“Picture it all, Darley”

2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sari Altschuler
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Media History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Two Stage ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Current Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Representational Limits ◽  
History Of Race

Sari Altschuler “‘Picture it all, Darley’: Race Politics and the Media History of George Lippard’s The Quaker City” (pp. 65–101) This essay adresses two related questions. First, how did George Lippard’s The Quaker City develop from a multimedia story told through newspaper conventions, illustration, and two plays into the novel that appeared in May 1845? And second, how did Lippard’s white-seduction narrative come to pivot around the nightmare of an ambiguously raced Devil-Bug? Joining these questions of form and content, I argue that the media history of The Quaker City is inextricable from its history of race. In the wake of the almost riot around the mid-serialization of his Philadelphia play, Lippard moved away from fictionalizing current events toward the “grotesque-sublime” through a broader critique of Philadelphia less open to charges of libel. This shift took place through the transformation of Devil-Bug, a character Lippard rapidly developed in the middle installments until he was complex enough to carry the new story. Turning the once-black Devil-Bug into his protagonist, however, required character developments that necessarily complicated the story’s representation of race, a process that occurred concurrently with events related to the work that highlighted the systemic oppression of African Americans. In winter 1844, troubles with two stage productions and his illustrator highlighted the problems of representing race. After a several-month hiatus, Lippard published new installments vituperously condemning the representational limits of these nonprose forms and turned to prose to develop his antislavery position through Devil-Bug. As a result of these confluent developments, The Quaker City became an antislavery text through the process of opening Devil-Bug’s character up to its own hybridity and interiority.

Police Records

2019 ◽  
pp. 797-819
Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

scholarly journals A Brief History of Race, Politics and Division in Trinidad and Guyana

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 44-54
Author(s):  
Kahlia Brown
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Trinidad And Tobago ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racial Divide ◽  
History Of Race

This essay will act as an analysis of the Indo-Afro racial politics of two west Indian countries: Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana. I will give the circumstances that led to the migration of large numbers of East Indians as indentured servants to Trinidad and Guyana, specifically. I will also explain how these conditions led to a distinct form of government and society. Through tables of electoral data in Trinidad, the racial voting patterns will be observed, and I will elaborate on how political parties do or do not pander to their respective racial communities. Finally, I will conclude by addressing how the racial divide in these two large Caribbean nations impact Caribbean regionalism on a larger scale.

scholarly journals New ways: the pandemics of science fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Glyn Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Current Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Creative Space

In unprecedented times, people have turned to fiction both for comfort and for distraction, but also to try and understand and anticipate what might come next. Sales and rental figures for works of fiction about pandemics and other disease outbreaks surged in 2020, but what can pandemic science fiction tell us about disease? This article surveys the long history of science fiction's engagement with disease and demonstrates the ways in which these narratives, whether in literature or film, have always had more to say about other contemporary cultural concerns than the disease themselves. Nonetheless, the ideas demonstrated in these texts can be seen perpetuating through the science fiction genre, and in our current crisis, we have seen striking similarities between the behaviours of key individuals, and the manner in which certain events have played out. Not because science fiction predicts these things, but because it anticipates the social structures which produce them (while at the same time permeating the culture to the extent that they become the touchstones with which the media choose to analyse current events). This paper demonstrates that science fiction can be a valuable tool to communicate widely around a pandemic, while also acting as a creative space in which to anticipate how we may handle similar events in the future.

Breaking Barriers and Coded Language

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-80
Author(s):  
Thomas D. Bunting
Keyword(s):  
American Politics ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Immigrant Assimilation ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Democratic Life ◽  
History Of Race

Drawing on recent literature on political spectatorship, I show how sport, and baseball in particular, can both illuminate and shape American politics. Following the history of racial segregation and immigrant assimilation in baseball, one sees that it mirrors American race politics on the whole. I argue that Jackie Robinson and the desegregation of baseball changed both American politics and the horizons within which citizens think. Although it is tempting to focus on this positive and emergent moment, I argue that for the most part, looking at the history of race in baseball shows instead coded language that reinforces racial stereotypes. This example of baseball and race shows how powerful spectatorship can be in the democratic world. Spectatorship need not be passive but can be an important sphere of activity in democratic life.

The Future of the Literary Past

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 959-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith L. McGill ◽  
Andrew Parker
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Media History ◽  
Paper Machine ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Serial Publication ◽  
Technology Grant

[B]y carrying us beyond paper, the adventures of technology grant us a sort of future anterior: they liberate our reading for a retrospective exploration of the past resources of paper, for its previously multimedia vectors.—Jacques Derrida, Paper MachineThis essay explores some of the ways that the contemporary mediascape has begun to transform the questions we can ask of our students and ourselves. Our subject derives from an undergraduate English course, Literary History and/as Media History, that we designed to address the lack of critical attention paid in the curriculum to the media of literary works. The course, whose catalog description follows, was intended to cover a lot of historical ground while highlighting theoretical questions that generally remain unasked in Norton Anthology–style surveys:Living in an era of rapid technological innovation, we tend to forget that print itself was once a new medium. The history of English and American literature since the Renaissance has been as much a response to the development of new material formats (scribal copying, printed playtexts, newspaper and serial publication, “little magazines,” radio, film, television, the internet) as it has been a succession of ideal literary forms (poems, plays, and novels). This course will survey literary works from the sixteenth to the twentieth century in relation to the history of media. What can these histories say to each other? Are they, indeed, one history?

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Florian Hoof
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Media History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Business Consulting ◽  
Independent Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Visualization Techniques ◽  
Global Growth

This introductory chapter establishes the book’s goal of recovering the media history of consulting and determining what the global growth of consulting knowledge can tell us about the modern world. The time span of the investigation, from 1880 to 1930, covers three parallel developments, which lead to a fundamental transformation of industrial knowledge structures. First, there is the constitution of an independent form of managerial activity in industry. Second, there is the establishment of the field of corporate consulting. Third, there is the emergence of a series of visualization techniques after 1880, which are at the disposal of the first two spheres, management and corporate consulting. These three tropes lead to a new form of visual management that follows from oral and written forms of management. The introduction describes the interdisciplinary approach the author adopts to trace the visual culture and historical epistemology of business consulting and consulting knowledge between media and business history and theory.

Digital Art and Experimental Color Systems at Bell Laboratories, 1965–1984: Restoring Interdisciplinary Innovations to Media History

Leonardo ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn L. Kane
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Media History ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
Computing Technology ◽  
Media Arts ◽  
The Public ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Time Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

AT&T's Bell Laboratories produced a prolific number of innovative digital art and experimental color systems between 1965 and 1984. However, due to repressive regulation, this work was hidden from the public. Almost two decades later, when Bell lifted its restrictions on creative work not related to telephone technologies, the atmosphere had changed so dramatically that despite a relaxation of regulation, cutting-edge projects were abandoned. This paper discusses the struggles encountered in interdisciplinary collaborations and the challenge to use new media computing technology to make experimental art at Bell Labs during this unique time period, now largely lost to the history of the media arts.

scholarly journals Successful Paranoia: Friedrich Kittler, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, and the History of Science

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-131
Author(s):  
Henning Schmidgen
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Media History ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Hermann Von Helmholtz ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer ◽  
History Of The University ◽  
The Media ◽  
Historical Accounts

With studies like Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich A. Kittler contributed significantly to transforming the history of media into a vital field of inquiry. This essay undertakes to more precisely characterize Kittler’s historiographical approach. When we look back on his early contributions to studies of the relationship between literature, madness and truth – among others, his doctoral dissertation on the Swiss poet and writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer – what strikes us is the significance that Jacques Lacan’s structuralist psychoanalysis had in shaping the orientation of Kittler’s later studies. His intensive engagement with Lacan galvanized Kittler’s concern with the question of sex and/or gender in the evolution of the humanities as well as his concern with the media history of the university. At the same time, Kittler’s reliance on Lacan led him to a kind of history that is interested above all in the internal logic of discourse. As we see, for instance, in Kittler’s anecdotic treatment of 19th-century physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, this historiography does not involve any original research in archives and/or museums. Rather, it builds upon existing historical accounts and focuses its analyses on the issue of symbolic structures. Instead of investigating the history of the material culture of science and technology, what is thereby ultimately reinforced is a philosophical idealism in which knowledge and paranoia become superimposed in and by means of an ‘original syntax’ (Lacan).

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