The legend of Texas Western: journalism and the epic sports spectacle that wasn’t

This essay interrogates journalistic accounts of Texas Western College’s 1966 college basketball championship, a game in which an all-Black team defeated an all-White team. The analysis traces the evolving portrayals of the game over 45 years. In 1966 American journalists did not emphasize the racial aspects of the game and it was largely forgotten. Twenty-five years later, however, journalists reconstructed the game as a racialized legend, and this account evolved into an epic American narrative. The author argues that the epic portrayals, although aesthetically appealing, reflect problems with accuracy, appropriation, and commercial exploitation. The latter factor led to the legend’s motion picture adaptation as part of a troublesome “White Savior” cinema genre.     

Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post‐cinematic Conditions,Limitations, and Possibilities

This paper contextualizes the Stanley Kubrick exhibition, a worldwide exhibition tour program dedicated to showcasing the complete oeuvre of the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, within ‘post‐cinematic’ conditions. Since the mid‐1990s, the formal and experiential components of the cinema in the 20th century have increasingly become displaced from the traditional apparatus and site and ‘relocated’ within new technological and institutional platforms, and museums have become one of those new sites for content consumption. The paper discusses both the limitations and possibilities of the exhibition as it is considered to represent the migration of cinema into the art museum context as one salient phenomenon of post‐cinematic conditions. The Kubrick exhibition is explored to uncover the underlying tensions of the ‘exhibition of cinema’ as a key trend of major international museums, between the movie theater as black box and the art museum's exhibition space as white cube. It considers the difference between these two institutional platforms and their conceptions of objecthood, artifact and the temporal economy of the viewing experience. The author argues that this event succeeds in realizing the possibilities for revivifying three constants of cinema: film auteur, cinematic apparatus, and intermediality. The ambivalence demonstrates that while the museum's exhibition of cinema inevitably removes some of its ontological essences, it also preserves and revivifies others.     

Rope Sluts,and Bottoms,and Subs,Oh My: 50 Shades of Grey and the Shifting Discourse on Female Submission in Feminist Kink Porn

To date, feminists have conflated (and continue to conflate) historical understandings of bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism (BDSM) as pathological and representations of BDSM in literature and popular media with the lived experiences of feminist BDSM practitioners. Feminist BDSM practitioner Madison Young’s pornographic film 50 Shades of Dylan Ryan (2012) takes the recent resurgence of the ongoing debate on women, submission, and popular literature as a starting point for reconsideration and possibility. By adapting the discourse surrounding 50 Shades of Grey, Young’s pornographic film points to the ways in which feminism also contributes to that which makes pleasure possible. Young’s film reimagines the dualities that have traditionally dominated feminist cultural critique through concepts the author calls “mediated authenticity” and “formal simultaneity.” Beginning with a brief, rigorous examination of the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon, this article analyzes Madison Young’s 50 Shades of Dylan Ryan and seeks to provide a critical intervention in feminist studies of pornography and popular culture.     

I Give Civil Rights Four Stars

Three recent Hollywood films, The Help (2011), Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013) and Selma (2014), drew attention for depicting the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. While Hollywood has been scrutinized for its role in racial discourse, less attention has been paid to how film critics discuss race in their reviews. This paper examines the critical response to these films, with an emphasis on the reviewers’ reliance on memory and history in forming their opinions. A textual analysis found that critics were reverential toward the movement and the black experience but still distrustful of the Hollywood system doing a credible job in explaining or understanding the events. The reviewers shaped and shared a memory of nightmarish race relations and prescribed corrections for both Hollywood and America. These reviews illustrate that film critics see themselves as arbiters not only of taste but also of history.     

The wounded man: Foxcatcher and the incoherence of white masculine victimhood

American cinema has recently favored representations of white men as victims of socioeconomic and political change. Recent scholarship on white masculinity suggests that representations of male victimhood enable white men to disavow that hegemonic white masculinity still fundamentally structures society. This essay argues that Hollywood’s wounded man similarly provides white masculinity with stable footing. I illustrate how the unintelligibility of screen masculinity evades criticism and, further, how melancholic male dramas nurture a traumatic attachment to victimhood. Examining the film Foxcatcher (2014), I show how unmasked portraits of white male victimhood function as counterparts to the hard-bodied action hero. The filmmaker’s effort to parse the distinction between material and superficial wounds reifies the experience of noble suffering as a superlative expression of aggrieved white manhood. Foxcatcher’s fragmented portrayal of white masculinity illustrates the elasticity of victimhood even where “crisis” suggests that white masculinity is open to revision.     

Negotiating class,ethnicity and modernity: the ‘Malaynisation’ of P. Ramlee and his films

Early Malaysian national cinema disseminates a social reconstruction process aimed at reconstructing Malay supremacy at the centre of a specific geographical, political, economic and cultural space. Aptly termed as ‘Malaynisation’, this process occurred during the Golden Age of Malaysian cinema through the films of P. Ramlee. While existing as a capitalist film culture located within an ethnically diverse society, early Malaysian cinema through Ramlee have produced a significant number of mono-ethnic representations solely focused on the culture, language and lifestyles of the Malays. As such, the articulation of the politics of inclusion and exclusion in Ramlee’s films articulates a right-wing nationalist sentiment that upholds the sovereignty of the dominant Malays while undermining other ethnic communities. The nature of these representations enunciates the context of an ‘imagined community’ which locates the formation of a particular type of nationalism within a social, political and cultural communicative space. This paper examines the construction of the ‘modern Malay’ identity in Ramlee’s films and the nationalist discourse in Ramlee’s films as an attempt at producing the idea of a nation as a continuous narrative of national progression by presenting the postcolonial Malays as a modern, successful and dominant force.     

Mario Van Peebles's Panther and Popular Memories of the Black Panther Party

The 1995 movie Panther depicted the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense as a vibrant but ultimately doomed social movement for racial and economic justice during the late 1960s. Panther's narrative indicted the white-operated police for perpetuating violence against African-Americans and for undermining movements for black empowerment. As such, this film represented a rare source of filmic counter-memory that challenged hegemonic memories of U.S. race relations. Newspaper reports and reviews of Panther, however, questioned the film's veracity as a source of historical information. An analysis of these reviews and reports indicates the challenges counter-memories confront in popular culture.     

Mediating modernity: Theorizing reception in a non‐western society

This article theorizes non‐Western media reception, based on a reception study of a Hindu epic, “The Ramayan,”; screened on the state‐owned Indian television system, Doordarshan, in 78 episodes beginning in January 1987. Based on interviews with viewers from a variety of social backgrounds and on analysis of press response to the epic, it argues that the epic represented, for many viewers, a narrative of community opposed to bourgeois modernity, and superior to it. For Doordarshan, as a broadcaster in a non‐western/incompletely modern society, the epic represented a way of mediating between a secular bourgeois public, and a “communitarian public sphere”; which, it is argued, characterizes Indian popular culture.     

#OscarsSoWhite: how Stuart Hall explains why nothing changes in Hollywood and everything is changing

ABSTRACT

Stuart Hall’s work on culture, representation, ideology and hegemony positions Hollywood as a cultural institution informed by and informative of US social values and norms. Thus contemporary debates over Hollywood's diversity are indicative of broader social conflicts. Empirically the article examines 2014–2015 news coverage of Hollywood to question the Hollywood paradox—the lack of diversity in film/TV production yet TV’s increasing shift towards on-screen diversity. It maps three discursive frames: Hollywood exceptionalism, economic imperatives, and institutionalized racism and sexism. The article concludes by using Hulu’s East Los High to reflect on TV’s digital turn and innovative models in production and representation.     

The “madness” of market logic: mental illness and late capitalism in The Double and Nightcrawler

This paper examines representations of mental illness in popular film, particularly Richard Ayoade’s The Double and Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler. As I argue, both films trouble typical Hollywood narratives of mental illness by situating schizophrenia and psychopathy, for instance, within a socioeconomic context, specifically relations of production under late capitalism and the unfettered self-interest of neoliberalism. If mental illness is a product of the postindustrial workplace in The Double, it becomes a prerequisite for success in Nightcrawler, providing a cinematic depiction of mental illness at odds with the “personal pathology” paradigm that dominates the current neoliberal landscape.     

“We want to see you sex it up and be slutty:” post-feminism and sports media’s appearance double standard

The notion that women in the United States’ electronic sports media face greater standards of appearance is not new (Sheffer, M. L., & Schultz, B. (2007) Double standard: Why women have trouble getting jobs in local television sports. Journal of Sports Media, 2(1), 77–101). What has not been explored, however, is the persistence of this double standard through a Foucauldian lens. Using Michel Foucault’s (Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Vol. 1, an introduction. New York: Vintage Books) power/knowledge paradigm, this Foucauldian discourse analysis uses one-on-one interviews with women sportscasters and textual analysis to grapple with this previously unexplored aspect of one of electronic sports media’s longest standing gendered double standards.

Using these data, this article argues that post-feminist discourses (Gill, R. (2007) Gender and the media. Cambridge: Polity Press; McRobbie, A. (2004) Post-feminism and popular culture. Feminist Media Studies, 4(3), 255–264) have a mutually informing relationship with three manifestations of the electronic sports media’s gendered double standard of appearance: sportscaster hiring and retention, inequitable media consumer evaluations of on-screen appearance, and expectations for sportscaster dress, the latter of which have required many women to wear increasingly revealing clothing, a trend this article refers to as nightclubification. While post-feminist analysis explicates the nuances of the appearance double standard and the electronic sports media’s contributions to our culture’s constructions of gender relations, Foucauldian discourse analysis demonstrates how the appearance double standard has been taken for granted and how it might inform other obstacles women in the industry must navigate.     

It's HBO: Passionate engagement,TV branding,and tourism in the postbroadcast Era

This paper contends with how postbroadcast television branding subsumes viewers’ affective interactivities with place to produce brand value. Focusing on the HBO series Treme, I argue that Treme engendered HBO's postbroadcast brand mutation by producing “passionate engagement,” where viewers were invited to interact with the show by touring New Orleans, thus adding place to online interactivity and multiscreen engagement as a means of constructing an “authentic” brand identity. The desire for viewers to connect to New Orleans’ culture is thus transformed into a vehicle for profit making for HBO and an assurance to shareholders that the brand still holds value.     

Digitally Empowered

In January 2013, Peter Bradshaw, a film critic for The Guardian, said that Twitter users had become the favourite “critics” of the film industry. The implicit concern in this article on a subject dear to cultural journalism—“Would be criticism bankrupted when we are all ‘critics’ on the Web?”—became evident in the following years. It is pertinent, then, to explore the media answer not only to this subject but both to sourcing and expertise in general in the culture section. Did they embrace these new news sources (and which) that emerged in the digital environment, such as the reader, blogs or artists tweets? Assuming the first hypothesis, how did they include them in their editorial model, alongside with the “traditional” experts and sources? We conducted a content analysis to the culture section of an international media—The Guardian—between 2014 and 2016 (n?=?992), identifying the role of what we would like to call digitally empowered sources and the presence of new “experts” in cultural criticism. We concluded that these digitally empowered sources play an important role in the overall editorial, business and engagement media's strategy and are deeply engaged with a new digital feature: hypertextuality. New patterns of expertise also reflect an editorial positioning supported in an engagement strategy and in the recognition of the readers’ added value to content.     

It Follows: precarity,thanatopolitics, and the ambient horror film

In the 2014 horror film It Follows, a teenage woman is terrorized by a fatal curse that passes from victim-to-victim via sexual intercourse. The subject of the curse is relentlessly pursued by vacant-minded assassins that take the form of friends, loved ones, and strangers. The film is set near the infamous dividing-line of Detroit’s 8 Mile Road, between what remains of the suburban working-class and the sacrifice zone of post-industrial urban triage. I argue that It Follows confronts audiences with the spectral manifestation of precarity: the deliberate and unequal redistribution of human fragility to populations who are the most socially and economically vulnerable. First, the generic shift from a specific monster to an anonymous and relentless force redeploys horror convention to draw attention to the conditions that induce horror within the prevailing socioeconomic order. Second, the film renders such precarity visible by contrasting the mise-en-scene of the suburban enclave with zones of postindustrial ruin; the relative comfort of the former predicated on the vulnerability of the latter. The film maps a landscape of postindustrial ruin, enacting a visual and narrative critique of thanatopolitics, the biopolitical organization of death under late capitalism.     

Black Radio Listeners in America’s “Golden Age”

“Black Radio Listeners in America’s “Golden Age’” argues that U.S. black listenership has been all but ignored in radio scholarship regarding the 1930s-1950s, as has the context of America’s racial segregation and radio’s active role in affirming and propagating it. The essay argues for an expanded understanding of archive and archival methodology in order to gain a more complex, accurate, and varied understanding of historical black listenership, and, toward that end, performs culturally contextualized close textual analysis across media: a 1937 Lead Belly song (“Turn Yo’ Radio On”), Joe Bostic’s column for The People’s Voice in the 1940s, Frederic Wakeman’s 1946 novel The Hucksters, a 1949 feature on black listeners in Sponsor magazine, a 1934 Vitaphone Short featuring Cab Calloway, and Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street. Through engaging with widely-varied representations of black radio listenership, Stoever argues that black listening practices from this period not only challenge the periodization of this era as the “Golden Age” of American radio, but also upend traditional categories of active, passive, and “resistant” listening that scholars have employed to understand media reception, revealing that active listening can look and sound different for black listeners, particularly in a period when listening “actively” to segregated media in ways prescribed by the dominant culture often proved to be deleterious. The act of “turning one’s radio on” was a complicated act of agency for black listeners, not simply a passive form of ignorance, escape, and/or anesthetization as popularly represented.     

The role of a local newspaper after disaster: an intrinsic case study of Ishinomaki,Japan

The city of Ishinomaki in Miyagi prefecture was devastated by the tsunami that struck Japan’s North East Coast on 11 March 2011. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Ishinomaki, which included interviews with senior journalists from the city’s two local newspapers, the Ishinomaki Hibi Shimbun and the Ishinomaki Kahoku, this paper presents an intrinsic case study of the role a local newspaper in Ishinomaki after the Great East Japan Disaster. The evidence reveals that in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami journalists recognised how their newspaper could serve the immediate information-needs of the local community by providing essential lifeline information, describing a duty to report, despite the operational difficulties that their newspapers faced. In the longer term recovery phase, interviewees acknowledged how their newspapers have attempted to communicate a message of hope to the city and provide an alternative perspective to the national media, which sometimes gave a false impression of the state of Ishinomaki’s recovery. This paper offers some insights into journalistic role conceptions, illustrating how journalists from the two newspapers embraced the role of information-disseminator after the disaster, and also identifies avenues for further research.     

“Not Just the Levees Broke”: Jazz Vernacular and the Rhetoric of the Dispossessed in Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke

This essay proposes the notion of the “jazz vernacular” as a tool specific to the Creole culture in New Orleans for understanding racial discourses of disposability both geographically and historically. We argue that the jazz vernacular is a discourse structured by musical repertoire. The jazz vernacular provides a channel for the historical pain of the black diaspora by playing in the background, both literally and figuratively, of communication in and about New Orleans. This essay considers Spike Lee's documentary When The Levees Broke to understand how the jazz vernacular frames hurricane Katrina as well as how it frames Lee's film as an intervention into “neoliberal” racial discourses. We argue that Lee's film utilizes the jazz vernacular as a metadiscourse to reinforce the ways in which residents used jazz to restructure cultural memory around the rhetoric of the dispossessed in New Orleans after Katrina. When the Levees Broke uses testimonials and affective communication to structure the narrative of Katrina through elements of the jazz vernacular like: displacement, embodiment, brashness, and improvisation to connect contemporary Creole New Orleanians to a long history of structural oppression and violence. By harnessing performative elements, Lee's film performs a jazz intervention into neoliberal discourses about freedom, defense, safety, and heroism that contrasts these discourses with the despair and the resistance of black America. Consequently, Lee's use of the jazz vernacular relies on native musical culture to recontextualize what neoliberalism had erased.     

Lord of the Rings,Star Wars,and participatory fandom: mapping new congruencies between the internet and media entertainment culture

The culture of media entertainment, as exemplified in the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars film franchises, is being infused with new modes of authorship, production, marketing, and consumption that are characterized by Internet fan clubs, online producer‐consumer affiliations, and real‐world legal controversies over the proprietary ownership of digital bits of information. To analyze these new interactive patterns being employed by two competing media franchises, Bourdieu's theory of cultural production is supplemented with Jenkins's study of participatory fandom. Then, the contested nature of computer‐mediated communication is explored using a model that brackets the opposing potentialities of Internet influence on offline society.     

Driving toward disability rhetorics: narrative,crip theory,and eco-ability in Mad Max: Fury Road

We argue that the film Mad Max: Fury Road challenges stigmas associated with disability by conceptualizing a world that embraces the differences between disabled and abled bodies. Drawing on crip theory and eco-ability scholarship, we examine how Mad Max: Fury Road’s narrative criticizes normative and ableist understandings about the body by imagining a world that constructs accessible and valued spaces for the disabled. Dolmage [Dolmage, J. (2013). Disability Rhetoric. New York: Syracuse University Press] argues that scholars need to situate rhetoric on the experiences of disabled bodies to generate new meanings about disability. Mad Max: Fury Road generates such meanings by challenging normative and stigmatizing conceptions of disability through positive and nuanced representations of disabled bodies.