Casting

2019 ◽  
pp. 31-63
Author(s):  
Lisa Blee ◽  
Jean M. O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Memorial Landscape ◽  
Over Time

This chapter takes up the cast of characters involved in setting the story of peaceful colonization in motion: the sculptor Cyrus Dallin and his engagement with the Massasoit in fashioning and casting Massasoit; the Improved Order of Red Men and the Massasoit Memorial Association in their imaginings of the Massasoit's role in creating the nation; and the Pilgrim Society, which provided the site for the original installation within a curated memorial landscape in Plymouth. This chapter argues that those who commissioned the original statue in Plymouth believed that men could prove their patriotism by possessing and appropriating Indians. When the statue was copied and took up residence in various locations, it continued to serve a related purpose in these different places over time. The statue filled the need in American popular culture for an innocent and innocuous reframing of the nation's founding principles of taking and profiting from Indigenous people.

Lawyers and Courts in French Popular Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Villez
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Television News ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
The Public ◽  
News Reports ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Over Time

From watching imported American popular culture dramas focusing on criminal justice, French television viewers have become confused as to how their own legal system really works. They have erroneous expectations of behaviours in court, like addressing judges by the wrong title, a title that comes from poor dubbing. Or they will refuse to answer questions, thinking they have Fifth Amendment protections, when they do not. They know very little of the organization of courtroom space. Since it is forbidden by law to take photographs or film trials in France, it is difficult to bring accurate court images to the public. The French produce police dramas, but very few series or made-for-television movies on justice, thus providing no alternatives for these erroneous criteria. They do, however, produce documentaries and docudramas dealing with past investigations or with timely issues such as recidivism or reintegration into society after prison. Documentaries, although pertinent, give viewers only one-shot access to the representations of justice and the legal professions they contain. The do not facilitate the acquisition over time of a legal culture. In addition to the confusion, the French have a negative image of lawyers as motivated by money and politics rather than justice. Films and French television fictions are responsible for this impression. Television news reports are short and give incomplete accounts of the law or on-going proceedings. Sometimes lawyers are interviewed in these reports, but never prosecutors or judges. Judges and prosecutors are magistrats, not lawyers. They train in different institutions from lawyers and are civil servants, so they are not as likely as lawyers to be making a lot of money, nor are they free to make public statements. The image of these professions is consequently more positive in the French imagination as portrayed in the popular culture.

Ideas of the Afterlife in American Religion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Gin Lum
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Inner City ◽  
Life Time ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
To Come ◽  
Line P ◽  
Over Time

Heaven and hell have survived in the United States beyond scientific critiques of the supernatural. For many Americans, the promise of eternal rewards and the threat of everlasting punishments shaped how they lived their lives in the here-and-now, and how they interacted with others. Oppressed groups used the afterlife to turn the tables on their oppressors, while others used the threat of the afterlife to try to keep people in line. The afterlife, after all, was never just after life. Heaven, hell, and their inhabitants could impinge on this life. Time and again, Americans have labeled various places or situations as hells on earth, from America itself (in the eyes of European colonizers), to the slaveholding South, to the battlefields of the Civil War, to the inner city. Reformers have sought to bring heaven to earth, even while hoping for heaven in the life to come. Meanwhile, discomfort with predestinarian teachings on salvation and damnation led to theological innovations and revisions of traditional Christian teachings on hell. Over time, the stark hell and theocentric heaven of the early colonists waned in many pulpits, with the symbols and figures of the afterlife migrating to fill the pages and TV screens of American popular culture productions. That said, the driving threat of hell remains significant in conservative American Christianity as a political tool in the early 21st century, just as in times past.

Public Service Motivation in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Mastracci
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Public Service Motivation ◽  
Public Servants ◽  
Buffy The Vampire Slayer ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Public Servant ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

In this paper, the author examines public service as depicted in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS). First, she shows how slaying meets the economist’s definition of a public good, using the BtVS episode “Flooded” (6.04). Second, she discusses public service motivation (PSM) to determine whether or not Buffy, a public servant, operates from a public service ethic. Relying on established measures and evidence from shooting scripts and episode transcripts, the author concludes Buffy is a public servant motivated by a public service ethic. In this way, BtVS informs scholarship on public service by broadening the concept of PSM beyond the public sector; prompting one to wonder whether it is located in a sector, an occupation, or in the individual. These conclusions allow the author to situate Buffy alongside other idealized public servants in American popular culture.

Publishing in Bible and American Popular Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 536-552
Author(s):  
Robert Paul Seesengood
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Academic Publishing ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Future Work

This essay is an examination of scholarship on the Bible and (American) popular culture. It reviews the history and assumptions of cultural studies and maps how this body of work influenced biblical scholarship after 1990. It surveys an array of examples of scholarship on the Bible and popular culture and concludes with some suggestions for future work. Specifically, this essay asks the following: How has interest in Bible and popular culture affected academic publishing? How did these trends emerge, and what assumptions prompt them? What new journals or series or reference works have appeared that are specifically devoted to this broad topic, and what are some ways that the Bible and popular culture have been treated therein?

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