|
Showing 1 - 7 of
7 matches in All Departments
In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond describes how popular
early American cartoon characters were derived from blackface
minstrelsy. He charts the industrialization of animation in the
early twentieth century, its representation in the cartoons
themselves, and how important blackface minstrels were to that
performance, standing in for the frustrations of animation workers.
Cherished cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the
Cat, were conceived and developed using blackface minstrelsy's
visual and performative conventions: these characters are not like
minstrels; they are minstrels. They play out the social, cultural,
political, and racial anxieties and desires that link race to the
laboring body, just as live minstrel show performers did. Carefully
examining how early animation helped to naturalize virulent racial
formations, Sammond explores how cartoons used laughter and
sentimentality to make those stereotypes seem not only less cruel,
but actually pleasurable. Although the visible links between
cartoon characters and the minstrel stage faded long ago, Sammond
shows how important those links are to thinking about animation
then and now, and about how cartoons continue to help to illuminate
the central place of race in American cultural and social life.
From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer
to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments
of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century
social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection
Incorporated move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a
punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a
contested mode of political and cultural capital-empowering for
some but oppressive for others. Escaping abjection's usual confines
of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, core to theories of
abjection by thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille, the
contributors examine a range of media, including literature,
photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga.
Whether analyzing how comedic abjection can help mobilize feminist
politics or how expressions of abjection inflect class, race, and
gender hierarchies, the contributors demonstrate the importance of
competing uses of abjection to contemporary society and politics.
They emphasize abjection's role in circumscribing the boundaries of
the human and how the threats abjection poses to the self and
other, far from simply negative, open up possibilities for
radically new politics. Contributors. Meredith Bak, Eugenie
Brinkema, James Leo Cahill, Michelle Cho, Maggie Hennefeld, Rob
King, Thomas Lamarre, Sylvere Lotringer, Rijuta Mehta, Mark
Mulroney, Nicholas Sammond, Yiman Wang, Rebecca Wanzo
From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer
to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments
of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century
social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection
Incorporated move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a
punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a
contested mode of political and cultural capital-empowering for
some but oppressive for others. Escaping abjection's usual confines
of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, core to theories of
abjection by thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille, the
contributors examine a range of media, including literature,
photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga.
Whether analyzing how comedic abjection can help mobilize feminist
politics or how expressions of abjection inflect class, race, and
gender hierarchies, the contributors demonstrate the importance of
competing uses of abjection to contemporary society and politics.
They emphasize abjection's role in circumscribing the boundaries of
the human and how the threats abjection poses to the self and
other, far from simply negative, open up possibilities for
radically new politics. Contributors. Meredith Bak, Eugenie
Brinkema, James Leo Cahill, Michelle Cho, Maggie Hennefeld, Rob
King, Thomas Lamarre, Sylvere Lotringer, Rijuta Mehta, Mark
Mulroney, Nicholas Sammond, Yiman Wang, Rebecca Wanzo
Some comics fans view the industry’s Golden Age (1930s-1950s) as
a challenging time when it comes to representations of race, an era
when the few Black characters appeared as brutal savages, devious
witch doctors, or unintelligible minstrels. Yet the true portrait
is more complex and reveals that even as caricatures predominated,
some Golden Age comics creators offered more progressive and
nuanced depictions of Black people.  Desegregating
Comics assembles a team of leading scholars to explore how
debates about the representation of Blackness shaped both the
production and reception of Golden Age comics. Some essays showcase
rare titles like Negro Romance and consider the formal
innovations introduced by Black comics creators like Matt Baker and
Alvin Hollingsworth, while others examine the treatment of race in
the work of such canonical cartoonists as George Herriman and Will
Eisner. The collection also investigates how Black fans read and
loved comics, but implored publishers to stop including hurtful
stereotypes. As this book shows, Golden Age comics artists,
writers, editors, distributors, and readers engaged in heated
negotiations over how Blackness should be portrayed, and the
outcomes of those debates continue to shape popular culture today.
The antagonists-oiled, shaved, pierced, and tattooed; the glaring
lights; the pounding music; the shouting crowd: professional
wrestling is at once spectacle, sport, and business. Steel Chair to
the Head provides a multifaceted look at the popular phenomenon of
pro wrestling. The contributors combine critical rigor with a deep
appreciation of wrestling as a unique cultural form, the latest in
a long line of popular performance genres. They examine wrestling
as it happens in the ring, is experienced in the stands, is
portrayed on television, and is discussed in online chat rooms. In
the process, they reveal wrestling as an expression of the
contradictions and struggles that shape American culture.The
essayists include scholars in anthropology, psychology, film
studies, communication studies, and sociology, one of whom used to
wrestle professionally. Classic studies of wrestling by Roland
Barthes, Carlos Monsivais, Sharon Mazer, and Henry Jenkins appear
alongside original essays. Whether exploring how pro wrestling
inflects race, masculinity, and ideas of reality and authenticity;
how female fans express their enthusiasm for male wrestlers; or how
lucha libre provides insights into Mexican social and political
life, Steel Chair to the Head gives due respect to pro wrestling by
treating it with the same thorough attention usually reserved for
more conventional forms of cultural expression. Contributors.
Roland Barthes, Douglas L. Battema, Susan Clerc, Laurence de Garis,
Henry Jenkins III, Henry Jenkins IV, Heather Levi, Sharon Mazer,
Carlos Monsivais, Lucia Rahilly, Catherine Salmon, Nicholas
Sammond, Phillip Serrat, Philip Sewell
Linking Margaret Mead to the Mickey Mouse Club and behaviorism to
Bambi, Nicholas Sammond traces a path back to the
early-twentieth-century sources of the normal American child. He
locates the origins of this hypothetical child in the interplay
between developmental science and popular media. In the process, he
shows that the relationship between the media and the child has
long been much more symbiotic than arguments that the child is
irrevocably shaped by the media it consumes would lead one to
believe. Focusing on the products of the Walt Disney company,
Sammond demonstrates that without a vision of a normal American
child and the belief that movies and television either helped or
hindered its development, Disney might never have found its market
niche as the paragon of family entertainment. At the same time,
without media producers such as Disney, representations of the
ideal child would not have circulated as freely in American popular
culture. development was translated into the practice of
child-rearing and how magazines and parenting manuals characterized
the child as the crucible of an ideal American culture. He
chronicles how Walt Disney Productions' greatest creation--the
image of Walt Disney himself--was made to embody evolving ideas of
what was best for the child and for society. Bringing popular
child-rearing manuals, periodicals, advertisements, and mainstream
sociological texts together with the films, tv programs, ancillary
products, and public relations materials of Walt Disney
Productions, Babes in Tomorrowlandreveals a child that was as much
the necessary precursor of popular media as the victim of its
excesses. William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. He is the
editor of Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of
Professional Wrestling, also published by Duke University Press.
|
You may like...
Love Sux
Avril Lavigne
CD
R185
Discovery Miles 1 850
Gloria
Sam Smith
CD
R407
Discovery Miles 4 070
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|