamed urban problems on
the urban underclass itself. This strategy was successful, Macek
argues, in deflecting attention from growing income disparities and
in helping to secure popular support both for reactionary social
policies and the assumptions underwriting them. Turning to the
media, Macek explains how Hollywood filmmakers, advertisers, and
journalists validated the right-wing discourse on the urban crisis,
popularizing its vocabulary. Network television news and weekly
news magazines, he shows, covered the inner city and its
inhabitants in ways consonant with the right's alarmist discourse.
At the same time, Hollywood zealously recycled this antiurban bias
in films ranging from genre thrillers like Falling Down and
Judgment Night to auteurist efforts like Batman and Seven. Even
advertising, Macek argues, mobilized fears of a perilous urban
realm to sell products from SUVs to home alarmsystems. Published
during the second term of an American president whose conservative
agenda has been an ongoing disaster for the poor and the working
class, Urban Nightmares exposes a divisive legacy of media bias
against the cities and their inhabitants and issues a wake-up call
to readers to recognize that media images shape what we believe
about others' (and our own) place in the real world-and the
consequences of those beliefs can be devastating. Steve Macek
teaches media studies, urban and suburbia studies, and speech
communication at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
