Zombies, Migrants, and Queers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Fojas
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Breaking Bad ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Global North ◽  
Television Film

The alarm and anxiety unleashed by the Great Recession found fascinating expression across popular culture. Harried survivors negotiated societal collapse among zombies in The Walking Dead. Middle-class whites crossed the literal and metaphorical Mexican border on Breaking Bad or coped with a lack of freedom among the marginalized on Orange Is the New Black. Camilla Fojas uses representations of people of color, the incarcerated, migrants, and trans/queers--vulnerable populations all--to explore the contradictions created by the economic crisis and its freefalling aftermath. Television, film, advertising, and media coverage of the crisis created a distinct kind of story about capitalism and the violence that supports it. Fojas shows how these pop culture moments reshaped social dynamics and people's economic sensibilities and connects the ways pop culture reflected economic devastation. She examines how racial capitalism persists through the proliferation of diverse forms of racial domination and non-European imperialism in the neoliberal era. Racial hierarchies are supplemented by other typologies, ones that are racialized but contain different symbolic capacities, particularly that between migrant or refugee or displaced person and citizen and global North and global South. Zombies, Migrants, and Queers shows how racial capitalism creates new tributaries of oppression in its neoliberal imperial form.

Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Cantor
Keyword(s):  
American Dream ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Legitimate Business ◽  
Breaking Bad ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
False Start

What is the American dream, and why has it proven so elusive for many people? By examining popular culture’s portrayal of the dark side of the American dream, this book seeks to answer these questions. Only when we see people fail in their pursuit of the American dream do we begin to understand its limitations and its inner contradictions. This book explores five representative examples of the American dream gone awry: (1) Huckleberry Finn; (2) the films of W. C. Fields; (3) the Godfather films;(4) Breaking Bad; and (5) The Walking Dead (and other “end-of-the-world” narratives). As these cases suggest, America, as the fresh-start nation, always threatens to become the land of the false start. America gives its people the freedom to reinvent themselves, but that easily turns into a license to imposture. The American ideal of the self-made man is shadowed by the specter of the con man, and the line between legitimate business and criminal activity sometimes becomes hard to draw clearly. Although the American dream is to achieve success in both family and business, the Godfather films and Breaking Bad show these goals tragically at odds. With its Hollywood endings, American popular culture is often thought to be naively optimistic; this book demonstrates that film and television creators have been capable of raising thoughtful questions about the validity and viability of the American dream, thus deepening our understanding of America itself.

‘Cambiando el chip’: The gendered constellation of subjectivities of the financialisation of remittances in Mexico

2021 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2110061
Author(s):  
Rahel Kunz ◽  
Brenda Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
Development Strategy ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Development Aid ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
Development Models ◽  
Transnational Family ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Global Financial Crisis

In the wake of the global financial crisis and a context of stagnating development aid, the international community now promotes linking remittances to finance as a development strategy, in what has been termed the ‘financialisation of remittances’ (FOR). This article analyses the ways in which the financialisation of remittance manifests in Mexico in gendered ways, and what this tells us about financialisation and financial subjectivation processes beyond the global North. We find that the financialisation of remittance represents a shift from earlier remittance-based development models whereby remittances become linked to financial inclusion and social welfare agendas and the focus is broadened beyond migrant income to diaspora wealth. Focusing on the governing arrangements of the financialisation of remittance, we propose the concept of ‘constellation of subjectivities’ in order to analyse the interrelated and interacting programmatic subjectivities through which the financialisation of remittance manifests in Mexico. Combining this conceptualisation with interdisciplinary feminist insights on financialisation, we analyse the various intersecting social dynamics that weave through such constellations. The analysis – based on document, interview and observation material – finds that the financialisation of remittance in Mexico creates and governs a gendered constellation of financial subjectivities with three dimensions: migrant men, remittance-receiving women and the constitutive outside of the non-transnational family. While most studies tend to focus on transnational families, we demonstrate that non-transnational families are an integral part of the financialisation of remittance. Our analysis destabilises the notion of the universal financial subject and highlights the importance of broadening our analysis of financialisation to constitutive outsides that often fall off the radar.

scholarly journals Climate Politics and Race in the Pacific Northwest

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Slocum
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
The United States ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Global North

The collective politics of climate justice makes the important claim that lowering emissions is not enough; society must also undertake radical transformation to address both the climate and inequality crises. Owing to its roots in the environmental justice movement, addressing systemic racism is central to climate justice praxis in the United States, which is a necessary intervention in typically technocratic climate politics. What emerges from US climate justice is a moral appeal to ‘relationship’ as politics, the procedural demand that communities of color (the ‘frontline’) lead the movement, and a distributive claim on carbon pricing revenue. However, this praxis precludes a critique of racial capitalism, the process that relies on structural racism to enhance accumulation, alienating, exploiting, and immiserating black, brown, and white, while carrying out ecocide. The lack of an analysis of how class and race produce the crises climate justice confronts prevents the movement from demanding that global north fossil fuel abolition occur in tandem with the reassertion of the public over the private and de-growth. Drawing on research conducted primarily in Oregon and Washington, I argue that race works to both create and limit the transformative possibilities of climate politics.

Media vs. candidates and minorities vs. majorities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Briana Trifiro ◽  
Yiyan Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Time Series Analysis ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Subsequent Performance ◽  
Setting Process ◽  
The Media ◽  
Online Web

Abstract Despite an abundance of research dedicated to the first level agenda setting process in political elections, there is a considerable gap within the literature regarding how the amount of media coverage granted to minority candidates – people of color and women – influence their salience in public opinion. The current study seeks to address this gap by analyzing the effects of online coverage of minority candidates and their subsequent performance in national polling data from June 1, 2019 to November 20, 2019. The present study utilizes a time-series analysis to compare three information formats: Twitter accounts of major media organizations, online web mentions of candidates from these organizations, and the candidates’ own Twitter presence. The presented findings illustrate important relationships – specifically, where candidates of color were able to set their own agenda through their Twitter accounts as opposed to coverage that they received from the media.

In the Time of Plastic Representation

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen J. Warner
Keyword(s):  
Women Of Color ◽  
White Women ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Racially Diverse ◽  
Black Representation ◽  
Education Community ◽  
Spectrum Shift ◽  
Do So ◽  
Complex Characters

To many men and women of color, as well as many white women, meaningful diversity occurs when the actual presence of different-looking bodies appears on screen. For them, this diversity serves as an indicator of progress as well as an aspirational frame for younger generations who are told that the visual signifiers they can identify with carry a great amount of symbolic weight. As a consequence, the degree of diversity became synonymous with the quantity of difference rather than with the dimensionality of those performances. Moreover, a paradoxical condition emerges whereby people of color have become more media savvy yet are still, if not more, reliant on overdetermined and overly reductive notions of so-called “positive” and “negative” representation. Such measures yield a set of dueling consequences: first, that any representation that includes a person of color is automatically a sign of success and progress; second, that such paltry gains generate an easy workaround for the executive suites whereby hiring racially diverse actors becomes an easy substitute for developing new complex characters. The results of such choices can feel—in an affective sense—artificial, or more to the point, like plastic. Black representation, as it's been understood in a popular sense, has been dominated by the circulation of mediated imagery yielding deleterious effects for the groups depicted. The fear of the effects of such “poor” representation has resulted in a set of binary, nonscientific, underdeveloped metrics—positive and negative—that constitute a nebulous catch-all system wherein the characteristics that define each pole on the spectrum shift depending on the era and the expectations of the audience. What marks a representation as “positive” or “negative”? Responses are often aligned with class (good job, education, community minded), behavior (hypersexual, well-spoken, “woke”), or with characterizations of character that either successfully assimilate into normative culture or fail to do so. However, such a scale oversimplifies the complexities of black identity that require audiences, pop culture critics, and scholars to invest in screen characters through experiencing nuances developed over time and ironically reinforces the stereotypes that operate as industry shorthand. The rationale for solely demanding plastic representation is understandable as a sanity-preserving tactic that can also build esteem and confidence, but it is not nearly enough. Meaningful, resonant diversity is a more difficult, underdeveloped approach that requires all stakeholders to think harder about what on-screen difference looks and feels like. But if representation truly matters, then it is an approach worthy of pursuit.

The Promise and The Lost City of Z: Diasporas, Cinematic Imperialism and Commercial Films

1969 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-161
Author(s):  
Sophia Balakian ◽  
Virginia R. Dominguez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Armenian Genocide ◽  
Movie Industry ◽  
Lost City ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Us ◽  
Global North

Through a mutual interview exchange, the authors reflect on two recent commercial films – The Promise and The Lost City of Z. The films deal with the Armenian genocide and British exploration of the Amazon, respectively, both chronicling events that took place in the early twentieth century. The authors’ inquiries address questions of diasporic imperialism through film, Othering, violence, and the US movie industry. While differing in their readings and opinions of the films, the authors argue that both movies reflect contemporary US fantasies and preoccupations, and that commercial cinema – and pop culture in the Global North more broadly – ought to be taken more seriously by anthropologists.

scholarly journals Decaying infrastructures in the post-industrial city: An urban political ecology of the US pipeline crisis

2019 ◽  
pp. 251484861989051
Author(s):  
Jonathan Silver
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Inequality ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
The Us ◽  
Global North ◽  
Essential Resource ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Fully Functioning

Infrastructure is critical to the ways in which urban inequality is produced and experienced. Across US post-industrial contexts urban infrastructures are decaying, causing problems to the capacity of various systems to deliver essential resource flows for social reproduction. This paper examines the US pipeline crisis to understand why, how and with what effects infrastructure has undergone a process of physical decay, concentrated across inner-city areas. It uses a case study of Camden, New Jersey, a poor city in which infrastructure has undergone decades of neglect, privatisation and under-maintenance. This decay has created difficulties in sustaining a safe, universal and fully functioning infrastructure. To understand these dynamics, the paper advances an urban political ecology approach to examining these infrastructural geographies. It makes three key contributions. First, it considers how to conceptualise decay and its effect on the urban circulations that have been enabled/disabled by infrastructure through the notion of unbounding. Second, given the highly segregated infrastructural experiences between a black city and white suburbs, the paper draws on recent geographic scholarship on racial capitalism, emphasising the role of race in the governing of infrastructure and in accounting for Camden’s conditions of decay. Third, the paper advances a relational theorisation that draws on concepts emanating from urban political ecology and associated research on infrastructure in cities of the global South. With the reported, widespread decay of infrastructures in global North, post-industrial contexts, a relational theorisation can draw on long-established vocabularies that challenge where we locate the ‘infrastructural South’ and prompt new political urban questions.

Past Scents

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Reinarz
Keyword(s):  
Group Identity ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Community Or ◽  
The World ◽  
Olfactory Sense ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global North

This book offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, it shows how people have relied on their olfactory sense to understand and engage with both their immediate environments and wider corporal and spiritual worlds. This broad survey demonstrates how each community or commodity possesses, or has been thought to possess, its own peculiar scent. Through the meanings associated with smells, osmologies develop—what cultural anthropologists have termed the systems that utilize smells to classify people and objects in ways that define their relations to each other and their relative values within a particular culture. European Christians, for instance, relied on their noses to differentiate Christians from heathens, whites from people of color, women from men, virgins from harlots, artisans from aristocracy, and pollution from perfume. This reliance on smell was not limited to the global North. Around the world, the book shows, people used scents to signify individual and group identity in a morally constructed universe where the good smelled pleasant and their opposites reeked. The book is a useful and entertaining look at the history of one of our most important but least-understood senses.

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