Spectacular Blackness

Spectacular Blackness
Author: Amy Abugo Ongiri
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2010
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0813928591

Exploring the interface between the cultural politics of the Black Power and the Black Arts movements and the production of postwar African American popular culture, Amy Ongiri shows how the reliance of Black politics on an oppositional image of African Americans was the formative moment in the construction of "authentic blackness" as a cultural identity. While other books have adopted either a literary approach to the language, poetry, and arts of these movements or a historical analysis of them, Ongiri's captures the cultural and political interconnections of the postwar period by using an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from cinema studies and music theory. She traces the emergence of this Black aesthetic from its origin in the Black Power movement's emphasis on the creation of visual icons and the Black Arts movement's celebration of urban vernacular culture.

Spectacular Politics

Spectacular Politics
Author: Matthew N Truesdell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 1997-06-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195344464

Drawing on newspapers, archival sources, and memoirs, Spectacular Politics shows how, as President of the Second Republic and then as Emperor Napoleon III, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte used public speech and spectacle to dazzle and seduce the French population, helping to pioneer the modern techniques of image politics and the manipulation of a mass electorate. Elected President of the Second Republic in 1848, the year of the inception of universal male suffrage, this nephew of Napoleon I overthrew that Republic in 1851 to establish himself as Emperor Napoleon III, a title he kept for almost twenty years. During this period, Louis-Napoleon used events as diverse as the annual national holiday on the birthday of Napoleon I, the glitzy inaugurations of Paris's new streets, the universal expositions, and the many military reviews of the time to stage elaborate public celebrations. Author Matthew Truesdell shows how these events were more than just festive amusements, but were in fact some of Louis-Napoleon's key tools in the projection before a mass audience of powerful images that allowed him to present himself as the incarnation of the national will and the ideal leader for the age. His ability to package his ideas in short, appealing verbal slogans made him one of the most successful political orators in French history. He had a knack for coming up with the felicitous phrase, the emotionally engaging slogan that summed up his policy in simple terms and was infinitely repeated in newspapers, speeches, songs, and poems, in the "soundbite" style that dominates politics today. But this study also goes beyond the story of Louis-Napoleon's attempts to manipulate public opinion to examine how his political opponents--especially the republicans--used similar techniques in their ultimately successful effort to supplant his regime. Spectacular Politics makes a significant contribution to the larger history of the discovery of image and spectacle as tools of political manipulation. It will be of interest to scholars of modern French history, modern Europe, and the history of politics.

Securing the Spectacular City

Securing the Spectacular City
Author: Timothy A. Gibson
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2004
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780739105696

Seattle's project of 'downtown revitalization' is often touted as a civic endeavour that serves the community as a whole. Gibson questions that assumption. He examines the trade-off between the gain produced by redevelopment and the loss of public space.

Spectacular Vernaculars

Spectacular Vernaculars
Author: Russell A. Potter
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780791426258

Viewing hip-hop as the postmodern successor to African American culture's Jazz modernism, this book examines hip-hop music's role in the history of the African-American experience.

Spectacular Modernity

Spectacular Modernity
Author: Lisa Blackmore
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2017-07-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822982366

In cultural history, the 1950s in Venezuela are commonly celebrated as a golden age of modernity, realized by a booming oil economy, dazzling modernist architecture, and nationwide modernization projects. But this is only half the story. In this path-breaking study, Lisa Blackmore reframes the concept of modernity as a complex cultural formation in which modern aesthetics became deeply entangled with authoritarian politics. Drawing on extensive archival research and presenting a wealth of previously unpublished visual materials, Blackmore revisits the decade-long dictatorship to unearth the spectacles of progress that offset repression and censorship. Analyses of a wide range of case studies—from housing projects to agricultural colonies, urban monuments to official exhibitions, and carnival processions to consumerculture—reveal the manifold apparatuses that mythologized visionary leadership, advocated technocratic development, and presented military rule as the only route to progress. Offering a sharp corrective to depoliticized accounts of the period, Spectacular Modernity instead exposes how Venezuelans were promised a radically transformed landscape in exchange for their democratic freedoms.

The Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts Movement
Author: James Smethurst
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2006-03-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 080787650X

Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement. Taking a regional approach, Smethurst examines local expressions of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement distinctive in its geographical reach and diversity, while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally changed American attitudes about the relationship between popular culture and "high" art and dramatically transformed the landscape of public funding for the arts.

A Spectacular Secret

A Spectacular Secret
Author: Jacqueline Goldsby
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022679198X

This incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America's national life—the history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans. Jacqueline Goldsby shows that lynching cannot be explained away as a phenomenon peculiar to the South or as the perverse culmination of racist politics. Rather, lynching—a highly visible form of social violence that has historically been shrouded in secrecy—was in fact a fundamental part of the national consciousness whose cultural logic played a pivotal role in the making of American modernity. To pursue this argument, Goldsby traces lynching's history by taking up select mob murders and studying them together with key literary works. She focuses on three prominent authors—Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Stephen Crane, and James Weldon Johnson—and shows how their own encounters with lynching influenced their analyses of it. She also examines a recently assembled archive of evidence—lynching photographs—to show how photography structured the nation's perception of lynching violence before World War I. Finally, Goldsby considers the way lynching persisted into the twentieth century, discussing the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and the ballad-elegies of Gwendolyn Brooks to which his murder gave rise. An empathic and perceptive work, A Spectacular Secret will make an important contribution to the study of American history and literature.

Symbolism and Power in Central Asia

Symbolism and Power in Central Asia
Author: Sally N. Cummings
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317986997

With the collapse of communism, post-communist societies scrambled to find meaning to their new independence. Central Asia was no exception. Events, relationships, gestures, spatial units and objects produced, conveyed and interpreted meaning. The new power container of the five independent states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan would significantly influence this process of signification. Post-Soviet Central Asia is an intriguing field to examine this transformation: a region which did not see an organised independence movement develop prior to Soviet implosion at the centre, it provokes questions about how symbolisation begins in the absence of a national will to do so. The transformation overnight of Soviet republic into sovereign state provokes questions about how the process of communism-turned-nationalism could become symbolised, and what specific role symbols came to play in these early years of independence. Characterized by authoritarianism since 1991, the region’s ruling elites have enjoyed disproportionate access to knowledge and to deciding what, how and when that knowledge should be applied. The first of its kind on Central Asia, this book not only widens our understandings of developments in this geopolitically important region but also contributes to broader studies of representation, ritual, power and identity. This book was published as a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies.

Media Control

Media Control
Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2011-01-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 160980015X

Noam Chomsky’s backpocket classic on wartime propaganda and opinion control begins by asserting two models of democracy—one in which the public actively participates, and one in which the public is manipulated and controlled. According to Chomsky, "propaganda is to democracy as the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state," and the mass media is the primary vehicle for delivering propaganda in the United States. From an examination of how Woodrow Wilson’s Creel Commission "succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population," to Bush Sr.'s war on Iraq, Chomsky examines how the mass media and public relations industries have been used as propaganda to generate public support for going to war. Chomsky further touches on how the modern public relations industry has been influenced by Walter Lippmann’s theory of "spectator democracy," in which the public is seen as a "bewildered herd" that needs to be directed, not empowered; and how the public relations industry in the United States focuses on "controlling the public mind," and not on informing it. Media Control is an invaluable primer on the secret workings of disinformation in democratic societies.

The Conservative Sensibility

The Conservative Sensibility
Author: George F. Will
Publisher: Hachette Books
Total Pages: 598
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0316480916

The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist's "astonishing" and "enthralling" New York Times bestseller and Notable Book about how the Founders' belief in natural rights created a great American political tradition (Booklist) -- "easily one of the best books on American Conservatism ever written" (Jonah Goldberg). For more than four decades, George F. Will has attempted to discern the principles of the Western political tradition and apply them to America's civic life. Today, the stakes could hardly be higher. Vital questions about the nature of man, of rights, of equality, of majority rule are bubbling just beneath the surface of daily events in America. The Founders' vision, articulated first in the Declaration of Independence and carried out in the Constitution, gave the new republic a framework for government unique in world history. Their beliefs in natural rights, limited government, religious freedom, and in human virtue and dignity ushered in two centuries of American prosperity. Now, as Will shows, conservatism is under threat -- both from progressives and elements inside the Republican Party. America has become an administrative state, while destructive trends have overtaken family life and higher education. Semi-autonomous executive agencies wield essentially unaccountable power. Congress has failed in its duty to exercise its legislative powers. And the executive branch has slipped the Constitution's leash. In the intellectual battle between the vision of Founding Fathers like James Madison, who advanced the notion of natural rights that pre-exist government, and the progressivism advanced by Woodrow Wilson, the Founders have been losing. It's time to reverse America's political fortunes. Expansive, intellectually thrilling, and written with the erudite wit that has made Will beloved by millions of readers, The Conservative Sensibility is an extraordinary new book from one of America's most celebrated political writers.