Digital Commons Network^™

“A Meaningless Institution”: Allen Ginsberg And The Struggle To Resist Dehumanization, James Altman

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

This presentation details how in poems such as “A Meaningless Institution,” “Howl,” and “American Change” Allen Ginsberg depicts individuals striving as best they can to maintain their freedom, especially freedom of thought in the face of lockstep conformity. In doing so, they seek to hang onto and reassert their humanity. In virtually every line, Ginsberg’s ideas about free speech, democracy, patriotism, inclusiveness, the environment, and community collided with the dehumanizing ideals of mainstream Cold War America. Ginsberg’s reverence for the United States as celebrated by his artistic “father” Walt Whitman functions as the catalyst for him to protest what the …

Black Culture And Community In Good Times, Angela Nelson

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

The situation comedy Good Times broadcast on the CBS network from February 8, 1974 to August 1, 1979, is a television milestone because it was the first series to feature a recurring, intact Black two-parent nuclear family, the Evanses, on American primetime television. In the conventions of seventies “TV World,” the “intact Black nuclear family” is a married, heterosexual, two-parent African American family with children all living in a single dwelling at the same time. David Marc in Demographic Vistas notes the focus of American situation comedies up to 1974: “The sitcom is a representational form, and its subject is …

A Semiotic Analysis Of Community’S “Advanced Dungeons And Dragons”, Marci Mazzarotto

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Unsurprisingly, the use of blackface rightfully remains a controversial topic situated within a remarkedly large sphere of popular culture (spanning nearly 200 years), as its roots stem directly from the systematic oppression of the African American community by silencing their voices and deleting their visibility. Such depictions turned people of color into grotesque and exaggerated caricatures that cemented deeply hurtful, incorrect, and negative stereotypes that continue to live and haunt our society and culture today.

This project addresses the controversial use of blackface in popular media, by briefly contextualizing its history and influence and then situating such context within a …