Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Surviving In The Land Of Opportunity: Outcomes Of Post-Crisis Urban Redevelopment In The United States, Brianna D. Foster

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

How we develop cities in the twenty-first century remains a subject of contentious debate worldwide. As neoliberal strategies are implemented in redevelopment projects, public safety nets are reduced and low-income communities of color in declining urban neighborhoods become particularly vulnerable. This multiple case study seeks to understand the experiences of post crisis urban redevelopment for low-income communities of color in 5 major U.S. cities. The data I analyzed include 101 short videos from the interactive documentary platform Land of Opportunity, documenting the process of post-crisis urban redevelopment in New Orleans, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco. In doing so, …

Still Waiting: An Analysis Of The Permeation Of Racial Stereotypes In Top-Grossing Black Romance Films From The 1960s To The 2000s, Jasmine Boyd-Perry

Honors College Theses

In this study, I compare how films portray relationships involving Black people, over the course of 5 decades. I do this by analyzing the characters and relationships in the top-grossing film from each decade (1960’s through 2000’s), that have a focus on Black love. I started this journey curious about how the silver screen portrayed how Black people loved romantically. As a person who regularly frequents my local major movie theatre, I had become tired of only seeing Black actors in comedies, Black men in drag and buddy dramas. I also grew tired of the sappy love stories featuring White …

Statistical Plight Of Black Women, Kimberly-Joy M. Walters

Sociology Summer Fellows

The purpose of this research is to examine how television shows and their portrayals of professional Black women impact the interpretation of marriage rates by race and perpetuate ideologies about the angry, unlovable Black woman. Using a content analysis of cable and network television shows with Black professional women as lead characters, this study connects an analysis of the characters’ lived experiences to normative expectations of Black women in relationships to call into question the prevailing narrative that Black women are in part personally responsible for their statistical plight. I will closely study how the two stereotypes, the Jezebel and …

Media Representation Of Asian Americans And Asian Native New Yorkers’ Hybrid Persona, Min Huh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Asian Americans, having been degraded in the realm of popular media and neglected in the consumer market, have been unable to obtain a voice or leave a trace in American pop culture. The meager representation that Asian Americans rarely have is highly controlled through a distorted lens, inclined to paint them in a grotesquely exaggerated light for comic relief. The absence of Asian Americans in the media has compelled the Asian American youth to adapt the personas of different cultures in their desires for social and cultural mobility. These factors have given birth to a hybrid persona among Asian Native …

The Texts We Play: Avatar Creation And Racial Invisibility In Role-Playing Video Games, Daniel L. Archer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project sets out to address problems of racial inequalities in role-playing video games as part of a growing field of video game studies in literary criticism. As these games are an increasingly popular form of entertainment in contemporary culture, their potential effects on players cannot be ignored. If these games continue to reflect society in a way that perpetuates racist stereotypes, social progress will halt. In order to study these games from a literary perspective, then, this project combines both narratological and ludological approaches to video game studies in order to bring about new insight from two strong perspectives. …

Reel Racism, Real Consequences : A Multiple Case Analysis Of Savior Films As Racial Projects., Eric A. Jordan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes how four blockbuster movies released in the years 2000-2014 represent racial projects. Racial projects encompass anything that helps people understand race. Films are racial projects because of their racist portrayal of characters. Films can be used to train audiences to view race in various ways that may contribute to problematic colorblindness. Specifically, the “White Savior” and “Magical Negro” tropes are ways through which films tell the viewers what to expect from White characters and characters of color. Viewers walk away from these films having constructed a racialized schema about White and Black characters, which further supports the …

Lovecidal: Walking With The Disappeared [Table Of Contents], Trinh T. Minh-Ha

Cinema & Media Studies

“Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared is filled with provocation and guided by evocation. Encompassing various forms (poetry, treatise, memoir, and historiography) and capaciously conceived, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s contemplation of war, state-authorized violence, state-sanctioned ‘security,’ and international amnesia is skillfully tempered by observations of beauty, humanity, and resistance. To say that this is an important book is in many ways an understatement; rather, Lovecidal is transformative.” —Cathy Schlund-Vials, author of War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work

An Unchained Analysis Of Racial Tension In America, Moriah Angott

Honors Projects

Modern race issues stem not only from the past but also from a lack of understanding and empathy for each other. How we talk about race will not only inform how we are able to move forward as a society, but it will also say a great deal about how we are evolving as human beings. It is important, and has been recognized as such, that black Americans have the freedom to grapple with that past, to understand it, and to feel connected to those ancestors who suffered in order for the foundation of this country to be built. Is …

A Borrowed Language, Yvonne Osei

Graduate School of Art Theses

Art has the potency of mediation: bridging human differences, questioning voids in historical trajectories, negotiating spaces of relevance, and most importantly, being signifiers that embody the absent. I speak in a borrowed language, a multilingual visual tongue, inspired by a culmination of Western and African Art modes of practices to create charged platforms for multicultural communication.

My art presents visual portals that allow for intercultural and interracial mingling as issues of colorism, present-day colonialism, gender inequality and the politics of dress are foregrounded for collective deliberation. The essence of the work is often activated and brought to its full potential …

Through Google-Colored Glass(Es): Design, Emotion, Class, And Wearables As Commodity And Control, Safiya Umoja Noble, Sarah T. Roberts

Media Studies Publications

This chapter discusses the implications of wearable technologies like Google Glass that function as a tool for occupying, commodifying, and profiting from the bio- logical, psychological, and emotional data of its wearers and those who fall within its gaze. We argue that Google Glass privileges an imaginary of unbridled exploration and intrusion into the physical and emotional space of others. Glass’s recognizable esthetic and outward-facing camera has elicited intense emotional response, partic- ularly when “exploration” has taken place in areas of San Francisco occupied by residents who were finding themselves priced out or evicted from their homes to make way …

Digital Refuse: Canadian Garbage, Commercial Content Moderation And The Global Circulation Of Social Media’S Waste, Sarah T. Roberts

Media Studies Publications

The story of a rogue Canadian garbage barge attempting to offload illegal garbage in the Philippines opens this article on techno-trash, in order to underline both the relationships between countries of the Global North with countries of the Global South in matters of waste, as well as to reframe discussions of techno-trash as one fundamentally tied to material things. The definition of techno-trash is then expanded, to cover digital detritus created through an entirely digital set of practices I term “Commercial Content Moderation.” The attempt to offload mounds of e-waste and the similar ways in which a great deal of …

Feeling And Healing Eco-Social Catastrophe: The "Horrific" Slipstream Of Danis Goulet's Wakening, Salma Monani

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

Cree/Métis filmmaker Danis Goulet’s science fiction short Wakening (2013) is set in Canada’s near future, yet the film reveals a slipstream of time where viewers are invited to contemplate the horrors of ecosocial crises—future, past, and present. I argue Wakening, as futuristic ecohorror, produces horrific feelings in the moment of its viewing that are inevitably entangled with the past, inviting its audiences to experience the monstrous contexts of Indigenous lives across time. To articulate this temporal dynamism, I overlay two key conceptual understandings: Walter Benjamin’s critiques of Western progress and historicism, and Indigenous notions of a Native slipstream. When brought …

In God’S Land: Cinematic Affect, Animation And The Perceptual Dilemmas Of Slow Violence, Salma Monani

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

In this paper, I argue that Indian independent filmmaker Pankaj Rishi Kumar's documentary In God’s Land (2012) blends animation and live-action to illuminate the destructive nuances of postcolonial literary scholar, Rob Nixon's notion of slow violence. In turning to cinema, I also suggest that In God’s Land’s “aesthetic strategies” further eco-film scholarship’s recent interests in animation, which have tended to highlight the mode's "feel good affect." I draw attention to In God's Land's hybrid of dark, discordant animation spectacle interspliced in the documentary live-action to articulate the potential of eco-animation outside of this affect. Ultimately, the film not only draws …

2017 Call For Submissions, Regennia N. Williams

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

Course Syllabus (W16 Online) Coli 331: "Pulp Fiction And Quentin Tarantino", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Objectives and Expected Learning Outcomes:

Rejecting the standpoint of the passively entertained consumer, our shared objectives in this course will be (1) to bring our selected cinematic and written texts into interaction in such ways as to produce high-quality scholarly writing. It is hoped that, by the end of the semester, each student’s active engagement with our course material should have enabled him/her, (2) to deepen and broaden his/her knowledge base concerning the social problematics we will have treated in such ways as to inform and encourage constructive social action.

We will view Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Reservoir …

Off The Road: Imperialism And Exploration In The American Road Movie, Andy Wright

Pitzer Senior Theses

This essay explores the imperialist nature of the American road movie as it is defined by the film’s era of release, specifically through the lens of how road movies abuse the lands that are travelled through. To accomplish this, my essay analyzes a classic road movie, Easy Rider, a more contemporary parody, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, and the futuristic film, The Martian. All of these films treat everything that which is not the metropolitan traveller in a distinctly oppressive sense, and each time a new generation of filmmakers makes a road movie, it becomes …

Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey

Theses and Dissertations--English

Since September 11, 2001 a substantial number of English-language, post-apocalyptic films have been released. This renewed interest in the genre has prompted scholars to examine the circumstances within western society that make post-apocalyptic films appealing to audiences. The popularity of these films derives from a narrative structure that reinforces conservative notions of good and bad and moral absolutism. The post-9/11, post-apocalyptic film typically features a white male hero who, in one way or another, reestablishes the pre-apocalyptic social order through proclamations of mandatory and prohibitive laws that must be adhered to by the survivors. The hero of post-apocalyptic film does …

Blancura Situacional E Imperio Español En Su Historia, Cine Y Literatura (S.Xix-Xx), Jose Maria Perez Sanchez

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This dissertation studies identity formation and race informed by the discipline Whiteness Studies. As such this dissertation conceptualizes Spanish Whiteness historically and analyzes its representation in Spanish narrative in prose and film. This research responds to two questions: 1) How has Spanish culture historically instrumentalized Blackness thus contributing to the creation of the Western’s conceptualization of Whiteness? 2) What does Spanish representation of Empire say about its Whiteness? In an effort to answer these questions, this study is divided into two parts that correspond to the conceptualization and representation of what are termed ‘Situational Whiteness’ and ‘Imperial Spanish Orientalism.’ I …

Trauma, Migrant Families, And Neoliberal Fantasies In Last Train Home, Yanjie Wang

Asian and Asian American Studies Faculty Works

This paper examines the traumatic experience of migrant workers through a reading of Lixin Fan's award-winning documentary film Last Train Home(2009). I am not primarily concerned, like most trauma-studies-based research, with grand, clearly recognizable catastrophes. I also avoid generalizing about human suffering in the age of global capitalism. I focus rather on post-Socialist China's more hidden social violence and its traumatizing effect on the quotidian life of migrantworkers-a subaltern group on the periphery of society. I argue that the trauma of the marginalized population must be socially and politically contextualized. The first section of the essay investigates the traumatic sense …

Saving Innocents: Tracing The Human Monster Hunter’S Hetero-Normative Agenda From The 1970s To Today, Adam Kem Yerima

Wayne State University Dissertations

In supernatural-themed American television programs that focus on hunting or exposing monsters and the monstrous, the human monster hunter’s representation and actions promote a conservative subtext. While horror scholarship prefers to examine the genre’s monsters and women, and regulate the hunter as simply being an expert, an exploration into the historical development of the figure reveals that there is a lot more to this character. The human monster hunter’s televisual depictions from the 1970s to today reveal a complex illustration that reifies the “American dream.” Time and time again, through the loss of an ideal middle-class experience, the human monster …

Black Feminist Discourse Analysis Of Portrayals Of Gender Violence Against Black Women: A Social Work Dissertation, Avina Ross

Theses and Dissertations

This study explored media discourse of gender violence against Black women in Black contemporary films. Four Tyler Perry films were examined using a novel, qualitative and analytical framework: Black Feminist Discourse Analysis. Discourses that were studied include, but were not limited to: portrayals of gender violence and victims, character dispositions and interactions, stereotypes, relationship dynamics as well as portrayals of race, gender, sexuality and religion. The use of new and existing controlling images based on systems of race, gender, sexuality and religion were revealed in a transitional and systemic model. Common themes across the films are provided. This research closes …

"Pa'l Norte," "Sueño Americano" E "Ice El Hielo": Un Análisis Del Video Musical En El Desmontaje De La Retórica Anti-Inmigrante En Los Estados Unidos, Aida M. Villarreal-Licona

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis is an analytical case study of three music videos, "Pa'l Norte" by Calle 13, "Sueño Americano" by Los Rakas, and "Ice El Hielo" by La Santa Cecilia. It explores the visual and lyric narratives of these works and their role in critiquing anti-immigration rhetoric towards Latino immigrants in the United States in a post-9/11 context. Through critical analysis, this thesis argues that their work is vital in dismantling the dehumanizing and criminalizing language prevalent in legal and popular discourse, as well as challenging the manifestations of everyday "illegality."

The Minstrel Legacy: African American English And The Historical Construction Of "Black" Identities In Entertainment, Jennifer Bloomquist

Africana Studies Faculty Publications

Linguists have long been aware that the language scripted for "ethnic" roles in the media has been manipulated for a variety of purposes ranging from the construction of character "authenticity" to flagrant ridicule. This paper provides a brief overview of the history of African American roles in the entertainment industry from minstrel shows to present-day films. I am particularly interested in looking at the practice of distorting African American English as an historical artifact which is commonplace in the entertainment industry today. Dialogue which is clearly meant as an imitation of African American English still results in the construction of …

Paul Leduc: The Politics Of Mexican Cinema In The 1970s, Joe Hogan

Cinesthesia

It thus makes sense that critics tend to present strong arguments about the political agendas of Mexican filmmakers from the 1970s. Among the most popular in the subject is Paul Leduc, whose work has been cast as exemplary of the political ethos of the day. However, it is my position that, upon close examination, Leduc’s films seem not always to present a straightforward political message, much less one that would clearly bolster the aims of the Echeverria administration. For that reason, I will examine two of Leduc’s films, Reed: México Insurgente and Frida: naturaleza viva (1983), to reveal how they …

Chile: Cinema In Exile, Hannah Lynch

Cinesthesia

Executions, disappearances, and exile are not the first words that come to mind when picturing the long, versatile landscape of Chile. Nonetheless, Chile was under the harsh control of Augusto Pinochet from 1974 until 1990 and experienced a high level of political oppression during that time. Though Chile had only a short film history before the rule of Pinochet, cinema remained relevant despite the exile and hardships experienced by several prominent Chilean filmmakers. Ironically, under the hostile dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Chile developed a stronger national cinema, producing politically and historically motivated films made by the exiled filmmakers, who persevered …

Becoming American: Constructing Mexican Immigrants In Local Newspapers, Zheng Zhu

Publications and Research

Media representation of Latino immigrants has been extensively studied by scholars across diverse academic disciplines. Particular to the U.S. context, preceding scholarships pertaining to the ways in which Latinos were represented centered on the media representation of Latino immigrants either as the exotic racial other or undesirable foreigners. In light of the important role that the Mexican immigrants played in understanding the current national debate on illegal immigration and the overall historical experiences of immigrants in Washington State (WA), this study critically investigated how news articles published in WA represented Mexican immigrants. As a crucial point of departure from prior …

Caribou, Petroleum, And The Limits Of Locality In The Canada–Us Borderlands, Jenny Kerber

English and Film Studies Faculty Publications

his article discusses Karsten Heuer’s 2006 book Being Caribou in light of debates in ecocriticism and border studies about how to define the local in the context of environmental problems of vast range and uncertain temporality. It explores how Heuer’s book about following the Porcupine Caribou herd’s migration engages in multiple forms of boundary crossing—between countries, between hemispheric locations, and between species—and shows how insights from Indigenous storytelling complicate the book’s appeal to environmentalist readers by asserting a prior, transnational Indigenous presence in the transboundary landscapes of present-day Alaska and the Yukon.

On A Particularly Patriotic Day, Laila M. Mufty

SURGE

I stare at myself in disgust before turning away and beginning to apply skin creams and makeup that promise a lighter complexion. I straighten my naturally thick, curly hair, methodically going over the same strand multiple times while wishing for straight hair like the other perfect blond girls in my grade. I put on a modest all black ensemble in an effort to avoid unwanted attention and pull on a large jacket with a hood to hide my face. [excerpt]

Book Review: (Re)Thinking Orientalism: Using Graphic Narratives To Teach Critical Visual Literacy, Antonio Lopez

Journal of Media Literacy Education

(Re)Thinking Orientalism’s primary aim is to offer a pedagogical model for using graphic narratives in the classroom to explore and contest what Jones calls a dominant “visual Orientalist” discourse in Western media. Graphic narratives are fiction and nonfiction stories told in comic form, and can range from graphic novels to comic journalism. The book also examines news media, photography, comic books and television in post-9/11 USA. In particular Jones focuses on several works that deal with the representation of the Islamic Other, especially Muslim women and their primary sign of difference in Western culture, the veil. As the title …

Discours Sur L’Environnement Et Stratégies Empathiques De L’Hégémonie Dans Les Écritures Francophones D’Afrique Noire, Jean-Blaise Samou

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

It is a known that discourse developed on Africa in the European imagination between the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century had largely contributed to the implementation of colonial ideology. Today, African writings recover and rework those discourses, highlighting the language strategies by which the construction of a tropical otherness, territorial dispossession and colonial domination in Africa were part of a pragmatic discourse. The analysis of those discourses in some novels and movies from French-speaking Black Africa not only reveals the environmental issues that underlay the European colonial adventure in Africa, but also the interest for …