Browsing by Subject "Popular culture"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    More Than a "Washed-Up Has-Been:" Textual Aspects of the Holmes Icon
    (2013-10-25) Johnson, Timothy
    This paper focuses on textual exemplars from the Sherlock Holmes stories in support of an argument that these texts are just as important in understanding Holmes as a cultural icon as are the visual exemplars found in printed materials, theater, motion pictures, and television. Following a brief summary of the visual exemplars, the author presents six textual examples from the Holmesian canon to support the central argument of this paper—that the "textual logo" or "emblematic wording" is as much a part of the Holmesian iconography as the essential images. In the end, the author concludes that the idea of Holmes as a cultural icon has moved beyond the bounds of the English-speaking world, i.e. is understood in a global context, and that this understanding is rooted in a robust iconography that includes both textual phrases and visual images.
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    “Oh what a world”: Queer Masculinities, the musical construction of a reparative cultural historiography, and the music of Rufus Wainwright.
    (2010-11) Schwandt, Kevin C.
    Throughout his ascendancy in fame and cultural visibility, singer/songwriter and gay pop icon Rufus Wainwright's output has been consistently related, by scholars and critics alike, to camp aesthetics, modes of artistic expression typically understood as emerging from queer communities, particularly certain gay male populations, but ones whose political potential is highly contested. Traditional conceptions of camp, as most famously articulated by Susan Sontag in the 1960s, emphasize style over content, necessarily rendering it politically-disengaged. However, scholars have vehemently challenged conceptions like Sontag's, in order to reclaim camp as a potent means to facilitate queer world-making and a powerful resistance to heteronormativity. I examine Wainwright's image and music in order to theorize a new queer interpretive listening position. Specifically, I draw upon the literary perspective of "reparative reading," articulated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in opposition to what she describes as "paranoid reading," to propose a uniquely queer approach to musical and cultural historiography, exemplified by Wainwright's music. Much of the current queer musicology focuses on lost histories, systematic marginalization, and the commoditization of queer identities. While such approaches have produced important insights, thorough examination of the relationships between queer cultural products and their queer reception has proven elusive. This project suggests a unique approach to understanding the musical construction of a specific kind of queer masculinity, one which combines authorial creation with reparative conceptions of reception, in order to theorize a uniquely gay male interpretive position. When viewed through a theoretical lens combining politically-potent conceptions of camp performativity with a reparative reading position, Wainwright's music strikingly enacts Philip Brett's call to claim, not historical evidence, but the right of interpretation, emerging as an act of resistance via the reclamation and consolidation of a queer interpretive authority. In this way, Wainwright articulates both a rupture in the history of queer masculinity and a powerful means of resistance to the often-exclusionary relationships between literary, musical, and artistic objects and the heteronormative cultural systems in which they are created.
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    Pedagogies of Slavery: Race, Media, and Citizenship
    (2016-06) Page, Allison Christine
    There has been a recent resurgence in media depictions of U.S. chattel slavery, including more than seven films released in 2013 and the History Channel's 2016 release of an updated version of Roots, the 1977 television miniseries that traced an enslaved family over generations. This media interest has accompanied wider debates about slavery's relation to contemporary racial disparities in poverty, incarceration, housing, and education. My dissertation analyzes five key historical moments since the 1960s when popular media have produced narratives about slavery. Despite significant moments when media produce programming on slavery, media studies has rarely taken up the question of slavery's depiction and further, the uses to which depictions have been put. Pedagogies of Slavery: Race, Media, and Citizenship shows how U.S. media from the 1960s to the present play an important and ongoing role in teaching viewers how to be what I term post-civil rights citizens: citizens who know how to think, act, and feel in accordance with new racial norms in an era defined by the supposed end of legal racism. Emotion plays a crucial role in the constitution of post-civil rights citizenship. Given the immense shifts of the postwar era vis-à- vis race and racial formation, I contend that emotion, produced by the pedagogical use of the history of slavery, is a powerful site through which to shape and manage race. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as political and social theory, I consider the role of news and entertainment television, video games, curricula, and digital apps in educating the American public about slavery in order to navigate post-civil rights citizenship. These media - alongside policy, political discourse, consumer culture, curricula, and institutions such as prisons and schools - provide templates for racialized citizenship in the post-civil rights era, yet these guides change with shifting historical and economic contexts. Despite repeated efforts to locate U.S. chattel slavery as firmly in the past, I document how media cannot fully ignore or erase the ongoing legacies and effects of slavery in the present.
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    War is the health of the State: war, empire, and anarchy in the languages of American national security
    (2014-12) Johnson, Ryan M.
    On the evening of September 6, 1901 anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot and killed U.S. President William McKinley. This violent scene set the stage for the creation of a popular, political, and legal culture premised upon defending the American nation from the specter of anarchy, both real and imagined. In this dissertation, I argue that the opening years of the twentieth century should be understood as a critical moment in the history of the American national security state. Beginning in 1901, government institutions enacted security legislation and policy in an effort to defend the state and the nation from the threat of enemy anarchists, engaging in a political and popular cultural environment defined by discourses surrounding exclusion and surveillance. I analyze these popular conceptualizations of anarchists as enemies of the nation and state alongside the circulation of a security-centric political discourse and the growth of surveillance bureaucracies as a way to trace the rise of a culture of state power and national identity centered upon the languages and metaphors of national security. National leaders enacted regulatory policies such as the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 at a critical moment of federal growth in U.S. history. They increased the breadth and scope of federal bureaucracies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service in order to secure the nation from the threats posed by anarchists. This national security project was rationalized as a necessary defensive measure to protect the nation from enemy anarchists. Americans engaged in a culture of war during a time of peace and from 1901 onward, the American nation-state acted as if it was at war with anarchy.