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'I am an American'
Filming the Fear of Difference
Cynthia Weber
Intellect Books, 2011
From Samuel Huntington’s highly controversial Who Are We? to the urgent appeal of Naomi Wolf’s The End of America, Americans are increasingly reflecting on questions of democracy, multiculturalism, and national identity. Yet such debates take place largely at the level of elites, leaving out ordinary American citizens, who have much to offer about the lived reality behind the phrase, “I am an American.”
 
Cynthia Weber set out on a journey across post-9/11 America in search of a deeper understanding of what it means to be an American today. The result is this brave and captivating memoir that gives a voice to ordinary citizens for whom the terrorist attacks of 2001—and their lingering aftermath—live on in collective memory. Heartrending first-person testimonials reveal how the ongoing fear of terrorists and immigrants has betrayed America’s core values of fairness and equality, which have been further weakened by polarizing international and domestic responses. Considered together, these portraits also provide a sharp contrast to the idealized vision of Americanness frequently spun by media and politicians.
 

Far more than a mere remembrance book about September 11, ‘I am an American’ offers precisely the kind of ground-level empathy needed to reignite a meaningful national debate about who we are and who we might become as a people and a nation.

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I Wonder U
How Prince Went beyond Race and Back
Adilifu Nama
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Featured in the 2020 Association of University Presses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show

In 1993, Prince infamously changed his name to a unique, unpronounceable symbol. Yet this was only one of a long string of self-reinventions orchestrated by Prince as he refused to be typecast by the music industry’s limiting definitions of masculinity and femininity, of straightness and queerness, of authenticity and artifice, or of black music and white music.
 
Revealing how he continually subverted cultural expectations, I Wonder U examines the entirety of Prince’s diverse career as a singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, record label mogul, movie star, and director. It shows how, by blending elements of R&B, rock, and new wave into an extremely videogenic package, Prince was able to overcome the color barrier that kept black artists off of MTV. Yet even at his greatest crossover success, he still worked hard to retain his credibility among black music fans. In this way, Adilifu Nama suggests, Prince was able to assert a distinctly black political sensibility while still being perceived as a unique musical genius whose appeal transcended racial boundaries.
 
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Ida Lupino, Director
Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition
Grisham, Therese
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Dominated by men and bound by the restrictive Hays Code, postwar Hollywood offered little support for a female director who sought to make unique films on controversial subjects. But Ida Lupino bucked the system, writing and directing a string of movies that exposed the dark underside of American society, on topics such as rape, polio, unwed motherhood, bigamy, exploitative sports, and serial murder.

The first in-depth study devoted to Lupino’s directorial work, this book makes a strong case for her as a trailblazing feminist auteur, a filmmaker with a clear signature style and an abiding interest in depicting the plights of postwar American women. Ida Lupino, Director not only examines her work as a cinematic auteur, but also offers a serious consideration of her diverse and long-ranging career, getting her start in Hollywood as an actress in her teens and twenties, directing her first films in her early thirties, and later working as an acclaimed director of television westerns, sitcoms, and suspense dramas. It also demonstrates how Lupino fused generic elements of film noir and the social problem film to create a distinctive directorial style that was both highly expressionistic and grittily realistic. Ida Lupino, Director thus shines a long-awaited spotlight on one of our greatest filmmakers.

 
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The Idea of a Free Press
The Enlightenment and Its Unruly Legacy
David Copeland
Northwestern University Press, 2006
With the introduction of the printing press in England in 1476, a struggle over its control--and its potential for interrupting power--was joined. The written word, once the domain of the upper levels of society that controlled politics, economics, and religion, could be seen passing into the hands of anyone throughout the social strata who wished to voice opinions on any topic of interest or importance. How the advent of printing led to the idea of a free press is the story told by David Copeland in this book, which traces a confrontation that began with issues of religion and gradually expanded into the realm of political freedom.

The rise of a free press was, in many ways, a legacy of the Reformation and Enlightenment. Copeland describes a discourse centered on questions of religion--a discussion that the government, with all its religious authority, could not suppress because of the belief that the ability to reason for oneself was God-given. In this account we see how the debate moved from religion to the purely political sphere, and how, through the increased use of the printing press, it was opened to a multiplicity of voices and opinions. Spanning nearly four centuries in Britain and America, Copeland's book reveals how the tension between government control and the right to debate public affairs openly ultimately led to the idea of a free press; in doing so, it documents an intellectual development of unparalleled relevance and importance to the history of journalism.
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#identity
Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation
Abigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has served as a major platform for political performance, social justice activism, and large-scale public debates over race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality. It has empowered minoritarian groups to organize protests, articulate often-underrepresented perspectives, and form community. It has also spread hashtags that have been used to bully and silence women, people of color, and LGBTQ people.

#identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world. Hailing from diverse scholarly fields, all contributors are affiliated with The Color of New Media, a scholarly collective based at the University of California, Berkeley. The Color of New Media explores the intersections of new media studies, critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. The essays in #identity consider topics such as the social justice movements organized through #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and #SayHerName; the controversies around #WhyIStayed and #CancelColbert; Twitter use in India and Africa; the integration of hashtags such as #nohomo and #onfleek that have become part of everyday online vernacular; and other ways in which Twitter has been used by, for, and against women, people of color, LGBTQ, and Global South communities. Collectively, the essays in this volume offer a critically interdisciplinary view of how and why social media has been at the heart of US and global political discourse for over a decade.
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The Idols of ISIS
From Assyria to the Internet
Aaron Tugendhaft
University of Chicago Press, 2020
In 2015, the Islamic State released a video of men smashing sculptures in Iraq’s Mosul Museum as part of a mission to cleanse the world of idolatry. This book unpacks three key facets of that event: the status and power of images, the political importance of museums, and the efficacy of videos in furthering an ideological agenda through the internet.

Beginning with the Islamic State’s claim that the smashed objects were idols of the “age of ignorance,” Aaron Tugendhaft questions whether there can be any political life without idolatry. He then explores the various roles Mesopotamian sculpture has played in European imperial competition, the development of artistic modernism, and the formation of Iraqi national identity, showing how this history reverberates in the choice of the Mosul Museum as performance stage. Finally, he compares the Islamic State’s production of images to the ways in which images circulated in ancient Assyria and asks how digitization has transformed politics in the age of social media. An elegant and accessibly written introduction to the complexities of such events, The Idols of ISIS is ideal for students and readers seeking a richer cultural perspective than the media usually provides.
 
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Image Ethics In The Digital Age
Larry Gross
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Over the past quarter century, dramatic technological advances in the production, manipulation, and dissemination of images have transformed the practices of journalism, entertainment, and advertising as well as the visual environment itself. From digital retouching to wholesale deception, the media world is now beset by an unprecedented range of moral, ethical, legal, and professional challenges. Image Ethics in the Digital Age brings together leading experts in the fields of journalism, media studies, and law to address these challenges and assess their implications for personal and societal values and behavior.

Among the issues raised are the threat to journalistic integrity posed by visual editing software; the monopolization of image archives by a handful of corporations and its impact on copyright and fair use laws; the instantaneous electronic distribution of images of dubious provenance around the world; the erosion of privacy and civility under the onslaught of sensationalistic twenty-four-hour television news coverage and entertainment programming; and the increasingly widespread use of surveillance cameras in public spaces. This volume of original essays is vital reading for anyone concerned with the influence of the mass media in the digital age.

Contributors: Howard S. Becker; Derek Bousé, Eastern Mediterranean U, Cyprus; Hart Cohen, U of Western Sydney; Jessica M. Fishman; Paul Frosh, Hebrew U of Jerusalem; Faye Ginsburg, New York U; Laura Grindstaff, U of California, Davis; Dianne Hagaman; Sheldon W. Halpern, Ohio State U; Darrell Y. Hamamoto, U of California, Davis; Marguerite Moritz, U of Colorado, Boulder; David D. Perlmutter, Louisiana State U; Dona Schwartz, U of Minnesota; Matthew Soar, Concordia University; Stephen E. Weil, Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Education and Museum Studies.

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Imagination and Invention
Gilbert Simondon
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A radical rethinking of the theory and the experience of mental images

Here, in English translation for the first time, is Gilbert Simondon’s fundamental reconception of the mental image and the theory of imagination and invention. Drawing on a vast range of mid-twentieth-century theoretical resources—from experimental psychology, cybernetics, and ethology to the phenomenological reflections of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty—Imagination and Invention provides a comprehensive account of the mental image and adds a vital new dimension to the theory of psychical individuation in Simondon’s earlier, highly influential work.

Simondon traces the development of the mental image through four phases: first a bundle of motor anticipations, the image becomes a cognitive system that mediates the organism’s relation to its milieu, then a symbolic and abstract integration of motor and affective experience to, finally, invention, a solution to a problem of life that requires the externalization of the mental image and the creation of a technical object. An image cannot be understood from the perspective of one phase alone, he argues, but only within the trajectory of its progressive metamorphosis.

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Imaging Hoover Dam
The Making of a Cultural Icon
Anthony F. Arrigo
University of Nevada Press, 2014
The mighty Hoover Dam, starting as a dream of land developers and farmers, became the most ambitious civil engineering project of the Great Depression. This landmark in the middle of the Mojave Desert, holding back the largest man-made lake in America, also became, like Mount Rushmore or the Empire State Building, a visual and cultural icon. The power and meanings of this icon came not through a single image but via myriad visual representations, in government propaganda, advertising, journalism, and art. Even before it was built, these images were used to shape the public’s perception of the project and frame the dam as the linchpin to an expanding American economic empire in the desert Southwest.

Anthony F. Arrigo has researched a wide array of primary sources and archival materials to trace the project from its earliest representations in illustrations to the documentary photography of its construction and later depictions of the structure in commercial promotions, fine art photography, and paintings. Analyzing Hoover Dam through the trajectory of imagery across several decades, rather than the narrative of its construction, illuminates the underlying cultural and ecological imperatives in the drive to build it, including the influence of religious doctrine and the American agrarian movement. Arrigo also discusses various portrayals of laborers, women, minority groups, nature, and technology in this imagery. In time, the visual icon of power and domination was commercialized to sell cars, vacations, and more.

Imaging Hoover Dam is an important work in both visual rhetoric and cultural studies. It will also intrigue readers interested in such varied topics as the history of the American Southwest, the Great Depression and the New Deal, social and environmental issues, and American popular culture.
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Imagining the Global
Transnational Media and Popular Culture Beyond East and West
Fabienne Darling-Wolf
University of Michigan Press, 2014
Based on a series of case studies of globally distributed media and their reception in different parts of the world, Imagining the Global reflects on what contemporary global culture can teach us about transnational cultural dynamics in the 21st century. A focused multisited cultural analysis that reflects on the symbiotic relationship between the local, the national, and the global, it also explores how individuals’ consumption of global media shapes their imagination of both faraway places and their own local lives. Chosen for their continuing influence, historical relationships, and different geopolitical positions, the case sites of France, Japan, and the United States provide opportunities to move beyond common dichotomies between East and West, or United States and “the rest.” From a theoretical point of view, Imagining the Global endeavors to answer the question of how one locale can help us understand another locale. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources—several years of fieldwork; extensive participant observation; more than 80 formal interviews with some 160 media consumers (and occasionally producers) in France, Japan, and the United States; and analyses of media in different languages—author Fabienne Darling-Wolf considers how global culture intersects with other significant identity factors, including gender, race, class, and geography. Imagining the Global investigates who gets to participate in and who gets excluded from global media representation, as well as how and why the distinction matters.
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Imagining the Mulatta
Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media
Jasmine Mitchell
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Brazil markets itself as a racially mixed utopia. The United States prefers the term melting pot. Both nations have long used the image of the mulatta to push skewed cultural narratives. Highlighting the prevalence of mixed race women of African and European descent, the two countries claim to have perfected racial representation—all the while ignoring the racialization, hypersexualization, and white supremacy that the mulatta narrative creates.

Jasmine Mitchell investigates the development and exploitation of the mulatta figure in Brazilian and U.S. popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, she analyzes policy debates and reveals the use of mixed-Black female celebrities as subjects of racial and gendered discussions. Mitchell also unveils the ways the media moralizes about the mulatta figure and uses her as an example of an ”acceptable” version of blackness that at once dreams of erasing undesirable blackness while maintaining the qualities that serve as outlets for interracial desire.

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The Immediate Experience
Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture
Robert WarshowWith an introduction by Lionel Trilling and a new preface by Stanley Cavell
Harvard University Press, 2001

This collection of essays, which originally appeared as a book in 1962, is virtually the complete works of an editor of Commentary magazine who died, at age 37, in 1955. Long before the rise of Cultural Studies as an academic pursuit, in the pages of the best literary magazines of the day, Robert Warshow wrote analyses of the folklore of modern life that were as sensitive and penetrating as the writings of James Agee, George Orwell, and Walter Benjamin. Some of these essays--notably "The Westerner," "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," and the pieces on the New Yorker, Mad Magazine, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and the Rosenberg letters--are classics, once frequently anthologized but now hard to find.

Along with a new preface by Stanley Cavell, The Immediate Experience includes several essays not previously published in the book--on Kafka and Hemingway--as well as Warshow's side of an exchange with Irving Howe.

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Imperial Affects
Sensational Melodrama and the Attractions of American Cinema
Eagle, Jonna
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Imperial Affects is the first sustained account of American action-based cinema as melodrama. From the earliest war films through the Hollywood Western and the late-century action cinema, imperialist violence and mobility have been produced as sites of both visceral pleasure and moral virtue. Suffering and omnipotence operate as twinned affects in this context, inviting identification with an American national subject constituted as both victimized and invincible—a powerful and persistent conjunction traced here across a century of cinema.
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Imprint and Trace
Handwriting in the Age of Technology
Sonja Neef
Reaktion Books, 2011

Today, writing by hand seems a nearly archaic process. Nearly all of our written communication is digital—our letters are via email or text message, our manuscripts are composed using word processors, our journals are blogs, and we sign checks to pay bills with the push of a button. Sonja Neef believes that what we have lost in our modern technological conversation is the ductus—the physical and material act of handwriting.

            In Imprint and Trace Neef argues, however, that handwriting throughout its history has always been threatened with erasure. It exists in a dual state: able to be standardized, repeated, copied—much like an imprint—and yet persistently singular, original, and authentic as a trace or line. Throughout its history, from the first prehistoric handprint, through the innovations of stylus, quill, and printing press, handwriting has revealed an interweaving, ever-changing relationship between imprint and trace. Even today, in the age of the digital revolution, the trace of handwriting is still an integral part of communication, whether etched, photographed, pixelated, or scanned.

            Imprint and Trace presents an essential re-evaluation of the relationships between handwriting and technology, and between the various imprints and traces that define communication.

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The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine
James Landers
University of Missouri Press, 2010
Today, monthly issues of Cosmopolitan magazine scream out to readers from checkout counters and newsstands. With bright covers and bold, sexy headlines, this famous periodical targets young, single women aspiring to become the quintessential “Cosmo girl.” Cosmopolitan is known for its vivacious character and frank, explicit attitude toward sex, yet because of its reputation, many people don’t realize that the magazine has undergone many incarnations before its current one, including family literary magazine and muckraking investigative journal, and all are presented in The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine. The book boasts one particularly impressive contributor: Helen Gurley Brown herself, who rarely grants interviews but spoke and corresponded with James Landers to aid in his research.
            When launched in 1886, Cosmopolitan was a family literary magazine that published quality fiction, children’s stories, and homemaking tips. In 1889 it was rescued from bankruptcy by wealthy entrepreneur John Brisben Walker, who introduced illustrations and attracted writers such as Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and H. G. Wells. Then, when newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst purchased Cosmopolitan in 1905, he turned it into a purveyor of exposé journalism to aid his personal political pursuits. But when Hearst abandoned those ambitions, he changed the magazine in the 1920s back to a fiction periodical featuring leading writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and William Somerset Maugham. His approach garnered success by the 1930s, but poor editing sunk Cosmo’s readership as decades went on. By the mid-1960s executives considered letting Cosmopolitan die, but Helen Gurley Brown, an ambitious and savvy businesswoman, submitted a plan for a dramatic editorial makeover. Gurley Brown took the helm and saved Cosmopolitan by publishing articles about topics other women’s magazines avoided. Twenty years later, when the magazine ended its first century, Cosmopolitan was the profit center of the Hearst Corporation and a culturally significant force in young women’s lives.
            The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine explores how Cosmopolitan survived three near-death experiences to become one of the most dynamic and successful magazines of the twentieth century. Landers uses a wealth of primary source materials to place this important magazine in the context of history and depict how it became the cultural touchstone it is today. This book will be of interest not only to modern Cosmo aficionadas but also to journalism students, news historians, and anyone interested in publishing.
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In Defense of Negativity
Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns
John G. Geer
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Americans tend to see negative campaign ads as just that: negative. Pundits, journalists, voters, and scholars frequently complain that such ads undermine elections and even democratic government itself. But John G. Geer here takes the opposite stance, arguing that when political candidates attack each other, raising doubts about each other’s views and qualifications, voters—and the democratic process—benefit. 

In Defense of Negativity, Geer’s study of negative advertising in presidential campaigns from 1960 to 2004, asserts that the proliferating attack ads are far more likely than positive ads to focus on salient political issues, rather than politicians’ personal characteristics. Accordingly, the ads enrich the democratic process, providing voters with relevant and substantial information before they head to the polls.

An important and timely contribution to American political discourse, In Defense of Negativity concludes that if we want campaigns to grapple with relevant issues and address real problems, negative ads just might be the solution.
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In Permanent Crisis
Ethnicity in Contemporary European Media and Cinema
Ipek A. Celik
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Refugees, migrants, and minorities of migrant origin frequently appear in European mainstream news in emergency situations: victims of human trafficking, suspects of terrorism, “bogus” asylum seekers. Through analysis of work by established filmmakers Michael Haneke, Fatih Akin, and Alfonso Cuarón, In Permanent Crisis contemplates the way mass media depictions become invoked by film to frame ethnic and racial Otherness in Europe as adornments of catastrophe. Special attention is given to European auteur films in which riots, terrorism, criminal activities, and honor killings bring Europe’s minorities to the forefront of public visibility only to reduce them to perpetrators or victims of violence.

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In Pursuit of German Memory
History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz
Wulf Kansteiner
Ohio University Press, 2006

The collective memories of Nazism that developed in postwar Germany have helped define a new paradigm of memory politics. From Europe to South Africa and from Latin America to Iraq, scholars have studied the German case to learn how to overcome internal division and regain international recognition.

In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz examines three arenas of German memory politics—professional historiography, national politics, and national public television—that have played key roles in the reinvention of the Nazi past in the last sixty years. Wulf Kansteiner shows that the interpretations of the past proposed by historians, politicians, and television producers reflect political and generational divisions and an extraordinary concern for Germany's image abroad. At the same time, each of these theaters of memory has developed its own dynamics and formats of historical reflection.

Kansteiner’s analysis of the German scene reveals a complex social geography of collective memory. In Pursuit of German Memory underscores the fact that German memories of Nazism, like many other collective memories, combine two seemingly contradictory qualities: They are highly mediated and part of a global exchange of images and story fragments but, at the same time, they can be reproduced only locally, in narrowly circumscribed networks of communication.

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In Search of Belonging
Latinas, Media, and Citizenship
Jillian M Baez
University of Illinois Press, 2018
In Search of Belonging explores the ways Latina/o audiences in general, and women in particular, make sense of and engage both mainstream and Spanish-language media. Jillian M. Báez’s eye-opening ethnographic analysis draws on the experiences of a diverse group of Latinas in Chicago. In-depth interviews reveal Latinas viewing media images through a lens of citizenship. These women search for nothing less than recognition—and belonging—through representations of Latinas in films, advertising, telenovelas, and TV shows like Ugly Betty and Modern Family. Báez's personal interactions and research merge to create a fascinating portrait, one that privileges the perspectives of the women themselves as they consume media in complex, unpredictable ways.

Innovative and informed by a wealth of new evidence, In Search of Belonging answers important questions about the ways Latinas perform citizenship in today’s America.

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In Sullivan's Shadow
The Use and Abuse of Libel Law during the Long Civil Rights Struggle
Aimee Edmondson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
For many years, the far right has sown public distrust in the media as a political strategy, weaponizing libel law in an effort to stifle free speech and silence African American dissent. In Sullivan's Shadow demonstrates that this strategy was pursued throughout the civil rights era and beyond, as southern officials continued to bring lawsuits in their attempts to intimidate journalists who published accounts of police brutality against protestors. Taking the Supreme Court's famous 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan as her starting point, Aimee Edmondson illuminates a series of fascinating and often astounding cases that preceded and followed this historic ruling.

Drawing on archival research and scholarship in journalism, legal history, and African American studies, Edmondson offers a new narrative of brave activists, bold journalists and publishers, and hard­headed southern officials. These little-known courtroom dramas at the intersection of race, libel, and journalism go beyond the activism of the 1960s and span much of the country's history, beginning with lawsuits filed against abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and concluding with a suit spawned by the 1988 film Mississippi Burning.
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Inclusion in New Danish Cinema
Sexuality and Transnational Belonging
Meryl Shriver-Rice
Intellect Books, 2015
Often recognized as one of the happiest countries in the world, Denmark, like its Scandinavian neighbors, is known for its progressive culture, which is also reflected in its national cinema. It is not surprising, then, that Danish film boasts as many successful women film directors as men, uses scripts that are often cowritten by the director and the screenwriter, and produces one of the largest numbers of queer films directed by and starring women. Despite all this, Danish film is not widely written about, especially in English. Inclusion in New Danish Cinema brings this vibrant culture to English-language audiences. Meryl Shriver-Rice argues that Denmark has demonstrated that film can reinforce cultural ethics and political values while also navigating the ongoing and mounting forces of digital communication and globalization.
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InDEBTed to Intervene
Critical Lessons in Debt, Communication, Art, and Theoretical Practice
Oliver Vodeb and Nikola Janovic Kolenc
Intellect Books, 2013
As governments and individuals struggle with growing indebtedness, the topic of debt itself—what it is, what it means, and how we understand it—has never been more salient. This collection brings together a range of contributions from many disciplines and around the world to consider debt through various lenses, including design, art, technology, political economy, social justice, surveillance, protest, education, urban and virtual spaces, and more. Aiming not just to advance scholarship, but to push ahead real change in the world, the book offers not only analytical insights and conceptual apparatuses, but practical tools and radical inspirations as well. A powerful analysis of a concept that has become ever more central to everyday society, Indebted to Intervene will be essential reading for scholars and citizens alike.
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The Indecent Screen
Regulating Television in the Twenty-First Century
Chris, Cynthia
Rutgers University Press, 2019
The Indecent Screen explores clashes over indecency in broadcast television among U.S.-based media advocates, television professionals, the Federal Communications Commission, and TV audiences. Cynthia Chris focuses on the decency debates during an approximately twenty-year period since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which in many ways restructured the media environment. Simultaneously, ever increasing channel capacity, new forms of distribution, and time-shifting (in the form of streaming and on-demand viewing options) radically changed how, when, and what we watch. But instead of these innovations quelling concerns that TV networks were too often transmitting indecent material that was accessible to children, complaints about indecency skyrocketed soon after the turn of the century. Chris demonstrates that these clashes are significant battles over the role of family, the role of government, and the value of free speech in our lives, arguing that an uncensored media is so imperative to the public good that we can, and must, endure the occasional indecent screen. 
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The Independence of the Media and its Regulatory Agencies
Shedding New Light on Formal and Actual Independence against the National Context
Edited by Wolfgang Schulz, Peggy Valcke, and Kristina Irion
Intellect Books, 2013
Media independence is vital for media democracies, and so is the independence of the regulatory bodies governing it. The Independence of the Media and its Regulatory Agencies explores the complex relationship between media governance and independence of media regulatory authorities within media systems within Europe, which form part of the wider framework in which media’s independence may flourish or fade. Based on research in more than forty countries, the contributions analyze the independence of regulators from different perspectives and draw links between social, financial, and legal traditions and frameworks.

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Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship
Laura Brueck, Jacob Smith, and Neil Verma, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2020
From the cinema to the recording studio to public festival grounds, the range and sonic richness of Indian cultures can be heard across the subcontinent. Sound articulates communal difference and embodies specific identities for multiple publics. This diversity of sounds has been and continues to be crucial to the ideological construction of a unifying postcolonial Indian nation-state.

Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship addresses the multifaceted roles sound plays in Indian cultures and media, and enacts a sonic turn in South Asian Studies by understanding sound in its own social and cultural contexts. “Scapes, Sites, and Circulations” considers the spatial and circulatory ways in which sound “happens” in and around Indian sound cultures, including diasporic cultures. “Voice” emphasizes voices that embody a variety of struggles and ambiguities, particularly around gender and performance. Finally, “Cinema Sound” make specific arguments about film sound in the Indian context, from the earliest days of talkie technology to contemporary Hindi films and experimental art installations.

Integrating interdisciplinary scholarship at the nexus of sound studies and South Asian Studies by questions of nation/nationalism, postcolonialism, cinema, and popular culture in India, Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship offers fresh and sophisticated approaches to the sonic world of the subcontinent.
 
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Indianizing Film
Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology
Schiwy, Freya
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Latin American indigenous media production has recently experienced a noticeable boom, specifically in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. Indianizing Film zooms in on a selection of award-winning and widely influential fiction and docudrama shorts, analyzing them in the wider context of indigenous media practices and debates over decolonizing knowledge. Within this framework, Freya Schiwy approaches questions of gender, power, and representation.

Schiwy argues that instead of solely creating entertainment through their work indigenous media activists are building communication networks that encourage interaction between diverse cultures. As a result, mainstream images are retooled, permitting communities to strengthen their cultures and express their own visions of development and modernization. Indianizing Film encourages readers to consider how indigenous media contributes to a wider understanding of decolonization and anticolonial study against the universal backdrop of the twenty-first century.

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Indians Illustrated
The Image of Native Americans in the Pictorial Press
John M Coward
University of Illinois Press, 2016
After 1850, Americans swarmed to take in a raft of new illustrated journals and papers. Engravings and drawings of "buckskinned braves" and "Indian princesses" proved an immensely popular attraction for consumers of publications like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly . In Indians Illustrated , John M. Coward charts a social and cultural history of Native American illustrations--romantic, violent, racist, peaceful, and otherwise--in the heyday of the American pictorial press. These woodblock engravings and ink drawings placed Native Americans into categories that drew from venerable "good" Indian and "bad" Indian stereotypes already threaded through the culture. Coward's examples show how the genre cemented white ideas about how Indians should look and behave--ideas that diminished Native Americans' cultural values and political influence. His powerful analysis of themes and visual tropes unlocks the racial codes and visual cues that whites used to represent--and marginalize--native cultures already engaged in a twilight struggle against inexorable westward expansion.
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Indie Cinema Online
Sarah E.S. Sinwell
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Indie Cinema Online investigates the changing nature of contemporary American independent cinema in an era of media convergence. Focusing on the ways in which modes of production, distribution, and exhibition are shifting with the advent of online streaming, simultaneous release strategies, and web series, this book analyzes sites such as SundanceTV, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and other online spaces as a means of redefining independent cinema in a digital era. Analyzing the intersections among cinema studies, cultural studies, and new media studies within contemporary convergence culture, author Sarah E.S. Sinwell looks at sites of media convergence that are often ignored within most studies of digital media. Emphasizing the ways in which the forms and technologies of media culture have changed during the age of convergence, this book analyzes contemporary production, distribution, and exhibition practices as a means of examining the changing meanings of independent cinema within digital culture.
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Indie Porn
Revolution, Regulation, and Resistance
Zahra Stardust
Duke University Press, 2024
In Indie Porn, Zahra Stardust examines the motivations and interventions of independent porn producers as they navigate criminal laws, risk-averse platforms, discriminatory algorithms, and rampant piracy. Herself a porn performer and participant, Stardust takes readers behind the scenes, offering intimate insights into this socio-political movement. She finds politicians who watch porn in parliament, protesters leading face-sitting demonstrations, sex workers making COVID-safe pornography, and artists reverse-engineering porn detection software. Against the backdrop of a global gig economy, Stardust documents the promises of indie porn to democratize content, revolutionize production, and redistribute wealth while outlining the fantasies of regulators, whose illusions of what porn is and does foreclose possibilities for transformation. Inevitably, as these paradigms collide, porn producers engage in creative tactics to hustle for survival and visibility, from ethical certification to law reform, sometimes reproducing hierarchies of stigma themselves. By highlighting how porn stigma is bound up with intersecting oppressions, Stardust identifies these junctions as coalitional opportunities for changing social relationships to sex, work, and capitalism.
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Indigeneity in Real Time
The Digital Making of Oaxacalifornia
Ingrid Kummels
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Long before the COVID-19 crisis, Mexican Indigenous peoples were faced with organizing their lives from afar, between villages in the Oaxacan Sierra Norte and the urban districts of Los Angeles, as a result of unauthorized migration and the restrictive border between Mexico and the United States. By launching cutting-edge Internet radio stations and multimedia platforms and engaging as community influencers, Zapotec and Ayuujk peoples paved their own paths to a transnational lifeway during the Trump era. This meant adapting digital technology to their needs, setting up their own infrastructure, and designing new digital formats for re-organizing community life in all its facets—including illness, death and mourning, collective celebrations, sport tournaments, and political meetings—across vast distances. Author Ingrid Kummels shows how mediamakers and users in the Sierra Norte villages and in Los Angeles created a transborder media space and aligned time regimes. By networking from multiple places, they put into practice a communal way of life called Comunalidad and an indigenized American Dream—in real time.
 
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Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire
Leah Perry
The Ohio State University Press, 2024

From the founding of the United States, enduringly consequential debates over Indigeneity and immigration have occurred on the battlefield and in Congress, in courtrooms, at territorial borders, and in mainstream culture. In Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire, Leah Perry traces the ways that the US created its empire through public pedagogies—which she defines as policy and media discourses—surrounding Indigenous dispossession, gendered state violence, and racialized immigration. These pedagogies have propelled the expansion of US empire, including the redrawing of the US as a neoliberal democracy. Perry argues that by changing the discourse around gender, race, immigration, and Indigeneity, the United States has continued its imperial project through different eras, always predicated on Indigenous dispossession.

In exploring crucial components of empire, such as welfare, eugenics, disability, sexual violence, foodways, queerness, and policing, Perry interrogates violence against Indigenous peoples and against immigrants, examining these not independently—as is so often the case—but as co-constitutive. Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire thus intervenes in and fills a gap in immigration studies, Indigenous studies, race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and US history.

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Indigenous Interfaces
Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America
Edited by Jennifer Gómez Menjívar and Gloria Elizabeth Chacón; Foreword by Arturo Arias
University of Arizona Press, 2019
Cultural preservation, linguistic revitalization, intellectual heritage, and environmental sustainability became central to Indigenous movements in Mexico and Central America after 1992. While the emergence of these issues triggered important conversations, none to date have examined the role that new media has played in accomplishing their objectives.

Indigenous Interfaces provides the first thorough examination of indigeneity at the interface of cyberspace. Correspondingly, it examines the impact of new media on the struggles for self-determination that Indigenous peoples undergo in Mexico and Central America. The volume’s contributors highlight the fresh approaches that Mesoamerica’s Indigenous peoples have given to new media—from YouTubing Maya rock music to hashtagging in Zapotec. Together, they argue that these cyberspatial activities both maintain tradition and ensure its continuity. Without considering the implications of new technologies, Indigenous Interfaces argues, twenty-first-century indigeneity in Mexico and Central America cannot be successfully documented, evaluated, and comprehended.

Indigenous Interfaces rejects the myth that indigeneity and information technology are incompatible through its compelling analysis of the relationships between Indigenous peoples and new media. The volume illustrates how Indigenous peoples are selectively and strategically choosing to interface with cybertechnology, highlights Indigenous interpretations of new media, and brings to center Indigenous communities who are resetting modes of communication and redirecting the flow of information. It convincingly argues that interfacing with traditional technologies simultaneously with new media gives Indigenous peoples an edge on the claim to autonomous and sovereign ways of being Indigenous in the twenty-first century.

Contributors
Arturo Arias
Debra A. Castillo
Gloria Elizabeth Chacón
Adam W. Coon
Emiliana Cruz
Tajëëw Díaz Robles
Mauricio Espinoza
Alicia Ivonne Estrada
Jennifer Gómez Menjívar
Sue P. Haglund
Brook Danielle Lillehaugen
Paul Joseph López Oro
Rita M. Palacios
Gabriela Spears-Rico
Paul Worley
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Indigenous Media in Mexico
Culture, Community, and the State
Erica Cusi Wortham
Duke University Press, 2013
In Indigenous Media in Mexico, Erica Cusi Wortham explores the use of video among indigenous peoples in Mexico as an important component of their social and political activism. Funded by the federal government as part of its "pluriculturalist" policy of the 1990s, video indígena programs became social processes through which indigenous communities in Oaxaca and Chiapas engendered alternative public spheres and aligned themselves with local and regional autonomy movements.

Drawing on her in-depth ethnographic research among indigenous mediamakers in Mexico, Wortham traces their shifting relationship with Mexican cultural agencies; situates their work within a broader, hemispheric network of indigenous media producers; and complicates the notion of a unified, homogeneous indigenous identity. Her analysis of projects from community-based media initiatives in Oaxaca to the transnational Chiapas Media Project highlights variations in cultural identity and autonomy based on specific histories of marginalization, accommodation, and resistance.

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Indigenous Peoples Rise Up
The Global Ascendency of Social Media Activism
Bronwyn Carlson
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Indigenous Peoples Rise Up: The Global Ascendency of Social Media Activism illustrates the impact of social media in expanding the nature of Indigenous communities and social movements. Social media has bridged distance, time, and nation states to mobilize Indigenous peoples to build coalitions across the globe and to stand in solidarity with one another. These movements have succeeded and gained momentum and traction precisely because of the strategic use of social media. Social media—Twitter and Facebook in particular—has also served as a platform for fostering health, well-being, and resilience, recognizing Indigenous strength and talent, and sustaining and transforming cultural practices when great distances divide members of the same community.
 
Including a range of international indigenous voices from the US, Canada, Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Africa, the book takes an interdisciplinary approach, bridging Indigenous studies, media studies, and social justice studies. Including examples like Idle No More in Canada, Australian Recognise!, and social media campaigns to maintain Maori language, Indigenous Peoples Rise Up serves as one of the first studies of Indigenous social media use and activism. 
 
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Indirect Subjects
Nollywood's Local Address
Matthew H. Brown
Duke University Press, 2021
In Indirect Subjects, Matthew H. Brown analyzes the content of the prolific Nigerian film industry's mostly direct-to-video movies alongside local practices of production and circulation to show how screen media play spatial roles in global power relations. Scrutinizing the deep structural and aesthetic relationship between Nollywood, as the industry is known, and Nigerian state television, Brown tracks how several Nollywood films, in ways similar to both state television programs and colonial cinema productions, invite local spectators to experience liberal capitalism not only as a form of exploitation but as a set of expectations about the future. This mode of address, which Brown refers to as “periliberalism,” sustains global power imbalances by locating viewers within liberalism but distancing them from its processes and benefits. Locating the wellspring of this hypocrisy in the British Empire's practice of indirect rule, Brown contends that culture industries like Nollywood can sustain capitalism by isolating ordinary African people, whose labor and consumption fuel it, from its exclusive privileges.
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An Indispensable Liberty
The Fight for Free Speech in Nineteenth-Century America
Edited by Mary M. Cronin
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Most Americans today view freedom of speech as a bedrock of all other liberties, a defining feature of American citizenship. During the nineteenth century, the popular concept of American freedom of speech was still being formed. In An Indispensable Liberty: The Fight for Free Speech in Nineteenth-Century America, contributors examine attempts to restrict freedom of speech and the press during and after the Civil War.
 
The eleven essays that make up this collection show how, despite judicial, political, and public proclamations of support for freedom of expression, factors like tradition, gender stereotypes, religion, and fear of social unrest often led to narrow judicial and political protection for freedom of expression by people whose views upset the status quo. These views, expressed by abolitionists, suffragists, and labor leaders, challenged rigid cultural mores of the day, and many political and cultural leaders feared that extending freedom of expression to agitators would undermine society. The Civil War intensified questions about the duties and privileges of citizenship. After the war, key conflicts over freedom of expression were triggered by Reconstruction, suffrage, the Comstock Act, and questions about libel.
 
The volume’s contributors blend social, cultural, and intellectual history to untangle the complicated strands of nineteenth-century legal thought. By chronicling the development of modern-day notions of free speech, this timely collection offers both a valuable exploration of the First Amendment in nineteenth-century America and a useful perspective on the challenges we face today.
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Inequity in the Technopolis
Race, Class, Gender, and the Digital Divide in Austin
Edited by Joseph Straubhaar, Jeremiah Spence, Zeynep Tufekci, and Roberta G. Lentz
University of Texas Press, 2012

Over the past few decades, Austin, Texas, has made a concerted effort to develop into a “technopolis,” becoming home to companies such as Dell and numerous start-ups in the 1990s. It has been a model for other cities across the nation that wish to become high-tech centers while still retaining the livability to attract residents. Nevertheless, this expansion and boom left poorer residents behind, many of them African American or Latino, despite local and federal efforts to increase lower-income and minority access to technology.

This book was born of a ten-year longitudinal study of the digital divide in Austin—a study that gradually evolved into a broader inquiry into Austin’s history as a segregated city, its turn toward becoming a technopolis, what the city and various groups did to address the digital divide, and how the most disadvantaged groups and individuals were affected by those programs.

The editors examine the impact of national and statewide digital inclusion programs created in the 1990s, as well as what happened when those programs were gradually cut back by conservative administrations after 2000. They also examine how the city of Austin persisted in its own efforts for digital inclusion by working with its public libraries and a number of local nonprofits, and the positive impact those programs had.

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Information Activism
A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies
Cait McKinney
Duke University Press, 2020
For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them. In Information Activism Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the fly and using everything from index cards to computers, these activists brought people and their visions of justice together to organize, store, and provide access to information. Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technologies animate the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including their antiracist and trans-inclusive endeavors. By bringing sexuality studies to bear on media history, McKinney demonstrates how groups with precarious access to control over information create their own innovative and resourceful techniques for generating and sharing knowledge.
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Information Fantasies
Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China
Xiao Liu
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Winner of the Science Fiction Research Association Book Award​

A groundbreaking, alternate history of information technology and information discourses

Although the scale of the information economy and the impact of digital media on social life in China today could pale that of any other country, the story of their emergence in the post-Mao sociopolitical environment remains untold. Information Fantasies offers a revisionist account of the emergence of the “information society,” arguing that it was not determined by the technology of digitization alone but developed out of a set of techno-cultural imaginations and practices that arrived alongside postsocialism.

Anticipating discussions on information surveillance, data collection, and precarious labor conditions today, Xiao Liu goes far beyond the current scholarship on internet and digital culture in China, questioning the limits of current new-media theory and history, while also salvaging postsocialism from the persistent Cold War structure of knowledge production.

Ranging over forgotten science fiction, unjustly neglected films, corporeal practices such as qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories, Information Fantasies constructs an alternate genealogy of digital and information imaginaries—one that will change how we look at the development of the postsocialist world and the emergence of digital technologies.

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Information Politics
Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society
Tim Jordan
Pluto Press, 2015
Conflict over information has become a central part of twenty-first century politics and culture. Currents of liberation and exploitation course through the debates about Edward Snowden and surveillance, Anonymous, the Arab Spring, search engines, and social media. In Information Politics, Tim Jordan confronts contemporary panic about whether we are being controlled by digital systems, such as social networks, iPhones, and Google. He approaches these issues in relation to the information politics that have emerged with the rise of mass digital cultures and the internet. Within our modern world, he argues for possibilities of rebellion and liberation interwoven among social and political conflicts including gender, class, and ecology.
            The first of Pluto Press’s new Digital Barricades series, focusing on ground-breaking critical explorations of resistance within the digital world, Information Politics explores the exploitations both facilitated by, and contested through, increases in information flows; the embedding of information technologies in daily life; and the intersection of network and control protocols. Anyone hoping to get to grips with the rapidly changing terrain of digital culture and conflict should start here.
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An Inky Business
A History of Newspapers from the English Civil Wars to the American Civil War
Matthew J. Shaw
Reaktion Books, 2021
An Inky Business is a book about the making and printing of news. It is a history of ink, paper, printing press, and type, and of those who made and read newspapers in Britain, continental Europe, and America from the British Civil Wars to the Battle of Gettysburg nearly two hundred years later. But it is also an account of what news was and how the idea of news became central to public life. Newspapers ranged from purveyors of high seriousness to carriers of scurrilous gossip. Indeed, our current obsession with “fake news” and the worrying revelations or hints about how money, power, and technology shapes and controls the press and the flows of what is believed to be genuine information have dark early-modern echoes.
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Insect Media
An Archaeology of Animals and Technology
Jussi Parikka
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Since the early nineteenth century, when entomologists first popularized the unique biological and behavioral characteristics of insects, technological innovators and theorists have proposed insects as templates for a wide range of technologies. In Insect Media, Jussi Parikka analyzes how insect forms of social organization-swarms, hives, webs, and distributed intelligence-have been used to structure modern media technologies and the network society, providing a radical new perspective on the interconnection of biology and technology.

Through close engagement with the pioneering work of insect ethologists, including Jakob von Uexküll and Karl von Frisch, posthumanist philosophers, media theorists, and contemporary filmmakers and artists, Parikka develops an insect theory of media, one that conceptualizes modern media as more than the products of individual human actors, social interests, or technological determinants. They are, rather, profoundly nonhuman phenomena that both draw on and mimic the alien lifeworlds of insects.
 
Deftly moving from the life sciences to digital technology, from popular culture to avant-garde art and architecture, and from philosophy to cybernetics and game theory, Parikka provides innovative conceptual tools for exploring the phenomena of network society and culture. Challenging anthropocentric approaches to contemporary science and culture, Insect Media reveals the possibilities that insects and other nonhuman animals offer for rethinking media, the conflation of biology and technology, and our understanding of, and interaction with, contemporary digital culture.
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Inside the Presidential Debates
Their Improbable Past and Promising Future
Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LaMay
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Newton Minow’s long engagement with the world of television began nearly fifty years ago when President Kennedy appointed him chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. As its head, Minow would famously dub TV a “vast wasteland,” thus inaugurating a career dedicated to reforming television to better serve the public interest. Since then, he has been chairman of PBS and on the board of CBS and elsewhere, but his most lasting contribution remains his leadership on televised presidential debates. He was assistant counsel to Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson when Stevenson first proposed the idea of the debates in 1960; he served as cochair of the presidential debates in 1976 and 1980; and he helped create and is currently vice chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has organized the debates for the last two decades.
 
Written with longtime collaborator Craig LaMay, this fascinating history offers readers for the first time a genuinely inside look into the origins of the presidential debates and the many battles—both legal and personal—that have determined who has been allowed to debate and under what circumstances. The authors do not dismiss the criticism of the presidential debates in recent years but do come down solidly in favor of them, arguing that they are one of the great accomplishments of modern American electoral politics. As they remind us, the debates were once unique in the democratic world, are now emulated across the globe, and they offer the public the only real chance to see the candidates speak in direct response to one another in a discussion of major social, economic, and foreign policy issues.
 
Looking to the challenges posed by third-party candidates and the emergence of new media such as YouTube, Minow and LaMay ultimately make recommendations for the future, calling for the debates to become less formal, with candidates allowed to question each other and citizens allowed to question candidates directly. They also explore the many ways in which the Internet might serve to broaden the debates’ appeal and informative power. Whether it’s Clinton or Obama vs. McCain, Inside the Presidential Debates will be welcomed in 2008 by anyone interested in where this crucial part of our democracy is headed—and how it got there.
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Inside the TV Newsroom
Profession Under Pressure
Line Hassall Thomsen
Intellect Books, 2018
In an era where the way people get news is ever-changing, how do broadcast journalists work? How do changes to the field affect journalists at traditional public broadcasters? And what similarities are there between license-funded news programs—like those on the BBC—and commercial news?

​This book, built on years of unique access to the newsrooms of BBC News and ITV News in the United Kingdom and DR TV Avisen and TV2 Nyhedeme in Denmark, answers those questions and more. Exploring the shared professional ideals of journalists, the study analyzes how they conceive of stories as important, and how their ideals relating to their work are expressed and aspired to in everyday practice.
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Instafame
Graffiti and Street Art in the Instagram Era
Lachlan MacDowall
Intellect Books, 2019
Instafame charts the impact of Instagram—one of the world’s most popular social media platforms—on visual culture in the mere eight years since its launch. MacDowell traces the intuitive connections between graffiti, street art, and Instagram, arguing that social media’s unending battle for a viewer’s attention is closely aligned with eye-catching ethos of unsanctioned public art. Beginning with the observation that the scroll of images on a sideways phone screen resembles nothing so much as graffiti seen through the windows of a moving train, Macdowell moves outward to give us a wide-ranging look at how Instagram has already effected a dramatic shift in the making and viewing of street art.
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Intelligent Action
A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia
Timothy Ridlen
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Through archival research and analysis of artworks by Gyorgy Kepes, Allan Kaprow, Mel Bochner, and Suzanne Lacy, among others, Intelligent Action examines how these artists brought alternatives to dominant conceptions of research and knowledge production. The book is organized around specific institutional formations—artistic research centers, proposals, exhibitions on college campuses, and the establishment of new schools or pedagogic programs. Formal and social analysis demonstrate how artists responded to ideas of research, knowledge production, information, and pedagogy. Works discussed were produced between 1958 and 1975, a moment when boundaries between media were breaking down in response to technological, cultural, and generational change. In the context of academia, these artistic practices have taken up the look, feel, or language of various research and teaching practices. In some cases, artists bent to the demands of the cold war research university, while in others, artists developed new modes of practice and pedagogy. Reading these works through their institutional histories, author Tim Ridlem shows how artistic research practices and artistic subjectivity developed in the long 1960s within and alongside academia, transforming the role of artists in the process.
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Intelligently Designed
How Creationists Built the Campaign against Evolution
Edward Caudill
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Tracing the growth of creationism in America as a political movement, this book explains why the particularly American phenomenon of anti-evolution has succeeded as a popular belief. Conceptualizing the history of creationism as a strategic public relations campaign, Edward Caudill examines why this movement has captured the imagination of the American public, from the explosive Scopes trial of 1925 to today's heated battles over public school curricula. Caudill shows how creationists have appealed to cultural values such as individual rights and admiration of the rebel spirit, thus spinning creationism as a viable, even preferable, alternative to evolution.
 
In particular, Caudill argues that the current anti-evolution campaign follows a template created by Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, the Scopes trial's primary combatants. Their celebrity status and dexterity with the press prefigured the Moral Majority's 1980s media blitz, more recent staunchly creationist politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, and creationists' savvy use of the Internet and museums to publicize their cause. Drawing from trial transcripts, media sources, films, and archival documents, Intelligently Designed highlights the importance of historical myth in popular culture, religion, and politics and situates this nearly century-old debate in American cultural history.
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The Inter American Press Association
Its Fight for Freedom of the Press, 1926–1960
By Mary A. Gardner
University of Texas Press, 1967

The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has been a pioneer in the concept of an inter-American professional, independent, and self-sufficient pressure group that acts on its own initiative and subsists on its own resources. This study first traces the development of IAPA from the initial meeting in 1926 through the mid-1940’s, when a small group of dedicated Latin American and United States journalists began the fight to wrest the IAPA from the control of government lackeys and Communist agents. Previously scarce accounts of the early annual meetings, often noisy and disorganized and sometimes violent, give the reader an insight into the problems and animosities faced by the democratically oriented members.

Mary A. Gardner then describes a reorganization in 1950, after which IAPA actively fought for the freedom of newspaper workers tyrannized by Latin American dictators, such as Argentina’s Perón, Colombia’s Rojas Pinilla, Cuba’s Batista, and the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo. Even while IAPA was fighting for freedom of the press it began several services for its member newspapers: It set up a circulation auditing service, created a scholarship fund, undertook a newsprint study, and established a technical center. It also began the administration of the Mergenthaler Awards—prizes awarded yearly to outstanding Latin American journalists.

Gardner also analyzes the merits of IAPA, basing her conclusions on data obtained from her own observations, from letters written by others long associated with operations of the organization, and from interviews with Latin American and North American journalists. She concludes that IAPA apparently surmounted the barriers of nationalism, of cultural and political differences, and of personal prejudices, thus succeeding in its attempt to unite its members in the fight for freedom of the press and for the propagation of democracy in the hemisphere.

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Interactive Journalism
Hackers, Data, and Code
Nikki Usher
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Interactive journalism has transformed the newsroom. Emerging out of changes in technology, culture, and economics, this new specialty uses a visual presentation of storytelling that allows users to interact with the reporting of information. Today it stands at a nexus: part of the traditional newsroom, yet still novel enough to contribute innovative practices and thinking to the industry.

Nikki Usher brings together a comprehensive portrait of nothing less than a new journalistic identity. Usher provides a history of the impact of digital technology on reporting, photojournalism, graphics, and other disciplines that define interactive journalism. Her eyewitness study of the field's evolution and accomplishments ranges from the interactive creation of Al Jazeera English to the celebrated data desk at the Guardian to the New York Times' Pulitzer-endowed efforts in the new field. What emerges is an illuminating, richly reported profile of the people coding a revolution that may reverse the decline and fall of traditional journalism.

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Interdisciplining Digital Humanities
Boundary Work in an Emerging Field
Julie Thompson Klein
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Interdisciplining Digital Humanities sorts through definitions and patterns of practice over roughly sixty-five years of work, providing an overview for specialists and a general audience alike. It is the only book that tests the widespread claim that Digital Humanities is interdisciplinary. By examining the boundary work of constructing, expanding, and sustaining a new field, it depicts both the ways this new field is being situated within individual domains and dynamic cross-fertilizations that are fostering new relationships across academic boundaries. It also accounts for digital reinvigorations of “public humanities” in cultural heritage institutions of museums, archives, libraries, and community forums.
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Intermediate Horizons
Book History and Digital Humanities
Edited by Mark Vareschi and Heather Wacha
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
This innovative collection examines how book history and digital humanities (DH) practices are integrated through approach, access, and assessment. Eight essays by rising and senior scholars practicing in multiple fields—including librarians, literature scholars, digital humanists, and historians—consider and reimagine the interconnected futures and horizons at the intersections of texts, technology, and culture and argue for a return to a more representative and human study of the humanities.
 
Integrating intermedial practices and assessments, the editors and contributors explore issues surrounding the access to and materiality of digitized materials, and the challenge of balancing preservation of traditional archival materials with access. They offer an assessment in our present moment of the early visions of book history and DH projects. In revisiting these projects, they ask us to shift our thinking on the promises and perils of archival and creative work in different media. Taken together, this volume reconsiders the historical intersections of book history and DH and charts a path for future scholarship across disciplinary boundaries.
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Internationalizing "International Communication"
Chin-Chuan Lee, editor
University of Michigan Press, 2015
International communication as a field of inquiry is, in fact, not very “internationalized.” Rather, it has been taken as a conceptual extension or empirical application of U.S. communication, and much of the world outside the West has been socialized to adopt truncated versions of Pax Americana’s notion of international communication. At stake is the “subject position” of academic and cultural inquirers: Who gets to ask what kind of questions? It is important to note that the quest to establish universally valid “laws” of human society with little regard for cultural values and variations seems to be running out of steam. Many lines of intellectual development are reckoning with the important dimensions of empathetic understanding and subjective consciousness.

In Internationalizing "International Communication," Lee and others argue that we must reject both America-writ-large views of the world and self-defeating mirror images that reject anything American or Western on the grounds of cultural incompatibility or even cultural superiority. The point of departure for internationalizing “international communication” must be precisely the opposite of parochialism – namely, a spirit of cosmopolitanism. Scholars worldwide have a moral responsibility to foster global visions and mutual understanding, which forms, metaphorically, symphonic harmony made of cacophonic sounds.
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The Internet Is for Cats
How Animal Images Shape Our Digital Lives
Jessica Maddox
Rutgers University Press, 2023
LOL cats. Grumpy Cat. Dog-rating Twitter. Pet Instagram accounts. It’s generally understood the internet is for pictures of cute cats (and dogs, and otters, and pandas). But what motivates people to make and share these images, and how do they relate to other online social practices? 
 
The Internet is for Cats examines how animal images are employed to create a lighter, more playful mood, uniting users within online spaces that can otherwise easily become fractious and toxic. Placing today’s pet videos, photos, and memes within a longer history of mediated animal images, communication scholar Jessica Maddox also considers the factors that make them unique. She explores the roles that animals play within online economies of cuteness and attention, as well as the ways that animal memes and videos respond to common experiences of life under neoliberalism. 
 
Conducting a rich digital ethnography, Maddox combines observations and textual analysis with extensive interviews of the people who create, post and share animal media, including TikTok influencers seeking to make their pets famous, activists tweeting about wildlife conservation, and Redditors upvoting every cute cat photo. The Internet is for Cats will leave you with a new appreciation for the human social practices behind the animal images you encounter online. 
 
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Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business
An EVE Online Reader
Marcus Carter
University of Minnesota Press, 2016

EVE Online is a socially complex, science-fiction-themed universe simulation and massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) first released in 2003. Notorious for its colossal battles and ruthless player culture, it has hundreds of thousands of players today. In this fascinating book, scholars, players, and EVE’s developer (CCP Games) examine the intricate world of EVEOnline--providing authentic accounts of lived experience within a game with more than a decade of history and millions of “real” dollars behind it.

Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business features contributions from outstanding EVE Online players, such as The Mittani, an infamous member of the game’s community, as well as academics from around the globe. They cover a wide range of subjects: the game’s technicalities and its difficulty; its projection of humanity’s future in space; the configuration of its unique, single-server game world; the global nature of warfare in its “nullsec” territory (and how EVE players have formed a global concept of time); stereotypes of Russian players; espionage play; in-game memorials to Vile Rat (aka U.S. State Department official Sean Smith, murdered in the 2012 Benghazi attack); its gendered playing experience; and CCP Games’ relationship with players; and its history and legacy.

Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business is a must for EVE Online players interested in a broad perspective on their all-consuming game. It is also accessible to scholars, game designers seeking to understand and replicate the successful aspects unique to EVE Online, and even those who have never played this notoriously complex game.

Contributors: William Sims Bainbridge, National Science Foundation; Chribba; Jedrzej Czarnota; Kjartan Pierre Emilsson; Dan Erdman; Rebecca Fraimow; Martin R. Gibbs, U of Melbourne; Catherine Goodfellow; Kathryn Gronsbell; Keith Harrison; Kristin MacDonough; Mantou (Zhang Yuzhou); Oskar Milik; The Mittani (Alexander Gianturco); Joji Mori; Richard Page; Christopher Paul, Seattle U; Erica Titkemeyer, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Nick Webber, Birmingham City U.


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Interpreting and Experiencing Disney
Mediating the Mouse
Edited by Priscilla Hobbs
Intellect Books, 2022
A collection of essays exploring the wide-ranging influence of the Walt Disney Company.  

It would be difficult to go through life without ever encountering a Disney product. Since the first Mickey Mouse cartoon premiered in 1928, Disney has played a central role in shaping American popular culture, and it has expanded to the global market. The company positioned itself as a titan of family entertainment, and many of its offerings, from films to consumable products, have become embedded in the minds of children and adults, woven into many of our life experiences. Fans of Disney build connections with their favorite characters and franchises, fueled by Disney’s marketing practices. Others have developed a near-cult-like relationship with the brand, equating its products with religious icons and theme park visits with pilgrimages. 

This edited volume looks beyond the movies and merchandise to peer into the very heart of the Disney phenomenon: how the fan response drives the corporation’s massive marketing machine and how the corporate response, in turn, shapes the fan experience.
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Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India
Roos Gerritsen
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
In *Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India*, Gerritsen explores the circulation of images of a movie star named Rajinikanth. Cities and towns in the south Indian state Tamil Nadu are consistently ornamented with huge billboards, murals and myriad posters featuring political leaders as well as movie stars. A selective part of these images is put up by their fan clubs. Tamil movie fans typically manifest themselves by putting up images of their star in public spaces and by generating a plethora of images in their homes. Gerritsen argues that these images are a crucial part of the everyday affective modes of engagement with family members and film stars but they are also symbolizing the political realm in which fans situate themselves. At the same time, Gerritsen shows how these image productions seem to concur with other visual regimes articulated in government restrictions, world class imaginaries and upper class moralities as presented on India's urban streets.
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Into the Field
A Foreign Correspondent's Notebook
By Tracy Dahlby
University of Texas Press, 2014

Tracy Dahlby is an award-winning journalist who has reported internationally as a contributor to National Geographic magazine and served as a staff correspondent for Newsweek and the Washington Post. In this memoir of covering a far-flung swath of Asia, he takes readers behind the scenes to reveal “the stories behind the stories”—the legwork and (mis)adventures of a foreign correspondent on a mission to be the eyes and ears of people back home, helping them understand the forces and events that shape our world.

Into the Field centers on the travel and reporting Dahlby did for a half-dozen pieces that ran in National Geographic. The book tours the South China Sea during China’s rise as a global power, visits Japan in a time of national midlife crisis, and explores Southeast Asia during periods of political transition and tumult. Dahlby’s vivid anecdotes of jousting with hardboiled sea captains, communing with rebellious tribal chieftains, enduring a spectacular shipboard insect attack, and talking his way into a far place or out of a tight spot offer aspiring foreign correspondents a realistic introduction to the challenges of the profession. Along the way, he provides practical advice about everything from successful travel planning to managing headstrong local fixers and dealing with circumstances that can range from friendly to formidable. A knowledgeable, entertaining how-to book for observing the world and making sense of events, Into the Field is a must-read for student journalists and armchair travelers alike.

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Into the Universe of Technical Images
Vilém Flusser
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent communication crisis, this work by Vilém Flusser forecasts either the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a society of unbearable, oppressive sameness, locked in a pattern it cannot change. First published in German in 1985 and now available in English for the first time, Into the Universe of Technical Images outlines the history of communication technology as a process of increasing abstraction.

Flusser charts how communication evolved from direct interaction with the world to mediation through various technologies. The invention of writing marked one significant shift; the invention of photography marked another, heralding the current age of the technical image. The automation of the processing of technical images carries both promise and threat: the promise of freeing humans to play and invent and the threat for networks of automation to proceed independently of humans.
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The Intoxication of Destruction in Theory, Culture and Media
A Philosophy of Expenditure after Georges Bataille
Erin K. Stapleton
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
This book examines the desire for, and intoxication with, destruction as it appears in cultural objects and representation, arguing that all cultural and aesthetic value is fundamentally predicated on its own fragility, as well as the living transience of those who make and encounter it. Beginning with a philosophy of expenditure after Georges Bataille, each chapter maps different operations of destruction in media and culture. These operations are expressed and located in representations of human extinction and explosive architecture, in the body and in sexuality, and in media and digital archives, which constitute a further destabilisation of the notion of destruction in the dynamic between aspirational immortality and material volatility embedded in the archival systems of digital cultures.
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Inventing Film Studies
Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, eds.
Duke University Press, 2008
Inventing Film Studies offers original and provocative insights into the institutional and intellectual foundations of cinema studies. Many scholars have linked the origins of the discipline to late-1960s developments in the academy such as structuralist theory and student protest. Yet this collection reveals the broader material and institutional forces—both inside and outside of the university—that have long shaped the field. Beginning with the first investigations of cinema in the early twentieth century, this volume provides detailed examinations of the varied social, political, and intellectual milieus in which knowledge of cinema has been generated. The contributors explain how multiple instantiations of film study have had a tremendous influence on the methodologies, curricula, modes of publication, and professional organizations that now constitute the university-based discipline. Extending the historical insights into the present, contributors also consider the directions film study might take in changing technological and cultural environments.

Inventing Film Studies shows how the study of cinema has developed in relation to a constellation of institutions, technologies, practices, individuals, films, books, government agencies, pedagogies, and theories. Contributors illuminate the connections between early cinema and the social sciences, between film programs and nation-building efforts, and between universities and U.S. avant-garde filmmakers. They analyze the evolution of film studies in relation to the Museum of Modern Art, the American Film Council movement of the 1940s and 1950s, the British Film Institute, influential journals, cinephilia, and technological innovations past and present. Taken together, the essays in this collection reveal the rich history and contemporary vitality of film studies.

Contributors: Charles R. Acland, Mark Lynn Anderson, Mark Betz, Zoë Druick, Lee Grieveson, Stephen Groening, Haden Guest, Amelie Hastie, Lynne Joyrich, Laura Mulvey, Dana Polan,
D. N. Rodowick, Philip Rosen, Alison Trope, Haidee Wasson, Patricia White, Sharon Willis,
Peter Wollen, Michael Zryd

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Invention Of Communication
Armand Mattelart
University of Minnesota Press, 1996
A fascinating tour of all of the ways we have thought about communication, now and in the past. Today, it is the Internet. One hundred years ago, it was the telegraph. And before that? Networks of road, rail, and water. It's all "communication." The Invention of Communication invites us to explore all the multifarious meanings that have made up our age-old attempts to connect. The book offers a heady tour of the multiple usages and systems that each historic period puts forth in the name of communication. A veritable history of the idea of the social, Armand Mattelart's genealogy maps the many means by which humans interact-from carefully cataloguing Others, to asserting power over them, to working together with them to build new forms of community. Studying a vast array of modern forms of social intercourse and control, The Invention of Communication takes up topics such as the elaboration of warfare as a logistic, the rise of professional societies of propaganda and national propagation, the history of universal expositions and world fairs, the birth of documentary film out of physiological investigations in the nineteenth century, the development of the popular press and the popular novel, and the origins of American social science. This history runs from the circuits of exchange to the circulation of goods, people, and messages, from the construction of railroads to the emergence of long-distance communication. Throughout, Mattelart brings a clarifying perspective to the ideologies and theories that accompany these transformations. He shows how Enlightenment and nineteenth­century utopian thinking about communication led to the strategic and geopolitical thinking of the twentieth century, and finally to mass and individual psychosociology, mass culture, and marketing. The Invention of Communication is a remarkable interpretation of the dizzying complex of systems supporting the social world of modernity. "Mattelart has, in a way, produced something of an academic cocktail. A blend of thoughts of some of the greatest scholars over the last two to three hundred years mixed to produce a series of claims about the importance of communication issues at central moments in the emergence of our modern times." Semiotica Armand Mattelart is professor of information and communication sciences at the Université de Haute­Bretagne, France. He is the author of Mapping World Communication (Minnesota, 1994) and coauthor (with Michèle Mattelart) of Rethinking Media Theory (Minnesota, 1992). Susan Emanuel lives in Massachusetts and France. Among her translations are Mapping World Communication (Minnesota, 1994) by Armand Mattelart as well as The Contemplation of the World by Michel Maffesoli (Minnesota, 1996).
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Invisibility by Design
Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy
Gabriella Lukács
Duke University Press, 2020
In the wake of labor market deregulation during the 2000s, online content sharing and social networking platforms were promoted in Japan as new sites of work that were accessible to anyone. Enticed by the chance to build personally fulfilling careers, many young women entered Japan's digital economy by performing unpaid labor as photographers, net idols, bloggers, online traders, and cell phone novelists. While some women leveraged digital technology to create successful careers, most did not. In Invisibility by Design Gabriella Lukács traces how these women's unpaid labor became the engine of Japan's digital economy. Drawing on interviews with young women who strove to sculpt careers in the digital economy, Lukács shows how platform owners tapped unpaid labor to create innovative profit-generating practices without employing workers, thereby rendering women's labor invisible. By drawing out the ways in which labor precarity generates a demand for feminized affective labor, Lukács underscores the fallacy of the digital economy as a more democratic, egalitarian, and inclusive mode of production.
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Invisible People
Stories of Lives at the Margins
Alex Tizon
Temple University Press, 2021

“Somewhere in the tangle of the subject’s burden and the subject’s desire is your story.”—Alex Tizon 

Every human being has an epic story. The late Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Alex Tizon told the epic stories of marginalized people—from lonely immigrants struggling to forge a new American identity to a high school custodian who penned a New Yorker short story. Edited by Tizon’s friend and former colleague Sam Howe Verhovek, Invisible People collects the best of Tizon’s rich, empathetic accounts—including “My Family’s Slave,” the Atlantic magazine cover story about the woman who raised him and his siblings under conditions that amounted to indentured servitude.

Mining his Filipino American background, Tizon tells the stories of immigrants from Cambodia and Laos. He gives a fascinating account of the Beltway sniper and insightful profiles of Surfers for Jesus and a man who tracks UFOs. His articles—many originally published in the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times—are brimming with enlightening details about people who existed outside the mainstream’s field of vision. 

In their introductions to Tizon’s pieces, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, Atlantic magazine editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize winners Kim Murphy and Jacqui Banaszynski, and others salute Tizon’s respect for his subjects and the beauty and brilliance of his writing. Invisible People is a loving tribute to a journalist whose search for his own identity prompted him to chronicle the lives of others.

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In/visible War
The Culture of War in Twenty-first-Century America
Jon Simons and John Louis Lucaites
Rutgers University Press, 2017
In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war. This paradox of in/visibility concerns the gap between the experiences of war zones and the visual, mediated experience of war in public, popular culture, which absents and renders invisible the former. Large portions of the domestic public experience war only at a distance. For these citizens, war seems abstract, or may even seem to have disappeared altogether due to a relative absence of visual images of casualties. Perhaps even more significantly, wars can be fought without sacrifice by the vast majority of Americans.
 
Yet, the normalization of twenty-first century war also renders it highly visible. War is made visible through popular, commercial, mediated culture. The spectacle of war occupies the contemporary public sphere in the forms of celebrations at athletic events and in films, video games, and other media, coming together as MIME, the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.  
 
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The Irish in Us
Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture
Diane Negra, ed.
Duke University Press, 2006
Over the past decade or so, Irishness has emerged as an idealized ethnicity, one with which large numbers of people around the world, and particularly in the United States, choose to identify. Seeking to explain the widespread appeal of all things Irish, the contributors to this collection show that for Americans, Irishness is rapidly becoming the white ethnicity of choice, a means of claiming an ethnic identity while maintaining the benefits of whiteness. At the same time, the essayists challenge essentialized representations of Irishness, bringing attention to the complexities of Irish history and culture that are glossed over in Irish-themed weddings and shamrock tattoos.

Examining how Irishness is performed and commodified in the contemporary transnational environment, the contributors explore topics including Van Morrison’s music, Frank McCourt’s writing, the explosion of Irish-themed merchandising, the practices of heritage seekers, the movie The Crying Game, and the significance of red hair. Whether considering the implications of Garth Brooks’s claim of Irishness and his enormous popularity in Ireland, representations of Irish masculinity in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, or Americans’ recourse to a consoling Irishness amid the racial and nationalist tensions triggered by the events of September 11, the contributors delve into complex questions of ethnicity, consumerism, and globalization. Ultimately, they call for an increased awareness of the exclusionary effects of claims of Irishness and for the cultivation of flexible, inclusive ways of affiliating with Ireland and the Irish.

Contributors. Natasha Casey, Maeve Connolly, Catherine M. Eagan, Sean Griffin, Michael Malouf, Mary McGlynn, Gerardine Meaney, Diane Negra, Lauren Onkey, Maria Pramaggiore, Stephanie Rains, Amanda Third

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Irrationalities in Islam and Media in Nineteenth-Century Iran
Faces of Modernity
Arash Ghajarjazi
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
This book deals for the first time with the cultural history of media in nineteenth-century Iran, a history that deals with how modern techniques of representation and communication were received in the Iranian Shiʿa society. This reception history is examined in religious photography, military reforms, Persian passion plays, Shiʿa medicine, and the burgeoning telegraphic culture. The problematic relationship between Shīʿa Islam and 19th-century media is conceptualised and contextualised, especially through the lens of the first Polytechnique college (Dār al-Fonun, 1851) in Iran. This college is conceptualised as a media laboratory, where the technological sphere in Iran was fundamentally transforming. It is also contextualised in the age of reform, a period in which the Middle East was undergoing widespread social, political, and military changes. Islamic (art) history, Iranian Studies, and cultural analysis form an interdisciplinary analytic framework to create new knowledge about the historical complexity of 19th-century Iran.
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Islam and Me
Narrating a Diaspora
Shirin Ramzanali Fazel
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Growing up in Mogadishu, Somalia, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel was immersed in the language and culture of Italy, Somalia’s former colonizer. Yet when she moved to Italy as a young mother in the 1970s, she discovered a country where immigrants and Muslims were viewed with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion­–where, even today, she and her children must seemingly prove they are Italian. 
 
In Islam and Me, Fazel tells her story and shares the experiences of other Muslim women living in Italy, revealing the wide variety of Muslim identities and the common prejudices they encounter. Looking at Italian school textbooks, newspapers, and TV programs, she invites us to change the way Muslim immigrants, and especially women, are depicted in both news reports and scholarly research. Islam and Me is a meditation on our multireligious, multiethnic, and multilingual reality, as well as an exploration of how we might reimagine national culture and identity so that they become more diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist. 

 
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Isle of Rum
Havana Club, Cultural Mediation, and the Fight for Cuban Authenticity
Christopher Chávez
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Focusing on Havana Club rum as a case study, Isle of Rum examines the ways in which western cultural producers, working in collaboration with the Cuban state, have assumed responsibility for representing Cuba to the outside world. Christopher Chávez focuses specifically on the role of advertising practitioners, musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists, who stand to benefit economically by selling an image of Cuba to consumers who desperately crave authentic experiences that exist outside of the purview of the marketplace.

Rather than laying claim to authentic Cuban culture, Chávez explores which aspects of Cuban culture are deemed most compelling, and therefore, most profitable by corporate marketers. As a joint venture between the Cuban State and Pernod Ricard, a global spirits marketer based in Paris, Havana Club embodies the larger process of economic reform, which was meant to reintegrate Cuba into global markets during Cuba’s Special Period in a Time of Peace.
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Italian Irish Filmmakers
Lee Lourdeaux
Temple University Press, 1993
"This penetrating study examines how these filmmakers confronted their cultural heritage and used it as a counterpoint to their depiction of mainstream America." --American Cinematographer In this unique film history, Lee Lourdeaux traces the impact of Irish and Italian cultures on four major American directors and their work. Defining the core values and tensions within each culture, and especially focusing on the influence of American Catholicism, he presents John Ford, Frank Capra, Francis Coppola, and Martin Scorsese as ethnic Americans and film artists. Lourdeaux shows each filmmaker on set with writers and actors, learning to bypass stereotypes in order to develop a shrewd reciprocal assimilation between his ethnic background and Anglo America. Beginning with D. W. Griffith's depiction of Irish and Italian immigrants, the author discusses Hollywood's stereotypical portrayals of ethnic priests, cops, politicians, and gangsters, as well as their surface acculturation in the movies of the 1920s. By the decade's end, John Ford was using all-American stories to embody the basic myths and tensions of Irish-American life. In his later westerns and foreign films, he tried to understand both Irish political strife and the key figures of Irish liturgy. Frank Capra pitted Italian family values against the Anglo success ethic, turning out social comedies about oppressed little people. Several decades later, Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola were highly critical of their religio-ethnic heritage, though they gradually discovered that to outline its weaknesses, like the blind pursuit of success, was to fashion a critical mirror of mainstream America. Lourdeaux discusses a number of recent films by Coppola and by Scorsese that have not yet been analyzed in any book. And, in the chapter on Scorsese, a personal interview with the director reveals how his ethnic childhood shaped his work in film. Examining the conflicts within American culture, Lourdeaux shows how the filmmakers themselves had to confront the self-destructive aspects of their ethnic background, not only to accommodate WASP audiences but to better understand their own heritage. He also observes that ethnicity is a strong draw at the box office, as in The Godfather, because it creates a sense of the Other who can both be admired and at the same time ridiculed. Illustrated with scenes of the movies discussed, this fascinating film history tells how four of America's most famous filmmakers assimilated their ethnic backgrounds on set and on screen. "Mr. Lourdeaux walks a tricky path in analyzing the films of each [director]: avoiding the trap of excessively detailing their lives and many films, while steering clear of ethnic stereotyping. Those interested in ethnic influences on outstanding persons or in the production of films by four of the best will find the book enjoyable." --The Baltimore Sun "This is an invaluable book because it arouses critical awareness of the ethnicity underlying many Hollywood movies that might otherwise appear merely to represent American archetypes." --Journal of American Studies "A valuable addition to the literature on ethnic identity in film. The insights Lourdeaux offers into major figures like Griffith, Ford, Capra, Coppola, and Scorsese contribute significantly to our understanding of their films." --Virginia Wright Wexman, University of Illinois at Chicago "For a number of years now, church historians have been giving us an account of American Catholicism that is much richer and more varied than the older institutional accounts of the Catholic Church ever let on. In this comprehensive and insightful study, Lee Lourdeaux shows us how much the ethnic movies of directors like Ford and Capra, Coppola and Scorsese have to teach us as well about Irish- and Italian-Catholic mores and instincts." --John B. Breslin, S.J., Director "A wonderfully sensitive, intelligent study of the complex issue of how the Catholic imagination works in the creative personalities of those raised in the Catholic heritage." --Andrew M. Greeley
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Italian TV Drama and Beyond
Stories from the Soil, Stories from the Sea
Milly Buonanno
Intellect Books, 2012
Since its inception in the mid-1950s, the television drama has emerged as the dominant medium of contemporary storytelling in Italian society, with a steadily increasing supply of locally produced domestic dramas offering up competing versions of Italian identity. Informed by the nation’s rich historical and cultural heritage—as well as a string of notable foreign imports—the narratives discussed here offer much insight into Italian society and highlight the wide array of television programming available outside of Britain and the United States.
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Izzy
A Biography of I. F. Stone
Robert C. Cottrell
Rutgers University Press, 2020
This is the classic story of the life and times of I. F. “Izzy” Stone. Robert Cottrell weaves together material from interviews, letters, archival materials, and government documents, and Stone’s own writings to tell the tale of one of the most significant journalists, intellectuals, and political mavericks of the twentieth century. The story of I. F. Stone is the tale of the American left over the course of his lifetime, of liberal and radical ideals which carried such weight throughout the twentieth century, and of journalism of the politically committed variety. Now available in a handsome new Rutgers University Press Classic edition, it is an examination of the life and career of a gregarious yet frequently grumpy loner who became his nation’s foremost radical commentator provides a window through which to examine American radicalism, left-wing journalism, and the evolution of key strands of Western intellectual thought in the twentieth century.
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