mass media

The Selves

admin — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Sonja Ahlers’ The Selves is a visual essay which combines collage, poetry, watercolor, calligraphy, prose and fabric. The result is a multi-layered and textured work that reveals something new every time you leaf through it. Although pastiche and mixed media immediately come to mind to describe Ahlers’ work, it may also be considered a new genre or a new way of looking at our lives as women in relation to mass media. As passive consumers of pop culture, we assimilate the images and narratives that mass media serve us. Unable to discern the promoters from the products and the dreams they’re selling, we model our various “selves” from babyhood to old age around the ideals these promoters project. At least, that’s my interpretation of the book, but yours may be very different. Now imagine someone appropriating these same images and presenting them in a new way as social commentary. For instance, Ahlers presents an intellectual side of Marilyn Monroe using a rare photograph of her reading, next to a text by Gloria Steinem describing how hard it was for men to reconcile Marilyn’s love for books with her physical appearance. We also see repeated images of Princess Diana throughout her life, from a young woman who marries a prince, to a princess who never lives happily ever after. We also see a very young Angelina Jolie in the company of her father, reminding us that beauty and fame do not exempt anyone from pain. The public is indeed very different from the private. Some serious themes such as suicide, child abuse, self-mutilation, female rivalry and abortion are raised in The Selves, but this book is not without humor. The images Ahlers uses are readily recognizable to any woman born in the 1970s or early '80s, and nostalgia is guaranteed. I enjoyed the author’s unapologetic acceptance of these images into her life and presenting them in a new light to show another side or expose another issue. This visual essay may be hard for some to embrace, but I applaud any artist-cum-author who takes on this challenge and does it well enough to land a publisher. Moving away from the old confines means not letting others define what an acceptable genre is.

Written by: Heather Leighton, August 26th 2010

Creating Ourselves: African Americans and Hispanic Americans in Popular Culture and Religious Expression

admin — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Edited by Anthony B. Pinn, Benjamin Valentin

Duke University Press

The topic of cross-cultural communication has fascinated me for a number of years, partly because of my own experiences in Latin America, and partly from observing the interaction between the Latino/a and African American communities. Watching these two groups interact has taught me a great deal about differences in the ways of communication, how what may be "appropriate" in one culture may not be in the other, and the need for discussion to avoid potential misunderstandings.

Therefore, it was with great interest that I read Creating Ourselves, a study on cross-cultural communication and collaboration between religious scholars of the two largest minority groups in the United States. The timing of the publication of this book is of great importance, as both groups have, to a certain extent, been viewed as "foreign elements" that might threaten the national identity of Americans, especially in the current economic climate. Scholars from both communities engage in a dialogue, an exchange of opinions, perspectives, and hopes, as their history and identity is linked through the cultural production via representations in popular culture.

I found the structure of the work innovative and very much needed in scholarly circles. The book consists of seven sections with two essays in each of them, one from each group. Every article is followed by a response written by a corresponding essayist from the opposite group, each contributor using their own personal experiences to further engage readers.

Teresa Delgado analyses the novel América’s Dream by Esmeralda Santiago, which delves into the life of América González, a single mother who takes a job as a maid in a hotel in New York after suffering abuse by her daughter's father in Puerto Rico. Although América finds freedom in New York, she remains isolated and silent, as she has not broken the dependency of oppression. Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, in response, reflects on the "womanist theory" that calls for revolution in the ways of seeing, living, and being. The term "womanist," coined by Alice Walker, refers to women who are in charge, who champion freedom and who transform the oppressive forms affected by race, gender, and class domination. Kirk-Duggan uses hip-hop artist Lauryn Hill as an example of just one of these extraordinary women.

In "Television and Religion," Jonathan Walton analyses the dramatised faith in megachurch movements; the colossal buildings that house sanctuaries, gyms, daycare, bookstores, and more are especially attractive to African American communities, with their charismatic pastors who even hold worship through an electronic church. Another form of melodrama is found in the Latin telenovelas (soap operas) that have become extremely popular for millions around the world; Kassandra, a Venezuelan soap opera attracts people as far away as Serbia, while The Rich Also Cry is popular even in Moscow.

Overall, I enjoyed reading Creating Ourselves as the subject of creativity in all different forms, styles, colours, and shadows is part of our daily life.

Written by: Anna Hamling, April 30th 2010

From Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News

admin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:01:00 +0000

By Geoffrey Baym

Paradigm Publishers

I consider myself a bit of a news junkie so a title involving both Walter Cronkite and Stephen Colbert immediately caught my attention. While Cronkite was first able to break heavy concepts down for the masses and Colbert was later on able to do the same using humor, From Cronkite to Colbert is not able to do either. This was an extremely hard book to read, and in truth, I was not able to get past the middle.

Author Geoffrey Baym writes in an extremely dense, over-reaching style, making From Cronkite to Colbert read like an overzealous undergraduate thesis or a none too subtle proposal for the new COM201 textbook. Either way, instead of being entertained while learning, this book had me remembering everything I hated about studying for my communications minor. I read this book not because it was fun, but because I had to, and as a result, I really learned no new neat tidbits about the evolution of broadcast news.

Another pet peeve of mine was Baym’s breaking of the "don’t tell us, show us" cardinal rule of writing. In many of his paragraphs, he tells the reader—in hundred dollar words no less—exactly how this fact correlates to that one or where this next fact will take them. I was never surprised or intrigued, but merely taken by the hand as a reader and escorted to every point. By the time I made it to the book’s middle, after agonizing weeks of attempting to force myself to get through it, I gave up. Tracing the history of television news still seems like it would be an interesting topic to read up on; however, I’d come back to asking Baym to cover it only after he loosened up a little or possibly took up social drinking.

Written by: Jen Klee, November 6th 2009

Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown

admin — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 09:27:00 +0000

By Jennifer Scanlon

Oxford University Press

I read Cosmopolitan. I have even been known to love it. I am the very working professional who Helen Gurley Brown addressed in her endless array of public statements about and to women. Now these ideas are wrapped in a new, critically written package. I am thankful, through Jennifer Scanlon’s recovery of Brown, that my infatuation of Cosmopolitan doesn’t make me unfeminist.

Where Gloria Steinem and others once tried to take over Brown’s offices at _Cosmopolitan, _declaring her and the magazine anti-feminist, Scanlon is reclaiming Brown and her space in history as an ally of feminism. This space is, according to Scanlon, also a space Helen Gurley Brown crafted in such a way as to make her timeless and ahead of her time.

Bad Girls Go Everywhere takes a unique approach to biography by creating a nexus of Brown’s public history, her published statements, and Scanlon’s own cultural and historical criticisms to weave together an understanding of feminism that is perfectly befitting our historic moment. We live in a time where iconic references to feminism are not as simple as a bra burning or an equal rights protest. Rather, they encompass images of feminist action as varied as a Guerrilla Girls rally to the Coyote Ugly bar in Nashville, and Scanlon’s recovery of Brown as more feminist friend than enemy, and unique in her personal activism, seems more than appropriate.

Bad Girls Go Everywhere approaches Brown and her history as one that “has largely been left out of established histories of postwar feminism’s emergence and ascendance.” Scanlon argues that Brown’s own political voice is one that was “more likely practiced by single women than by housewives, and by working-class secretaries rather than middle-class college students.” Brown’s Sex and The Single Girl is framed as political simply with the gesture of aligning it with the publication of Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique just one year later

It is with this gesture that Brown is reclaimed as a feminist trailblazer. Scanlon recognizes Brown’s life as worthy of examination for many reasons, but perhaps the most important is what an analysis of Brown’s life and work might add to fill in the gaps of understanding between the second and third waves of feminism. Bad Girls Go Everywhere is particularly useful and timely both as an incredibly captivating understanding of an extremely influential life, but also because of the conflagration of feminist ideas that collide in mass media under the moniker of third wave (and even fourth wave) feminism. Scanlon’s work is outstanding in that it doesn’t simply position Brown’s life as a history that helps to tell the story, but critically aligns Brown with notable feminist moments and fixtures in order to shine a light on a woman who once was so troubling to feminism.

This fresh look at Brown honors her work in a theoretical way that brings not only an excellent example of how to “do” contemporary feminist writing to the table, it also brings forth a new version of an old feminist.

Written by: Dr. Julie E. Ferris, September 6th 2009