Detective Stories During Apartheid: H.I.E. Dhlomo as a Precursor of Drum

This article aims to contribute to the discussion of English-language crime fiction by black South African writers before 1994 by exploring H.I.E. Dhlomo’s relatively overlooked contribution to the genre in the first decade of apartheid. In particular, I intend to close read three detective stories written between the late 1940s and the early 1950s by Dhlomo, namely “Village Blacksmith Tragicomedy”, “Flowers”, and “Aversion to Snakes”, and compare them with the more celebrated stories published by Arthur Maimane in the popular magazine Drum a few years later. Notwithstanding their different re-elaboration of the tropes of crime fiction, I argue that both Dhlomo and Maimane resorted to this productive strand of popular literature to reassert a claim to knowledge denied to Africans, saturating their texts with new local meanings and exceeding Western genre conventions.

Early 20th-Century Popular American Magazines

The American popular magazine came into being in the 1890s due to advances in marketing, printing, and distribution. These were general interest magazines but they soon splintered into specialty magazine genres, geared at specific audiences or specific interests. In general, magazines are an ecology within the even larger ecologies of print and literary culture. By their very nature they are multivocal and fragmented, singular objects with kaleidoscopic contents. The study of magazines reflects their subject, drawing from many fields and relying upon many critical approaches for a multitude of possible applications. With huge circulations and nationwide distribution, American popular magazines were arguably the first iteration of mass culture. Yet there is a large disjunction between the importance and prevalence of popular magazines of the first half of the 20th century and the amount of critical work devoted to them. One of the central reasons for this disjunction has been the preponderance of scholarly attention paid to literary modernism, which is seen as oppositional to the popular and commercial (an idea that has been more recently revised). Consequentially, studies of small circulation, coterie little magazines vastly outnumber those dedicated to popular periodicals. The study of popular magazines enjoyed an upswing with second-wave feminism. Sociological and literary studies followed which traced the construction of women as passive consumers (of goods, of identity) back to The Ladies Home Journal and forward into contemporary women’s homemaker magazines. The next few decades saw an expansion and complication in the studies of the relationship between audience and magazines, especially as the field of cultural studies gained momentum. Feminist work on imagined reader communities saw popular magazines as potentially empowering and the study of African American Popular Magazines flourished as did the study of how magazines constructed masculinity. In the last twenty years or so, the popular magazines of the first half of the 20th century have frequently become the subject for critical literary scrutiny. This shifting of focus is due in part to the rise of new modernist studies, which has decentralized modernism and largely dispelled the idea that modernism wasn’t available to the masses, along with the rise of modern periodical studies, which has expanded attention beyond little magazines. As a result of these critical practices, middlebrow, genre, and working-class magazines—such as Smart Magazines, Pulp Magazines, and Hollywood Fan Magazines—are emerging as objects of study, spurred by growing digital archives of magazines that were rarely collected in libraries.

Aproximación al imaginario de género en revistas juveniles

El escrito analiza el imaginario de género presente en una revista juvenil chilena de los añossesenta en Chile. En esta década surgen las revistas para jóvenes intentando incorporar esta generaciónal consumo, y fueron clave en la construcción de la imagen juvenil. Rescatando la importancia delas fotografías, el concepto imaginario social y desde una perspectiva de género, realizamos unanálisis visual sobre las portadas de una popular magazine chilena entre 1965 y 1970. Siguiendo unametodología mixta, el análisis de las portadas de Ritmo revela un imaginario tradicional para la juventudde la época, contrastante con una sociedad cambiante en lo económico, político y sociocultural. Estoshallazgos plasman aspectos importantes de los medios de comunicación dentro de la industria cultural,compartiendo pero también criticando elementos de otras investigaciones de género y medios. Porúltimo, se promueve el estudio de imágenes como acceso legítimo al estudio de imaginarios sociales.

Elite Rhetoric, Target Group Positioning, and Policymaking: Immigrant Women and Project 100% in San Diego County

Thousands of Mexicans are crossing the U.S. border, bearing children, and collecting welfare checks, according to a dramatic 1994 article printed in the popular magazine Reader's Digest. This well-known publication, which at the time sent out 15 million copies per month, included a story alleging that Mexican citizens were committing rampant fraud and abuse of the social welfare system in San Diego County, CA. In California in the 1990s, key state and federal level reforms involving immigrants and welfare usage occurred, such as Proposition 187 (1994) and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA, 1996). Then, in 1997, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors (SD County BoS) in conjunction with the office of the District Attorney (DA) approved Project 100% (P100), an anti-fraud initiative that mandated invasive and warrantless comprehensive home inspections for all welfare program applicants in the county. In order to analyze how pejorative rhetoric can influence racialized policies, this research project applies Herbert Blumer's (1958) Group Position Theory to investigate the underlying racial bias existing in SD County at the intersection of anti-immigrant elite language that coevolved with restrictive welfare reforms. This derogatory language codified metaphors, storylines, and discourses that were publicly disseminated by governing and non-governing actors who in turn used these labels to enact public policies that burdened the target groups. This research analyzes this specific rhetoric filled with harmful metaphors targeting women, Latinos, and African Americans in what Foucault would call the dismissive language of power and dominance. Fanning the flames of social anxieties and perceived resource threat, the dominant group engages in a process of discourse structuration and institutionalization to create negative identities for non-dominant social groups in order to maintain and reinforce its own privileged position. This research applied qualitative methods in MaxQDA software to analyze the frequency of certain elite discourse terms and metaphors in government meeting minutes and media sources to investigate if elite and public discourse used discourse coalitions (Hajer, 2006) that indicated concern over maintaining group position (Blumer, 1958) on the issue of welfare usage in SD County. This paper then analyzes the evidence for how these factors influenced key policy influencers and makers in the formulation, adoption, and implementation of P100. Findings include evidence of all four of Blumer's categories in elite rhetoric on the issue of immigrants and welfare along with how this rhetoric was operationalized via policy. Further, the existence of a discourse structuration is presented, with pregnant Latina women occupying the bottom rungs and becoming a target of discourse institutionalization via early home visits and Project 100%. Finally, the research contemplates the long-term and ongoing impacts of elite discourse in general, P100 in SD County in particular, and the new complications arising from COVID-19 and the future U.S. political climate regarding immigration.

“Miss Romania” in the USA (1929): The Interplay between Beauty and Politics

This article focuses on the links between political discourse and feminine beauty in one of Romania’s first national beauty pageants. By selecting its “Miss Romania” in March 1929 and sending her to compete in the international “Miss Universe” pageant in Galveston, Texas, the popular magazine Realitatea Ilustrată sought to affirm its role in creating a visible symbol of the Romanian nation. “Miss Romania” was promoted and legitimized as an incarnation of national unity capable of assuring internal cohesion and external renown. In this way, the idealization of the national beauty winner and her transformation into a symbol of collective virtue translated political and propagandistic ambitions in terms of feminine identity.

Gendered Boundary-work within the Finnish Skepticism Movement

As a worldwide social movement, skepticism aims to promote science and critical thinking. However, by analyzing texts published in the magazine of the Finnish skepticism movement between 1988 and 2017, we find that the movement carries out its mission in a way that maintains and produces gendered hierarchies. We identify six forms of gendered boundary-work in the data: (1) science as masculine, (2) questioning women, (3) complementary and alternative medicine as feminine, (4) debating the status of gender studies, (5) gender within the skepticism movement, and (6) supporting equality. Gender is an important aspect of the boundary-work undertaken by the movement to establish boundaries between science and nonscience. The forms of gendered boundary-work contribute to the idea of “true” science as a masculine and male-dominated domain, excluding women from both science and the skepticism movement. Even when the exclusions are subtle, hidden, or humorous, they nevertheless produce gendered inequalities by excluding women, belittling women’s knowledge production, or granting women-only dismissive recognition. Indeed, our analysis indicates that there is a need to look deeply into science-based social movements: exclusive structural tactics are part and parcel of such movements’ mundane activities, as our examples from Skepsis ry’s popular magazine demonstrate.

Citra Perempuan Di Dalam Majalah Popular (Analisis Wacana Terhadap Artikel Di Majalah Popular Edisi Mei 2019)

This study is entitled "Women's Image in Magazine Photos (Semiotic Analysis of Photos in Popular Magazine May 2019 Edition)". The object of this research is a photo in the May 2019 issue of Popular magazine. This study uses Rholand Barthes's semiotic analysis framework. The purpose of this research is to find out how the depiction of the objectification of women in the photo model of the May 2019 Popular Magazine and expose the myths contained in the photos. There is objectification in the sexual form which makes a woman's body an object to be observed, valued, and enjoyed by her sexual values. The myth that can be unearthed from the meaning of the sign in the photographs is the beauty myth that defines women's beauty in uniform criteria. Penelitian ini mengangkat tentang citra wanita dalam foto di majalah. Objek penelitian ini adalah foto di Majalah Popular Edisi Mei 2019. Kerangka analisis yang digunakan pada penelitian ini yaitu Analisis Semiotika Roland Barthes yang memiliki tujuan pencitraan perempuan dalam foto, serta menggali kebenaran tentang adanya pemaknaan tanda dalam foto-foto keanggunan wanita sesuai dengan porsi yang sama. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui bagaimana penggambaran objektifikasi perempuan dalam model foto di Majalah Popular dan memaparkan mitos-mitos yang terkandung dalam foto. Terdapat objektifikasi dalam bentuk seksual yang membuat tubuh wanita menjadi objek untuk diamati, dihargai, dan dinikmati oleh nilai-nilai seksualnya. Mitos yang dapat digali dari makna tanda dalam foto adalah mitos kecantikan yang mendefinisikan kecantikan wanita dalam kriteria seragam.

Illustration and the Narrative Quality of Appeal

Illustrators of popular magazine fiction struggled to reconcile the distortions of caricature with realistic modes of representation. William Glackens was one who succeeded. Combining close attention to narrative with a style of sketch-drawing that neither promised absolute fidelity to reality nor resorted to caricature, Glackens also used perspective and composition to connect readers to the story on the page. This chapter focuses on Irish-Jewish writer Edward Raphael Lipsett’s “Denny the Jew” stories, which depict a young Irish immigrant to New York who decides to pass as Jewish. Through masterful deployment of dialect, Lipsett heightens rather than erases individual identity in his immigrant fiction. Glackens’ illustrations, meanwhile, use a sketched-from-life technique rather than caricature to depict closely observed individuals rather than types. These stories exemplify how textual and visual strategies worked together to convey the comic sensibility in illustrated magazine fiction.