The Social Construction of Race, Part Deux

nb. I guess the wind took this week away along with all the trees of Rome so please be advised that the screening for Ava DuVernay's 13th is cancelled. We will reschedule the screening for next week. Same time (7.30pm), same place (actually it will be in GG1) on Tuesday and I will confirm in class. In the meantime, so that we don't fall behind on our schedule, please begin with the readings below as we investigate the political economy of 'black television' and look to questions of representation and power in relation to race.

This is the bulk of readings for the 'discourses of race' section of the course as we wade through it this week. 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. The Herman Gray article is also important. The other articles you can use for your papers, if relevant and/or to expand on our class discussion.

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"

This is the  'incomplete sentence' vaudeville routine by Mantan Moreland & Ben Carter from the Charlie Chan movie The Scarlet Clue (Phil Rosen, 1945)

Below is Sarah Jones' 'Your Revolution' (with DJ Vadim) from Def Poetry Jam's Season 1 (2002)

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

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
 
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.

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

The Social Construction of Race I

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 by Lee 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.

*Through Bamboozled please reflect on the mechanisms that Lee describes (through a satirical register) as well as how he narrativizes the power dynamics at work inside the (fictional) CNS network. How does he convey the conversion of aspects of African-American culture into a commodity within the context of a white-owned and controlled corporation? Also, as Delacroix is 'permitted' to move up in the corporate entertainment ladder by becoming show runner and head writer of a 'variety' show, what are the conditions that he needs to submit to? How does the white construction of black culture play into what he is being asked to conform to? In the end, what is the price that Delacroix has to pay according to Lee?
Finally, what does Spike Lee say about the way in which Mantan: The New Millenium Minstrel Show's genealogy in minstrel shows and blackface performance (along with the accumulation of historical artefacts) has become an empty gesture, a comedic ploy that removes the complexities of history and society and keeps racial hierarchies intact? What forms of contemporary popular culture do you think Spike Lee would consider to be operating through the same mechanisms today?
That's a whole lot of questions. Enjoy.

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 minstrelsy.

Construction and Performance II: Masculinity

Eminem, Lose Yourself

Jackson Katz, "Advertising and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity: From Eminem to Clinique for Men"

Gail Dines, "King Kong and the White Woman: Hustler Magazine and the Demonization of Black Masculinity"

Claire Cain Miller, "Many Ways to Be a Girl, but One Way to Be a Boy: The New Gender Rules"
from The New York Times, Sept. 14, 2018 

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

Hans Magnus Enzensberger - Constituents of a Theory of the Media (1970)

Extra:
John Downing - Radical Media in Italy

Marco Tullio Giordana's I cento passi (The One Hundred Steps, 2000) will be screened on Thursday, October 11 @7.30pm in GK1.3 (Guarini Campus)

How To Talk Like A Situationist

Guy Debord - Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action (1957)

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.

Zap! Crumb! Splat!: Underground Comix + Alternative Visions

Sabin, "Going Underground" from Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art
+
Sabin, "Alternative Visions" from Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art

Danky & Kitchen, "Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix, 1963-1990"

(please note that the images included in these chapters are offensive, crude, anarchic and sometimes disturbing as comix are known to be; also, be aware that the files are quite big and might take a little time to load)

Fantagraphics released a 6 volume 'Complete Zap Comics'. Find a 60 page excerpt chock-full of comics by many of the artists that have graced R.Crumb's publication here in PDF format (nb. it's a big file, wait for it to load). Included are also an introduction by Crumb himself and a 'For Adult Intellectuals Only: A Zap Oral History' by Patrick Rosenkranz.

The library has the actual box set if you are interested in checking out the look and feel of those irreverent books that Crumb was selling in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco out of a baby carriage at the dawn of the hippie era.

Text and Context: Reception

Janice Radway, "Women Read The Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context"

The Spirit!: Short Writing Assignment #1

As already mentioned in class this first writing assignment revolves around Will Eisner's The Spirit. For this short exercise (3-5 pages) you should first of all read a number of The Spirit stories as they appear in The Best of Spirit anthology which is on reserve in the library (below you will also find four more Spirit stories in digital format --however, as I said in class, you should read this particular text 'the old fashioned way', on paper). 

For your actual writing assignment you should first of all offer a historical contextualization of Eisner's work: where does The Spirit fit into the history of sequential art in general and of comics in particular. Secondly, you should choose two pages in one of the stories (try to choose the two pages that you find are most interesting in terms of their encapsulation and layout --there are plenty of these in Eisner's work and don't be afraid to move deep into The Best of Spirit anthology to the late 40s material) and simply describe the particularities of The Spirit's stylistic features. Please note that I am not necessarily looking for any particularly deep analysis. What your paper should end up being is a simple description of encapsulation, panel to panel relations, full page layout, use of color, line and text, insets, etc. What this should end up being, more than anything, is an exercise for applying and using comics terminology and an excuse to encourage you to look at an example of comic art closely and attentively.
I'm including here, along with the already mentioned extra Spirit stories, an issue each of DC's Action Comics and Detective Comics so that you can use these as comparative texts to Eisner's technique in The Spirit.
Finally, as a conclusion to your short paper remark what, if anything and in your opinion, makes The Spirit such a standout example of comic art. Enjoy.

Will Eisner, The Spirit
DC's Action Comics #1 (1938)
DC's Detective Comics #27 (1939)
Please refer to Andrei Molotiu's essential "List of Terms for Comics Studies". Use the illustrated examples as a guideline.
There's also this Comics Terminology Graphic 1 & Graphic 2 (from Abel & Madden, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures)

**In order to overcome the technical issues we might have with the .cbr extension  I have renamed all linked comic books with a .zip extension. As mentioned in class zip and cbr files are the same thing, the only difference being that the .cbr extension allows your Comic Book Reader application to open and display the images in the zipped folder as a paginated book. All you need to do, after you've downloaded the files to your computer, is change the file extension from .zip to .cbr. Have fun.

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Film

Stills from Otto Preminger's Laura, 1944

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

We will discuss Preminger's Laura and Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure" essay after we complete our discussion on 'gendered media spaces' and melodrama/soap opera. We will however also refer to Laura as a 'melodrama' in its own right and include an initial discussion of it's place in media space. 

Those who missed the screening on Friday (and the few who had to leave before the thrilling finale of the film) are required to watch it on their own before our class meeting on Tuesday. You can find the DVD on reserve in the library. You could also look for it on some of the streaming services online (even though I have not personally checked to see if it is in fact available).

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

‘Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at. -John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Jill Soloway, the creator of the TV series Transparent and  I Love Dick (based on the Chris Kraus novel of the same title about having a crush on cultural critic and author Dick Hebdige which some of you might have read in previous classes). This is a talk she gave on 'The Female Gaze' at the Toronto Film Festival.

Teddy and Walt in The New Yorker

The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the Critique of Pop Culture
by Alex Ross

Even the New Yorker caught up, some 90 years later. This is a good reflection by the premier high brow cultural magazine (Theodore would just call it an ersatz culture publication still a product of the culture industry) on the ideas of the Frankfurt School. It's a nice primer to integrate your readings of Adorno and Benjamin as well as the Situationists and Enzensberger later on.

"One way or another, the Frankfurt School mode of criticism—its skeptical ardor, its relentless scouring of mundane surfaces—has spread far. When online recappers expend thousands of words debating the depiction of rape on “Game of Thrones,” or when writers publish histories of sneakers or of the office cubicle, they show intense awareness of mass culture’s ability to shape society. And in some cases the analysis takes a recognizably dialectical turn, as in Hua Hsu’s 2011 essay, for Grantland, on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s album “Watch the Throne.” A dispassionate hip-hop fan, Hua Hsu ponders the spectacle of two leading rappers making an “album against austerity,” in which they mark their ascension to a world of “MoMA and Rothko, Larry Gagosian, and luxury hotels across three continents,” and at the same time forfeit a hip-hop tradition of fantasy and protest. Citing the Kanye track “Power”—“Grab a camera, shoot a viral / Take the power in your own hands”—Hsu writes, “This version of power is entrancing—it explains an entire generation. But it also confuses ubiquity for importance, the familiarity of a celebrity’s face for true authority.” There is no telling how Adorno and Benjamin might have negotiated such contemporary labyrinths. Perhaps, on a peaceful day, they would have accepted the compromise devised by Fredric Jameson, who has written that the “cultural evolution of late capitalism” can be understood “dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.”

These implacable voices should stay active in our minds. Their dialectic of doubt prods us to pursue connections between what troubles us and what distracts us, to see the riven world behind the seamless screen. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”: Benjamin’s great formula, as forceful as a Klieg light, should be fixed as steadily on pop culture, the ritual apparatus of American capitalism, as it has been on the art works of the European bourgeoisie. Adorno asked for only so much. Above all, these figures present a model for thinking differently, and not in the glib sense touted by Steve Jobs. As the homogenization of culture proceeds apace, as the technology of surveillance hovers at the borders of our brains, such spaces are becoming rarer and more confined. I am haunted by a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”"

The Technology and the Society: A Critique of McLuhan

In order to be done with ol' Marshall (even though you're never done with him).
Raymond Williams, "The Technology and the Society" from Television: Technology and Cultural Form

Hot and Cold Media Is the Message in the Global Village of the Guttenberg Galaxy

Eisenstein Diagram

Here are the 'notes' re: the taxonomy of Hot and Cold media. Below is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's 'Conference' program from 1977 where McLuhan discusses and responds to audience questions on his main theoretical ideas. If we don't get to watch and discuss this in class please watch it on your own:

From Superheroes to the 'Seduction of the Innocent'

Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965)
Part1 + Part2

Action Comics #1
Action Comics #7

from Comics Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America
Wright, "Confronting Success: Comic Books and Postwar America, 1945-1950"
Wright, "Youth Crisis: Comic Books and Controversy, 1947-1950"

Wertham, "Seduction of the Innocent"
+ Self-Regulating Codes of the Comics Book Industry

from Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comics
Gabilliet, "Calls For Censorship"
+
Gabilliet, "Production"
Gabilliet, "The Business of Comic Books"

That James Dean vs That Daydream Nation Look: Taylor Swift covered by Ryan Adams - Genre, Gender and Style

Here's a nice press review of the discourses surrounding the Ryan Adams/Taylor Swift operation. I've also included a few articles from the past past, mainly Taylor Swift profiles from mainstream magazines like The New Yorker and New York Magazine. Make sure you all read the Tavi Gevinson article linked to at the bottom of the post in .pdf format. Also included is a recent article from The Atlantic about authorship in pop music and the strategies used by record companies to downplay the 'outsourcing' of pop hit manufacturing. Enjoy.

Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the Vindication of Taylor Swift

Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the mansplaining of Taylor Swift

No Blank Space, Baby: Taylor Swift Is The Soul Of Ryan Adams

Ryan Adams isn’t revealing something ‘good’ about Taylor Swift’s ‘1989.’ The album was already great.

Beats 1 Ryan Adams interview about '1989' with Taylor Swift call in 'surprise'

Platinum Underdog: Why Taylor Swift Is the Biggest Pop Star in the World

You Belong with Me

How Taylor Swift made teen angst into a business empire.

Taylor Swift Is Confusing

Haters Gonna Hate: Listening to Ryan Adams’s “1989”

The Reinvention of Taylor Swift

Flavorwire Interview: Talking Taylor Swift With Tavi Gevinson

JUST KIDDING, LOVE SUCKS

NOTES ON TAYLOR SWIFT

The complete version of this article by then 16-year old Tavi Gevinson published in The Believer in 2013 is below in PDF. Tavi Gevinson started the Style Rookie blog when she was 12. Rookie Mag below is a treasure of 'readings' of Tween/Teen culture from a non mainstream perspective --with all of its exhilaration and limitations.

Tavi Gevinson, JUST KIDDING

Rookie Mag 

Why must we hate the things teen girls love?

Hit Charade: Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.