Searching for Culture, Creativity and Resistance in Comic Books II: Fans

Henry Jenkins - "Super-Powered Fans": The Many Worlds of Sand Diego Comic-Con
you can also access a copy of the Boom: A Journal of California printed version on Slideshare here.

Jeffrey A. Brown - Ethnography: Wearing One's Fandom

Brian Swafford - Critical Ethnography: The Comics Shop As Cultural Clubhouse
Joli Jenson - Fandom as Pathology
John Fiske - The Cultural Economy of Fandom

The Social Construction of Race, Part Deux

This is the bulk of readings for the 'discourses of race' section of the course as we wade through it this week and next. Please have these articles read in the order posted. Pay particular attention to Zook's article on the Fox Network as it invests that political economic perspective that is so well dramatized in Bamboozled as well as the Means-Coleman article on 'black sitcoms' which is a good example of textual analysis.

Kristal Brent Zook, "The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television"
Robin R. Means-Coleman, "Black Sitcom Portrayals"
Herman Gray, "The Politics of Representation in Network Television" from Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (University of Minnesota Press, 1995/2004)

Donald Bogle, "Workplace Dramas, Ensemble Casts 1990s Style"
Chyng Fen Sun, "Ling Woo in Historical Context: The New Face of Asian American Stereotypes on Television"

Audiences

Ang, "The Nature of the Audience"
Gandy, "Tracking the Audience"
Meehan, "Don't Blame The Viewers"
Nussbaum, "What Would Tina Fey Do For A SoyJoy?"

The Social Construction of Race I

This is a short, introductory article on race and the media. As we watch Spike Lee's Bamboozled and discuss the film, Ash Corea's "Racism and the American Way of Media" is a good summary of the issues raised in the film and those that you will be reading about in greater detail with the next group of articles. As a bonus, a classic article by Stuart Hall.

Ash Corea, "Racism and the American Way of Media" from Questioning the Media
Stuart Hall, "What is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture" from Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies






Clip from the 1949 film Hollywood Varieties where actors Glenn Vernon and Edward Ryan apply blackface make-up while on stage and reminisce about 'the good ol' days' --as they say-- of ministrelsy.

Searching for Culture, Creativity and Resistance in Comic Books I: Art

Chris Ware, Panels from "Wingnutz"

Bart Beaty - "Searching for Artists in the Entertainment Empire" from Comics Versus Art

Com/Media Theory Exam Review/Questions

Exam is here.

Women In The Director's Chair - Film Series @ JCU

The JCU MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION SPEAKER SERIES, The Communications  and the Italian and modern languages departments together with istituto luce/cinecitta - filmitalia PRESENTS:

Women in The Director's Chair: First Time Italian Women Directors

showcasing the debut features by a new generation of Italian women directors.

Don't Miss the First Screening, Monday October 13 @7pm in the Aula Magna. The Director, Alina Marazzi, will be present at the event to introduce the film and take questions from the audience.

Beneath the cobblestones, the beach: Theory, Situationism and Cultural Resistance

Guy Debord - Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action (1957)
Hans Magnus Enzensberger - Constituents of a Theory of the Media (1970)
Extra:
John Downing - Radical Media in Italy

If you are interested in reading more of the Situationist International's documents, manifestos and screeds (they are always fun, engaging and inspiring) you can find an excellent selection in the anthology edited by Tom McDonough and published by MIT Press titled Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Modern day situationists have made the book available here. Of course all of the Situationist documents are also available online at the Situationist Online Archive which is a true treasure trove of material. There are many other sources for Situationist materials freely available online, a direct result of the 'proto-free culture' approach the Situationist International always promoted.

Study Guides: Race & Gender + Media, Culture and Society

After the usual wise and profound words of Father Guido, which are so perfectly comforting during exam crunch times, here are the much agonized for study guides:

Race and Gender

Media, Culture and Society

(Comics and Theory guides will be discussed and handed out in class)

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Film

"Woman as image, man as bearer of the look"

Otto Preminger's Laura (1944)

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
You can also find it in html format here.

Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976)

Still from Kathryn Bigelow's Zero-Dark Thirty (USA, 2012). Jessica Chastain as subject and image.