THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO GLOBAL

POPULAR CULTURE

Research on popular culture is a dynamic, fast-growing domain. In scholarly terms, it

cuts across many areas, including communication studies, sociology, history, American
studies, anthropology, literature, journalism, folklore, economics, and media and cultural
studies. The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture provides an authoritative,
up-to-date, intellectually broad, internationally-aware, and conceptually agile guide to
the most important aspects of popular culture scholarship.
Specifically, this Companion includes:

• interdisciplinary models and approaches for analyzing popular culture;

• wide-ranging case studies;
• discussions of economic and policy underpinnings;
• analysis of textual manifestations of popular culture;
• examinations of political, social, and cultural dynamics; and
• discussions of emerging issues such as ecological sustainability and labor.

Featuring scholarly voices from across six continents, The Routledge Companion to Global
Popular Culture presents a nuanced and wide-ranging survey of popular culture research.

Toby Miller is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of California,

Riverside, the Sir Walter Murdoch Professor of Cultural Policy Studies at Murdoch
University, and Professor of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University.
He is the author and editor of more than thirty books, including Television Studies: The
Basics and The Contemporary Hollywood Reader.
This page intentionally left blank
 THE ROUTLEDGE
COMPANION TO GLOBAL
POPULAR CULTURE

Edited by Toby Miller

First published 2015
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of
the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

The Routledge companion to global popular culture/edited by Toby Miller.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Popular culture. 2. Civilization. 3. Social history. 4. Culture. I. Miller, Toby, editor.
HM621.R685 2014
306—dc23
2014021198

ISBN: 978-0-415-64147-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-08184-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Goudy
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
 CONTENTS

List of Figures ix
List of Tables xi
Notes on Contributors xii
Acknowledgments xxii

Introduction: Global Popular Culture 1

TOBY MILLER

PART I
Theories

1 Political Economy 13
VINCENT MOSCO
2 Theoretically Accounting for Television Formats in the New
International Division of Cultural Labour 23
ANTHONY QUINN
3 Social Semiotics 36
BOB HODGE
4 Audiences: The Lived Experience of Popular Culture 45
HELEN WOOD
5 The Media and Democratization 56
GRAEME TURNER
6 Participation (Un)Limited: Social Media and the Prospects of
a Common Culture 66
MARISOL SANDOVAL
7 Designing Affective Consumers: Emotion Analysis in
Market Research 77
KELLY GATES
8 The Metrics, Reloaded 93
SHAWN SHIMPACH
9 Roland Barthes’s Mythologies: A Breakthrough Contribution
to the Study of Mass Culture 103
DANA POLAN

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 CO N TEN T S

10 The Humdrum 112

ALEC MCHOUL
11 Celebrity 119
JO LITTLER
12 Celebrities in Global Development 128
KARIN GWINN WILKINS
13 Relationbits: You, Me and the Other 137
ANA MARÍA MUNAR AND RICHARD EK
14 Studying Change in Popular Culture: A “Middle-Range” Approach 149
STUART CUNNINGHAM AND JON SILVER
15 Externalism and Linked Brains: Popular Culture as a
Knowledge-Creating Deme 159
JOHN HARTLEY

PART II
Genres

16 De Do Do Do, De Da Da Dadaism: Popular Culture and

the Avant-Garde 175
SCOTT MACKENZIE
17 Privatization Is the New Black: Quality Television and the
Re-Fashioning of the U.S. Prison Industrial Complex 187
MARIA PRAMAGGIORE
18 The Money Shot in Feminist Queer and Mainstream Pornographies 197
TIFFANY SOSTAR AND REBECCA SULLIVAN
19 The Horrors of Slavery and Modes of Representation in Amistad
and 12 Years a Slave 207
DOUGLAS KELLNER
20 Black Frankenstein and Racial Neoliberialism in Contemporary
American Cinema: Reanimating Racial Monsters in Changing Lanes 229
MICHAEL G. LACY
21 Nonverbal Signals as Key to Howard Hawks’ Cinema:
The Importance of Adaptors in His Girl Friday 244
PAULA REQUEIJO REY
22 The Labor of Classical Maternal Melodramas 259
KATHLEEN A. MCHUGH
23 Agitprop Rap? “Ill Manors” and the Impotent Indifference
of Social Protest 268
MIGUEL MERA
24 World Music: The Fabrication of a Genre 282
TIMOTHY D. TAYLOR

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25 The Shifting Boundaries of Jazz and/in Popular Culture 292

SILVIO WAISBORD
26 Body, Space and Authenticity in Shakira’s Video for “My Hips
Don’t Lie” 301
ANAMARIA TAMAYO DUQUE
27 “We Cannot Live in Our Own Neighborhood”: An Approach to the
Construction of Intercultural Communication in Television News 308
LEONARDA GARCÍA-JIMÉNEZ, MIQUEL RODRIGO-ALSINA,
AND ANTONIO PINEDA
28 Online Tabloid Newspapers 323
DAVID ROWE
29 Media Representation of Science and Health: The Case of Coma 333
JENNY KITZINGER
30 Mass Movement: Popular Culture and the End of the Corset 342
SARAH BERRY
31 Shirley Temple: Child Star 356
GEOFF LEALAND
32 Retro in Contemporary Bombay Cinema 366
RANJANI MAZUMDAR

PART III
Places

33 The Personal Is Political: The Political Economy of

Noncommercial Radio Broadcasting in the United States 379
ROBERT W. MCCHESNEY
34 Little Hollywoods: The Cultural Impacts of Runaway
Film Production 388
VICKI MAYER
35 The Next Ronald Reagan? Celebrity, Social Entrepreneurism,
and the Case of Brazilian TV Host Luciano Huck 397
BRUNO CAMPANELLA
36 Solidarity Matters: Global Solidarity, Revolution and Indigenous
Peoples in Latin America 407
ROY KRØVEL
37 Performing Native Identities: Human Displays and Indigenous
Activism in Marcos’ Philippines 417
TALITHA ESPIRITU
38 “Like” It or Not: The Impact of Facebook and Social
Networking Sites on Adolescents’ Responses to Peer Influence 426
DREW P. CINGEL AND ELLEN WARTELLA

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 CO N TEN T S

39 Gallipoli, Tourism and Australian Nationalism 436

JIM MCKAY AND BRAD WEST
40 ‘Creativity Is for People – Art’s for Posh People’: Popular Culture
and the UK’s New Labour Government 449
KATE OAKLEY
41 The Politics and Possibilities of Media Reform: Lessons
from the UK 458
NATALIE FENTON AND DES FREEDMAN
42 Spaces of Emotions: Technology, Media and Affective Activism 471
INKA SALOVAARA
43 Asian Popular Culture Review 481
ANTHONY Y. H. FUNG, JOHN NGUYET ERNI, AND
FRANCES YANG
44 Capitals without Countries: Cairo and Beirut in English 492
JENINE ABBOUSHI
45 La Sape: Fashion and Performance 500
DOMINIC THOMAS
46 “Popular Culture” in a Changing Brazil 510
EDSON FARIAS AND BIANCA FREIRE-MEDEIROS
Index 519

viii
 FIGURES

2.1 The circuit of capital in the case of the format trade. After Fuchs, 2009 26
2.2 A beneficial ownership analysis of the 26 version format
Undercover Boss 27
2.3 The field of television production in the Republic of Ireland 29
2.4 The means of production (mp) in the circuit of capital of the
format trade 33
18.1 Courtney Trouble’s Nostalgia. Reprinted with permission from
TroubleFilms 200
21.1 Molly grabs her purse while she explains to the reporters that she
doesn’t have a romantic relationship with Williams 248
21.2 Molly puts her hand on her face 249
21.3 Molly puts her hand to her mouth 249
21.4 Hildy uses an alter-adaptor with Mrs. Baldwin 251
21.5 Hildy interlaces and rubs her hands 252
21.6 Hildy pinches one of her gloves 253
21.7 Walter stares at a cigarette and spins it while he tries to think
how to approach his ex-wife 254
21.8 Walter moves away and puts his right hand on his pocket 255
21.9 Walter supports both hands over the telephone 255
21.10 Walter’s and Louie’s clothing references their relationship 256
23.1 Plan B: “Get your bloody tools out” 274
23.2 Leader of the pack 274
23.3 “Ill Manors” sample construction derived from Shostakovich’s
Symphony No. 7, Fourth Movement 276
23.4 Spectrogram showing the build to the final chorus in “Ill Manors” 277
23.5 Lyrics to “Ill Manors” 278
30.1 Portrait of Catherine Parr, 1545, by Master John. National
Portrait Gallery, London 344
30.2 Jean-Simon Bertélemy’s costume designs for Le Triomphe de
Trajan, an opera by Louis-Luc Loiseau de Persuis and Jean-François
Le Sueur, 1807. Bibliotèque national de France 346
30.3 Madame Parisot, in a caricature from 1796, displaying her risqué
dancing style. The “Q” in the title is the Duke of Queensbury. Isaac
Cruikshank, British Museum 347

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 FIGURES

30.4 A satirical cartoon from the July 11, 1857 issue of Harper’s
Weekly. Caption: ARABELLA MARIA: “Only to think, Julia dear,
that our Mothers wore such ridiculous fashions as these!” BOTH:
“Ha! ha! ha! ha!” Courtesy of the Picture Collection, New York
Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations 348
30.5 “Skirt Dancing and Its Charms,” The Philadelphia Inquirer,
March 3, 1895. Vol. 132, no. 62, p. 13. © NewsBank and the
American Antiquarian Society, 2004 349
30.6 Woman Dancing, 1887, by Eadweard Muybridge. Animal Locomotion
series. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division 351
30.7 Loïe Fuller Dancing, ca. 1900, by Samuel Joshua Beckett.
Metropolitan Museum of Art 352
30.8 Isadora Duncan, ca. 1915–1923, by Arnold Genthe. Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division 352

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 TABLES

27.1 Matrix for analyzing television newscasts 311

27.2 Distribution of topics by television station 314
27.3 Subjects and actions on the television newscasts within the topic
of “conflictive interculturality” 315
27.4 Subjects and actions on the television newscasts within the topic
of “possible interculturality” 318
27.5 Subjects and actions on the television newscasts analyzed within
the topic of “unresolved interculturality” 319

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 CONTRIBUTORS

Jenine Abboushi is an Assistant Professor at the Lebanese American University, where

she teaches comparative literature and creative writing. She studied at Birzeit
University in Palestine, and did her graduate work at Columbia and Harvard. She
taught at NYU and, following a Fulbright year in Morocco, she left NYC to live and
work in Casablanca. She has published on American expansionism, French cultural
imperialism, the politics of translation, Islamism’s new media, and the relationship
between cinema and the new transnational novel. Most recently, she completed a
novel, Stars at Noon over Casablanca. She is currently writing about non-native
cultural production.

Sarah Berry is the author of Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood
(Minnesota University Press, 2000), and writes on film, fashion, media, technology
and gender. She has a PhD in Cinema Studies and a Master’s in Interactive
Telecommunications from New York University. She is an educational software
designer and developer and teaches part-time at Portland State University.

Bruno Campanella is Assistant Professor in media and cultural studies at Universidade

Federal Fluminense, Niterói. He holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and an MA in Transnational Communications
and the Global Media from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has pub-
lished the book Os Olhos do Grande Irmão: Uma etnografia dos fãs do Big Brother, and
several academic articles on reality TV, fan culture, media ethnography, celebrity, and
television studies.

Drew P. Cingel (M.A., 2012, Wake Forest University) is a doctoral student at

Northwestern University. His research focuses on children’s learning from media, as
well as adolescent–peer relationships in online environments. His work has appeared
in journals such as New Media & Society and Media Psychology.

Stuart Cunningham is Distinguished Professor of Media and Communications at

Queensland University of Technology and Director of the Australian Research
Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.

Richard Ek is Associate Professor at the Department of Service Management and

Service Studies, Lund University, Sweden. Since 2003 he has held a PhD in human
geography from Lund University. He has published on topics including critical geo-
politics, space and biopolitics and tourism. His current research interests include
nihilistic planning, mediated insularity and post-political urbanism.

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 CO N TRI BU T O R S

John Nguyet Erni is Professor and Head of the Department of Humanities and Creative
Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University, after having served as Head of the
Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong (2010–13).
An elected Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities, Erni has published
widely on international and Asia-based cultural studies, critical public health, Chinese
consumption of transnational culture, gender and sexuality in media culture, youth
popular consumption in Asia, and human rights philosophy and criticism.

Talitha Espiritu is Associate Professor of English and Film and New Media Studies at
Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Multiculturalism,
Postcoloniality and Transnational Media, Popular Culture in Asia and Social Identities. She
is currently working on a book on Philippine Cinema and the Marcos regime.

Edson Farias is a researcher at the National Council for Scientific Development

(CNPq). He is a Professor of Sociology at Brasilia University, and Professor of Program
Memory: Language and Society at the State University of Southwest Bahia. He is also
leader of the Research Group Culture, Memory and Development (CMD/UNB), and
editor of the journal Archives of CMD.

Natalie Fenton is a Professor in Media and Communications in the Department of

Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is Co-Director
of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre and Co-Director of Goldsmiths
Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. She has published widely on
issues relating to news, journalism, civil society, radical politics and new media, and
is particularly interested in rethinking understandings of public culture, the public
sphere and democracy. She is on the Board of Directors of the campaign group Hacked
Off and a founding member of the Media Reform Coalition.

Des Freedman is a Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University

of London. He is the author of The Contradictions of Media Power (2014), The Politics
of Media Policy (2008), co-author (with James Curran and Natalie Fenton) of
Misunderstanding the Internet (2012), co-editor (with Michael Bailey) of The Assault
on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance (2011) and co-editor (with Daya Thussu) of
Media and Terrorism: Global Perspectives (2011). He is the chair of the UK Media
Reform Coalition and on the national council of the Campaign for Press and
Broadcasting Freedom. He is an editor of the journal Global Media and Communication
and a member of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.

Bianca Freire-Medeiros is Senior Lecturer of Sociology at Getulio Vargas Foundation

(Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), and was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Mobilities
Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University. She has published extensively, in several
languages, on urban sociology, media studies and visual culture. Her latest publication
is the book Touring Poverty (Advances in Sociology Series, Routledge, 2013).

Anthony Y. H. Fung is Director and Professor in the School of Journalism and

Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD at
the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota.

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He is also a Pearl River Chair Professor at Jinan University at Guangzhou, China. His
research interests and teaching focus on popular culture and cultural studies, popular
music, gender and youth identity, cultural industries and policy, and new media stud-
ies. He published widely in international journals, and authored and edited more than
ten Chinese and English books.

Leonarda García-Jiménez, PhD in Communication, is Associate Professor,

Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Murcia (Spain). She
earned her postdoctoral education at the University of Colorado, Boulder (USA).
She has also taught and researched in several Spanish, Swiss and Mexican univer-
sities. She has completed more than fifty works (conferences, articles, books, etc.)
in culture, theory of communication, and media theory. Some of her work appears
in Communication Monographs, European Journal of Communication, Studies in
Communication Sciences, Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of
Communication, Razón y Palabra, Global Media Journal and Zer, among others. She
regularly participates in the main conferences of the field of communication
(ECREA, ICA, NCA, WAPOR, IAMCR, FELAFACS, Bienal Iberoamericana de
Comunicación, and IBERCOM).

Kelly Gates is Associate Professor of Communication, Science Studies, and Critical

Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her work navigates the
intersections of cultural and media studies, science and technology studies, and sur-
veillance studies. She is author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology
and the Culture of Surveillance (NYU Press, 2011) and volume editor of the International
Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Volume 6: Media Studies Futures (Wiley-Blackwell,
2013).

John Hartley, AM, is Professor of Cultural Science and Director of the Centre for
Culture and Technology at Curtin University, Australia, and Professor of Journalism,
Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, Wales. He has written many books
and articles in cultural studies, journalism, media studies and creative industries—
most recently, Cultural Science (Bloomsbury; with Jason Potts). His first book, Reading
Television (with John Fiske), established TV studies as a distinct field. Since then,
Hartley has studied media citizenship, and led a team working on the transformation
of the creative economy in the digital era. His current research focuses on cultural
science. He was head of the Journalism School at Cardiff University and Dean of the
Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, where he later
won an Australia Research Council Federation Fellowship. He was awarded the Order
of Australia in 2009.

Bob Hodge is Foundation Professor of Humanities in the Institute for Culture and
Society, University of Western Sydney. After receiving his doctorate from Cambridge
University he taught at universities in UK and Australia. He was co-author of a sem-
inal book on social semiotics with Gunther Kress (Social Semiotics, Polity, 1988), and
has applied the theories to different aspects of popular culture: in Australia (Myths of
Oz, Allen and Unwin, 1987, with John Fiske and Graeme Turner), in China (Politics
of Chinese Language and Culture, Routledge, 1998, with Kam Louie) and Mexico
(Mexico and Its Others, Legas, 2010, with Gabriela Coronado).

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Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at UCLA and
is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture, including
Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism; Camera Politica; Critical Theory, Marxism,
and Modernity; Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond; works in
social theory and cultural studies, such as Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism,
Media Culture and Media Spectacle; a trilogy of books on postmodern theory with Steve
Best; and a trilogy of books on the media and the Bush administration. His website is
at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html.

Jenny Kitzinger is Professor of Communications Research at Cardiff University and

Co-Director of the Cardiff–York Chronic Disorders of Consciousness Research
Centre, which specialize in examining social and ethical aspects of the vegetative and
minimally conscious state.

Roy Krøvel has a PhD in History. His dissertation was on the relationship between the
media and guerrilla organizations and indigenous peoples in Mexico and Central
America. He is also a civil engineer specializing in the environment and risk analysis.
Krøvel is currently Professor of Journalism at Oslo and Akershus University College
of Applied Sciences in Norway and Professor II in Latin American Area Studies at
University of Oslo. Outside academia, Krøvel has published several books on
journalism and conflict. He coordinates research and higher education projects in
cooperation with indigenous and communitarian universities in Latin America.

Michael G. Lacy, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Queens College,

City University of New York, in Queens, New York. His areas of teaching, scholarship,
and expertise are rhetoric, race, culture, and politics. He is co-author (with Kent Ono)
of Critical Rhetorics of Race, a collection of critical race studies published by NYU Press
in 2011, and co-author (with Mary Triece) of Race and Hegemonic Struggle: Pop
Culture, Politics, and Protest, published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in
2014. In addition, his research appears in the Communication Yearbook 32, The Howard
Journal of Communications, and The Journal of Intercultural and International
Communication. He has served as principal investigator and writer for several reports
published by the Education Commission of the States and online education journals,
as well as reviewed grants for the U.S. Department of Education. Professor Lacy has
taught and delivered lectures at several colleges and universities and received several
teaching awards and commendations, including being listed in Who’s Who among
American Teachers.

Geoff Lealand is an Associate Professor in Screen and Media Studies, University of

Waikato, New Zealand, and is currently researching the Shirley Temple ‘double’
competitions held in New Zealand in the 1930s. He can be contacted at lealand@
waikato.ac.nz; his website is http://cinemasofnz.info.

Jo Littler PhD works at City University, London, UK. She has written widely on celeb-
rity, having edited the “Celebrity” issue of Mediactive 1:2 (2004); “Celebrity and the
Transnational,” in Celebrity Studies 2:1 (2011); and—with Mike Goodman—“Celebrity
Ecologies,” in Celebrity Studies 4:3 (2013). Other celebrity pieces include a chapter on
CEOs in Holmes and Redmond (eds.), A Reader in Stardom and Celebrity, Sage 2007,

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and “I Feel Your Pain: Celebrity Do-Gooding, Cosmopolitan Caring and the
Globalised Soul” in Social Semiotics, 18:2 (2008). She is the author of Radical
Consumption (Open University Press, 2009) and is on the editorial boards of Cultural
Studies, Soundings and Celebrity Studies.

Scott MacKenzie teaches Film and Media at Queen’s University, where he is also cross-
appointed to the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies. His books include Cinema
and Nation (with Mette Hjort, Routledge, 2000); Purity and Provocation: Dogma ‘95
(with Mette Hjort, BFI, 2003); Screening Québec: Québécois Moving Images, National
Identity and the Public Sphere (Manchester UP, 2004); The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works
of John Greyson (with Brenda Longfellow and Thomas Waugh, McGill-Queen’s UP,
2013); Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures (University of California Press,
2014); Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (with Anna Stenport, Edinburgh UP, 2014);
and The Cinema, Too, Must Be Destroyed: The Films of Guy Debord (Manchester UP,
forthcoming).

Vicki Mayer is Professor of Communication at Tulane University in the U.S. She is

editor of the international journal Television & New Media and directs the cultural
archive project MediaNOLA.org. She is the author of Below the Line: Producers and
Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Duke UP, 2011) and Producing
Dreams, Consuming Youth: Mexican Americans and Mass Media (Rutgers, 2003). She
has edited volumes on media production for The International Encyclopedia of Media
Studies (Blackwell, 2013) and Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries
(Routledge, 2010).

Ranjani Mazumdar teaches Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics,
Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her publications focus on urban cultures, popular cin-
ema, gender and the cinematic city. She is the author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive
of the City (2007) and co-author with Nitin Govil of the forthcoming The Indian Film
Industry (2014). She has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and her productions
include Delhi Diary 2001 and The Power of the Image (Co-Directed). Her current
research focuses on globalization and film culture, the visual culture of film posters
and the intersection of technology, travel and design in 1960s Bombay cinema.

Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of

Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. McChesney has
written or edited 23 books. His most recently published books are: with John Nichols,
Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex Is Destroying America
(Nation Books, 2012); Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against
Democracy (New Press, 2013); and, with John Bellamy Foster, The Endless Crisis: How
Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China
(Monthly Review Press, 2012). McChesney has also written some 105 journal articles,
150 book chapters and another 300 newspaper pieces, magazine articles and book
reviews. His work has been professionally translated into 31 languages.

Alec McHoul retired in 2007 from his Professorship in the School of Arts at Murdoch
University—though no-one ever told him what he was Professor of. He is now a
casual tutor on a range of courses. Having published widely in the interdisciplinary

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field of sociology and language studies, he is mostly dedicated to growing Australian

native plants on his semi-rural property and birdwatching. For more details, go to:
http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/mchoul/.

Kathleen A. McHugh (mchughla@ucla.edu), a Professor of English and Cinema and

Media Studies at UCLA, is the author of Jane Campion (Illinois, 2007), and American
Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama (Oxford, 1999), the co-
editor of South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre and National Cinema
(2005, 2008) and the co-editor of a special issue of SIGNS on Film Feminisms. She
has published articles on feminist filmmakers, experimental autobiography, domestic-
ity, transnational media feminisms, global melodrama, and the avant-garde in camera
obscura, Cultural Studies, Jump Cut, Screen, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Velvet Light
Trap.

Jim McKay is Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Critical and Cultural
Studies at the University of Queensland. He is former editor of the International Review
for the Sociology of Sport and is interested in the links among globalization, nationalism
and popular culture. Some of his recent publications are “‘We Didn’t Want to Do a
Dial-a-Haka’: Performing New Zealand Nationhood in Turkey” (Journal of Sport &
Tourism); “A Critique of the Militarisation of Australian History and Culture Thesis:
The Case of Anzac Battlefield Tourism” (PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary
International Studies); and “‘Lay Down Sally’: Media Narratives of Failure in Australian
Sport” (Journal of Australian Studies).

Miguel Mera is a screen composer who is also widely published in music and moving
image studies. His film and television music has been screened and broadcast around
the world. Miguel is the author of Mychael Danna’s The Ice Storm: A Film Score Guide,
the editor of European Film Music, and editor of special issues of Ethnomusicology
Forum (“Screened Music Global Perspectives”) and Music, Sound and the Moving
Image (“Invention/Re-invention”). He is Deputy Head of the Department of Music at
City University London.

Toby Miller is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of California,

Riverside, the Sir Walter Murdoch Professor of Cultural Policy Studies at Murdoch
University, Australia, and Professor of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at
Cardiff University. He is the author and editor of more than thirty books, including
Television Studies: The Basics and The Contemporary Hollywood Reader.

Vincent Mosco is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Queen’s University, Canada, where

he was Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society and head of the
Department of Sociology. His most recent book is To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent
World, Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Ana María Munar is Associate Professor in the Department of International Economics

and Management, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. She holds an MSc in
political science and a PhD in business and economics. Her research interests are
policy and trends in tourism education, information and communication technolo-
gies, globalization processes and destination branding. Her latest work provides

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insights in the field of digital critical tourism studies. Her articles examine the role of
digital mediation on cultural change, social reproduction and higher education.

Kate Oakley is Professor of Cultural Policy at the School of Media and Communication,
University of Leeds. Her work focuses on the relationship between cultural produc-
tion, place, labour and policy. Her latest book is Cultural Policy, co-written with David
Bell and published by Routledge.

Antonio Pineda, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Audiovisual

Communication, Advertising and Literature at the University of Seville, Spain. He
has researched at several Spanish universities. His main current interests are the the-
oretical and empirical study of propaganda and the relationships between ideology and
the media.

Dana Polan is a Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University and is the author
of eight books on film and media studies.

Maria Pramaggiore is Professor and Head of Media Studies at NUI Maynooth in Co.
Kildare, Ireland. She is the co-author (with Tom Wallis) of Film: A Critical Introduction
(2011), the author of Neil Jordan (2008) and Irish and African American Cinema since
1980 (2007), and the co-editor of Representing Bisexualities (1996). She was a Fulbright
Fellow at University College Cork in 2007. She has published widely on feminism,
queer theory, and national identity, in essays ranging from Jane Fonda’s star persona
to sound in post 9/11 films and the child in Spanish horror. She is completing a book
on Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Her current projects also include a collection on
the voice in documentary, a project on the Irish equine imaginary, and a book on
dynastic celebrity.

Anthony Quinn worked for a decade as a journalist and researcher for national online,
print, radio and television outlets in the Republic of Ireland. He lectures in visual
culture, mass communication and journalism at the University of Limerick, and his
research focuses on media work practices.

Paula Requeijo Rey is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the European Project
CriCoRM (Crisis Communication and Risk Management). Previously, she worked for
Complutense, University of Madrid, Spain, where she developed her doctoral thesis.
She has written more than twenty articles and book chapters related to different com-
munication aspects, and has participated in various national and European research
projects.

Miquel Rodrigo-Alsina, PhD, is Professor of Communication Theories at Universitat

Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. He is coordinator of the Audiovisual Communication
research group UNICA, and has researched at the Research Center for Language and
Semiotic Studies (Indiana University) and at the Center for the Study of
Communication and Culture (Saint Louis University).

David Rowe is Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society,
University of Western Sydney, Australia. His most recent books are Digital Media

xviii
 CO N TRI BU T O R S

Sport: Technology, Power and Culture in the Network Society (co-edited, Routledge,
2013) and Sport, Public Broadcasting, and Cultural Citizenship: Signal Lost? (co-edited,
Routledge, 2014).

Inka Salovaara is an Associate Professor at the Department of Aesthetics and

Communication, Media Science, Aarhus University, Denmark. Her present research
focuses on digital journalism, participatory cultures, and computational thinking. Her
research interests also include media and democratisation in transitional societies,
especially on digital media and civic activism. Other research interests include digital
media freedom and pluralism. She has been a Lecturer and Researcher at the
Department of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland; Associate Professor
in Communication at Tallinn University, Estonia; and Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s
College, Oxford, UK, as well as at Central European University, Hungary; the
University of Leuven, Belgium; and the University of Westminster, UK. She has con-
tributed chapters and articles to a number of edited collections and journals. Her
recent books include Communicating the Nation (with Anna Roosvall, 2010), Media
Geographies. Newspapers and Economic Crisis (2009), and Manufacturing Europe: Spaces
of Democracy, Diversity and Communication (editor, 2009).

Marisol Sandoval is a Lecturer at the Department of Culture and Creative Industries at

City University, London. She is author of From Corporate to Social Media: Critical
Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility in Media and Communication Industries
(Routledge, 2014) and managing editor of the open-access journal tripleC:
Communication, Capitalism and Critique.

Shawn Shimpach is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and the

Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts in
Amherst. He is author of Television in Transition: The Life and Afterlife of the Narrative
Action Hero (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

Jon Silver is Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Media at Queensland
University of Technology, Australia. His research focuses on strategic issues facing
screen content businesses, especially the impacts of new technology on distribution
and exhibition.

Tiffany Sostar is a genderqueer bisexual feminist activist and academic at the University
of Calgary. She studies representations of sexuality, gender, and consent in contempo-
rary media, with a focus on liminal and illegible identities, such as non-binary gender
and non-monosexualities.

Rebecca Sullivan is a Professor in the Department of English, the Director of the

Institute for Gender Research, and the Coordinator of the Women’s Studies program
at the University of Calgary.

Anamaria Tamayo Duque is a Professor of Dance Theory, Cultural Studies and

Anthropology at the Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia. She studied Anthropology
at the Universidad de Antioquia and Critical Dance Studies at the University of
California, Riverside. Her dissertation, En Colombia se baila así: Intersectional Bodies,

xix
 CO N TRI BU T O R S

Race, Gender and Nation Building in the Barranquilla Carnival, addresses the processes
of creation of national identity discourses through the performing female bodies of the
Barranquilla carnival, interrogating the national formation myths embedded in
Cumbia dancing, carnival queens and pop icons.

Timothy D. Taylor is a Professor in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the

University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Global Pop: World Music,
World Markets (Routledge, 1997), Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture
(Routledge, 2001), Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Duke, 2007), and
The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture (Chicago,
2012), and co-editor, with Mark Katz and Tony Grajeda, of Music, Sound, and
Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio
(Duke, 2012). He is currently completing a book about music in today’s capitalism.

Dominic Thomas is Madeleine L. Letessier Professor of French and Francophone

Studies at UCLA. He is the author of Black France: Colonialism, Immigration and
Transnationalism (2007), Museums in Postcolonial Europe (editor, Routledge, 2009),
Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism (2013), and The
Invention of Race (editor, Routledge, 2014).

Graeme Turner is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies in the Centre for Critical and
Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. His most recent publica-
tions include (with Anna Cristina Pertierra) Locating Television: Zones of Consumption
(Routledge, 2013), What’s Become of Cultural Studies? (Sage, 2012), and a revised
second edition of Understanding Celebrity (Sage, 2014).

Silvio Waisbord is a Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George
Washington University.

Ellen Wartella (PhD, University of Minnesota 1977) is the Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa
Al-thani Professor of Communication, Professor of Psychology, Professor of Human
Development and Social Policy, and Professor of Medical Social Sciences at
Northwestern University. She is Director of the Center on Media and Human
Development and chair of the Department of Communication Studies. She is a lead-
ing scholar of the role of media in children’s development and serves on a variety of
national and international boards and committees on children’s issues.

Brad West is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of South Australia. He is

the co-founder of the Cultural Sociology Group of the Australian Sociological
Association and is a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale
University. Amongst other professional duties, he sits on the advisory editorial boards
of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology and Tourist Studies. His research focuses
on commemoration, crisis and the changing dynamics of national collective memory.
Current research projects include examining the role of national discourses in fostering
humanitarian aid and ethnographic investigations of war tourism sites in Vietnam.

Karin Gwinn Wilkins (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) serves as Professor of Media

Studies, Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Chair, Global Studies

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 CO N TRI BU T O R S

Bridging Disciplines Program, at the University of Texas at Austin. Wilkins has won
numerous awards for her research, service and teaching. Her work addresses scholar-
ship in the fields of development communication, global communication, and political
engagement. Selected recent works include Handbook of Development Communication
and Social Change (editor, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014); New Agendas in Global
Communication (editor, Routledge, 2013); Questioning Numbers: How to Read and
Critique Research (Oxford University Press, 2011); and Home/Land/Security: What We
Learn about Arab Communities from Action Adventure Film (Lexington Books, 2008),
as well as journal publications in Nordicom; Communication Theory; Media, Culture &
Society; Communication, Culture & Critique; International Journal of Communication;
and Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies.

Helen Wood is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester,

UK. She is author of two audience research books, Talking with Television (2009) and,
with Beverley Skeggs, Reacting to Reality Television (2012). She has published widely
on television and audiences and is associate editor of the journals Ethnography and the
European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Frances Yang is a PhD candidate in both Gender Studies and Journalism and
Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She obtained her Master’s
degree at the Journalism and Communication School of the Renmin University of
China. She has also been a senior editor at Women’s Health magazine. Her research
interests focus on popular culture, gender studies, and cultural studies.

xxi
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank Erica Wetter and Simon Jacobs at Routledge for their patience and
skill. The authors have been wonderful. Several people inspired me during the life of
this project, notably Anamaria Tamayo Duque, Marta Hernández Salván, Sara Ayech,
and Noel King. Some may have driven me crazy, but the freeway opened up as a
consequence.
Toby Miller, London, May 2014

xxii
 INTRODUCTION
Global Popular Culture
Toby Miller

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen debuted on US network TV as twin babies in the situation
comedy Full House (ABC 1987–95). During that period, a merchandising company
emerged to capitalize on their prominence via music, books, and videos. When the teen-
aged twins went on to launch a clothing line, Hollywood Reporter magazine nominated
them as “the most powerful young women in Hollywood.” At 18, each was worth over
US$130 million, derived from US$1.4 billion in sales (Shade and Porter 2008).
Numerous Bangladeshi women, whose names I do not know, made the clothing line
owned and endorsed by the cute-as-a-button Olsens, which was heralded as a chic
“homeless look.” These employees worked for wages of between US$189.28 and
US$436.80 a year, and were denied mandatory paid maternity leave. The New
International Division Cultural Labor thus saw a fashion line neatly—and gruesomely—
index the difference in choices between the Olsens and their employees. Meanwhile,
pro-anorexia web sites highlighted the twins as role models, and 2011 found the bubbly
twosome releasing an alligator backpack retailing at US$39,000 (Shade and Porter
2008; Lipczynska 2007; http://www.globallabourrights.org/press/maternity-leave-cam-
paign-mary-kate-and-ashley-olsen; Smith, 2014).
The Olsens’ careers have seen them move across shifting discourses of femininity, in
a world where women may stand for domestic values, be high-profile actors in public
life, or live as low-paid, exploited workers—sometimes next door, sometimes next con-
tinent. As part of that shift, from a very early age the Olsens were both embroiled in and
representative of complex commodity and labor relations for which they were held
responsible. Their struggles with education, weight, and love made them subjects of
identification for many others dealing with the impact of feminism—without its ideo-
logical, organizational, and interpersonal buttressing (Probyn 2008). Their arms-length
exploitation of others is less visually central to their image, but materially crucial to it.
Such a multi-sited popular-cultural phenomenon requires consideration of the condi-
tions that underpin it in order to draw attention to a dialectical struggle between the
privileged, if sometimes traumatic, lives of the Olsens, which are routinely subject to
public scrutiny, and the infinitely harsher, equally gendered, frequently invisible labor
process on which their affluence depends. The lesson of this anecdote is that popular
culture can involve a multitude of topics and sites and necessitates a host of analytic
approaches.
 M I LLE R

For that reason, this Companion covers wide terrain, and in varied forms. It is
structured in three segments, each of which can be seen at play in the Olsen twins’ labor
narrative: theories (political economy, psychology, and feminism), genres (situation
comedy, fashion, and celebrity), and places (the US and Bangladesh).
The book’s three segments are heuristic rather than substantive divisions. Theories use
genres and come from places, and the same multiple identities apply to the other sections.
But the trichotomy is in place to permit three key ways of analyzing the popular:

• theorization, from everyday understandings to academic norms;

• generic distinctions, based on themes and qualities; and
• the places in which theories and genres occur and are modified.

The need for most books to be written in one language militates against complex
cultural analysis, for which many forms of expression exist by contrast with, for instance,
scientific or legal publishing. For that reason, and acknowledging the distinctive kinds
of English that thrive around the globe, this volume has an even greater variety of
language than is usual in a document produced by divers hands. The volume deliber-
ately lacks a unifying authorial presence, style, or form of thought. Just as some writers
are closer to textual than economic analysis, others are closer to British English than
Colombian English. This is as it should be when the addresses of the scholars involved
include fifteen countries and a dozen disciplines. That said, this introduction offers
some tentative guidelines for studying popular culture as a backdrop to the chapters that
follow it, without covering all the methods at play in the collection.
The word “popular” frequently denotes “of the people,” “by the people,” and “for the
people.” In other words, the popular both constitutes and is constituted by:

• subjects, whom it textualizes via such genres as drama, sport, and information;
• workers, who undertake that textualization through performances and recording;
and
• audiences, who receive the ensuing texts.

This inevitably connects us to culture and its many and complicated discourses.
The word ‘culture’ derives from the Latin colere, a verb to describe tending and devel-
oping agriculture (Adorno 2009: 146; Benhabib 2002: 2). With the advent of capitalism’s
division of labor, culture came both to embody instrumentalism and to abjure it, via the
industrialization of farming, on the one hand, and the cultivation of individual taste, on
the other. Eighteenth-century German, French, and Spanish dictionaries bear witness
to a metaphorical shift from agricultural cultivation to spiritual elevation. As the spread
of literacy and printing saw customs and laws passed on, governed, and adjudicated
through the written word, cultural texts supplemented and supplanted physical force as
guarantors of authority. With the Industrial Revolution, populations urbanized, food was
imported, and textual forms were exchanged. An emergent consumer society produced
such events as horse racing, opera, art exhibits, and balls. The impact of this shift was
indexed in cultural labor: poligrafi in 15th-century Venice and hacks in 18th-century
London wrote popular and influential conduct books. These works of instruction on
everyday life marked the textualization of custom and the development of new occupa-
tions. Anxieties about cultural imperialism also appeared, via Islamic debates over
Western domination (Burke and Briggs 2003; Mowlana 2000).

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 I N TRO DU C T I O N

Immanuel Kant ideologized these commercial and imperial changes, arguing that cul-
ture ensured “conformity to laws without the law.” Aesthetics could generate “morally
practical precepts,” schooling people to transcend particular interests via the develop-
ment of a “public sense, i.e. a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account
(a priori) of the mode of representation . . . to weight its judgement with the collective
reason of mankind” (1987; also see Hunter 2008). Kant envisaged an “emergence
from . . . self-incurred immaturity,” independent of religion, government, or commerce
(1991: 54).
Culture has usually been understood in two quasi-Kantian registers, via the social
sciences and the humanities. They emerged as secular alternatives to deistic knowledge
(Schelling 1914) focused on dual forms of “self-realization” (Weber 2000)—truth versus
beauty. A heuristic distinction in the 16th century (Williams 1983: 38), it became sub-
stantive as time passed. Culture was understood as a marker of differences and similari-
ties in taste and status within groups that could be explored interpretatively or
methodically.
In today’s humanities, theater, film, television, radio, art, craft, writing, music, dance,
and electronic gaming are judged by criteria of representativeness and quality, as framed
by practices of cultural criticism and history. For their part, the social sciences focus on
the languages, religions, customs, times, spaces, and exchanges of different groups, as
explored ethnographically or statistically. So whereas the humanities articulate differ-
ences within populations through symbolic norms (for example, providing some of us
with the cultural capital to appreciate high culture), the social sciences articulate such
differences through social norms (for example, legitimizing inequality through doctrines
of human capital) (Wallerstein 1989; Bourdieu 1984).
An aesthetic discourse about culture sees it elevating people above ordinary life, tran-
scending body, time, and place. Conversely, a folkloric discourse about culture expects
it to settle us into society through the wellsprings of community, as part of daily exist-
ence. And a discourse about pop idealizes fun, offering secular transcendence through
joy (Frith 1991: 106–07).
The connection of market entertainment to social identities has led to many varied
reactions. During the Industrial Revolution, anxieties about a suddenly urbanized and
educated population raised the prospect of a long-feared “ochlocracy” of “the worthless
mob” (Pufendorf 2000: 144). Theorists from both right and left argued that newly liter-
ate publics would be vulnerable to manipulation by demagogues. Bourgeois economics
assumes that rational consumers determine what is popular culture, but concerns that
people can be bamboozled by unscrupulously fluent rhetoricians have recurred through-
out the modern period. Marxism has often viewed popular culture as a route to false
consciousness that diverts the working class from recognizing its economic oppression;
feminist approaches have moved between condemning the popular as a similar distrac-
tion from gendered consciousness and celebrating it as a distinctive part of women’s
culture; and cultural studies has regarded it as a key location for the symbolic resistance
of class, race, and gender oppression alike (Smith 1987; Hall and Jefferson 1976).
From an array of political and epistemological perspectives, there has been an empha-
sis on the number and conduct of audiences to popular culture: where they came from,
how many there were, and what they did as a consequence of being present. Such con-
cerns are coupled with a focus on content: what were audiences watching when
they. . . . And so both audiences and texts are conceived as empirical entities that can
be known, via research instruments derived from sociology, psychology, literary criticism,

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 M I LLE R

demography, linguistics, communications, anthropology, accountancy, economics, and

marketing.
Perhaps the foremost theorist of popular culture in critical thinking of the kind rep-
resented in this volume is Antonio Gramsci, whose opposition to fascism in the 1920s
and ’30s is an exemplar for progressive intellectuals. Gramsci maintained that each
social group creates “organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homo-
geneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the
social and political fields”: the industrial technology, law, economy, and culture of each
group. The “‘organic’ intellectuals that every new class creates alongside itself and elab-
orates in the course of its development” assist in the emergence of that class, for example
via military expertise. Intellectuals operate in “[c]ivil society . . . the ensemble of organ-
isms commonly called ‘private,’ that of ‘political society’ or ‘the State’.” They comprise
the “‘hegemony’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society” as well as the
“‘direct domination’ or command exercised through the State and ‘juridical’ govern-
ment.” Ordinary people give “spontaneous’ consent” to the “general direction imposed
on social life by the dominant fundamental group” (Gramsci 1978: 5–7, 12). In other
words, popular culture legitimizes socio-economic-political arrangements in the public
mind and can be a site of struggle as well as domination.
The Welsh drama critic Raymond Williams (1977) used the idea of residual, domi-
nant, and emergent hegemonies to describe the process whereby class formations com-
pete over narratives that legitimize social control. Examples of these categories might
be the remains of an empire, a modern mixed economy, and neoliberal transformation
respectively. Extensive use has been made of hegemony theory beyond the Global
North. In Latin America, Gramsci’s notion of the national popular harnessing class
interests is common sense for both left and right (Massardo 1999). The same applies in
South Asia and segments of the Arab and African worlds (Patnaik 2004; Dabashi 2013;
Marks and Engels 1994).
While hegemony theory is alert to struggle rather than simply domination, some
critiques of popular culture suggest that its commercial manifestations “impress . . . the
same stamp on everything” because their organizational form necessitates repetition
rather than difference: factory-like production of films, songs, news bulletins, radio for-
mats, and programs, as if they were cars. This perspective derives from the Frankfurt
School, anti-Nazi scholars writing around the same time as Gramsci. The principals of
that School, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1977), saw consumers and citizens
as manipulated from the social order’s economic apex: “[d]omination” masquerading as
choice in a “society alienated from itself.” Culture becomes just one more industrial
process, ruled by dominant economic forces that reduced ideological or generic
innovation in favor of standardization.
Because culture’s organic laws and lores and their textual manifestations represent
each “epoch’s consciousness of itself” (Althusser 1969: 108), audiences, creators, govern-
ments, and corporations make extraordinary investments in it. For imperial Britain, the
study of culture formed “the core of the educational system” and was “believed to have
peculiar virtues in producing politicians, civil servants, Imperial administrators and leg-
islators,” incarnating and indexing “the arcane wisdom of the Establishment” (Plumb
1964: 7). Culture was expected to produce and renovate what Matthew Arnold called
“that powerful but at present somewhat narrow-toned organ, the modern Englishman”
(1875: x). These policies also informed imperial expansion through Spain’s conquista de
América, Portugal’s missão civilizadora, and France and Britain’s mission civilisatrice,

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 I N TRO DU C T I O N

creating a global anxiety about foreign cultural domination that has never subsided and
in fact been exacerbated by the global entertainment demesne of the US over the last
century (Mowlana 2000).
Critiques of this cultural imperialism have found significant uptake in the Global
South, not least for their focus on the machinery of propaganda sold to ordinary people
by powerful sovereign-states. They have enjoyed a particular purchase in Latin America,
because of the region’s proximity to the US, and in other postcolonial states whose
traditions and languages tie them to texts exported from the metropole (Segoviana
García 2011; Dorfman and Mattelart 1971). Latin Americans generated the theory of
dependent development in the 1940s to explain how the industrial take-off experienced
by Western Europe and the US had not occurred elsewhere. It gained adherents across
the Global South over the next three decades in reaction to the fact that rich societies
at the world core had become so through their colonial and international experience,
importing ideas, fashions, and people from the periphery while exporting manufactured
popular culture (Prebisch 1982; Cardoso 2009).
Cultural-imperialism arguments have resonated in everyday talk, broadcast and tel-
ecommunications policy, unions, international organizations, nationalistic media and
heritage, cultural diplomacy, anti-Americanism, and post-industrial service-sector plan-
ning (see Schiller 1976 and 1989; Beltrán and Fox de Cardona 1980; Dorfman and
Mattelart 1971). They are exemplified by Armand Mattelart’s stinging denunciation of
external cultural influence on the Global South:

In order to camouflage the counter-revolutionary function which it has assigned

to communications technology and, in the final analysis, to all the messages of
mass culture, imperialism has elevated the mass media to the status of
revolutionary agents, and the modern phenomenon of communications to that
of revolution itself.
(1980: 17)

The concern is that popular culture exported from the Global North transfers its domi-
nant value system to others, through hegemony over news agencies, advertising, market
research, public opinion, screen trade, technology transfer, propaganda, telecommuni-
cations, and security. There is a corresponding diminution in the vitality and standing
of local languages, traditions, and national identities. As Herbert I Schiller expressed
it, “the media-cultural component in a developed, corporate economy supports the
economic objectives of the decisive industrial-financial sectors (i.e., the creation and
extension of the consumer society)” (1991: 14).
Beginning as reflections of reality, commodity signs displace representations of the
truth with false information. Then these two delineable phases of truth and lies
become indistinct. Once underlying reality is lost, signs become self-referential, with
no residual correspondence to the real: they have adopted the form of their own
simulation (Baudrillard 1988). People are said to buy commodities to give meaning to
their world because societies no longer make them feel as though they belong. This
concatenating simulation has implications for the aesthetic and social hierarchies that
“regulate and structure . . . individual and collective lives” (Parekh 2000: 143) in
competitive ways that harness popular culture for social and commercial purposes. For
this reason, analysts discern close ties between ideological content and industrial
impact.

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 M I LLE R

More positive responses to popular culture also exist within critical thought. For
example, the Marxist dramatist and librettist Bertolt Brecht simultaneously admired,
copied, and sought to transcend the popular. He welcomed passionate sporting crowds
as potential sites of resistance to government and capital (1964), and even Adorno
reflected that sport had “an anti-barbaric and anti-sadistic effect by means of fair play, a
spirit of chivalry, and consideration for the weak” (2010).
Cultural studies has been a productive leftist response to the phenomenon. Historical
and contemporary analyses of slaves, crowds, pirates, bandits, minorities, women, and
the working class have utilized archival, ethnographic, and statistical methods to
emphasize day-to-day non-compliance with authority, via practices of popular-cultural
consumption that frequently turn into practices of production. For example, UK research
has lit upon Teddy Boys, Mods, bikers, skinheads, punks, school students, teen girls,
Rastas, truants, drop-outs, and magazine readers as its magical agents of history—groups
who deviated from the norms of schooling and the transition to work by generating
moral panics. Scholar-activists examine the structural underpinnings to collective style,
investigating how bricolage subverts the achievement-oriented, materialistic values and
appearance of the middle class. The working assumption has often been that subordinate
groups adopt and adapt signs and objects from dominant culture, reorganizing them to
manufacture new meanings. The oppressed become producers of new fashions, inscrib-
ing alienation, difference, and powerlessness on their bodies (Leong 1992).
Popular culture has become ever more central to economic and social life. The inau-
gural President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and noted
music theorist Jacques Attali explains that a new “mercantile order forms wherever a
creative class masters a key innovation from navigation to accounting or, in our own
time, where services are most efficiently mass produced, thus generating enormous
wealth” (2008: 31). He recognizes that a prosperous economic future lies in finance
capital and ideology rather than agriculture and manufacturing—seeking revenue from
innovation and intellectual property, not minerals or masses. It is no surprise that the
global trade in culture increased from US$559.5 billion in 2010 to US$624 billion in
2011 (United Nations 2013). Rather than being nation-based, popular culture has inter-
nationalized, in terms of the export and import of texts, attendant fears of cultural
imperialism, and a New International Division of Cultural Labor (Miller et al. 2005).
Meanwhile, the canons of aesthetic judgment and social distinction that once sepa-
rated humanities and social science approaches to the popular, distinguishing aesthetic
tropes, economic needs, and social norms, are collapsing in on each other. The media
are more than textual signs or everyday practices. Popular culture offers important
resources to markets and nations—reactions to the crisis of belonging and economic
necessity occasioned by capitalist globalization. It is crucial to advanced and developing
economies alike, and can provide the legitimizing ground on which particular groups
(e.g., African Americans, lesbians, the hearing-impaired, or evangelical Protestants)
claim resources and seek inclusion in national and international narratives (see Yúdice
2002 and Martín-Barbero 2003 on Latin America; Colla 2012 and Pahwa and Winegar
2012 on Egypt; Yang 2009 on China; Boateng 2008 on Ghana).
For some analysts, popular culture represents the apex of modernity. Rather than
encouraging alienation, it stands for the expansion of civil society, the moment in his-
tory when the state becomes receptive to, and part of, the general community. The
population is now part of the social, rather than excluded from the means and politics
of political calculation, along with a lessening of authority, the promulgation of

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 I N TRO DU C T I O N

individual rights and respect, and a newly intense, interpersonal, large-scale human
interaction that are necessitated by industrialization and aided by systems of mass com-
munication. The spread of advertising is a taken as a model for the breakdown of social
barriers, exemplified in the triumph of the popular (Shils 1966; Hartley 1992).
There remains a paradox and possibly a contradiction in cultural studies’ engagement
with the popular, because commodified fashion and convention learnt to respond almost
gratefully to subcultures. For instance, even as the media and politicians announced that
punks were folk devils and set in train various moral panics about their effect on society,
the fashion and music industries were sending out spies to watch and listen to them as
part of a restless search for new trends to market. Whenever the politics of spectacle is
used effectively by social movements, advertising agencies watch on and parrot what
they see. Capitalism appropriates its appropriators.
The need for an awareness of this double-edged investment in commodities, as objects
of resistance whose very appropriation can then be re-commodified, makes socio-
economic analysis via critical political economy a good ally of representational analysis
via close reading. A certain tendency on both sides has maintained that the two
approaches are mutually exclusive: one is concerned with structures of the economy, the
other with structures of meaning. But this need not be the case. Historically, the best
critical political economy and the best close reading have worked through the imbrica-
tion of power and subjectivity at all points on the cultural continuum, bringing together
the insights of Gramsci and Frankfurt.
At a moment when the Global North uses culture as a selling point for deindustrial-
ized societies, and the Global South does so for never-industrialized ones, we should
focus on a nimble, hybrid approach that is governed not by the humanities or the social
sciences, but by a critical agenda that inquires cui bono—who benefits and loses from
such governmental and corporate maneuvers, who complains about the fact, and how
can we learn from them?
This commitment to social and cultural justice as well as academic theorization and
research has proven magnetic to many subordinate groups entering academia for the first
time over the last fifty years. Hence the appeal of studying popular culture not only at
the conventional scholarly metropoles in the US and the UK, but in Colombia, Brazil,
Turkey, India, and other important sites that are all too accustomed to being theorized
and analyzed and all too unfamiliar with being regarded as the sources of ideas, not
merely places for their application.
At the same time, it has also thrived in the context of a more reformist, even reaction-
ary formation, which rejects the field’s past as a form of insurrectionary semiotic reading
and instead favors hitching itself to the new surge in cultural industries represented by
public policies and investment patterns. This has involved consultancies on behalf of
the media, museums, copyright, pornography, schooling, and cultural precincts.
Instrumental policy people and scholars argue for an efflorescence of creativity, cultural
difference, import substitution, and national and regional pride and influence, thanks
to new technologies and innovative firms—with capitalism an ally, not a foe (Hartley
2005; Florida 2002).
This position connects with a new model of consumer freedom that derives from sub-
cultural politics, even though the two developments share little in terms of commitments
to social justice. The working assumption is that corporate popular culture is being over-
run by individual creativity in a Marxist/Godardian fantasy where people fish, film,
fornicate, and finance from morning to midnight. New communications technologies

7
 M I LLE R

obliterate geography, sovereignty, and hierarchy in an alchemy of truth and beauty. A

deregulated, individuated world makes consumers into producers, frees the disabled from
confinement, encourages new subjectivities, rewards intellect and competitiveness, links
people across cultures, and allows billions of flowers to bloom in a post-political cornu-
copia. Consumption is privileged, production is discounted, and labor is forgotten.
This new world supposedly destroys the inequalities and injustices personified by the
Olsen twins and their unnamed employees. The Magna Carta for the Information Age, for
instance, proposes that political-economic transformations have been eclipsed by
technological ones:

The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology,
economics, and the politics of nations, wealth—in the form of physical
resources—has been losing value and significance. The powers of mind are
everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.
(Dyson et al., 1994)

Time magazine exemplified this love of a seemingly immaterial world when it chose
“You” as 2006’s “Person of the Year,” because “You control the Information Age.
Welcome to your world” (Grossman 2006). The Guardian newspaper is prey to the
same touching magic: someone called “You” headed its 2013 list of the hundred
most important folks in the media: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/sep/01/
you-them-mediaguardian-100-2013.
This discourse buys into fantasies of reader, audience, consumer, player, and activist
autonomy, where music, movies, television, and politics converge under the sign of
empowered fans and rebels. True believers invest with unparalleled gusto in
Schumpeterian entrepreneurs, evolutionary economics, creative industries, and revolu-
tion. They’ve never seen an “app” they didn’t like, or a socialist party they did. Faith in
devolved media-making amounts to a secular religion, offering transcendence in the
here and now via a “literature of the eighth day, the day after Genesis” (Carey 2005). It
seems to end the era of the gatekeeper and restore the popular to its original, organic
qualities as the property of ordinary people, where customs override consumption, capi-
talism is no longer corporate, and citizens govern suzerains.
The chapters that follow offer numerous ways in to such claims and the time-honored
popular-cultural issues that they engage. One last thing: remember the US$39,000 alliga-
tor backpack brought to you, and people like you, by the Olsen twins? May 2014 found
Mary-Kate advising The Wall Street Journal that the loveable twosome had “spent a couple
of years . . . retraining the customer that that’s not the only product that’s available”
(quoted in Smith 2014). Readers may even encounter a way of appreciating that sentence.

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 1
POLITICAL ECONOMY
Vincent Mosco

Definitions and Characteristics

Political economy is the study of the social relations—particularly the power
relations—that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of
resources, including communication resources (Mosco 2009). This formulation has a
certain practical value because it calls attention to how the communication business
operates; for example, how communications products move through a chain of produc-
ers such as a Hollywood film studio, to wholesalers, retailers, and, finally to consumers,
whose purchases, downloads, and attention are fed back into new processes of produc-
tion. A more general and ambitious definition of political economy is the study of
control and survival in social life. Control refers specifically to the internal organization
of social group members and the process of adapting to change. Survival means how
people produce what is needed for social reproduction and continuity. Control processes
are broadly political, in that they constitute the social organization of relationships
within a community and survival processes are mainly economic, because they concern
production and reproduction.
Political economy has consistently placed in the foreground the goal of understanding
social change and historical transformation. For classical political economists of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Adam Smith (1937), David Ricardo
(1819), and John Stuart Mill (1848), this meant comprehending the great capitalist
revolution, the vast social upheaval that transformed societies based primarily on agri-
cultural labor into commercial, manufacturing, and, eventually, industrial societies. For
Karl Marx (1976), it meant examining the dynamic forces within capitalism and the
relationship between capitalism and other forms of political economic organization, in
order to understand how social change would ultimately lead from capitalism to
socialism.
Political economy is also characterized by an interest in examining the social whole
or the totality of social relations that make up the economic, political, social, and cultural
areas of life. From the time of Adam Smith, whose interest in understanding social life
was not constrained by the disciplinary boundaries that mark academic life today,
through Marx, and on to contemporary institutional, conservative and neo-marxian
theorists, political economy has consistently aimed to build on the unity of the political
and the economic by accounting for their mutual influence and for their relationship to
wider social and symbolic spheres of activity. The political economist asks: How are
power and wealth related (Clark 1998)? How do these influence media, communication,
knowledge production, and entertainment (Fuchs and Mosco 2012; McChesney 2013)?
 MOSCO

Political economy is also noted for its commitment to moral philosophy, defined as both
an interest in the values that help to create social behavior and in those moral principles
that ought to guide efforts to change it. It is therefore both descriptive and normative.
For Adam Smith (1976), as evidenced in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, this meant
understanding values like self-interest, materialism, and individual freedom that were
contributing to the rise of commercial capitalism. For Karl Marx, moral philosophy
meant the ongoing struggle between the drive to realize individual and social value in
human labor and the pressure in capitalism to reduce labor to a marketable commodity.
Contemporary political economy tends to favor moral philosophical standpoints that
promote the extension of democracy to all aspects of social life. This goes beyond the
political realm, which guarantees rights to participate in government, to the economic,
social, and cultural domains where supporters of democracy call for income equality,
access to education, and full public participation in cultural production based on the
right to communicate freely.
Following from this view, social praxis, or the fundamental unity of thought and action,
also occupies a central place in political economy. Specifically, against traditional aca-
demic positions which separate the sphere of research from that of social intervention,
political economists, in a tradition tracing its roots to ancient practices of providing
advice and counsel to leaders, have consistently viewed intellectual life as a form of
social transformation and social intervention as a form of knowledge. Although they
differ fundamentally on what should characterize intervention, from Adam Smith who
supported free markets, to Marx, who called on labor to realize itself in revolution,
political economists are united in the view that the division between research and
action is artificial and must be overturned.

Research on the Political Economy of the Media

North American research has been extensively influenced by the contributions of two
founding figures, Dallas Smythe (1981) and Herbert Schiller (1996). Smythe taught the
first course in the political economy of communication at the University of Illinois and
is the first of four generations of scholars linked together in this research tradition.
Schiller, who followed Smythe at the University of Illinois, similarly influenced several
generations of political economists.
Their approach to communication studies drew on both the institutional and marxian
traditions. A concern about the growing size and power of transnational communication
businesses places them squarely in the institutional school, but their interest in social
class and in media imperialism gives their work a definite marxian focus. However, they
were less interested than, for example, European scholars, in providing an explicit theo-
retical account of communication. Rather, their work and, through their influence, a
great deal of the research in this region has been driven more explicitly by a sense of
injustice that the communication industry has become an integral part of a wider cor-
porate order that, they maintain, is both exploitative and undemocratic. Although
Smythe and Schiller were concerned with the impact within their respective countries,
they both developed a research program that charts the growth in power and influence
of transnational media companies throughout the world.
Partly owing to their influence, North American research has produced a large litera-
ture on industry and class specific manifestations of transnational corporate and state
power, distinguished by its concern to participate in ongoing social movements and

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 POLITICAL ECONOMY

oppositional struggles to change the dominant media and create alternatives (McChesney
2000; Mosco 2009; Schiller 1999; Wasko 2003). A major objective of this work is to
advance public interest concerns before government regulatory and policy organs. This
includes support for those movements that have taken an active role before interna-
tional organizations in defense of a new international economic, information, and
communication order (Mosco and Schiller 2001).
European research is less clearly linked to specific founding figures and, although it is
also connected to movements for social change, particularly in defense of public service
media systems, the leading work in this region has been more concerned to integrate
communication research within various neo-marxian and institutional theoretical tradi-
tions. Of the two principal directions this research has taken, one, most prominent in
the work of Garnham (2000) and in that of Murdock and Golding (2000), has empha-
sized class power. Building on the Frankfurt School tradition, as well as on the work of
Raymond Williams, it documents the integration of communication institutions, mainly
business and state policy authorities, within the wider capitalist economy, and the resist-
ance of subaltern classes and movements that oppose neo-conservative state practices
promoting liberalization, commercialization, and privatization of the communication
industries.
A second stream of research foregrounds class struggle and is most prominent in the
work of Armand Mattelart (1983, 2000). Mattelart has drawn from a range of traditions
including dependency theory, Western marxism, and the worldwide experience of
national liberation movements to understand communication as one among the princi-
pal sources of resistance to power. His work has demonstrated how peoples of the third
world, particularly in Latin America where Mattelart was an advisor to the government
of Chile before it was overthrown in a 1973 military coup, used the mass media to
oppose Western control and create indigenous news and entertainment media.
Research on the political economy of communication from the less developed world
has covered a wide area of interests, although a major stream has grown in response to
the modernization or developmentalist theory that originated in Western, particularly
U.S., attempts to incorporate communication into an explanatory perspective on devel-
opment congenial to mainstream academic and political interests. The developmentalist
thesis held that the media are resources, which, along with urbanization, education, and
other social forces, stimulate economic, social, and cultural modernization. As a result,
media growth is an index of development (Rogers 1971; Schramm 1964). Drawing on
several streams of international neo-marxian political economy, including world systems
and dependency theory, political economists challenged the fundamental premises of
the developmentalist model, particularly its technological determinism and the omis-
sion of practically any interest in the power relations that shape the relationships
between rich and poor nations and the multi-layered class relations between and within
them (Alzouma 2005; Bolano, Mastrini, and Serra 2004; Pendakur 2003; Zhao 2008).
The failure of development schemes incorporating media investment sent moderniza-
tion theorists in search of revised models that add new media into the mix (Jussawalla
and Taylor 2003). Political economists have responded principally by addressing the
power of these new technologies to help create a global division of labor. A first wave of
research saw the division largely in territorial terms: unskilled labor concentrated in the
poorest nations, semi-skilled and more complex assembly labor in semi-peripheral soci-
eties, and research, development, and strategic planning limited to first world corporate
headquarters to which most profit would flow. Contemporary research acknowledges

15
 MOSCO

that class divisions cut across territorial lines, and maintains that what is central to the
evolving international division of labor is the growth in flexibility for firms that control
the range of technologies which overcome traditional time and space constraints
(Wasko and Erickson 2008; Yu Hong 2011).
One can also map political economic theory through the three social processes that
are central to the field: commodification, spatialization, and structuration.
Commodification is the process of taking goods and services which are valued for their
use, e.g., food to satisfy hunger, stories for communication, and transforming them into
commodities which are valued for what they can earn in the marketplace, e.g. farming
to sell food, producing drama for commercial television. The process of commodification
holds a dual significance for communication research. First, communication practices
and technologies contribute to the general commodification process throughout society.
For example, the introduction of computer communication gives all companies, not just
communication companies, greater control over the entire process of production, distri-
bution, and exchange, permitting retailers to monitor sales and inventory levels with
ever-improving precision. Second, commodification is an entry point to understand
specific communication institutions and practices. For example, the general, worldwide
expansion of commodification in the 1980s, responding in part to global declines in
economic growth, led to the increased commercialization of media programming, the
privatization of once public media and telecommunications institutions, and the liber-
alization of communication markets (Murdock and Wasko 2007; Schiller 2007).
The political economy of communication has been notable for its emphasis on
describing and examining the significance of institutions, especially businesses and
governments, responsible for the production, distribution, and exchange of communi-
cation commodities and for the regulation of the communication marketplace.
Although it has not neglected the commodity itself and the process of commodifica-
tion, the tendency has been to foreground the study of business and government. When
it has treated the commodity, political economy has tended to concentrate on media
content and less so on media audiences and the labor involved in media production.
The emphasis on media structures and content is understandable in light of the impor-
tance of global media companies and the growth in the value of media content. Tightly
integrated transnational businesses, such as Time Warner, Google, News Corp., and
Apple create media products with multiplier effects that generate revenue from selling
content, delivering viewers to advertisers and making use of the least expensive labor
worldwide (Bettig and Hall 2003). Political economy has paid some attention to audi-
ences, particularly to understand the common practice whereby advertisers pay for the
size and characteristics of an audience that a newspaper, web site, or television program
can deliver. This generated a vigorous debate about whether audiences, in fact, labor,
i.e., sell their labor power (in effect, their attention) in return for whatever content is
produced (Smythe 1981). Political economy research has advanced the analysis of
audience research by examining audience history and the complex relationship of audi-
ences to the producers of commercial culture (Hagen and Wasko 2000; Meehan 1999).
It has also extended the debate over audience labor to the internet, where the process
of building web sites, modifying software, and participating in social media communi-
ties both resembles and differs from the labor of audiences that Smythe described
(Terranova 2004).
In addition to media content and audiences, media labor is subject to the commodi-
fication process. Braverman’s now classic (1974) work directly confronted the

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 POLITICAL ECONOMY

transformation of the labor process in capitalism. According to him, general labor is

constituted out of the unity of conception—the power to envision, imagine, and design
work—and execution, the power to carry it out. In the process of commodification, cap-
ital acts to separate conception from execution, skill from the raw ability to carry out a
task, in order to concentrate conceptual power in a managerial class that is either a part
of capital or represents its interests, and acts to reconstitute the labor process with this
new distribution of skill and power at the point of production. In the extreme, and with
considerable labor resistance, this involved the application of detailed and intrusive
“scientific management” practices pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Braverman
documented the process of labor transformation in the rise of manufacturing, but he is
particularly recognized for demonstrating the extension of this process into the service
and information sectors. His work gave rise to an enormous body of empirical research
and theoretical debate, the latter focusing principally on the need to address the con-
tested nature of the process, the active resistance of workers and the trade union move-
ment and, finally, on how the transformation of the labor process was experienced dif-
ferently by industry, occupation, class, gender, and race (Mosco and McKercher 2008).
The labor of communication workers is also being commodified as wage labor has
grown in significance throughout the media workplace. In order to cut the labor bill
and expand revenue, managers replaced mechanical with electronic systems to elimi-
nate thousands of jobs in the printing industry as electronic typesetting did away with
the jobs of linotype operators. Today’s digital systems allow companies to expand this
process by eliminating jobs, employing a greater share of part-time and temporary work-
ers, and relying on audiences, especially for online media, to do more of the media
labor. Companies generally retain the rights to the multiplicity of repackaged forms and
thereby profit from print, audio, video, and online forms. Broadcast journalists carry
cameras and edit tape for delivery over television or computer networks. Companies
now sell software well before it has been fully debugged on the understanding that
customers will report errors, download and install updates, and figure out how to work
around problems. This ability to eliminate labor, combine it to perform multiple tasks,
and shift labor to unpaid consumers further expands the revenue potential (McKercher
and Mosco 2007). Workers have responded to this by uniting people from different
media, including journalists, broadcast professionals, and technical specialists in the
film, video, telecommunications, and computer services sectors, into trade unions that
represent large segments of the communications workforce (Mosco and
McKercher 2008).
The second starting point for the political economy of communication is spatializa-
tion, or the process of overcoming the constraints of space and time in social life.
Classical political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo found it necessary
to devote considerable attention to the problems of how to value the spaces taken up by
land and the built environment. Furthermore, their development of a labor theory of
value was bound up with the problem of how to define and measure labor time. Today,
political economists maintain that business, aided by developments in communication
and information technology, transforms the spaces through which flow those people and
goods that make up the global division of labor whose transformation is evidenced in
the massive relocation of millions of jobs to China, India, and other low-wage regions
of the world (Mosco, McKercher, and Huws 2010).
The political economy of communication has traditionally addressed spatialization as
the institutional extension of corporate power in the communication industry. This is

17
 MOSCO

manifested in the sheer growth in size of media firms, measured by assets, revenues, profit,
employees, and stock share values. For example, communications systems in the United
States are now shaped by a handful of companies including U.S.-based firms General
Electric (NBC), Viacom (CBS), the Walt Disney Company (ABC), Time Warner
(CNN), and new media companies led by Apple, Microsoft, and Google. There are oth-
ers including non-U.S.-based firms such as the News Corporation (Fox), Bertelsmann,
and Sony. Political economy has specifically examined growth by taking up different
forms of corporate concentration (Baltruschat 2008; Herman and Chomsky 2002; Kunz
2006). Horizontal concentration takes place when a firm in one line of media buys a major
interest in another media operation that is not directly related to the original business.
The typical form of this is cross-media concentration or the purchase by a firm in an older
line of media, say a newspaper, of a firm in a newer line, such as a television station or an
online service. Vertical integration describes the amalgamation of firms within a line of
business that extend a company’s control over the process of production as when a major
Hollywood film production studio purchases a distributor of film. In addition to demon-
strating how media firms have developed into transnational conglomerates that now
rival, in size and power, firms in any industry, political economists are addressing the
development of flexible forms of corporate power evidenced in the joint ventures, strategic
alliances and other short-term and project-specific arrangements that bring together com-
panies or parts of companies, including competitors. These take advantage of more
flexible means of communication to come together for mutual interest (Wasko 2003). In
recent years, political economists have addressed the impact of communication technol-
ogy on the built environment, including massive demands on the power supply, as well
as toxic chemical and air pollution (Maxwell and Miller 2012).
The third entry point for the political economic theory is structuration, a contempo-
rary rendering of Marx’s view that people make history, but not under conditions of their
own making. Specifically, research based on structuration helps to balance a tendency
in political economic analysis to concentrate on structures, typically business and gov-
ernmental institutions, by incorporating the ideas of agency, social process, and social
practice to understand social class, race, gender, and other significant social divisions
(Giddens 1984). Concretely, this means broadening the conception of social class from
its structural or categorical sense, which defines it in terms of what some have and others
do not, to incorporate both a relational and a formational sense of the term.
A relational view of social class foregrounds the connections, for example, between
business and labor, and the ways in which labor constitutes itself within the relationship
and as an independent force in its own right. This takes nothing away from the value of
seeing class, in part, as a designation for the differences between the “haves” and the
“have-nots”. The political economy of communication has addressed class in these terms
by producing research that documents persistent inequities in communication systems,
particularly in access to the means of communication (the “digital divide”), and the
reproduction of these inequities in social institutions (Hindman 2008). This has been
applied to labor, particularly in research on how communication and information tech-
nology has been used to automate and deskill work, including labor in the media
industries (Rodino-Colocino 2006). It has also been used to show how the means of
communication are used to measure and monitor work activity in systems of surveillance
that extend managerial control over the entire labor process in precise detail.
A relational view of social class maintains, for example, that the working class is not
defined simply by lack of access to the means of communication, but by its relationships

18
 POLITICAL ECONOMY

of harmony, dependency, and conflict to the capitalist class. Moreover, a formational

conception of class views the working class as producer of its own identity, however
tenuous, volatile, and conflicted, in relation to capital and independently of it. This
research aims to demonstrate how classes constitute themselves; how they make history
in the face of conditions that constrain this history-making activity (Eubanks 2011).
When political economy has given attention to agency, process, and social practice,
it tends to focus on social class. There are good reasons for this emphasis. Class struc-
turation is a central entry point for comprehending social life and numerous studies have
documented the persistence of class divisions in the political economy of communica-
tion. Nevertheless, there are other dimensions to structuration that complement and
conflict with class structuration, including gender, race, and those broadly defined social
movements, which, along with class, make up much of the social relations of communica-
tion. Political economy has made important strides in addressing the intersection of
feminist studies and the political economy of the media (Meehan and Riordan 2002).
It has also taken major steps in research on information technology, gender, and the
international division of labor, which addresses the double oppression that women work-
ers face in industries like microelectronics, where they experience the lowest wages and
the most brutalizing working conditions (Pellow and Park 2002). Communication stud-
ies has addressed imperialism extensively, principally by examining the role of the media
and information technology in the maintenance of control by richer over poorer socie-
ties. Race figures significantly in this analysis and more generally in the social process of
structuration, as Gandy (1998) takes up in his multi-perspectival assessment of race and
the media. Racial divisions are a principal constituent of the multiple hierarchies of the
contemporary global political economy and race, as both category and social relation-
ship, helps to explain access to national and global resources, including communication,
media, and information technology (Green 2001; Pellow and Park 2002).
One of the major activities in structuration is the process of constructing hegemony,
defined as what comes to be incorporated and contested as the taken-for-granted, com-
mon sense, naturalized way of thinking about the world, including everything from
cosmology through ethics to everyday social practices. Hegemony is a lived network of
mutually constituting meanings and values, which appear to be mutually confirming
(Gramsci 1971). Out of the tensions and clashes within various structuration processes,
the media come to be organized in full mainstream, oppositional, and alternative forms
(Williams 1983).
Understanding the political economy of communication also requires one to look
outward, at the relationship between this theoretical formulation and those on its bor-
ders. Although one can map the universe of academic disciplines in numerous ways, it
is useful to situate the political economy of communication in relation to cultural
studies.
The cultural studies approach is a broad-based intellectual movement which focuses
on the constitution of meaning in texts, defined broadly to include all forms of social
communication. The approach contains numerous currents and fissures that provide for
considerable ferment from within (Grossberg 2010). Nevertheless, it can contribute to
the understanding political economy in several ways. Cultural studies has been open to
a broad-based critique of positivism (the view that sensory observation is the only source
of knowledge). Moreover, it has defended a more open philosophical approach that
concentrates on subjectivity or on how people interpret their world, as well as on the
social creation of knowledge. Cultural studies has also broadened the meaning of cultural

19
 MOSCO

analysis by starting from the premise that culture is ordinary, produced by all social
actors, rather than by a privileged elite, and that the social is organized around gender
and nationality divisions and identities as much as by social class.
Although political economy can learn from these departures, it can equally enrich
cultural studies. Even as it takes on a philosophical approach that is open to subjectivity
and is more broadly inclusive, political economy insists on a realist epistemology that
maintains the value of historical research, of thinking in terms of concrete social total-
ities, with a well-grounded moral philosophy, and a commitment to overcome the
distinction between social research and social practice. Political economy departs from
the tendency in cultural studies to exaggerate the importance of subjectivity, as well as
the inclination to reject thinking in terms of historical practices and social wholes.
Political economy also departs from the tendency of cultural studies to use language that
belies the approach’s original vision that cultural analysis should be accessible to those
ordinary people who are responsible for creating culture. Finally, it calls on cultural stud-
ies to pay more attention to labor, the labor process and the importance of labor in
contemporary movements for social change (Smith 2011).
Current trends in the political economy approach include the globalization of the
field, the expansion of an enduring emphasis on historical research, the growth of
research from alternative standpoints, especially feminism and labor, the shift from an
emphasis on old to new media, and the growth of activism connected to the political
economy tradition. None of these are brand new tendencies but rather build on existing
ones which were often submerged beneath dominant trends in the field (Wasko,
Murdock, and Sousa 2011).

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Rowman and Littlefield.

22
 2
THEORETICALLY
ACCOUNTING
FOR TELEVISION
FORMATS IN THE
NEW INTERNATIONAL
DIVISION OF
CULTURAL LABOUR
Anthony Quinn

All thirteen parts of House of Cards, series two, arrived on Netflix on Valentine’s Day in
February 2014. This televisual event brought back familiar feelings of pleasure first expe-
rienced during series one of this tale of amorality. Some people watched four-in-a-row.
Others created their own appointment TV with Francis Underwood, played by Kevin
Spacey. The Machiavellian character of Francis is not new to the small screen: Francis
has an English predecessor, Francis Urquart. He, too, uttered the shrewd words, ‘You
might think that. I couldn’t possibly comment’. House of Cards is a television format;
the first version, based on Michael Dobbs’ book, was broadcast on the BBC in the UK
in 1990. The freshly re-versioned House of Cards is a television format that has been
put at the head of a battering ram, to repurpose Rupert Murdoch’s phrase about access-
ing new televisual markets. Outside the gate is former DVD-by-post company Netflix;
on the inside is distinction-soaked HBO. It has much to lose. The goal, stated Netflix’s
chief content officer Ted Sarandos, ‘is to become HBO faster than HBO can become
us’ (in Hass, 2013).
The industrial context to House of Cards underlines the importance of understanding
the television format trade. The use of formats to make television programmes is not a
new phenomenon, and goes back to the 1951 sale of What’s My Line? by CBS to the
BBC. However, the number of formats being adapted has increased significantly. Over
the last decade, local versions of formats such as Homeland, The Killing, Ugly Betty,
Strictly Come Dancing, Big Brother and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? have placed the
 QUINN

format model at the centre of transnational television production. Formats have become
a major commodity form in an expanded version of what Miller et al. conceptualise as
the ‘New International Division of Cultural Labour’ (2005).
This chapter focusses on how to theoretically account for television formats as a
new division of cultural labour, both as a set of commodity forms and as indicators of
real social relations in media labour. Formats are cultural objects that simultaneously
exist within a transnational field of televisual production, within national fields of
televisual production, within a field of political and economic power and within var-
ious subfields of cultural production. Formats are therefore cultural objects which link
fields. The chapter draws on empirical insights gained during an ethnographic study
of the effects of television formats on the autonomy of television producers. Concepts
drawn from the theories of Miller et al., Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu and Susan Leigh
Star are used to contribute to what Georgina Born calls a ‘post-Bourdieuian theory of
culture’ (2010).

What Is a Format?
The seminal research on the topic of formats has been done by Albert Moran
(1998, 2006). He states that to ask the question ‘what is a format?’ is to ask the ‘wrong
kind of question’:

Such a question implies that a format has some core or essence . . . ‘format’ is a
loose term that covers a range of items that may be included in a format
licensing arrangement. The term has meaning not so much because of what it
is but because of what it permits or facilitates. A format is an economic and
cultural technology of exchange that has meaning not because of a principle
but because of a function or effect.
(2006: 6)

The concept of exchange is thus crucial when thinking theoretically about television
formats. In order to understand these exchanges, we need to think of a format as a ‘com-
modity’. Karl Marx initially defines such a commodity as ‘an object outside us, a thing
that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another’ (2008: 13). He notes
the complex unfurling of socioeconomic relations that emerges once we follow this line
of thought: ‘ . . . a commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily under-
stood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical
subtleties and theological niceties’ (2008: 42).
From a Marxian perspective, it is through an analysis of commodities that we can
understand social relations. The metaphysical subtleties of television formats begin to
take shape when four distinct aspects of formats as a commodity are identified.
Following Dallas Smythe (1977), formats have an audience commodity aspect. In order
that branded consumer products and services are sold, the attention of audiences has to
be bought by advertisers from media companies and broadcasters. This aspect of formats
is visible during ad breaks and though product placements within the content of pro-
grammes. Netflix is primarily based on a subscription model, so there are no adverts.
Product placement is visible, however. In House of Cards, we see Frank Underwood
playing late-night sessions of Call of Duty on his PlayStation and communicating on a
Blackberry with journalist Zoe Barnes.

24
 TELEVI SI O N F O RM ATS A N D C U LT U R A L L A B O U R

Formats also reduce risk for broadcasters and television producers, both in terms of
the time it takes to develop a programme and the ideas that are perceived to ‘work’: thus
there is a risk reduction commodity aspect. This aspect is important in the context of the
global socioeconomic crisis, with broadcasters wishing to reduce both reputational risk
and economic risk. The fact that House of Cards had worked for the BBC made it more
likely that the Netflix version would succeed. Formats also have a brand commodity
aspect; these potent brands are used to create branded opportunities for multiple revenue
streams with potentially long tails: merchandising, live events tickets, music, magazines
and premium rate telecoms. For example, the 45 or so different versions of X Factor are
expertly used to exploit these sources of revenue. To use William Melody’s concept
(1987), formats also have an information commodity aspect: the format bible, instructions
on how to make it; the format consultancy process represented by a ‘travelling producer’
who oversees a re-version; and sample recordings of other territorial versions of the
format. Finally, formats have a legal commodity aspect. The copyright to images, music
and programme titles is exchanged in the format trade. While ownership is maintained,
the legal rights to use copyrighted elements are sold and bought.
The four aspects of the commodity form of formats are thus the risk reduction com-
modity, the legal commodity, the audience commodity and the information commodity.
This is what is being sold in the transnational market for television formats, and this is
what a format is as a ‘thing’. However, this is an insufficient definition. In order to gain
a socioeconomic understanding, we need to draw on the work of Karl Marx, as per
Garnham (1979) and Fuchs (2009). Using Marx to discern the particularities of the
circuit of capital as it relates to the television format trade is a good way of thinking
about the exchanges that surround formats in the new international division of cultural
labour.
Once we use the circuit of capital model, we begin to understand formats as not only
a ‘thing’ but, more importantly, as a valuable indicator of social relations in the new
international division of cultural labour. Television formats are a method by which to
extract surplus value from media workers and to valorise capital (to increase its value),
so that the money form that M invested at the start of the circuit becomes larger. A rent
model is a major part of this dynamic: the purchase of the legal aspects of the commod-
ity that enables a television production team to reproduce a particular programme, with
particular music and graphics, in a particular place.
More than ten years ago, Daniel Schiller said that ‘there can be no doubt that televi-
sion has grown to comprise a global cultural infrastructure . . . a massive change in
direction has concurrently reoriented the institutional structures of global
television . . . television system development has been largely handed over to capital’
(2001: 54). Since Schiller made this important point, further flows in the ‘hand over’
have been facilitated via the mechanism of television formats. A beneficial ownership
analysis of any major format reveals familiar corporate names. To take the example of
successful format Undercover Boss, we can see from Figure 2.2 that MediaSet, Sony, and
non-traditional media owners Permira, which holds investment funds of €20 billion, are
the beneficial owners of Undercover Boss, via All3Media.
Public service broadcasters (PSBs) are also involved with formats. BBC Worldwide,
the commercial arm of the iconic UK PSB, is a major format player. Strictly Come
Dancing has multiple other lives through the format Dancing with the Stars. The Irish
public service broadcaster RTÉ runs a ‘formats lab’; successful formats get aired as a
programme, and commercially-oriented distributors then sell them abroad. Institutional

25
 instruments
of e.g. television cameras,
production use of spaces of production
new ideas
material subject of labour
risk reduction commodity of raw material
pre-existing ideas appropriated M
production
legal commodity from the general intellect +
accumulated
use of pre-existing
surplus value
format bought here
=
mp
M C <L P C’ M’
Television
distributor?
Labour
audience commodity labour Process
sale of format
time
information commodity sale of a reversioned
of television format as series to
producers broadcaster
sales in ancillary markets
e.g. advertising, product placement,
of other sponsorship, merchandise, live event
television tickets, music, magazines, premium
workers rate telecoms

valourised capital valourised capital

relaunched in circuit removed from
as M circuit

Figure 2.1 The circuit of capital in the case of the format trade. After Fuchs, 2009
 TELEVI SI O N F O RM ATS A N D C U LT U R A L L A B O U R

Formats: Undercover Boss (26 versions), Are Your Smarter Than? (53 versions), The Cube (11 versions),
Skins (2 versions), How To Look Good Naked (10 versions), Cash Cab (39 versions), The Real Hustle
(8 versions)
All3Media
All3Media International (distribution) ARG (agency for actors and presenters)
Bentley Productions (Midsomer Murders, Cactus TV (Richard & Judy, TV Book Club)
Ultimate Force)
Company Pictures (Shameless, Skins, IDTV (crossmedia production; Dutch drama)
Generation Kill)
Illumina Digital (digital content for education Kameleon (branding)
and public service)
Lime Pictures (Brookside, Hollyoaks, The Lion Television (London, Glasgow, New York,
Outsiders) LA)
Maverick Television (Ten Years Younger, How Mme Moviement (German TV production)
To Look Good Naked)
North One Television (sports and factual Objective (Derren Brown, The Cube, The Real
entertainment) Hustle)
South Pacific Pictures (Shortland Street) Studio Lambert (Undercover Boss, Benefit
Busters)
Tower Productions (venture with BBC Zoo Productions (Are Your Smarter Than?)
Worldwide)
Permira
Food (Birds Eye; Telepizza, HiperDino and Clothing (New Look)
SuperSo food shops)
Consumer (Ancestory.com; Hugo Boss, Dr Gambling (Galaxy Entertainment)
Martens)
Industry (Freescale semiconductors, Borsod- Financial Services (The AA, Saga, secure pay-
Chem) ments)
Media and Telecoms (All3Media, ProSieben-
Sat.1 TV station, TDC)

Figure 2.2 A beneficial ownership analysis of the 26 version format Undercover Boss
Sources: www.all3media.com, www.permira.com

PSBs have been a part of the format trade since its beginnings. The institutional role
that PSBs play is one reason why the circuit of capital only gives us a partial theoretical
account of formats. In order to facilitate a more detailed account, it is necessary to turn
to Pierre Bourdieu.

Marx, Bourdieu and Fields

In his theoretical dialogue between Marx and Bourdieu, Michael Burawoy states that
Bourdieu’s social theory is ‘so clearly a response’ to Marx (2011: 4). Yet, in his meeting
between the thinkers, Burawoy points out that the structural dynamic of fields presented
by Marx and Bourdieu is ‘profoundly different’ (2011: 5). He notes that, for Marx, there is
‘just one major field’; the capitalist mode of production, ‘with its inherent laws of compe-
tition leading to crises of overproduction and the falling rate of profit on the one side and
the intensification of class struggle on the other’ (2011: 5). He continues: ‘If Marx has a
historical succession of economic fields, Bourdieu has a functional coexistence of fields.
Bourdieu’s multiplication of coexisting fields poses a host of new problems with respect to
the relations among fields’ (2011: 5). Analysing the semi-autonomous nature of fields is

27
 QUINN

one of these problems; Bourdieu’s prime example is the early French literary field (1996).
Autonomy, self-law, is relative, as both Weber and Bourdieu have pointed out.
Bourdieu pluralises the idea of capital, and brings it beyond the economic form. For
Bourdieu, the structure of a field is constructed via empirical study and is composed of
the distribution of capitals and the value of capitals at a given time: ‘the structure of the
social world is defined at every moment by the structure of the distribution of the capi-
tal and profits characteristic of the different particular fields’ (1985: 734). Autonomy, in
a Bourdieuian sense, is about the range and volume of distinctive forms of capitals held
by cultural producers within a given field. For Bourdieu, the autonomy of a field is
‘revealed to the extent that the principle of external hierarchization there is subordi-
nated to the principle of internal hierarchization’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 216). In other words,
to what extent do forces from outside of the field of television production define what
is regarded as ‘of value’ within the field?
Also, autonomy is a vital concept with respect to economic and political determina-
tions from outside of fields: the ‘double dependency’ explored by Champagne: ‘journalists
are structurally condemned to produce – variably, depending on the period and outlet –
under political and/or economic constraints’ (2005: 49). In exploring the important ques-
tion, ‘autonomy from what?’ Schudson states that the ‘membrane of the journalistic field,
permeable in relation to the market or the state, is relatively resistant to influence from
other groups’; but that a ‘democrat should not want journalism to be as self-enclosed and
separated from outside pressures as mathematics or poetry’ (2005: 220). While the emer-
gence of fully autonomous media fields may not be desirable, the converse, the dissolution
of the autonomy of media fields, may threaten the ‘quality and significance of the [cultural]
artefacts produced’ (Brown and Szeman, 2000: 7). This fact is crucial in the context of
cultural production. Bourdieu states of the wider journalistic field that it is a

very weakly autonomous field, but this autonomy, weak though it is, means that
one cannot understand what happens there on the basis of knowledge of the
surrounding world . . . [it] cannot be understood unless one conceptualises this
microcosm as such and endeavors to understand the effects that the people
engaged in this microcosm exert on one another.
(2005: 33)

Thus, using empirical data, I have constructed the field of television production in the
Republic of Ireland, as shown in Figure 2.3.
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus refers to the perceptions and actions of producers within
a given field. These can be collective. I constructed four television producer habitus:
The PSB Producers, The Storytellers, The Formats Devisors and The Format
Reproducers. The struggles in a field over time for recognition and resources can alter
the very structure of the field itself. As Bourdieu puts it, ‘the temporal movement pro-
duced by the appearance of a group capable of leaving its mark . . . is rendered by a
shifting of the structure of the field of the present’ (1996: 158). Format capital is a new
form of specific capital partly held by some of these television producers who are buying,
and selling, formats in transnational, and mass produced, context. David Hesmondhalgh
has identified one major problem with Bourdieu, and this is as regards mass production:

It is simply astonishing how little Bourdieu has to say about large-scale,

‘heteronomous’ commercial cultural production, given not only its enormous

28
 educational
Economic capital +, +?
Economic capital + consecration + Format capital +
PSB producer capital + public service Ideas capital +
Format capital nil broadcaster
consecration +
Field of economic and political power
mass national F
audience +
Transnational field of
‘PSB PRODUCERS’ ‘FORMAT DEVISORS’ Televisual
Format work: none Formatt work: sale Production
C D E R conssecration
mass national audience + Format capital +
M Economic capital +
S Ideas capital +
Pole of H Q Pole of large-
Subfield: restricted J O scale production
Radio production A K
Production B
I N Subfield of
Subfield:
L Music
Book ‘STORYTELLERS’ mass transnational
‘FORMAT T REPRODUCERS’ Production
Production audience +
Format work: none Format work: reproduction
Subfield: P
G
Print Mass transnational
Journalism audiences - but format
Production links
Economic capital − Economic capital −
Storytellers’ capital + educational Format capital −
Format capital nil consecration − Storytellers’ capital −
mass national Subfield: public service
audience − Film broadcaster
film festival Production consecration −
audiences +

I Form of capital − + Existing link with another subfield of

Key: Television producer Trajectory cultural production

Figure 2.3 The field of television production in the Republic of Ireland

 QUINN

social and cultural importance in the contemporary world, but also its
significance in determining conditions in the sub-field in which he is clearly
much more interested, restricted production.
(2006: 217)

Theoretical and empirical attention to the mass production, and reproduction, of cul-
ture is thus essential. Formats are an indicator of the mass production of culture on a
transnational scale. They are also a form of capital. What I found is that the advent of
format capital signals a structural transformation of the field of television production in
the Republic of Ireland and, given the transnational flows of formats, also in other
places.
The rise of formats is a structural transformation in the field of television production
in the Republic of Ireland. This is so in two ways. A new form of capital – format
capital – has been introduced. This introduction has occurred at the edge of the field,
at an overlap. There are also more connections in the top right of the field I constructed,
to the field of economics and politics, and to the global television marketplace that
Havens explores (2006), labelled here as the transnational field of television produc-
tion. These connections need to be theoretically elaborated. Swartz states that the ‘con-
nections between fields, like the opposition within fields, stem from structural factors,
not the intentions of actors’ (1997). A structural factor, in a Bourdieuian sense, is the
distribution and value of forms of capital. But Swartz refers to ‘an unresolved and uneasy
tension between the priority Bourdieu gives to the internal analysis of fields and his
emphasis on boundaries as contested terrain’ (1997: 122). There is a conceptual gap as
regards events at the boundaries of fields. Perhaps Bourdieu’s message here is that these
matters have to be worked out empirically.

Susan Leigh Star, Boundary Objects and

Boundary Infrastructure
Format capital, within the complex triad of habitus-field-capitals, is an insufficient
description of formats. In the final part of this chapter, my focus is this matter of the
dynamics of field boundaries, and how these boundaries are key loci in advancing the
subfield of media production and the broader field of mass communication.
In his concluding chapter of the recent book on Bourdieu and historical analysis,
Gorski mentions two possibilities as regards the permeability of field boundaries
(2013: 332). He posits that there can be changes in degree (the ‘ease or fluidity with
which actors or resources flow from one field to another’) and changes in direction
(‘changes in the net flows from one field or subfield to another’) (2013: 332). In order
to describe television formats as structures that link fields, it is necessary to reach outside
orthodox Bourdieuian analytics. The changes in degree of capitals, and changes in direc-
tion of capitals, occur through these structures. Susan Leigh Star, both alone and in work
with others, draws our attention to what she called ‘boundary objects’ and ‘boundary
infrastructure’. In an article with Griesemer about museum objects which mean different
things to different people, they state that

Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local
needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough
to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in

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common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may
be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds
but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them
recognizable, a means of translation. The creation and management of boundary
objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting
social worlds.
(1989: 393)

The ideas which are used for television programme making can be thought of as bound-
ary objects. Under this category of boundary objects, we can include the more general
use of the term format – news format, cookery format, chat show format, observational
documentary, talent show – and also the more granular programme elements: ideas for
programme making in form (diary cam) or content (sex education).
The information commodity aspect of a format has three sub-elements: a format bible,
a travelling producer who provides consultancy services, and older versions of the pro-
gramme. These are more controlled than ideas. Despite its widescale applicability, the
concept of boundary objects does have limits: the concept is, state Bowker and Star,
‘most useful in analyzing cooperative and relatively equal situations; issues of imperialist
imposition of standards, force, and deception have a somewhat different structure’
(Bowker and Star 1999). The process of devising a format involves moving from the use
of a boundary object – ideas – into a television programme and a format – boundary
infrastructure.
Star and Ruhleder state that infrastructure is a ‘fundamentally relational concept’: it
‘becomes in relation to organized practices’ (1996: 113). This fits well with Bourdieu’s
idea of co-existing social fields which affect each other – the political and economic
forces. In order to relationally describe formats in the context of effects on the autonomy
of television producers, I use the concept of ‘boundary infrastructure’. Here, standards
are key, and formats are standards. To use an engineering metaphor, formats are a pipe
that is made to pierce through the edge of a televisual field so that capitals can flow.
They are also the immaterial (symbolic) and material (physical objects) substance that
flows through the pipe. What flows? Ideas. This is where textual analysis is important.
Brennan’s exploration of the ideas that are flowing shows some key themes repeat, such
as surveillance and individuality: ‘In their representation of acquisitive, individual com-
petition, formats, for the most part, are structurally predisposed to represent a single,
monetary hierarchy as the dominant definition of human accomplishment’ (2010: 20).
What else flows via formats? Non-economic forms of capital, understood as symbolic
capital, such as the prestige of being the devisor of the format. Of course, the four com-
modity forms discussed are a major part of the story. The format trade is a major source
of economic accumulation, partly through surplus value but mostly through rent. As
critical geographer David Harvey has pointed out, the general tendency with rent mod-
els is towards monopolization. He states that ‘Monopoly rent arises because social actors
can realize an enhanced income stream over an extended time by virtue of their exclu-
sive control over some directly or indirectly tradable item which is in some crucial
respects unique and non-replicable’ (2001/2012: 395).
But law tends to lean against formats being protected. Rubin describes formats as
being ‘caught in abyss of the ideas-expression dichotomy’ (1996: 663), with ideas not
being covered by law, and expressions of ideas being covered by national and interna-
tional copyright laws. Rubin states at the ‘heart of the problem is a lack of legal certainty

31
 QUINN

in disputes regarding idea submissions’ (1996: 667). In contrast to legal precedent, the
main industry body in the trade, the Format Recognition and Protection Association
(FRAPA) maintains that the ideas in formats come under the vague umbrella of
‘intellectual property rights’:

Many judges consider formats to be generic programme ‘ideas’, as opposed to

creative works, maintaining that ideas cannot be protected by copyright law. It
is hardly surprising that, in the absence of clear legal guidelines, courts have
been reluctant to uphold claims of copyright infringement as applied to
television formats. While the format trade assumes that intellectual property
(IP) rights exist in formats, this assumption is disputed in law. Against this
backdrop, format theft continues to be a threat, rendering IP protection of
central importance to the formats industry.
(Format Recognition and Protection Association, 2014)

At a theoretical level, as a television programme moves from being a programme

comprised of boundary objects – ideas – into format land, it becomes solidified as
boundary infrastructure, a format. But law is not enough to protect this boundary
infrastructure, from the perspective of the beneficial owner. Within a capitalist para-
digm, an owner needs to own the means of production. Otherwise, control cannot be
exerted and profits are put in doubt. Producer S, a format devisor, told me about the
importance of international relationships with regards to control over the means of
production:

It’s a two way thing and that’s where the protection of your ideas will be
strongest because you move up the food chain in terms of who you’re selling to
and we don’t rip each other off and if we do, if any production company gets
known as ‘they ripped off [format name]’, they become blacked in the industry.
It’s happened [to] a couple of companies that were known to rip off the show.
Other distributors suddenly don’t take a meeting with them anymore.

Producer F, also a format devisor, also talked about this aspect of the format trade:

Formats are very difficult to protect. I mean, I would say when they’re on paper
they’re very vulnerable and it’s essentially first to air is a sort of, get it on is the
sort of golden rule, or, as we’ve had to do this year, just make a pilot ourselves.
Stuff can be nicked, our ideas can be poached from shows and it has happened
and it’s very difficult to police and you need, again you need, an awful lot of
money to defend your formats because you’re going to end up in the High Court
and you could lose but what we do is we’ve a very good media lawyer, [name] in
[location] and he polices all our contracts.

Under international and national legal precedent, ideas are not protected. In Marxian
terms, the means of production are not protected. Yet, in order for capital to be valor-
ised, for money to be made, they need to be somehow ringfenced. Therefore, owners of
capital are doing it through moral pressure.
Producers that do not have recourse to lawyers have limited options. Producer A was a
relatively late arrival to television, and has no consecration in terms of educational capital

32
 TELEVI SI O N F O RM ATS A N D C U LT U R A L L A B O U R

or PSB producer capital. Nevertheless, Producer A co-devised a format that was successful,
in that it became a format after the crucial first-country production, but then sold it:

We sold it to the biggest player in the market which protected us from them,
because you’re only as good as your willingness to go to court and two freelancers
who barely made it through the first series are not going to take the world’s
biggest production company to court at a cost of a hundred thousand a day for
about a year-and-a-half, you know what I mean. No one is that stupid, you
know. [International format company] basically bought it and shelved it, so it
went into their catalogue of formats.

Boundary infrastructure is important in cultural fields, because it is where we can find

control of the means of production; in this case, ideas. In Figure 2.4, we go back to the
Marxian circuit of capital.
The shutting off of ideas – accumulation by dispossession in Marxian terms – is occur-
ring with the advent of formats. The surveillance-soaked ideas behind Big Brother might
not be so socially positive. What if the main idea is sex education, a vital public health
area? This is the case with another Endemol programme, The Sex Education Show. Could
ideas for sex education programming be closed off by Endemol? Additionally, we do not
know how ideas will be used in the future, but it is crucial that they remain usable,
beyond the reach of profit-driven legal and moral forces.

instruments
of e.g. television cameras,
production use of spaces of production
new ideas
material
of
<subject of labour
raw material
production pre-existing ideas appropriated
from the general intellect
use of pre-existing
format

C <L
mp
P
Television
Labour
labour Process
time

of television
producers

of other
television
workers
Figure 2.4 The means of production (mp) in the circuit of capital of the format
trade

33
 QUINN

Conclusion
In her discussion of a post-Bourdieuian theory of culture, Born states that

If there is an overriding dimension of creative practice that has been lamentably

neglected – by Bourdieu, production of culture and cultural studies alike – and
that demands to be studied, it is the insistent, existential reality of the historical
orientation of producers by reference to the aesthetic and ethical trajectories or
coordinates of the genres in which they work, an orientation that enables or
affords agency.
(2010: 192)

The format devisors that I interviewed are playing an international game, no longer as tied
to the hit-and-miss national independent production cycle. These are also the producers
who are getting the options on important formats from elsewhere. What the Format
Devisors do is create boundary infrastructure which will enable them to access the inter-
national field of television production. The usual way that this happens is through a creat-
ing a television programme, getting it on-air, and then selling the format – the bible, the
consultancy and an example of what was broadcast. They then own the means of produc-
tion, and have moved from being a format reproducer to being a format devisor.
Leigh Star’s concept of boundary infrastructure is thus an important idea when cul-
tural fields are being studied. Boundary infrastructure needs to be seen as a method for
accessing other fields, via the international field of television production, a major part
of which is the format trade. Thus, by using a structure that mediates between fields,
producers increase their effective agency, both at a cultural level and at an economic
level. However, if a television producer is on the receiving end of a format, their effec-
tive agency is reduced via the particular demands of the format being used.
Both Marx and Bourdieu help set up a relational way of thinking. Marx’s circuit of capi-
tal helps us clarify the economic aspects of the format trade. Bourdieu lets us narrow from
the economic and political context (field of power) to a particular context within which
television is produced (the field of television production); to the perceptions and actions of
producers within that field (habitus); and to the resources that television producers and
institutions draw on (forms of capital). A critique of Bourdieu socially-orientated sche-
mata in my work gives rise to an additional field structure of formats as infrastructure,
following Susan Leigh Star. In conclusion, when constructing cultural fields, it is neces-
sary to give due attention to the circuit of capital, to boundary objects and to boundary
infrastructure. These concepts allow us to pay attention to forms of agency and to the
linked process of control, both vital concepts in the new international division of cul-
tural labour. The viewing pleasures of House of Cards are one small part of this division.

References
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Bowker, G. and Star, S. L. (1999) ‘Categorical Work and Boundary Infrastructures: Enriching Theories
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Chicago Press.

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 3
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS
Bob Hodge

Social semiotics is an approach to the analysis of popular culture which distinctively

emphasizes social dimensions of meaning, systematically crossing major boundaries that
are often taken to constitute different forms of popular culture. It sees popular culture
as a set of social and cultural facts in a system of differences. It can refer primarily to
the main genres of contemporary mass culture, film, TV and now other digital media,
or it can refer to traditional popular forms of culture and cultural practices, in them-
selves, or displaced or cannibalized by mass culture. For social semiotics, these differ-
ences do not have the status of definitions, but describe a single complex landscape
whose flows and blockages of meaning across these boundaries are themselves major
objects for analysis.
This entry will indicate what social semiotics can and cannot do, illustrated from a
single film, Frida, a 2002 biopic about the famous Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo (1907–
1954). Social semiotics is useful for analysing three issues.

1 Multiple media. This film won an Oscar for best original score. Music has long been
part of the visual culture of film, but how can it be analysed for its role in a spectrum
of semiotic forms or media? How can the meanings of practices and behaviours be
analysed in the same terms?
2 Popular versus ‘high’ culture. This is a popular film, but it is about an artist whose
importance in the international art scene is exploding. How does that double role
of ‘culture’ work, in an understanding of the film’s meaning and importance as
popular culture?
3 Popular culture and everyday life. The subject of the film is not only Frida as artist,
but also Mexican culture, then and now, including its popular culture. Mexico is a
major set of meanings, represented or appropriated in this film, part of the commod-
ity viewers buy with the ticket. How can this embedded object, the ‘culture’ in all
its senses, be analysed, inside and outside the film? Can the transactions between
these forms of culture be understood and analysed together, in all their complexity?
Social semiotics has useful answers to all these questions, as a contribution to the
analytic repertoire of popular culture studies.

Definitions
Semiotics was defined as ‘the life of signs in society’ by Saussure, a founding father
(1974), but his followers neglected the social. Social semiotics is a version of semiotics
distinguished by greater emphasis on the social, in which social relations, processes,
 SO CI A L SEM I O T I C S

practices, contexts, forces and effects are always crucial for analysis and description, and
where meanings always play a central explanatory role for understanding culture.
In classical semiotics, there are two main categories of sign. In ‘motivated’ signs the
meaning is inherent in the sign itself: e.g., Frida refused to pluck her heavy eyebrows,
which ‘naturally’ signify masculinity. In ‘arbitrary’ or ‘conventional’ signs the meaning
of the sign is established by social convention. For social semiotics, ‘conventionality’ is
the site where social meanings are most active. The meaning of Frida’s eyebrows and her
refusal to depilate them, against a background of gender expectations, combines the two
kinds of sign in a radical statement about her gender identity, which is more powerful
and legible because it combines the two. Because of its basis in similar physiological and
social conditions, it has a similar meaning and force in the film as in the culture, though
it was probably more defiant in Frida’s Mexico than it is now in US culture.
Within this general social semiotic framework there are two kinds of Big Meaning
that orientate social semiotic analyses of popular culture of all forms. One is ‘culture’
itself, understood as a web of shared meanings holding the group together through its
habitual meaning-making practices. The other is ‘ideology’, where the origins and func-
tions of these Big Meanings are looked for in their relationship to the interests of
dominant groups. Whereas students of culture typically define themselves as interested
only in culture, not ideology, and students of ideology the converse, for social semiotics
both can be objects of analysis, depending on the social relations of the production and
analysis of the meanings. Frida’s eyebrows, for instance, convey a gender ideology which
is a crucial component of the culture she constructs and to which she belongs.
For social semiotics, all producers of meaning themselves have social meaning, which is
part of the meanings of the texts or objects they produce or in which they appear. For this
reason, no form of popular culture is innocent of political and social value. There are always
struggles, which always have social meaning. For instance, the film’s director was a woman,
like Frida, but not Mexican. The two identities contribute to the unstable social meanings
of the film, and the culture it represents. Is it cultural imperialism of a Mexican icon, or a
respectful tribute to Mexican or women’s creativity? Or both? The culture is mainly depicted
as rooted in Mexico, but European influences, like surrealism and international recognition,
mainly from France and USA, are briefly shown to play decisive roles. For social semiotics,
social complexity contributes to and is realized as social meaning.

Historical perspectives
The name ‘social semiotics’ specifically identifies an analytic tradition that stems from
two works: linguist Michael Halliday’s Language as Social Semiotic (1976) and cultural
theorists Bob Hodge and Gunther Kress’ Social Semiotics (1988). For Halliday, ‘social
semiotic’ referred to the meaning resources of a culture carried by language. Hodge and
Kress were influenced by Halliday, while grounding their theory more strongly in Marxist
social theory and the semiotic tradition as inflected by this social perspective.
But social semiotics is more usefully seen as a broader tradition which may not be
labelled as ‘social semiotics’. It is so closely interwoven with semiotics that its history as
a practice for analysing different aspects of popular culture needs to be described as part
of that larger history. The two ‘founding fathers’ of semiotics, Charles Peirce (1956) and
Ferdinand de Saussure (1974), established the scope of semiotics as the study of both
verbal and non-verbal signs. But neither Peirce not Saussure applied their theories to
the analysis of any kind of text or any aspect of culture, popular or otherwise, and neither

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 H O DG E

saw a strong role for the social dimension of signs in use. Social semiotics can be used to
refer to a family of approaches which combine semiotic scope with social dimensions,
and apply these to analyse the full range of signifying systems and practices that
constitute all forms of culture.
In this brief, partial history of semiotics/social semiotics, mention must be made of the
contribution of Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein. In effect, before semiotics had
been officially introduced to the world, Eisenstein invented it, and applied it to his own
practice of film-making, including literature, music and painting as analogous practices.
His key term, ‘montage’, first proposed in 1923, referred to the principles of syntax of
the new ‘language’ of film (1968), thus laying down a path that led to a tradition of
semiotics for which film as a medium is analysed as a language, as by French theorist
Christian Metz (1974). But Eisenstein went beyond formalist concerns with how film
and other languages used in popular culture constructed meanings, to emphasize the
‘image of the theme itself’ (1968: 19) unpredictably produced by these juxtapositions.
Because he was a Marxist film-maker, that theme was always social. In this respect,
Eisenstein bequeathed to the study of film and other popular forms not only semiotics,
in his conception of the many semiotic modes deployed in film, but also social semiotics,
tying forms of the media to social meanings. But from the point of view of later versions
of social semiotics, he over-emphasised the unity of the meaning of texts, as if it were
totally under the control of its producer. Every act of montage, combining pieces of film
or scraps of culture, can be put together differently in the minds of viewers or consumers
of that product or that culture.
Frida can be interpreted as having many different social meanings for different audi-
ences as members of different cultures. Mexican culture likewise can be seen as a
montage of different kinds and strata of culture, including indigenous and European
traditions, mixed in a significant melange. For social semiotics, meanings do not exist
separately from social agents of meaning. There is not a single ‘right’ meaning which
others may get wrong. There is a repertoire of meanings and interpretations, which are
social facts but not always agreed readings.
A different line of semiotics which also led towards social semiotics can be seen in
the work of Roland Barthes, who applied semiotic analysis to distinct kinds of objects
of popular culture (1972). In one study, he looked at the meanings of milk and wine in
French culture compared to non-French cultures. This is popular culture as a tradi-
tional set of meanings. He looked at hairstyles in US films, a French gaze on this
dominant form of popular culture. He looked at soap powders, mystifying products of
mass culture dominating French advertising and supermarkets. Finally, he looked at
ideologically-laden objects of popular culture, such as the use of the French flag in
popular magazines.
In each of these examples, ‘popular culture’ has a different sense, ranging between folk
culture and ideology, but Barthes uses the same gaze and the same methods of analysis
to intuit continuities across this whole domain. Like Eisenstein, Barthes did not theorize
his understanding of the social dimensions of the different kinds of meaning he was
tracking, in different aspects of what is called popular culture, but his analytic practices
are full of lessons and implications for social semiotics and the study of popular culture.
Barthes’ different forms and objects of social semiotic analysis apply usefully to different
aspects and problems of Frida as source of problems for analysis. The place of tequila in
Frida’s culture (she was a heavy drinker) is a significant contrast with wine in Barthes’
French culture. Frida used brightly coloured clothes to signify an ideology around

38
 SO CI A L SEM I O T I C S

Mexican indigenous identities, both contesting the racism of her society yet paradoxically
also using some motifs of the dominant nationalist ideology.
Dick Hebdige (1979) was another influential writer who used a social framework for
semiotic analysis of popular culture without calling it ‘social semiotics’. He was con-
cerned with the social meanings and functions of a form of popular culture he called
‘subculture’, which he interpreted as a culture of resistance. A distinctive part of his
theory was his proposition that there is a typical social process whereby distinctive
semiotic features of a subculture are appropriated by the dominant culture and turned
into commodities.
Hebdige’s work has been criticised as being too specific about the subcultural groups
he was studying, British working-class groups in the post-war period. However, when
placed in a more general social semiotic framework, he can be seen to have developed
some important principles for social semiotics. His analysis of specific sign systems was
embedded in a social analysis of the dynamics of the group in relation to its struggles,
with other groups and with the dominant society. He saw that from this perspective, a
similar set of signs could have drastically different meanings, from rebellion and resist-
ance to conformity, depending on who is using and interpreting them, and under what
conditions. Extrapolating from what he said about the way subcultures can be appropri-
ated to morph into components of popular culture, we can propose a general model of
forms of culture, dominant and ‘popular’, in which the boundaries around each form are
socially constructed and subject to constant change, whose basis is always social and
always socially significant.
Frida’s flamboyant dress style and ‘bohemian’ behaviour, portrayed in the film and
reconstructed from other sources, had many of the characteristic forms and functions of
a ‘subculture’ in Hebdige’s sense, but with a significant variation on the Hebdige trajec-
tory. Frida’s culture of resistance was constantly in danger of being co-opted into the
commercial logic of the dominant culture, yet it also found another route into that
culture via its merging with ‘high art’ in the international art market. Her lifestyle is
distinct from her art, but some aspects of it were incorporated into the commercial pack-
age, of herself as artist and as appropriated in Frida. From a social semiotic perspective,
this kind of struggle of social groups and forms of culture, rather than a single pre-
determined outcome, is the real object of analysis.

Current Contributions
The ‘social’ part of social semiotics has been exemplified in a number of works that add
other traditions of social analysis to the analytic repertoire, especially as a way to explore
the rule-governed forms of everyday social life. Alec McHoul describes his own approach
as ‘effective semiotics’ (1996), which includes a diverse range of sources, including
Wittgenstein and Nietzsche as well as Foucault, Derrida and Saussure, in a package
which has a similar structure and purpose to social semiotics, so much so that each could
be seen as a version of the other.
Toby Miller and McHoul (1998) opened up a ground-breaking approach to the taken-
for-granted meanings of familiar actions and routines in everyday life, making some of
the suggestive and influential insights of Michel de Certeau (1984) into the practices
and spaces of everyday life more available to rich empirical analysis.
Recently, social semiotics has added the concept of multi-modality to its analytic
repertoire (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001). Multi-modality incorporates the basic social

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semiotic principle that all message systems are carried by more than one semiotic mode.
This was true of film from the outset, but the omnipresence of multimedia forms in
contemporary popular culture constitutes a socio-semiotically important trend, in which
popular culture is leading the way. Popular culture, then, is the best site for the study of
this major transformation of media and forms of thought.
With hindsight, we can project backwards, and suggest that this was always the case,
as the example of film studies already shows. Eisenstein’s work took for granted what
would now be called multi-modality as characteristic of film, present in Frida as in all
films. Most forms of popular culture, typically judged as limited and simple when
viewed through the reductive lenses of the dominant mono-modal print culture, are
typically multi-modal, with an inherent complexity that has been invisible through
those lenses. From a social semiotic perspective, we can say that traditional elitist
studies of popular culture used an inappropriately reductive mono-modal approach to
pre-judge popular culture, dismissing the complexity and richness of popular culture
that they could not see.

Critical Issues and Topics

Social semiotics can be applied in the analysis of all forms of what are called ‘popular
culture’, as we have seen with the work of Barthes, but it is not a neutral method. On
the contrary, most forms of social semiotics rest on assumptions about society and cul-
ture, and the processes of meaning which constitute both and through which their
effects are manifested.
From this point of view, the social semiotic take on the debate in studies of popular
culture around the categories of ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture sees them as socially sig-
nificant stances taken by different kinds of social agent, reflecting their specific interests
through those stances, and attempting to have social effects through such interven-
tions. This can be seen more easily now with historical instances. Matthew Arnold’s
19th-century definition of ‘culture’, in a dichotomy captured in the title of his most
famous book Culture and Anarchy (1993), defined the cultural lacks which made the
‘lower’ classes such objects of fear, and created a need for the dominant class to reassert
its cultural and social dominance through the only kind of ‘culture’ they recognized as
culture. For a social semiotic approach there is no pre-given definition of culture and
popular culture, only a dynamic, shifting set of cultural forms, including forms of ‘high’
culture, whose boundaries and functions are set and unsettled in conditions of struggle.
A second perspective on the play of (popular) cultural forms that can be seen in social
semiotics can be derived from Barthes’ work, the idea that cultural forms of different
kinds can be embedded in other forms, to form complex, unstable and socially signifi-
cant packages. For instance, in Frida, fragments from Mexican culture are inserted into
the narrative of a Hollywood film. Multiple juxtapositions happen so rapidly that mass
audiences who do not know about Mexican culture may switch off, or not understand
what they have seen. Conversely, Mexican audiences at that point may switch on,
briefly gratified by this glimpse, or angered by its brevity. The overriding point, a prob-
lem for what some students would want from a method of analysis, is that there is no
single meaning of this text. Social meanings are traces of struggle which precede the
presentation of any complex text in popular culture and which continue on after any
given act of instantiation or interpretation. Social semiotics makes the interpretation of
popular culture and its texts richer and more interesting, but not easier.

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Research Methods
Social semiotics has a strong orientation to methods of analysis available for the study
of different forms of popular culture, many of which have already been alluded to. Here
I set out some basic principles, illustrated from Frida. This small-budget film returned a
profit of 370%. It was nominated for six Oscars, and won two, including ‘best original
score’ for Elliott Goldenthal and Julie Taymor. The Miramax production was directed
by Taymor and starred Mexican-born Salma Hayek in the title role. Through Hayek as
promoter and producer it incorporated a deep first-hand knowledge of Mexican culture.
For illustrative purposes, I focus especially on a single short scene built around the
performance of a traditional Mexican song, La Llorona (The woman who weeps). It begins
in a typical Mexican taverna, after Frida’s husband, Diego Rivera, announces he wants
a divorce. Frida gazes into a mirror and a dream-like sequence follows. It begins with a
Mexican figure of Death, then cuts to 83-year-old Costa Rican/Mexican singer Chavela
Vargas, with deeply lined face and rasping, powerful voice, singing La Llorona to Frida.
The song, only 2 minutes 20 seconds long, organizes a complex narrative, told through
sharp cuts, of the death of Trotsky, Frida’s former lover, and Frida’s inspiration for one of
her most famous paintings, The Two Fridas. I set out seven steps that a social semiotic
analysis might take. As a film, it is best suited to show the application of social semiotics
to artefacts and texts, but I also use it to analyse lived culture.

1. Seek Out a Well-Motivated, Complex

Site of Analysis
This first step is crucial, so complex in itself that it cannot be reduced to a mechanical
formula. A single genre, like Hollywood film, is too vast and yet not complex enough in
the right way, unless there is a good prior reason that draws you to it. The same applies
to a category like Mexican (popular) culture. In the case of Frida, I was drawn to the
phenomenon of Hollywood appropriating Mexican culture and Mexican culture insert-
ing itself into Hollywood, so that the film was a site of cultural struggle and negotiation
on a small scale. Two aspects of the popular culture were also referenced: the iconogra-
phy of Death, and taverna-culture, each a possible focus for analysis.

2. Find a Point of Entry

The terms outlined above are broad enough to start a search, but too broad for a con-
crete analysis to know where to begin. Frida’s success at the Oscars was a reason to look
at it. As I viewed it, this scene struck me as especially interesting for an in-depth analy-
sis, but many others could have served the purpose.

3. Clarify the Social Meanings and

Contexts First
Social semiotics looks at the play of social meanings as carried by texts, but the analysis
of meanings needs to be framed and guided by social analysis, not the converse. The
categories of Mexican and American (gringo/a, in Mexican discourse) are crucial in the
case of the film. The construction of the film, and the scene, are an interplay of the two
identities: a Hollywood film directed by an American woman for consumption by an

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American audience, in the first place, but representing a Mexican woman, played by an
English-speaking Mexican woman, listening to a singer who was famous in Mexico but
not well known in America, singing a song in Spanish, its words in subtitles. In the
represented culture, a more significant category is gender.

4. Follow Meanings into Society

and Back
Social semiotics is vitally interested in meanings, just not in meanings isolated from
multiple social contexts. For instance, Chavela Vargas’ 83-year-old face is a film-maker’s
delight, full of lines captured lovingly in close-up. These are motivated signs in the clas-
sic semiotic sense. They are also conventional signs, their meaning embedded in specific
meanings in Mexican culture. She only finally came out as lesbian in a late auto-
biography, but her public image carried that kind of meaning. She dressed in men’s
clothes and fired a pistol on stage as she sang traditional songs written for men as if she
were a man, in a harsh, androgynous voice. Barthes coined the graphic term ‘grain of
the voice’ to refer to the immense social semiotic potential of voices (1977), a term
which applies illuminatingly to other expressive codes in popular culture, including, in
this instance, Vargas’ face.
Yet this kind of journey into the potential infinity of meanings always needs a social
map, to be able to ask whose meanings these are, which culture do they come from. For
instance, Taymor had to know more about Mexican culture than most Americans to
have found and cast Chavela Vargas, but as a director she needed to convey some of the
conventional meanings of Vargas and her voice. Even within Mexican culture there are
different levels of knowledge. For instance, Salma Hayek, in her commentary on
the film, reports the tradition that Chavela Vargas was one of Frida’s lovers. This is the
knowledge of an inner circle, a culture within the culture within the culture, which is
not referenced in the film but can give a further dimension of meaning for those who
know.
Frida drinks tequila, first with Diego, her husband, and then continues to drink alone
at the bar, before drinking with Chavela in the hallucinatory sequence. Tequila and
alcoholism were defining features of taverna culture, but with some levels of complexity.
In Frida’s time, women were largely barred from drinking in public bars. This scene
shows transgressive behaviour, without marking it. In Chavela’s case it was also self-
destructive. She retired for 17 years to battle her alcoholism. In a social semiotic analysis,
the meaning of alcohol (and many other drugs which play a similar role) includes these
‘motivated’ signs in tense conjunction with the conventional meanings they are
assigned, by group members and those they resist.

5. Assume Ambiguity, Complexity and

Contradiction
Forms of analysis that aspire to the condition of ‘science’ prize ‘objectivity’, enshrined
in a rule that analysts should assume nothing about the object of their analysis. For social
semiotics, this misrepresents inherent properties of the act of interpretation, even in
science, and far more in the study of popular cultural forms. Scientists do not merely
describe, but propose hypotheses and pursue them in their investigations. If students of
popular culture in a social semiotic line assumed that meanings are single, simple and

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consistent, they would ignore ambiguity, complexity and contradiction until they cannot
be denied. It is better to rely on the outcomes of countless social semiotic studies of
popular culture which always find these qualities omnipresent.
In the case of Frida, social complexity and struggle ensure that there will be many
significant ambiguities, in the film and in this scene, which flow from social tensions
and conflicts. For instance, the Llorona text has a realist narrative, in which Frida is
rejected by her husband and Trotsky is shot, overlaid by a symbolic narrative in which
Death is an ambiguous figure: ‘black but loving,’ in the seductive words of the song. In
one mode, Frida and Trotsky are weak; victims. In the other mode, they are archetypal
figures who triumph precisely through the adversity. How is this contradiction to be
resolved? It is an analogous problem in the culture. The affirmation of death as part of
life in Mexican culture, associated with the Day of the Dead, is also a strategy to cope
with poverty, oppression and pain in everyday life, but not necessarily to struggle against
its causes. Its fatalism is an alternative to revolution, not an expression of it, though the
two lines co-exist in Frida’s life and culture.

6. Use Multi-Modal Analysis

Use multi-modal analysis to explore all the main semiotic modes and media intersecting
in the object of analysis. See what modes carry which meanings, and for whom, and the
social meanings of their interaction. For instance, in the Llorona scene, the song is in
Spanish, for Mexican audiences; badly translated into English subtitles, in effect, non-
Spanish speakers are excluded from knowing what is really going on. Spanish has gender,
and the singer, a woman, uses masculine forms for herself, a woman wooing the woman,
Frida, in front of her: Vargas’ gender revolution, which she shared with Frida, in life as
in culture.
The song, sung live by Vargas, is lightly over-scored with an orchestral arrangement,
making it more lush, less popular, less Mexican. Does this signify an alliance or a com-
promise? Or both? The 2 minutes 20 seconds of the song overlay a rapid visual montage,
which includes the tavern scene, Frida’s journey home, and the death of Trotsky, repre-
sented in realist terms with a human assassin, then, in Mexican iconographic language,
by a man in a death mask, Death itself. So much is compressed into this short piece of
film that the diversity is likely to be reflected in a diversity of interpretations. In her
commentary on the scene, director Taymor said, ‘you get what you want from the scene’.

7. Look for Relationships across

Different Scales
Society and culture exist at different scales, from small-scale (micro-) through medium
(meso-) to large-scale (macro-), with many grades between, crossed by meanings and
forces. The same is true of forms of text and culture. But the two kinds of scale can be
related in many ways. For instance, the Llorona scene is 2% of the whole film, yet in
some ways encapsulates that larger whole. Frida is a small percentage of Mexican-themed
Hollywood films, but again it encapsulates many of the key issues. Frida was a unique
individual, but she constructed her identity out of meanings shared by her subcultural
group, which in turn defined itself against elements of the dominant culture. No level
is identical with any other, but the play of meanings up and down the scale is always
significant.

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It is because of this multi-scalar framework that social semiotics is able to do what it

is sometimes criticised for, but which it does best. A multi-scalar framework gives a
rationale to minutely analyse small objects of popular culture, small texts in their con-
text, objects like Frida’s eyebrows or Chavela Vargas’s face, a single song like La Llorona,
a cultural practice like drinking tequila, for signs and clues of a larger culture. Yet there
are checks on such extrapolations in social semiotic practices. No significant object,
however small or large, has an uncontested meaning for all members of any given group
or culture. Empirical work of social analysis is always necessary to frame analysis across
different social scales and signifying spaces, to ask who produces these meanings, in what
contexts, with what effects.

Future directions
Like other approaches to popular culture, social semiotics needs to take account of the
huge impact of digital technologies on all forms of popular culture. In the case of social
semiotics, the classical typology of signs needs to be expanded to give digital signs a
major place. The role of all three kinds of signs needs to be explored as they interact in
the semiotic products and processes of a rapidly-expanding set of digital technologies
that penetrate most forms of popular culture and create many new ones.
A particular challenge of digital technologies for social semiotics is the role of virtual-
ity. Influential claims are made that there is a radically new relationship between the
‘virtual’ products of digital technologies and all elements previously understood to con-
stitute popular culture, agents, identities, objects, practices, relationships, communities.
To the extent that this is so, it potentially changes the whole field of contemporary
popular culture, and the means of studying it. Social semiotics needs to meet the chal-
lenge of understanding these new forms and their effects. However, these claims are so
important that social semiotics also needs to be able to demonstrate where this hype
distorts and misrepresents what is going on in mediated forms of popular culture, in what
is likely to be a hybrid multi-modal cultural system for the foreseeable future.

References
Arnold, M. (1993) Culture and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barthes, R. (1972) Mythologies. London: Jonathan Cape.
———(1977) Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana.
De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Eisenstein, S. (1968) The Film Sense. London: Faber.
Halliday, M. (1976) Language as Social Semiotic. London: Edward Arnold.
Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.
Hodge, B., and Kress, G. (1988) Social Semiotics. Oxford, Polity Press.
Kress, G., and Van Leeuwen, T. (2001) Multimodal Discourse. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
McHoul, A. (1996). Semiotic Investigations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Metz, C. (1974) Film Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Miller, T., and McHoul, A. (1998) Popular Culture and Everyday Life. London: Sage.
Peirce, C. S. (1956) Selected Writings. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Saussure, F. de (1974) A Course in General Linguistics. London: Fontana.

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 4
AUDIENCES
The Lived Experience
of Popular Culture
Helen Wood

Most studies of popular culture involve an understanding of audiences, since by deeming

something ‘popular’ an assumption about the size and type of an ‘audience’ of some kind
has been already made. But thinking about who that audience might be is not necessar-
ily straightforward. The audience is a shifting and moving object since we are all at some
point part of an audience of some kind or another. Therefore audiences only really come
into being by those looking to generate knowledge about them – whether it is the mar-
ket analyst trying to predict entertainment trends, the policymaker trying to explain
young people’s behaviour, or the cultural researcher trying to interpret the relevance of
popular culture to any particular moment in history. Ways of detailing, measuring and
describing audiences are therefore open to vested interests and we can understand a
good deal about the culture industries by knowing about how they generate knowledge
and data about their audiences (see Ang 1991; Napoli 2003; Smythe 1991).
In this entry, we shall first take a historical look at the ways in which popular cultural
audiences have been labelled and made visible, teasing out their various connections to
social commentary. Most relevant texts about audiences focus upon media audiences and
they can take various approaches depending upon their association with communication
theory, psychology or social science. This entry will emphasise the value of taking a
‘culture-led’ approach to the audience and takes a look back at the value of observa-
tional ethnographic methods influenced by Cultural Studies. It is impossible to account
for all the work carried out about audiences of the popular, but such an approach has
been privileged most by those interested in television audiences, for reasons which will
become clear. Finally, we will consider the challenges and directions of a ‘culture-led’
approach to audiences in the current highly technologized and individualised cultural
landscape.

Fears and Audience Labels

We can gain considerable insights into how audiences have been conceived by their
labelling, because such labels reveal the nature of concerns over social behaviour and
power relations between groups. Over different periods audiences have been described
 WOOD

largely through different types of fears around collective forms of entertainment. By the
mid-eighteenth century, when theatre-going became popular for all classes, commenta-
tors were concerned about the ‘crowds’ that attended. Their fears were about the rowdy
behaviour of people of lower classes which needed to be contained. These anxieties were
given fuel by psychological perspectives on how those of poor education become overly
excited and emotional by the sheer fact of their being assembled together (Le Bon
1896/2001). Associated terms like ‘mob’ indicated the class distain with which bour-
geois theatre-goers attempted to get working-class audiences banned from theatres.
Richard Butsch (2008) describes the insecurities of the new middle classes of the mid-
nineteenth century who, as part of distinguishing themselves from manual workers,
‘tamed’ and ‘civilised’ the theatre audience. In many ways, therefore, the struggle over
ways of classifying popular audiences is highly indicative of broader struggles between
people.
The arrival of ‘mass’ entertainment through the ‘mass’ media generated a new term –
the ‘mass’ audience – and with it came another set of associated societal concerns. The
audiences of broadcasting were now less publically visible and, therefore, in some ways
less threatening. Whereas previous concerns were mostly around the over-stimulated
and active assembled audience, mass media audiences, geographically dispersed, were
considered to be passive. They posed a different threat – not one to public order and
civil society – but rather one to civic engagement and the workings of democracy. In
this view, the ‘mass’ audience as created by the mass media were atomised individuals
who were pathologically open to easy manipulation and persuasion. This was not an
even process for different types of media, because the radio was mostly hoped to be a
public good whose audiences were potentially citizens and their collective identity con-
stitutive of ‘publics’. However, the television audience with its consumption of
advertising (from the outset in the US and from 1955 in the UK) was considered as a
pathological atomised ‘mass’ (Butsch 2008).
Early social research stemmed from moral panics concerned with vulnerable audi-
ences, mostly children, women and the working classes who were not deemed able to
cope intellectually or emotionally with the influence of propaganda or media violence.
In accounts of media audience research this work is referred to as the ‘media effects’
tradition following a ‘hypodermic needle model’ through which assumptions were made
about popular media overpowering individuals. The most often cited of that enormous
area of research is that by Bandura et al. (1961, 1963) in which laboratory experiments
tested children’s violence against a doll after viewing television violence. Much public
funding, especially in the US, was put into experimental research aiming to assess the
short-term effects of media exposure on attitudes and forms of behaviour. In accounts of
media audience research there is often a narrative about effects research as over-
simplified because it isolates media and individuals from other social and cultural influ-
ences in order to look for cause and effect. Whilst we might want to reject the audience
labels such as ‘cultural dopes’ and ‘passive dupes’ that have accompanied some of this
type of effects research, it would, however, seem naïve to assume that popular media has
absolutely no influence upon people at all. (For further discussion of these debates see
Livingstone 1996; Philo 2001; and Petley and Barker 2002.)
The arrival of television as the mass medium par excellence spurred a renewal of
critiques of mass popular culture, which have been discussed elsewhere in this hand-
book. Fears galvanised from literary critics concerned with the standardisation of
aesthetic forms to attacks from the left into mass culture’s ideological hold over the

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masses (the Frankfurt School). Many of these viewpoints, however, are rarely formed
with an interest in the lived experiences of audiences because starting with the notion of
‘mass audience’ already embeds a set of assumptions about isolated, lazy and uncritical
individuals, leaving the distinctions between them and their pleasures, feelings and daily
routines untouched. The dominance of these perspectives, however, initiated the oft-
cited comment from cultural historian Raymond Williams that ‘there are in fact no
masses; only ways of seeing people as masses’, which critiques the ways in which the
audience is constructed to serve some societal perspective. This quote is from the essay
‘Culture is Ordinary’, which attempted to flesh some vital experiential detail to the lived
experience of everyday culture, at a particular time and in a particular location. When
the study of popular culture gained credibility, outside of wanting to form opinions
related to social and psychological fears, its research methods leant towards the ethno-
graphic and interpretive. Whilst more embedded and thus more complex pictures of
popular culture audiences emerged, they often did so in dialogue with the kind of
labelling and popular characterisations described above.

A Culture-Led Approach to Audiences

When cultural historian Richard Hoggart was writing about the juke box boys in the
Uses of Literacy in 1957 he was making observations about the way in which young
people ‘acted out’ their music choices in the milk bars of Leeds. He was concerned with
mass culture gaining popularity by means of mass production and mass distribution.
However, his ethnographic observations were also about the ways in which a popular
cultural form could begin to constitute a ‘way of life’ and a way of being in the world. In
the book, Hoggart is still very critical of the way he sees popular mass-produced enter-
tainment displacing the more ‘authentic’ working-class culture of the northern British
town of Leeds, but his ethnographic description allows some atmosphere of the ‘scene’
and its attractions to come through. For example:

. . . most of the customers are boys aged between fifteen and twenty, with drape-
suits, picture ties, and an American slouch. Most of them cannot afford a
succession of milk-shakes, and make cups of tea last for an hour or two whilst –
and this is their main reason for coming – they put copper after copper into the
mechanical record player . . . Some of the tunes are catchy; all have been
doctored for presentation so that they have the kind of beat which is currently
popular; much use is made of the ‘hollow-cosmos’ effect which the echo-
chamber recording gives. They are delivered with great precision and
competence, and the ‘nickelodeon’ is allowed to blare out so that the noise
would be sufficient to fill a good-sized ballroom, rather than a converted shop
in a main street. The young men waggle one shoulder or stare, as desperately as
Humphrey Bogart, across the tubular chairs.
(1957: 248)

What is interesting here is Hoggart’s description of the performative element of being

part of the music audience in the specific environment of the milk bar. What Hoggart
sees as the repetitive strains of the music text are clearly something more at the moment
of consumption to the meanings of youth as generated by the boys. We start to see how
that music is stitched to the fabric of the situation by gestures, actions and the material

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environment, and that is a way of seeing that has seeped into audience studies from a
more culture-led perspective.
Richard Hoggart formed the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in
Birmingham, UK, and the interest in ethnography and lived experience came to influ-
ence the development of audience research (Alasuutari 1999; Moores 1993). In a sense
many of the early accounts of music subcultures tried to interrogate this sense of fear
around young people’s expression around music cultures in the 1970s at a time of eco-
nomic and social disruption in the UK. It considered how being part of a youth culture –
collected around the appreciation of a particular music and style – culminated into a
way of life that could also be resistant to dominant cultural forms (e.g. Hebdige 1979;
Hall and Jefferson 1978). This offered a re-appraisal of the collective experiences of pop-
ular culture as far removed from the assumptions of ‘crowds’ or ‘passive dopes’. Detailing
emergent and differentiated types of cultural activity shows how active audience engage-
ment can be identity-forming, which the CCCS found politically exciting.
An early emphasis on publicly visible subcultures, however, did not quite capture
other domestic audiences of the popular. Angela McRobbie (1992) researched young
girls’ cultural practices as pop music listeners and magazine readers as they were con-
tained in the bedroom, and in so-doing critiqued the gender-blindness of early subculture
studies. The point of their ethnographic emphasis upon public and domestic contexts,
though, grasped a sense of the way in which popular culture is itself constituted by the
feelings, enactments and attachments that operate around its forms. Whilst the story of
subculture research is not always brought to bear upon the story of audience research,
the idea that audiences might be active in their practices is one that has held sway. This
has led to the label ‘active audience tradition’, which has been developed through
research on television and assumes an approach influenced by Cultural Studies. It has
also led to some criticism for being over celebratory of the resistive power of audiences
(Philo and Miller 2001).

From Soaps to Sci-Fi: The ‘Active’

Television Audience
Partly in response to elite notions of television as the lowest form of popular culture,
television audience research has dominated the understanding of popular culture audi-
ences. A classic account of the evolution of the relationship between television audience
research and Cultural Studies can be found in David Morley’s (1992) Television,
Audiences and Cultural Studies, where he discusses the twin areas of class and ideology
and gender and domestic leisure as generating a research agenda which all pointed to an
ethnographic tradition.
At the CCCS, David Morley’s (1980) first audience research project into evening
news magazine show Nationwide tested communication theory models which presumed
the linear transmission of media messages and supported assumptions about ‘passive’
audiences. His work demonstrated how a text’s meaning was dependent upon the social
location of the audience, as he revealed the different interpretive strategies of audience
groups from different social backgrounds. This meant that, dependent upon their social
location, audiences could adopt, negotiate or resist the ideological messages of the text.
This work rested upon Stuart Hall’s (1980) theoretical exposition of the encoding/
decoding paradigm where a text’s meaning lay somewhere between the encoding
intended by the producer and the decoding strategies brought to it by the audience

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member. It set in motion ‘a new and exciting phase in so-called audience research’ (Hall
1980: 131) and, whilst Morley’s initial work was conducted through focus groups in the
university setting, his later work Family Television (1986) instigated a turn to more eth-
nographic accounts of television and media consumption which privileged the domestic
setting. Morley subsequently argues that to fully understand television one needs also to
detail the dynamics of the places of consumption:

Television as ‘text’ and television as technology are united by their construction,

their recontextualisation, within the practices of our daily lives and in the
display of goods and cultural competence, both in private and in public. If we
are to make some sense of these activities which, after all, are the primary ones
for any understanding of the dynamics of the pervasiveness and power of
contemporary culture, then we have to take seriously the varied and detailed
ways in which they are undertaken. This is the basis for a commitment to
ethnography as an empirical method.
(Morley 1992: 182–3)

It was feminists who mostly developed this cultural studies audience tradition. Of the
many fears of the arrival of television as a domestic technology, one was over its ability
to stupefy women at home (and perhaps distract them from domestic labour: Spigel
1992). Feminists were concerned with the characterisation of women viewers of popular
entertainment, mainly soap operas, as stupid and passive viewers. There is a long tradi-
tion of devaluing women’s culture; Huyssen (1986) details the strategies of gendering
mass culture as feminine and inferior in the nineteenth century. Feminists were there-
fore increasingly interested in an agenda which rescued women and their favourite texts
from scorn. Charlotte Brunsdon (2000) reflects upon the configuration of the three
central figures to this narrative: ‘the feminist, the housewife and the soap opera’.
Some of the first work was conducted by Dorothy Hobson (1980) as she spent time
talking to housewives about their use of the radio and television in the home. What she
describes, using Ann Oakley’s work on the housewife, is the way in which broadcasting
can be used to combat the two most classic problems of their life: loneliness and bore-
dom. But work with audiences also began to interrogate myths around the lack of critical
appreciation involved in being a fan of soap opera. Ellen Seiter’s (1989) classic work
discusses how soap opera viewers themselves take issue with that position and value
forms of melodrama, whilst Ien Ang’s (1985) work with viewers of the US soap Dallas
shows how viewers deploy strategies interrogating the texts’ ‘emotional realism’ as a dif-
ferent form of critical engagement with the text. Hobson’s (1982) work on the British
soap opera Crossroads entailed watching television with women at home, seeing how the
text allowed viewing around child care and housework in a complex arrangement of
distracted viewing and multi-tasking. Other work has discussed the classed and genera-
tional distinctions between women’s appreciation of realism (Press 1991) and the
connection of the value that women find in soap operas to forms of orality (Brown
1994). This research begins to elicit how popular texts become meaningful as they are
appropriated in contexts, here within the domestic ritual and routine of the home and
everyday life.
The call to appreciate the contexts of popular cultural consumption is central to a
culture-led approach to audiences, but it is also quite difficult to balance. Once one
begins to think about context, then it can be all encompassing and we can begin to

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understand more about the ‘use’ of media than we do about the lived forms of the popu-
lar cultural text. Ann Gray’s (1992) study of women’s use of the video recorder and their
rental habits combines this approach to thinking about the meanings associated with
the technology as material culture and the video texts themselves as relevant to the
gendering of domestic space. Using ethnographic methods and tools of participant
observation from anthropology, other examples of work that has successfully been car-
ried out in this vein include Marie Gillespie’s (1995) work on the young people in
Southall and their media use in the negotiation of diaspora, or Purnima Mankekar’s
(1999) study of the way in which Indian women use melodramatic texts to negotiate the
gendered politics of the nation around the dynamics of the television set in the home.
Television is often seen as a barometer of social change. Audience research has there-
fore followed television trends, attempting to account for what is ‘popular’ about popular
culture by looking for the relationships between texts, contexts and broader cultural
changes in ideology and national sentiment. Work on talk show audiences has attempted
to understand how the dominance of talk relates to broader political shifts in the com-
mercialisation of the public sphere and the rise of self-reflexivity (Wood 2009; Manga
2003; Livingstone and Lunt 1994; Wilson 2003). Reality television and makeover audi-
ences have been considered in relation to the ways in which self-reflexivity is connected
to insecurities around authenticity within social formations that have become much
more fluid (Hill 2005, 2007; Sender 2012). Skeggs and Wood (2012) discuss reality
television’s role in normalising moral frameworks of passing judgment upon others as
part of a broader project of extracting value from personhood which can extend class
differences in late capitalism. How audiences engage with television’s storytelling is used
to tell us more about the ways in which social change is negotiated and lived out.
Other audience research that has privileged context is from fan studies, and again this
was born from taking issue with a label – that of the ‘fanatic’– as pathological, reinforced
by media images of the screaming hysterical teenage pop fan (Jensen 1992). The work
above on women and soap operas is also often discussed under the rubric of ‘fan studies’,
since fan research is often interested in groups that have been pejoratively labelled and
inscribed in popular discourse. Studies have for instance focused on football fans and of
fans of science fiction; for good accounts, see Hills (2002) and Sandvoss (2005). Much
of this work has emphasized the active and creative involvement of fandom against
notions of passivity and pathology. Bacon-Smith’s (1992) research on Star Trek fans
revealed a dispersed and diverse active community of women fans. It is perhaps here in
fan studies where celebrations of cultural consumption have been most dominant. Henry
Jenkins’ (1992) work described how participatory culture offers television fans routes to
re-create texts for themselves, emphasizing their ‘productive’ role in popular culture. In
these ways participatory media begins to unsettle the notion of audience, as the lines
between production and consumption become blurred in new media environments. This
is one of a set of related issues that we will come to later in this discussion.
Audience research from a culture-led tradition therefore has considered popular cul-
ture from the point of view of lived experience, often in defence of audiences. This
involves being prepared to be surprised by audiences and not to assume as a cultural
analyst that one already ‘knows’ what a popular cultural text ‘means’. For example,
against a tide of reasoning concerned over the dominance of American exports as
straightforward cultural imperialism, television audience research found resistance and
re-negotiation (Liebes and Katz 1990; Miller 1993). For some cultural researchers it is
enough to only to study the form itself – the music genre, the film, the television

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series – especially since audience research itself only involves another set of interpreta-
tions of what others are doing with the text (Moores 1993). But for others, what makes
that popular cultural form significant is the way it is vitally connected to very particular
located ways of life and to the meanings generated in any moment in history. Time and
space therefore have been central to the ethnographic specificity of a cultural studies
approach to audiences.

Where Is the ‘Audience’ Now?

However, significant changes, largely led by technological developments in how we
engage with popular culture across numerous new platforms, present challenges for a
culture-led approach to audience. When many practices are difficult to trace to a geo-
graphical location and become ‘de-territorialised’ and ‘textualised’ in online spaces, can
we or should we hold on to the ‘lived’ and ‘embodied’ ways in which audiences become
meaningful actors in popular culture? For instance, in what sense does watching and
posting YouTube clips constitute any sense of being part of an audience?
The accounts that started out this entry about fears were about the collective sense of
the audience as generated through popular entertainment. Cultural studies approaches
to those experiences then re-evaluated some of those fears to consider the possibilities
offered by shared experience. Broadcasting transformed the shared physical audience of
the theatre or the cinema to a collective imagined audience and sense of national ‘family’
(Morley 1992). Fan cultures too rely heavily on sharing experiences and paraphernalia
which have easily migrated into online communities. But, increasingly, media and pop-
ular cultural practices are apparently defined by individualisation as we consume them
through personalised and mobile media, and ‘mass’ audiences become ‘cultural omni-
vores’ pursuing numerous cultural tastes (Petersen 1992). As audiences migrate onto
online platforms and viewing figures fragment, industry executives are chasing niche
audiences dealing with an ‘attention economy’ (Newman 2010).
Once-clear distinctions which secured the audience as an entity have been re-
configured. The boundary between performer and audience are blurred. Television, for
instance, has grown increasingly interested in the performance of ‘ordinary people’ in
talk shows and reality television, in what Graeme Turner (2010) calls the ‘demotic’ turn
as a critique of the way in which democratic potential is actually only tuned to the needs
of the industry. The audience is now also the show, which may have a longer history
than we might think (Hill 2011), but the notion of audience participation is firmly
embedded in contemporary popular culture. Whilst celebrity is now a relatively acces-
sible career option for young people, the diverse range of online cultural practices means
that some form of notoriety is available to everyone and everyone can have an audience.
Social media facilitates the capturing of our everyday performances to show and relay to
our ‘friends’ for comment. Increasingly, as we are all part of an audience at some time or
another, we are all increasingly performers of some kind or another, as the ‘performance
logic’ of late capitalism becomes increasingly pervasive and powerful (Skeggs and
Wood 2012).
Convergence culture, where distinctions between production and consumption are
blurred, brings with it labels like the ‘produsers’ (Bruns 2008). For some, this champions
the creative potential of audiences and generates considerable freedoms to ‘play’, inno-
vate and take on new identities, unconstrained by material inequalities (Jenkins 2006;
Gauntlett 2007). Others, however, exercise caution, following on from the work of

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Dallas Smythe (1991) which labelled the audience as also a ‘commodity’ delivering big
economic rewards to powerful industry players. Smythe was referring to the television
audience and its relationship to advertising, but activity on the internet is also being
more sceptically considered as ‘free labour’, as it is increasingly monetized by advertisers
and the owners of platforms, rather than by those (audiences?) who make it (Terranova
2000; Caraway 2011; Fuchs 2014).
To what extent these changes are politically radical is the subject of much debate, as
the banal postings of images of today’s dinner can sit alongside political activism.
However, what they do emphasise is the very social nature of our willingness to perform
and to ‘audience’, and therefore it might be increasingly more pertinent to consider ‘to
audience’ as a verb rather than as a noun, as we engage in varied practices of audiencing
even whilst it is difficult to find consolidated audiences. Whilst so much of modern life
is mediated, the audience is simultaneously ‘everywhere and nowhere’ (Bird 2003: 3)
and thus some of the easiest ways to track the audience is to trace digital movement and
to turn it into data. This disembodies as well as de-territorialises the audience, as it
becomes code, allowing big companies engage in data-mining in order to capture audi-
ence trends (Andrejevik 2012).
But such a de-sensitising of audience research is also evident in the social sciences. As
audiences have had more control over their media and cultural environments, down-
loading, file-sharing, navigating and so on, this notion of audiences as also ‘users’ has
also complicated any easy understanding of a dichotomy between activity and passivity.
With the advent of internet culture, television has been categorised as a ‘lean back’
technology whilst computers require us to ‘lean in’, which ignores some of the very find-
ings of the complex set of emotional attachments found in television audience research
and of television’s interactive potential (Wood 2009). Labels like ‘produser’ and an
interest in ‘user-generated content’ also reflect a waning of the label ‘audience’ in media
ethnographies. This presents a problem for those interested in popular culture since it
can remove reference to textual and aesthetic qualities and their relationship to broader
formations of cultural meaning.
Elsewhere, I have argued for the necessity to hold questions of use and interpretation
together to bring out the material and aesthetic features of audience engagements (Wood
2007). It is important for a cultural understanding of audience migration to ‘user plat-
forms’ to also hold on to notions of sentiment, attachment and feeling (Wood and
Taylor 2008). Another approach to online communities is to take ethnographic imper-
atives around descriptions of the setting and the field, and to treat the human and the
non-human as equally significant (Hine 2000). There is good audience work which
makes sense of the traces the audience leaves as text online in attempts to engage in
virtual ethnography (e.g., Baym 2000; Bielby et al. 1999).
Despite all of the emphasis upon tracking new forms of connectivity, it seems that
young people still use those online affordances mostly to enhance their social connec-
tions with people that they already know (Watkins 2009). Online forms of ‘audiencing’
also must involve a physical space from which that takes place; for some, like Morley
(2007), this makes questions of geography even more pressing than before. It is also
important to remember that the process of technological change is globally uneven,
which means that we must attend to the cultural conditions of place, or risk our own
imperialism (Pertierra and Turner 2013). Therefore, a culture-led approach to audiences
is dealing with many challenges, but the relevance of lived experience to any cultural
formation remains the same.

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 5
THE MEDIA AND
DEMOCRATIZATION
Graeme Turner

Introduction: The Media and Democracy

Western liberal models of the media have traditionally regarded it as one of the
cornerstones of the democratic state: on the one hand, the role of the media is to cre-
ate the fully informed citizen required for a properly functioning democracy and, on the
other hand, the ‘fourth estate’ role of the media is to operate on behalf of the citizenry
by holding government to account – publishing comment and criticism, checking the
accuracy of government information, uncovering information in the public interest, and
observing protocols of ethical practice in order to guarantee the legitimacy of their role.
That the media should operate in this way is more or less taken for granted; the contro-
versy over the media’s behaviour during the recent phone-tapping scandals, for instance,
is motivated by anger at the transgression of these protocols. We need to remember,
however, that this is a very particular version of the media, with its own history; it is able
to take the media’s democratic function for granted because it has normatized the expe-
rience of the Western democracies of the global north (Hallin and Mancini, 2004).
Once we move beyond that context – and most media theory does not – we encounter
a great many variations in the structure of the political relations between the media and
the state. (Furthermore, of course, there is plenty of media – media content as well as
media institutions and organizations – that are directed to serving political interests that
have little to do with democracy.) Despite the West’s considerable political and histori-
cal investment in exporting both democracy and the liberal version of the media (often
in partnership), Katrin Voltmer (2013) points out that this has proven to be much
easier said than done. Even when there is a policy framework for transitioning into
democratic forms of government, Voltmer argues, the process is often influenced by local
scepticism about the ‘desirability of becoming like the West’, while the adoption of
Western models of ‘media freedom’ is challenged through accusations of colonialism or
imperialism (2013: 5). Voltmer argues that the imposition of such models onto environ-
ments that have very different cultures and circumstances to the West can have
unexpected consequences:

[T]he experiences of the last two decades or so, when radical neoliberal
economic reforms, premature elections and uncurbed media liberalization
have frequently resulted in more inequality, violent intergroup conflicts and
political polarization, . . . [suggest the need] for a greater sensibility for the
 TH E M EDI A A N D DEM O C R AT I Z AT I O N

specific conditions under which transitions are taking place outside the
Western world.
(Voltmer 2013: 5)

The conditions to which Voltmer refers are those that have framed the experience of
‘transitional democracies’ – mostly states emerging from authoritarian regimes, such as
the nation-states created out of the former Yugoslavia, for instance. The evidence
Voltmer gathers challenges any assumption that there might be a direct relationship
between the establishment of an independent commercial media and the development
of a democratic state. The political functions of the media turn out to be far more con-
tingent than such an assumption would suggest.
Even within the West, however, and considering how the media’s functions have
changed over the last decade or two in particular, there is reason to be sceptical about
the standard accounts of the media and democracy. James Curran (2011) makes the
point that there is something unrealistic, or perhaps just too idealistic, about any con-
ception of the media that thinks of it only as a structural component of the democratic
state. For a start, the media are now much more thoroughly commercialized than ever
before. They have their own commercial interests to pursue. Furthermore, if our original
ideas of the democratic role of the media derive from the eighteenth and nineteenth
century, Curran argues, when the ‘press consisted primarily of highly politicised news-
papers and journals’, we need to recognise that much has changed: today, ‘the great bulk
of content produced by contemporary media systems’ is ‘unrelated to conventional
understandings of politics’ (2011: 63) and is now, rather, focused solely on entertain-
ment. This is not to deny that entertainment can interest itself in politics, that it can
and does carry political meanings, and that entertainment should not be seen as a
domain which is sealed off from the political. However, it is now very difficult, if one
starts from the traditional position, to understand how the entertainment media, in
particular, contributes to the functioning of a democracy in the ways taken for granted
by the traditional model. To do this effectively, now, requires a fundamental re-
conception of the relation between the media and democracy.

New Media and Democratization

Nowhere is this more necessary than in the academic analysis of the political potential
of new media. The rise of digital technologies has radically altered the media landscape,
for producers and for consumers. Digital television, social media, online user-generated
content (from political blogs to cat videos on YouTube), e-commerce, the emergence of
video aggregators for entertainment and other content, and new techniques for seeking
information, such as Google, have also generated wider social and cultural transforma-
tions that reach out into the ordinary person’s everyday life. Foremost among these
transformations, it has been argued, are the differentials which now structure the power
relationship between the media and their consumers. The affordances of digital tech-
nologies carry particularly significant implications for this relationship. As we all know,
content accessed through digital media can be copied, shared, edited or changed and
redistributed by the consumer at no cost. The consumption of this content is no longer
tied to industry structures such as broadcasting schedules; as a result of the massive
expansion of choice available through digital and cable television but also through
online and mobile providers, the consumer now has unprecedented control over what

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they view, on what platform, in which location, and when. The consumer can also
participate in media production by generating their own content and uploading it onto
video sites such as YouTube, by creating a public persona via blogs, personal websites,
Facebook or Twitter, or by contributing to the production of news and current affairs via
news blogs, citizen journalism and so on. Since content production and distribution was
previously so completely controlled by the mainstream media organizations, these new
capacities for consumers, as well as this blurring of the binary distinction between pro-
duction and consumption, has rightly been seen as a radical reconfiguration of the
politics of the media.
Given the widespread social impact of these changes, it is not surprising that many
would find in them the seeds of even more significant political change – further enhanc-
ing the power available to the consumers of popular culture. John Hartley was one of
the earliest to detect the capacity for what he called ‘DIY citizenship’ as well as the
democratizing implications of media developments which empowered ‘ordinary people’
to participate in ‘democratainment’, literally the democratization of entertainment
(Hartley 1999: Chapters 12 and 14; also 2008: 122–4). Jon Dovey discussed the increased
visibility of ordinary people on television, particularly via reality TV, and the widening
demographics from which these participants are drawn, also as evidence of a general
trend towards the democratization of the media (Dovey 2000). This trend was of course
welcomed by many of those who were critical of the increasing concentration and com-
mercial use of media power; they understood how the control of the means of production
was essential to the maintenance of that power. Such criticism of the mainstream media
has been particularly pronounced in relation to the production of news. The capacity to
produce news blogs, and for citizens to generate their own news – text, images, and
video – from their laptops or their phones was greeted as a fundamental shift in the
symbolic economy, but also in the scale and quality of citizens’ access to independent
information. In a famous ‘manifesto’, Jay Rosen celebrated the liberation of ‘the people
formerly known as the audience’ from this top-down model of the media, and projected
a future in which citizen journalists would play an increasingly significant role in the
production of independent news and current affairs (2006). The capacity to bypass the
gatekeepers in the mainstream media organizations also meant that barriers to participa-
tion – race, class, gender, personal appearance and so on – had been lowered and a more
open and egalitarian media beckoned.
In what is probably the most influential contribution to the documenting of the
social, cultural and political provenance of this new media environment, Henry Jenkins’
Convergence Culture (2006), while also acknowledging countervailing trends within the
media industries, focused on the potential released by the scale of the participation now
available to media consumers as platforms converged and possibilities expanded:

Convergence . . . is both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up

consumer-driven process. Corporate convergence coexists with grassroots
convergence. Media companies are learning how to accelerate the flow of
media content across delivery channels to expand revenue opportunities,
broaden markets, and reinforce viewer commitments. Consumers are learning
how to use these different media technologies to bring the flow of media more
fully under their control and to interact with other consumers. The promises of
this new media environment raise expectations of a free flow of ideas and
content. Inspired by these ideals, consumers are fighting for the right to

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participate more fully in their culture. Sometimes corporate and grassroots

convergence reinforce each other, creating closer, more rewarding relations
between media producers and consumers.
(Jenkins 2006: 18)

Few would challenge the proposition that there is greater participation in the media
now, involving more people, across divisions of class, race and gender, as a result of
the complex of shifts that take us from changes in television formats to the expanding
population of ‘ordinary’ celebrities, and to the writing of personal blogs online. This
new regime of participation has been largely understood in terms of propositions about
its political implications; Jenkins, for instance, devotes a chapter (called
‘Photoshopping Democracy’) to examining the nuances of how the new media envi-
ronments contribute to, and perhaps affect, the legitimacy of democracy in America.
As Matthew Hindman demonstrates, however, that is a relatively modest proposal
compared to what has become an almost unchallenged popular nostrum: that the
internet, in particular, is an inherently democratizing technology; this, notwithstanding
its implication in the spread of hate-speech, extremist politics and so on. Representative
of the comments cited in Hindman’s several pages of quotations from public officials,
journalists, even a Supreme Court judgment from the US, is the comment from the
campaign manager for the failed US Presidential candidate, Howard Dean, that
the ‘internet is the most democratizing innovation we’ve ever seen, more so even than
the printing press’ (Hindman 2009: 2). Some of the more dramatic claims for the scale
of the likely political effects of the widespread take-up of new media can be read off
the titles of some of the mainstream publications which have popularised these ideas,
such as Tapscott and Williams’ Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
(2006) or Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without
Organizations (2008).
One of the factors which makes such accounts possible is the elision of the principles
of the market with those of democracy, and the assumed equivalence between the simple
fact of participation and a democratic process. To take up the first issue, it has become
extremely common for the expansion of consumer choice (indeed, for the operation of
markets) to be compared to, even equated with, democracy. In fact, it has become rou-
tine, across both government and industry, to find that a proliferation of choice and an
extension of access is accompanied by assurances that the outcomes will be more inclu-
sive, empowering and, thus, democratic. However, while individual transactions on the
internet might carry no designated charge, access to the online environment is not free.
The principle of user-pays has been gradually extended right across the media today as
they increasingly privatise and commercialise their operations. So, while greater access
to increased consumer choice is a benefit, it usually comes at a financial cost; that, in
turn, means that some sections of the community actually won’t have a choice at all.
Equity issues such as this, however, tend to be swamped by the enthusiasm of those I
have called elsewhere ‘the digital optimists’ who have welcomed, largely uncritically,
the growth of user-generated content online, and, in particular, the rise of the blogger,
presaging a grass-roots popular takeover of media space (Turner 2010). The fact that
these developments rely upon successfully commodifying consumers’ participation
online (through, for instance, the commercial use of data gathered via social media), has
not attracted sufficient discussion. Industry spin, emerging as much of it does from
smaller enterprises that represent themselves as competing with and challenging

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mainstream media, has often been uncritically recycled. Lev Manovich is one of the few
who have drawn attention to this situation:

In celebrating user-generated content and implicitly equating ‘user-generated’

with ‘alternative’ and ‘progressive’, academic discussions often stray away from
asking certain basic critical questions. For instance: to what extent is the
phenomenon of user-generated content driven by the consumer electronics
industry. To what extent is [it] also driven by social media commentators
themselves – who after all are in the business of getting as much traffic to their
sites as possible so they can make money by selling advertising based on their
usage data.
(2008: 35–6)

The second issue is the conflation of participation and democracy, as if the one led
inevitably to the other. What tends to be overlooked is the fact that democracy
involves a very particular kind of participation. The citizen’s participation in demo-
cratic decision-making involves the exercise of structural power in response to a
process of public deliberation, and that exercise has the potential of carrying signifi-
cant consequences for the society as a whole. There is quite a substantial difference,
then, between this process and the participation by contestants in a reality TV format,
or that involved in posting comments on a blog. Most importantly, democratic par-
ticipation is not offered as a commodity for sale. While you might happily pay for
access to more television channels, or for your broadband connection, you do not
expect to be asked to pay when you turn up to vote. Furthermore, the fact of participa-
tion does not bring with it any inherent politics. As I have argued elsewhere on a
number of occasions now, there is no necessary connection between a ‘broadening
demographic in the pattern of access to media representation and, on the other hand,
a democratic politics. Diversity is not of itself intrinsically democratic irrespective of
how it is generated or by whom’ (Turner 2010: 17). In my view, these developments
are more accurately described as a demotic, rather than a democratic, turn: that is,
they are indeed open to a greater proportion of the population (the demos), but that
doesn’t necessarily mean they bring with them a democratic politics or, indeed, any
particular brand of politics at all.
One of the key areas where it has been suggested that an increase in participation
has constituted a form of democratization has been in the production of celebrity –
in particular, the increased access to celebrity enjoyed by the ordinary person in
the current climate of reality television, personal blogs and so on. However, what
tends to be under-recognised is that celebrity is still overwhelmingly the product
of the promotions and publicity arms of the mainstream media, even though it is
now available to more participants than ever before. As Driessens argues, ‘we
should not be dazzled by the seemingly diverse and democratic character of celeb-
rity; rather we should pay attention to how and by whom it is produced, which
obviously bears ideological consequences’ (2013: 646). Driessens goes on to cite
from Tyler and Bennett a much more severe political interpretation of claims to
democratization, which suggests that such claims risk ‘becoming indistinct from
neoliberal ideologies of market meritocracy, which use the rhetoric of equality of
opportunity to disguise and sustain massive inequality’ (2010: 379). That is a pos-
sibility worth considering.

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De-Mythologising Digital Democracy

Although there was a significant period when digital optimism was among the ortho-
doxies within studies of new media, debate over the political impact of digital media has
become more varied and intense in recent years. The privileging of consumer choice,
for instance, has come under attack from a number of points of view. It is not surprising,
of course, that the expansion of consumer choice has been regarded as one of the key
benefits of the transformation of the media in recent years. The almost infinite capacity
for the online environment to deliver, store, and customise content has played a
fundamental role in generating popular enthusiasm for new media technologies, and in
creating the sense of personal empowerment and control that lies behind this enthusi-
asm. A similar effect can be seen in regard to the choices offered by subscription
television, with hundreds of channels now available to many consumers as well as new
platforms for both mobile and located delivery, and new techniques for time-shifting or
downloading television content from online sources. While this has been welcomed by
many, there are also those who are concerned about what has been lost as we have gone
from an ‘era of scarcity’ dominated by broadcasting to an ‘era of plenty’ (Ellis 2002) in
which we can no longer rely upon the sharing of a common media culture. Instead,
media cultures are fragmenting around taste preferences and, more worryingly, around
the ability to pay. Milly Buonanno has criticised what she describes as ‘narrowcasting’
– that is, a niche-oriented schedule which is directed towards the satisfaction of taste
fractions rather than offering a benefit to the wider community:

[I]t would be proof of one’s technological determinism not to acknowledge that

the advent of narrowcasting has also been made possible by the emergence of a
strain of social demand, not widespread but diffused to a greater or lesser degree
according to the particular case, for ‘made-to-measure’ television tailored to the
specific preferences and interests of a restricted number of viewers (the so-called
‘niche market’).
(2008: 25)

Cass Sunstein raises similar concerns, albeit with a more pointed political prove-
nance, in what has become an influential response to the emerging patterns of
consumption of the internet (2007). He warns of the dangers of ‘cyber-polarization’:
the fragmenting of the common culture as fractions of the market – constituted
through taste, social or political preferences – are drawn more and more towards the
same, personalised but nonetheless restricted, diet of media sources for their supply
of news and information, thus limiting their exposure to views and opinions differ-
ent to their own – something broadcasting had always offered as a social and political
benefit:

. . . there are serious dangers in a system in which individuals bypass general-

interest intermediaries and restrict themselves to opinions and topics of their
own choosing. In particular, I . . . emphasize the risks posed by any situation in
which thousands or perhaps millions or even tens of millions of people are
mainly listening to louder echoes of their own voices. A situation of this kind
is likely to produce far worse than mere fragmentation.
(Sunstein 2007: 13)

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From such a point of view, then, the unqualified celebration of choice, of personalization
and customization, is misguided because while it emphasizes the expansion and develop-
ment of one dimension of the media – entertainment and the construction of personal
identities – it overlooks what such development may have cost us in areas that are,
arguably, of greater importance to the society, and the polity as a whole. Democracy, far
from being served, is potentially the loser in this scenario.
A second area where mythologies have prospered is in relation to the benefits of user-
generated content. Fundamental to the orthodox projections of a decline in the power
of media organizations has been the proposition that user-generated content (UGC) is
taking over the mediascape. Among my favourite pieces of hyperbole around this pos-
sibility is Axel Bruns’ suggestion that ‘television – once constituting an effective and
powerful network for widespread content distribution – [has] now been outclassed by the
internet’ (2008: 86). Whatever he might mean by ‘outclassed’, and notwithstanding the
extraordinary growth in UGC from a standing start, it is clear that television remains
overwhelmingly the dominant medium five years later. In markets such as the US and
the UK, there has been no net decline in the hours of television consumed, and in the
UK the broadcast sector is proving far more resilient than predicted as a result of the
introduction of the Freeview digital platform. When one examines what is being
uploaded as UGC, too, it is commonplace now to point out that the vast majority of
video that finds its way even onto sites such as YouTube was originally produced for
television. In terms of the assumption that consumers are itching to get into production,
and that the new technologies are radically changing how everyone interacts with the
media, it is salutary to be reminded of what is now called the ‘1% rule’, ‘which says that
if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will interact with
it (commenting or offering improvements), and the other 89 will just view it’ (Lovink
2008: xxvii). Nobody has argued with these figures but, nonetheless, much of the inter-
est in the notion of the ‘produser’ or ‘prosumer’ (i.e., the consumer who also produces
UGC) comes from the dramatic projections made about the kind of role they might play
in the future rather than in the evidence of what is currently the case. UGC is obviously
significant, of course, but the assessments of its importance has been heavily influenced
by the manner in which discussion has been skewed; it has effectively normatized the
behaviour of early adopters in the US – which is still where most UGC comes from, and
where most of it is consumed – and assumed that the same behaviour will be replicated
elsewhere. Clearly, in a world where access to the technologies required is so unevenly
distributed, let alone where so many different cultures of use are already evident, this is
far from a safe assumption.
Finally, there is a range of associated myths that are specifically about the political
potential of the internet. In an important book, The Myth of Digital Democracy, Matthew
Hindman puts many of these myths to the test of empirical investigation. Most centrally,
he takes on the proposition that the internet is having a significant effect by ‘re-
distributing political influence’. Among the ways in which it is believed to broaden the
public sphere so as to achieve this outcome is through an increase in political participa-
tion by involving citizens in political activities that were previously closed to them, and
by challenging the monopoly of traditional elites through the introduction of new, hith-
erto silenced, voices. To give just a taste of what is a very detailed and thorough critique,
Hindman is careful to distinguish between who gets to speak on the internet and who
actually gets heard. His analysis of the algorithms of the web, his analysis of the league
tables of political bloggers, and his analysis of who actually gets to be the successful

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bloggers, makes for sobering reading. Search engines systematically deliver consumers
to sites with the most links to other sites – hence to the mainstream media organisations’
websites. The league tables of political bloggers are dominated by mainstream media
organisations as well, with a smattering of independent commentators with established
media or academic profiles, who constitute another small group of new media elites. In
fact, Hindman finds that the concentration of news and opinion around a limited group
of sources is even more extreme online than elsewhere in the media. New voices, at least
those that get heard, are few and far between. As Hindman says, the actual evidence of
the politics of the web ‘bear little resemblance to the myths that continue to shape both
public discussion and scholarly debate’:

While it is true that citizens face few formal barriers to posting their views
online, this is openness in the most trivial sense. From the perspective of mass
politics, we care most not about who posts but about who gets read – and there
are plenty of formal and informal barriers that hinder ordinary citizens’ ability
to reach an audience. Most online content receives no links, attracts no
eyeballs, and has minimal political relevance. Again and again, this study finds
powerful hierarchies shaping a medium that continues to be celebrated for its
openness. This hierarchy is structural, woven into the hyperlinks that make up
the Web; it is economic, in the dominance of companies like Google, Yahoo!
and Microsoft; and it is social, in the small group of white, highly educated,
male, professionals who are vastly over represented in online opinion.
(Hindman 2009: 136)

It would be hard to find any evidence to counter this assessment, even now.

Conclusion
It is not uncommon for scholars working on popular culture from within a cultural stud-
ies tradition to regard grassroots developments within popular culture as inherently
progressive; there is a long history of this that includes some of the key publications
within the cultural studies tradition – Dick Hebdige’s Subcultures, for instance, John
Fiske’s Television Culture, or Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers. It is not at all surprising,
then, that a domain of experience that has suddenly provided a new degree of openness
and accessibility, as well as the possibility for creative engagement from the ordinary
person, should have attracted as much interest and enthusiasm as have those media
developments associated with the world of ‘Media Studies 2.0’ (Gauntlett 2007). There
are all kinds of other reasons why cultural and media studies academics should feel an
affinity with, and a confidence about, the politics of the small enterprises that have built
at least one tier of the digital revolution – in ways that had never been the case in terms
of their relation to ‘big media’. Nonetheless, this default orientation has produced an
over-investment in what was really only the most optimistic scenario for the politics of
this new media environment and, as a result, insufficient scrutiny was given to what was
actually going on as these new platforms appeared, and as new cultures of use developed
around them.
There have been research projects investigating the possibility that this new world of
enhanced access and participation was generating the kinds of wider political engage-
ment implied by these scenarios of democratization. So far, the evidence is not

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encouraging. In a study of public engagement with the media, Nick Couldry and Tim
Markham looked closely at the consumption of celebrity, in order to assess whether it
played a part in people’s ‘public connection’ – their interest in and involvement with
public political and social issues. Despite all the talk about how the broadening of access
to celebrity constituted a form of democratization, Couldry and Markham’s research
found that the cluster of informants who were most engaged with celebrity were actually
the least ‘politically engaged’ (2007: 438):

This is of course not surprising, and is certainly linked to the gendering of

political culture, itself an important and socially regressive factor. Indeed, all
the evidence suggests that following celebrity culture represents a positive
choice by this group . . . Our argument is not, however, that there is anything
‘wrong’ with this choice, since such a choice can only be evaluated in the
context of the wider genderizing and polarizing of the UK public sphere. Our
point rather is that there is little evidence for some optimistic claims that this
aspect of popular culture provides any potential routes into political culture,
even in an expanded sense.
(418)

While it is perfectly understandable that we might want the attractive aspects of the
contemporary media environment – its openness, its variety, the new opportunities it
offers for participation and interactivity – to really be the forerunners of a significantly
more democratised mediasphere, any careful inspection of the evidence would encour-
age more caution than has often been exercised in making predictions about how this
particularly volatile period of innovation and change will turn out in the end. At the
very least, as Couldry and Markham suggest, we need to ‘recognize that popular culture
is not always the bridge to an effective and expanded democracy that we would like it
to be’ (419).

References
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Australia, 126, 82–94.
Buonanno, M. (2008) The Age of Television: Experiences and Theories (trans. Jennifer Radice). Bristol
Intellect.
Couldry, N., and Markham, T. (2007) ‘Celebrity Culture and Public Connection: Bridge or Chasm?’
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 10:4, 403–22.
Curran, J. (2011) Media and Democracy. London and New York: Routledge.
Dovey, J. (2000) Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television. London: Pluto.
Driessens, O. (2013) ‘The Celebritization of Society and Culture: Understanding the Structural
Dynamics of Celebrity Culture’. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16:6, 641–658.
Ellis, J. (2002) Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I. B. Taurus.
Fiske. J. (1987) Television Culture. London: Methuen.
Gauntlett, D. (2007, February 24) ‘Media Studies 2.0’. Theory.org. Available at http://www.theory.org.
uk/mediastudies2-print.htm.
Hallin, D. and Mancini, P. (2004) Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hartley, J. (1999) Uses of Television. London and New York: Routledge.
Hartley, J. (2008) Television Truths. Malden MA and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

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Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.

Hindman, M. (2009) The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jenkins, H. (1992) Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.
Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New media Collide. New York: New York
University Press.
Lovink, G. (2008) Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. New York and London:
Routledge.
Manovich, L. (2008) ‘The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life’. In G. Lovink and S. Niederer (eds.),
Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube (pp. 33–44). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
Rosen, J. (2006, 27 June) ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’. PressThink: Ghost of
Democracy in the Media Machine. Available at http://journalism.nyu.edu.ed/pubzone/weblogs/
pressthink/2006/0627/ppl_frmr.htm.
Shirky, C. (2008) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York:
Penguin.
Sunstein, C. (2007) Republic.com 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tapscott, D. and Williams, A. D. (2006) Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.
London: Portfolio.
Tyler, I. and Bennett, B. (2010) ‘‘Celebrity Chav’: Fame, Femininity and Social Class’. European Journal
of Cultural Studies, 9:2, 153–165.
Turner, G. (2010) Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn. London: Sage.
Voltmer, K. (2013) The Media in Transitional Democracies. Cambridge: Polity.

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 6
PARTICIPATION
(UN)LIMITED
Social Media and the Prospects
of a Common Culture
Marisol Sandoval

In 1932, Bertolt Brecht (2000: 43) argued that radio technology could open-up access
to media production for everybody. Similarly, in 1934 Walter Benjamin (1996: 772)
stressed that the press could become a more democratic tool for communication by
enabling its readers to become writers and thereby turning the “literary competence”
into “public property.” In 1970, Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1982) pointed out that
electronic media have the potential to abolish the distinction between receiver and
transmitter, and with it the “cultural monopoly of the bourgeois intelligentsia”
(Enzensberger 1982: 55).
Computer and online technologies seem to have brought their vision to life: ordinary
Internet users can not only be writers, editors, choreographers, visual artists or film
producers but can also make their creative work available to a potentially global audi-
ence. Social media ostensibly enable the flourishing of an inclusive and participatory
popular culture.
This chapter discusses to what extent social media have realized the liberating prom-
ise of the apparent democratization of popular cultural production. It thereby gives an
overview of ongoing debates about popular culture and relates them to questions of
domination and ideology on the one hand, and emancipation and resistance on the
other hand.

Popular Culture between Domination

and Emancipation
Definitions of popular culture in different ways refer to culture that is produced, con-
sumed and enjoyed by many ordinary people (for an overview of definitions see, for
example, Bennett 1980: 18 cited in McGuigan 1992: 65, Hall 2009: 512–514). Very
often debates about what popular culture is and is not evolve around questions of eman-
cipation and resistance on the one hand and domination and ideology on the other
hand. While this normative orientation demonstrates the critical intent of many writers
 SO CI A L M EDI A A N D CO MMO N C U LT U R E

on popular culture, it also makes the field prone to dualistic reasoning that describes
popular culture either as a pure expression of the dominative forces of commercial
culture or as a site of resistance to them.
Probably the most famous example for the former approach is Theodor W. Adorno’s
account of popular culture. Against the background of his experience of the rise of mass
culture during his exile in the USA after having fled Nazi Germany, Adorno regarded
popular culture as an expression of the subjection of culture under “the mechanism of
supply and demand” which “acts as a control on behalf of the rulers” (Horkheimer and
Adorno 2002: 106). He was particularly critical of popular music, which he considered
as the musical equivalent to industrial mass production. The structure of popular music,
according to Adorno, is based on imitation and standardization, reproducing the work-
ings of capitalism and thereby contributing to its legitimacy. Classical music, on the
contrary, would expose the total negativity of capitalist society. Adorno argued that: “In
Beethoven, position is important only in a living relation between a concrete totality
and its parts. In popular music, position is absolute. Every detail is substitutable; it serves
its function only as a cog in a machine” (Adorno 2009: 64).
Because of statements like this, Adorno has often been criticised as a cultural elitist
who failed to take popular cultural expressions seriously (see, e.g., Gauntlett 2011: 38).
Adorno’s account of popular culture is based on a dualism according to which high
culture has the potential to transcend and resist capitalism while popular culture is
bound to capitalist markets and therefore entirely shaped by commercial interests.
However, I would argue that his disregard of popular culture, and popular music in par-
ticular, does not only follow from his analysis of culture under capitalism but also stems
from his personal taste: Adorno was a fan of serious music. He enjoyed playing as well
as listening to classical music and was convinced that it has the potential to expose the
irrationality of capitalism: “And that bourgeois society is exploded by its own immanent
dynamics – this is imprinted in Beethoven’s music, the sublime music, as a trait of
esthetic untruth” (Adorno 1998: 46). Despite his questionable analysis of both popular
and classical music, Adorno has contributed essential ideas to a critical understanding
of culture in modern capitalist societies. One of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s great
achievements was to theorize the integration of culture into the capitalist economy. The
concept of the culture industry offers a radical critique of the subsumption of culture
under market principles so that it “dutifully admits to being a commodity, abjures its
autonomy and proudly takes its place among consumer goods” (Horkheimer and Adorno
2002: 127).
Thus, a central question is how we can overcome Adorno’s overly dismissive reading
of the popular, while maintaining a perspective that is critical of the economic coloniza-
tion of cultural production and consumption. This question seems particularly important
since today Adorno’s dualism between high culture and popular culture seems to have
been largely replaced by another dualism: a dualism between capitalist economy and
culture that has resulted in an overly enthusiastic analysis of the popular. And, while
Adorno as a fan of classical music was convinced of the emancipatory power of
Beethoven’s work, today’s fans of social media highlight the progressive character of user
participation in the production of culture (see, for example, Jenkins 2008, Gauntlett
2013).
Arguments that emphasise the progressive character of popular culture by far precede
the emergence of social media. For many decades, representatives of a certain version of
cultural studies have addressed popular culture as a site of resistance where consumers

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as active subjects critically interpret and challenge the dominant meanings of the
offerings of the culture industry (Grossberg 2009, Fiske 2010, Johnson 1999).
John Fiske for example defines popular culture as necessarily progressive. He argues:
“there can be no popular dominant culture, for popular culture is formed always in
reaction to, and never as part of, the forces of domination” (Fiske 2010: 35). This under-
standing of popular culture has never been uncontested (see, e.g., Garnham 2009). Jim
McGuigan criticised Fiske’s work on television as an example of “uncritical populism”
(McGuigan 1992: 70), which focuses “on ‘popular readings’ which are applauded with
no evident reservations at all” (McGuigan 1992: 72).
The rise of user-generated content on social media – which is the main concern of
this chapter – has again fuelled hopes regarding the progressive potential of popular
culture.

Social Media: Creativity Contra

Companies
On social media, the involvement of “the people” is no longer limited to active inter-
pretation but includes active cultural production. It has become commonplace within
media studies that so-called social media tend to dissolve the boundaries between cul-
tural producers and consumers. Enthusiasts stress that YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and
co. enable unprecedented levels of participation in cultural production and democratize
self-expression (Hartley 2009: 242).
According to Henry Jenkins, YouTube is the “epicentre of today’s participatory cul-
ture” (Jenkins 2009: 110). What makes it so special is that it enables participation at the
level of production, selection and distribution on a single platform (Jenkins 2008: 275).
According to David Gauntlett, participation online “puts ‘ordinary people’ back in the
driving seat of storytelling and creativity” (Gauntlett 2013: 81). He emphasizes the
emancipatory potential that results from creative engagement with social media: “crea-
tive material and ideas, when shared, discussed and networked via the Internet, can
challenge the status quo” (Gauntlett 2013: 87).
These accounts picture YouTube and other social media as sites of counter-power,
participation, resistance, cooperation and community building – platforms that enable
culture to become truly popular. What tends to be neglected is the fact that most suc-
cessful social media applications are not only platforms for creative expression,
communication, collaboration and sharing but also successful businesses – with
Wikipedia being the most prominent exception (Sandoval 2012). YouTube, for exam-
ple, is owned by Google, which is one of the most powerful Internet companies and in
2012 generated 50.2 billion USD of revenue (Google 10-k Form 2013).
It would be mistaken to argue that social media enthusiasts simply ignore commercial
interests and corporate power in the cultural sector. However, they insist in the auton-
omy of popular culture and in a dualist manner try to establish a separation between
economic forces and the workings of popular culture.
Fiske (2010), for example, distinguishes between a cultural and a financial economy
that operate according to different principles: while the financial economy circulates
wealth, the cultural economy circulates meanings and pleasure; while in cultural econ-
omy the audience members become producers of meaning and pleasure, in the financial
economy audiences are a commodity that is sold to advertisers (Fiske 2010: 21ff).
Likewise, David Gauntlett stresses that the economics and pleasures of social media

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must be considered separate from each other: “The argument about economics cannot
be used to resolve an argument about people’s experiences, or knowledge, or feelings”
(Gauntlett 2013: 82)
In their book Spreadable Media (2013) Jenkins, Ford and Green argue that when
studying social media it is “crucial not to diminish the many noncommercial logics
governing the engaged participation of audiences online” (2013: 55). One of these non-
commercial logics is what they describe as a moral economy that refers to “moral
understandings between the participating parties” (2013: 48). According to them, the
moral economy might lead users to resist if they perceive the practices of platform own-
ers to be morally inappropriate or unfair. Elsewhere Green and Jenkins argue that the
social media landscape is characterized by “a constant pull and tug between top-down
corporate and bottom-up consumer power with the process of media convergence shaped
by decisions made in teenagers’ bedrooms and in corporate boardrooms” (Green and
Jenkins 2009: 214). This quote suggests that power is equally located in corporate board-
rooms and teenagers’ bedrooms. Such a dualism mystifies actual power relationships:
Corporate owners can set the rules of the game, they can decide whether or not to
charge access fees, whether or not to display (personalized) advertising, or whether or
not to sell a teenager’s email address to an advertising client. It is true that collectively
the users of social media might be able to resist corporate practices, but organising an
effective collective resistance of millions of users takes a much bigger effort of mobiliza-
tion and coordination than a management decision in a corporate boardroom.

Social Media and Corporate Power

Critics have warned against an overly enthusiastic understanding of social media and
stressed the need to look at how actual power structures shape online participation
(Fuchs 2013, Miller 2009, Scholz 2008). Christian Fuchs (2013: 99, 102) argues that the
corporate social media world is characterized by asymmetries of visibility and attention.
Toby Miller (2009: 432) highlights that increased user participation is not necessarily
emancipatory but also needs to be understood within the context or neoliberal outsourc-
ing of work tasks from paid employees to unpaid consumers.
These critical accounts remind us that understanding popular culture on social media
requires taking a differentiated look at the actual dynamics of social media. Rather than
separating economic and cultural aspects of popular culture, this means examining the
complex interrelation between active user engagement and the corporate power struc-
tures that characterize today’s social media landscape. Such an approach allows
understanding popular culture as dynamic, complex and contradictory. Taking popular
culture seriously means considering actual social media usages as well as business imper-
atives behind most social media offerings. This is what Jim McGuigan has described as
critical populism, “which can account for both ordinary people’s everyday culture and
its material construction by powerful forces beyond the immediate comprehension and
control of ordinary people” (McGuigan 1992: 5).
Without doubt, developments in computer technology and the rise of social media to
a certain extent have called the distinction between cultural producers and cultural
consumers into question and on a technical level enable an increased number of people
to not only express themselves creatively but to make these creative expressions avail-
able to others. However, that does not mean that the locus of power in the cultural
sector has shifted from corporations to individual users: Online collaboration,

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communication and sharing today takes place within a largely corporate-controlled

social media landscape. The owners of commercial social media platforms have an eco-
nomic interest in generating profits based on social media services and accordingly
define the terms under which users can access them. The dominant business model of
commercial social media platforms is based on advertising. Users receive access for free
and profit is generated by selling user attention as well as data to advertising clients.
Critical scholars have stressed that this advertising-based business model is problematic
as it fosters surveillance and exploitation of users and reinforces a consumer culture.

Surveillance
The problem of user surveillance is intrinsically connected to the advertising-based
business model (Miller 2009: 429; Fuchs 2013: 108, Scholz 2008, Andrejevic 2009,
2012, Allmer 2012). Advertising has always been a major source of income for compa-
nies in the cultural sector. However, in the Internet era the amount and variety of
available information about consumers has increased substantially as users, while using
social media platforms, are simultaneously producing data about themselves. These data
are then stored in large searchable databases and used to create targeted advertisements
that are presented to those consumers groups that are perceived as particularly suscepti-
ble to buying certain products.

Exploitation
Another issue related to the social media business model is the exploitation of the free
labour of social media users (Andrejevic 2009: 417, Fuchs 2010, 2013, Wasko and
Erickson 2009: 383). Exploitation, as Karl Marx has described it, takes place when sur-
plus, i.e., profit, is generated by selling the products of work for more than the cost of
the work and the material needed for producing it (Marx 1990: 270). Social media
platforms could not exist without users who actively produce content and connect with
other users. As early as 1977 Dallas Smythe (1977/1997: 440) showed that in the case
of the advertising media business model the commodity that is sold by the media is their
audience. Christian Fuchs (2010, 2013) applied Smythe’s concept of the audience com-
modity to social media. He argues that on social media sites prosumers are productive
workers because they create media content and usage data that is sold in order to gener-
ate profit (Fuchs 2010: 147, 2013: 110). Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson stress that the
commodification of labour is “one of the most worrisome aspects of YouTube’s monetiza-
tion strategies” (Wasko and Erickson 2009: 383).

Consumer Culture
A third implication of the advertising-based social media business model is the rein-
forcement of consumer culture. The users of social media are not only surveilled and
exploited but constantly exposed to advertisements for consumer products. Toby Miller
argues that YouTube’s business model “obfuscates distinctions in viewers’ minds between
commercials and programs via participatory video ads” (Miller 2009: 432). Likewise,
Mark Andrejevic stresses that after being captured, user data is “returned to its produc-
ers in the form of an external influence: the congealed result of their own activity is used
to channel their behaviour and induce their desires” (Andrejevic 2009: 421).

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Critics of the advertising-based social media business model have been accused of not
taking popular cultural production online seriously. In the following I will discuss three
objections that are commonly held against this criticism of commercial social media.

It Is Fun, So It Can’t Be Exploitation

A first objection against critics is that the concept of exploitation does not adequately
describe the experience of people who share their work online. David Gauntlett argues
that users enjoy the work they voluntarily perform on platforms like YouTube:

[T]he ‘free labour’ which is ‘harvested’ is happily and voluntarily given by users
who want to share their creative work [ . . . ]. So making them sound like slaves
in a workhouse is a rhetorical device which doesn’t, I think, line up with most
people’s own experience.
(Gauntlett 2011: 188)

Similarly, Jenkins, Ford and Green stress non-economic incentives for creative pro-
duction online: “the millions of individuals producing videos for YouTube take pride
in their accomplishments, quite apart from their production of value for a company”
(2013: 59). They therefore suggest describing the free labour of social media users as
“engaged” instead of “exploited” (Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013: 60). Banks and
Deuze (2009: 436) argue that exploitation like other “categories of capitalism (such
as value-added, monetary gain, market size and audience) perhaps are not the most
useful concepts” for understanding the phenomena of user-generated content and
creative co-creation online.
These authors argue that social media users are not expecting economic rewards when
engaging in creative production online. They rather enjoy creating, sharing, communi-
cating and collaborating, and therefore do not feel exploited. This may well be the case
for many social media users but that does not mean that they are not exploited.
Exploitation does not describe a subjective feeling. It rather is an objective category that
helps to understand structures of domination and injustice that characterize capitalist
societies. In a very basic sense it describes how some actors can generate profit based on
the work of others. On YouTube, for example, users work for free when they create and
upload their own videos or comment on others’ videos. Without this work, YouTube
would not exist and could not generate any profit since it would not be able to attract
advertising clients. Social media users can and are likely to enjoy creative engagement
online but can at the same time be exploited in the sense described in the previous
section.
Fuchs and Sevignani speak of an “inverse fetish character of the social media com-
modity” that hides the commodity form of social media behind their use-value “i.e. the
social relations and functions enabled by platform use” (Fuchs and Sevignani
2013: 261). This means that the experience of pleasure and fun mystifies the com-
modification of work that takes place on social media platforms. This insight does not
mean to characterize users as stupid or “cultural dupes” that are not aware of their own
exploitation, but rather recognises the contradictions that shape the commercial
social media landscape today. Taking user-generated popular culture seriously means
acknowledging both the experiences of pleasure and the structures of exploitation that
shape online production and examining how they relate in any particular context. It

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is exactly by paying attention to the tension between the pleasurable experience of

using social media and the structures of exploitation that accompany it that criticism
can emerge.
One argument against describing free prosumer labour on social media as exploited
dangerously implies that what it is pleasurable can’t be exploitative and does not even
need to be paid for. In fact, work in the cultural sector, which is often experienced as
rewarding in many non-economic regards, very often is precarious and low paid (Ross
2009; Gill 2011). Arguments that stress that the users of (for example) YouTube want
to actively creative, contribute and share and neither look for financial rewards nor care
whether their work is used to generate corporate profits play directly into the hands of
corporations that profit from harnessing the creativity of people at low cost or for free.
The claim that we should focus on the “engagement” rather than the “exploitation” of
users sounds like an extension of YouTube’s business rhetoric. YouTube recommends its
advertising clients to focus on the “engaged” users, as they are the ones who are most
likely going to serve as a multiplier for advertisements:

Engage your fans not just viewers. Viewers sit back. Fans lean forward. Viewers
consume. Fans contribute. Viewers move on to the next thing. Fans share,
comment, create. YouTube wasn’t built for fans. It was built BY fans. Share in
fans’ passions and be an active part of the communities that matter most to your
audience.
(YouTube 2013b: 2)

This quote illustrates that YouTube is taking particular advantage of creative, “engaged”
users, which it describes as a unique demographic, the so-called “GenC” (the creative
generation) (YouTube 2013b: 3). GenC is not only particularly creative, networked and
engaged, but also particularly interesting to advertisers: “GenC sets the trends and deter-
mines what’s going to be popular next, with an influence that accounts for $500bn of
spending a year in the US alone” (YouTube 2013a: 6). As this statement demonstrates,
YouTube does think about its creative and engaged users in economic terms. Arguing
that economic categories of exploitation, profit and money-making no longer matter on
social media is to mystify the realities and power relations of a corporate-controlled
media system.

Advertising Is Ok – If You Don’t Like It,

Don’t Use It
According to David Gauntlett (2011: 187), while advertising is not unproblematic,
it is an acceptable price to pay for free access to social media platforms. He argues
that if users felt exploited or disturbed by a company’s advertising practices they
would stop using commercial social media platforms: “After all, if they felt that they
were being punished or exploited, they would simply do something else” (Gauntlett
2011: 188).
However, the decision to just stop using social media is a difficult one and has wide-
spread implications for an individual’s cultural engagement as well as for social networks.
As there are hardly any non-commercial alternatives available, Internet users have the
choice to either use commercial platforms at terms and conditions that are determined
by platform owners or to disengage from the social media world.

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In fact, data shows that most Internet users actually don’t think that advertising is
“ok”. A survey conducted by the market research company Mintel based on 1,764 UK
Internet users shows that 68% of Internet users agree that online advertising is
annoying, while only 7% disagree. Sixty-one percent agree that online advertising is
intrusive, while only 7% disagree. Fifty-nine percent agree that advertisements that are
based on their browsing history make them feel uncomfortable, while only 9% disagree
(Mintel 2013). These data confirm that a majority of Internet users find online adver-
tising annoying and intrusive, and that they feel uncomfortable when they are shown
ads based on their browsing history.
Christian Fuchs (2009: 99), in a survey among Austrian students, found that they
consider surveillance related to advertising as problematic but are willing to take the risk
because they nevertheless appreciate the opportunities for communication and collabo-
ration these platforms are offering. Users perceive commercial social media platforms as
beneficial and problematic at the same time. Due to this contradictory experience they
might chose to continue using a certain platform service even they disagree with the
business practices of the company that is operating it.
Users dislike online advertisements. At the same time Mintel’s survey showed that
only 9% of Internet users are willing to pay for ad-free online services (Mintel 2013).
However, instead of legitimizing advertising-based business models, it is necessary to
think about alternative ways of funding and providing social media platforms.

Social Media’s Critics Don’t Take Online

Participation Seriously
Scholars that highlight the dark side of commercial social media, shaped by exploita-
tion, surveillance and consumer culture, have been criticised for not taking ordinary
people and their creative practices seriously. Gauntlett writes that critics take “an espe-
cially dim view of ordinary people, who are assumed to have little creative capacity of
their own and are liable to fall for whatever trick the media barons might push at them”
(Gauntlett 2011: 193). Similarly, John Banks and Mark Deuze (2009: 424) argue that
critics treat consumers as manipulated cultural dupes. According to these objections,
questioning the immediate user experience and criticising the power structures that
shape the commercial media landscape means taking an elitist perspective that dismisses
the creative practices of social media users as a manipulated activity.
This argument is unsatisfactory because it does not take into account that it is possible
to criticise surveillance and exploitation on social media while at the same time
acknowledging that using social media can be a genuinely pleasurable activity. It fails to
grasp the contradictory character of commercial social media platforms as being plat-
forms for creative engagement and at the same time collaboration and sites of prosumer
exploitation and surveillance.
An account that over-emphasises the liberating aspects of user-generated content and
downplays how new and hip media companies like Google and Facebook exploit and
surveil their users contributes to the ideology of what Jim McGuigan (2009) has called
cool capitalism: “‘Cool’ is actually the dominant tone of capitalism today. Corporations
have incorporated counter-cultural traditions and deployed signs of ‘resistance’ in order
to market their wares” (McGuigan 2009: 124). It seems that in times when the bounda-
ries between producers and consumers have become blurred and every Internet user can,
in principle, produce her own media channel, talk about exploitation has become quite

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uncool. By not taking the downsides of the social media business model seriously, social
media enthusiasts provide legitimacy for corporate practices that take advantage of user
engagement and turn it into a private financial surplus.

Envisioning Alternatives: Common Culture

The debates considered in this chapter illustrate that popular culture on social media
can neither be adequately understood as purely emancipatory nor as necessarily domina-
tive. Opening up media and cultural production is a necessary but not a sufficient
condition to achieving a participatory popular culture. Popular culture as such – even
on social media – is not enough for a truly democratic culture to emerge. The problem
thus is not that people participate on social media, but that social media are not par-
ticipatory enough: participation is limited to content production while ownership and
decision power are privately controlled by corporations.
A fruitful starting point for thinking about more participatory alternatives is Raymond
Williams’ concept of a common culture. He argued that “the creation of all meanings is
an activity which engages all men” (Williams 1989: 35) and therefore famously con-
cluded that “culture is ordinary” (1958, 1989). Creating a truly common culture would
thus require “a condition in which the people as a whole participate in the articulation
of meanings” (Williams 1989: 36). A common culture presupposes an “educated and
participating democracy” (Williams 1989: 37): participating because a common culture
can only be what is commonly created by all people and educated because education is
necessary to acquire the means and abilities to fully participate.
The idea of the common as it has been recently revived by Marxist scholars points
not only at the participatory aspect of cultural production but also collective ownership
of cultural resources (Dyer-Witheford 2010: 82; Hardt and Negri 2009; Harvey 2012:
73). Nick Dyer-Witheford stresses that commons are shared among collectivities: “The
notion of a commodity, a good produced for sale, presupposes private owners between
whom this exchange occurs. The notion of the common presupposes collectivities –
associations and assemblies – within which sharing is organized” (2010: 82). Using
Williams’ (1989: 36) description of a common culture and these recent debates on
cultural commons, we can thus identify two main aspects of a common culture: common
participation and common ownership.
The idea of a common culture has the potential to overcome both the dualism
between high culture and popular culture as well as the dualism between economy and
(popular) culture. On the one hand, Raymond Williams describes common culture as
“the culture as the way of life of people, as well as the [ . . . ] contributions of specially
gifted and identifiable persons” (Williams 1989: 35). On the other hand, the idea of a
common culture relates questions of cultural production to economic questions of own-
ership: Common culture not only democratizes cultural production but furthermore
democratizes ownership rights. Envisioning a common social media culture thus means
imagining social media platforms on which popular culture is collectively produced as
well as collectively owned and controlled.
If we want to take the creative practices of Internet users seriously, we must risk being
uncool and restlessly criticise their corporate appropriation. In order to realize the true
potential of social media, as platforms that are not only socially produced but also
socially owned and controlled, we need to find ways to go beyond the commercial social
media model.

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 7
DESIGNING AFFECTIVE
CONSUMERS
Emotion Analysis in
Market Research
Kelly Gates

Introduction
In 2009, researchers from MIT launched a start-up company called Affectiva to
commercialize automated facial expression analysis (AFEA)—their effort to program
computers to parse out meaningful expressions displayed on human faces captured in
video. The time was ripe, they decided, to migrate their work from the lab to the mar-
ketplace and see what profitable uses might take hold. At the time, the only commercial
application of automated facial expression analysis was Sony’s Smile Shutter™ app, a
feature installed on its Cyber-shot cameras that was designed to automatically snap a
photo when the person being photographed smiles. (“Switch on Smile Shutter and let
your Cyber-shot take the photo for you!” proclaims an online promotion [Sony n.d.].)
The founders of Affectiva had a different idea for their version of the technology: “to
measure the emotional connection people have with advertising, brands, and media.”
The plan was to build a profitable company by marketing AFEA as a market research
tool, at the same time gathering video data from the online world for further research
and development of AFEA. Since Affectiva’s launch, scientists from the Machine
Perception Lab at the University of California, San Diego, formed a similar venture
called Emotient. On their website, Emotient claims to be “the leading authority on
facial expression recognition and analysis technologies.” The company markets their
FACET™ software development kit (SDK) and FACET™ Vision products to “Fortune
500 companies, market research firms, and a growing number of vertical markets”
(Emotient 2014: “About Emotient”).
Companies like Affectiva and Emotient are riding a wave of newly intensified interest
in emotion—in media and market research, business and management consulting, security
and policing, and in a wide range of less applied disciplines. Market research aims to
capitalize on the development of new tools for emotion measurement, like AFEA and
functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI, in order to gain greater purchase on the
internal drives that cause people to desire things, to form attachments, to have particular
 G ATE S

kinds of emotional reactions to media, and of course to choose certain brands over others
and spend money on products and services. These tools promise to visualize and define
people’s emotional fluctuations in more sophisticated ways than existing techniques like
surveys and focus groups, giving market researchers direct access to people’s pre-conscious
and nonverbal sensory experience. In turn, emotion-measurement data generated for mar-
ket research serves the dual purpose of furthering the research and development programs
of psychologists and computer scientists developing automated techniques of emotion
recognition and analysis. In fact, new business ventures aimed at monetizing emotion
measurement promise to play a formative role in the development of artificial intelli-
gence—now conceived not as cold and calculating information-processing machines, but
as affectively engaged systems that interact with humans in ways that attend to, and also
aim to interact with and even manipulate their emotional states and fluctuations. In a
broad sense, the computational treatment of emotion promises to transform what Elizabeth
Wilson (2011) calls our “affective circuitry,” or the shape and character of our emotional
engagements—with machines, with each other, and with the world.
This chapter provides a brief survey of emotion measurement in the domain of market
and media research, addressing key critical questions and debates relevant to under-
standing the application of automated facial expression analysis (AFEA), functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and related technologies “to measure the emo-
tional connection people have with advertising, brands, and media.” These market
research applications are significant in themselves, as well as in terms of the contribu-
tion they make to the computational treatment of emotion more broadly. New tools like
AFEA are themselves products of the attention that emotion has received since the
1990s in the intersecting fields of computer science, human-computer interaction,
machine learning and artificial intelligence research. But it would be wrong to suggest
that emotion was irrelevant to these fields before then; the seemingly recent upturn in
attention to emotion in the artificial intelligence domain belies its longstanding impor-
tance, even if its relevance was denigrated much of the time (Wilson 2011). Precisely
what is new about the current wave of emotion research is a central question addressed
here—how to best make sense of the complex conjuncture of disciplines, ideas, interests,
aims, methods and technologies that define emotion-based market research and the
contribution it promises to make to the conditions of human affective experience.

Some Background on Emotion in Media

and Market Research
Emotion was an object of special interest for market and media research well before the
development of technologies like AFEA or fMRI. “Since strategies of mobilizing emo-
tional commitment have been around for a long time,” writes Mark Andrejevic (2013),
“the newness of this discourse seems to hinge more on its urgency in a multiplatform,
multi-outlet era than its originality” (p. 50). Marketing in general, according to the edi-
tors of a recent anthology titled The Rise of Marketing and Market Research, “is about
reconciling the imperatives of production with the needs and desires of consumers”
(Berghoff, Scranton, & Spiekermann 2012: 1–2). Packing emotional force into media
content has long been one of the main goals of the commercial creative industry, with
the attachment of emotions to products and services for sale in the marketplace the
central aim of modern advertising appeals. A dialectic relationship between advertising
strategies and people’s emotional needs and desires lies at the heart of consumer capitalism

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and its ideological diffusion (Lears 1983, 1994). The methods devised historically to
inform this process are central to the historical evolution of market research as such.
The question of what role psychology and its theories should play in the development
of advertising strategies was much debated in the early twentieth century—as suggested,
for example, in applied psychologist Walter D. Scott’s famous article, “The Psychology
of Advertising,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1904. But there is some dispute
about what direct role applied psychology actually played in efforts to rationalize con-
sumption. The marketing guru Hans Domizlaff apparently thought market research in
general—informed by psychology or otherwise—was “utterly useless,” while his contem-
porary, the famous Eric Dichter, had a doctorate in psychology and used in-depth
interviews designed “to trace un-conscious, mainly sexual motives behind purchasing
decisions” (Berghoff, Scranton, & Spiekermann 2012: 6–7). Dichter founded the
Institute for Motivational Research in 1946 and promoted himself as “an expert who
possessed the key to the hidden secrets of consumers’ psyches” (ibid.: 8). Even before
Dicther’s well-known rise to prominence in U.S. marketing field, the Austrian sociolo-
gist Paul Lazarsfeld (1934), founder of Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social
Research, advocated for the use of psychological analysis to uncover the unconscious
motivations behind the act of buying. He suggested that psycholinguistics, for example,
could be used to interpret what was beneath the surface of subjects’ responses to inter-
view questions (Lazarsfeld 1937). Lazarsfeld’s media effects research easily crossed over
from academic to business applications, more or less by design.
Of course, to reduce the history of the relationship between psychology and market
research to the differing approaches of celebrated marketing and ad men would mean
falling prey to their astute self-promotion. But what we can glean from the historical
emphasis on these professional figures is that psychology was a part of the conversation
among marketing strategists throughout the early formation of the modern market
research industry. Early twentieth-century advertising strategies were informed, without
a doubt, by the belief that emotional appeals would be more effective than rational ones
at assimilating people to a culture of consumption. Writing in the 1980s, the historian
T. J. Jackson Lears argued that what oriented people toward commodity consumption in
early twentieth-century America was an emerging “therapeutic ethos,” or “a shift from
a Protestant ethos of salvation through self-denial toward a therapeutic ethos stressing
self-realization in this world” (Lears 1983: 4). Advertisers both capitalized on and helped
to construct this secular therapeutic ethos, Lears argued. To do so, they hired psycho-
logical consultants to help them devise ways to “arouse consumer demand by associating
products with imaginary states of well-being” (Lears 1983: 19). A therapeutic approach
that targeted the human psyche would allow advertising to depart from rational appeals
and “speak more directly to consumers’ desires for sensuous enjoyment” (ibid.: 19).
Making a different case about historical changes in advertising strategies, Michael
Schudson (1986) insisted that the shift toward emotional appeals in the first half of the
twentieth century had less to do with advertisers applying psychology and behavioral
science and more to do with marketplace changes that altered how advertising agencies
operated. These changes included assumptions about the emotional vulnerability of
valuable female consumers, the growing need to compete with an ever-increasing
amount of advertising clutter, and the rising prominence of visual media, seen as espe-
cially amenable to emotional appeals. In Schudson’s view, advertising did not need
psychological theories and methods to recognize the power of emotion as a source of
human motivation.

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There was also attention to emotion among media researchers on the other side of the
aisle—that is, among those concerned with the potentially dangerous effects of new
media on the emotional well-being of individuals and society. Such a concern mani-
fested in the Payne Fund Motion Picture studies in the 1930s—“the first systematic
study of media effects” (Malin 2009: 389). Media historian Brent Malin focuses on one
such study, led by Christian Ruckmick at the University of Iowa’s Department of
Psychology and resulting in a 1933 report titled The Emotional Response of Children to the
Motion Picture Situation. Ruckmick’s study examined the emotional responses of children
to movies by hooking them up to “psycho-galvanometers and pneumo-cardiographs that
monitored perspiration, respiration, and heart rate” (Malin 2009: 368). An early study
of emotional response to media, Ruckmick’s research already made apparent the suspi-
cion researchers felt about the conscious, introspective accounts respondents gave to
describe their feelings. Respondents’ subjective descriptions of their emotions seemed
inherently flawed and unscientific. In contrast, instruments for measuring embodied
physiological fluctuations promised “to reach a deeper emotional truth of the body”
(Malin 2009: 382). Malin argues that the study of emotion as a physiological phenom-
enon was tied to the perceived need to establish psychology’s scientific legitimacy,
aligning it with the biological sciences and disarticulating it from philosophy. “By medi-
ating a subject’s emotions through a constant flow of empirical data,” writes Malin, “the
psycho-galvanometer promised to remove the human scientist from the process of
emotional interpretation, even as it provided intimate access to a subject’s innermost
feelings” (Malin 2009: 375).
These early research efforts of Payne Fund psychologists to gauge the emotional effects
of movies by measuring physiological processes like perspiration, respiration, and heart
rate, were not aimed at designing more effective techniques of emotional manipulation
for commercial purposes. Instead, the Payne Fund motion picture studies were motivated
by a paternalistic concern about the potentially dangerous emotional impact new media
were having on a vulnerable population, and a perceived need to encourage greater
emotional restraint among what were seen as easily excitable audiences (Malin 2009).
Still, it is not hard to envision how the techniques that the researchers devised to meas-
ure the apparent physiological manifestations of emotion could be repurposed to serve
affect-oriented strategies of persuasion and selling, to devise ways of encouraging people
to deeply engage with a culture of consumption and tie their identities and desires to a
more consumerist way of being.
For its part, the film industry made significant innovations in market and audience
research throughout the twentieth century. It did not necessarily adopt the kind of
emotional response measurement methods that the Payne Fund psychologists used, at
least not on a significant scale. However, beginning in the 1930s and ’40s the industry
did move in the direction of more “scientific” forms of market research, namely random
sampling and statistical analyses of survey responses and ticket sales, in contrast to the
more intuitive forms of trial-and-error testing of movie popularity that took place during
the earlier days of film (Bakker 2003). In addition, new market research firms like
George Gallup’s Audience Research pioneered techniques like the “Preview Jury
System,” test-marketing new films by using devices that gauged a sample of viewers’
reactions, scene-by-scene. While this sort of research measured viewer taste, not their
emotional responses per se, it did suggest the extent to which the film industry aspired
to design and redesign film content in order to achieve desired audience reactions. More
so and earlier than other industries, the big studios incorporated market research at the

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design stage of their product development, rather than after the products went to
market, tweaking movie content in order to best fit consumer preferences, with the aim
of generating as much profit as possible. In fact, more specialized techniques of test-
marketing in the film industry emerged in tandem with the rising sunk costs associated
with filmmaking (Bakker 2003). Return on investment became the top priority along
with the high costs of such developments as the full-length feature film, the incorpora-
tion of sound, the integration of production and distribution, and other capital-intensive
industry practices that took shape throughout the twentieth century. The more money
that went into filmmaking, the more attention the film industry gave to gauging viewer
response.
There is a great deal of additional literature on the history of advertising, market and
media research that could be consulted for insights about the field’s important shifts and
developments; here the focus has been narrowly on attention to emotion, in order to
provide some historical context for understanding the recent resurgence of interest in
emotion in the new media landscape. This very partial background on attention to emo-
tion in the domain of media and market research suggests that it was well recognized
that tapping into emotional lives would be a highly effective way of persuading people
to become active consumers and brand loyalists. Many of the well-known figures in
marketing and advertising certainly fancied themselves experts in human psychology
and were celebrated as such. However, there is no clear historical record showing that
media and market researchers engaged in the directed study of emotional response on
any consistent, systematic basis. Surveys were a key consumer-response technology, but
they were limited to enumerating what people were willing and able to articulate about
their feelings, or what researchers could interpret from those responses, and consumer
self-disclosures were almost always viewed with some suspicion. Despite its limitations,
the survey was by far the dominant mode of market research throughout much of its
history, along with focus groups and other forms of consumer self-reporting. Perhaps
market researchers doubted the usefulness or reliability of the available emotion-
measurement methods, or perhaps ways of measuring emotional response were not pos-
sible or cost-effective on a large enough scale to provide useful results. In any case, a
central problem for advertisers and marketers has long been how to understand consum-
ers and their motivations in more depth and specificity. The question of how to increase
the emotional valence of commercial media was ever-present, and an adequate means
of effectively measuring and analyzing people’s inner emotional lives seemed always out
of reach. The lack of means to more effectively access the depths of people’s psyches
consistently dogged advertisers’ ability to fully exploit the gaping hole in the individual
and collective sense of well-being, brought on to a great extent by the consumer culture
itself.

Emotion Analysis in Market and Media Research Today

The more recent turn to the close study and measurement of emotion in market research
is evident in a slate of trade books that began appearing on the topic of in the late 1990s
and early 2000s. These works included titles like The Marketing Power of Emotion
(O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy 2003); Emotions, Advertising and Consumer Choice
(Hansen and Christensen 2007); and Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for
Connecting Brands to People (Marc Gobé 2001/2010). In The Marketing Power of Emotions,
the authors explain the prevailing view in the field that strong brand loyalties depend

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on the emotional connections consumers establish with brands, and that effective mar-
keting techniques require a better understanding of how consumer choices are guided
by emotions. What they call “NERS” scores, or “net emotional response strengths,” are
estimated by drawing on a variety of emotion measurement methods, including skin
conductivity tests, heart rate measurement, gaze tracking, brain scans, and the analysis
of facial expressions (O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy 2003). Combining a variety of
emotion-measurement techniques promises to empower market researchers to deter-
mine the right emotional response, of the right intensity, and the right time to produce the
sought-after emotional engagement with a product, company or brand.
Apparent in this popular trade literature, and in marketing industry press more
broadly, is a resurgent interest in devising ways of bypassing consumers’ introspective
verbal explanations of emotions and targeting their pre-verbal sensations and uncon-
scious desires. This preoccupation with probing the depth of the consumer psyche is
especially evident in the rise of “neuromarketing”—the application of neuroscience to
marketing, using brain imaging technologies to analyze consumer responses to prod-
ucts, packaging, advertising and other marketing techniques (Schneider and Woolgar
2012: 169). The ratings firm Nielsen, for example, is now in the business of neuromar-
ket research, moving beyond people meters to monitoring brain activity. Brain imaging
technologies promise to give market researchers more accurate and in-depth assess-
ments of people’s visceral, pre-verbal responses to commercial messages than their
conscious responses to survey questions or focus group discussions. Much like the phys-
iological measures employed by the Payne Fund researchers, the aim of neuromarketing
is “to reach a deeper emotional truth of the body,” in this case by visualizing and
interpreting the neurological activity that takes place along with people’s exposure to
media.
The neuromarketing phenomenon, and its aim of bypassing conscious consumer
response, has caught the attention of scholars in science and technology studies (STS)
investigating the “neuroscientific turn” in the human sciences (Littlefield and Johnson
2012). Tanja Schneider and Stephen Woolgar (2012) have examined neuromarketing
from the perspective of STS, questioning how “the consumer” is conceptualized in the
new methods and practices of neuromarketing. They examine academic and popular
accounts of neuromarketing, finding a consistent tendency to conceptualize the con-
sumer as “an unknowing, unreliable entity,” a passive and secondary object of attention
who is unaware of her own true motives (Schneider and Woolgar 2012: 185). The claim
in the domain of neuromarketing is that identifying consumer motivations requires
expert interpretation of brain activity: “This depiction of the consumer as non-
knowledgeable is premised on the [notion] that consumers do not know why they buy
something, whereas consumers’ brains can provide objective answers” (ibid.: 181).
Neuromarketing promises to create new knowledge about consumers through specialized
analysis of their brains, revealing the hidden causes of buying behavior by entrusting
brain-interpretation to a new community of experts (neuromarketers) empowered with
new technologies (like fMRI). Thus neuromarketing redistributes the “accountability
relations” that animate the market research scenario: “Accountability for subjects’
motives passes from the subjects to the technology and its operatives” (ibid.: 184).
Schneider and Woolgar’s attention to the reconceptualization of “the consumer” in
neuromarketing is consistent in many ways with the argument that what needed to be
produced en masse, to fully usher in commodity capitalism, were not only consumer
goods but consumer-subjects themselves. The rise of neuromarketing and its particular

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ways of conceptualizing the consumer suggests that reproduction of the ethos of con-
sumption—getting people to identify with a consumerist way of being at a deep psychic
level—remains central to the reproduction of the capitalist system. New technologies
like fMRI and automated facial expression analysis promise to be useful not only for
accessing, measuring and interpreting the unaware consumer’s embodied affective activ-
ity, but also for developing and testing ways of targeting and stimulating that activity—
likewise in ways that new neuro-consumers need not consciously be aware of.
It is not only “the consumer” that is being reproduced and re-conceptualized in cur-
rent methods of market and media research. The resurgence of interest in emotion-based
market research methods corresponds with the ways “the audience” has been rethought
and reconstituted along with the rise of interactive media. “Audience research,” whether
referring to the ratings industry or the academic sub-discipline of audience studies, no
longer adequately captures the range of approaches being developed for studying how
people engage with networked, digital media. Applied or market-based studies of media
reception have moved beyond the conventional ratings industry practice of counting
the number of viewers of a television show, or even segmenting those viewers into
different niches and analyzing the ways they choose and interpret media products differ-
ently. Now, online social media and streaming content providers double as massive user
monitoring systems, gathering volumes of detailed personal data that can be mined to
construct a virtually infinite variety of niche user categories. In addition, “usability stud-
ies,” administered at the design stage, test how people interact with media products like
video games, software apps, and websites, measuring test-subjects fluctuating levels of
emotional intensity as they interact with these media products. The expressed aim of
usability studies is typically to make interactive media more “user-friendly” or engaging,
but ultimately the goal is to make them more monetize-able, and, in the case of video
games, harder to stop playing. For video games in particular, preference for the notion
of “user” seems apt given the reportedly addictive qualities of commercially successful
video games, and the efforts of more highly capitalized game developers to design the
games in ways that keeps users hooked on playing (closely analyzing users’ responses to
game mechanics, for example). Video games share much in common with slot
machines—designed, both algorithmically and ergonomically, to lure players into a
trancelike state that gamblers call the “machine zone,” as Natasha Dow Schüll (2013)
documents in her great book, Addiction by Design.
While it may be the case that market-based media research is responding to changes
in media forms and uses, in fact the relationship between user studies, media forms, and
uses is more reciprocal than linear, more cybernetic feedback loop than one-way cause-
effect relationship. We might say that the relationship between new emotion-oriented
market research methods, on the one hand, and our affective engagement with media
on the other, is one of coproduction. Market-based media research itself has a central role
to play in delimiting the range of possible media experiences and engagements that
developers envision and attempt to design into media products. In fact, one of the
promises of new approaches like neuromarketing is to provide greater potential for
incorporating product testing in the design stage (Ariely and Burns 2010). We might
even say that neuromarketing aims to more tightly integrate brain activity with com-
mercial media design, challenging the notions of both finished media product and fully
formed consumer subject.
Here it is useful to consider Jack Bratich’s (2013) suggestion that media studies ought
to re-examine what is meant by “the audience,” as well as other ways of conceptualizing

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collective and individual engagements with media, including consumers, publics,

masses, recipients, fans, users and so on. For Bratich, these individual and collective
engagements with media are better conceptualized as different media subjectivities. In
other words, things like “the audience” and “the consumer” are not pre-constituted
people or objects-in-themselves that already exist as individual or collective recipients
of media. Instead, they are and always have been subjects-in-perpetual-formation, as
well as “a convergence of discursive problematizations” (Bratich 2013: 425)—different
ways of envisioning subjectivities, making them knowable and bringing them into being.
“Every participant in a communicative act has an imagined audience,” write Alice
Marwick and danah boyd (2011: 115), and how an audience is imagined can be very
different in different communicative contexts. Further, in online social media especially,
actual readers or viewers can be very different than what the producer-user imagines her
audience to be—a fact that is especially true of Twitter, given the variety of ways people
consume and spread tweets, as Marwick and boyd point out. The study of audiences
reaches its limit in the emergence of interactive media, Bratich argues, allowing us to
better understand “the audience” for what it always was: a form of media subjectivation,
one way among others in which collective and individual engagements with media are
conceptualized and constituted (Bratich 2013). In their market research and product
design applications, new emotion-measurement technologies like fMRI and AFEA can
best be understood as technologies of media subjectivation.
The resurgence of emotion measurement methods also coincides with another sig-
nificant development in the field of market research: namely, the rise of predictive
analytics, or the use of statistical analysis, data mining and machine learning techniques
to make predictions about the future. The subtitle of a trade book titled Predictive
Analytics defines it as “The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die” (Siegel
and Davenport 2013), suggesting some of its applications: for media and market research,
fraud and crime prediction, insurance and medicine. In market research, these two coex-
isting trends—emotion analysis techniques and predictive analytics—correspond to
what are, roughly speaking, two long-standing approaches or “schools of thought”: “One
favors psychology and science whereas the other privileges statistics by analyzing demo-
graphic and other data” (Berghoff, Scranton, & Spiekermann 2012: 11). In addition,
both of these approaches share the common aim of “utilizing prediction to overcome
market uncertainties”—persistent efforts, at the heart of market research, to deal with
the “fundamental unpredictability of the future” (ibid.: 11). In fact, it could be argued
that “predictive analytics” is simply a new buzzword or way of describing forms of market
analysis that, while much more data-intensive today, are nonetheless consistent with
more long-standing ways of applying statistical analysis to predict market trends. Still,
it would not be accurate to describe current predictive marketing techniques, or the
digital media landscape they aim to make sense of, as simply more data-intensive. As
one marketing blogger puts it, “marketing is undergoing an existential change” (Lyons
2014), upended by new forms of quantitative analysis afforded by, and demanded of, vast
quantities of data generated from a proliferation of sources—credit-card transactions,
social media platforms, internet browsing and search queries, streaming media services,
smart phone apps, GPS and cellular location data, text messaging, and more.
Where predictive analytics meets the resurgent interest in emotion in market research
we find the new field of “sentiment analysis.” Computer scientist Bing Liu defines senti-
ment analysis, “also called opinion mining,” as a field of study that analyzes people’s
opinions, sentiments, attitudes and emotions towards “products, services, organizations,

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individuals, issues, events, topics, and their attributes,” using the computational tech-
niques of natural language processing (Liu 2012: 1). In his recent book Infoglut, Mark
Andrejevic (2013) offers a critique of sentiment analysis in the context of his broader
discussion of the crisis of representation associated with current conditions of informa-
tion overabundance. The marketing industry is at the forefront of efforts to mine the
realm of sentiment and emotion online, he explains, especially as it manifests in the vast
troves of data generated through users’ everyday activities on social media platforms.
Andrejevic suggests that this interest in sentiment data fits well with at least two trends
in the information-era economy: “first, the increasing importance attached to emotional
response as a means of navigating a landscape of information glut; and second, the role
of information about preferences, opinions, and emotional response” in facilitating the
mass customization economy (Andrejevic 2013: 44). Sentiment analysis opens up
the realm of emotion to mass quantification, data collection and mining, holding out
the measurement of emotional response as “the key to cutting through the clutter of
available information” (Andrejevic 2013: 43–44). It promises to give businesses a means
of gauging the Internet’s background feeling tone, making order out of Internet chaos
and gaining predictive power. Predictive analytics provides the knowledge base for
experimental interventions, devising new management strategies, not only in marketing
but in politics and other domains, “to minimize negative sentiment and maximize
emotional investment”; the aim is “not merely to record sentiment as a given but to
modulate it as a variable” (Andrejevic 2013: 46).

Automated Facial Expression Analysis as

Market Research Technology
This brings us to the companies introduced at the outset of this chapter, Affectiva and
Emotient. These new ventures are attempting to transition AFEA from the lab to the
marketplace, marketing their versions of the technology as market research tools that
can stand alone or be integrated with other devices and platforms. One of the big prom-
ises of AFEA is its potential application for visual sentiment analysis—mining visual
data to automatically gauge the affective tone of individual content or collections of
images and video. Whether the technology will fulfill this promise, beyond limited
applications that can measure a small number of faces in constrained settings, remains
uncertain. Automated facial expression analysis is still an unproven technology, and it
is too soon to say whether these particular ventures—the first of their kind—will be
successful, or in what direction their business might lead. In fact, companies like
Affectiva and Emotient are arguably more important for their research activities than
for their business viability. There is always a possibility that one or both of these com-
panies will fold, or, more likely, be acquired by larger companies to be enfolded into
separate business ventures with different or related research and development priorities.
This means that we can consider here only a version of how these emotion-measurement
products are designed to work, and the sort of promises that the companies make about
their products, at a particular moment in time (circa 2014). (For an analysis of the social
construction of AFEA before the formation of these companies, see Gates 2011.) The
companies’ product descriptions and promotional material cannot tell us how these tech-
nologies are actually used in practice. However, while one might argue that how the
technologies actually work in practice is more important than product descriptions or
claims made in promotional material, in fact the descriptions and promises are likewise

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important. They tend toward an ideal vision of how the technologies would ideally func-
tion if they actually delivered what the companies envision is most needed and desired
in the market research domain. Of course, the companies would be foolish to make lofty
promises that their products have no chance of delivering. As with much of the promo-
tional rhetoric associated with tech products and companies, the descriptions that
Affectiva and Emotient offer negotiate a balance between what is currently possible and
what developers hope the technology might be capable of in the future, based on their
perceptions of potential needs of those users they deem relevant.
So how do these companies define their emotion-measurement technologies? Not
surprisingly, the Affectiva and Emotient product descriptions are suffused with the “dig-
ital sublime” (Mosco 2005) and the language of “technological solutionism” (Morozov
2013). At the company website, Affectiva explains its mission “to digitize emotion, so
it can enrich our technology, for work, play and life” (Affectiva 2014, “About Affectiva”).
Here they suggest that the importance of “digitizing emotion,” and hence the value of
its product, extends across different spheres of social life, in fact to all of life. Similarly,
Emotient suggests in a promotional video that its “industry-leading emotion-aware sys-
tem will enable a revolution in device and application personalization” (Emotient 2014:
“Emotion-Aware Computing”). The promise is that Emotient’s product can allow device
and software developers to design forms of emotional engagement into their devices and
apps. An Emotient promotional video, “Enabling Human-Aware Devices” (2014),
begins with the question, “What if your devices could read your emotions, and respond
to them?” It proceeds to show images of people engaged in various activities while mak-
ing facial expressions, each face overlaid with a graphical measuring device that
identifies the specific emotions and their temporal intensities. The video suggests a
number of potential applications of the Emotient application programming interface
(API), including organizing personal photo collections by emotion, real-time measure-
ment of videogames to maximize player engagement, and the possibility of “adapt[ing]
your service to changes in the user’s temperament, adding a new dimension to the user’s
experience,” in this case suggesting an in-car application by depicting an image of a
driver expressing “frustration” (ibid.).
Affectiva offers its product, called “Affdex,” in two different forms: either as a cloud-
based platform, where video captured from webcams is processed on Affectiva’s servers
via an Internet connection, or as a software development kit, allowing software developers
to integrate Affdex into their own apps. Emotient describes two types of applications,
one that can operate in real-time using a webcam over an internet connection, and
another that can analyze sets of images or recorded videos “in batch mode,” for “non
time-sensitive requirements” (Emotient 2014: “About Emotient”). One possibility for
the latter app, Emotient explains, is for “aggregate customer sentiment analysis”: “Major
retailers, brands and retail technology providers can use Emotient’s technology for aggre-
gate customer sentiment analysis at point of sale, point of entry, or on the shelf”
(Emotient 2014: “Markets”).
Visitors to the Affectiva website can try a demo of Affdex that takes the form of cloud-
based platform. The demo records and analyzes viewers’ facial expressions in response to
a selection of advertisements. The demo asks users to “Please click the ‘Allow’ button in
the video window to grant us access to your webcam for recording” (Affectiva 2014:
“Affdex Demo”). Willing participants then watch an advertisement as their computer’s
webcam records their reactions. When the ad is finished, a brief survey asks for basic
demographic information (age and gender), whether viewers have seen the ad before, and

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whether they will allow Affectiva to use their facial expressions “to spread the word about
Affdex” (ibid.). (Note that viewers of the demo have already consented to allowing
Affectiva to use the video for internal research purposes by clicking on the “allow” button
to enable the software app to access their webcam.) After the brief survey is complete,
the results are processed and then displayed, overlaid with “Tips for Using the Affdex
Dashboard.” A graph shows the fluctuations in the viewer’s facial expressions over the
course of the ad, as well as the way his or her results compare to other viewers who
watched the ad, along the dimensions of “surprise,” “smile,” “concentration,” “dislike,”
“valence,” “attention,” and “expression.” The graphical results are not exactly intuitive,
suggesting that some amount of additional expertise is required to interpret them.
As a web-based platform that records video images of willing visitors to the Affectiva
website, the Affdex demo provides a data-gathering mechanism to build video archives
for further experimentation and tech development, collecting data on facial expressions
“in the wild” from Internet users. The use of the demo as a facial data-gathering mecha-
nism is significant, as it gives developers more visual data needed to make advances in
developing computer vision algorithms for the automation of facial expression analysis.
In return for doing “the work of being watched” (Andrejevic 2002), visitors who opt in
to having their faces recorded while viewing ads earn the benefit of seeing the results of
their own expression analysis, with the suggestion that they can learn more about them-
selves and their emotive responses by examining line graphs of their expressive responses
to ads.
Emotient does not offer a demo of its product for visitors to try; instead there are a
number of videos at the website that demonstrate the different uses of Emotient. One
depicts Dr. Marian Bartlett, Emotient’s Lead Scientist and one of the company founders,
posing a series of facial expressions of varying intensity, as an overlaid square frames her
face and an image to her right displays the graphical measurements of her facial move-
ments. In other Emotient product videos, the people having their faces
analyzed are not depicted as scientists or developers of the technology, but regular
people of various ages (mostly young), genders, and ethnicities (mostly white), using
different kinds of technologies and having visible, seemingly spontaneous emotional
reactions.
Given the issues raised in this chapter, it is important to consider the way these com-
panies conceptualize “the consumer” whose emotions they are trying to measure. What
assumptions are made about people and their emotions and engagements with media in
Affectiva and Emotient’s company literature? It is not surprising to find that these com-
panies carry on the aim of bypassing consumers’ conscious self-reporting of emotional
response, promoting their facial expression analysis systems as capable of accessing and
deciphering objective measures of people’s feelings by reading them directly off the body.
“People struggle to accurately describe their emotional experience,” notes the Affectiva
website, and the “traditional survey self report, while powerful, is . . . hampered by cog-
nitive bias. Consumers either can’t or won’t provide the level of detail needed to really
understand the effectiveness of the creative”—“the creative” here referring to the media
products people are exposed to (Affectiva 2014: “Media Measurement”). To remedy the
problem of vague respondents, unaware of or unwilling to reveal their own true emo-
tions, Affdex “bypasses ‘cognitive editing’ and deliver[s] scalable, authentic emotional
insight across key emotional measures” (ibid.). For its part, Emotient promises to provide
a means of accessing nonverbal, “unedited” emotional response via their product’s
unique ability to target and identify “microexpressions,” or “very rapid flashes of

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involuntary facial muscle movement that are easily overlooked by the human eye”
(Emotient 2014: “Markets”). They insist that “there is a wealth of information con-
tained within microexpressions,” beyond what subjects would explicitly reveal about
their feelings (ibid.). As with neuromarketing, and even much earlier approaches to
studying emotional response, the conscious and self-aware subject is bypassed, dismissed
as providing incomplete and unreliable information about self-motivations. Instead,
trust is placed in technologies to provide more accurate and objective measures by
targeting the body’s physiological processes. AFEA and fMRI promise to bring into
existence even more infinitesimal levels of embodiment, making visible and knowable
small spaces and times that were previously imperceptible and beyond the threshold of
knowledge or intervention (see Thrift 2008).
However, the question of how these companies conceptualize users is a bit more com-
plicated than simply reproducing the non-knowledgeable consumer so common to the
field of market research. In the efforts of these companies to define both the uses and
the users of their products, we find a sort of subject-object slippage, so that it is not
always easy to determine who the preferred users are. This slippage or confusion stems
in part from the fact that, in addition to defining the range of subjects whose emotions
are open to examination, these companies are also in the business of delineating and
speaking to their own customer—not the end-user of a device or software platform
whose emotions are being measured, but instead “the researcher” or expert-professional
subject invested in emotional measurement output. There is a clear concern for this
particular type of user—an actor with an interest in measuring the emotions of others.
There are instances when Affectiva and Emotient are clear about precisely who the
envisioned users of the technology are, the specific actors whom they intend to
“empower” with their technologies: “The Emotient API offers facial expression and
emotion detection and analysis tools to empower companies and market research firms to
create new levels of customer engagement, research, and analysis” (Emotient 2014:
“Products,” emphasis added). However, at other times the subject who is target of emo-
tion-measurement and the researcher or emotion-data analyst are more conflated. The
Affdex demo, for example, suggests that anyone and everyone can and should be con-
cerned with emotional self-awareness, and even use emotion-measurement technologies
to evaluate and modulate themselves. Even “Lead Scientists” subject their own facial
expressions to measurement, as does Dr. Marian Bartlett of Emotient (even if only to
demonstrate how well the technology works). This subject-object confusion no doubt
stems in part from the ongoing “interpretive flexibility” of these technologies, even as
those developing and marketing the technologies strive toward “rhetorical closure” (to
use the language of STS) (Pinch and Bijker 1989). But the effect is a sort of flattening
out of the application of emotion analysis, a democratization of the technology’s suggested
uses, such that everyone is both a potential user and a potential subject to be analyzed.
This so-called democratization of users and uses is partly the result of the effort to por-
tray emotion analysis as beneficial to everyone, from consumers or end-users to market
researchers and tech developers. The promotional material suggests a kind of all-
encompassing emotion-measuring system, one that reaches everyone equally, benefitting
all by “empowering,” “enabling,” and “enriching” everyone’s emotional life, through the
sublime solution of digitization. If in the past an adequate means of effectively measuring
and analyzing people’s inner emotional lives seemed always out of reach, the computa-
tional analysis of emotion promises to leave no emotional being or experience unexposed
or unexamined.

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The way that Affectiva and Emotient conceptualize their envisioned users is not
exactly the same as found in neuromarketing discourse, at least in terms of Schneider
and Woolgar’s (2012) findings. To be sure, companies marketing emotion-sensing sys-
tems for market research applications often try to piggyback on the cultural fascination
with and currency of neuroscience by associating their products with neuromarketing.
Affectiva, for example, describes Affdex as a “neuromarketing tool that reads emotional
states such as liking and attention from facial expressions using an ordinary web-
cam . . . to give marketers faster, more accurate insight into consumer response to
brands, advertising and media” (Affectiva 2014: “Affdex Facial Coding”). However,
they also make a concerted effort to differentiate their product from neuromarketing
techniques, suggesting that it has certain relative advantages for market researchers.
After describing Affdex as a “neuromarketing tool,” the company then suggests that it
offers unique benefits over neuroscience: while neuromarketing techniques “have been
gaining in popularity,” they involve “in-lab methods that require complex hardware and
black-box analysis” (Affectiva 2014: “Solutions”). In contrast, Affectiva claims, “Faces
are easy to understand, and the spontaneous reactions we see on faces are unfiltered and
unbiased” (ibid.). The implication here is that neuromarketing involves cumbersome
technologies and analytical results that are not transparent or legible to non-experts.
The difference with Affdex, they suggest, is that it is easy for anyone to use and produce
readily readable results in the form of direct measurements of facial motion, rather than
esoteric output that requires those who use such methods to place their faith in the
specialized knowledge and interpretive skills of experts. Here, the suggestion is that
reading emotion off the surface of the body is a more viable approach for market
researchers, given their knowledge and area of expertise, than attempting to visualize
and make sense of the invisible interior activity of the brain. In other words, market
researchers and tech developers are not neuroscientists, and transferring agency and
accountability to the latter may not be in the former’s best interest.
Another key emphasis in the promotional discourse and business models of companies
like Affectiva and Emotient is the “scalability” of their emotion-sensing technologies.
The promise of “scalability” is to extend emotion-measurement to the level of popula-
tions, creating “big data” systems for sentiment analysis, adaptable to the aims of
predictive analytics. Distributing automated emotion measurement technologies across
networks and integrating them with networked devices and platforms promises to break
down the conventional distinction in market research between the analysis of emotional
response on the small scale of the laboratory or focus group setting, and the large-scale
statistical analysis of mass markets. In other words, making AFEA apps “scalable” is one
way of merging the two “schools of thought” that have long defined market research, the
one favoring psychology and science, and the other privileging statistics and data analy-
sis. Both of these approaches—psychological methods on a small scale and statistical
analysis on a large scale—are future-oriented, aiming to make future predictions in order
to overcome market uncertainties. This future orientation is very much tied to the issue
of scalability in the way these companies define and promote the value of their products.
For example, appealing to the needs of marketers to deal with the unpredictability of the
future, Emotient emphasizes both scalability and future-orientation: “We built our archi-
tecture with the future in mind; it is highly scalable and extensible to adapt quickly with
changing market and customer needs” (Emotient 2014: “About Emotient”).
This promise of future scalability, as well as better functionality, is akin to a point that
Schneider and Woolgar make about neuromarketing: in neuromarketing discourse,

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there is some acknowledgment of the limitations, with the promise of perfected tech-
niques deferred to a future time when “what turns out to have been temporary technical
problems have been overcome” (Schneider and Woolgar 2012: 184). In other words, if
current technologies and forms of expert interpretation prove far from perfect, not to
worry—their continuous improvement is in process, and eventual perfection assured.
Whether in fact AFEA technologies are ready for the “scalable” demands of big data and
predictive analytics, or if they ever will be, is yet to be determined. But for certain, the
likelihood of getting there requires transitioning emotion-measurement prototypes out
of the lab and into devices, platforms and distributed digital networks. Regardless of
whether two companies called Affectiva and Emotient are market contenders with a
viable future, they already have a place in the history of emotion analysis in market
research, as well as in the “technological trajectory” of efforts to digitize and automate
emotion analysis. As I have argued elsewhere, the very possibility of creating automated
forms of facial expression analysis suggests that certain assumptions about human affec-
tive relations are already in circulation—assumptions that posit affect as a physiological
process capable of being not only coded and analyzed, but also engineered (Gates 2011).
The belief that this is possible, and the perceived need and demand to make it so, suggest
that companies like Affectiva and Emotient are just the beginning of efforts to monetize
new emotion measurement technologies.

Conclusion
The marketization of new emotion measurement techniques as market research tools
is a significant development, and not just for businesses determined to tap into and
manipulate our unconscious drives and desires. The market orientation of this early
application of new affect-sensing technologies shapes their “technological trajectory”
(MacKenzie 1993), designing the priorities of the market and monetization into
these technologies. This is not to deny that these technologies have other potential
applications, less inflected with market values, such as autism therapy or basic
research in psychology. But the digitization of emotion for market research purposes
promises to scale up these technologies, broadening their reach and making them
more widely applicable for a range of institutional applications that promise to have
more far-reaching effects. Ultimately, the underlying aim of emotion analysis in mar-
ket research is to inform the design of media and emotional subjectivation, ways of
measuring and modulating embodied; affective engagements to bring emotional
subjectivities into being. The automation of emotion sensing, and its “scalability,”
promises to extend experimental techniques out of the lab and across distributed
networks and their user populations. By integrating automated facial expression anal-
ysis into distributed digital networks, market research ventures like Affectiva and
Emotient offer prototypes for more dispersed and broad-based applications of auto-
mated emotion-sensing, building out networked “emotion-aware” systems that aim
to modulate our affective relations—with one another, with machines, and with the
world we inhabit.
There are plenty of questions in need of further consideration. What are the connec-
tions, collaborations, and points of differentiation between academic research fields of
psychology and neuroscience, on the one hand, and neuromarketing and sentiment
analysis on the other? How do more recent intersections between these fields follow or
differ from the historical relationships between academic psychology and the market

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research industry? How closely allied are these fields, in other words, and what is the
nature of their exchange in concepts, methods, and research? What historical
connections might be found between media and market research (and emotion research
in particular) and the history of computing and computerization, artificial intelligence
research and cybernetics? How did computerization in media and market research
change the field’s methods and approaches, or how might the history of the field be
rethought through the lens of the current conjuncture of market research methods and
data science? In the domain of emotion research, in what ways are digitization and
monetization correlated, and in what sense are they discrete phenomena or processes?
And how does the priority of media monetization shape the forms that “emotionally
aware” digital technologies end up taking, if not also the forms of emotional awareness
that users of these technologies are able or encouraged to learn and identify with? We
might also ask questions about how to intervene on the technological trajectory pushing
the build-out of emotion-sensing systems to serve market demands. How can media
subjectivities subvert, or appropriate for different aims, those forms of media subjectiva-
tion that would reproduce the unsustainable imperatives of consumption? In short, how
do we reinvent ourselves and our “affective circuitry” in a manner consistent with a
more just, ethical and ecologically viable existence?

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 8
THE METRICS,
RELOADED
Shawn Shimpach

The unprecedented growth of the culture industries over the last 100 years has been
facilitated by increasingly sophisticated means of measuring and analyzing data about
the industries’ customers and audiences. Such data allow the culture industries to imag-
ine the people for whom culture is produced and to whom it is sold. The sheer size and
geographic dispersal of these audiences has meant that by necessity measurements are
conducted from a distance, through surveys, sampling, and demographic categorization.
In this way the indeterminate behavior of individuals becomes regularized as the predict-
able responses of an aggregate audience.
As the product of rapidly developing techniques and technologies, the audience is
acutely susceptible to change. Serving the needs of commodity exchange and capital,
the audience’s value and utility shifts with business trends. This is made clear if we
examine the construction, use, and value of the audience for a specific culture industry.
U.S. television provides an apt example, as there are few sites of popular culture more
closely associated with the measurement of their audience. Even the most passive couch
potato is aware of the value of television ratings, after all. Yet recent developments in
the television industry, its programming, technology, and viewership have complicated
the role of viewer ratings in that industry. High ratings numbers are now perhaps one,
rather than the only, metric for analyzing television industry success. At the same time,
there has never been more debate about how best to obtain ratings numbers that will be
useful to all stakeholders. The response by the television industry has been to rely now
even more on the collection of data to measure, understand, and manage this confusing
audience.

Television
The act of watching television is no longer easy to define. If you are streaming an
Amazon-produced program pilot on your iPad, are you “watching television”? Or, for
another example, consider that shortly before the 2013 Primetime Emmy Awards cere-
mony was to begin, Twitter users may have received the following “tweet”: “Netflix
should get all of its Emmys immediately at the start of the show. AMC should get half
its Emmys tonight, the other half [next year].”1 It was written by a newspaper reporter,
but sent via social media micro-blogger Twitter and referenced basic cable channel AMC
in the same 140 characters as internet company Netflix. On the eve of what was supposed
 SH I M PA C H

to be the U.S. television industry’s biggest night of self-congratulation, this tweet’s

implicit suggestion was that watching television, even television about television,
involved much more media than simply television.
The more explicit implication, of course, was that television programming strategies
were rapidly and visibly transforming. Referencing Netflix’s audience practice of
“binge” viewing (Jurgensen 2012, 2013; Poniewozik 2012) and AMC’s then-recent
announcement that the final season of its signature series, Mad Men, would be split
into two and programmed over consecutive years (O’Connell 2013), this joke drew
attention to the most recent trends threatening to redefine the ever-shifting landscape
of television programming and reception. Binge viewing appeared to rewrite the tem-
porality of television programming by negating scarcity in favor of abundance, offering
all the episodes of an entire season (or more) at once, at any time, anywhere,
on-demand. AMC meanwhile was heightening program scarcity, thereby delaying
gratification and extending their brand’s association with an important program for
yet another year. These were seemingly opposite strategies, yet both were designed
around changing understandings of the television audience. In the event, both Netflix
and AMC did win Emmys that evening (although they were doled out in the tradi-
tional manner). Netflix’s win made it the first internet site to win a major category
award at the Emmys.
Even as the television industry was rewarding these efforts, however, it was clearly also
anxious about the implications. The less apparent if rather more profound cause for
concern was actually happening behind the screens. Not only were these companies
gathering their audiences in novel ways, but each was also measuring and learning to
value its audience differently.

Audiences
In fact, the act of watching television has never been easy to define. If you are in a room,
in your home, and the television happens to be on, are you “watching television”?
Moreover, how could anyone else ever be sure, since you are in a room, in your home,
when this occurs? A great deal of effort and money has been spent over the last 100 years
attempting to answer these questions.
The modern audience finds its origins in the rapid economic and social changes of the
nineteenth century when popular culture was reshaped by commercial undertakings that
“originated in, mirrored, and served the techniques of mass production and distribu-
tion,” erecting “the modern audience imperative” (Hurwitz 1983: 30). By the early
twentieth century, the culture industries were combining new techniques of population
measurement and rational business management to construct audiences from dispersed
customers, a crucial step for magazines and motion pictures alike to become “eligible for
the various forms of external capital and financing necessary for their growth” (Shimpach
2005; Wasko 1982: 8). By the 1920s, the implications of knowing the audience from a
distance grew as wireless broadcasting began early efforts to attract broad audiences with
commercial entertainment. In the U.S., commercial broadcasting began as a value-
added service intended to sell radio receivers, so audiences were encouraged to listen in
the privacy of their own homes, on their own radios. This domestic privacy combined
with the geographic dispersion of a broadcast signal made it difficult for anyone to sys-
tematically observe or measure the audience, leaving in question precisely who and how
many were listening to which broadcasts.

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Broadcast audience measurement became an industry in the early 1930s, replacing

informal practices of anecdote, intuition, and occasional “applause cards” encouraging
listeners to write in (Butsch 2000: 196). As the medium became advertising dependent
in the U.S., a variety of sponsors, concerned that their money was being wisely spent,
jointly supported pollster Archibald Crossley—who claims to have coined the term
“rating” (Buzzard 2012: 14)—to call randomly-selected phone numbers in about 30 cit-
ies and ask the people who answered what radio programs they had listened to the day
before. This non-profit Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting (CAB) became “the first
formal rating company to provide regular studies of the radio audience on a continuing
basis” (Buzzard 2012: 15). CAB continued to operate for over a decade, but was soon
facing severe competition as Montgomery Clark and Claude Hooper’s “Hooperatings”
emerged with a new methodology, the “telephone coincidental.” This method, borrowed
from George Gallup, also dialed randomly selected numbers, but the person answering
was asked what they were listening to at that very moment (reducing the burden of
accurate recall) (Buzzard 2012: 17; Schafer Gross 2004: 1891).
The A. C. Nielsen Company, meanwhile, entered the industry of broadcast ratings
in 1948 after establishing what it considered to be a scientific approach to marketing
and advertising efficiency (Buzzard 2012: 22). Using a combination of viewer diaries
and a device called the Audimeter that recorded when the radio (and then TV) was
on and to what channel it was tuned (much later these were somewhat combined into
the PeopleMeter), Nielsen soon came to monopolize the industry of broadcast ratings.
As Webster, Phalen, and Lichty observe, “like any commercial enterprise, research
companies must produce goods or services that can be sold in the marketplace”
(2000: 127). Nielsen’s consolidation of the television ratings business coincided with
the golden age of national broadcast television in which 90% of U.S. viewers watched
one of three national broadcast networks: NBC, CBS, or ABC. These three networks,
along with major media buyers working on behalf of advertising agencies, constituted
the company’s most lucrative customers, and Nielsen has thrived by supplying them
with what they want: “converting a sea of data into manageable information” (Webster,
Phalen, and Lichty 2000: 127). The result is that “ratings have grown to be an end in
themselves, a product sold to parties interested in the composition of audiences for
broadcasting” (Rothenbuhler 2004). Given this state of extremely limited competition
within what was essentially an oligopoly of national broadcast interests, the most
important information was comparative, indicating the relative viewership of each
network.
Television ratings were sold in various formats to advertisers, advertising agencies,
program syndicators, television networks, local stations, and cable program and system
operators, all of whom used this data to make decisions and to negotiate with one
another. As ratings data came to form a currency of negotiation within the industry,
seemingly paradoxically, Nielsen’s monopoly on audience measurement was naturalized.
The benefits of competition have never seemed to outweigh the costs of potentially
conflicting ratings claims that would “add greater uncertainty and analytical burdens to
the audience marketplace” (Napoli 2011: 295). Thus, as Rothenbuhler (2004) suggests,
“even if this [monopoly] service provides inaccurate numbers, those numbers become
agreed upon currency for purposes of negotiation.” Within the industries they support,
ratings measurements were not really about precise accuracy, much less what it means to
watch television. Their real value was as that of a common currency—so long as all par-
ties agreed to play along, ratings were valued.

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This system of valuing the audience began to be challenged, however, as the national
mass of viewers measured by ratings began to fragment across dozens and then hundreds
more channels. By the 1990s, the obvious culprit was cable television, which was in 50%
of U.S. homes by 1988 and 86% by 2007 (Shimpach 2010: 19). Recall that because the
number of people who watch television is so large, not everyone who watches is being
directly measured by ratings. Instead audience ratings are determined through a method
of statistical sampling. This method is efficient, but inherently subject to sampling error
(Webster, Phalen, and Lichty 2000: 100–112). During the era of the big three networks,
a program’s ratings were only really compared to two others’ and were typically high
enough that the standard error range was of relatively little concern. However, as the
audience fragmented, with more and smaller fragments watching different channels,
ratings grew much lower. Cable channel ratings were particularly low and sampling error
took on new significance. Plus or minus half a point might seem inconsequential for a
22 rating, but it is incomprehensible for a 1 rating (Schafer Gross 2004: 1891–3).
Statistical sampling rendered much of cable’s low ratings literally not meaningful.
The growth of cable television became a problem for the traditional currency of
national audiences, revealing the limits of ratings measurement and analysis techniques.
However, within this problem there emerged an opportunity to seize upon new ways of
valuing the measured audience. Some channels could now argue that size does not mat-
ter. Instead, branding specific niche appeals through “narrowcasting” in order to target
specific audience segments became a commercially viable option. Boutique offerings
would become available to advertisers alongside the broadcast network’s big box offer-
ings. It need not matter if granular analysis could not reveal precisely which channel got
more overall viewers, because each channel was now pursuing different kinds of viewers.
The value of audience data was transformed.

AMC
Take, for example. the cable channel mentioned in the tweet above, AMC. Known for
playing revival house movies, AMC actually began in 1984 as a premium subscription
cable service (like HBO). American Movie Classics attempted to monetize vaults of
otherwise unseen old movies by attracting subscribers whose fees would be split between
the cable company and the channel. Three years later it switched to cable’s “basic tier,”
securing a much smaller monetary percentage from a much larger viewer base. Initially,
getting cable Multi-System Operators (MSOs) to carry the channel was more important
than the number of viewers tuned to the channel. AMC, like most cable channels,
charges each cable company a “carriage fee,” which is an amount of money based on the
number of cable subscribers who could watch the channel because they receive cable (as
opposed to the number who actually do watch this particular channel). As AMC found
carriage on most MSOs, it shifted focus to the demographics of the viewers who do
watch the channel. It began to shape its brand identity to match the measured identity
of its (small) audience.
In 2001, the channel surprised long-time viewers by airing commercials, initially
between movies. Attempting to build upon its educated, male-skewing viewers, AMC
announced in 2002 an official change in format, from “classic” movies to simply movies.
“AMC” would no longer stand for “American Movie Classics” (Associated Press 2003).
This move was accompanied by an announcement that AMC would double the number
of commercials it showed and begin interrupting movies for scheduled commercial

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breaks (Battaglio 2002; Dempsey 2002). Programming content was altered to sustain its
demographic advantages while growing an overall younger audience attractive to adver-
tisers (Dempsey 2008). Following contemporary corporate practices of “rebranding,” in
order to expand and enhance its commercial viability and capitalize on its position on
most cable lineups, AMC began a process by which it would alter its image, transform
its viewership, and reintroduce itself to the cable and advertising industries.
By 2006, AMC had commissioned Mad Men for a premiere the following June (Martin
2006). “It’s retro but contemporary at the same time,” AMC told Daily Variety, trying
out AMC’s new brand image as much as that of its new program. Comparing the style
of Mad Men to movies already showing on the channel, like The Man in the Gray Flannel
Suit and The Apartment (Martin 2006), the idea was to ease programming (and audiences
along with it) into this new niche. The audience that came to AMC for John Wayne
and Three Stooges marathons would be asked to stay for Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
With Mad Men, AMC sought to distinguish itself on basic cable, offering refined
programming for a refined audience segment. Unlikely to compete with broadcast net-
works for audience size, AMC instead opted to place a different kind of value on
audience metrics, focusing on quality and kind rather than quantity. Thus AMC dem-
onstrates that audiences could be valued in new ways. It was never about the sheer size
of the audience for AMC, it was about generating and sustaining a “brand” appeal to
attract a particular and desirable audience fragment (even if relatively small) to the
channel on a regular basis. Size was no longer the only thing that mattered in a televi-
sion audience, it also mattered how you used the audience you had: especially if that
audience appealed to advertisers. AMC’s appeal to an educated, upscale, male-skewing
audience gave it a distinct appeal to advertisers wishing to reach this group. That the
channel branded its appeal with a show romanticizing a golden age of advertising made
the deal that much sweeter for people working in advertising.
This transformation was not about forsaking audience data. It was all made possible
by drawing on the data collected by Nielsen, but also by creatively focusing less on sheer
bulk numbers and more on specific demographic data that arrived alongside those num-
bers. It thus took advantage of the murkiness of granular analysis of small audiences in
the ratings by de-emphasizing size comparisons with competitors and focusing on brand,
context, and type of likely viewer. Along with many similarly strategic cable channels,
AMC’s focus on brand and niche transformed the value of audience measurements for
a new era.

Netflix
AMC had started off with the HBO model of “premium” subscription, which could rely
on direct subscriber fees in lieu of advertisers. While still interested in data about its
viewers, such premium channels have a very different set of priorities when it comes to
utilizing and valuing ratings data. To some extent, premium cable channels need not
worry who or how many are watching, so long as enough people continue to subscribe.
Programming becomes less about attracting eyeballs to a certain channel at a certain
time and more about attracting and sustaining subscribers and avoiding “churn.” AMC
found this model unsustainable because the programming with which it began, old black
and white movies, did not attract and sustain enough subscribers. Netflix, however, even
while coming from a different kind of media business, has essentially utilized the pre-
mium subscription model to differentiate itself from other consumer media sources.

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Netflix has, from the start, capitalized on technological transformations in television

viewing. Launched in 1997, its initial business model was a hybrid of two retail trends
of the era: the video store and “dotcom” retailer. The video rental store was a retail
phenomenon that had emerged in the 1980s to capitalize on the growing home owner-
ship of VCRs and the popularity of pre-recorded feature film titles on VHS. The growth
of access to the internet and rapid development of web browsers in the 1990s, mean-
while, led to an initial wave of online retail sites (many of which were overvalued and
became bankrupt when the “dotcom bubble” burst in 2000). Netflix began as an online
video rental retailer. As McDonald (2013) has demonstrated, its online interface, rec-
ommendation algorithms, fortuitous decision to deal only in DVDs (as opposed to the
then more prevalent VHS tapes), and monthly subscription fee (that eliminated late-
return fines endemic and profitable to most rental stores) led it to successfully weather
the dotcom boom and bust. McDonald (2013) notes that Netflix

was especially noteworthy in that it combined the power of a web-based

interface with the existing United States postal system to deliver DVDs directly
to customers. It was with this unique, and in some ways counter-intuitive,
hybrid approach that Netflix supplanted not only neighborhood video stores
[ . . . ], but leading corporate giants such as Blockbuster Video.

By 2010, Netflix was rapidly re-conceiving of its central business, de-emphasizing its
DVD-by-mail approach in favor of an on-demand digital streaming service. Netflix
assumed that enough consumers now subscribed to MSOs’ supplementary broadband
internet services that streaming programs on-demand would appeal as much or more
than waiting for discs to arrive in the mail. Apparently correct in this assumption, that
year saw Netflix’s subscriber base increase by more than 7 million (McDonald 2013). By
2013, industry trade journals were reporting that Netflix’s “domestic streaming audi-
ence” was over 31 million while its global subscriber base was over 40 million
(Wallenstein 2013). As McDonald notes, “This made it one of the largest subscriber
services in the country, comparable to cable providers such as Comcast and premium
cable networks such as Home Box Office (HBO)” (McDonald 2013). In fact, by 2013
Netflix had millions more subscribers than HBO (Wohlsen 2014). Netflix was already
generating more revenue than subscription cable channels Starz and Showtime (and
AMC for that matter) (Kafka 2014).
This began to transform the metaphor used to explain Netflix’s business, from that of
retail store to that of media-delivery, or even television channel. But Netflix had been,
all the while, utilizing something neither video stores nor television channels could
access. Like similar online retailers, but unlike television or cable, Netflix utilized pro-
prietary software to offer suggestions to subscribers. Called CineMatch, this software
helped Netflix avoid the movie-rental business bottleneck of customers requesting only
new releases. Netflix’s use of CineMatch instead “emphasized the breadth of its selection
[ . . . ] to direct customers toward more eclectic fare, effectively downplaying new
releases while appealing to more discriminating movie connoisseurs” (quoted in
McDonald 2013).
At the same time, however, the CineMatch recommendation engine offered an alibi
for collecting data about subscribers. As Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos,
explained, with the DVD-by-mail business “we know what we shipped to you and we
know when you returned it” (Carsey-Wolf Center 2012). Those subscribers wishing for

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better recommendations were prompted by the site’s interface to offer more details (e.g.
how much they liked the DVD on a scale of 1–5 stars) that became part of establishing
their subscriber identity and feeding into the algorithms that recommended movies for
others as well.
As Netflix moved into streaming, and its subscriber base rapidly grew, it was able to
amass more and more kinds of data. Based in part on analyses of these data (“We’ve run
our data and it tells us that our audiences would watch this series” [quoted in Auletta
2014: 58]), Netflix commissioned new, original streaming programming to supplement
the second-run fare it already offered, promoting exclusive content as a reason to sub-
scribe. Yet, as Netflix began to invade the territory once occupied exclusively by
television channels, it failed to acknowledge their traditions. Netflix viewership is not
measured by Nielsen ratings. Netflix collects its own data and refuses to release anything
comparable to traditional television ratings (even to the producers of the shows it has
commissioned (Cohen 2013)). For television, failing to join in the mutual agreements
of the industry can “further complicate the value of metrics” (Petruska 2013).
To be sure, Netflix is invested in audience metrics. As Sarandos explains, “with
streaming, we have insight into every second of the viewing experience. I know what
you have tried and what you have turned off. I know at what point you turned it off. It’s
very sophisticated” (Carsey-Wolf Center 2012). Such sophistication extends beyond
merely tracking preferences and habits. In fact, rather than canonical media genres,
Netflix breaks its offerings into 79,000 categories (Auletta 2014: 58), allowing for fine-
toothed parsing of viewer preferences. Netflix tracks how quickly subscribers watch each
episode, how many episodes are watched in one night, and how long it takes to get to
the fifth episode—”a strong indicator of commitment, regardless of varying season
lengths” (Jurgensen 2012). One of the company’s former data scientists revealed the
extent of the metrics being tracked by Netflix: every user; more than 30 million plays
per day (including every rewind, fast forward, and pause); over 4 million ratings per day;
over 3 million searches per day; geo-location data; what device is being used to access
and watch; the time of day and week; as well as metadata collected from traditional
companies, like Nielsen, and new companies, like Facebook and Twitter (Harris 2013).
As another Netflix software engineer explained to the New Yorker, “there’s a whole lot
of Ph.D.-level math and statistics involved” (quoted in Auletta 2014: 58).
Because Netflix streams content to specific accounts, it can link its data to a person’s
name, address, and credit card number (among other things), attributing an array of
behaviors to specific subscribers. It can also aggregate all this data into an enormous
collection for new kinds of analyses. Combined, analyzed, and continually updated, the
result of all this data collection is being called “big data.” Big data collection and analysis
differentiates Netflix’s approach to audience metrics significantly from that of broadcast
and cable television companies.
Big data collection means that Netflix does not need to rely on the ratings measure-
ment technique of statistical sampling. There is no bias, there is no sampling error, and
there is very little additional expense when Netflix ascertains data about its audience.
Out of 115.8 million households with television in the U.S., Nielsen’s sample size, or N,
=20,000 or about .02% (at some points in its history no more than .004% of the popula-
tion has been sampled [ Schafer Gross 2004]). Out of Netflix’s approximately 40 million
streaming subscribers worldwide, however, its equivalent sample size, or N, =all, or 100%.
Moreover, in conjuncture with its long-tail business model and recent trends in sta-
tistical analysis, Netflix’s Bayesian approach to probability (e.g., when predicting viewer

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preferences for recommendation) is designed to become less wrong over time

(Feuerverger, He, and Khatri 2012). Finally, Netflix collects more kinds of more data
than Nielsen or any television executive can do. Big data, as marketing consultants will
eagerly explain, allows for

billions of data points, all being collected and analyzed in real time and real
conditions. That’s the secret to the transformative power of big data. By vastly
increasing the data we use, we can incorporate lower quality sources and still be
amazingly accurate. What’s more, because we continue to reevaluate, we can
correct errors in initial assessments and make adjustments as facts on the ground
change.
(Satell 2013)

This places a significantly new and different value on audience metrics.

Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier (2013), in their book-length treatment of the trendy
topic, somewhat vaguely define “big data” as “things one can do at a large scale that
cannot be done at a smaller one, to extract new insights or create new forms of
value” (6). For these authors, the big data trend boils down to “applying math to huge
quantities of data in order to infer probabilities” (12). With big data analysis, patterns
are sought and then tested for correlation, not cause. Thus, for Netflix, as Sarandos
demonstrates, this means “there are some really wonky results here, too, like right after
somebody watches Thelma and Louise, they are much more likely to watch a Geena
Davis movie than a Susan Sarandon movie” (Carsey-Wolf Center 2012). For Netflix’s
purpose of recommending your next viewing, it does not matter why you are more
likely to want to see more Geena Davis, just that you are. If perfected, Netflix would
not have to commission and test-screen expensive pilots of potential series. Netflix
would not even have to spend as much promoting and advertising new programming:
the show will appear in your recommendations and you will see it (Harris 2013). Such
big data analysis of audience metrics is meant to take the guesswork and intuition, the
initial expense, and most of the risk and uncertainty out of the media programming
process.
In other words, big data analysis of audiences, even if more nuanced and subject to
more elaborate algorithms, serves the same basic purpose as audience data always has
across the culture industries. It is meant to make indeterminate behavior predictable.
Big data, in the end, would seem to confirm Ang’s (1991) point about audience data
that, “the control sought after is never completely achieved, and has to be continuously
pursued by accumulating ever more information” (9). Netflix continues to fetishize the
collection and analysis of big data, so that “algorithms drive our entire website—there
isn’t an inch of uncalculated, editorial space” (Carsey-Wolf Center 2012).
This most recent shift in the value of audience metrics is, in fact, appealing to
companies throughout the media industries. In advertising, the measurements of ad
“exposures” and message “impressions” are being replaced by consumer “profiles” and
digital “reputations,” linking the utility of individuals’ metrics to marketers and media
firms (Turow 2013: 235). Just as Netflix uses its data to target each subscriber, boasting
that “there are 33 million different versions of Netflix” (Carr 2013), big data and digital
media are “preparing to present different people with different opportunities and world
views across a broad gamut of platforms” (Turow 2013: 235). Media industries have long
mutually agreed that imperfect data should function as a currency of exchange between

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them. This emerging new value on audience metrics now signals a new economy where
we all participate, whether we agree or not, and the currency of exchange is our own
personal information.
Audience metrics reflect a worldview that is satisfied with defining personhood in
terms of probability, and behavior by the past behaviors of other people—behavior lim-
ited, moreover, to what can be measured (even if that is a lot). If it cannot be measured
and then accounted for in an algorithm, it literally has no value. The audience is a
product, embedded within economic imperatives. The reason for measuring audiences
is not to understand people but to diminish the financial risk of unpredictability posed
by a gathering of many individuals into an audience.

Note
1 Tweeted by New York Times culture reporter David Itzkoff, September 22, 2013, 7:01pm. See: http://
newsfeed.time.com/2013/09/23/top-10-emmys-tweets/ [Accessed 16 March 2014].

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 9
ROLAND BARTHES’S
MYTHOLOGIES
A Breakthrough Contribution
to the Study of Mass Culture
Dana Polan

Within the history of the study of mass culture and everyday life, Roland Barthes’s
Mythologies from 1957 enjoys legendary status—and rightfully so. Bringing together most
of a series of essayistic reflections that Barthes had been fashioning on a monthly basis
for the journal Lettres Nouvelles on objects, phenomena, and key practices of contempo-
rary mass culture (plus two pieces from other publications), Mythologies stands as one of
the first concerted modern attempts to attend closely to the concrete operations of mass
culture as ideological practice. (In passing, it should be noted that the first English lan-
guage edition of Mythologies, from 1972, had been shorn of twenty-five of the little
pieces by the publisher. The year 2012 saw a new English language edition of the volume
with the missing essays restored. But this new edition suffers from numerous, often quite
troublesome, errors of transcription that mean that today’s reader needs to approach it
with caution.)
Mythologies gains additional value from a long theoretical postscript, “The Myth
Today,” that Barthes penned in 1957 after he had concluded his series of little examina-
tions of French everyday life and that he appended to these to seem to grant them the
rigor of quasi-scientific method. Although the analyses themselves tended to eschew
jargon and high theoretical formulation for more journalistic commentary, “The Myth
Today” claimed that underlying each of Barthes’s disquisitions on specific practices of
mass culture there was a grounding of analysis in that fairly new methodology known as
semiology (the science of signs, here understood as the taking of mass cultural phenom-
ena as so many loaded messages addressed to everyday citizens).
Barthes had in fact been grappling with semiological theory from the end of the
1940s, when Claude Lévi-Strauss and A. J. Greimas had first recommended some key
readings to him, and Barthes’s relatively recent encounter with the new theories has
several consequences. On the one hand, not all of the theoretical apparatus is in itself
worked out: there is, for instance, as Umberto Eco and Isabella Pezzini note, a confusion
in Mythologies between second-order languages that add connotation to first-order ones
(which is basically what Barthes argues modern myths do) and a very different sort of
 PO LA N

other second-order languages (what the new theories would term “meta-languages”) that
comment on the shape and form of first-order languages, rather than building new con-
notative meanings from them. But, as Eco and Pezzini admit, Barthes corrects such
technical errors in his more authoritative, textbookish outline of semiological theory,
“Elements of Semiology,” from 1964 (Barthes 1967). On the other hand, and even more
consequential than these technical confusions in the early elaboration of his semiology,
is the undeniable impression that Mythologies sometimes conveys of a gap between the
essayistic mythological readings themselves and the more formal, even dogmatic theo-
retical framework offered up by “The Myth Today”: not merely are the readings generally
bereft of any direct utilization of semiological vocabulary but they do not even always
follow the deeper argument of “The Myth Today” that what needs to be studied are the
quite ideological processes by which modern myth passes off as eternal verities the actu-
ally quite historically-rooted and tendentious values of middle-class life. In fact, not all
of Barthes’s little texts are indeed dissections of dominant ideology in the way that “The
Myth Today” calls for, and some actually seem more in the vein of camp appreciations of
this or that curious phenomenon in popular culture. For example, the opening essay of
Mythologies compares the spectacle of wrestling to classic Greek myth and seems virtu-
ally laudatory in tone: Barthes appears to find delight in this ostentatious show of bodies
crashing against each other. It may be significant that the essay on wrestling was the
single one that Barthes insisted must remain in the truncated English language version
(on this, see Calvet 1994: 143).
Most famously, Barthes’s oft-referenced pages on “The Face of Garbo” asserts that
this actress, whose great moment was in the prewar period, had an abstracted, ethereal
look that Barthes himself seems greatly to admire (contrasted, as Barthes would have
it, to the postwar visage of an Audrey Hepburn—more down-to-earth, more quotid-
ian, and less heavenly). If, as Barthes’s close associate, the sociologist Edgar Morin,
asserted in an influential book from the same period, Les Stars (1957), stars in many
ways are the modern age’s supreme mythology—the stars as our guides to Being,
our inspiring Gods—then Barthes himself appears to endorse the notion of Garbo’s
heavenliness.
But almost everywhere else in Mythologies the tone is one of condemnation. Overall,
it is the book’s combination of the very concrete and specific—in its often harsh reflec-
tions on individual practices of mass culture, and its appeal to a very modern theoretical
apparatus that, it claimed, anchored those reflections in rigorous methodology—that
has made Mythologies a canonic work of mass culture analysis.
One of the most-famed mythological analyses, “The Great Family of Man,” which
comes towards the end of Barthes’s book, can serve as a useful condensation of many of
the operations and arguments that Barthes brings to bear on contemporary mass culture.
Often singled out in studies on Barthes, and rightfully so since it does capture his ideo-
logical critique at its sharpest, the piece takes as its target a travelling exhibit by the
American photographer Edward Steichen that originally bore the name “The Family of
Man” but was re-titled “The Great Family of Men” (“la grande famille des hommes”)
when it came to Paris in 1956. The exhibit offered images of humans from around the
globe, being birthed, laboring, sustaining themselves, loving each other, and dying.
In Barthes’s analysis, the exhibit’s intent is to deny specific human situations (for
example, the differences in the ways diverse populations come into the world, live
within it, and die) for the sake of a generalization about a universal human condition.
In his words:

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man is born, works, laughs and dies in the same fashion everywhere; and if in
these actions some ethnic particularity subsists, there is now some understanding
that there is deep inside each one of us an identical ‘nature,’ that their diversity
is merely formal and does not belie the existence of a common matrix.
(196–97)

The effects of this universalization are several. First, the human adventure (along with
the very idea that there is one single such adventure) is rendered in sentimental terms
(we all are born, we all die; that’s what human existence is all about). Second, by assum-
ing we are all put on the earth in the same way and to the same ends, the exhibit can
easily slide beyond mere sentiment toward religiosity—what Barthes terms a “pietistic
intention” that readily imagines we are all here for one purpose: in Barthes’s words, “God
is reintroduced into our Exhibition: the diversity of mankind proclaims his richness, his
power; the unity of its actions demonstrates his will” (197).
Finally, and most importantly, the assumption of a universal human condition—across
time, across cultures—encourages passivity: if this is our fate, if this is our nature, then
there is no reason to try to change things. But, as Barthes counters, even if we all are
born, live, and die, we don’t always do so in equivalent ways and we don’t necessarily
have to do so in the ways that this or that society has tried to determine for us. As
Barthes proclaims,

Whether or not the child is born with ease or difficulty, whether or not he
causes his mother suffering at birth, whether the child lives or dies, and, if he
lives, whether he accedes to some sort of future—this, and not the eternal lyric
of birth, should be the subject of our Exhibitions. And the same applies to
death: Are we really to sing its essence once again and thereby risk forgetting
that we can still do so much against it?
(198)

Thus, in a blunt example, Barthes cites the savage lynching/murder at the hand of
Southern white racists of the African American boy Emmett Till the year before the
Family of Man exhibit came to Paris: yes, Till died and we all will, but his early, horrific
death had fully historical, fully social causalities behind it, ones that shouldn’t have
existed in a society that declares itself democratic, ones that should no longer exist and
that one might fight to make sure no longer exist.
Before the appearance of Mythologies 1957, there had been isolated cases of attentive
dissection of works of mass culture by cultural commentators. To take just one example,
in the late ’40s, the literary philologist Leo Spitzer had, in an essay entitled “American
Advertising Explained as Popular Art” (1962), carefully examined a Sunkist Orange
Juice ad in ways that parallel Barthes’s later disquisitions on the ideology at work in
contemporary mass culture. Thus, for instance, Spitzer argued that the ad’s rendition of
a glowing sun that engendered both the oranges and the juice that emanated from them
made the whole process seem magical and mythical: the “sun-kissed” commodity
appeared to arise from an absolutely natural process for which any recognition of the
human labor (for example, field workers) necessary for commodity-production was elim-
inated. In like fashion, while many of Barthes’s little essays in Mythologies tend above all
to look at the internal make-up of the modern mythologies he picks out, he often moves
(and often in the last paragraph) outward from the mythological object itself to the way

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in which its worldly consequences frequently have to do with a quite tendentious occul-
tation of real-world politics, especially the politics of exploitative labor practices. To
take just one example, one oft-cited piece from Mythologies, on “Wine and Milk,” may
center on a quite phenomenological close analysis of wine’s internal mythic properties
(for instance, “[I]n its red form, it has, as a very old hypostasis, blood, that dense and
vital fluid” [79]), but the essay ends by going beyond wine’s substantive meaning to the
labor politics that luxuriating in those meanings loses sight of:

[I]t is true that wine is good, a fine substance, but it is no less true that its
production is heavily involved in French capitalism, both that of private
distillers and that of the big Algerian settlers who impose on the Muslims, on
the very land of which they have been dispossessed, a crop for which they have
no use, while they actually lack bread. . . . [T]he truth about our present
alienation is precisely the fact that wine cannot be an entirely happy substance,
unless we wrongfully forget that it is also the product of an expropriation.
(82)

But where, say, Spitzer’s essay is a one-off effort that he develops nowhere else in his
work, focused more on canonic literature and on classic philological questions,
Mythologies’s great resonance within the history of mass culture study derives first of all
from the sheer mass, the very diversity, of commodity practices that Barthes draws on
from across a vast range of modern everyday life. To the extent that dominant ideology
operates by means of the grafting onto the objects and practices of the world a set of very
specific (and circumscribed) values, semiology becomes interlinked with ideology-
critique: the mythologist studies bourgeois acts of signification—especially in their
internal workings in the construction of socially tendentious meanings—in all sort of
things from words and pictures to gadgets and gizmos to comestibles and so on. As
Barthes himself asserts:

The whole of France is steeped in this anonymous ideology: our press, our films,
our theater, our pulp literature, our rituals, our Justice, our diplomacy, our
conversation, our remarks about the weather, a murder trial, a touching
wedding, the cooking we dream of, the garments we wear, everything, in
everyday life, is dependent on the representations which the bourgeoisie has and
makes us have of the relations between the man and the world.
(252)

That every practice of the social world could be read as ideological was a first attraction
of Mythologies.
But Barthes continues, “[I]t is through its ethic that the bourgeoisie pervades France:
practiced on a national scale, bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a
natural order—the further the bourgeois class propagates its representations, the more
naturalized it becomes” (ibid.), and here we see a second, consequential aspect of
Barthes’s volume. It is not just that he analyzes lots of different phenomena from modern
French life but that he incessantly brings them back to a common core. Whether it be
a food or a car or a face in a mass periodical, the objects of French middle-class life, when
consumed, endlessly convey a common and circumscribed set of significations: whatever
the diversity of things that embody it, the dominant system of French values is an

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insistent, even overwhelming, repetition of the same (of the same values; that is, and of
the same ideological operations). In this respect, Mythologies is of a piece with other
postwar analyses that take to task the totality of contemporary mass culture—and,
indeed, start from the assumption that it does constitute a totality, a singular and inces-
sant and insistent repetition of an engulfing sameness, a blanketing, homogenizing,
banalizing ersatz way of life imposed from on high by a deleterious culture industry. As
the scholar of French modernity Kristin Ross claims about a number of texts of mass
culture critique in the postwar period, what these works [her key examples are not only
Mythologies but the contemporaneous and complementary Critique of Everyday Life by
Barthes’s confrère Henri Lefebvre]

registered with a startling clarity was that de Gaulle comes to power and the
Fifth Republic is founded precisely at the moment when ‘the consumer era’
begins in France in earnest. This was the moment . . . when the groundwork
was laid for a full-scale disruption of older popular culture and its replacement
with the rhythms and habits of an American-style capitalist or ‘mass’ culture.
(Ross, 2008: 231–32)

Ross moves usefully beyond the French context alone to suggest that such texts by
Barthes and Lefebvre have parallels with contemporaneous mass-culture critique else-
where, such as Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (like Mythologies, from 1957):

these formative texts bear comparison with breakthrough works being produced
in England at the exactly the same moment in the late 1950s. . . The British
and French projects are alike in the following way: contemporary in focus, they
were themselves focused by, organized through, and constituted responses to,
the immediate pressures of the postwar moment and the society in which they
were written.
(233)

At the very least, many of the modern myths offered up in Mythologies come off as
kitschy or cheesy bundles of sentimentalism and ideological simplification that merit,
on the part of the analyst, a wincingly mocking tone. (In the last line of the book’s
preface, Barthes declares that his times “make sarcasm the condition of truth” [xii].) But
in quite a number of cases, the dangers and excesses of ideological mystification are so
strong that comedy or mocking derision seem less called for than virulent and vigorous
denunciation. Like many other texts of suspicion about mass culture in the postwar
period, Mythologies is not free of an attitude of severe condemnation, a disdain that
borders on moral panic at the ostensible depredation of everyday living by a top-down
commodity-culture industry. There is little room for contradiction within the object
here: the messages of mass culture come through in uniform manner and repeat the same
dogma again and again. (Here, we might contrast the close readings Barthes enacts in
Mythologies, finding the recurrent operations of bourgeois everywhere, to his later slow-
motion dissection of a single Balzac story over hundreds of pages in his 1970 S/Z: there,
Barthes uses close reading to capture Balzac’s text as caught between realism and mod-
ernism, between representation and its delirious break-down, and between depiction of
an older social order’s stability and the invocation of the new unfixed social relations of
an expansive capitalism geared to creative destruction [Barthes 1975].)

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Moreover, in Mythologies, mass culture’s non-contradictory repetition is one that

meets little resistance in the ordinary citizens it incessantly assails. Although Mythologies
appeared more than a decade earlier than the famous argument by the French Marxist
Louis Althusser that ideology operates by means of an interpellation of social subjects,
a hailing by which they are made to assume proper position in the dominant order of
things (Althusser 1971), Barthes’s study anticipates that of Althusser in viewing mass
culture as a set of insistent intentions that work effectively on social subjects in ways
that are hard to resist. As Barthes puts it:

Myth has an imperative, buttonholing character . . . It is I who it has come to

seek. It has turned toward me, I am subjected to its intentional force, it summons
me to receive its expansive ambiguity. . . [T]his interpellant speech is at the
same time a frozen speech.
(234–35)

Barthes tends in particular in the period around Mythologies to regard middle-class cul-
ture in very physicalized terms as a oozing, even hemorrhaging, flow that threatened to
spread over ordinary citizens in quite visceral ways. (As Barthes declares pointedly in a
footnote in Mythologies, “What is sickening in myth is its resort to a false nature. . . . This
will to weigh the signification with the full guarantee of nature causes a kind of nausea”
[236].) In his previous book, a 1954 study of the French republican historian Jules
Michelet, Barthes had noted this venerable figure’s adherence to the age-old theory of
the Humors—which had it that emotions and attitudes not only of individuals but of
whole civilizations and races were governed by basic bodily fluids such as blood, bile,
and so on (Barthes 1986), and it might be said that Barthes himself employs his own
version of humoral philosophy. The objects to which the culture industry imparts its
values take on substantive meanings (for instance, in the world of wrestling, one vile
character inspires “nausea” and this visceral response means that the “crowd’s passionate
condemnation no longer rises to the level of judgment but reaches deeper into the zone
of its humors” [5]) and are received in virtually behavioral bodily fashion by ordinary
citizens.
Yet to the extent that, as Barthes would have it, bourgeois practices enact mystifica-
tions in which the social or the historical is fobbed off as something natural and
inevitable and universal, it is tempting for him to then imagine as a corollary that prior
to, or in some space outside ideology and mystification, there exists a realm of the
authentic, the true, the natural, and the innocent. In other words, if ideology is imag-
ined as blanketing effect that takes over the world, it is easy for Barthes to believe in
realms beyond or before ideology.
At this moment in his writerly trajectory, Barthes was very much inspired by a
Marxist theory of alienation in which under capitalism the meaningfulness of human
labor is taken away from the laborer to return to him/her in alienated form (for exam-
ple, a separation of the worker from any real say in the making of, or uses to which,
the products of his/her labor are to be put). Contrasting such capitalist alienation,
Barthes asks the reader to imagine what he claims is the un-alienated labor of a “wood-
cutter”:

If I am a woodcutter and I am led to name the tree I am felling, whatever the

form of my sentence, I ‘speak’ the tree, I do not speak about it. This means that

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my language is operational, transitively linked to its object; between the tree

and myself, there is nothing but my labor, that is to say, an action.
(Mythologies, 258)

In Marxist terms, the claim here is that the woodcutter engages in a direct, unmediated,
unalienated, and therefore authentic praxis. Needing to intervene directly in the world,
the woodcutter, for Barthes, moves in a realm outside ideology. But we might well ques-
tion if such a realm of supposedly pure and pristine labor as the woodcutter’s exists—or
existed at least in any substantial, meaningful way, by the mid-1950s. Perhaps there were
such pure woodsmen here and there within the space of modernity, but the image seems
out-of-date, mythified in its own manner. (One inspiration for Barthes might be the
famous encounter in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea of the existentially-questioning
protagonist-narrator Roquentin with a tree that comes to stand for him as ultimate fact
of the primal, fundamental being of the world, beyond all sociality, beyond all humanly
imposed meanings [Sartre 1938].)
Another of the case studies in Mythologies, “Toys,” also deals with the supposed natu-
ralness of the human encounter with woodenness. Among other things, “Toys” claims
to recount how the purity and innocence of wooden toys is being lost in the modern age
to the alienating nature of plastic toys. As Barthes would have it, plastics “eliminate the
pleasure, the gentleness, the humanity of touch. An alarming sign is the gradual disap-
pearance of wood, an ideal substance for its firmness and comparative softness” [DP:
Note how we witness here a substantialist approach to things in the world: each sort of
object, modern or pre-modern, has its precise, irreducible nature as tactile thing], “the
natural warmth of its contact. . . wood is a familiar and poetic substance which allows
the child a continuity of contact with the tree, the table, the floor” (60–61).
Significantly, if the tale of the woodcutter in “The Myth Today” allowed Barthes to
imagine an unadulterated, uncorrupted, unalienated immediate form of praxis, in “Toys,”
Barthes suggests that what he sees as the direct access to play that wood allows as a form
of praxis too: with wood, he feels, the child can act directly on the world and according
to his or her own ludic desires. In contrast, Barthes argues, the problem of modern toys
is not just that they are made of plastic but that they are shaped generally as recogniz-
able, if miniature, versions of objects from modern everyday life—for example, dolls that
cry and even pee—and, as such, they don’t demand creativity (for example, the modern
doll socializes the young girl into the role of slavish homemaker and asks little else of
her). Wood blocks, on the other hand, don’t represent anything specific and don’t dic-
tate any particular use to which they might be put. In this way, they allow the child to
be creative, thereby discovering possibilities of inspired fabrication that make him or her
into a veritable inventor in this particular realm (that is, the realm of play).
Revealingly, then, productive, unalienated creative labor is often relegated in
Mythologies to sites that are virtually folkloric in nature: for instance, the inventive child
who once upon a time had access to wood but now risks listless and mechanical non-play
with plastic objects; the self-determining woodcutter in a space presumably far from the
city; or, elsewhere in the text, the poet who denaturalizes language and tries to reach a
realm of pure linguistic play.
Much of the problem derives from the very semiological model Barthes employed in
the 1950s in Mythologies and into the 1960s: specifically, Barthes takes from the Danish
linguist Louis Hjelmslev an opposition between denotation (as the literal, first meaning
in a signification) and connotation (as new values added in particular situations to the

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primary meaning and which send it in new directions). Barthes then grafts this opposi-
tion onto the theorization of ideology defined as the adding of tendentious, unnatural
signification to a more primary, more primal, relation to the natural. Thus, to take the
most famous example from Mythologies, a photograph of a young black man in French
uniform saluting the flag appears on the cover of Paris-Match, where Barthes comes
across it in a barber shop (225). The photograph uses a first level of truth—insofar as he
was photographed, it would seem true that this black man actually did salute the flag—
to build up and shore up a tendentious, underlying message that goes something like
“Being part of the imperial nation of France is natural, even for a colonized subject.”
The conceptual (and political) problem here is not in the assumption that social con-
notations are always being added to existing significations, but that the latter are
somehow initially free of connotation and start out from some level of pure denotation.
In the example of the young saluting black man, Barthes wants to argue that there are
meanings to this figure (for instance, the irreducible details of his life) that exist prior
to his embodiment on the Paris-Match cover and some of which the cover needs to gloss
over in order to do its ideological work. This glossing over is necessary since if the viewer
focuses too much on the details of the first level of meaning—focusing, for instance, on
contingent details in the photo or wondering too much about those irreducible life
details—it becomes harder for the image to abstract away from it to make generalizable
ideological assertions. A photograph appears to capture more of the surface truth of the
world than, say, a verbal phrase or a drawing, and that is both its power and its weakness
when marshaled in the cause of broad arguments. But in using a before/after model (con-
notation builds on denotation, comes after it), Barthes risks the implication that there
was a first realm that could have ever been free of social meanings, that somehow signi-
fied the world directly and not through context. The young black gains new social
meanings when he is put on the cover of a mass-market periodical, but he already would
have had social meanings in the contingency of his life: how he came into French impe-
riality and what that says about the life he’s been able to lead is already social through
and through.
By S/Z, at the beginning of the 1970s, Barthes was still insisting on the theoretical
value of the concept of connotation, as well he should have, but also beginning to reject
the power of the concept of denotation, as well he also should have. As he now put it,
what he terms the “philologists” believe in a primacy of denotation

declaring every text to be univocal, possessing a true, canonical

meaning . . . [while] others (the semiologists, let us say) contest the hierarchy
of denotated and connotated; language, they say, the raw material of denotation,
with its dictionary and its syntax, is a system like any other. . . . [D]enotation is
not the first meaning but pretends to be so; . . . it is ultimately the last of
connotations . . . , the superior myth by which the text pretends to return to the
nature of language, the language of nature.
(7, 9)

In other words, all meanings, all human acts, are social and contextual. There is no pre-
social meaning that would be literal and free of connotation. In mythologizing a space
of authenticity, one that he tends moreover to imagine nostalgically as a literal, transi-
tive engagement with the natural before its take-over by ideology, Barthes limits politics
to the aforementioned children, woodsmen, poets, and other quaint figures from

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pre-capitalist golden ages. Pointedly, and revealingly, he also cuts himself off, as
mythologist, from any sense of politics as mass movement: while he asserts in the last
pages of Mythologies that the critical demystification of myths is a “political act,” Barthes
also elegizes that the social status of the reader of myths is “one of being excluded” and
that such a reader “can live revolutionary action only vicariously” (271). Certainly, as
Barthes himself notes, anyone who critiques dominant ideology risks angering ordinary
citizens who find pleasure in the products of that ideology (“To decipher the Tour de
France or the ‘good French wine’ is to cut oneself off from those who are entertained or
warmed up by them” [272]), but one might also imagine (or at least fantasize) such
citizens as grateful for learning about the ideology they’ve been interpellated into,
impregnated with. It is here that the reader of myths might also turn into a teacher of the
reading of myths, a pedagogical identity, that is, that fights against one’s exclusion and
isolation by assuming one has lessons to offer others. In fact, by the 1970s, Barthes would
come to see his own seminars as possible models for new social arrangements (though
the emphasis was on a closed space of affect and eros, and not on pedagogy as democratic
mass activity).
Yet anyone who has used Mythologies in the classroom discovers how teachable its
lessons are and how resonant its critique of ideology remains. Barthes may not have had
an effective answer to the omnipresence of bourgeois ideology but his very attention in
detail to that ideology offers lasting lessons for cultural study today.

References
Althusser, Louis (1971 [1970]) “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy
and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Barthes, Roland (1986 [1954]) Michelet, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang.
———Mythologies, Complete Edition (2012 [1957]), trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers.
New York: Hill & Wang.
———Elements of Semiology (1967 [1964]), trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill &
Wang.
———S/Z (1975 [1970]), trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang.
Calvet, Louis-Jean (1994 [1990]) Roland Barthes: A Biography, trans. Sarah Wykes. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press.
Eco, Umberto and I. Pezzini (1982) «La sémiologie des Mythologies.» Communications, 36 : 19–42.
Hoggart, Richard (1957) The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, with Special Reference to
Publications and Entertainments. London : Penguin Books.
Morin, Edgar (2005 [1957]). Stars. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ross, Kristin (2008) “Yesterday’s Critique, Today’s Mythologies.” Contemporary French and Francophone
Studies, 12(2): 231–42.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1938) La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard.
Spitzer, Leo (1962) “American Advertising Explained as Popular Art,” in Essays on English and
American Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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 10
THE HUMDRUM
Alec McHoul1

— To give the mundane its beautiful due.

—John Updike

“Popular culture” is usually taken to mean the culture of everyday life; albeit that the
focus of a great deal of popular cultural studies tends to be the occasional spectacular
spikes that can occur in the rather dull and uniform wave pattern of the mundane. In
an important sense, Harry Potter, Lady Gaga, Game of Thrones and so on are almost the
obverse of the everyday: the every day-in-day-out kind of day. And yet, at the same time,
even sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll—and the rest of the more dramatic phenomena we
may or may not know and love—have their completely prosaic qualities (Byrne 2012).
Someone has to buy the condoms, hide the stash and hump the amps: ordinary activities
as much as any others. So it seems to me that if we’re serious about making investiga-
tions of popular culture, we ought to be able to get some kind of handle on this quality
of ordinariness: the humdrum, as it is, in all its confronting ordinariness.
Against this, perhaps because of a fashionable will to “theorize” in the contemporary
social sciences and humanities, perhaps out of laziness, we are compelled—are we not?—
to go searching for theories of the everyday as a fast track to what it might be all about,
rather than making laborious studies of actual everyday life, in situ, where it lies before
us for all to see and hear in the quotidian course of ordinary affairs. The main stations
on the line are, of course, Lefebvre and de Certeau, where, respectively, we are invited
to consider the everyday in terms of dialectics and poetics. Arriving there, we may even
be sent off down side tracks to such figures as Barthes, Bataille and even Freud. Before
too long, anything that even vaguely resembles everyday life has been transformed into
the rubrics of the semiotic, the immanent, the unconscious and a host of other
unfamilars.
An example perhaps? I suppose most readers of this chapter will have been to the
cinema. What was it like last time you went? What can you remember about it? When
you go again, if you were to keep notes, what would they look like? What would best
describe your experience? I’d be concerned about the seat I sat in, given my optimal focal
length; the relative noise levels of my fellow viewers; whether the popcorn was any good;
the quality of the print and the sound system . . . and a host of ordinary cinema-going
bits of business, not to mention the content of the film itself. This (below) is probably
the last thing I’d record in my notebook:

Cinema has been studied as an apparatus of representation, an image-machine

developed to construct images or visions of social reality and the spectator’s place
 TH E H U M D R U M

in it. But, insofar as cinema is directly implicated in the production and

reproduction of meanings, values and ideology in both sociality and subjectivity,
it should be better understood as a signifying practice, a work of semiosis: a work
that produces effects of meaning and perception, self-images and subject positions
for all those involved, makers and viewers; and thus a semiotic process in which
the subject is continually engaged, represented and inscribed in ideology.
(de Lauretis 1984: 37)

The film section of my library contains thousands like this; many even more distant from
what cinema means to the vast majority of people who go there. I dragged it up from my
wilder days when such things seemed to make sense. But imagine saying anything like
that to a companion on the way out!
In this chapter I want to suggest another way of going about things. And I think we
can begin by jettisoning both the appeal of the spectacular and, at least in the first place
and in the usual sense, theorizing. If the reader wishes to step ahead to the end from
here, I shall sum this up by saying: just go and have a bloody good look at some ordinary
events in detail and describe what you see. Now I’ll get on with saying why I think this
is a good policy for finding out about everyday cultural affairs: the truly “popular” in the
sense of “general,” “common” and “prevalent,” as opposed to the merely “well-liked,”
“desired” and “fashionable.”
To go on, I need to take a step back. Just now, I suggested the obviation of “theoriz-
ing.” And I can already hear the quick reply from anyone with a pass in Cultural Studies
100: but no-one can avoid theory; you can’t say anything about anything without some
underlying theory. There is no pure description; no one-to-one adequation between a
description of something and that something as such. Etc., etc. The long arm of
Immanuel Kant reaches far, it would seem.
So let me begin by trying to put a wedge between (bad) “theorizing” or speculation and
(unavoidable) “theory”—the necessary underlying field propositions of any inquiry.2 The
former, it seems to me, is a rather specialist kind of activity—a special form of
far-from-everyday-life—that has certain institutional sanctions and imprimaturs. It is a
very specific mode of addressing life. And I think we can explain how it comes about in
the following way.
The great phenomenological thinker, Alfred Schütz, was undoubtedly a social theorist
in one sense. In another, he draws a distinction that might lead us to see how he (or
anyone for that matter) might have some, as we know, unavoidable theories and yet, at
the same time, eschew theorizing. Schütz proposed that there were two distinct domains
of inquiry and that proposal is one of his (and my) underlying field propositions (Schütz
1962: 4–7).
In the first domain of inquiry, the investigator comes upon his or her proper objects
as objects which do not have interpretations of themselves and then super-adds inter-
pretations to them. Physics is a typical example. Atoms do not have conceptions of
themselves as possessing atomic mass, atomic number or electric charge. The physicist,
quite properly, has to supply these by observation, measurement and so forth. Ditto for
electrons. They do not conceive themselves as having line spectra, orbital angular
momentum or spin. Again, these have to be supplied by the investigator. And so the
constructs of the physicist are constructs of the first order.
In the second domain of inquiry, the investigator’s proper objects are among those in
the world which have pre-interpreted themselves; most notably cultural beings, i.e.,

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human beings—though there may be some others that need not interest us for now. In
this case, it is an error to approach them as if they were first-order objects. Instead, in
this (primarily human) domain, it is the business of the investigator to—at least in the
first place—come to understand and describe what we can now call “members’”
pre-understandings, pre-interpretations or pre-constructs of themselves. This kind of
investigator—typically but not exclusively the social scientist—has constructs that are
dependent on the constructs already formed by those he or she is investigating. They are
constructs of the second order and they utterly depend on what we can now call the
“endogenous” constructs of those under investigation.
For the second type of investigator to act as though he or she were working under the
same conditions as the first—with a “blank slate” of un-pre-interpreted objects—is,
then, a fundamental mistake, though it covers a surprising amount of what passes for
social science today. To work in such a way is often called “ironic” or taking an “ironic
stance,” in the sense that it produces results which are at odds with anything that would
be expected by, or recognisable to, the “participants” (the members) themselves. Little
wonder, then, that, as ordinary folk, we frequently find social-science “results” about
ourselves to be amusing. For instance, when we are told that something called “life” is
merely biological, that we are nothing but one species among many, or that we are the
products of our “selfish genes,” that is surely far from anything we might associate with
“having a life,” let alone “getting a life.” (Though it still beats me how many these days
are falling for the wiles of the psy professions and respecifying themselves as monadic
individuals ruled by brain chemicals and neurological processes.)
To take ordinary, everyday practical affairs in non-ironic ways (attempting to find the
methodic properties of those affairs that any members could find out about themselves),
then, involves theory. It has to have its field propositions, as we have just seen. To take
a cultural practice ironically simply is theorizing. It is speculating, without endogenous
grounds, about what may be going on in the ordinary everyday world. The dialectics,
poetics, semiology and psychoanalysis of everyday life, among no small list of others, are
mere theorizing. To use a metaphor, they can’t see the difference between projecting
pictures of things and projecting pictures of things that project their own endogenous
pictures of themselves. Accordingly, they find orders (for example, “structures” or “sys-
tems”) of social life that are hidden from ordinary members. They find what Eric
Livingston calls “the hidden order” (2008). This is opposed to the “witnessable order”:
that which can be found in ordinary everyday materials for anyone to see or hear (though
not to exclude, where relevant, the other human senses).
What, then, are “members” members of? We might be tempted to say “a culture.” But
we would first have to say what that was. And here the work of our next non-theorising
(non-ironicising) social theorist, Harvey Sacks, is helpful. Rod Watson (1994: 172)
summarises Sacks’s position on culture as follows, also bringing him into a rough rap-
prochement with Schütz:

Sacks’s view of culture was virtually inseparable from his views concerning the
actual and potential alignment of the discipline of sociology to a given culture—
and Sacks was most interested in developing an indigenous [= endogenous]
analysis. His position is that the sociologist, in seeking to describe or interpret
the social world, unavoidably “encounters” a world that has already been
described and interpreted, not by other sociologists but by society-members
themselves in their everyday activities. To a certain extent, Sacks in his early

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work follows Alfred Schütz’s (1962) argument that these descriptions comprise
a store of ready-made, already-constituted, socially derived constructs and
characterizations—not only typifications of persons and conduct, but also
typified methods of describing the environment, of typical means for bringing
about typical ends in typical situations, etc. The stock of practical, mundane
knowledge—“knowledge-in-action”—comprises the culture, and language is
the medium for the transmission and use of this stock: language is the typifying
medium par excellence.

Members, then, are whoever it may be—on witnessable inspection—that share a stock
of practical knowledge. And here the emphasis is on “practical”: members have shared
methodical ways of getting things done. They are not so much identifiable by knowing that
such-and-such as by knowing how folks-like-us conduct themselves and putting that
“knowledge-in-action” to practical use, day-in-day out, remorselessly, and such that “this
is who we are” is marked by the proper conduct of “our culture.”3
Members, we can say, are those collections of persons in deep accordance vis-à-vis
how to act. They may even be in equally deep disagreement about knowing or believing
some substantive thing(s), and often are. This is not where we can go looking for every-
day (i.e., popular) culture. Heidegger—though in other respects the theorizer par
excellence and therefore of negligible importance to us here—has occasionally insightful
moments on this notion of accordance running deeper than merely shared substantive
knowledge, opinion and belief:

Accordance in this essential sense is even the precondition for divergence of

opinions, for disputes; for only if the opponents mean the same thing in general
can they diverge with regards to this one thing. The concord and discord of men
are accordingly based on fixing the same and the stable . . . . [M]isunderstanding
and lack of understanding are only deviant forms of accordance.
(Heidegger 1987: 91)

Still, we can probably construct this argument without recourse to St Martin (useful as
he may be, in passing, for reminding us that we do not mean simple agreement in opin-
ions or beliefs) and simply return to the notion that a culture is constituted out of
members’ accordance re witnessably-displayed orders of practical knowledge-in-action.
Another way of putting this would be to say that ordinary everyday actions (as opposed
to mere “behaviors,” perhaps) are not only methodic but that, in order to be the specific
actions that they are, display their methodic properties in and as their very doing. For
this aspect of methodicity, Harold Garfinkel uses the term “reflexivity” (1967). Now
that’s a very easily misunderstood term unless we take it, qua term, with a pinch of salt.
It’s something I’ve written about elsewhere in some detail, though I’d prefer to skip some
of that detail here.
Let’s just put it this way for now: any methodical, practical, everyday activity will not
only be done methodically (i.e., have witnessable methodical properties), it will also—in
and as its very coming to be done—account for (make itself witnessable as) its methodic-
ity. Hence the term “reflexivity of accounts” (Czyzewski 1994). But “accounting” does
not mean something like a voice-over track or commentary running alongside the activ-
ity; something like (to foreshadow our upcoming example): “And here I am now waiting
for a bus; I’m not just standing around here in this bus shelter, maybe to get out of the

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rain; I’m actually waiting for the number 252 to Byford; you know, the one that comes
along about 10:30 though it’s often quite late . . . .” And, as they say, “blah blah blah,”
where the “blah blah blah” could go on indefinitely, if you think about it. No, that kind
of accounting would not do at all.
And so, to that very example. It’s one I’ve used before and will no doubt use again for
its clarity and relevance. Remember, above, we touched on Eric Livingston’s distinction
between the hidden social order (associated with ironic approaches to the everyday) and
the witnessable social order (associated with ethnomethodological approaches). Here,
then, is Wes Sharrock (1995: 4) discussing the question of precisely that: witnessing
social order:

Social order is easy to find because it’s put there to be found. When you go
about your actions . . . you do them so that (or in ways that) other people can
see what you’re doing. You do your actions to have them recognized as the
actions that they are. When you stand at the bus stop, you stand in such a way
that you can be seen to be waiting for a bus. People across the street can see
what you’re doing, according to where and how you’re standing . . . . [Y]ou’re
standing at a bus stop and somebody comes and stands next to you and they
stand in such a way that eventually you can see that these people are standing
in a line and that one person’s the first and another is the second, and some
person’s at the end. People stand around at bus stops in ways they can be seen
to be waiting for a bus.

Here we have two ordinary activities, “waiting for a bus” and, contiguous with it, “form-
ing a bus queue.” In everyday life, we do audio-visually witnessable social practices that
are chock full of social order, and we do them in ways that account for the particular bit
of social order being done. And that is done in and as part of the very social practice
itself. But note that, in Sharrock’s example, not a word has been said. The social prac-
tices are indeed, nevertheless, account-ably the particular ones that they are. The reader
might like to think about—or better go out and observe—just what it is that people do
at bus stops that makes what they do accountably waiting for a bus; as opposed, for
example, to just hanging around there with no intention of taking the bus. See, even
intentions are visible; they’re not ghostly head-contents!4
On a related matter: there is much talk in popular cultural studies about the produc-
tion and consumption of cultural goods, artefacts and the like. But what of actual
everyday practices? Presumably they are also produced and consumed. Or rather, pro-
duced and (as our example shows) recognised. When I first came to Fremantle, it was the
time of the America’s Cup. The place was full of yachties watching TV screens, espe-
cially in pubs and at countless street parties. People were commenting, loudly, on the
races in Gage Roads on the coast out there on the edge of the Indian Ocean. All I could
see were a few boats sailing on the sea. I was, to all intents and purposes, not a member.
But they could see actually socially-accomplished practices happening; practices to
which I was utterly blind. Eventually, after much questioning—and to the annoyance of
the aficionados—I came to recognise such things as “tacking into the wind” and, a little
later still, things such as “tactical tacking into the wind.” I could never do those things
or be part of them. But I knew that if I had to do them, this would be how I would do
them. There was, then, some kind of dovetailing between the production of the practices
(by yachtsmen and -women actually out there on the ocean) and the recognition of them

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by the fans in the pub watching on TV. Being a socially competent member of this, as it
were, “crew,” consisted in just that: the absolute identity of the methods (or procedures)
for producing and the methods (or procedures) for recognising the activity as that very
specific activity as against some other, or as against just meaningless behaviour—which
is all that I’d been able to see at first sight.5
This is another of Sacks’s crucial insights. The methods for the production of everyday
actions and the methods for their recognition are identical. And that, too, is what a
culture is: “A culture is an apparatus for generating recognizable actions; if the same pro-
cedures are used for generating as for detecting, that is perhaps as simple a solution to
the problem of recognizability as is formulatable (Sacks 1992 vol. 1: 226).
And so, we now have a whole bunch of field propositions—the term is Heidegger’s (1987:
41–42)—and it’s worth looking at what he has to say there about the distinction between
these bits of, again loosely, “theory” and the practical work of doing science. The reader
could go back and count them if desired. But I prefer to take the whole of the path from
first versus second order constructs, via the reflexivity of accounts, to the production-
recognition assumption as a gestalt contexture forming the ethnomethodological field.
It’s equally clear what has to be done on the basis of this gestalt contexture: go and
find out about any particular ordinary everyday practice, or array of practices, that might
interest you. The field propositions (aka gestalt contexture) won’t have to alter much,
but the utterly massive range of things they (or it) can be used to find out about is legion.
Here’s one that anyone could do right now. The inspiration is, to an extent, “philo-
sophical”—nothing wrong with that; some philosophy does have some uses—but it
suggests a range of possible observational studies:

Two boys fairly swiftly contract the eyelids of their right eyes. In the first boy
this is only an involuntary twitch; but the other is winking conspiratorially to
an accomplice. At the lowest or the thinnest level of description the two
contractions of the eyelids may be exactly alike. From a cinematograph-film of
the two faces there might be no telling which contraction, if either, was a wink,
or which, if either, were a mere twitch. Yet there remains the immense but
unphotographable difference between a twitch and a wink.
(Ryle 1971 vol. 2: 480)

Let us hypothesise then, on the basis of our field propositions, that the distinction
between a wink and a twitch (in Ryle’s sense of these actions—or is the latter a mere
behavior?) has to do with the methodic production of “doing winking” in, and as part of,
a culture. How would one collect a number of instances from actual everyday scenes and
then go about finding the features of the methodicity of winking? I strongly suspect that
this could be done and, in the course of the investigations, it might be possible to find
some clues as to the production and recognition of “intended messages” in a more gen-
eral sense.6 No amount of considerations of the dialectics of winking, the poetics of
winking or, indeed, of the semiotic analysis of “codes” for the winked message, or specu-
lations on the unconscious activity underlying intentional winking versus involuntary
twinges could do that.
Yes, it’s humdrum. But the humdrum witnessably reveals—it is produced to be
recognised as—part of the indefinitely fascinating background hum of everyday
knowledge-in-action going on all around us as popular culture (a.k.a. the witnessable
social order) to which all speculative theorizing is necessarily blind. The word “popular”

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comes from the Latin, populus (people). The Greek is ε′θνος (ethnos). And, if culture, as
I have argued, is a bundle of apparatuses, procedures or methods, then “popular culture”
means ethno-methods. So the study of popular culture is ethno-method-ology. No?

Notes
1 This chapter draws on a previous conference presentation and its subsequent write-up (McHoul 2009).
It also makes liberal use of ideas from Harold Garfinkel, particularly his Studies in Ethnomethodology
(1967). Not all of these borrowings are cited in the text as they are far too numerous to mention in detail,
and some are but Garfinkel-inspired ideas. Those who know their Garfinkel will recognise them for what
they are, where they are. Those who do not should read the book.
2 The notion of “field propositions” will be returned to its proper home later in this chapter.
3 On the distinction between “knowing how” and “knowing that,” see Ryle 1949 (pp. 25–61); though it
can also be found in Heidegger 1996 (orig. 1927), whose work Ryle obviously knew (Ryle 1971 vol. 1:
179–214; orig. 1946).
4 This is among the myriad of reasons why the last thing studies of everyday popular culture need is the psy
disciplines.
5 I had similar problems, at first, understanding Australian Rules football. It came gradually but the big
breakthrough came when a fellow English migrant told me: “Just imagine real football for 36 goalkeepers”.
The artfulness that this one remark opened up was immense. On the other side of the coin, I have
recently found how difficult it is to get someone “membershipped” when trying to explain—to the point
of appreciation—what goes on in televised test cricket.
6 A parallel study that could be informative for our prospective one is Lincoln Ryave and Jim Schenkein’s
“Notes on the Art of Walking” (1974). How do we recognise that someone is producing the action “walk-
ing down the street” as opposed to “walking down the street in company with another”? We do do this, and
equally we know the moral consequences of getting it wrong. The moral order, too, is witnessable (Jayyussi
1984). For a good list of ethnomethodological studies, check Paul ten Have’s (2013) website.

References
Byrne, D. (2012) How Music Works San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s.
Czyzewski, M. (1994) “Reflexivity of Actors versus Reflexivity of Accounts,” Theory Culture & Society
11(4), 161–168.
de Lauretis, T. (1984) Alice Doesn’t: Feminisim, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Heidegger, M. (1987) Nietzsche, Vol. III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans.
J. Stambaugh, D. Farrell Krell, and F. A. Capuzzi, New York: Harper and Row.
——— (1996) Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh, Albany: State University of New York Press.
Jayyusi, L. (1984) Categorization and the Moral Order, Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Livingston, E. (2008) Ethnographies of Reason, Aldershot: Ashgate.
McHoul, A. (2009) “What Are We Doing When We Analyse Conversation?” Australian Journal of
Communication 36(3), 15–21.
Ryave, A. L. & Schenkein, J. N. (1974) “Notes on the Art of Walking,” in R. Turner (ed.),
Ethnomethodology, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 265–274.
Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson.
——— (1971) Collected Papers, 2 vols, London: Hutchinson.
Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Schütz, A. (1962) Collected Papers, Vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Sharrock, W. (1995) “Ethnographic Work,” The Discourse Analysis Research Group Newsletter 11(1), 3–8.
ten Have, P. (2013) EMCA General Bibliography. <http://www.paultenhave.nl/resource.htm>. Accessed
15 August 2013.
Updike, J. (2004) The Early Stories 1953–1975, New York: Ballantine Books.
Watson, D. R. (1994) “Harvey Sacks’s Sociology of Mind in Action,” Theory Culture & Society 11(4),
169–186.

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 11
CELEBRITY
Jo Littler

Introduction
What is celebrity? There is little consensus in either academia or popular culture over
its significance, depth, vacuity, meaning, history and fluctuating fortunes, but there is a
sizeable amount of debate. In media, film and cultural studies a range of approaches has
been adopted, from screen studies to political economy, from ideological critique to
audience research. Celebrity has therefore been variously understood as an inevitable
part of some kind of universal ‘human condition’, as psychoanalytic mystery to be
unwrapped, structural by-product of the PR industry, vestige of Romantic individualism
and commodity fetish par excellence. Let us dip an analytical toe in its spangled waters.
The word ‘celebrity’ tends to get elided with two others – ‘stars’ and ‘fame’ – with
which it has become, to some extent, synonymous. There are interesting genealogical
differences in meaning between this triad. Celebrity was, in its earliest usage, linked to
‘fame’; but it was also linked to the word ‘thronged’, a derivation indicating something
of the activity around the celebrity, gesturing towards, for instance, the acts of talking
about and congregating around them; a vibrant, social quality that is also connected to
celebrity’s predecessor as a noun, ‘celebration’. As Robert van Kreiken puts it, linking
the emergence of the word celebrity with a moment when individuals were increasingly
struggling for power in a court society and an expanding mercantile culture, ‘one could
be quietly and respectably famous, whereas to have ‘celebrity’ had different quality, a
certain buzz in everyday social life’ (van Kreiken 2012: 15). This also indicates – as
several decades of work on fan cultures has been at pains to point out – how the celebrity
would be nothing without its audience, or its fans, to construct it and prop it up (Lewis
1992; Hills 2002; Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington 2007)
Historians of celebrity have sought to stamp different periodisations on celebrity cul-
ture. Leo Braudy’s groundbreaking book The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History
(1986) devoted over 600 lively pages to cultures of fame in the west, from Alexander
the Great onwards. ‘The history of fame’ wrote Braudy ‘is the history of the changing
ways by which individuals have sought to bring themselves to the attention of others
and, not incidentally, have thereby gained power over them’ (Barudy 1986: 3). Braudy’s
definition also indicates something of how tenaciously celebrity has been linked to the
notion of an individual (indeed, a question just as likely to be asked is ‘What is a celeb-
rity?’). When the term ‘celebrity’ (rather than ‘fame’) came into being in the English
language in the sixteenth century, and started to gain pace as common currency in the
seventeenth, this was also at the earliest moments of what the political theorist C. B.
Macpherson famously termed ‘the rise of possessive individualism’: the idea of the self
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as, above all, a profoundly ‘bounded’ entity, a personal property (Macpherson 2010; van
Krieken 2012: 15).
The Frenzy of Renown has occasionally been taken to task – as is the lot of influential
texts – for presenting celebrity, despite the remit of the book, as a fairly transhistorical
phenomenon (Morgan 2011). A more generous reading might note that whilst there is
slippage between the terms, Braudy’s book leans more toward a study of fame, rather
than ‘celebrity’ (as its title indicates). But the critique does highlight something of the
disagreements between historians of celebrity. Whilst Robert van Krieken provides a
persuasive account of the word’s sixteenth-century emergence, Fred Inglis, in his book
A Short History of Celebrity (2010) argues that celebrity culture begins in the eighteenth
century and solidifies in the nineteenth, when ‘celebrity comes into being as a portion-
ing out of the posture and position of power’, a ‘portioning-out’ institutionalised through
consumer culture, the fashion-system and new media formations (Inglis 2010: 9). The
development of the new forms of visual culture of photography and film, and their
industrialisation, were to consolidate this rise of celebrity in the twentieth century.
Whilst Inglis’s book presents a later view of celebrity than that of Braudy or van
Krieken, it is nonetheless similarly trying to act as a rejoinder to those with no apparent
historical consciousness who think that celebrity was invented yesterday, or demarcate
it as solely a twentieth century, mass-produced phenomenon. In other words: historians
of celebrity like to accuse each other of erroneous periodisations, and there are different
historical and geographical cultures of celebrity. As Simon Morgan says, ‘it would be
naïve to expect celebrity cultures to be identical in form in widely differing times and
places’ (Morgan 2011: 109).
I would argue that out of these struggles for definitionary power by these white male
Western historians of celebrity we might make three main points. First: that celebrity
cannot be understood as a transhistorical phenomenon, but that elements of what it
came to involve – in particular, competing for attention – have an extremely long his-
tory. Second: that the evolution of the term ‘celebrity’ needs to be understood as a
particular geneaology which in the West owes a great deal to the emergence of moder-
nity, bourgeois capitalism and possessive individualism. And third: that since then, and
aside from then, there have been a number of distinct discursive formations or ‘waves’
of celebrity culture, all with their own particular characteristics.

‘Known for His Well-Knowness’: Gendering

False Images
If some of these earlier ‘waves’ of celebrity culture might be distinguished by their rela-
tionships to expanding mercantile cultures and the challenges to religion in courtly
society, or to the advent of mass production in the nineteenth century, a later significant
celebrity phase was that intersecting with Fordism in the twentieth century, together
with its cultural correlates including the industrialisation of film and the rise of PR as
an industry. Out of this epoch emerged Daniel Boorstin’s telling, widely-quoted and
entertainingly (or maddeningly) tautological description of a celebrity as ‘a person well-
known for his well-knownness’ (1961: 57). Boorstin’s definition appeared in his book
The Image (one of a range of interesting popular sociological texts he published) along-
side another, somewhat less quoted maxim: ‘the sign of a celebrity is often that his name
is worth more than his services’ (220). These are interesting descriptions (not least in
that they unconsciously denote celebrity as male) as they both gestured towards and

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helped codify what are by now well-trodden themes of celebrity: that celebrity is, in
Boorstin’s other term, a ‘pseudo-event’, a phenomenon which is not based around talent,
which is not organic and ‘real’, but ‘manufactured’; one which is dependent on the
puffery of the PR industry.
It is worth disaggregating these themes a little, as they are important. Celebrity as
‘pseudo-event’, for example, became popularised in critical theory by followers of Jean
Baudrillard, and celebrity associated with a vacuous desert of the hyper-real. The
strength of this position is that it highlights the strategies of exploitation and the
untruths used by capitalist consumer culture and the PR industry in order to sell prod-
ucts for profit. The weakness of this position is that by figuring celebrity culture as false
and unreal it obscures the very processes through which it is able to gain traction:
including the psychological investments of fans and audiences, the corporate scaffolding
of the PR industry, the discourse of profit and economic growth and the labour of cul-
tural intermediaries. This means that celebrity culture becomes effectively situated in a
hermetically-sealed theoretical bubble from which it is very hard to see either how it
does change, or indeed how it might ever change or be challenged.
The question of how celebrity buzz was created, packaged and sold through the enter-
tainment industry, and how this was connected to the exploitations of a new stage in
capitalist political economy, was also one that concerned some of the earliest twentieth-
century writers on celebrity. It particularly concerned writers associated with the
Frankfurt school, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and Leo Lowenthal.
In his essay ‘The Triumph of Mass Idols,’ Lowenthal charted the rise of entertainment
celebrity since the beginning of the century through a content analysis of prominent
figures in magazines and newspapers, and concluded that a shift had taken place from
‘idols of production’ to ‘idols of consumption’ (Lowenthal 1944/1984). The piece is not
only saturated with anxiety towards feminized mass consumption, and valorizes ‘serious’
middle-class culture against ‘base’ lower class culture, but it also – somewhat perversely
for a Marxist text – normalizes the category of business celebrity as somehow respectable
(Littler 2006).
Lowenthal’s anxiety towards the gendered dimension of the new idols of consump-
tion betrayed a more widespread anxiety by intellectuals towards the position and
power of women (Huyssen 1986). This was of course not completely new, nor has it
died away. Popular culture continues to be disparaged as insignificant whilst simultane-
ously feminized on a regular basis (Holmes and Negra 2011). There are also longer
formative associations between celebrity and women; as Mary Louise-Roberts points
out, the word ‘star’ was first used in the context of fame in 1824, in England, to refer
to an actress who could sell out a show in a theatre through her name alone (Roberts
2010: 108; van Krieken 2012: 47). There is also a lengthy related history of printed
materials dealing in gossip around female actresses from seventeenth-century
Restoration drama onwards, indicating an eroticised excitement at a new prominence
for women in this part of the public sphere alongside a desire to sell papers (Nussbaum
2005: 150; van Krieken 2012: 35).
The conflation between femininity, mass/popular culture and celebrity can itself be
understood as cashing in on, reflecting and creating gendered interests and pursuits, and
has therefore been interpreted with various emphases on these different aspects. In the
1980s and 1990s, an influential body of work in film studies, often coalescing around the
journal Screen, sought to understand the way cinema and its apparatus worked in con-
nection with what we might term the ‘psychological apparatus’ of its viewers. Part of the

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achievement of feminist film theory at this time was to foreground the sheer complexity
of how and why people related to and ‘identified with’ cinematic celebrities. Jackie
Stacey’s work on ‘feminine fascinations’, for instance, yoked together audience studies
and psychoanalytic theory to explore the range of roles women adopted when watching
and talking about film stars (devotion, adoration, aspiration, imitation) and to empha-
sise how these worked to mix up conventional distinctions between identification and
desire (Stacey 1994). Such lines of enquiry had a connection with work on the relation-
ship between fans, gender and identity – for example, work on how the ‘bedroom
cultures’ of teenage girls involved arranging various possessions including celebrity post-
ers as a means of testing out identities, or work in fandom studies on how female
audiences’ screaming at concerts might be a means for young women to deal with the
contradictions of sexual and gender identity (McRobbie 1991; Lewis 1992).

Constructed Celebrity and the Question of Really

The question of the gender dynamic between celebrity and audience was taken up in
Richard Dyer’s highly influential work. This work brought together screen studies and
queer studies, and linked this to an analysis of ideology that typified much of the cultural
studies work coming out of the UK in the late 70s and 80s. Dyer’s first book on celebrity,
Stars, explored the characteristics of stardom, noting, for instance, the recurrent fourfold
motifs of ordinariness, extraordinariness, luck and hard work in most celebrity construc-
tion. Using material from Hollywood’s ‘classic period’ of the 1920s to 1940s, he produced
an analysis of social type of the star and its sub-categories (the tough guy, the good Joe,
the pin-up) and of key motifs surrounding stardom. This included how love was a core
theme of Hollywood fan magazines at this time – with its sense of ‘a world in which
material problems have been settled and all that is left is relationships’ (Dyer 1980: 45)
– but in which only certain kinds of love (heterosexual emotional/erotic) were fore-
grounded; ‘not relationships of, for example, work, friendship, political comradeship or,
surprisingly enough, parents and children’ (Dyer 1980: 45).
Dyer’s work foregrounded how celebrity was constructed on multiple levels, involving
both an official version of celebrity (e.g., actors on film) then a highly orchestrated
expose of ‘the real’ celebrity behind the public mask, an expose of ‘what they’re really
like’ (e.g. through media coverage of and interviews with the stars). The activity of
secondary media becomes crucial to the active construction of the personae of the ‘pri-
vate self’: this is a key mechanism providing ‘intimate access’ to the star.
The mechanisms these media realms deployed and through which celebrity is con-
structed were to become an area taken up by a branch of cultural sociology interested in
analysing media production. Turner, Bonner and Marshall’s co-authored work Fame
Games: The Construction of Celebrity in Australia (2000) interviewed a variety of people
working in the promotions industries to help them analyse how celebrity was being
constructed in and around the Australian media. Jessica Evans and David Hesmondhalgh’s
co-edited book, Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity, connected together three perspec-
tives on celebrity, linking together a study of celebrity’s media production with an
analysis of it as a text, and from the vantage point of audience studies.
Dyer’s later work Heavenly Bodies continued his analysis of the ‘social types’ stars
offered, this time by providing an in-depth analysis of those offered by the personae of
Marilyn Monroe, Paul Robeson and Judy Garland. Its analysis of the constraints of het-
eronormative femininity, the changing face of racist cinematic stock types and the appeal

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of the ‘tragic’ celebrity for queer audiences combined a very contextually-oriented social
analysis of the changing acceptable models of personhood at a particular moment with a
nuanced sense of the malleable uses of the star for its various audiences (Dyer 2003).
However, studies of celebrity in the 1980s still remained overwhelmingly oriented
towards cinema and stardom, as indicated by the dominance of the term ‘star studies’.
In the 1990s, the dominance of this term was to shift, along with the texture of celebrity
culture itself.

The Rebirth of Celebrity

As the end of the twentieth century rolled into view, new outlets were created for celeb-
rity culture. Media deregulation, digital technology and the commercial aspirations of
magazine publishers all helped facilitate a boom in the expansion of celebrity magazines
where markedly less respectful star coverage was the norm, alongside celebrity-oriented
television programming, especially around reality TV (Holmes and Jermyn 2004). The
formats of programmes such as I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! and Celebrity Big
Brother were to have a considerable global reach. I’m A Celebrity!, for instance, which
was created in the UK, was franchised in France, Germany, Hungary, India, the
Netherlands, Sweden and the US. The Dutch-born Celebrity Big Brother spawned fran-
chises worldwide including in Indonesia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
UK, India, Bulgaria, Croatia, Israel, Portugal and the Philippines.
A key feature of these mutated celebrity media forms was their somewhat inventive
use of the celebrity fashion cycle. ‘Z-list,’ or at least D-list, celebrities – those forgotten
about, or whose media stock was deemed to be waning – were enthusiastically targeted
and signed up by the aforementioned reality shows and given a new lease of celebrity
life. What might be thought of as ‘celebrity kitsch’ was incorporated with zeal into real-
ity programming. For Chris Rojek, such brief celebrity could be imagined as part of a
typology. Rojek christened ‘celetoids’ those ‘lottery winners, one-hit wonders. Stalkers,
whistle-blowers, sports’ arena streakers, have-a-go heroes, mistresses of public figures and
the various other social types who command media attention one day, and are forgotten
the next’ (Rojek 2001: 20–1). A sub-category of the celetoid, for Rojek, is a ‘celeactor’,
which is a fictional variant of the momentarily ubiquitous celetoid (like Borat) (Rojek
2001). Rojek’s lexicon of celebrity joined earlier variants such as James Monaco’s tri-
parte celebrity structure of (in order of longeivity and prestige) the hero, the celebrity
and the ‘quasar’ (Monaco 1978).
‘Celebrity studies’ boomed, to some extent, in academia by the 2000s, alongside this
wave of celebrity in popular culture. Publications like P. David Marshall’s The Celebrity
Culture Reader, Sean Redmond and Su Holmes’ Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader and the
journal Celebrity Studies worked to attempt to map and extend this new field. ‘Celebrity
studies’ had, therefore, expanded both in order to try to deal with the proliferation of
these new formations of celebrity and to push it beyond the narrow vacuum of film stud-
ies in which it had previously become entrenched. Beyond the horror of those
predominantly UK-based conservative media journalists who expressed outrage that
celebrity should be seriously thought about in academia (and who still apparently didn’t
realise either cultural studies or the 1960s had happened at all), the emergent or expand-
ing interest in celebrity as an area did leave open a troubling question. Was it at risk,
despite its multidisciplinary and critical approaches, of fetishising and celebrifying a
celebrity culture it sought to analyse?

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This question raises a related and wider issue: the question of the relationships
between the new formations celebrity culture was taking and the political landscape of
neoliberalism. The individualisation, personalisation and celebritisation of the political
processes of representative democracy in the West came under useful scrutiny in works
such as John Corner and Dick Pels’ interesting collection Media and the Restyling of
Politics (2003), Kristina Riegert’s edited volume Politicotainment (2007) on how televi-
sion and celebrity negotiate politics, John Street and P. David Marshall’s work on
celebrity politicians (Street 2012; Marshall 1997) and Mark Wheeler’s book on the
celebritisation of Obama and beyond (Wheeler 2014).
Some of the most telling work on celebrity and neoliberal politics has been in the area
where celebrity intersects with the voluntary sector and charitable/‘humanitarian’ work.
As I have discussed elsewhere, the expansion of celebrities’ connection to charity has a
number of causes: the ‘professionalization’ of charities and NGOs; the fact that it is often
a way for celebrities to get free or cheap publicity; and the marketization of areas of
public or ‘common’ expenditure (Littler 2008; 2015). For instance, Dan Brockington’s
book Celebrity and the Environment was driven not by an interest in celebrity personae –
he entertainingly admits in the introduction that his main problem in writing the book
was that to begin with he simply did not know the names of the people involved – but
by the fact that their presence in his area of study, wildlife conservation, was becoming
unavoidable and increasingly powerful (Brockington 2009; 2014). For Ilan Kapoor,
treading a staunchly Žižekian path, ‘celebrity humanitarianism’ is fundamentally depo-
liticising and aggrevates the very global inequality it seeks to redress (Kapoor 2012).
Whilst professional celebrity involvement in the humanitarian sector has a lengthy
history, including UNICEF’s collaboration with the American actor Danny Kaye in
1953, for example, its expansion since the 1980s through the invention of the UN
Goodwill Ambassadors and philanthrocapitalism more widely has been dramatic
(Wheeler 2011; Wilson 2011; Littler 2015). For Lillie Chouliaraki, this is marked by a
shift in celebrity presentation from other-directed humanitarian compassion to self-
directed post-humanitarian narcissism, meaning that celebrities today tend to talk about
their own personal growth through charity work (Chouliaraki 2012).

New Directions
The connections between celebrity and environmental issues is a related area, and this
domain of ‘spectacular environmentalisms’ is shot through with similarly graphic para-
doxes, hyperbole and hypocrisies (Goodman and Littler 2013; Boykoff, Brockington,
Goodman and Littler 2015). In Greening the Media (2012) Richard Maxwell and Toby
Miller point out that whilst many Hollywood stars are eager to be ‘eco-celebs’, ‘the
motion picture industry is the biggest producer of conventional pollutants of all indus-
tries located in the Los Angeles area’ and that the disposable orientation of film and TV
production and consumption is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions
more generally (Maxwell and Miller 2012: 67–9). Nonetheless, as Miller also points out,
we ignore at our peril the ‘tiny, superstructural roles that stars can play, so powerful are
their names in orienting discourse’ (Miller 2013: 373).
There has been some interest in analysing ‘icons’ (Latour and Weibel 2002; Ghosh
2011) that are deemed as distinct from celebrities inasmuch as they ‘acquire value over
time’ (Ghosh 2011: 177). It could be remarked here that icons are part of a continuum
in the same way that the celetoid is related to the celebrity. In these respects, Bishnupria

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Ghosh’s work is interesting as it works to theorise the material and symbol intersections
of icons with specific and changing political landscapes, and finds more progressive pos-
sibilities in iconicity. She writes of how Indian ‘Bandit Queen’ Phoolan Devi became a
commodity image, but also much more: ‘The woman with arms upraised had become the
mediator of a structure of feeling for an emergent collective – possible but yet to come’
(Ghosh 2011: 3).
Another inevitably developing area of study is the use of social media by celebrities.
The idea of having more direct access to the celebrity through their Twitter feed, for
example, has ignited the excitement of both fans and publicists. (At the time of writing,
US singer Katy Perry is celebrity queen of Twitter in terms of number of follower num-
bers – over 50 million – closely followed by US singer Justin Bieber and US President
Barack Obama.) In one sense, the popularity of certain celebrities on Twitter simply
perpetuates the feature Dyer emphasised as fundamental to celebrity culture, namely its
manufactured ‘reveal’ of the mystery of what celebrities are ‘really’ like; in another, it
marks a significant shift in the way celebrities communicate and mediate their interac-
tion with their audience, in terms of how it functions to apparently disclose trivia in
‘real’ time, using what appear to be the ‘direct’ words of the star (Marshall 2006;
Crawford 2009; Bennett 2012).
Twitter appears in these particular ways to be dominated by US celebrities; in another
sense, it indicates some of the transnational connections and new global configurations
made possible by social media. The question of how celebrity translates, or does not,
across national boundaries remains a persistently interesting area of celebrity study.
Arvind Rajagopal’s work on Mother Theresa, for instance, demonstrates how she never
achieved anything like the levels of celebrity in India that she did in Europe and the
US: he argues that she mainly functioned as a neo-colonial figure of compassion and
caring for the West, an exported model of individualised solutions to social problems, a
figure through which India could be patronised and imperial dynamics negated
(Rajagopal 1999: 126–141). Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking work on Bob Marley demon-
strated how it is possible for celebrity to gain its power through an entrenchment in
diasporic identity rather than via one singular national culture. Gilroy argues that
Marley’s celebrity became ‘planetary’ in nature, relating through hybridised diasporic
cultures, part of the ‘more difficult cosmopolitan commitment’ that is connected to the
anti-imperialist struggle while eschewing essentialism (Gilroy 2000: 130–131).
There is, then, a wide range of existing approaches to celebrity. And others are in
process: take, for example, the interesting ethnographic research project and social
media project ‘CelebYouth’, a collaborative, UK-based investigation into ‘the role of
celebrity in young people’s classed and gendered aspirations’.1 However, possibly the
approach receiving least attention is that voiced in the introduction to Brockington’s
Celebrity and the Environment:

There are millions of us who are not interested in celebrities. In fact, we are in
the majority. Over 98 per cent of the population of Britain does not buy Hello!;
over 80 per cent does not even read any celebrity magazine.
(Brockington 2009: viii–ix)

Alongside the relationship between celebrity and those radically anti-individualist

political movements which work to hide personalised identity – from the scarf coverings
of Zapatistas through Occupy’s Guy Fawkes masks to the balaclavas of Pussy Riot and

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beyond – it could, perhaps, be argued that we should try to fit this type of everyday, less
self-consciously political, radical lack of interest in celebrity more firmly into the frame
of celebrity analysis.

Note
1 http://www.celebyouth.org/about/. Accessed 1st March 2014.

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Boykoff, Max, Dan Brockington, Mike Goodman and Jo Littler (2015) (eds.), ‘Spectacular
Environmentalisms’, special issue of Environmental Communication (forthcoming).
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Brockington, Dan (2009) Celebrity and the Environment: Fame, Wealth and Power in Conservation.
London: Zed Books.
Brockington, Dan (2014) Celebrity Advocacy and International Development. London: Routledge.
Celebrity Studies journal. Taylor & Francis.
Chouliaraki, Lilie (2012) The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Corner, John and Dick Pels (2003) Media and the Restyling of Politics. London: Sage
Crawford, Kate (2009). ‘These Foolish Things: On Intimacy and Insignificance in Mobile Media’, in
Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth (eds.), Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media,
Routledge, pp. 252–65.
Dyer, Richard (1980) Stars. London: British Film Institute.
Dyer, Richard (2003) Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd Edition. London: Routledge.
Evans, Jessica and David Hesmondhalgh (2005) Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity. Maidenhead:
Open University Press.
Ghosh, Bishnupria (2011) Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular. Durham: Duke.
Gilroy, Paul (2000). Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Goodman, Mike and Jo Littler (eds.) (2013) ‘Celebrity Ecologies’, a special issue of Celebrity Studies
4(3).
Gray, Jonathan, Cornell Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington (eds.) (2007) Fandom: Identities and
Communities in a Mediated World. New York: NYU Press.
Hills, Matt (2002) Fan Cultures. London: Routledge.
Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn (2004) Understanding Reality Television. London: Routledge.
Holmes, Su and Diane Negra (eds.) (2011) In the Limelight and under the Microscope: Forms and Functions
of Female Celebrity. London: Continuum.
Huyssen, Andreas (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism. London:
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Inglis, Fred (2010) A Short History of Celebrity. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Kapoor, Ilan (2012) Celebrity Humanitarianism. New York: Routledge.
Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel (eds.) (2002) Iconoclash. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lewis, Lisa (ed.) (1992) The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. New York: Routledge.
Littler, Jo (2006) ‘Celebrity CEOs and the Cultural Economy of Tabloid Intimacy’, in Su Holmes and
Sean Redmond (eds.), Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader. London: Sage.
Littler, Jo (2008) ‘I Feel Your Pain: Celebrity Do-Gooding, Cosmopolitan Caring and the Globalised
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Littler, Jo (2015) ‘The New Victorians? Celebrity Charity and the Demise of the Welfare State’,
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New Brunswick: Transaction Books, pp. 203–235.
Macpherson, Crawford B. (2010) The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism from Hobbes to Locke.
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Marshall, P. David (1997) Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Marshall, P. David (2006) The Celebrity Culture Reader. London: Routledge.
Maxwell, Richard and Toby Miller (2012) Greening the Media. Oxford University Press
McRobbie, Angela (1991) Feminism and Youth Cultures: From Jackie to Just Seventeen. London:
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Miller, Toby (2013) ‘Why Coldplay Sucks’, in Jo Littler and Mike Goodman (eds.), ‘Celebrity
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148–168.
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Street, John (2012) ‘Do Celebrity Politics and Celebrity Politicians Matter?’ British Journal of Politics
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of Female Stardom’, Celebrity Studies, 2(1), pp. 56–68.

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 12
CELEBRITIES IN
GLOBAL
DEVELOPMENT
Karin Gwinn Wilkins

Celebrities champion global development, bringing public visibility to poverty while

spotlighting neoliberal strategies as heroic adventures. The wealthy few are applauded
for their noble gestures toward helping the projected grateful beneficiaries. These nar-
ratives of individual sacrifice and benefit draw attention away from more complex and
contextual issues of inequity and injustice. Issues of global development are of serious
concern, with an increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor, impending environ-
mental consequences to human industry, and enduring concerns with human rights. In
efforts toward resolution, global development schemes require massive financial capital,
steered toward strategic social change, applauded by audiences of celebrities glamour-
izing development processes. Following a brief articulation of global development as an
industry, I turn to the roles of celebrities within this landscape, considering their char-
acterization in narratives that position sanctified heroes as rescuing romanticized victims
at the mercy of depoliticized villains. I conclude with concerns over the implications for
engagement in global development.

Global Development
Understanding global development as an industry means foregrounding the political and
economic structures of resource allocation directed toward strategic objectives designed
to promote the public good. While what actually becomes grounds for the “good” of the
“public” is and should be contested, the underlying motive to improve problems becomes
the shared mantra of institutional missions. While organizations’ efforts define and
attempt to resolve social concerns in a variety of ways, they share a sense that problems
exist, and that resources can be directed toward their alleviation. Within a global set-
ting, resource redistribution takes place across national boundaries, through the work of
public and private, as well as community, national and transnational organizations and
movements.
Critical communication approaches to social change consider the role of discourse and
praxis within the political-economic conditions that structure the work of the development
industry (Hamelink 2008). These analyses interrogate how communication about develop-
ment (Wilkins & Mody 2001) articulates particular constructions of problems and communities,
 CELEBRI TI ES I N G LO BA L D E V E L O P ME N T

thus guiding solutions offered through strategic intervention (Escobar 1995). The industries
engaged in this work are quite varied in terms of funding sources and concentrations, historical
institutional missions, political allegiances, and organizational dynamics. Even the terms typi-
cally used to describe the development landscape—bilateral (national foreign aid agencies),
multilateral (such as United Nations agencies), and nongovernmental organizations—gloss
over important considerations such as proportion of corporate funding, control over implemen-
tation, and sense of accountability. Within this diverse landscape, the underlying assumption
is that interventions can and should address global development programs.
Classic development models have highlighted national policies, but emerging trends
recognize the importance of transnational organizations and mobilities, as well as global
economic contexts. Globalization, with reference to strategic social change, contributes
to a changing development geometry in which social change more broadly understood
has come to encompass the strategic work of social movements and not just the develop-
ment industry (Shah & Wilkins 2004). But both social movements and development
programs must operate within a geopolitical structure that limits mobilities of people
and goods, and an economic structure that legitimizes free-market capitalism over other
systems of distribution. Over time, the strengthening dominance of global capitalism has
resulted in growing inequities, within and across national boundaries (Melkote 2012;
Milanovic 2011; Sparks 2009). With the wealth that has contributed to this increasing
gap between those with and without financial capital, corporations have been accruing
high profits, with surplus to invest in philanthropic projects on a global scale.
Private donors, including profitable corporations as well as wealthy individuals, have
attracted leading roles on the global development stage. Although they have secured
public attention, their financial contributions to global programs are proportionately
less than that of bilateral and multilateral agencies (Edwards 2009; Kremer, van Lieshout,
& Went 2009). Assessing the financial contributions across private donors is a challenge
given the diversity of organizations that fit this loose category, which encompasses non-
governmental organizations and civic groups, as well as corporations. What unites them,
though, is that they are not “public” in the sense of being accountable to government
agencies, in some systems relying on taxes from citizens for revenue. When taxes are
relatively low, elite individuals and corporations have the opportunity to earn more,
which then may be more likely to be donated to private charities (Roodman and
Standley 2006), although middle-income families give proportionately more of their
household income than wealthier families in the U.S. (Gipple & Gose 2012). While
wealthy individuals may elect to participate in development through their charitable
contributions, the focus here is the mediated celebration of the elite as enacting nobility
through their publicized acts.

Celebrities in Global Development

Celebrities appear in the development landscape in a variety of roles, manufacturing
their publicity to bring attention to their selected causes and to their own status. Finding
ways to perpetuate media recognition, extending beyond their work in popular culture
to their philanthropic concerns, attracts public attention for their sustained commercial
viability.
Building on charismatic appeal marketed through global media industries, celebrities
are able not only to highlight global concerns, such as poverty and girls’ education, but
also to make compassion seem trendy.

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Caring then becomes cool, so that humanitarian concern, at least in terms of outward
manifestations, such as clicking “like” buttons or wearing RED (Richey & Ponte 2011),
connects audiences as consumers to communities loosely linked through their allegiance
to particular celebrities. Celebrities are able to mediate distant tragedies to their fans
through the narratives they create and contribute, amplifying the horror of situations as
well as the possibilities for individual action (Scott 2014). Through their prominent
roles in these narratives, celebrities perpetuate the ideologies that support their indus-
tries, as well as dominant discourses of global development. Global development
discourses privilege global cultural industries when projecting neoliberal agendas, which
serve the interests of the wealthy elite.
When wealthy individuals become prominent donors contributing to social causes,
they become known as the elite group of “philanthrocapitalists.” As public figures,
celebrities include not only those whose fame is rooted in popular culture, such as
Angelina Jolie, but also those who have become part of popular culture through their
wealth, such as Bill Gates. While some applaud the rise of “philanthrocapitalism” as
central to funding development enterprise, others raise critical concerns about the
implications of this as supporting neoliberal agendas, reinforcing market frameworks as
guiding principles for social exchange. Neoliberal approaches to social change privilege
individuals over collectives and structures, often referencing “empowerment” as indi-
cated by entrepreneurship in market economies. Individual entrepreneurship is valued
as a mechanism for mobility out of poverty, through the support of resonant develop-
ment strategies as well as the glorification of elite individuals who serve as global
philanthrocapitalists.
Their ability to accrue substantial wealth, often based in their profit from global com-
munication industries, enables them to establish their own development foundations,
implementing programs guided by their implicit assumptions about social change. When
Time selected Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates as their 2005 people of the year, they
helped to legitimise their roles as justified actors in creating development agendas.
Celebrities act on behalf of these development agencies, in support of elite philanthro-
capitalists, reinforcing the power of financial and social capital produced through global
industry (Cooper 2008; Kapoor 2013; Tsaliki, Franonikolopoulos, & Huliaras 2011).
Celebrities are used within the development industry to attempt to raise awareness
not only of global issues but also of particular organizational approaches toward their
resolution (Street 2012). The branding of the agency and that agency’s programs
becomes part of the publicity, intended to mobilize public support broadly, as well as
garner political support particularly, thus advancing legitimacy claims as well as attract-
ing additional support. Global philanthropies, such as Red Cross and Oxfam, recognize
this dynamic when they rely on celebrities for public outreach as well as political access
(Colapinto 2012).
Their roles range from more passive visual compositions, appearing in photographs,
to more actively engaged advocacy work, such as that of Peter Gabriel in Witness
(Pedelty 2013). Some celebrities speak on behalf of issues, such as Natalie Portman
concerning micro-finance or Scarlett Johansson on girls’ education (Traub 2008), while
others establish their own named foundations, such as Angelina Jolie and Oprah. Some
celebrities may be seen as public diplomats, enacting public political acts without serv-
ing elected constituencies (Cooper 2008). Participating in global politics, particularly
among Anglo celebrities, is seen as enabled through globalization of digital media as well
as trends toward transnationalizing cultural identities and social movements.

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Publicity through their visuals and voices helps celebrities build more humanitarian
images, suggesting that they are altruistic and perhaps even deserve their wealth (Kapoor
2013; Tsaliki et al. 2011). The argument is not that all celebrities are artificially manip-
ulating their public relations without any altruistic impulses, but rather that global
cultural industries are financially and ideologically served by manufacturing appearances
of celebrities in ways that strengthen their public images as compassionate. Moreover,
this compassion needs to appear transnational and not local, given the economic imper-
ative of global cultural industries to profit across territorial boundaries. It is not just the
celebrities that matter, but more so the narratives that structure their appearances.

Global Development as Rescue Narrative

For intervention in global development to attract public significance, celebrities must
be ready for their close-ups. The mediated gaze connects fans to celebrities, demonstrat-
ing their valor and virtue through performances that are orchestrated for sympathetic
attention. Charity is not engaged for its own sake, but for the mediated celebration of
the cause, urgent enough to warrant rescue. This narrative requires a cast of characters
that positions a blameless victim at the mercy of a cruel villain, at last rescued by a
sanctimonious hero. In the mediated global development version, representation of the
villain serves to depoliticize the conditions that create serious problems faced by victims,
who are romanticized as worthy yet powerless to act in order to justify external interven-
tion. Next, I will discuss this narrative of global development in terms of depoliticizing
villains, romanticizing victims, and sanctifying heroes, before turning to critical implica-
tions for participation and advocacy constrained by this rescue fantasy enacted through
celebrity culture.

Depoliticizing the Villain

The suspenseful narrative of global development sets the conditions for serious injury,
devastation, or conflicts too dire to remain unresolved. People are in trouble, and need
to be rescued. The villain in the global development plot might be a set of uncontrol-
lable circumstances, such as a typhoon or earthquake, the result of corrupt leadership
running and ruining national and local economies, or evil terrorists traumatizing inno-
cent citizens. Whether a manifestation of official mismanagement, violent conflicts, or
environmental causes, the blame for the problem is not placed with the victims, who
must be portrayed sympathetically, as well as passively, to justify their rescue.
But not only are those suffering not responsible, neither are the actors with the power
to create the worlds in which subjects face avoidable injuries and deaths, and are denied
basic rights. Lack of safety and security in the construction of homes and factories causes
harm, rather than protects people from heavy rain and winds, as well as shifting tectonic
plates. Those responsible for these investments and regulations are not highlighted as
villains in this narrative, but nor are the global elite who benefit from and support indi-
vidual leaders of countries who manage their economies in ways that benefit their elite
but rob resources from their poor. The global elite, benefitting historically from the
conditions that perpetuate inequities, are rarely pictured as villainous, particularly when
celebrities dominate development discourse.
By avoiding attention to the global conditions that contribute to development con-
cerns, these narratives depoliticize their stories, oversimplifying much more complex

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histories. That way, the very global inequalities that—rooted in capitalist cultural
industries—result in extreme celebrity wealth are kept off-stage (Dieter & Kumar 2008).
Zooming in on the specifics of a particular disaster contributes to a sense of urgency,
justifying immediate and limited intervention, rather than addressing more long-term
mechanisms for managing resource allocation. Public debate limits engagement by nar-
rowing the boundaries of conversation to local conditions without historical context,
perpetuating development as a matter of technological management rather than an issue
of social justice or human rights.

Romanticizing Victims
Victims, then, in the development narrative are neither responsible for their circum-
stances nor able to resolve them alone. Critical to the visual imagery that accompanies
these stories is romanticizing victims, enabling audiences to invoke sympathetic
responses and support for heroic intervention. The spectacle of victims tends to accen-
tuate suffering children and appreciative mothers who cry in the face of villains and
smile with the entrance of masculine heroes.
Perpetuating problematic stereotypes of women and young children as being unable
to actively work to resolve problems, their static passivity is captured in visuals of global
development meant to establish both the dire nature of devastation as well as their
gratitude toward charitable help. Girls make particularly appealing victims as well as
objects of development, pictured in the schools funded by Oprah in South Africa (Peck
2008), with sequel editions by Angelina Jolie in Afghanistan and attempts by Madonna
in Malawi. The trend toward global adoptions made glamorous by Angelina has been
imitated by Madonna and many other female celebrities, building on the role of global
mother as compassionate beyond racial, national, and gender divides (Wilkins 2014).
Their publicized adoptions of diverse children enhances their public image as not
ensconced in one particular country but as active on a global scale. Children, benefitting
through adoptions, orphanages, schools, and other charitable programs, appeal as ideal
victims in need of rescue.
The setting of victims also contributes to this romanticization by portraying Third
World scenes as sites of adventure (Kapoor 2013). Resonant with the action-adventure
narrative, the Indiana Jones hero, representing northern, white empire, finds joy in
pursuing adventure while rescuing feminine counterparts. Bono’s articulation of “Africa”
as “an opportunity, as an adventure, not a burden” (Bono 2007) reinforces the construc-
tion of development intervention as adventure. Perpetuating stereotypes of the African
region as inhabited by fatalistic, corrupt, miserable people, development schemes geared
toward addressing AIDS, poverty, education, and other concerns contribute toward
development discourse that infantalizes aid recipients, thus justifying patriarchal inter-
vention (Eriksson Baaz 2005; Richey & Ponte 2011)
The hierarchy of this patriarchal rescue is further accentuated through the mission-
ary zeal of development, following rhetoric of Christianity with visual references to
virtuous light and evil dark. The 1980s recording of “Do They Know It’s Christmas”
offers one illustration of a western-produced song meant to benefit a loosely con-
structed African beneficiary with Christian themes. Metaphors of Christian missions
are referenced often in programs designed to help children and women (Wilkins
2007). Analyses of visual ideographs of Afghan women as requiring rescue demon-
strate the ways in which these images reinforce the “white man’s burden” through

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light and dark scenerios (Cloud 2004). This visual and verbal rhetoric of salvation
resonates with the action-adventure narrative, making the rescue necessary as well as
fun. If seen as divinely sanctioned, then there seems to be little choice about interven-
tion. In this narrative, victims play secondary roles, with the heroes speaking on
their behalf.

Sanctifying Heroes
Given how helpless victims are portrayed to be, resolution to dire villainous conditions
requires the action of heroes to save the day. The narrative then sets the stage for the
nobility of the act of intervention. Dominant discourses establish the necessity of devel-
opment as rescue, with public debate centering on narrow questions of how rather than
broader questions about why.
Many celebrities have been featured as heroes of global development, as generous
donors, such as Oprah, as goodwill ambassadors, such as Angelina Jolie (also a major
contributor), or as networkers, such as Bono. Celebrities need to be portrayed as virtuous
in this portrait, rather than as undeserving of their vast wealth. Their role as heroes is
contingent upon the articulation of the completely pathetic victim unable to rescue
herself, alongside the omnipotent and altruistic savior. In comparison to the glowing
coverage of Angelina’s foundation, schools, and adoptions, Madonna’s own attempts to
attract flattering public attention to her intentions to build schools and achievements
in adopting children across racial and national lines met with mixed enthusiasm.
Although these two female celebrities appear to have enacted similar strategies, their
results, as well as the appearances of these results, differ greatly, in part contingent upon
the gendered constructions of the helping process. Female celebrities appearing in the
development narrative are praised for their characterizations as compassionate global
mothers, particularly when partnered with a handsome leading man, such as Brad Pitt.
Madonna’s projection as global mother suffered by not being linked with a male, neces-
sary to convey an idealized heteronormative family with two parents. In contrast, Bono
and Geldof’s global activism does not require this compassionate characterization, but
rather that of an entrepreneurial spirit. Bono’s appearances with the Davos World
Economic Forum are celebrated as networking initiatives, in the serious business of com-
merce, while Angelina’s appearance at Davos received much less public attention.
Masculine roles contribute to global development through the work of finance, while
feminine roles nurture children, each serving the greater good as prescribed by the res-
cue narrative.
Given the sanctified imperatives for economic and social intervention, celebrity roles
are celebrated in ways that contribute to their fame and promote the legitimacy of global
development. When these acts become coded as heroic, their economic wealth, sup-
ported through global capitalism, is portrayed as justified rather than as questionable.
The virtuosity of wealth then is celebrated, rather than inequality questioned. In order
for this system to work, fans are complicit through consumption and slacktivism, neither
enacting significant engagement in global development.

Limitations to Celebrated Global Development

Celebrity participation in global development contributes to dominant discourse that
limits visions of social change as well as of participation (Chouliaraki 2012). Within

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development, neoliberal agendas privilege modernization as a capitalist economic

structure that spotlights individual agency in entrepreneurship, emphasizing free market
principles at the expense of social justice interests (Dutta 2011; Willis, Smith, &
Stenning 2008). The further limiting of individual agency to acts of consumption works
within a narrow view of social change, disguising political issues as noncontroversial
humanitarian work.
Encouraging audiences to participate in global development, celebrities support con-
sumption as the best way to resolve poverty and other social concerns. In this way,
consumers are invited to participate in the role of heroes in global development
(Goodman 2010). Richey and Ponte (2011) describe strategies such as Brand Aid as a
business practice that requires those interested in “doing good” to do so by “shopping
well.” Promoting consumption serves to distract audiences from the exploitations and
inequities of global industry, legitimizing neoliberal capitalism (Boykoff & Goodman
2009; Kapoor 2013; Rasmussen & Richey 2012; Street 2012).
To connect with celebrity causes on many issues, digitally connected fans are invited
to click website buttons to indicate their connections and interests. Some groups then
use the numbers created by those clicking buttons to define membership in their organ-
izations, or to identify communities of those who share similar attitudes, such as poverty
being a bad thing. Slacktivism has been critiqued by UNAIDS and others as not repre-
senting actively engaged advocacy but instead invoking temporary actions with limited
consequences, easing the guilt of privileged classes when faced with the realization that
so many others live with so little.
Global civic engagement in development may be helped by collective action, but only
if directed towards understanding and resolving the underlying causes of global con-
cerns. Global development is constrained by the resurrection of celebrities as heroes in
classic rescue narratives, contributing to the idea that individual consumption and lim-
ited responses are sufficient. These constraints limit parameters of debate, marginalizing
celebrities such as Harry Belafonte when they question U.S. political leadership on
imperialist actions. Future research can contribute to opening this debate to include
questions concerning the reasons for global inequity, as well as different approaches
toward resolution.

References
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21, 2012.
Cooper, A. F. (2008). Celebrity Diplomacy. Boulder: Paradigm.
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Further Reading
Brockington, D. (2014). Celebrity Advocacy and International Development. Oxford: Routledge.
Enghel, F. & Wilkins, K. (eds.) (2012). Communication, Media and Development: Problems and
Perspectives. Nordicom. Special Issue.
Gumucio-Dagron, A. & Tufte, T. (eds.) (2006). Communication for Social Change. Anthology: Historical
and Contemporary Readings. South Orange, NJ: Communication for Social Change Consortium.
Melkote. S. (ed.) (2012). Development Communication in Directed Social Change: A Reappraisal of Theory
and Practice. Singapore: AMIC.
Wilkins, K., Tufte, T., & Obregon, R. (eds.) (2014). Handbook of Development Communication and Social
Change. IAMCR Series. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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 13
RELATIONBITS: YOU,
ME AND THE OTHER
Ana María Munar and Richard Ek

Time magazine captured the hype of the social media revolution when it, in 2006,
announced YOU as the person of the year. This choice acknowledged the impact of
millions of people who were now able to share and consume online content. YOU
became a celebratory example of the ideological discourse that dominated the expansion
of social media towards the end of the 2000s. This ideological discourse, which still
maintains a dominant position, combines features of technopian (Kozinets 2008) and
libertarian social imaginations. Web 2.0 was portrayed as the new democratic frontier;
as the arena that could foster the wisdom of the crowds (Keen 2007); as the place where
identities could be reconfigured and reborn; as a plethora of fora for self-determination
and freedom. Online communities were promoted as a means to solve democratic defi-
cits and revitalize the public sphere (Dahlberg 2007). Virtual worlds were conceived of
as separated from physical ones, as immaterial spheres of communication floating in
space that could erase frontiers of personal, social and geographical character. A Utopian
vision that borrowed elements of a science fiction imaginary, like in a futuristic dream,
virtual worlds were there to provide the ultimate freedom from the constraints of bodies,
materialities, socio-cultural structures and geography. For “seizing the reins of the global
media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and
beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you”
(Grossman 2006).
This chapter questions this ideological discourse which builds upon two popular
beliefs: firstly, that digital mediated communication, including social media, is a ques-
tion about the self-directed relationship between an individual and a set of technological
tools and platforms, and secondly, that media, in this case digital media, are something
immaterial. We discuss how multiple agents (corporations, administrators, legal sys-
tems) and multiple “stuff” (materialities, bodies, places) (Miller 2010) are present in
such a relationship. There is no virtuality without a physical and material dimension.
There is no I or YOU without the presence of many OTHERS, those being an audi-
ence, the technical expert systems that maintain, develop and profit from our virtual
communication, or those that are excluded from digital worlds. Just as the earlier stages
of economic science were dominated by an overall belief in the utility maximizer homo
economicus, so is the analysis of digital worlds equally dominated by an ontology of the
individual utility maximizer consumer (Munar, Gyimóthy, & Cai 2013). This onto-
logical dominance has fostered a narrow understanding of digital media to say the least.
 MUNAR AND EK

Social media do not tell a story about a relationship between an individual and an
immaterial virtual world; the story is not even about millions of individuals having
personal relationships to a multitude of virtual worlds. The world of relationbits is a
much more crowded affair.
The discussion of this crowed affair is structured through three sections. “YOU” deals
with the expansion of user-generated content and its digital exploitation; it challenges
democratic narratives of new media and explores online orchestration and control;
“ME” examines the theme of digital identities and embodied cognition; and, finally,
“THE OTHER” explores the theme of knowledge production and what is absent in
digital studies. The theoretical discussions are exemplified through empirical studies
from the world of tourism. The digital tourist is conceived here as an archetype of the
hyper-mobile virtual consumer. Tourism can be seen as “the ethnography of modernity”
(MacCannell 1999: 5) and it is also a practice that increasingly becomes “the norm”
rather than the exception, as “for an increasing number [of tourists], the ordinary life is
an ‘interlude’ located between two nonordinary unboundednesses” (Jafari 1987: 159).
The digital tourist represents the sublimation of the citizen limited by territoriality,
rights and duties. This ideal figure is a surplus of desires, self-representations and sym-
bols, iconic performances of market values, and consumption without political
consequence.

YOU: Digital Exploitation, Glocalization

and Orchestration
As celebrated by Time magazine, YOU refers to the expansion of user-generated content
(UGC). UGC is at the core of what has been termed the Web 2.0 revolution. It entails
the aggregation and leveraging of users’ contributions on the web resulting in the digital
transformation of cultural objects: text, sounds and images (Poster 2006). The impor-
tance of UGC is evident in the fact that a number of companies which intensively use
Web 2.0 tools are already among the sites most visited by internet users and also among
the top brands worldwide (e.g. Facebook, YouTube). The dominance of YOU is at the
core of the myth of the individualization of virtual worlds. This myth is reflected in the
influential thesis of Manuel Castells:

[T]he World Wide Web, a flexible network of networks within the Internet,
where institutions, businesses, associations and individuals create their own
“sites” on the basis of which everybody with access can produce her/his/its
homepage made of a variable collage of text and images . . . On the basis of
these groupings individuals and organizations were able to interact meaningfully
on what has become, literally, a World Wide Web of individualized, interactive
communication.
(Castells, 1996: 335; emphasis added)

A key concept of Castells’ theories is the idea of a self-directed connectivity which

allows any person to connect to the web and publish his or her own information. Self-
directed connectivity is a tool for social organization, collective action and meaning
(Castells 2001). According to him, virtual communities support free and non-
hierarchical communication and a key assumption is that these platforms should be
based on the free exchange of ideas. Besides self-directed connectivity, the myth of

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individualization is also linked to the emergence of the “Pro-Am”. The term “Pro-Am”
appeared in the pamphlet entitled The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts Are
Changing Our Economy and Society, written by Leadbeater and Miller (2004). According
to their analysis:

[I]n the last two decades a new breed of amateur has emerged: the Pro-Am,
amateurs who work to professional standards. ( . . . ) The Pro-Ams are
knowledgeable, educated, committed and networked by new technology. The
twentieth century was shaped by large hierarchical organisations with
professionals at the top. Pro-Ams are creating new, distributed organisational
models that will be innovative, adaptative and low-cost.

This definition is a good example of what Keen denominates “The Cult of the Amateur’
(Keen, 2007). The myth of individualization understands the Web as a new frontier of
communication dominated by free individuals and Pro-Ams. This myth is further linked
to the liberal individualist democratic narrative of the Internet, which sees the Web as
a free marketplace of individual ideas and interests (Dahlberg 2007). This technopian
vision plays an active role in the maintenance of the dream of a democratic and person-
alized Web. This myth helps to hide two crucial facts behind the expansion and
popularity of UGC: first, user-generated content is a core resource that allows digital
exploitation, the commercialization of virtual relationships and the capitalist expansion
of social media corporations; second, personal agency and self-determination are delim-
ited by the specifications and properties of digital technologies (Baym 2010).
Communicative acts and social interactivity online are tailored and orchestrated
(Munar 2013). Instead of the “enlightened” user portrayed by Leadbeater and Miller,
Keen critically describes Web 2.0 and the wisdom of the crowds as “an endless digital
forest of mediocrity” (2007: 3) and the new Internet economy as driving on an endless
desire for personal attention expressed in the “cult of self-broadcasting” (2007: 7).
Keen denounces the way in which the logic of the algorithm and the database has
come to represent human wisdom, but what is also relevant is the fact that this “collec-
tive intelligence” made of personal contributions is a capital asset for the benefit of
major IT firms. The process towards an increased commercialization of new media has
been described as social media exploitation (Andrejevic 2011). It is characterized by the
transformation of social and emotional resources into tradable capital. Through partici-
pation in new media, a digitally-enabled human has accessed the possibility of gaining
digital capital and has, at the same time, become digital capital herself. This possibility
entails gains in social reputation, cultural knowledge, emotional influence and eco-
nomic advantages, but also increased control and exploitation of the personal sphere.
This process can be seen as that of a separation in which previously non-tradable areas
of the life-world (such as personal face-to-face communication about travel experiences)
become assets in the process of production. Thanks to digitization, what previously were
private social experiences of knowledge sharing are now transformed into global data-
bases of consumer information managed and analyzed by firms and organizations. This
results in the establishment of new property rights on user-generated content, rights
which benefit social media firms. Related sites are not only public spaces for dialogue,
they are big business! YouTube is a media-sharing channel for tourists and organizations
alike, and it is increasingly being used to promote destinations. Social network sites such
as Facebook have both a communicative and a commercial dimension, with users

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constantly being exposed to advertising and with information about users transformed
into a global market information database.
An example of social media exploitation is the review site TripAdvisor. Thanks to
e-reviews, tourists have become reflexive co-creators of heritage experiences and thereby
empowered agents of interpretation, but, at the same time, these digitalized interpreta-
tions have become capital assets for social media firms (Munar and Ooi 2012). Tourists’
contributions are tailored, ranked, stored and analyzed. Because of the “invisibility” of
the content’s gatekeepers, tourists increasingly communicate emotions and feelings, for
example, through immediate exclamations of pleasure or displeasure, the use of smileys,
like-button signs, etc. Such expressions also communicate an emotional sense of honesty
and help to maintain the illusion of personalization and user sovereignty. However,
TripAdvisor is far from being an open public sphere of free communication. Tourists’
online conversations and electronic word-of-mouth act as market agents. They can
change the credibility of different information sources (Litvin, Goldmsith, & Pan 2008)
and the perception of specific advertisements, and affect online information search pat-
terns (Huang, Chou, & Lin 2010). TripAdvisor provides millions of reviews by users and
is at the same time a sales channel and advertising platform for tourism firms.
Despite the promises of participation by these media, social media administrators use
interface design and regulations to limit the autonomy of the user, to tailor communica-
tive practices and to shape the horizon of communication. Online behavior is orches-
trated, pushed, transformed and molded, not by free-individuals interacting in neutral
spaces, but by the socio-technical platforms that are embedded in specific technical
cultures. For example, on TripAdvisor, tourists openly discuss their opinions on tourism
products but are not allowed to question pre-established rating categories and typologies.
Relationships are instantly created and dismantled. While traditional communities rely
on personal identities, anonymous reviewers decouple their identities from their reviews.
Fake reviews or misinformation do not necessarily entail penalties for the contributors
or the administrators of the sites. In user-generated reviews, the richness of social and
personal cues is poor. The terms of use of the social network Facebook also limit the type
of communication among users. For example, the site prohibits nudity or drug consump-
tion in visual content (Pariser 2011). However, casual sex, binge drinking, drug use and
other prohibited behavior are relevant practices of some tourism experiences (Sönmez
et al. 2006; Uriely and Belhassen 2006). Tourists sharing experiences on social media
sites conform to communicative limitations. These technologies incorporate new rules
and frameworks that limit what can be represented and discussed. The tailoring of
tourist communicative practices often enhances a sanitized, non-conflictive and techno-
expressive vision of tourism.
In techspressive ideological positions, the supreme good is the achievement of
individual pleasure through technology (Kozinets 2008). Contemporary tourism self-
expression increasingly depends on the use of social media technology. Social media
represents touristic cultures which are young, cool, liberating and creative. Thanks to
technology, tourists can achieve higher levels of emotional engagement. Discourses in
this field are dominated by the “ME-tourist,” a tourist who seeks to maximize pleasure,
fun and self-expression through the customization of ever-new and unique travel experi-
ences. Munar and Ek (2013) explain this in their metaphor of the tourist-light:

IT-savvy tourists blend the lifestyles of sensualists and specialists (Habermas,

1989) in one singular subject: the specialist–sensualist digital tourist-light. The

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tourist-light is an iconic representation of the overlapping of the cultural/

aesthetic and the commercial. The “light” virtual tourism socio-economic
structure reproduces itself by demanding newer, more intense, and individually
tailored experiences and products. Social media allow tourists to be socially and
emotionally present, although physically absent; they provide the promise of
influence without consequence [ . . . ] The virtual media system in which this
specialist–sensualist tourist operates is in these studies not a public sphere of
deliberation but a marketplace. The specialist lifestyle seeks gains in personal
reputation and these are typically promoted through techno-meritocratic
systems of rewards and rankings aimed at inducing expertise and merit. Such
systems are often embedded in the design of specific types of social media sites
(e.g. review sites). (Munar, 2010; Stringam, Gerdes, & Vanleeuwen, 2010)
[ . . . ] The tourist-light represents the triumph of hedonism.

Besides the barriers set up by the administrators of the sites, Internet companies such as
Google, Facebook and Yahoo are increasingly accused of acting as gatekeepers of Web
content thanks to the use of personalized filters that show the Internet what these com-
panies believe users want to see (Pariser 2011). These filters provide the type of
information that supports users’ previously-established interests and views, acting as a
conservative tool which makes it more difficult to access challenging viewpoints differ-
ent from the users’ cultural background. Commercial sites adopt social media tools to
expand the touristic marketplace. Popular sites such as hotels.com or expedia.com com-
bine traditional e-commerce features with user-generated reviews and use these reviews
as promotional tools on their sites. These sites’ financial results show that social media
are not only platforms for the free exchange of ideas and personal empowerment, but,
increasingly, very profitable businesses (Buss and Strauss 2009). Commercialization ten-
dencies are enhanced by the trend of linking e-commerce channels to social media
platforms. Major virtual communities aim to transform their users into buyers and sellers
and, for example, consumer-to-consumer e-commerce is already the most successful
e-commerce business model in China, while Facebook and Twitter are used by airlines
as sales channels (Hvass and Munar 2010).
Additionally, far from being a global individualized phenomenon, review-making is a
glocalized cultural practice. While online media have the semblance of global culture,
the interaction in virtual forums is embedded in localized socio-cultural practices and
circumstances. For example, foreign tourists reviewing heritage sites such as the
Acropolis in Greece and the Forbidden City in China pay a lot of attention to the prac-
ticalities of travel, providing helpful tips to other tourists with similar cultural
backgrounds, while concerns about local communities or the residents of the place are
practically missing (Munar and Ooi 2012). A study of tourist bloggers in India revealed
how tourists’ blogging focused on the negative aspects of life in India, disapproving of
different cultural views on sexual relations and gender, or criticizing a cultural encounter
with the host community (Enoch and Grossman 2010).
The relevance of socio-cultural backgrounds becomes even more evident in the case
of conflictive heritage sites. One of the issues dealt with by the virtual tourist commu-
nity is the touristification of Ground Zero. A reviewer, dsw from Toronto, voiced
concerns about touristification, with the heading: “Ground Zero unfortunately now a
tourist money trap!” Tourism is seen as having a corrupting influence. There seem to be
tacit “dos and don’ts” for a memorial site like Ground Zero. What is acceptable and

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unacceptable is negotiated online. For instance, StickyNic from the UK declared that
the site was “Not a tourist attraction” (July 8, 2005) (Ooi and Munar 2013).
Similar conflicts among different fan tribes with different ideological preferences were
also observed by Gyimóthy (2013) in her study of the online community of the Roskilde
Festival, a Danish music festival established in 1971 that currently attracts over 130,000
attendees every year. Similar to the Woodstock festival in the US, the essence of
Roskilde Festival is related to ideologies born and cultivated in the 1970s (solidarity,
rock and roll, liberal attitudes to sex and boundary-crossing festivities). In this case, the
conflict shows the different ideological views of fan groups regarding the increased pro-
environmental focus of the festival:

[A] symbolic explosion takes place chaining further on the same theme and
highlighting a clear disagreement in the fan community:
“How about putting the energy produced by dancing festival guests into good
use [link to website]. Join the co-creation of Audience Energy!” (11:13 Roskilde
Festival)
“Use the money on some music instead :-)” (12:29 MBR)
“More rock n’ roll, less Greenpeace bullshit. I’m sick and tired of all that
stuff. It is not rock n’ roll.” (12:53 FBF)

The excerpts above show different fantasy themes emerging, highlighting

contested notions about the raison d’être of the Festival. The discussion starts
with the reiteration and re-enchantment of the inherited rhetorical vision of a
solidaristic and sustainable event (by actualizing it through the cues of organic
beer, concerns about the future, charity event, putting dance energy to good
use), which is directly disapproved of by a cheeky fan. In his view, pro-
environmental activities are developed at the expense of the musical program,
even though the festival claims that there is no irreconcilable conflict between
the two.
(Gyimóthy 2013: 67)

Sense-making of digital communication is not a self-directed individual affair.

Communication happens “in-place,” “in-culture” and “in-body.” The conflictive dia-
logue experienced in this online community only makes sense if it is contextualized
through the lenses of the historical evolution of the festival and a Danish socio-cultural
and political context. As explained by Gyimóthy, in this discussion “‘Greenpeace’ is
symbolically reassigned from meaning rebellious environmental activism practiced by a
minority group to signifying actual governmental priorities on sustainable development.
Hence, the discussion reflects a contemporary debate in Danish society where green is
mainstreamed by the political majority” (2013: 67).

ME: Embodiment, Technogenesis and the

Art of Becoming
Philosophy in the Flesh is the title of an inspiring book written by philosophers George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999). Through their analysis of language and the power of
the metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson show how the human mind is embodied and how
“Thought requires a body—not in the trivial sense that you need a physical brain to

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think with, but in the profound sense that the very structure of our thoughts comes from
the nature of the body,” and so do our relations to materialities and technical worlds.
Technology happens in the flesh. Our fears and passions of technology, our addictions
and our troubles adapting to virtual platforms, are embodied. It is also our thesis that
this cognitive flesh/this body is not alone. Bodies are embedded in material worlds, and
therefore the understanding of the virtual cognitive and digitally-enacted cultures
depends on the understanding of the bodily relationship to the material world of tech-
nologies (the design, the affordances, the access to and the ownership of technological
tools). Challenging a conceptual division between mind and body as separate entities,
the idea of embedded cognition claims that human language and actions are bodily
embedded and enacted, and that the affordances and attributes of objects in the envi-
ronment support and extend memory, idea production and complex thinking (Hutchings,
cited in Hayles 2012: 92–93). Additionally, embedded cognition acknowledges that a
large part of the process of thinking does not take place at the level of the conscious
mind (or self-awareness) but at the level of the non-conscious and unconscious (Hayles
2012). The theory of embedded cognition is closely related to contemporary technogen-
esis. The idea of technogenesis posits a strong link in the adaptation of technics and
humans. Hayles (2012) argues that thanks to this dynamic interplay, late-modern socie-
ties are experiencing changes in cognitive modes. Technogenesis relates to the “dynamic
interplay between the kinds of environmental stimuli created in information-intensive
environments and the adaptive potential of cognitive faculties in concert with them”
(Hayles 2012: 97).
Tourists use social media to construct their digital identities. Often, discussions of
digital identities tend to maintain two simplistic and oversimplified positions (Cover
2014), the first being the popular belief that individuals are just expressing their identities
online through UGC. In this case, social media is perceived as a neutral space, a mirror
in which people can reflect their true selves. According to this position, tourists use social
media to express their “real” and “true” tourism experiences, but they may be at risk of
disclosing too much information and allowing intrusions in their privacy. The second
position is a belief in the inherent opposition between the real and the virtual, where the
real identity is maintained by the individual while the constructed identity is presented
on the social media sites. It is a reversed Picture of Dorian Gray in which the mediated,
portrayed and staged identity is a fake “me” while the physical body contains, and also
hides, the real “me.” In this case there is the “real” tourist acting in the “real” world and
the “constructed” digital tourist present in virtual spaces. In both positions there is a
belief in individuals having pre-existing identities (outside of technology) as if “the very
process of identity construction, constitution and formation ceases the moment one sits
down at the computer” (Cover 2014: 58). Instead, the acts, behaviors and possibilities of
technology constitute an essential part of the making of identity. The art of becoming or
the making of the “self” is a performance in which technology plays an active role, not as
separated from the “real” but as embodied, and as an essential part of what exists:

The tourist is different with a smartphone in her hand; the smartphone is

different with her holding it. She is another subject because she holds the
smartphone; the smartphone is another subject because it has entered into a
relationship with her; the social world is different because they have entered
this relationship with one another.
(Paraphrasing Latour, 1999 in Munar & Gyimóthy 2013: 245–246)

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Equally, the cultural constitutions of identity that take place in and through virtual
worlds do not happen in a vacuum. We should not only examine how does the sharing
of tourists’ travel photos takes place but how it “feels” to be invited to take a selfie with
somebody, or to look at the selfies of others. How does one cope with the stress of email
and internet connection while trying to escape from the pressures of daily life and work?
There is a need to shift the focus of analysis from what technological tools mean or how
they are designed to an examination of the being, feeling and bodily impacts of these
technologies and materialities.

THE OTHER: Materialities, Topologies and the

Absence of the Presence-Absent
The YOU and ME express an understanding of digital social communication and the
world that combines standpoints from several ontological positions. The world is filled
with acting subjects—people—communicating with each other through technical
devices and artifacts that are neatly ordered as technology. The subject is conceptualized
as an autonomous agent, ontologically taken for granted and a Cartesian figure. This
ontological figure is situated in the world through his or her body, with a mind and a
consciousness that is not necessarily bound in the body, while technology appears—
ontologically speaking—identifiable as material devices. YOU and ME are modernistic
in essence (even if both reflect a mixture of rationalist and empiricist understandings of
the world), based on normative and powerful dichotomies like subject–object, nature–
culture, self–other, in which one part of the dichotomy is implicitly or explicitly the norm
and the other part is a submissive other. Even if these dichotomies have been decon-
structed and criticized for decades (for instance Haraway 1991; Latour 1993) they still
remain strong, dominant assumptions about how the world is ordered and how the world
functions. The main consequence (of interest here) is that as a result of this particular
worldview the phenomenon of digital media (with its culture and sociality) is defined and
understood through the marginalization and the invisibility of THE OTHER (Law 2004).
What is made visible, understood and defined, on the one hand, and what is made
invisible, unknown and irrelevant, on the other, is based on the principle of the
metaphysics of presence. This principle is perhaps the main target of poststructuralist
deconstruction and phenomenological and anti-foundational philosophy (Heidegger
1997; Derrida 1998). Contemporary social sciences have continued to problematize
these neat and tidy Cartesian (and Newtonian) ontologies. The development of mobile
technologies (e.g. smart phones or tablets) has, for instance, unfolded a need to address
the enmeshment of corporeality and materiality as well as co-presence, mobility, and
place. This examination takes place through a post-phenomenological register which
stresses the peripatetic, the haptic and the relational spatialities as “it is no longer pos-
sible to consider space in terms of dichotomized categories of here/there, near/far,
personal/private, inner/outer or presence/absence” (Richardson 2007: 202; see also
Wilken & Goggin 2012). These ubiquitous technologies blur the traditional touristic
distinctions between home and away; between daily life and non-ordinary life. Actor-
Network Theory (ANT) has concentrated on scrutinizing and dissolving ontological
distinctions as the social and material, the human and non-human. Technology is no
longer the black box of technical magnificence but the inherent components of hetero-
geneous networks or assemblages that, in practice, as networks, dissolve the distinctions
of the Cartesian worldview (Latour 2005).

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In particular, Annemarie Mol and John Law (Mol & Law 1994; Law and Mol 2001)
have approached this topic with a spatial sensitivity (Ek 2012). Through the metaphysics
of presence in modernity, what is visible and geographically present has been systemati-
cally prioritized, in comparison to what is invisible and geographically absent. Geographical
proximity, presence, and tangibility have thus been a key factor in the recognition of what
is important and not. The representation of this version of the world, this ontological
single version of reality or “gold-standard” (Law 2004: 53), can be described as topo-
graphical (topos = place and graph = write, i.e., representations of place/the world, the
traditional world map being the paradigmatic example). But this topographical version of
the world is only one of several possible ways of approaching the world and the mess of the
world. There are several social topologies, and, methodologically speaking, they present
different versions of the world as they make some elements, events and processes invisible
while other becomes visible. It is like the visual apparatus of the extraterrestrial hunter in
the film series Predator: thermal vision, infrared vision, etc.
Mol and Law (1994) focus on the social topology of fluidity, an understanding of the
world that stresses the changeability of research objects, boundaries and border. Variation
and transformation is here a precondition for the sustainability of the networks and
assemblages that constitute “society”. This social topology challenges more Cartesian-
based topologies of the region and the network—topologies that present a more static
and stratified version of the world (coherent geographical areas and stable networks
overstretching physical distances). Law and Mol (2001), on the other hand, present the
social topology of fire, yet another understanding of the world that favors change and
instability. Fire spatiality has a never-changing shape which comes out of the interaction
and tension between the forces and variables that are present and those that are absent
(but nevertheless still are a condition for the existence of what is present).
What is absent (an invisible other) for YOU and ME, but nevertheless necessary for
the existence of digital communication and popular virtual worlds of social interaction,
we argue, is the materiality of the information technology devices and artifacts and all
the labor of mining the metals and refining the chemicals that are used in a common
laptop (an artifact that contains all metals listed in the periodic table). The physical and
metaphysical presence and existence of a digital culture of communication centered on
YOU and ME is based on the invisible other (present-absent, in the meaning that it
makes a difference of the configuration of what is present but absent according to the
logics of the metaphysics of presence). The “other” is the village that gets its ground
water polluted because the mining company disregards the safety precautions of the
mining process (Ek 2013) or the workers that try to find precious metals by picking away,
without protection, at computers full of leaded glass discarded by First World users
(Miller 2006). And, as Lisa Nakamura indicates:

In contrast with the Internet’s early claims to transform and eliminate both race
and labor, digital communication technologies today racialize labor, employing
‘virtual migrants’ who perform tasks such as help-line staffing, [and] online
gamers who sell their virtual gold and leveled-up avatars to busy American and
Europeans to use in MMORPGs.
(Nakamura 2014: 48)

This type of labor is racialized as being Asian, abject and despised. In a similar way, in
the world of tourism there is a predominance of the imaginary of the served that avoids

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and silences the servers. The virtual world of tourism is dominated by a “tourist central-
ity” in which the opinions and needs of local communities are practically missing. This
is a virtual reproduction of the racialization that characterizes labor conditions in several
key tourism industries, such as the cruise industry (Wood 2000).
What is present-absent is lacking in the discourse of YOU and ME, and it is not
addressed to a sufficient degree by the influential voices on digital social media,
particularly not in the field of tourism social media research. We found this not only
epistemologically naïve but also ontologically troublesome, as the political nature of
digital media is systematically neglected. Ontology is always political; ignoring the polit-
ical nature of interpretations of the world is a political choice (Munar and Ek (2013).
The spatial representations of the research community are not an exception from this.
Research on these topics is a part of the production of space (Lefebvre 1991) and, con-
sequently, inherently political.
Perhaps it is a paradox—or perhaps it is totally logical—that the tendency to focus on
YOU and (to some degree) ME, but to disregard THE OTHER grows stronger as rela-
tionbits expand and the more interwoven and connected people become. In this chapter
we have addressed these social (and in some regard, anti-social) trajectories in digital
culture using tourist social media as a case of exemplification. We have emphasized that
digital communication is material and physical and argued that digital communication
is not an affair between an autonomous user and technological tools and platforms (as
indicated in the word “interface”) but a societal affair that includes a plethora of
OTHERS, whose work and absence makes the digital communication possible in the
first hand (“Interfaces” in the literal sense of the word). The otherness of digital com-
munication needs to be admitted more widely in research, as the solipsistic tendencies
of YOU and ME entail limited and biased political, ideological and philosophical under-
standing of the world with very tangible implications.

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 14
STUDYING CHANGE
IN POPULAR
CULTURE
A “Middle-Range” Approach
Stuart Cunningham and Jon Silver

The broad architecture of approaches in media, communication and cultural studies to

the analysis of popular cultural phenomena is by now well established. The main struts
are: political economy of industry and firm structure (e.g. corporate power, state regula-
tion); production cultures, organizations and processes (e.g. conditions of labor,
production regimes); texts and content (e.g. genre, style, innovation or progressivity);
and audiences/readers/users (e.g. active audiences, user agency, thresholds or indicators
of popularity). What is hotly contested in the discipline field is how to account for
change in popular cultural industries. This is especially the case in debates around
the rates and effects of digitally-influenced change. Indeed, a central issue in our disci-
pline field today is the proposition that we are in the middle of a rapid process of change
which is seeing established or “old” media being challenged for primacy in audiences’
and users’ attention by new modes and types of production, dissemination and display.
Are we “both witnesses to and participants in the largest, most fundamental transfor-
mation in the history of the media since the advent of typeface, the moving image, and
terrestrial broadcast transmission” (Levin 2009: 258), or is the evidence for the sup-
planting of old by new “sparse and thin” (Miller 2010: 10), ignoring the way the new is
folded into the old, adding to rather than killing it off? In her magisterial work The
Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979) points out that Europe
was relatively stable in 1450, before the Gutenberg revolution, and was relatively stable
in 1550, after it. But in the intervening decades there was chaos and great change in
values and institutions and much experimentation. Historians, she says, have ignored
the transitional times.
This chapter reviews the capacity of the discipline field to account for the velocity
and quality of digitally-driven transformations, while making a case for a “middle range”
approach that steers between unbridled optimism (“all-change”) and determined skepti-
cism (“continuity”) about the potential of such change. The chapter focuses on online
screen distribution as a case study, considering the evidence for, and the significance of,
 CU N N I N G H A M A N D S I LV E R

change in industry structure and the main players, how content is produced and by
whom, the nature of content, and the degree to which online screen distribution has
reached thresholds of mainstream popularity.
Middle-range approaches, drawing their original inspiration from sociologist Robert
K Merton, “fill in the blanks between raw empiricism and grand or all-inclusive theory”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton; see Merton 1949). In film studies,
David Bordwell and Noel Carroll (1996), in taking issue with “grand theories” (post-
structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism) that operate as doctrines
and produce predetermined analytical outcomes, exemplify such an approach. In media
studies, work such as that of Chin-Chuan Lee (1979) broke down the “grand theory” of
media imperialism, arguing that the presumption that media power and influence fol-
lows economic power and is dependent on it is not borne out on a case-by-case basis. In
a similar vein, Michael Curtin (2003) developed his “media capital” concept to sit
between the totalizing explanatory schema often seen in political economy of media,
and traditional area studies approaches which repetitively iterate empirical examples of
country-specific trends in international media, demonstrating in the process that there
is a plurality of media capitals, rather than a fixed core-periphery model of the spatializa-
tion of media power.

Business Control and Strategy

Analyses of the rate of change of the membership of the Fortune 500 (the largest US
companies) show clearly that the velocity of turnover has increased as time has passed
(Strangler and Arbesman 2012). In contrast, there has been remarkable stability in busi-
ness dominance in the screen industry. Of the original eight companies that dominated
film (Paramount, MGM, Fox, Warner Brothers, RKO, Universal, Columbia and UA)
during the first half of the 20th century, only RKO fell from grace, replaced within the
oligopoly by Disney during the 1950s. MGM-UA slipped from the annual list of top 10
studio-distributors only during the 2000s. The oligopoly in broadcast television, while
somewhat shorter-lived, is even tighter. CBS, NBC and ABC have dominated the TV
landscape for almost 70 years.
The Majors have adapted to waves of significant change in regulatory structure, tech-
nology, and taste across more than a century, reforming into corporate structures which
now have re-established a form of de facto vertical integration through their parent
conglomerates: NBC-Universal; Viacom-Paramount-CBS; Time-Warner; Disney-ABC
and Fox. However, they are now confronted by arguably unprecedented challenges.
“Continuity” scholars point to top-line trend data, such as rising cinema attendances
globally and research showing more people watching television than ever before. The
fragmentation of once-stable viewership means that TV’s splintering-but-still-big audi-
ence is increasingly valuable to advertisers. While it is very difficult to gather a mass
audience in any kind of media, mobile or otherwise, broadcast TV can still draw nightly
audiences of over 100 million in the US. But the core North American cinema box
office is kept high by increasing ticket prices, and the cable TV industry, faced with
escalating cord-cutting, responds with subscription increases which, arguably, only con-
tribute to further rates of exit.
But there is now evidence that firms that have long dominated the mass media may now
face the most serious challenge in their history. Hollywood tried and failed to establish
viable online distribution businesses for over a decade from 1997. The challengers are

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outsiders, most of which are much larger companies with far larger resources, employing
IT industry business models rather than Hollywood’s premium-content and pricing mod-
els. The fundamental difference between Google/YouTube, Apple’s iTunes, Amazon,
Yahoo!, Facebook and Hollywood’s incumbents – one which optimizes their chances of
being able to formulate successful business models and better monetize screen content
online – is that they are Internet “pure-play” companies that already had or have been able
to develop a critical mass of online customers and possess extensive data on their past
online search behavior and purchasing habits. In addition, they have years of experience
marketing directly to their customer base, targeting those most likely to be interested in a
particular genre or program based on web analytics of each individual’s past behavior and
any product feedback that they may have provided. The fact they have been prepared to
work around the content blocking tactics of the Majors by commissioning new content
has led to substantial change in the modes of presentation and distribution of content.
But there is also significant variety amongst the new players, and it is incumbent on
the analyst to differentiate carefully without assuming predictive powers. The threat to
the incumbents posed by Google’s video platform YouTube, by the Amazon/LoveFilm
platforms, and by Netflix, is real and present. Yahoo!Screen, Facebook and Apple (with
iTunes, Apple TV and the much-rumoured iTV) have developed strategies which could
see them also become major content players in the emerging mediascape of Internet-
delivered television. Intel and Microsoft are also investing heavily in establishing
content distribution capacity as television migrates online.
In terms of business strategy and revenue models, what Netflix, Amazon and Hulu
accomplished isn’t really fundamentally different than TV’s incumbents in terms of
production economics or even creative sensibility – the subscription VOD model is old
wine poured from newer (IPTV-delivered) bottles. That trend should be contrasted with
a lower-budget but more creatively diverse tier of advertising-supported online content
available from a wider range of sources either on YouTube or other Internet video-
sharing portals. They run the gamut from amateur creators you may have never heard of
(yet) to more professionally slick properties from outfits that may become the big media
companies of tomorrow.
Screen scholarship has tended to focus on incumbency and on continuity. According
to Perren and Petruska, most of the “limited number of scholarly studies of Hollywood
digital-distribution strategies thus far . . . have tended to focus predominantly on the con-
tinuities in business strategies and corporate practices across conglomerates” which tends
to play down the “widespread sense of chaos and confusion” (2012: 106) within the cita-
dels of media power. While there are major contributions to new cultures of viewership,
connection and co-creative participation (e.g. Lotz 2007, Bennett and Strange 2011,
Holt and Sanson 2013), there is little, yet, that brings to center stage the strategies of the
major corporate newcomers, including recent developments around online commissioned
content, TV-like scheduling, and multi-channel branding (although see Cunningham
and Silver 2013). Spirited defenses of the Hollywood majors like that of Eli Noam (2010),
based on the system’s “industrial efficiency” and premium content, need to be assessed in
the light of Hollywood having very little ownership stake in the new platforms.

Production Culture
Most studies of popular culture take its commonly large-scale commercial underpinnings
as a given and proceed to critique or affirm as the case, and position of the analyst,

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demands. The fact that new content production platforms such as YouTube and Amazon
Studios (and, to a lesser extent, other video-hosting platforms like Vimeo and Blip
Studios) are now systematically commercializing and seeking to professionalize previ-
ously amateur work brings a series of additional critical moves into play. The balance of
critical literature on YouTube, as by far the central site for this process, is suspicious of
its overall benefits to the broader creative community, especially when this community
is defined as an already self-identifying professional community. Aymar Jean Christian
(2011) makes this line of attack explicit: “The Problem of YouTube may be that the
effects of YouTube content creation strategies are to dampen professionalism, marginal-
ize it online, and make it more difficult for professional filmmakers to find their online
niche.” But there is a middle-range perspective that, steering between an overly celebra-
tory account of the democratizing, participative potential of social media as propounded
by a Clay Shirky (2008, 2010) and its equally extreme denigration at the hands of an
Andrew Keen (2007) or a Jaron Lanier (2010), attends to the complex logics of
professionalization YouTube is engendering. This takes the signaling behavior of popular
amateur YouTube video makers and provides highly competitive pathways to remunera-
tion through shares of advertising revenue: “the function of [open production] on
YouTube is not only or primarily aimed at an egalitarian and democratic culture of
production, but also to generate an entrepreneurial desire that is aligned with the com-
mercial interests of the company” (Jakobsson 2010: 116).
But YouTube has gone much further, commissioning content first within its Original
Channel Initiative and then with multi-channel networks (MCNs) that have grown
rapidly within the YouTube “eco-system”. The largest include Fullscreen, Big Frame,
Machinima, Maker, Defy Media, Stylehaul, CDS, BroadbandTV, Bent Pixels, Base 79,
Revision3 and IGN. As content aggregators, they seek to leverage scale advantages to
attract advertisers and provide support, education and marketing services for the array
of original content providers within their network. The MCN landscape is reminiscent
of the earlier days of online distribution – many struggle to monetize content within the
YouTube eco-system and it appears the less efficient MCNs will fail, some will merge to
gain further scale, some threaten to leave YouTube for hopefully “greener pastures” and
some will lose key content providers who are wooed away by the Majors to adapt their
programs for TV and cable (historically, the standard Hollywood studio modus operandi
when competitors emerge is to crush them, buy them or undermine them by cherry pick-
ing their best talent).
We have already noted the extent to which market-leading new platform providers
are outsiders, entering online content commissioning and distribution as Internet pure
play companies. The major MCNs vary in size and scale but our analysis of the back-
grounds of their founders and CEOs revealed that 14 out of the top 34 MCNs (in terms
of size, scale and popularity on YouTube), had no movie, TV or music industry experi-
ence so they were attitudinally unfettered by ingrained industry paradigms. The other
20 had top executives who had worked in content businesses, and several of these roles
were for independents, not the major studios.
Despite this evidence for greater diversity, it is notable how rapidly the new content
production environment has institutionalized along similar lines to the established TV
production culture. Both individual content creators – the YouTube Partners – and the
MCNs (who are like “mini majors” filtering, aggregating and packaging creative input
for distribution) are in an interdependent battle with a near-monopolist – YouTube –
over terms and conditions, revenue shares, and the pros and cons of this newly minted

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supply chain. As the creative community works through the advantages and
disadvantages of “working on YouTube’s farm” (Calcanis 2013), much of the analysis of
these emerging dynamics are found in online industry bulletins and blog posts rather
than in the academic literature. One producer is clear about the advantages of working
on the farm: the sheer scale and quality of resource (free, global, HD video hosting with
more than 1 billion users monthly, part of the largest advertising network in the world –
Google – plus in-depth audience analytics and expert executives). But he is equally clear
about the disadvantages: high costs, because YouTube takes a 45% cut of advertising
revenues and provides no marketing, so content creators relying solely on YouTube –
working essentially to burnish the YouTube brand – find it very hard to build a sustain-
able business.

Texts/Content
The strands of our discipline field’s attention to texts and content have come largely
from the literary traditions in which many academics were schooled before the consoli-
dation and establishment of the discipline as such. At times, the salience of this attention
has had to be defended (by, for example, McKee 2006) against those who might see it
as “nothing more than the trivial dissection of popular movies and television shows”
(Levin 2009: 259). But there has always been a tension between studying what Francis
Bonner (2003) calls “ordinary” television, on the one hand, and critical favorites and
fandom, according to whatever variety of critical taste, on the other. In their compre-
hensive review of Television Studies, Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz caution against
“unacknowledged biases regarding quality and/or to a sense that prime time matters
above all else,” leading to television studies “at times doggedly [clinging] to prime-time
television from the broadcast networks and a limited number of boutique channels”
(2012: 54–55). They also counsel a greater focus on the segmentation of content:
“Television studies will also need to respond to the dissemination of television via social
media by examining units smaller than the individual show that travel as such” and “If
textual analysis has expanded to encompass collections of texts in the form of genres, it
should also contract to make sense of segments.”
But these critical parameters require readjustment in approaching the new profes-
sionalizing, including commissioned, “born online” content. Our survey (Cunningham
and Silver 2013: 96) in late 2012 of programming being commissioned as original con-
tent by the major new platforms showed there is, without doubt, continuity. (We studied
280 samples of television-like, studio quality production, comprising 168 YouTube pro-
grams/channels and 112 non-YouTube programs/channels. The YouTube videos are
exclusively from its 100-channel major commissioning initiative in 2011. The rest are
profiled on the basis of their offering innovation in genre, content and/or participants.)
Entertainment webcasts were the most prevalent, followed by lifestyle shows, then com-
edy, sports, news and current affairs, including financial news. Long form drama series,
such as House of Cards or Orange Is the New Black – which have set the critics alight – are
a rare commodity, along with documentaries.
But if the genres are familiar, much else about the structure and modes of address of
online commercial content is experimental and in many ways innovative. Rather than
being approached as segmentation and redistribution of otherwise produced content,
almost all “born online” content is short-form by design and often of necessity, given
that increasingly the circumstances of consumption are interstitial and mobile.

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Moreover, the sheer vastness of this content universe (Fullscreen, just one of the top tier
MCNs, claims 15,000 channels, 200 million subscribers and 3+ billion monthly views)
makes the idea, canvassed by Gray and Lotz, that “[a]nother huge frontier for television
studies is simply to study much more television” (2012: 54), a truly Herculean task. The
job of accounting for the overall shape of this content universe may well need to await
its big data analyst – someone like a Franco Moretti (2013) for online content. In the
meantime, scholars need unapologetically to assess how value for audiences is being
created in the burgeoning villages of this vast city. Again, there is continuity across
incumbents and born online. In speaking of NBC’s “360-degree programming” Michael
Curtin and Jane Shattuc capture this with “[v]alue comes from super-serving a niche of
passionate customers” (2009: 177).
As critical humanists, popular culture scholars regard “value” as a super-charged
word. We will always problematize any equation of value only with monetization, and
seek to foreground pro-social values in research and analysis. The study of born online,
professionalizing content, however, is precisely a study of new strategies of
commercialization – in the case of YouTube, a study of extremely rapid commercializa-
tion from origins which most users can remember as a playful space of entirely amateur
user-generated content. What value is being created, and what values reinforced, as
YouTube first creates its Partnership Program and then commissions content in its
Original Channel Initiative? In the time-honored tradition of “critical favorites”, we
discuss three examples.
As we have seen in the previous section on Production Culture, there are all of the
tensions one would expect in the early start-up stage of new businesses. Integral to most
of these businesses, however, is the management of the transition from unremunerated
amateur to commissioned professional. One of the few detailed studies of this transition
tracks the trajectory of short-segment comedy Annoying Orange “from user-generated
content to television series and cultural phenomenon” (Morreale 2013). Intriguing the
analysis is, but the tone (“The case of Annoying Orange exemplifies the processes
whereby everyday prosumer content on the web becomes fodder for commercial media
and demonstrates how YouTube, while presenting itself as a site for participatory cul-
ture, has become an arm of traditional media,” 2013: 3) suggests that the transition
(inevitably?) involves compromised values and innovation deficit. These are assump-
tions that should be tested by the degree to which Annoying Orange creator Dane
Boedigheimer’s “super-serving” of his niche of “passionate customers” continues to suc-
ceed over time.
Not all commissioned content has been originally amateur. WIGS, or “Where It Gets
Interesting,” is a high-gloss premium YouTube channel created by Jon Avnet and
Rodrigo Garcia that produces short episodic films built around high-end female-driven
narratives and storylines developed in recognition that women over 25 were an under-
served demographic on YouTube. This emphasis extended to the recruitment of writers
and directors (of which more than half are women, compared to the five percent of
Hollywood films directed by women). The ability to attract both A- and B-list names at
minimal cost is a clear sign of the ability of the leading new players to challenge the cost
structure of premium TV programming, the idea being that “when you get one or two
big-name actors, it’s a snowball effect” (Acuna 2012). It is one of many examples of
going back to the future, with partner/sponsors Unilever, American Express and News
Corp (Acuna 2012) evoking 1950s retro TV sponsorship-as-funding arrangements.
What isn’t retro is the plan to produce daily and weekly content catered according to

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user comments, with instant feedback to shape the next content delivery (the mantra is
“No rules, no ratings guidelines, no boundaries”). The high quality of WIGS has enabled
it to emerge as the number one channel for scripted drama, prompting Avnet to ask
whether it is the “water cooler experience for the iPad generation” (Chmielewski and
Villarreal 2013).
In February 2012, FOX entered into a multiyear programming, marketing and distri-
bution partnership with WIGS, with the aim of generating new content that could also
be broadcast on TV. In June 2013 YouTube lifted its exclusive distribution rights on
WIGS, enabling FOX Broadcasting to widen WIGS’ availability, and the short episodic
content has now been serialized into TV-length formats on Hulu and Hulu Plus. YouTube
has outlined its support for content partners to distribute across multiple platforms on
the premise that partners’ ability to better popularize and monetize their content will
ultimately benefit YouTube.
Can a commercial platform provide the most efficient communication medium for
witnesses of human rights abuses? Witness and the Human Rights Channel is a test case.
The rapid growth of video-enabled mobile devices – especially in developing nations –
has enabled citizens operating at a grassroots level to highlight disadvantage, expose
corruption and abuse and to advance human rights to a potentially global audience with
levels of anonymity, security and freedom of expression previously unobtainable. Visual
media – especially documentary video – has proved crucial to human rights campaigns
in terms of raising awareness and resources, mobilizing publics, and circulating visual
evidence and personal testimony (Brough and Zhan 2013). A reduction in both dis-
semination and maintenance costs and the large potential audiences that may be found
on commercial platforms such as YouTube mean that advocacy groups continue to be
attracted to them – particularly when the core goals are increased visibility and mobili-
zation. This is despite potential setbacks, including reduced security for participants and
producers, questions about credibility, some loss of control over messaging (Brough and
Zhan 2013), and an over-reliance on the continued stewardship of commercial services
to store and support advocacy resources.

Audiences
By definition, popular culture studies must attend to thresholds of popularity. What
constitutes a “mainstream” audience in the transmogrifying field of online screen distri-
bution? How to avoid “Occidentalism” – making the West (actually, one part of it) a
metonym by default for the world? How to appropriately assess the agency of audiences,
particularly given the strong claims that have given rise to neologistic hymns to agency
such as the “produser” and “prosumer”?
Adopting the perspective of audience agency reminds us, if we needed it, that
peer-to-peer downloading, which is mostly piratic, has been the dominant, and highly
inventive, mode of “informal” screen distribution. Indeed, Lobato’s (2009) review of the
“politics of digital distribution” doubts the democratizing potential of formal online
distribution and any real diversification of film culture through it, directing our atten-
tion instead to the fact that the vast majority of online film consumption continues to
take place in the extralegal realm. But the beginnings and spread of successful legal
online enterprises may change this. Since the entry of Netflix and Spotify into Norway
in late 2012, piracy has declined by at least half due to the availability of legal alterna-
tives at reasonable price points (Curtis 2013).

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Accounting for audience activity has given rise to a rash of terms of variable analyti-
cal purchase: binge viewing, multi-tasking, audience fragmentation, cord cutting, and
connected viewing. But binge viewing is not especially new, and “water cooler TV” –
highly socially-mediated television viewing experiences – was arguably much stronger
before today’s radical audience fragmentation.
In studying major change in online distribution, it is impossible not to focus on the
US innovation hothouse, as that is where the major corporate and business strategy
struggles are taking place, and where the significant majority – but not all – of new
content providers are based. But very different conditions prevail elsewhere. Penetration
rates of Internet and broadband vary substantially across regions, while a minority (2.7
billion people; 37.8%) of the world’s population access the Internet. But extensive
broadband and mobile phone use has been a major trigger for vernacular and profes-
sionalizing content and communication in South Korea, China and Brazil. In the larger
markets of Northern Europe, Amazon/LoveFilm and Netflix enter as start-ups into com-
plex distribution environments with the strong presence of, for example, major public
broadcasters. Developments in China – particularly the merger of the two giant online
video operations Youku and Toudu – resist classic center-periphery explanations. It is
even arguably the case that Youku Originals provided YouTube with its commissioning
model.
Whilst it is not possible to directly compare rates of adoption of broadcast and cable
TV with current online distribution, the latter is achieving take-up rates roughly com-
parable to the early years of broadcast TV in the 1950s and DVD in 2000s. For example,
it took Netflix 6 years to develop a subscription base larger than canonical premium
cable brand HBO (31 million US subscribers to HBO’s 29 million in 2013). Research
company Sandvine reported in November 2013 that Netflix and YouTube together
accounted for over half of North America’s downstream Internet traffic (Netflix 31.62%
and YouTube 16.62%). And consumer costs for switching to online video/TV are much
lower. YouTube is free ad-supported viewing. Cord-cutters can subscribe to Netflix and
Hulu Plus for $16 per month and can also access premium content on a pay-per-view
basis via Apple TV or Roku streaming video players and have à la carte viewing for way
below the cost of a basic cable TV package with all of those unwanted bundled channels.

Conclusion
This chapter has focused on online screen distribution as a case in the study of fast-
moving, digitally-influenced change – a central concern of popular cultural studies
today. While we have found much to agree with in Gray and Lotz’s assertion that
“Television is neither “beating” nor “losing” to new media in some cosmic clash of tech-
nology; rather, television is an intrinsic part of “new” media” (2012: 3), we have
suggested that there is more at stake than the “continuity” school might lead us to
believe. Television as we know it is neither dead, nor dying, but neither is it the indis-
putably dominant popular cultural medium it has been for a good 50 years. Television is
being reinvented, but with significant differences and innovations.
With regard to ownership, control and business strategy, the new players we have
canvassed represent potentially epochal change in what we have noted as, historically,
remarkably stable oligopolies in film and television. Some of these new players massively
outrank in size and scale the companies which have run film and television. While their
revenue models, principally subscription VOD and advertising, are not new, the growing

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efficiency with which they are being implemented continues to grow steeply their rev-
enue base, although the “analogue dollars to digital cents” conundrum remains. Their
business strategies, on the other hand, are definitely undercutting “premium-content,
premium-pricing” Hollywood logics and the bulk bundling logics of cable.
The content genre may be familiar, but the structure of the content is often different –
the short form has been reinvented, and a voluminous range of content is being generated
by a significantly new range of providers. Many of the large claims concerning radically
different viewer/user behavior would not survive close analysis, but there can be no doubt-
ing the relative speed with which audiences are migrating to online distribution platforms
– where they are available – and the “born online” content which they often headline.

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 15
EXTERNALISM AND
LINKED BRAINS:
Popular Culture as a
Knowledge-Creating Deme
John Hartley

Externalism is a simple idea: it is that the individual brain is constituted in its networked
relationships with other brains and with extra-somatic knowledge (outside the body),
technologically stored in libraries, the internet, etc. The brain cannot be understood
behaviorally, by what it does as an isolated organ, or through methodological individu-
alism, which explains social phenomena by taking individual intentions, choices and
actions as their source, or by appeals to individual talent—genius, inspiration, imagina-
tion. It can be explained instead as an agent or ‘node’ in a complex communicative
network.
These days, that network is most extensive and inclusive via popular culture,
understood in both of its chief senses: the culture of the populace, i.e. everyday life and
practices; and popular culture as mediated semiosis, especially in commercial entertain-
ment. This chapter takes that inclusiveness a stage further, making the concept of
‘popular culture’ as extensive as possible, seeking to explain it by reference to the whole
population. In other words, where most ‘popular culture studies,’ including much of my
own work, take the term to be one of a pair, contrasted to high, elite, serious or intel-
lectual culture, this chapter makes no such concession. Instead, it takes popular culture
to be ‘the culture of the population’: everyone’s, everywhere, all the time. As a species,
across difference and diversity (indeed, the generator of these), what unifies us? The
answer is culture. What is culture for? The answer is to create groups that create and
extend knowledge – ideas, know-how, value (Hartley and Potts 2014). How does culture
work? The answer is . . . externalism, which can be understood as an evolved capability
of Homo sapiens.
Externalism may seem an abstract idea, not readily relevant to contemporary culture.
To make matters worse, it doesn’t conform to common-sense experience, which seems
clearly to demonstrate that individuals are indeed the source of ideas and author of their
own actions. But externalism is a big idea (Hermann-Pillath 2009)—one that can help
to explain both contemporary culture and individual experience much more convinc-
ingly than the guesswork, ideology and dogma that predominate at the moment. In order
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to understand popular culture in this sense, you may need first to be convinced that
externalism does connect with individual perception and, more importantly (in the
end), that individual perception itself needs to be explained in turn—and externalism
will do that. To minimize abstractions and to stay connected with human/cultural real-
ities, I will introduce the concept of externalism with two stories. One is a story of
singularity or individualism; the other a story of scale, or complex systems. Both are
equally improbable—probability (rather than essence) being one of the things that
externalism requires as part of its explanatory framework (Hartley 2012: 155–75).

Story 1: ‘Still Figuring It Out’

In 2008, Tavi Gevinson (aged 11) started her own fashion blog, Style Rookie. Its instant
popularity, with a reported 4 million readers, attracted fashion designers and magazines.
The New York Times reported that she “became the darling of those she’d revered”
(Schulman 2012). Gevinson’s resulting profile enabled her to gain paid work as a col-
umnist and subsequently to launch her own online teen magazine, Rookiemag.com.
Gevinson was an “entrepreneurial consumer” (Hartley & Montgomery 2009), continu-
ally switching between ‘audience’ and ‘entrepreneur’ in a career that combined her own
personal identity-formation (via blogging about her fashion-fanship), competitive sig-
naling of her expertise in novelty-choices (her fashionable taste and feminist viewpoint),
and entrepreneurial action to secure a new niche market in a desirable demographic (her
own, i.e., teen consumers)—all before she turned 16.
By that time, she had already pupated into an “online impresario,” the “Oracle of Girl
World” (The New York Times), touring the USA to promote her magazine, and—among
many other public activities—giving a well-crafted TEDx Teen talk, called “Still Figuring
It Out,” about “strong women characters.” This talk soon attracted over half-a-million
YouTube views, thousands of likes and hundreds of comments: it was a catalyst for “pub-
lic thought” (Hartley 2012: ch. 4).
The odds are obviously against any individual achieving all that, especially while still
a child. But improbability didn’t prevent it happening: this is a true story about individual
agency, and at the same time a fable of free enterprise in an “economy of attention”
(Lanham 2006). The Chicago Magazine commented:

Like any teenager, Tavi is still finding out who she is. But, unlike most 16-year-
old girls, she has an audience that’s interested in following her every step of the
way. She’s not a business-minded media mogul, but even she recognizes that her
voice—and the throngs of girls who are listening—is a force with incredible
potential. “Her business and commercial mind are still developing,” says her
father, Steve Gevinson.
(Knight 2012)

Individual agency, meaningfulness and enterprise, in a crowded marketplace of ideas and

fashions, produces a “voice” among “throngs of girls” and links them within an uncertain
environment in which the ‘agent’ in question is literally making herself up as she goes
along, and changing year by year, using the semiotic resources of the culture in which
she’s immersed, this being what popular culture is for. Because she was still a child,
observers were ready to emphasize that knowledge-creation is a continuing process,
incomplete even while bursting with “incredible potential.” Like any human who must

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understand the environment in which they live while living in it, she is analyzing and
being a teen at once: learning by doing. For Gevinson herself, ‘doing’ (unique, original
action) includes both copying (emulating forward-facing fashion) and social networking
(via blog, magazine, events, etc.), as well as organizing and initiating her various ven-
tures and developing her ideas in text. Combining Gevinson’s life-story with a readers’
network results in an innovative mode of social learning, itself a key component in the
evolution of childhood (Konner 2010: 350–1; 500–1). Thus, those who ‘follow’
Gevinson are also ‘doing’ social learning, both experientially (living what they are seek-
ing to understand) and self-reflexively (story as theorization of new experience).

Story 2. The Total Perspective Vortex

The second story is from Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and other adventures in improbability. In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
Adams (2002: 238) describes the “most savage psychic torture a sentient being can
undergo.” It is administered by a machine called the “Total Perspective Vortex,” which
causes people to attain a perfect sense of proportion—specifically, an understanding of
their own individual significance, proportional to the scale of the entire universe. The
Total Perspective Vortex makes you see “the whole infinite Universe. The infinite suns,
the infinite distances between them, and yourself an invisible dot on an invisible dot,
infinitely small” (250). Trin Tragula, its inventor, was motivated to build this terrifying
machine in order to annoy his (unnamed) wife, because instead of “staring out into
space,” she wanted him to show “some sense of proportion!”

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex—just to show her. And into one
end he plugged the whole of reality . . . and into the other he plugged his wife:
so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of
creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock
completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had
proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in Universe of this size, then the
one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
(Adams 2002: 252)

This story is about unimaginable scale, emphasizing the difference between a single
‘sentient being’ and the system in which she exists. Note that despite its infinite size,
“reality” is construed as a place where “every piece of matter in the Universe is in some
way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe” (251–2). That’s a pretty big
network, especially when you also take into account the time dimension since the Big
Bang. Nevertheless, it’s a unitary system because everything in it is linked to everything
else, and causation flows throughout, although not always in one direction only, because
it’s a cybernetic feedback system. You might be “infinitely small” but still you’re a dot on
a dot, connected to the forces, energies, and matter of everything else.
The one thing that can’t coexist with all this scale, in Douglas Adams’ fictional
universe, at any rate, is “sentience.” In a semiotic variation of the Heisenberg Principle
(which states that you can’t know the position and momentum of subatomic particles
at the same time), it seems that your brain can’t be in this system and know it at the
same time. Experience and knowledge—life and mathematics, if you like—are mutually
incompatible at the level of consciousness. As for Mrs Tragula, so for all biota: life

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“cannot afford to have . . . a sense of proportion.” So says Douglas Adams. Is he onto

something?

Greater and Lesser Fleas

These two stories illustrate proportion as a problem of knowledge. We appear to be the
authors of our own actions, and we experience ourselves as inalienably ours alone. Each
person is their own ‘Tavi’ on the inside (even while they’re still figuring out what that
is and how it works). That’s at the micro level. At the macro level, our individual per-
ception cannot cope with ultra large-scale systems, even though we know they’re out
there. Indeed, bizarrely, each individual ‘Tavi’ is such a system because, at the truly micro
level, everyone is made up of trillions of cells and trillions of cohabiting organisms
(many more of them on and in you than there are cells of you). And, wherever you look,
there are billions of similar organisms, among trillions of life forms, all connected via
sequences of DNA coding that ‘we’ (like all the other eukaryotes) share with archaea
and bacteria (including the trillions of them living in our gut) going back billions of
years, and that’s just on planet Earth.
Our apparent indivisibility as individuals is an illusion. Look up to the macro-scale
or, fractally, down to the microscopic, and everywhere, as the old nursery rhyme has
it:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

Connectedness, proportionality and uncertainty of identity across improbable scale:

these conditions are the stuff of systems, and, among them, the systems we call indi-
viduals. Improbability attends both ends of the scalar gradient. How, then, do we know
about (and by means of) individual experience, agency and achievement, on the one
hand, and about (and by means of) impersonal scale, networks and complexity, on the
other, such that we can ascribe causal force to agency, and rules or laws governing how
uncertainty and improbability are managed at system level? Or, to put it another way,
can each individual ‘Tavi’ ‘figure it out’ in time to save her brain from being annihilated
in the Total Perspective Vortex?

Self-Creation
To answer these questions, let’s turn to Thomas Hardy (1915), novelist and poet, who
wrote about the clash of systems—cultural, technological and personal on the one hand
and natural, impersonal on the other—in his poem “The Convergence of the Twain
(Lines on the Loss of the ‘Titanic’)”, where the “convergence” of incommensurate cul-
tural and natural systems produced new knowledge in a most shocking manner:

Over the mirrors meant

To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

From the point of view of these apparently alien creatures, Hardy asks a pertinent
question:

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Dim moon-eyed fishes near

Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’

It is unlikely that Hardy had this in mind, but that “query” is fundamentally a system
question, about how an organism interfaces with its environment; a question of the kind
posed by social-systems theorist Niklas Luhmann (1991; 2012). How does a fish—a
vertebrate like us, and cellular like the crawling “sea-worm” and its ancestor organisms
in the early biosphere—interact with the sea, or with “gilded gear” plummeting down
from a kilometer or two above? Certainly with a “query,” since communication is at the
core of systems theory. The question about what something as excessive as the Titanic is
doing down “here” is part of a continuing process of boundary creation for the “dim
moon-eyed” denizens of the deep, who need constantly to distinguish between self (life)
and environment (source of food, threat and reproductive opportunity).
Only by doing that can any organism, as it crawls over some inexplicable crystal, cre-
ate for itself an interior (psychic) system that is different from the exterior (physical or
social) world. Thereby it reduces the complexity of the environment by selecting only
a limited amount of information from it as meaningful. It can only exist as a self by not
experiencing the environment as a “Total Perspective Vortex.” Information (which is
encountered in the trillions in the external environment) isn’t knowledge until it is
meaningful—and that requires selection, filtering, and imaging of information from
external environments. The very properties that Hardy ascribes to sea-creatures—that
they are “dumb,” “indifferent,” “dim,” etc.—are the reason they need constant commu-
nication with the external environment in order to sense themselves. It follows that
communication is not in the first place an equal sharing of information between indi-
viduals; nor is it a transmission system, as in Claude Shannon’s (1948) influential model
of communication. In origin, communication is a product of the internal systems of an
organism/species, drawing meaningfulness out of the environment, beginning with the
establishment and maintenance of a boundary between self and environment.
Luhmann coined a name for this process of continuously reproducing identity by fil-
tering meaningfulness from the external environment through communication. He
called it “autopoiesis”—self-creation (Luhmann 1986; and see Maturana & Varela 1980,
from whom he borrowed the term). He argues that it is the defining feature of social
systems: they self-organise, and reproduce themselves, with communication. Crucially,
he makes autopoietic organization an attribute of systems, not of life. In fact he makes

a sharp distinction between meaning and life as different kinds of autopoietic

organization. Meaning-using systems have to be distinguished according to
whether they use consciousness [psychic systems] or communication [social
systems] as modes of meaning-based reproduction.
(1986: 173)

Thus, consciousness and communication are not strictly speaking attributes of life
but of systems. Meaning and life are not reducible to each other, as the Pythonesque
goldfish in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) discovered at about the same
time. Social systems are based on communication, while psychic systems are based on
consciousness. What reveals itself to your consciousness, after being filtered and ren-
dered meaningful by largely automatic processes in your brain, is perception. It

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follows that social systems are not founded on individuals or even acts, but in
communication. Communication is a mechanism for constituting and maintaining
complex systems.

Communication Creates Individuals

Communication synthesizes information, utterance and understanding (Luhmann
1991). Individuals use communication to reduce complexity by creating a boundary
between themselves and the outside world, and they are constituted (self-organized)
through their act of communication with that environment. In so doing, they also
construct the outside world through which they know themselves. They are thus self-
reflexive—able to observe as well as to act—and Luhmann sees this as a general feature
of autopoietic systems, which are cybernetic (self-steering, using feedback loops). They
are not based on testing observations against other, external observations, i.e. they are
not based on behavioral rationality. All observations about society are by definition self-
observations. Self and system are not distinguishable.
Using this approach, Luhmann analyzed various social systems, such as the economy,
the law, science and art. In one of his many books, Art as a Social System, he criticizes
the Western tradition that relegates “perception” to a lower status than “reason,” allow-
ing perception to animals but reason only to humans. Luhmann conjectures the
contrary: “One could argue that a comparison between humans and animals demon-
strates the evolutionary, genetic and functional priority of perception over thought”
(2000: 5):

A creature endowed with a central nervous system must succeed in externalizing

and constructing an outside world before it can begin to articulate self-reference
on the basis of its own bodily perceptions as a result of its problems with this
world.
(Luhmann 2000: 5)

In other words, even creatures as lowly Hardy’s sea-worms, or Monty Python’s philoso-
phizing fish-in-a-tank, must establish a communication system; it’s this that allows them
to perceive and thus deal with “problems” as they arise: such as the sudden arrival of
the Titanic into their astonished purview. Luhmann adds: “It suffices to remain aston-
ished that we see anything ‘outside’ at all, even if our seeing happens only ‘inside’”
(2000: 5–6). The abilities to communicate with exterior reality (so to construct it), and
to perceive (in order to act in it), are non-trivial achievements for any creature
endowed with a central nervous system. As for creatures, so for humans: “Today we
know that the external world is the brain’s own construction, treated by consciousness
as if it were a reality ‘out there’” (2000: 6). Luhmann’s reconceptualization of aesthetics
in terms of systems theory allows us to glimpse an awkward truth: that the operations
of the self, perception, consciousness and communication, and the continuity between
animals and humans, are all evidence that knowledge is created by more organisms
than just our species, using a process very close to self-delusion, in the very act of self-
creation, because, although it is taking in massive amounts of sensory information, the
brain does not inform our “observing consciousness” what it is doing (i.e. constantly
choosing what we observe, apparently directly and unfiltered) prior to the act of
perception.

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Sacralizing Culture
How should popular culture be understood: from the perception of individuals (focus on
each individual ‘Tavi’), or in terms of evolutionary complex systems (focus on the Total
Perspective Vortex)? Evolutionary approaches have extended from the natural to the
social sciences, especially economics (Hodgson 1993). But the same cannot be said for
culture. This is because the fate of the concept of culture has been rather different from
that of the economy, even though the two were briefly understood as coterminous in the
nineteenth century. Perhaps the most influential writer on culture in English during that
period was John Ruskin, writing contemporaneously with Darwin and Marx, who rou-
tinely labeled his books a “political economy” of art, seeking to make appreciation of
beauty into a broadly understood component of citizenship.1 Where classical economics
sought to reconcile political ‘common sense’ with mathematics (becoming at the same
time progressively less interested in history or place), the concept of culture was increas-
ingly sacralized, as the opposing pole to the material world of industry and science, which
was dubbed “civilization” (Watson 2010: 31-4, Lepenies 2006: 4–6).
Thus, in a manifesto that shaped literary and cultural studies for several generations
and remains influential as the educated commonsense of educators and arts administra-
tors, the literary critic F. R. Leavis (1930) posed “minority culture” as the antidote to
“mass civilization.” He took Matthew Arnold’s (1869) famous definition of culture, as
“the best that has been thought and said in the world,” and added a theorized voice to
this antagonistic element, where “the best” (i.e. ‘high’ culture, ‘serious’ music, ‘fine’ art)
was always set in opposition to “the rest” (i.e. popular culture, popular music, the popu-
lar arts), such that artistic talent was one thing, and popular culture (including the press,
cinema, popular fiction, spectator-sports, even popular science—in short, the culture of
an industrial population) was decidedly another.
Leavis was intellectually close to the Anglo-American poet and critic T. S. Eliot, who
added his own portentous voice to the debate with his notion of “tradition and the
individual talent” (Eliot 1920). Here, Eliot proposed his “impersonal theory,” that a poet
of talent must continually “surrender himself” to the tradition of which “his” poetry
forms a part, thus making the poet an impersonal medium for the transmission through
time of tradition, which Eliot saw as the only means by which true novelty (as opposed
to repetition) could be achieved. Not forgetting that Eliot’s most celebrated poem is
called The Waste Land, a modernist coruscation of modernity, it is easy to see that such
a notion of “tradition,” linked with Leavis’s “minority culture” and Arnold’s “best” val-
ues, fails to find any sign of such a culture that it can value among industrial populations.2
That attitude was then taught to those same populations via compulsory schooling, the
literary curriculum of which was thoroughly colonized by Leavisite values (via his jour-
nal Scrutiny).
This provoked a further sacralization of culture. Over the course of the twentieth
century, culture was removed from the domain of knowledge and re-sited in its own spe-
cial zone of values, far away from industrial laboratories, factories or suburbs. Now fully
institutionalized as the secular religion of wealthy countries, culture was endowed with
its own marble museums, travertine galleries, ferroconcrete libraries and titanium con-
cert halls. It was produced, conserved, curated and interpreted by a special caste of
trained professionals. It was propagated across the world, at public and philanthropic
expense, in prestige locations at the center of any city worthy of the name, for reveren-
tial rituals of obeisance to “the great tradition” (Leavis 1948).

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This is a “great tradition,” no doubt, but one where “the tradition of the dead genera-
tions weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” as Marx (1852) famously put
it. Because it has become rigid in cultural institutions, bureaucratic routines (arts coun-
cils, etc.) and common-sense thought among the educated and popular classes alike, this
sacralizing concept of culture is a serious impediment to understanding culture in a
different way. That is why Raymond Williams took it on—argued it to a theoretical
standstill—over a number of important publications (1958; 1960) in which he chal-
lenged ‘high’ culture with the anthropological concept of culture as “whole way of life”
or “culture is ordinary.” Compelling though this work is, backed up by subsequent cul-
tural critics who sought to modernize the concept in order to investigate the culture and
media of the modern, urban, industrial and popular classes, and so to invent cultural and
media studies, it was only partially successful. That is because the institutional apparatus
of public and private patronage, training in universities and conservatoria, and the mar-
ket in literature, fine art and serious music, all retain a practical if not intellectual
commitment to culture Eliot’s “sacred wood.” Which government, university, city—or
banking corporation—does not have its own fine-art collection, sponsored concert hall,
or literary prize? That’s how you can tell the winners: it is ‘costly signaling,’ notifying
elite consumers that such corporations can afford to waste money on ‘cultural value.’ So
these edifices spread all over the world, including among ambitious emerging countries
like China, whose investment in cultural infrastructure since joining the WTO in 2001
has been nothing short of staggering, capped off with the “Giant Egg” (巨蛋), Beijing’s
national opera house.

Conciliating Culture and Knowledge

The sacralization of culture is an impediment to culture’s reincorporation into the
domain of knowledge; and, in that context, a barrier to its reconceptualization as an
evolutionary concept. Here, it is not sufficient simply to jump horses and ride off into the
Darwinian sunset in the company of a posse of evolutionary anthropologists, linguists,
psychologists and the like, because their conceptualization of culture, while evolution-
ary, does not carry with it what was important about the “great tradition” version of
culture, namely, its commitment to understanding—and contributing to—the produc-
tion of socialized meaningfulness, by analyzing identity, and humanity’s place in a
changing world through talented performance in the creative arts and media. Further,
it is wrong to assume that writers and artists are uninterested in scientific problems and
themes. They ask the same questions that scientists do, and they have been just as
keenly interested in how we know what we know. So it isn’t necessary to set up art in
opposition to evolution: culture and art versus civilization and science. The history of
scientific and artistic endeavor is the same history. The institutionalization of the so-
called “two cultures,” in C. P. Snow’s venerable but inaccurate phrase, is a problem of
bureaucracy, not of knowledge as such.
How, then, may it be possible to reconcile the study of culture as inherited from the
“dead generations” of cultural criticism with new approaches, inherited from the sci-
ences? How may we promote “consilience” (Wilson 1998) in the domain of knowledge,
and understand culture’s role in its growth?
In order to shift from “two cultures” to “consilience,” it will be necessary to do more
than dump previous work on culture. True consilience demands an approach that rec-
ognizes culture as part of the growth of knowledge, and adds meaningfulness to the

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‘sciences’ rather than dry reduction of knowledge to ‘ideas’ or ‘information.’ Here, the
social production of meaningfulness takes full account of both “individual talent” and
“tradition.”
Systems always defeat individuals in the end. From the point of view of supposedly
“lowly” life-forms (Darwin 1871), ‘feedback’ can be taken literally, reminding us that the
idea of “lowly” creatures is relative when you consider the mutual relations between man
and maggot, as strikingly put in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Theatre audiences know from a
previous scene that Hamlet has killed a character called Polonius. Now, King Claudius
(who Hamlet suspects has murdered his father, married his mother and usurped the
throne) confronts Hamlet:

King. Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?

Hamlet. At supper.
King. At supper? Where?
Hamlet. Not where he eats, but where’a is eaten. A certain convocation of
politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for
diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for mag-
gots; your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two
dishes, but to one table – that’s the end.
King. Alas, alas!
Hamlet. A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the
fish that hath fed of that worm.
King. What dost thou mean by this?
Hamlet. Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the
guts of a beggar.
(Hamlet, IV.iii.19–26)

Worm eats king; fish eats worm; beggar eats fish and so—after due alimentary process—
beggar shits king. We’re all equal in death. Thus does Shakespeare translate exalted
individuals to the “lowly” status of the worm; especially those, like Claudius, who have
attained their status by murder, usurpation and incest. The implication is that individual
repute is little more than hearsay. Inward reality may be the opposite of outward rank.
Once again, caution should be exercised about consigning maggots to a lower rung on
the hierarchical ladder, since that distinction will in due course be reversed, with a
“convocation of politic worms” dining on king and beggar alike: two dishes, one table,
one real “emperor” at the last, albeit the one whose reputation is for being “grotesque,
slimed, dumb, indifferent” (Hardy).
A well-known theme of Hamlet is Shakespeare’s interest in the difference between
appearance and reality, seeming and being. It was clearly a key problem of statecraft in
a time of monarchical rule, but he made it a problem of personcraft too: “to be, or not
to be,” as Hamlet famously phrased the question. Here, as elsewhere in Shakespeare,
individualism is not a clear and positive value as you might expect, but a sure sign of
villainy. Claudius here, Macbeth, Edmund in King Lear, and others, are all examples of
individualists whose personal ambition looks modern to us. Edmund’s cry of “why bas-
tard; wherefore base?” (King Lear, I.ii.6) surely resonates with a modern audience. Why
shouldn’t characters strive to achieve the social rank and reputation that matches their
inner sense of self-worth? But meddling with heredity upsets the order of succession and,
this being tragedy, they all pay for it in the end.

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At best, the achievement of individual psychological realism in Shakespeare is a

problem. Although the Tudor propagandist in him knew well enough that ‘rightful’
kingship might be gained by conquest rather than inheritance (as in Richard III), he
routinely caused genealogy to trump individualist free enterprise in order to restore
‘order’—social cohesion through marriage or succession—at the end of a play.
Shakespeare used drama, dialogic conflict and interactions among groups onstage to
enact “possessive individualism” as a disruptive challenge of tragic proportions, just at
the time when it was gaining ground in modern political theory (Macpherson 1962).
Shakespeare’s tragedies indicate that Western modernity has had trouble with the con-
cept of the individual from the start. Even though individuals (e.g. William Shakespeare)
are valued highly by a culture, it is not safe to erect theories of creativity, never mind
succession and the reproduction of society, on their personal qualities and achievements.
Identity is not an input but an uncertain prize, lusted after by flawed characters, who
thereby wreak destruction on their group.
Shakespeare is sometimes credited with inventing “psychological realism” (Bloom
1998), where the inner life of the individual explains their actions. But in the context
of the plays it’s a troubling achievement. The very form of drama is anti-individualist,
literally staging sociality in action. The group (ensemble of actors), dialogue and conflict
(meaningfulness) reveals the ‘character’: it emerges from the system of the play, not from
unobservable personal motivations. Hamlet’s soliloquies, hesitations and prevarications
are links in a network of meaningfulness across the play as a whole. They display some-
thing even more modern than personal ambition, and almost the opposite of rugged,
self-sufficient self-realization. What Hamlet (and Hamlet) communicates most
profoundly is doubt. And that is the founding condition of modern knowledge, from
religious reformation to scientific skepticism to existential angst to postmodernism. But,
in Hamlet, doubt is not presented as heroic or admirable, much less scientific. Rather, it
is tragic: it’s an agent of Schumpeterian “creative destruction.”

Linked Brains and Externalized Knowledge

Where the high-culture approach is interested only in the traditionalist individual (Eliot’s
“poet”), and evolutionary approaches are not interested in individuals at all but only in
populations, the problem of the individual may be resolved by holding purposeful agency
and complex system in productive tension. The justification for doing that is the concept
of externalism. In relation to ‘the brain,’ externalism proposes this: It is not the individual
brain that produces the network, but the networked brain that produces the individual.
The idea comes directly from evolutionary biology (for the brain), combined with
complexity theory (for the network). Mark Pagel (2012: 12) calls “a group of people,
somehow organized around an identity,” a “cultural survival vehicle,” for which a more
familiar term is “tribe” (without connotation of primitivism). There’s no ready word for
such groups, so Hartley and Potts (2014: ch. 3) employ the concept of a “deme.” This
term is familiar from the Greek ‘demos’ (political grouping), and from the biosciences
where it denotes an ‘interbreeding subpopulation.’ Demes are ‘we’-groups, made by cul-
ture, in which knowledge is generated and shared within the group, but kept apart from
outsiders, who may be regarded as adversaries (‘they’-groups). Thus knowledge survives
and adapts through in-group cultures, not individuals. In successful demes, individuals
are willing to sacrifice their own interests (e.g. reproduction) for the benefit of the group
(willingness to die for a cause).

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The human ‘disposition’ to form into demic groups is a phenomenon that has held
throughout our evolutionary history. Pagel explains that humanity has evolved a more
complex “vehicle” even than the gene-transmitting body:

When I use the term cultural survival vehicle, it is to capture the idea that our
species evolved to build, in the form of their societies, tribes, or cultures, a
second body or vehicle to go along with the vehicle that is their physical body.
Like our physical body, this cultural body wraps us in a protective layer, not of
muscles and skin but of knowledge and technologies, and . . . it gives us our
language, cooperation, and a shared identity.
(Pagel 2012: 12–13)

Thus, for Pagel, culture—a property of demes (“societies, tribes, or cultures”)—is the
driving force of human identity, through knowledge and technologies. Individuality is
the outcome of that process, not its agent. What’s more, our identity is made of lan-
guage, cooperation, knowledge, technology and group relations and interactions, not
something bodily that somehow precedes all these. Methodological individualism has
things the wrong way round.
Further, once embarked on the road of cultural evolution, much of what evolves is
clearly seen as independent of individuals. As W. Brian Arthur (2009) has compellingly
argued, technologies too are “autopoietic” or self-creating, evolving by combining com-
ponents of previous technologies into new more complex systems. It takes agents to do
that, so his example, the jet engine, had to have its Frank Whittle, but every component
in Whittle’s invention already existed as an element of something else within the tech-
nological repertoire to hand.
The evolution of sociality explains the growth in size and complexity of the human
brain, as part of H. sapiens’ adaptation to rapidly changing environments; adaptations
enabled by groups of non-kin being able to work together collaboratively, imaginatively
and technologically, turning the species into a generalist that could occupy any niche
environment, well beyond the African Rift Valley. Something caused such traits to
survive natural selection. Evolutionary biologists have pointed to the need for coopera-
tion among non-kin to permit our extended childhood, which is required to let our big
cranium grow, post-partum, to allow room for our relatively enormous, energy-guzzling
brains. These giant neural networks, modeled on the Total Perspective Vortex, seem
acutely attuned to the requirements of sociality—learning, a ‘theory of mind’ (apprehen-
sion of the intentions of others), and language. Through them, that trait which Darwin
(1871) thought could “hardly be overestimated” could all the more readily be expressed;
namely, the “love of praise and the dread of blame.” That, in turn, is explicable as a
mechanism for inculcating sociality in a species where survival required groups, not
individuals, to make decisions (get food), and to reproduce (care for infants), while
amassing new knowledge in conditions of uncertainty and external threat.
Mark Pagel (2012: 38) argues that “social learning” is key. To emphasize its impor-
tance, he points not just to our ability to copy the behavior of others, which humans
share with crows, but also to two more dynamic and impressive abilities: first, to emulate
the new (patterns not previously encountered); and second, to improve on it. When
these features are isolated, it’s easier to see that social learning is not just a matter of
internalizing rules, norms, etc., but also a playful, creative and competitive process; part
curiosity about the world and its changes (‘what’s new?’); part social one-upmanship

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(‘anything you can do I can do better’); part innovation (‘stealing a march’). You don’t
just copy a tool (better arrow-heads), a dance move (Gangnam-style), a fashion novelty
(Gevinson-style) or an idea; you look for angles, and chip away at the edges until it’s
sharper, lighter, more fit for purpose, and more likely to bring you praise and repute
among your group, which is the source of innovation in production and social network
markets in the domain of popular culture (Potts et al. 2008; Mokyr 2009).
Taking the findings from evolutionary sciences seriously, it seems inevitable that we
embrace the concept of externalized identity—an externalized brain—for H. sapiens.
The brain itself evolved to deal with complex interactive communication, not just for
cooperative hunting, but also for care of non-kin, social learning, and adaptability to
new environments. It was culture, not individualism, that saw the species span the
globe, occupying new niches and adapting to new circumstances by generating new
knowledge. None of this can be explained without the externalist or “demic” concept
of linked brains, which are linked by autopoietic cultural systems: knowledge, technol-
ogy, language, sociality. These links are now mediated, as nowhere else, through the
culture of all the population: popular culture.

Notes
1 Ruskin’s “political economy” titles: ‘A Joy Forever’ and Its Price in the Market: Two Lectures on the
Political Economy of Art (1857); Unto This Last: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy
(1862); Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political Economy (1872).
2 Eliot wrote part of The Waste Land in a beachside shelter just up the road from my childhood home near
Margate, Kent, and site of later riots between Mods and Rockers, from where he could observe the indus-
trial population at play, while he wrote about being able to “connect Nothing with nothing.” The shelter
is now part of Britain’s national heritage: www.english-heritage.org.uk/about/news/seaside-ts-
elliotlisted/ (my childhood home is demolished).

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G EN R E S
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 16
DE DO DO DO, DE
DA DA DADAISM
Popular Culture and
the Avant-Garde
Scott MacKenzie

The relationship between various avant-gardes and popular culture is historically fraught, at
least in terms of how it is understood by factions of both the avant-garde and popular culture
itself. Nevertheless, this relationship is far more dialogical and interdependent than most
theorists and practitioners may wish to claim. For this reason, I shall not presently re-hash
tired debates about popular culture’s appropriation of the avant-garde leading to its de-
fanging, decay and death, along the lines of complaining that the opening credits of David
Fincher’s Se7en (USA, 1995) appropriate the aesthetic strategies of Stan Brakhage. Nor am
I interested in disparaging the “pretentiousness” of some popular culture texts that take
either the avant-garde or high culture as intertextual grist for the mill by appropriating, say,
Carl Jung or Vladimir Nabokov (as exemplified by the oeuvre of Sting). Instead, I wish to
trace moments of confluence between the avant-garde and popular culture to delineate the
productive tension that lies between these two modes of artistic, cultural and ideological
expression. This tension is felt both by popular culture artists working in the avant-garde
idiom, and avant-garde artists who appropriate from popular culture within their works. I
argue that popular culture and the avant-garde have always been in dialogue with each
other, despite the plethora of claims that they inherently antithetical. This productive
dialogue is exemplified in Walter Benjamin’s methodology for his Arcades Project: “Method
of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no
valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not
inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of
them” (1999: 460). The question, then, that lies at the heart of the relationship between
popular culture and the avant-garde is about how to best engage various publics in debates
about industrial and technological society in contemporary culture.

Avant-Garde Popular Culture

From the 1920s onwards, avant-garde cinema appropriated and re-tooled popular culture.
Despite the historical revisionism offered by formalist, and highly masculinist, avant-garde
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histories like P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film (1974), this re-tooling was not simply a
critique, but far more nuanced. From the Dadaists to contemporary found-footage film-
makers, avant-garde cinema has a long history of active engagement with the questions
raised by popular culture’s positive and negative impact on the public sphere. A case in
point: perhaps the most globally recognized, and popular, figure of the early twentieth
century was Charlie Chaplin. His films, at times derided for their stubborn realism and
sentimentality in the face of more modernist filmmakers like Keaton and Lloyd, were
nevertheless a touchstone for the European avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s. Brecht,
Aragon, Ray, and Isou all wrote approvingly of Chaplin. Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique
(France, 1923–24) turns the Tramp into a modernised, mechanical man, more than a
decade before Chaplin did the same thing in Modern Times (USA, 1936). Many avant-
garde artists were profoundly interested in the mechanization of the modern man, and
Chaplin’s films, with their working/underclass settings in impoverished and destitute
industrialised landscapes in The Immigrant (USA, 1917) and A Dog’s Life (USA, 1918)
lent themselves ably to this analysis, propping up the idea that the masses were in tune
with the means of their exploitation through the massive popularity of his films on a
global scale.
And while the avant-garde celebrated Chaplin in the 1920s, other avant-garde film
movements looked to popular culture as a means by which to create meta-commentary
on popular culture. For instance, the use of the Situationist theory of détournement has
played a key role in the development of found footage filmmaking, which takes com-
mentary on popular culture as a central function. This process is not a simple disavowal
of the aesthetic values of popular culture. As Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman note in
their explication of détournement:

. . . we can observe that Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is one of the most important
films in the history of the cinema because of its wealth of innovations. On the
other hand, it is a racist film and therefore absolutely does not merit being
shown in its present form. But its total prohibition could be seen as regrettable
from the point of view of the secondary, but potentially worthier, domain of the
cinema. It would be better to detourn it as a whole, without necessarily even
altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation
of the horrors of imperialist war and of the activities of the Klu Klux Klan,
which are continuing in the United States even now.
(2003: 209)

Détournement was revitalized in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While many “old-guard”
critics lamented the death of the avant-garde as a meaningful force, a new generation of
experimental and avant-garde filmmakers were re-imagining what the avant-garde could
and should become. The arrival of feminist, queer and ideological critiques in regards to
both avant-garde theory and practice, along with a newfound concern with popular
culture and politics, lead to a radical re-imagining of the avant-garde. One of the key
reasons that the avant-garde was seen by “old boys” (or, less generously, “almost-dead,
mostly straight, white men”) as being embalmed and buried had quite a bit to do with
these newfound political and popular concerns, and a concurrent move away from high-
Modernist preoccupations with film’s formal elements to the exclusion of all else. Found
footage filmmaker Craig Baldwin notes: “I think it’s healthy to work with all the mate-
rial cluttering up our brains: The Flintstones’ tune; the Shell sign; ‘snap, crackle, pop’”

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(MacDonald 1998: 176). Situationist-inspired filmmaker Keith Sanborn makes a similar

point:

. . . for my generation . . . formal experimentation was at a dead end, that in

fact that there were too many films already, and that what was needed wasn’t
new films or formal innovation in that sense, but rather a better understanding
of what was already out there.
(Wees 1993: 90)

In these cases, the use of popular culture in avant-garde cinema is not simply an attempt
to repudiate it, but to engage with it, recognizing the productive tension enabled by this
dialogical relationship between the two forms of cultural practice.

The Frankfurt School and Fordist Sausages

To frame this productive tension, one must nevertheless consider one of the most prom-
inent and influential critiques of popular culture, if only to counter it, as put forward by
members of the Frankfurt School. In perhaps their most famous essay, “The Culture
Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer
make their case against popular culture and its supposedly pernicious effects on mass
society. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the Fordist nature of the mechanical repro-
duction of culture leads to a society where “Films, radio and magazines make up a system
which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political
opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system” (1972:
120). For Horkheimer and Adorno, much like Star Trek’s Borg, resistance is futile, as:

Like its counterpart, avant garde art, the entertainment industry determines its
own language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary, by the use of anathema.
The constant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to the old
pattern) serves merely as another rule to increase the power of the conventions
when any single effect threatens to slip through the net.
(1972: 128)

This leads to the inevitable conclusion that even breaking with the system is an act of
recuperation: “Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is
forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations
which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system” (1972: 129).
This critical stance does not allow for popular culture to have effects that are not, in the
end, pernicious. Moreover, it disavows the possibility of the avant-garde addressing pop-
ular or mass culture in a critical or dialogical manner and reduces questions of the
production of art, popular or avant-garde, to simple aesthetics. If any rupture in popular
culture or the avant-garde only leads to a retrograde reification of the system, then the
use-value of cultural production in any form is, in essence, non-existent. Perhaps, then,
contra Adorno and Horkheimer, it is worthwhile to re-visit some interstitial texts from
both popular culture and the avant-garde to see if all is indeed lost, or if, alternatively,
hot dogs do have some aesthetic and cultural value.
Why hot dogs? Because, while there is no biographical evidence one way or another
to prove this claim, it is safe to assume that Adorno and Horkheimer despised them. As

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a mass-produced, commodified form of fast food, originating (perhaps apocryphally) in

Coney Island, New York in 1870, these mass produced sausages were a popularized form
of the Frankfurter Würstchen, a pork sausage prevalent in Frankfurt since the thirteenth
century and holding a version of “Protected Geographical Status”—now an EU term
enforcing that only products coming from a specific geographical region can lay claim
to the name in trade—in Germany since 1860. The mass production of these sausages
since the fin du siècle in the USA heralded a move away from the work of local, artisanal
butchers to Fordist factory practices would no doubt be, for Adorno and Horkheimer, a
sign of everything that is wrong with mass culture. I bring this up not to celebrate the
lowly hot dog, but to highlight the unyielding flaw that Adorno and Horkheimer see at
the heart of all mass culture: the total eradication of individual artistic expression in the
face of standardization and mass production, and the concomitant debasement of arti-
sanal practices. What this argument elides is the interconnection between the two kinds
of frankfurters: the hot dog itself would not exist without the artisanal sausage that came
before. Furthermore, as Bruce Kraig points out in Hot Dog: A Global History, the
Americanization of the Frankfurter Würstchen into the hot dog is not the end of the
process: the hot dog has re-migrated to Europe and circled the globe, transmogrifying
into the street foods of local cultures, and re-gaining a cultural specificity in the process
(2009: 96–114). For instance, a Swedish Tunnbrödsrulle (a hot dog topped with mashed
potatoes and prawn salad, wrapped in a thin bread) is a long way from both a Frankfurter
Würstchen and a hot dog, but points to the interface between global foods and local
cultures, and the creativity that these exchanges provide. The hot dog, then, marks not
the eradication of the Frankfurter Würstchen, but one stage in a dialogical relationship
between popular culture and artisanal production. This same tension lies at the heart of
the relationship between popular culture and the avant-garde.

Pop Music and Pop Art: Who’s Selling Out?

Much like the cultural transformations of the sausage, 1960s English pop and rock music
spoke to a dialogical relationship between both music cultures (between African American
blues, country and R&B and working and middle class post-War English youths) and pop
culture and the avant-garde. Indeed, the history of English popular music in the 1960s
points to a process of extreme hybridity, decades before the term became au courant in
critical theory. To understand the hybridity between avant-garde and pop music, one could
turn to many examples, including the influence of the Baroque and musique concrête on
the Beatles or of Pop Art on The Who. Indeed, one could do worse than turning to the
early output of The Who, whose guitarist and main songwriter, Pete Townshend, appropri-
ated freely from avant-garde, high art, middle-brow, and popular culture sources. Studying
at the Ealing College of Art in the early 1960s (most notably with avant-garde artist and
theorist Gustav Metzger, who pioneered auto-destructive art, and who co-organized the
Destruction in Art Symposium in London in December 1966), Townshend incorporated
avant-garde strategies into his band’s music and performance. Indeed, he claimed that
Metzger directly inspired his guitar destruction through his teaching, which was codified
in the auto-destructive manifesto Metzger released on 4 November 1959:

Auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial societies.

Self-destructive painting, sculpture and construction is a total unity of idea,
site, form, colour, method and timing of the disintegrative process.

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Auto-destructive art can be created with natural forces, traditional art

techniques and technological techniques.
The amplified sound of the auto-destructive process can be an element of the
total conception.
The artist may collaborate with scientists, engineers.
Self-destructive art can be machine produced and factory assembled.
Auto-destructive paintings, sculptures and constructions have a life-time
varying from a few moments to twenty years. When the disintegrative process
is complete the work is to be removed from the site and scrapped.
(Wilson 2008: 182)

Influenced by Metzger, Townshend began destroying his guitars onstage sometime in

September 1964, a fairly audacious act as, at that time, The Who were essentially a bar
band without a contract. In post-War Britain, the fetishisation of the guitar was extreme,
despite the generous layaway plans on offer. And Townshend saw Metzger’s theory of
auto-destruction as applicable not only to guitars but to the band itself:

Metzger had a profound effect on me. I was [at a] gig with The Who and took
it as an excuse to smash my new Rickenbacker that I had just hocked myself to
the eyebrows to buy. I really believed it was my responsibility to start a rock
band that would only last three months, an auto-destructive group. The Who
would have been the first punk band except that we had a hit.
(Wilkerson 2008: 28)

Combining his auto-destruction with feedback, in songs like “My Generation” and
“Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” (both from 1965), Townshend underlined the ways in
which the electric guitar was as much about amplification as it was about “music.”
Furthermore, by smashing his guitars, he demonstrated the Fordist nature of electric
guitar production, undercutting the “uniqueness” of the instrument and stripping away
its aura. As lead singer Roger Daltrey noted: “What is an electric guitar? It’s a plank of
wood with a pick-up on it. Someone has the balls to charge three hundred quid for it. I
mean, it’s still a plank of wood” (Clarke 1979: 32). Here, Daltrey describes the process
of commodification as succinctly as any cultural theorist.
Building on their interest in commodity culture, the band also actively aligned them-
selves with other forms of avant-garde art. Developing the dialectic between popular
music and Pop Art (artists such as Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton and David Hockney
took adverts, comic books and other popular cultural images and transmogrified them
through collage into avant-garde art), the band, under the guidance of co-manager Kit
Lambert (son of British composer and conductor Constant Lambert) willfully incorpo-
rated Pop Art principles into their stage act—exemplified by Townshend and bassist
John Entwistle’s Union Jack vests—and albums. For instance, 1967’s release The Who
Sell Out directly mimicked the sound and structure of pirate radio stations such as
Radio London and Radio Caroline, interspersing adverts for Rotosound Strings, Heinz
Baked Beans and Medac Pimple Cream (all written by Townshend and Entwistle)
between the more “proper” songs, some of which also deal directly with advertising,
such as Townshend’s “Odorono,” which tells the tale of a young singer whose big
chance is ruined by not using underarm deodorant. This practice aligns itself with
critical definitions of Pop Art: as Hamilton wrote in 1961, “the artist in twentieth

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century urban life is inevitably a consumer of mass culture and potentially a contributor
to it” (2002: 727).
All of which raises the question as to whom, if anybody, is The Who selling out? Is it
to the avant-garde or to crass commercialism? While the title is no doubt tongue-in-
cheek, it speaks to the anti-commercial spirit of the times (which elides the fact that the
band was under contract with Decca, and that pirate radio sold commercials), while at
the same time appropriating the strategies of Pop Art on their record. Implicitly, then,
the band is “selling out” on two fronts: to the spirit of commercialism and to the appro-
priation of the avant-garde to commercial ends. In so doing, the band creates a text that
is neither strictly commercial (as it has avant-garde pretensions) nor strictly speaking
avant-garde (as it is a commercial, mass marketed product). In this way, The Who Sell Out
becomes a mash-up avant la lettre, straddling the avant-garde and the popular, and offer-
ing a salient critique of both. The Who Sell Out, therefore, points to the confluence of
avant-garde practices and popular culture in the late 1960s. Moreover, the album fore-
grounds how the concerns of the popular and the avant-garde, outside of retrograde and
hermetic avant-garde formalism, are not at odds, but deeply interwoven.

Popular Feedback on Avant-Garde Feedback

In many ways, Lou Reed’s fifth solo album, Metal Machine Music (1975) is to pop music
as Andy Warhol’s Empire (USA, 1964) is to the cinema: a text many have strongly held
views on, but few have seen, or in this case, heard. Its status is far more of an interven-
tion or provocation as it is a text that stands on its own; to this extent, it could be
considered a sound manifesto of sorts. A double album, with each side running exactly
16:01, contained nothing but feedback generated by amplifiers. Reed claimed the album
had avant-garde precursors, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and LaMonte Young (with
whom Reed’s Velvet Underground collaborator John Cale worked); the album was
received, for the most part, with derision and anger. If John Cage’s 4”33 (1952) is a work
without “proper” sound, then Reed’s work was both its antithesis and its progeny. The
album was a guitar feedback album without the guitar, with only the technology of the
amplifier creating noise. While Reed claimed that whilst listening one could find brief
passages of Mozart and Beethoven, most writers dismissed it as an album only a speed
freak could produce and/or enjoy.
Yet not quite everyone hated it. Rock writer Lester Bangs, Reed’s frequent sparring
partner in the 1970s, wrote a series of reviews of Metal Machine Music upon its release.
In one review, he described the sound of the album as follows:

ZZZZZZZRRRRRRREEEEEEEGGGGGGGRRRRAAAARRRRRRR
GGGGGGGGHHHHHNNNNNNNNNNNIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEERRR
RRRRRRRR . . . .
(1988: 188)

In a 1975 review, Bangs writes:

Most of the people who buy Metal Machine Music are going to be pretty mad at
Lou, but it’s an even bigger joke on RCA, and the ultimate fall guy is the artist
himself. Because what we are witnessing here is commercial suicide. Sally Can’t
Dance was the first, and probably only, Lou Reed album to go Top Ten . . . . Now

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he’s put out this migraine, which will get zero radio play and bomb so bad it will
make Berlin look like an Elton John Album.
(2003: 203)

Here, Bangs foregrounds the way in which the album is both an act of anti-capitalist
sabotage and artistic self-sabotage (though Reed’s career survived quite nicely). The
difference between Reed’s album and other “experimental” works by pop artists like
George Harrison’s Electronic Sound—which he described in the album’s liner note as: “It
could be called avant garde, but a more apt description would be . . . ‘Avant garde
clue’!”—or John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Unfinished Music 1: Two Virgins (1968) is
pronounced: while the Beatle-affiliated albums could be seen as side projects, Metal
Machine Music was the follow-up album to Reed’s greatest post-VU solo success. Perhaps
banking on the idea that buyers would pick up the album, thinking it was stylistically
similar to Sally Can’t Dance (1974), Reed undercut those expectations in a dramatic way,
releasing an album that provoked anger and revulsion as much Andres Serrano’s Piss
Christ (1987). Yet, Metal Machine Music also speaks to the brutalization many film critics
and feminist theorists thought was the central pleasure popular film held for audiences.
In a subsequent essay, Bangs delineates the link between Reed’s album and contempo-
rary popular films:

So why do people go to see movies like Jaws, The Exorcist, or Isla, the She-Wolf
of the SS? So they can get beaten over the heads with baseball bats, have their
nerves wretched while electrodes are being stapled to their spines, and be
generally brutalized at least once every fifteen minutes or so (the time between
the face falling out of the bottom of the sunk boat and the guy’s bit-off leg
hitting the bottom of the ocean). This is what, today, is commonly understood
as entertainment, as fun, as art even! So they’ve got a lot of nerve landing on
Lou for MMM. At least here there’s no bullshit padding between brutalizations.
Anybody who got off on The Exorcist should like this record. It’s certainly far
more moral a product.
(1988: 196)

Metal Machine Music, then, works is two inter-related manners: on the one hand it suc-
ceeds in the goal that many avant-garde artists from Baudelaire and Rimbaud onwards
claim as their own, but which the avant-garde more often than not fails to do: to épater
le bourgeois. On the other hand, it provides the kind of experience that much of popular
cinema is built around, without, as Bangs notes, dressing up that experience in the guise
of pleasant entertainment.

Society of the Sex Pistols

The UK punk explosion of 1975–1978 has been variously described as an eruption from the
street, giving voice to a youthful underclass, and an instantiation of the most avant-garde
art practice to emerge in popular music. The truth lies in the dialectic between the two,
which is what gave the movement both its impact and its ability to popularize a radical,
avant-garde critique of contemporary society. The most notorious example of this dialectic
is epitomized by the Sex Pistols. Formed in London in 1975, the band brought together a
bunch of outliers from the British working and middle class who, through the press, both

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during their short existence and in the subsequent discursive battles between self-styled
impresario cum manager Malcolm McLaren and lead singer Johnny Rotten (née Lydon),
claimed quite variant sources of inspiration for the band. McLaren, art-school educated and
grand self-mythologizer, along with sleeve artist Jamie Reid and fashion designer (and
McLaren’s then-partner) Vivienne Westwood, claimed that the main inspirations for the
band were to be found in the Situationist practice of Debord—who claimed in Society of the
Spectacle that “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship
between people that is mediated by images” (1977: thesis 4)—and in the London-based
offshoot King Mob, which both McLaren and Reid claimed to be involved with on the
periphery. Working class Lydon, on the other hand, thought all this a posteriori talk of
Situationist practice was a load of bollocks, and claimed in the band-sanctioned film The
Filth and the Fury (Julien Temple, UK, 2000) that the “Rotten” persona was a collage of
British Music Hall and Laurence Olivier’s portrayal of the antiheroic, hunch-backed,
Machiavellian King Richard in the cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III
(Olivier, UK, 1955). In the first instance, this it is an argument about class; even Lydon’s
invocation of Olivier’s Richard is drawn not from the “high art” of Shakespeare, but from
a cinematic version that brings “high art” to the masses. Yet Lydon’s “Rotten” persona is
itself a détournement of British forms of popular culture as much as Jamie Reid’s sleeve with
a safety pin through the nose of the Queen was. Indeed, we can see this in various accounts
of the Sex Pistols, and punk more generally. Contemporaneous critics thought of the Pistols
as the embodiment of Situationist practices. Fred and Judy Vermorel note:

thanks largely to the Sex Pistols, [King Mob’s] ideas are current in rock and roll
circles. For example, the Situationist concept of “détournement,” which is
turning the establishment’s codes, forms, and values (i.e. the hit parade) against
itself . . . . And, of course, every creative person is now more acutely aware of
the drag of the establishment on his/her needs and insights, the pressure to
direct creativity (which is, by definition, always subversive) into cosy and
harmless cul de sacs.
(1981: 273–274)

Simon Frith and Howard Horne go further, noting how punk creates “situations” which
obtain the results imagined by the avant-garde in a far more suitable manner than the
staid museum or gallery:

Punk performances were thus informed by avant-garde arguments about shock

value, multi-media, montage and deconstruction. Artists (Throbbing Gristle
were the most significant example) suddenly found that they could apply their
ideas in a pop club setting and get a much more vital reaction than they ever
got in a gallery—even gobbing was a better response to an experimental show
than polite applause.
(1987: 128)

Perhaps the Sex Pistols’ most infamous “situation” was their appearance as a last-minute
replacement for EMI label-mates Queen on Thames Television’s The Today Show, hosted
by Bill Grundy on 1 December 1976. Near the end of a chaotic interview, the band was
provoked to “say something outrageous” by the drunken host. Guitarist Steve Jones
called Grundy a “dirty bastard.” Grundy kept pushing for more: “go on again . . . what a

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clever boy!” Jones obliged with “You dirty fucker . . . you fucking rotter!” Far more than
any of their songs, this act, one the Situationists would no doubt approve of, as it under-
mined the spectacle of pleasant teatime conversation on television, sealed the Pistols’
fate as a non-recuperable act (albeit temporarily, as by 1989 Thames was re-broadcasting
it as a classic moment in celebration of their twenty-first anniversary) (Savage 1991:
259–263). Fleet Street went wild, with The Sun, the London Evening Standard, and the
Daily Mail blazing headlines about the broadcast. The Daily Mirror, under the title “The
Filth and the Fury,” reported that a lorry driver had kicked through his TV in response
to the broadcast (Lydon tartly retorted, “Haven’t they ever heard of the off button?”)
(Savage 1991: 265). This act of breaking the unwritten code of how even so-called
“subversive” acts were supposed to behave on television ably demonstrates how the
Situationist practice of creating “situations” in order to épater le bourgeois was perhaps
far more effective as an act of provocation in popular culture than it could ever be in the
avant-garde proper. Despite the claims and counter-claims about whether the Sex Pistols
were a salient instantiation of working class uprising or the application of radical avant-
garde Situationist practice, the strength of their intervention in the British public sphere
can be best understood as popular art applying—and not simply appropriating—avant-
garde strategies to popular culture through the mass media, the mode of communication
thought by figures as diverse as Adorno and Debord to be beyond redemption.

Haute Couture and Fashion Victims

The first fashion house, and the beginnings of haute couture, emerged in Paris in 1857,
with the first designs of Brit Charles Frederick Worth. Haute couture, as it developed,
was neither popular culture nor avant-garde. Instead, haute couture represented bourgeois
culture, reflecting its taste and morals around questions of sexuality, gender and adorn-
ment. And, while haute couture has changed drastically over the last 150 years, its status
as a bastion of the bourgeoisie still maintains. There are a few exceptions to this rule,
most notably the works of Vivienne Westwood. Westwood’s career began in a shop she
co-owned with McLaren, which went through various names—Too Fast to Live, Too
Young to Die; SEX—and which began by catering to the Edwardian fashion needs of Teds
and, over time, incorporated bondage and sex gear into her designs. Many of these
clothes became a backbone of the punk aesthetic (although Lydon also played a part in
this, détourning a Pink Floyd t-shirt by scrawling “I Hate” on it). In this way, Westwood
brought design aesthetics to youth culture (a market rarely, if ever, tapped by haute cou-
ture, with the possible exception of the Mods), pointing to another strand of influence
on the punk aesthetic. Westwood synthesized radically different aspects of British cul-
ture into a critique of its representations, and questioned what “fashion” itself was in the
process. In 1985, Westwood moved away from youth culture re-tooling and into the
realm of haute couture. Yet the style she developed—appropriating from Victorian
England, Dior, 1960s Carnaby Street, Scottish Harris Tweed, and, according to
Westwood, in an inverted flashback to her punk days, youthful photos of Queen
Elizabeth II—was one of collage. Instead of designing “new” clothes, she trawled through
fashion history, re-purposing haute couture, popular culture and the avant-garde to create
meta-commentaries on fashion itself (in terms of music, the same can be said for the
entire oeuvre of Madonna). As Sinéad Murphy notes: “the single characteristic of feature
of Westwood’s work . . . is precisely its radical indeterminacy, precisely this near
inexhaustibility of its bank of references” (2010: 165). Westwood’s work, in both its

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punk and haute couture iterations, is in many ways sui generis, pointing to the radical
breakdown of popular culture, bourgeois and avant-garde distinctions, provoking strong
(and often negative) responses from all quarters. And, this being England, the most
salient challenge engendered by Westwood’s work was to the class system itself and how
sartorial choices inevitably delineated the cultural and political hierarchies that so pro-
foundly underpin British culture.

New Queer Cinema and Popular Culture:

‘I Hate Straights’
Canadian New Queer Cinema filmmaker John Greyson has consciously synthesized the
avant-garde with popular culture, creating a truly hybrid form. On his own artistic prac-
tice, Greyson notes:

I try to occupy that no-man’s land between a pomo avant garde practice and
mainstream storytelling, using humor as a bridge . . . . In different ways over the
years, my aim has been to take the formal, aesthetic, and political strategies of
what we used to call an avant garde to move a project into user-friendly territory
using devices like music and humor; to also make it come from a gay context,
and then see who would watch.
(Hays 2007: 151)

Perhaps the work that best exemplifies this practice is his long-banned film The Making
of “Monsters” (Canada, 1991). Framed as a “making of” documentary about a film-of-the-
week on gay bashing for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Making of
“Monsters” examines the relationship between avant-garde and popular culture forms of
representation. Realist producer/scriptwriter Georg Lukács (played by David Gardner)
and anti-realist director Bertolt Brecht (played by a catfish) argue over the best way to
tell the story of Joe McGuire, a gay male teacher beaten to death in Toronto’s Trinity
Bellwoods Park. Brecht and Lukács debate the script over dinner (Brecht orders the
salmon). Brecht tears into Lukács’ script and storyboards, stating, “Your clichéd crosscut-
ting technique actually achieves the opposite of what you want. It suggests that McGuire
and the boys are equivalent, two equal forces that come together and, wham, dynamite!
I refuse to shoot reactionary garbage.” When Lukács retorts that the audience will then
identify with the boys, Brecht responds: “Your script stresses their European immigrant
roots. It makes a fetish out of their particular teenage vernacular—‘Let’s shotgun some
brewskis, dickwad.’ . . . the boys become pathological freaks, a spectacle the audience can
consume and discard.” A voice-over from Lotte Lenya then states: “The creative dia-
logues between great film artists are a vital part of the cinematic process.”
Along with illustrating these debates through any number of realists and anti-realist
techniques, the film re-casts the music of Brecht and Kurt Weill to tell the story. For
instance, “Mack the Knife,” from Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (1928) is
re-tooled as “I Hate Straights”:

In this big world, there’s a rule dear,

That boys must choose girls as their mates,
We were always taught in school dear,
To hate queers, but I hate straights.

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In his critique of Lukács, Brecht writes:

The criteria for popular art and realism must therefore be chosen both generously
and carefully, and not drawn merely from existing realistic works and existing
popular works, as often happens. . . . In each case, one must compare the
depiction of life in a work of art with the life that is being depicted (instead of
comparing it to another depiction).
(1974: 53)

In The Making of “Monsters”, Greyson addresses this Brechtian critique by including a

moving account by McGuire’s mother of the differences between her early love-making
in a field with her husband and the stigma attached to her son’s cruising. As the scene
ends, Brecht yells “cut” and chastises Lukács for his maudlin script: “Shallow sentimen-
tality. The mythic Mother guaranteed to make the audience cry.” This scene functions
as what Brecht calls Gestus, demonstrating to audiences, through both emotion and
critique, the limits of the political efficacy of realism.
The film also examines the role of male violence and how it’s acculturated, pointing
to the fact that the real “monsters” are the “normal,” heteronormative straights. In a
scene with grown boys playing with dolls in a gigantic crib, a “voice of authority” watch-
ing them states: “our research suggests that if young boys are encouraged to play with
dolls they will develop nurturing instincts.” The boys, playing with Kens and a Barbie,
then role play: “suck on this Barbie” and “rape her—excellent!” Here, Greyson, in car-
nivalesque fashion, turns “normal” straight culture on its head, delineating that the real
“deviance” lies in the way boys are turned into men in contemporary culture. The use
of humor further allows one to see “normal” culture through another lens, making it
both alien and drawing into relief the underlying and unexamined roots of violence. In
so doing, Greyson foregrounds the fact that where popular culture and the avant-garde
often meet is through the use of humor.

Pop-Garde?
What we see throughout these examples from the 1920s onwards, in both popular and
avant-garde art, is that the relationship between these supposedly distinct forms is much
closer than either faction may care to think. The possibility of a vibrant, politically
engaged culture rests on not simply denouncing popular culture as “mindless
entertainment,” nor confining the avant-garde to a rarefied and hermetic mode of pro-
ducing self-contained, elitist, masculinist works of art. Instead, what one sees is that the
dialogical relationship between the avant-garde and popular culture offers the opportu-
nity for both forms to critically engage with contemporary life and the public sphere,
allowing for a radical re-imagination of the roles of both art and entertainment.
My thanks to Anna Stenport for her astute and insightful comments on drafts of this chapter.

References
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Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Brecht, B. (1974) “Against Georg Lukács.” New Left Review 84: 39–53.
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Savage, J. (1991) England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London: Faber.
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1959-1969.” Third Text 22.2: 177–194.

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 17
PRIVATIZATION IS
THE NEW BLACK
Quality Television and the
Re-Fashioning of the U.S.
Prison Industrial Complex
Maria Pramaggiore

Criminal behavior has always been fashionable in American popular culture. The first
“original gangstas” appeared in early films such as D. W. Griffith’s Musketeers of Pig Alley
(1912). This urban gangster film, shot on New York’s lower East Side, became notorious
because it claimed to feature petty street criminals as extras, a promotional stunt that—
whether factual or not—established an enduring connection between sociopaths and
their silver screen counterparts that remains intact in films such as Goodfellas (1990)
and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). In the 1930s, Little Caesar (1931), Public Enemy
(1931), and Scarface (1932) shocked audiences with violent prohibition-era scenarios
that were “ripped from the headlines,” a phrase used six decades later to tout the authen-
ticity of the NBC television program Law & Order (1990–2010), which traded upon
topical, true crime plotlines.
Crime famously did not pay under the dispensation of the Motion Picture Production
Code. As the industry’s mechanism of self-censorship between the 1930s and the 1960s,
the Code stipulated that evil could not appear to be attractive, and wrongdoers had to
be punished. Despite these injunctions, deviance of all kinds abounded in the film noir
cycle of the 1940s, the social problem films of the 1950s, and the exploitation films of
the 1960s. The films of the anti-establishment 1970s flouted the by-then defunct Code
by depicting criminals in complex and potentially sympathetic ways in films like Bonnie
and Clyde (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Superfly (1972). In that era, the
morality of the most popular characters on the small screen could not be equated with
obeying the law either, because (predominantly white and male) protagonists routinely
operated outside the boundaries of the law on programs such as The Fugitive (1963–
1967), Kojak (1973–1978), Beretta (1975–1978), and The Rockford Files (1974–1980).
In the increasingly corporatized media environment of the 1980s, American
television’s ambiguous criminals and cops went underground, overshadowed by earnest
do-gooders in the feminist saga Cagney and Lacey (1982–1988), the working class drama
 PRA M A G G I O R E

Hill Street Blues (1981–1987), and the upscale soap opera LA Law (1986–1994), all
programs that focused on the struggles of righteous cops and lawyers as they appre-
hended and punished criminals. In other developments, Hip Hop and gangsta rap
“mimicked, mocked, or relished the criminal danger historically projected onto com-
munities of color” (Hunt 2007: 69), providing the soundtrack for the New Black cinema
wave. After 9/11, superheroes—physically indomitable and technologically sophisti-
cated throwbacks to an earlier era—dominated film and television in lucrative franchises
for Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and Iron Man, and in television programs such as
Smallville (2001–2011).
This brief gloss suggests that American popular culture’s penchant for addressing anti-
social deviance is both enduring and elastic. Inevitably, prevailing ideologies of crime
and punishment, and of normativity and deviance, inform these representations. Since
the 1980s, the Reagan era’s “tough on crime” rhetoric, an increasing risk aversion among
media conglomerates, and the post 9/11 militarization of the U.S. security environment
(and, indeed, culture at large) have contributed to the production of films and television
programs that sanctify the use of military procedures and paramilitary practices by law
enforcement. This cycle found its apotheosis in the Fox network’s popular and contro-
versial series 24 (2001–2010).
In that same decade, however, cable channels and traditional networks produced
crime narratives that revolved around complex and, arguably, sympathetic perpetrators.
From the world of organized crime came HBO’s The Sopranos (1999–2007); vigilantism
was well represented by Showtime’s Dexter (2006–2013); and the war on drugs was taken
to task in both HBO’s The Wire (2002–2008) and AMC’s Breaking Bad (2008–2013).
Showtime, the cable channel that capitalized on lesbian chic with The L Word
(2004–2009) and its reality TV offspring, The Real L Word (2010–), shifted the terms of
reference by creating a show about female criminality. Weeds (2005–2012) was built
around the figure of Nancy Botwin, a white, educated, attractive, and recently widowed
mother of two who becomes a drug dealer to support her family. This narrative of white
middle class criminal necessity born of a melodramatic turn of events (in this case, a
cancer diagnosis rather than a spouse’s death) would be repeated in Breaking Bad’s Walter
White three years later, to great acclaim.
Following the success of Weeds, the program’s creator Jenji Kohan produced Orange Is
the New Black (2013–) for Netflix. Based on Piper Kerman’s bestselling memoir of the
same name, OITNB depicts a white, educated, attractive, self-described “ex-lesbian”
(Kerman 2010: 26) who is doing time in a federal women’s prison for what she often
treats as a youthful indiscretion involving her thralldom to her former lover, Nora; she
served as a drug money courier. Netflix released OITNB with great fanfare as a stream-
ing-only series on July 11, 2013, a new format that capitalized on the trend toward binge
watching and the box set marathons. By September 2013, OITNB was hailed as Netflix’s
“most-watched show,” and plans for a second season were announced (Aurthur 2013).
The program was nominated for the 2014 People’s Choice Award for “Favorite
Streaming Series.”
In their focus on contemporary criminality, OITNB, Weeds, Breaking Bad, and Dexter
crystallize several post-9/11 trends in the televisual rhetoric of crime and punishment.
The first of these trends is a keen awareness of the growing consensus that the U.S. war
on drugs has been a dismal failure. The policies attached to the pursuit of the war on
drugs did not succeed in reducing drug use or drug-related crimes, but instead have had
the effect of decimating minority communities, burdening taxpayers with a growing

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prison population, and creating a powerful prison industrial complex (PRIC)

encompassing both public and private interests.
Popular media has played a role in the war on drugs since its inception. Launched by
President Richard Nixon in 1970 with the Controlled Substances Act, the war on drugs
was extended in significant ways during the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan
brought Hollywood to the White House. The personal responsibility sloganeering of
Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign recruited B-list celebrities such as Mr. T. to get
the message out. Reagan’s law and order agenda was effected through mandatory mini-
mum sentencing for non-violent drug-related crimes and “three strikes” laws in the
1980s, policies that resulted in an 800% growth in the federal prison population between
1980 and 2012. Fully half of the people incarcerated in 2014 are serving time for drug-
related crimes.
The prosecution of the war on drugs has taken a powerful toll. The U.S. now boasts
the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, surpassing Rwanda, Russia, the
Republic of Georgia, and the Virgin Islands. Because of this statistic, Steven Raphael
and Michael Stoller describe incarceration as the latest form of American exceptional-
ism (2013: 1). A number of researchers directly link the growth in the prison population
to federal sentencing rules (Raphael and Stoller 2013: 28), and Piper Kerman herself
cites the PRIC problem in her memoir, writing that “mandatory minimum sentencing
for drug offenses are the primary reason that the U.S. prison population has ballooned
since the 1980s to over 2.5 million people” (2010: 23). In recent years, a critique of U.S.
drug policy has found purchase, not only among prison abolitionists (see Shigematsu
2011) but also among politicians on the right and in conservative think tanks such as
The Cato Institute. Financial concerns came to the forefront after the 2008 financial
collapse drained state coffers, as state governments bear the costs of incarceration, which
tripled between 1980 and 2007 (Raphael and Stoller 2013: 20–22). The shift in
American attitudes regarding the war on drugs represents a revision, if not an outright
rejection, of the punitive approach associated with Reagan, the revered patriarch of the
conservative movement.
One stunning public acknowledgement that the consequences of the war on drugs
were no longer considered acceptable was U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s August
12, 2013 announcement of policy changes that would reverse or elide the practices
associated with Reagan’s reign. In unveiling this new approach, Holder stated, “too
many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law-
enforcement reason” (Roberts and McVeigh 2013).
The war on drugs has taken its toll disproportionately on communities of color. The
vast majority of prison inmates are men with low education attainment, and ethnic and
racial minorities are vastly overrepresented (Raphael and Stoller 2013: 8–10). Thirty
five percent of black male high school dropouts under age 40 are in prison, compared
with 0.7 percent for the U.S. population as a whole (Parry 2013). Ashley Hunt writes,
“the rhetorics of crime control [have become] the new parlance of racial control” (2007:
69). Nevertheless, most quality television prison shows, including Oz (1997–2003),
Prison Break (2005–09), and OITNB, foreground white protagonists, with The Wire
serving as (mostly) an exception, as the first two seasons of that show featured white
cops and unions.
The most recent development in the PRIC debate is the issue of privatization. In
2010, prison management companies Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and
the GEO group together reported profits of $2.9 billion (Stanage 2013: 20). In 2012,

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CCA bought Lake Erie Correctional Institution for $72 million, which represents the
first purchase of a state facility by a private corporation. The privatization solution
threatens to exacerbate the problem of prison population growth, as the CCA demanded
a guarantee of a 90% occupancy rate when it purchased Lake Erie Correctional. It is
somewhat ironic that quality television programs remain silent on the issue of privatiza-
tion because they are a product of the same neoliberal economic regime. The origins of
quality television lie in the media deregulation fever of the 1970s and 1980s. HBO was
the first cable outlet to establish a reputation for quality through its staging of “event
television” in the 1980s, the precursor to NBC’s “must-see TV” in the 1990s.
Citing a broad range of television programs (Miami Vice, The DEA, Cops) as well as
narcotraficante films and narcocorridos, Curtis Márez argues that “drug war literature,
music, television, and films have become privileged cultural forms for reflecting upon
larger political-economic power relations in America” (2004: 3). Following Márez’s
argument, I will argue that the recent spate of quality television programming that takes
aim at the war on drugs has expressed a particular interest in gender and power, and, to
a lesser extent, in dynamics of race and cultural identity.
Under the rubric of “quality television,” television scholars refer to a diverse group of
programs running the gamut from The Simpsons to Lost that appear on both network
television and cable. Jason Mittell argues that these programs represent a distinct nar-
rational mode: they produce a cumulative (rather than episodic) sense of narrative by
undercutting situational continuity and rejecting the need to return to equilibrium in
each episode (2012–13: “Complexity in Context,” paras. 5 and 8). Michael Kackman
has questioned the narrow formal emphasis within the discourse of quality television.
He asserts that this approach, which privileges aesthetics, ignores the long history of
television scholarship that engages with popular forms, such as the soap opera, which
are coded as feminine. Kackman proposes that even a program like Lost, which is
obsessed with masculine power, forces us to “reinvoke melodrama as the constitutive
force behind much of what we call quality television” (2010). I would argue that an
obsession with masculine power is at the center of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking
Bad as well, and I return to Kackman’s reframing of the quality TV discussion in terms
of gender and the much-maligned genre of melodrama below.
The second development that informs the OINTB narrative is the emergence of
quality television as a forum for negotiating gender, sexuality, and race. Although the
scholarly and popular discourse on quality television tends to focus on male crime
dramas such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Treme, and House of Cards, an
analysis of programs such as Weeds, The Big C, and OITNB helps to clarify the range of
issues at stake. In particular, these programs elucidate the full ramifications of the con-
vergence of media and fashion industries for televisual criminality. This industry
convergence, evidenced in the expansion of talent management company Relativity
Media from entertainment and sports to fashion (Block 2013), both broadens and con-
centrates the opportunities for disseminating the postfeminist logic that equates female
empowerment with fashion and physical appearance (see Negra and Tasker 2007). I am
arguing that this logic may be most visible among televisions female felons, yet applies
to the medium’s male malefactors as well. The neoliberal emphasis on self-improvement
and the postfeminist obsession with appearance infuse representations of sympathetic
criminality throughout the quality television oeuvre. In these programs, captivating
criminals are rendered “relatable” and therefore capable of rehabilitation partly because
they successfully navigate the world of fashion.

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The romanticization of the gangster’s sartorial style is hardly new: the lineage of well
turned-out thugs extends from Al Capone to Clyde Barrow to Coolio. The fact that the
underworld remains a potent source for high fashion was made evident in 2011 when
Ralph Lauren used images of Australian gangsters from the 1920s to inspire his mens-
wear collection and decorate his flagship stores (Safe 2011).
In fact, prison culture has been driving fashion for decades. “If hip-hop is the voice of
a generation, ass-sagging pants is the uniform,” writes Kirsten West Savali (2012).
Sagging originated in prisons, where belts are removed and inmates lose weight; the look
has come to dominate youth culture, famously prompting President-Elect Barack
Obama’s to say, shortly after the 2008 election, that “brothers should pull up their pants”
(Haberman 2008). Sagging is a fashion trend with legs: General Larry Platt performed
“Pants on the Ground” for an American Idol audition in January 2010, and Quarterback
Brett Favre chanted the lyrics after his Minnesota Vikings defeated the Dallas Cowboys
in the playoffs, in a video that went viral on YouTube. Later, Jimmy Fallon, performing
as Neil Young, covered the song on his talk show, a performance that also found a vast
internet audience.
Moreover, material connections are developing between the PRIC and the rag trade
through a burgeoning prison fashion industry. “Prison Blues Jeans” is a line of denim
jackets and jeans produced by inmates in a work program at the Eastern Oregon
Correctional institute. Clothing, hats, and t-shirts are marketed online as the “authentic
prison-constructed blue jean brand,” which are “made in the U.S.A.” (prisonbluejeans.
com). The philosophy behind this presumably lucrative enterprise rests on the promise
of rehabilitation: 96% of the inmates will be released back into the community and,
therefore, the facility seeks to “provide these individuals a work ethic and basic skills
needed to improve their chances of getting a job and becoming a productive citizen once
released” (prisonbluejeans.com).
Moving back to prison programming, my proposition that the contemporary articula-
tion of criminality is a postfeminist matter aligns with Kackman’s argument regarding
gender and melodrama. Addressing the gendered dimensions of quality television is
critical to fully understanding its dynamics across programs, networks, and platforms.
On quality television generally, including programs such as Mad Men, exaggerated and
stereotypical representations of gender (whether arch in tone or not) have currency and
often are foregrounded in marketing campaigns. Female solidarity was established
between the protagonists of Showtime’s The Big C and Weeds, for example, in a promo-
tional video in which the two “difficult” women—cancer survivor Cathy Jamison from
the former show, and drug dealer Nancy Botwin—compete with one another by recount-
ing their heinous behavior, accompanied by the strains of “Dueling Banjos.” This ad
reveals the way these programs have secured for Showtime a reputation as the “female
problem” network, one whose edgy entertainment features challenging “anti-heroine
mother protagonists” (Bradshaw 2013).
A comparison of two cancer survivors, Walter White from Breaking Bad and Cathy
Jamison from The Big C, offers a perspective on the re-emergence of traditional gender
roles on quality television. Upon diagnosis, Cathy’s behavior becomes moderately anti-
social, rather than criminal. She builds a swimming pool that a neighbor objects to,
begins a brief affair, and consumes nothing but alcohol and desserts for a period of time,
whereas Walter becomes a murderous meth manufacturer to support his family.
Their pathways are distinctly gendered; however, both Cathy and Walter, like their qual-
ity television cohorts, are subjected to the postfeminist principle that self-improvement

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grows from paying attention to appearance and style. Cathy has her pubic hair waxed
for the first time, which facilitates her affair. Walter commits to a future as a drug king-
pin by adopting the moniker Heisenberg, and acquires the look of a spaghetti western
hero with his bald pate (necessitated by cancer treatments) and a wide-brimmed hat.
One might initially consider Weeds, The Big C, and OITNB to be feminist incursions
into male territory. I would argue, however, that the terrain for OITNB’s cuddly crimi-
nality was prepared in advance, not only by Weeds, but also by The Wire, The Sopranos,
Dexter, and Breaking Bad, whose characters are largely defined by their distinctive styles.
The opening credits to Dexter emphasize his grooming and dressing rituals, and the
Dexter fan wiki finds that the serial killer’s Miami-appropriate clothing merits repeated
mention: “beneath the benign bowling shirts lies his obsession with stalking and killing
the guilty” (Dexter Wiki). In “The 8 Best Fashion Statements Cooked Up on Breaking
Bad” a Fashionista blogger comments favorably on Walter White’s shaved head and the
way that Jesse Pinkman “fancied himself a gangsta in the early seasons and dressed in
baggy pants,” also wearing “Ed Hardy-esque jackets and shirts” (Fashionista). In short,
the postfeminization of televisual criminality has not been limited to female characters.
The importance of fashion branding to characters and celebrity personas has risen, as
popular culture reportage converts any public appearance into an occasion for advertis-
ing fashion labels. E! Network’s Fashion Police creates artificial feuds (“Bitch Stole My
Look”) while applauding and denigrating public figures for their fashion choices.
Fashion is also associated with celebrity criminality, an arena whose gender dynamics
have become more egalitarian in recent years. In the 1990s and 2000s, paparazzi exposed
the misbehavior of men such as Robert Downey Jr., Nick Nolte, and Mel Gibson. The
beat expanded in the 2000s to include Paris Hilton (2006), Lindsay Lohan (2007), and
the reigning girl next door, Reese Witherspoon (2013). Fashion plays an important role
in these rise-and-fall narratives, as elaborate descriptions of what celebrities wear at
their court dates often accompanies the coverage of their substance-fueled hi-jinks. In
Witherspoon’s case, the star used apparel as atonement. Shortly after a video of her
Atlanta arrest was circulated on YouTube, she sported an Atlanta Police baseball cap
while walking through LAX airport.
Celebutante Paris Hilton’s conviction inspired several free online games, all linked to
attire. In one game, the player dresses Paris in jail. In another, called The Prison Life, an
avatar of Hilton wears “stiletto heels, designer sunglasses and an orange jumpsuit” and
“attempts to undertake her prison duties under the watchful eye of a baton-wielding
warden” (Katz 2007). For the incarcerated Hilton, “orange is the new pink” (Katz 2007).
Quality television’s female criminals compete with nubile ne’er-do-wells like Paris
Hilton, even if they are middle-aged moms. Weeds’ Nancy Botwin, notoriously dubbed
a MILF (“Mother I’d Like to Fuck”) by Snoop Dogg in a guest appearance on the show,
has an enthusiastic following of fans who pay close attention to her appearance. The
Weeds Wiki home page refers in a tongue-in-cheek way to Nancy’s fashion sense.
“Though she appears to be a hip suburban mom sporting hobo bags, bohemian jewelry
and bright sneaks, there’s definitely a double meaning when this girl puts on her Mary
Janes.” A section of the Wiki devoted specifically to fashion lists Nancy’s “smoking style
moments” and a caption accompanying a “Top Look from Season Three” integrates
televisual narrative and fashion sense: “Looking stylish while crouched on the floor of
the Grow House kitchen in a chic head-to-toe black outfit and pretty platforms as four
drug lords are pointing guns at her head” (Weeds Wiki). In short, Nancy’s adventurous
escapades are inseparable from the garments she wears.

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Eleanor Novek writes that “prison-focused entertainment has become as American as

football” (2009: 376), but it might be said that such entertainment has become as
American as Fashion Week. Piper Kerman’s memoir and the Netflix series Orange Is the
New Black seek to explore a woman’s experience of prison with a title that overtly signals
the importance of fashion as a lens through which to view the whole enterprise. The
book describes a moment when the recently-incarcerated Kerman receives a letter from
a friend that included The New York Times’ “On the Street” fashion column: “covering
the half-page were over a dozen photographs of women of every age, race, size, and
shape, all clad in brilliant orange.” The friend writes: “NYers wear orange in solidarity
w/Piper’s plight!” (2010: 71).
Piper Kerman’s memoir traces the Smith-educated author, renamed Piper Chapman
in the Netflix series, as she serves time in federal prison in the Correctional Institute at
Litchfield, CT. Her crime is drug-related: Piper’s ex-lover “Nora” (renamed Alex in the
television series, and based on a woman named Catherine Cleary Wolters, who is writ-
ing her own memoir, tentatively entitled Out of Orange) coerced Piper to carry money
for an African drug lord. Six years later, when the U.S. government seeks to prosecute
the drug lord, Piper is charged with conspiracy. She pleads guilty to money laundering
to improve her chances for obtaining a short sentence.
Now partnered with a man, Kerman imagines herself from his point of view: she is his
“ex-lesbian, boho-WASP girlfriend [who] was also a soon-to-be-convicted felon” (2010:
26). She spends years waiting to be sentenced because the government is attempting to
extradite the drug lord from the U.K. Piper explains the delay in terms of apparel: “They
wanted me in street clothes, not an orange jumpsuit, to testify against him” (24). Her
sentencing is similarly predicated upon clothing and appearance, as she plays upon her
white middle class privilege to relate to the judge. She and her attorney select a skirt suit
described as “very country club” so as to remind the judge “of his own daughter or niece
or neighbor when he looks at you” (29). She was sentenced to 15 months in federal
prison in February 2004.
OINTB’s title may reference fashion jargon, but it also conveys an implicit racial
undertone, as it displaced a memorable version of this snowclone, used at the time of
Barack Obama’s 2007 presidential campaign: “Obama is the new black” (Katovsky
2008). In fact, the program’s gender and race politics illuminate the degree to which
OITNB is a case study in postfeminist notions of white female empowerment. Jenji
Kohan has gone on record saying she is not invested in the story of a “white girl going
to prison” and had intended to use Kerman’s memoir to “delve into stories about incar-
cerated women of color and other disenfranchised women” (Aurthur 2013). And,
indeed, the program’s first season is structured by numerous flashbacks recounting the
backstories of many of the women inmates and thus explores some racially diverse nar-
ratives. Yet in treating the Piper character as its indisputable point of reference, OITNB
offers a “yuppie’s view of prison” (Ball 2013), heavily dependent upon inventive self-
fashioning spiced with a voyeuristic investment in lesbian sexuality.
A strong theme of beauty and fashion is threaded through the narratives of all the
characters. “Red,” the Russian émigré who runs the kitchen, offers her lackeys Bioré
facial cleansing strips as incentives to do her bidding. Sophia, a transgendered African
American, is the prison hair stylist. In one episode, racial difference is treated as nothing
more than fashion as Piper barters away a thatch of her blonde hair to be used in a weave
for Taystee, an African American inmate who needs a fashion boost to confidently
appear before her parole board.

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The gender and racial dynamics of the prison are implausible and mostly played for
comedy. One buffoonish male guard is mockingly nicknamed “Pornstache” because of
his outmoded disco-era facial hair. He intimidates the women and supplies them with
illegal drugs in perhaps the most sinister subplot of the series. The only intimations of
sexual coercion, however, occur off-screen in relation to quid pro quo drug transactions.
When a romantic relationship between an inmate, Diaz, and another guard, John,
results in her pregnancy, Diaz reluctantly initiates a sexual relationship with Pornstache
in order to protect her lover, who would face prosecution if their relationship were dis-
covered.
Racial tension is both acknowledged and minimized; the segregated world of the
prison reframes racial difference as social clique. Piper belongs to the white “tribe,” yet
has an uncanny knack for crossing boundaries, which embellishes her fish out of water
narrative. Living in the “ghetto” section of the dormitory with a Jamaican roommate,
she is the only white character who attempts to work with, identify with, and support
all her fellow inmates. The one character whom Piper antagonizes is Tiffany, nicknamed
“Pennsatucky” and coded as white trash through her attire (hoodies and sweat pants)
and meth-ravaged teeth. The two literally come to blows at the finale of season one in
a climax that highlights the fact that the primary conflict arises between two white
women.
Sexual dynamics are far less sanitized than racial difference. In the memoir, Piper’s
relationship with fiancé Larry is unassailable, whereas the show challenges Piper’s
supposedly straight sexuality with scenes of hot lesbian sex at every turn. The memoir
suggests the improbability of such prison hookups; Kerman writes that “it was hard to
see how a person could conduct an intimate relationship in such an intensely over-
crowded environment” (2010: 76). On the program, the showers and the chapel are sites
of public and private encounters between women with conventionally sized, attractive
bodies and numerous tattoos. In the first episode, as Taystee waits to use the shower she
demands to see Piper’s breasts, and praises the way they look. “Ex-lesbian” Piper is not
immune to this sexualized environment: after being banished to solitary confinement,
she returns to the general population and initiates sex with her ex-lover Alex. Shortly
thereafter, she agrees to marry Larry while she is still in prison, rather than waiting for
her release. Season one ends with Piper estranged from both lovers.
With this love triangle subplot, the show’s narrative exposes the underlying melo-
drama that Kackman identifies within quality television overall, and veers toward the
“women in prison” genre. That genre—and, indeed, Piper’s “ex-lesbianism,” which is
based upon her being a lesbian while in college at Smith—turns upon sexologist
Havelock Ellis’s “pseudo invert.” Unlike the true lesbian, the pseudo invert merely
responds to her environment and rejects lesbianism outside the prison setting (Ciasullo
2008: 198–201). Women-in-prison genre fiction invariably concludes with the pseudo
invert protagonist’s release and subsequent marriage (Ciasullo 2008: 205), the trajectory
mapped out by Kerman’s memoir. The television program, however, has contributed
sexual complications that position Piper as the protagonist of prison lesbian pulp fiction.
Piper and the television audience, “can look like the prison lesbian does—that is, as the
prison lesbian would look—without being a ‘‘true’’ lesbian” (Ciasullo 2008: 206).
OITNB thus capitalizes upon the popularity of queer friendly television such as Glee and
Modern Family and ratifies the appeal of the lipstick lesbian, which Showtime explored
and exploited earlier in The L Word. The femme style of the lipstick lesbian renders her
potentially attractive to a broad audience, including straight males as well as straight

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and gay female viewers. With the exception of Boo, played by comic Lea DeLaria, and
Crazy Eyes, an eccentric character played by Suzanne Warren, the women of OITNB
are predominantly young, conventionally attractive, and sexually flexible. Even Diaz,
the heterosexual, pregnant inmate is able to contain her distaste in order to have stra-
tegic sex with Pornstache.
The rapid absorption of this fashion-forward prison saga into American culture is
clear from magazine spreads such as the August 2013 Harper’s Bazaar, which claimed
that OITNB “made us think more about women’s prisons than we ever have wanted to,”
before the writer returned to the truly important business at hand: “it’s made us actually
question—is orange the new black?” (Pieri 2013). New York Fashion week confirmed
that on the 2013 runway, orange was the new black, leading an Elle commentator to
note: “We doubt the creators behind the addictive new Netflix series, Orange Is the New
Black, realized they were predicting a major New York Fashion Week color moment
when they dreamed up the show’s title. But they sure did” (Levinson).
If, as Ashley Hunt argues, “images of the prison, policing, and courts that litter popu-
lar culture [are] far more visible than prisons themselves” (69), then popular quality
television entertainment programs like OITNB require serious consideration. Like The
Wire, Weeds, and Breaking Bad before it, Orange Is the New Black leverages the wide-
spread disenchantment with the U.S. war on drugs not to address the history and politics
of that war and its impact on minority communities, and not to query the neoliberal
privatization of crime and punishment. Instead, the program reconditions classical
tropes of white femininity through a protagonist whose fashion sense and sexual adven-
turism are the only ammunition she can use to undermine the power of the PRIC.
I thank my colleague Kylie Jarrett for her help with the title.

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September 2013. Available at: www.buzzfeed.com/kateaurthur/laura-prepon-orange-is-the-new-
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Katz, Leslie. (2007) “For Paris Hilton, ‘The Prison Life’ is all games.” CNET. June 5, 2007. Available
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Culture. Durham, NC: Duke UP.
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of Social Justice 21: 376–84.
Parry, Marc. (2013) “The American Police State.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 20,
2013. Available at: www.chronicle.com/article/The-American-Police-State/142965/
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harpersbazaar.com/fashion/fashion-articles/orange-pre-fall-2013-trend
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 18
THE MONEY SHOT
IN FEMINIST QUEER
AND MAINSTREAM
PORNOGRAPHIES
Tiffany Sostar and Rebecca Sullivan

“If you don’t have the come shots, you don’t have a porno picture. Plan on at least ten
separate come shots” (Ziplow, quoted in Williams 1989: 93). Stephen Ziplow’s advice
was given to pornographers in 1977, after Golden Age pornography gave us the “highly
visible spectacle of the money shot that would become the sine qua non of all hard-core
pornography for decades to come” (Williams 2008: 133). The money shot became the
defining trope of pornography due in large part to the Golden Age triumvirate of Deep
Throat (1972), Behind the Green Door (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973). Its
significance to the gender politics of contemporary pornography persists (Tibbals 2010:
636; Paasonen 2013: 83). The most common iteration of the money shot is the scene-
ending sequence of a man’s penis ejaculating onto a passive woman’s body, either her
face or some eroticized part of her body. Both characters are usually identified as
cisgender—meaning that their gender identity aligns with their sex assignment at birth.
Given this, the money shot may seem irredeemably linked to the “blatant misogyny and
enthusiastic embrace of degradation by many of those who make pornography” (Boyle
2010: 216).
The money shot valorizes a trajectory of sexual pleasure that moves unilaterally
toward a cataclysmic eruption of pleasure. Even the colloquial for orgasm—climax—
suggests that this is the singular goal of sex and all energies must be directed toward this
summit experience. Thus, we suggest, it is not the money shot per se that best speaks to
the sexist, misogynist, and queerphobic impulses in much pornography. Rather, it is
what the money shot represents: penetrative mastery, goal-oriented pleasure, and cre-
scendo-like sexual rhythms. Linda Williams calls this “the frenzy of the visible” in
pornography (1989). While the money shot is the most obvious example, the porno-
graphic conventions of representing women’s pleasure have also succumbed to similar
rhythms and trajectories. Most often, women’s climax is delineated aurally through
moaning and screaming, and visibly through writhing and grasping, both escalating in
tandem with the money shot. The question we pose in this essay is, can women’s pleas-
ure, and the pleasure of non-binary individuals who were designated female at birth
 SO STA R A N D S U L L I VA N

(DFAB), be differently depicted? Can the climax either be postponed or even withheld
altogether while sexual satisfaction, including orgasm, is still clearly connoted?
Furthermore, how can such depictions of pleasure aid us in delineating different pornog-
raphies and their underlying gender and sexual politics?
We examine the pornographic strategies of sexual pleasure via the feminist queer
politics in Courtney Trouble’s Nostalgia. This film begins with the premise of Trouble
and their girlfriend, Pepper Sox, spending a night in bed to watch porn and have sex. It
imaginatively reconstructs key scenes from four Golden Age porn classics—Deep Throat,
Behind the Green Door, Babylon Pink, and The Devil in Miss Jones—by subverting the
generic trope of the climax. Three of these films also received prestige remakes by Vivid,
the global leader in pornographic film production. The New Devil in Miss Jones (2005),
Throat: A Cautionary Tale (2009), and The New Behind the Green Door (2013) were all
directed by Paul Thomas, with lavish production budgets, high caliber stars, and rever-
ent references to the actors featured in the originals. Each of these four films makes a
point of expressing women’s/DFABs’ sexual agency and rightful desire for sexual pleas-
ure. The comparisons end there, however, as the manner by which their sexual pleasure
is connoted radically differs. By exploring the particular valences of sexual pleasure for
women and non-binary DFAB individuals in these films, more nuanced understandings
of pornography as a cinematic genre and as a form of sexual cultural politics can be
achieved.

History and Theory: The Porn Wars and the

Politics of the Orgasm
Our intention is not to choose sides in the ongoing and unproductive debate of pro/
anti-pornography. Rather, it is to explore the different ways that sexual pleasure is
depicted to suggest that it is possible to be strongly in favor of some pornography prac-
tices, strongly opposed to others, and more often than not landing somewhere along that
continuum in the critical assessment of specific pornographic films. Karen Boyle states
that on the topic of pornography, “[m]eaningful dialogue has long since broken down,
to the extent that it is rare to find opposing views represented side-by-side in an aca-
demic context, with each ‘side’ blaming the other for this” (2006: 3). We suggest that
one reason for this impasse is that anti-porn scholars tend to analyze mainstream
pornographies, while pro-porn scholars tend to analyze queer, feminist or otherwise
countercultural pornographies. The most interesting current scholarship on pornogra-
phy recognizes the “richness and complexity of porn as a genre . . . both in the
mainstream and on its countercultural edges” (Penley et al. 2013: 9). The films we
examine here offer a unique opportunity to analyze both feminist queer and mainstream
pornographies’ contemporary reinterpretations of the most dominant generic element
in pornographic film – the money shot.
Defining pornography has frustrated activists, scholars and legislators since 1964,
when United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s uttered his famous state-
ment: “I know it when I see it.” Pornography has been called everything from the source
of rape to the source of women’s liberation. Political commitments aside, most agree that
pornography refers to the graphic depiction of sexual acts in publicly-mediated forms
(McNair 2013: 18). Furthermore, pornographic films do not merely depict sex but incite
an intensely bodily-erotic response from the viewer (Williams 1991: 3). There is little
doubt that the mediated performance of sexuality is increasingly critical to any discussion

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of identity or subjectivity. Therefore, questioning the political value of pornography in

terms of the way that sexual pleasure is depicted for differently gendered and sexed bod-
ies remains a top priority for both feminist and queer scholarship. Thus, we disagree with
any claims that the study of pornography is now in a post-feminist phase (Williams
2004: 1; McNair 2013: 59). Such an argument persists in aligning feminism with anti-
porn and eliminates the possibility of feminist porn performance and its analysis. Boyle
points out that the very ubiquity of pornography in the media landscape does not pre-
clude feminist interrogation but demands its deeper attention (2006: 5). In The Feminist
Porn Book pornography scholars and activists also insist that greater attention be paid to
“concepts of desire, agency, power, beauty, and pleasure at their most confounding and
difficult” (Penley et al 2013: 9).
Feminists who actively embrace the political potential of pornography often engage
directly with mainstream heterosexual pornographies in order to challenge the social
conventions of sexuality depicted therein. Much of that work has been heavily influ-
enced by advances made in queer activism and scholarship, while insisting on grounding
analysis in feminist concerns of gendered power, privilege, and embodiment. Writing in
1999, Dana R. Shugar considered the potential of queer theory to both threaten and
enhance lesbian feminist scholarship. She noted that in addition to its emphasis on
performativity and sexual subjectivity, queer theory also drew attention to the need for
greater coalition building and alliance networks across the gender and sexual spectrum.
However, she continued to emphasize the need to account for differential power rela-
tions, persistent gender and sexual hierarchies, and the specific forms of social, political,
and economic oppressions perpetuated on the basis of gender or sexual difference
(Shugar 1999: 19). Thus, we have chosen the term “feminist queer pornographies” to
reflect on those practices that attempt to account for both subjective and structural
issues of gender and sexual politics in the production of sexually explicit media. While
some see feminist queer pornographies’ engagement with and reworking of mainstream
pornography as a sign of co-optation, we align with others who argue that it is necessary
to respond to “the limits, exclusions, and biases of the adult mainstream industry”
(Comella 2013: 91).
As Susanna Paasonen argues, we must “define pornography as a plural category and
[account] for its different instances without suggesting that one’s findings . . . speak of
the genre as a whole” (2013: 84). We agree, however, that mainstream pornographies
are those that operate within hegemonic norms of gender (cis-identified), sexuality
(heteronormative), and commerce (capitalist, free enterprise). There is room for great
variety and blurring of categories even within this definition of mainstream pornogra-
phies, but there is a mainstream, and it is recognizable by its conformity to those norms.
Countercultural pornographies, including feminist, queer, and feminist queer pornogra-
phies are those that explicitly and intentionally challenge or resist hegemonic norms of
gender, sexuality, and commerce. The four remakes present a set of dialogic engagements
with Golden Age pornography’s reliance on the money shot to connote sexual pleasure.
Nostalgia (2009) inserts queer desires and bodies into the cisgender heterosexual past
and claims space within the mainstream. In this sense, nostalgia itself is queered and
exposed as a practice of selective memorialization that excuses or outright erases past
sociosexual relations of inequity. Vivid, conversely, reimagines the Golden Age in ways
that seem at first to destabilize but ultimately reiterate the gendered power dynamics of
mainstream pornography. Interestingly, all four achieve their political goals through the
depiction of women’s sexual pleasure vis-à-vis the money shot.

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Figure 18.1 Courtney Trouble’s Nostalgia. Reprinted with the permission of

TroubleFilms.

Nostalgia and (Il)legible Diversity

Nostalgia (2009) presents a diverse cast in terms of gender identity, racialization, and
body type. However, the legibility of this diversity depends, in large part, on the viewers’
knowledge of the identities of the performers. Many of the performers hold “star” status:
both Jiz Lee and Syd Blakovich are well-known Hapa (mixed-heritage) Asian gender-
queer porn performers. Madison Young founded the Femina Potens Art Gallery, runs her
own production company and straddles the mainstream and countercultural porn con-
texts. April Flores is an award-winning Latina porn performer, plus-size model, and
writer. Courtney Trouble is a world-renowned genderqueer porn performer. While the
names of the performers are well-known to one countercultural audience, allowing the
diversity in Nostalgia (2009) to be legible, many other viewers will not have the back-
ground knowledge of the film’s performers and may read the film as being either entirely
white, or exclusively about women. This in turn sets up an opportunity to question the
way that gender and sexual norms are assumed unless clearly defined otherwise.
Trouble selects some of the most explicit and problematic money shots from the orig-
inal films and remakes them in the context of sexual pleasure for diverse gender and
sexual identities, all of whom are designated-female-at-birth (DFAB) individuals. This
appears to be an intentional choice on Trouble’s part, centering the pleasure and
experiences of the DFAB bodies that mainstream pornography has been accused of
objectifying and demeaning, and challenging mainstream representations of women’s
sexual pleasure while also challenging the assumption that anyone with a vulva is a
woman. While penises and penetrative sexual acts occur in the film—by strap-ons and
other sex toys—the film subverts the money shot until it ultimately excludes the very
idea of climactic sexual pleasure altogether. Thus, it poses important questions about
how sexual pleasure in mainstream pornography demands visibility and thus treats wom-
en’s sexual pleasure as a problem to overcome. Trouble, instead, pushes the climactic
moment further to the margins until the concluding scene, which offers neither visible

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nor audible orgasms. This is a radical act of displacing climactic sexual pleasure and is
therefore a rejection of the logics of phallic sexuality which have informed most porno-
graphic film practice, even at the countercultural edges. Thus, by returning to those
classic films that first canonized the money shot and established the generic foundations
for depicting pornographic sexual pleasure, Trouble engages with the politics of pleasure
itself.

Behind the Green Door: Orgasm, Consent,

and the “Money” Shot
The original Behind the Green Door (1972) includes a spectacular 7 minutes of “optically
printed, psychedelically colored doublings of the ejaculating penis” (Williams 2008:
141). The film presents an extreme example of passive femininity and active masculin-
ity. Gloria, performed by Marilyn Chambers, is abducted and hypnotized before being
brought to the stage of an exotic sex club to be “ravished.” The sex in the film has Gloria
held in place first by other women and then by a series of men who penetrate her orally
and vaginally until she appears to orgasm and they ejaculate in the aforementioned
7-minute psychedelic money shot. Gloria’s consent is not only lacking but it is her pas-
sive, coerced condition that lies at the center of her presumed pleasure.
In Nostalgia (2009), Trouble begins her exploration with a re-telling of this scene.
Kimberlee Cline appears before a masked crowd, silent but clearly alert, as a group
seduction commences. Almost all the audience and exclusively all the performers are
DFAB. The scene follows the usual progressions to sexual pleasure, including penetra-
tive sex by Jiz Lee using a strap-on. Yet, a reviewer noted that Lee’s blank expression
during the sex was jarring and “took me out of the scene,” despite the writhing and
moaning of Cline who clearly climaxes (Kulystin 2009). The money shot is also in evi-
dence but aggressively subverted as Lee removes their prosthetic penis and masturbates
to ejaculation all over Cline. In the reimagined scene, the woman receiving the ejaculate
is actively engaged with the sex acts throughout the scene. When two female characters
ejaculate onto her torso, closely mirroring the “psychedelic” money shot scene of the
original, she makes eye contact with them, she is not restrained, and the non-consensual
passivity of the original scene is replaced by consensual submissiveness. Similarly, while
the scene relies on conventional techniques of moaning and writhing, interestingly such
performance comes mostly from Cline, making those who ravish her seem more in ser-
vice to her than using her for their own pleasure. Thus the phallocentrism of penetration
and ejaculation as the locus of sexual pleasure is challenged from both feminist and
queer perspectives.
Vivid’s The New Behind the Green Door seems to also offer an empowered and fully
active cisgender woman at the center of the narrative. Brooklyn Lee plays Hope, the
supposed long-lost daughter of Marilyn Chambers, who is both sexually frustrated and
financially devastated by her boyfriend. Through an old boyfriend, she is lured to the
Emperor’s Club and eventually convinced to become its star attraction. Relational sex
is replaced by her becoming a high-priced sex worker, achieving both the personal atten-
tion and financial success she has craved. In place of a sexual money shot, the final sex
club sequence offers up a literal money shot. It reveals Hope not as a desiring subject but
as the product of a Svengali-like promoter who invites his clients “to fuck the DNA of
an icon” while a price list of her services plays over her naked, writhing, and completely
silent body. Some may argue that a recognition of sex work as labor deserving of

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compensation is better than previous pornographic tropes that suggest women do it only
because they love it. However, the film first reduces Hope to tears of desperation and
disgust at her initial foray into sex work, and then closes with a doubled matte shot of
Hope removing her mask to stare into the camera while her “mother” fades into the
background in a scene from the original Behind the Green Door. As a replacement for the
double-pronged ejaculation scene of the original, the scene doesn’t so much indicate
Hope’s consent as it does her inevitable destiny as a desirable object of the
pornographic gaze.

Deep Throat: Ejaculation, Clitorises, and

the Embodiment of Sex
The conceit of all iterations of Deep Throat is the misplaced clitoris, a fantasy that
allowed the original Deep Throat (1972) to place male ejaculation as the primary goal of
sex. Linda Williams cites Deep Throat (1972) as the film that brought fellatio into the
public consciousness, as it was the first “highly visible spectacle of the money shot that
would become the sine qua non of all hard-core pornography for decades to come”
(Williams 2008: 133). The original Deep Throat revolves around a woman’s quest for an
orgasm. She seeks help from a doctor who discovers that her clitoris is in her throat. He
then pimps her out to his male patients. Eventually, she decides to marry one of the
clients after the doctor increases his penis size (somewhat magically, over the telephone).
The film ends with a cacophony of fireworks, bells, rocket launches, and musical statues
before returning to Lovelace, her face soaked with ejaculate, satisfied at last.
Deep Throat (1972) was, and is, a controversial film. As Diana E. H. Russell writes,
“although many people would classify Deep Throat as nonviolent pornography because it
does not portray rape or other violence, we now know from Linda (Lovelace) Marchiano’s
books . . . that this film is in fact a documentary of rape from beginning to end” (2000:
55). Courtney Trouble deals with the coercive production history of the original Deep
Throat (1972) by casting three highly recognizable stars, Jiz Lee, Syd Blakovich, and
Madison Young, in the scene. Each is known not only for their work in pornography but
also for their sex worker activism. Similarly, Vivid casts Sasha Grey, one of the industry’s
most outspoken performers and advocates for self-empowered sex work, for their prestige
remake Throat: A Cautionary Tale (2009). The two films’ reworking of Deep Throat are
interesting for the number of overlapping strategies utilized, at least until their conclu-
sions. In both Throat and Nostalgia, women’s sexual agency is specifically linked to the
absence of the ejaculating penis. In Throat, Grey’s character, Julie Garett, discovers her
misplaced clitoris in a rare scene of non-sexualized camaraderie between cisgender
women, when her coworker at a local sex club teaches her how to deep throat a dildo.
This scene is the first of many moments of sexual agency and independence for Julie.
However, problematically, once she discovers sexual pleasure, her agency is slowly robbed
from her first by her manipulative boyfriend and then by a mysterious Svengali-like fig-
ure—both common characters in Vivid’s remakes. Nostalgia (2009) also uses dildos and
self-directed sexual activity to center women’s sexual pleasure despite the misplaced
clitoris that seems to erase cisgender women’s actual bodies. By casting Madison Young,
the only cisgender woman present, as the center of this scene, Trouble directly addresses
pornographic representations of women’s sexual agency and pleasure. The extended and
highly explicit three-way sex scene explores oral, anal, and vaginal pleasure in balance,
using fingers, tongues, vibrators, penetrative toys, and strap-ons. Whenever the sex seems

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to have climaxed, the action starts again. Even after Madison Young is finally sated, the
scene closes with an extended sequence of her sucking on two strap-ons simultaneously,
her concern solely and seemingly never-endingly for her own pleasure.
The overlap between the two remakes ends abruptly as the Vivid film reasserts the
centrality of cisgender men’s sexual power to turn Julie’s sexual pleasure into a
commodified object (2013: 216). Julie’s sexual agency is entirely stripped, as first one
boyfriend then another coerces her into sex work that violates the boundaries she
explicitly set for herself earlier in the film. The focus of the second half of Julie’s story is
much more on power than pleasure. An oral gangbang with no less than eleven men
is one scene of coercion, with multiple money shots onto Julie’s face and mouth. Julie is
clearly disaffected throughout this scene, and at no point does she perform the orgasm
that the female body in pornography is supposed to perform.
Eventually, Julie is tricked into performing in a porn film, mirroring Linda Lovelace’s
experiences. There is no ejaculation in this scene, and when she realizes the cameras are
present she bites her partner’s penis and screams at the crowd, blood rather than ejacu-
late dripping down her chin. The movie ends with her dead, having deep throated a
broken bottle. That her suicide is punishment for her sexual behavior is made clear in a
voiceover earlier in the film, in the middle of the coerced gangbang, where her sex
worker friend says that “she sold out, and she suffered the consequences.” Rather than
criticizing the men who abuse and coerce Julie, the film places the blame on Julie her-
self. The bottle that she uses in her suicide is handed to her by a religious fanatic client
who says, “if thine eye offends thee, cut it out,” further emphasizing the idea that it is
her non-normative means of sexual pleasure that is the source of her abasement. Where
Nostalgia (2009) maintains the silliness of the original film and reasserts women’s sexual
pleasure as the scene ends, Throat seems to call for anxiety and disgust, ending with a
cautionary tale of fatal reprisal to women who seek sexual pleasure on their own terms.

The Devil in Miss Jones and the Goal of

the Pornographic Scene
Perhaps the most dramatic departure from the original is the The Devil in Miss Jones
sequence that concludes Nostalgia. In the original, a sexually repressed woman commits
suicide but asks for one more chance to experience lust before entering Hell. Abundant
and varied pleasure is hers until the final moment where she recklessly squanders her
opportunity for a final orgasm, delaying it unnecessarily and to the frustration of her two
male partners. She is then punished eternally, locked in a cell with a sexually disinter-
ested man, begging him to get her off one last time while her own frantic fingers fail her
over and over. In Nostalgia, April Flores asks her guide to the Underworld to let her
experience “queer lust.” The guide knows just the right place, and ushers her into
Trouble and Pepper’s bedroom. This breaking of the fourth wall draws awareness to the
pleasures of porn, a dialogic relationship wherein actors and viewers are engaged in
similar acts, reinforcing the value of sexual performance that is open-ended and per-
petually reconstituting. The 12-minute sequence includes a veritable cornucopia of
sexual acts between four different DFAB bodies. It does not so much culminate as it does
wind down until three are sleeping peacefully and the guide strokes them all gently
before disappearing.
This final scene includes neither visible nor audible orgasms for any of the four char-
acters, and is a significant departure from both classic and contemporary mainstream

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pornographic tropes. Trouble refuses both maximum visibility and maximum audibility,
leaving orgasms hidden from the viewer. Instead, the scene focuses on representations
of sex that are participatory and pleasure-focused, displacing orgasm as the end-goal of
the scene. She undoes not only the trope of the money shot, but also the principle of
climactic, linear pleasure that this trope represents. The film slowly escalates the stakes
of orgasmic pleasure, culminating in an extensive orgiastic scene that brings to life
Trouble’s definition of queer porn as “collaborative, open-communication-centric, inti-
mate art” (Gabrielle 2010).
The New Devil in Miss Jones also strategically displaces the orgasm but with very dif-
ferent implications. In the original, Justine is told from the beginning that she is eternally
damned for giving up on her own sexual pleasure and committing suicide. In the remake,
it is revealed that Justine’s punishment has nothing to do with her sexual pleasure but
is because she failed to recognize her male neighbor’s lust for her, thus contributing to
his suicide. Furthermore, that information is kept from her until the very end of the film,
often leaving her distraught and confused. Justine’s lack of knowledge about what is
happening to her and her lack of agency in choosing her fate is a source of gleeful mock-
ery in the film. While there are multiple scenes of sexual interaction for Justine, she is
merely the receptacle for ejaculate and does not have any visible or audible orgasms.
Like the original, Justine is abruptly removed from a three-way sex act just before her
climax to spend the rest of eternity trapped in a state of frenzied unsatisfaction with the
man whose lust she unwittingly rebuffed. While her orgasm is delayed forever, her last
act on earth is to swallow the ejaculate of the men she asked to slow down and let her
enjoy herself longer. Thus order is restored and punishment rightly doled out to the
woman who dares to put her own sexual pleasure ahead of a man’s.

Conclusion: What Makes Queer Porn Feminist?

The narrative of sexual pleasure presented in Golden Age pornography was one of pas-
sive femininity performing for and always satisfied with active masculinity, evidenced
by the money shot. Vivid re-asserts that primacy by offering narratives of women’s sexual
agency and pleasure that seem at first to divert from the money shot but ultimately end
in shame, punishment, and death for women who dare to decenter the climax. While
Hope is merely reduced to being the literal commodification of her own sexuality, Julie
and Justine are punished with grisly self-induced deaths and eternal sexual torment. In
contrast, Nostalgia (2009) presents a narrative that first claims ejaculatory orgasm for
DFAB bodies, then moves away from centering orgasm at all. It provokes such a
challenge to the generic expectations of pornography that even some feminist queer
reviewers seemed confused. “Oftentimes, the action has no order to it—one sexual act
fades (literally) into another, causing a sense of disjointedness that I do not enjoy. I like
to feel like a scene has a beginning and end, and that the action progresses cohesively”
(Epiphora 2010). Nonetheless, Trouble insists that through persistent challenges to
“cookie-cutter, formulaic pornography,” queer porn can not only drive “new ways of
being sexy,” but also demonstrate that queers “are not freaks, deviants, or second class
citizens” (Gabrielle 2010).
A worthwhile critique of Nostalgia, however, is its unrelenting focus on DFAB bodies,
of varying identities and desiring positions, to the exclusion of transwomen, cisgender
men, and other differently-sexed-at-birth bodies. This issue goes to the heart of why we
define the film as feminist queer, engaging specifically with mainstream, cisgender, and

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heteronormative pornography and its conventional representations of women’s pleasure

as subordinate to phallocentric climax. To critique Nostalgia for its lack of bodily diver-
sity is to also suggest that empowering pornographies cannot fulfill their political
potential unless they tick off a seemingly endless list of sexual identifications. Trouble
has explored multiple sexualities throughout their career, especially with a slate of 2013
films, including Trans Grrls (“a queer porn epic”), Girl Pile (“an unscripted lesbian
orgy”), and Come Find Me! (heterosexual “bike smut”). As Trouble argues, feminist porn
and queer porn share much in common, but do not necessarily overlap. The former
“actively challenges male privilege,” while the latter is “actively engaged in a discussion
about gender fluidity, queer sexuality, and identity politics” (Prima Feminista 2010).
Nostalgia clearly does both. It operates intersectionally to simultaneously critique the
misogynist and heteronormative origins of pornography while engaging in a multi-
faceted, open-ended, and highly explicit exploration of sexual pleasure. Thus, it renews
demands to understand pornography less as a monolith and more as a complex matrix
of political and sexual cultures that plays an undeniably important role in shaping both
our gendered social structures and our sexual identities.

References
Boyle, K. (2010) Everyday Pornography, New York: Routledge.
———(2006) “The Boundaries of Porn Studies,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 4(1): 1–16.
Comella, L. (2013) “From Text to Context,” in Taormino T., Shimizu C., Penley, C., & Miller-Young,
M. (eds.), The Feminist Porn Book, New York: The Feminist Press.
Epiphora. (n.d.) “Review: Nostalgia,” Hey Epiphora. http://www.heyepiphora.com/2010/02/review-
nostalgia/. Retrieved 26 Jan 2013.
Gabrielle. “Courtney Trouble Wants to Turn You On,” Autostraddle. http://www.autostraddle.com/
courtney-trouble-interview-68139/. Retrieved 26 Jan 2013.
Kulystin, T. Q. (2009) “Courtney Trouble’s Nostalgia,” Shameless Pleasure. http://www.shamelesspleasure.
com/2009/10/04/porn-review-nostalgia/. Retrieved 26 Jan 2013.
McNair, B. (2013) Porno? Chic! New York: Routledge.
Paasonen, S. (2013) “Repetition and Hyperbole: The Gendered Choreographies of Heteroporn,” in
Boyle, K. (ed.), Everyday Pornography, New York: Routledge.
Penley, C., Parreñas Shimizu, C., Miller-Young M., & Taormino, T. (2013) “Introduction: The Politics
of Producing Pleasure,” in Taormino T., Shimizu C., Penley, C., & Miller-Young, M. (eds.), The
Feminist Porn Book, New York: The Feminist Press.
Prima Feminista. (n.d.) “The Queen of Queer Porn.” She Does the City. http://www.shedoesthecity.com/
the-queen-of-queer-porn-an-interview-with-courtney-trouble. Retrieved 26 Jan 2013.
Russell, D. (2000) “Pornography and Rape,” in Cornell D. (ed.), Feminism and Pornography, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Shugar, D. (1999) “To(o) Queer or Not?” Journal of Lesbian Studies 3(3): 11–20.
Strager, S. (2003) “What Men Watch When They Watch Pornography,” Sexuality and Culture Winter:
50–61.
Tibbals, C. (2010) “From The Devil in Miss Jones to DMJ6—Power, Inequality, and Consistency in the
Content of US Adult Films,” Sexualities 13: 625–644.
Williams, L. (1989) Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” Berkeley: University of
California Press.
———(1991) “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44(4): 2–13.
———(2004) “Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies On/Scene: An Introduction,” in Williams,
L. (ed.), Porn Studies, Durham: Duke University Press.
———(2008) Screening Sex, Durham: Duke University Press.

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Further Reading
Luke Ford provides a history of Golden Age porn in A History of X (New York: Promethus Books,
1999). Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne, The Other Hollywood: An Uncensored Oral History of the
Porn Industry (New York: Regan Books, 2005) takes us through the Golden Age to contemporary
times. The new journal Porn Studies (Routledge) offers a wide range of critical cultural scholarship
on pornography. Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape (Berkeley,
CA: Seal Press, 2008) is a collection of important writings on contemporary feminist and gender-
queer sexual politics.

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 19
THE HORRORS OF
SLAVERY AND MODES
OF REPRESENTATION
IN AMISTAD AND
12 YEARS A SLAVE
Douglas Kellner

Solomon Northup’s testimonial 12 Years a Slave (1853) tells the heart-wrenching story
of how a free black man living in New York was captured by slave traders and forced to
live as a slave on southern plantations in the 1840s under inhuman and oppressive
conditions. Writing up and publishing his experiences, Northrop presents a searing
portrayal of the evils of slavery that influenced abolitionist arguments and movements
in the pre-Civil War period as debates over slavery intensified,1 leading to the bloodiest
war in American history. Steve McQueen’s 2013 film provides a powerful cinematic
rendition of Northup’s 12 Years a Slave and has been affirmed as one of the one most
powerful films on slavery ever produced, a film that, as I write in early 2014, is being
nominated for and winning multiple awards.
In this article, I will contrast Gordon Parks’ relatively unknown PBS “American
Experience” film of 1984, Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, with McQueen’s film, although I
open with a look back at Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1998), which presents a 1839 slave
revolt on a ship bound to the Americas and the subsequent trial of the rebels. The Amistad
rebellion and trial, like Northup’s book, influenced the abolitionist movement and
represent significant, although often forgotten, moments in U.S. history. Hence, the
current discussions of McQueen’s highly acclaimed film provide the opportunity for a look
backwards at a painful moment in U.S. history and for discussion of different modes of
cinematic representation of slavery. Accordingly, I will contrast Spielberg’s film with Parks’
and McQueen’s presentations of slavery in their versions of Northup’s 12 Years a Slave.
Although Spielberg’s Amistad contains many features of dominant American ideology and
an individualist Hollywood narrative which informs Spielberg’s liberal cinema, it is perhaps
the most modernist, and one of the most compelling, of Spielberg’s films, and deserves a
second look and comparison with Parks and McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave.
 KELLN E R

I will, accordingly, first examine Amistad, which provides a broader panorama of the
system and complex effects of slavery in U.S. life and history than Park’s powerful
narrative of Northrop’s book and McQueen’s more concentrated and intense focus on
the horrors of slavery in 12 Years a Slave. I contrast Parks’ use of classical realist modes
of representation with McQueen’s aestheticized and modernist version.2 Juxtaposing
different cinematic representations of slavery and cinematic renditions of Northup’s
slave testimony, I show how McQueen’s film provides a modernist version of Northup’s
text that forces the audience to experience the horrors of slavery, while Parks uses a
more conventional realist narrative to tell Northrop’s story and depict the institutions
of slavery. These films, I believe, are among the best English-language cinematic efforts
to engage the “peculiar” and arguably monstrous American institution of slavery that
continues to shape our history today, in the Obama era.

Steven Spielberg’s Amistad

Spielberg’s historical epic Amistad depicts the horrors of slavery through the story of an
almost forgotten 1839 slave revolt aboard a Spanish slave ship off the coast of Cuba. A
cargo of Africans who had been captured in Sierra Leone, loaded into a slave trader that
sailed to Havana, sold into slavery in Cuba, and put aboard the ship La Amistad to be
transported to a life of slavery on the other side of the island of Cuba, revolted and took
over the ship. Many of the crew and the blacks working with them were killed, although
two of the Spanish crew were spared to help the rebels navigate the ship to what was
hoped would be a safe port. The Spaniards, however, managed to aim the direction of
the seized ship toward North America where it was boarded by American naval troops
off the coast of Long Island. They arrested the mutineers and took them to prison in
New London, Connecticut, where they would go on trial in a media spectacle that
captured the attention of the nation and furiously fuelled the fateful national controversy
over slavery.3
“La Amistad” is ironically the Spanish word for friendship, while the story of the
Amistad rebellion demonstrates the unfriendly and inhuman nature of the slave trade.
In Spielberg’s narrative, “Amistad” also refers to the Africans’ friends in the abolitionist
movement; those who saw the inhumanity of slavery and joined with rebellious slaves
to fight the institution of slavery. The Amistad rebellion and the subsequent trial played
a significant role in mobilizing abolitionists at the time, and thus was a significant event
leading to the Civil War, as anti-slavery forces strongly side with the rebels, while pro-
slaver forces sided with the ship owners and the Spanish government, which demanded
the return of the ship and prisoners.
As historian Marcus Rediker notes, the story of the Amistad rebellion was well-known
in the build-up to the Civil War, with abolitionists and journalists writing extensively
on the event, playwrights, novelists, and songwriters memorializing the rebellion and
the trial, and with the public closely following the long trial and its aftermath. Yet,
Rediker claims that the story of the Amistad rebellion was largely forgotten by the 20th
century, until Spielberg’s film brought again the story to wide public attention.4
Spielberg tells how the film’s producer Debbie Allen brought the story to him, and
that he saw it as a serious epic history lesson that should be presented to the American
public.5 Spielberg had just begun his new DreamWorks studio and sought a prestige
property that would help promote his studio as a producer of important movies.6 He was
at the time one of the most important and influential Hollywood directors, with

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megahits like Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the Indiana Jones
franchise (1981, 1984, 1989, 2008), E.T. (1982) and the Jurassic Park films (1993 and
1997 with the 2008 film directed by Joe Johnson). Spielberg had also attempted to make
more serious films like The Color Purple (1985), based on Alice Walker’s novel of a
young oppressed black woman growing up in the South, and Empire of the Sun (1987), a
rendering of J. G. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel of growing up in Shanghai
during the Japanese occupation in World War II. While these films received a mixed
audience and critical reception, his film Schindler’s List (1993), about a German
businessman who saved Jews in the Second World War, received enthusiastic reviews
and won Spielberg his first Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture. Amistad
thus follows Spielberg’s practice of mixing serious epic historical dramas with his more
popular entertainment films, taking on an important episode in the revolt against slavery
and struggles toward freedom and equality in U.S. history.
Amistad opens dramatically, during a storm, with a mysterious close-up of what turns
out to be the eyes of a black man, then shown chiseling a metal object from wood.
Spielberg cuts rapidly, showing splotches of blood on the man’s hand, a metal nail being
ripped out of the plank of the deck, followed by a long shot of the man using the nail to
break the lock of the manacles that bound him to the ship. The man frees another, and
a quickly-edited montage shows groups of black men breaking free of the manacles that
had kept them in bondage.7 With dramatic music, thunder and lightning, fragmentary
images, and quick cutting, the modernist opening produces a jarring sense of dislocation,
intensified as the black men are torn loose from their chains and appear on deck,
resolved to take over the ship.
The fast editing, strobe-like effects during the storm, and dramatic action continue as
the men attack the ship’s captain, who fires back, hitting two of the attackers and
stabbing one with a bayonet attached to the end of his rifle. The rebels fight the ship’s
armed crew with knives, sabers, and sticks, seizing control through guerilla-like action.
The white captain is overpowered by the rebellious Africans, and he is stabbed to death
by a powerful black man who emerges as the leader of the slave revolt and who will
eventually be introduced to the audience as Joseph Cinqué (Djimon Hounsou), a central
figure of the film. Throughout the film, Cinqué will be positioned as the natural leader
of the rebels who is the center of cinematic representation and the key narrative link
between the major characters. The image of him as a powerful leader is highlighted
during the rebellion sequence, first, beginning the literal process of freeing the Africans
from their chains, and then in images of Cinqué standing out from the group, framed in
heroic poses, illuminated by bright lighting, and thunderous music during the uprising.
Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski reportedly constructed the film’s
visual style by deploying images from the paintings of Francisco Goya, whose horrors of
war and incarceration pictures helped shape opening images of the Africans’
imprisonment in the ship and revolt, and then the later prison scenes during the trial.8
Spielberg and his crew also intended to provide accurate historical representations of
the Amistad rebellion and subsequent trial and to tell much of the story from the
standpoint of the Africans.9
The opening and subsequent images portray the Africans as radically “other” to the
white Europeans involved in the slave trade and the white Americans who must sort
out their fate through machinations in the U.S. political and legal system. The African
sounds and language are initially untranslatable and frightening to Western ears, and
throughout the film the incommunicability between the Africans, their Spanish

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slave-trading captors, and the Americans putting the African rebels on trial in their
mysterious justice system is highlighted. Yet the film’s fierce humanism eventually
establishes communication and understanding between the African captives and their
abolitionist American allies who work to free the rebellious slaves and enable their
return to Africa.10
After the dark, stormy, and Goya-esque opening sequence, the film flashes a title,
“1839,” and cuts to a clear blue sky and placid sea as the rebels wake up in charge of the
ship. For a brief period of time, the rebels control the Amistad and attempt to direct it
toward Africa, but the treacherous Spanish ship owners, Ruiz and Montez, who they
saved, cleverly sail West toward the sun (and presumably Africa) in the day, but tack
North at night toward America. A title, “Six weeks,” follows, with the ship short on
water, and when they come upon Long Island, New York, a strange sequence shows rich
Americans on a yacht enjoying a dinner with black servants and classical music, while
the liberated slave ship passes by and both sides look upon the other in wonder,
highlighting the class and cultural differences between the groups. The Amistad rebels’
freedom is about to come to an end, however. When Cinqué and some of the rebels go
ashore to get fresh water, a U.S. Navy vehicle encounters the Amistad, and the sailors
observe that it is manned by a motley crew of black people. The Americans board the
ship, seize it, and arrest all the rebels, who will go on trial for mutiny and murder.
The rest of Spielberg’s Amistad unfolds as a legal drama, with scenes cutting from the
bright lighting in courtrooms and law offices to grimmer scenes of the rebels in prison.
Initially, wealthy abolitionists Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman) and Lewis Tappan
(Stellan Skarsgård)11 attempt to persuade former U.S. president John Quincy Adams
(Anthony Hopkins) to defend the rebels, but he declines, portrayed as more interested
in cultivating exotic plants in a greenhouse garden than involving himself in demanding
struggles in the public sphere. Eventually, the abolitionists sign up a real estate lawyer
(Matthew McConaughey) to defend the rebels, and in the film he provides a highly
articulate and ultimately effective defense, focusing on the issue of property, and whether
the rebels belonged to the ship owners or not.12
Amistad establishes the geo-political framework of the legal case in a striking shot that
cuts from a close-up of Cinqué’s gleaming eyes in captivity to the eyes of a young woman
looking at her reflection on a metal object. An establishing shot shows her to be Isabella,
the Queen of Spain (Anna Paquin). The U.S. President, Martin van Buren (Nigel
Hawthorne), is first depicted as having no interest whatsoever in the Amistad case and
the freedom of the African captives, and throughout is represented as weak and
vacillating, fearing losing Southern votes in his re-election campaign if he sides with
the Africans and apparently having no strong convictions concerning slavery and the
freedom of black persons.
The Amistad case is depicted as proceeding fitfully through the American legal
system, which is portrayed as strange and confusing from the point of view of the
Africans. Their initial encounter with their abolitionist allies show them perceiving the
hymn-singing and praying Christian abolitionists as “miserable” and sickly, and,
confronted with their voluble young lawyer, Baldwin, they think he looks and acts like
an “elephant dung scraper,” although later one concludes that perhaps this is what they
need. After a federal District Court in New Haven rules that the Amistad rebels are
guilty of “insurrection on the high seas,” and will not be released, the Amistad captives
are understandably confused and angry, and they are condemned to stand trial in a
complicated court case.

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Spielberg’s film conveys the complicated legal claims of property ownership by Spain,
the United States, the Spanish owners of the slaves and of La Amistad, and the American
captain and first mate of the U.S. ship that took the Amistad rebels into custody. Scenes
with the Spanish Queen Isabella II, whose government are demanding return of the ship
and the slaves, and U.S. president Martin van Buren dramatize the geopolitical
dimensions of the case, while a dinner with van Buren and southern slave apologist
Senator John Calhoun (D-SC) highlight the domestic issues involved in the case. At a
dinner for the U.S. political elite, Calhoun explains to the Spanish ambassador,
Calderon, that the Northern states consider pro-slavery Southerners as “immoral” and
inferior, which Calhoun claims may be so in terms of amassing wealth. But, Calhoun
asserts to the crowd, eliminating slavery could well destroy the U.S. economy and an
anti-slavery conclusion to the Amistad affair might lead to Civil War in the U.S.
Aware of the political stakes, van Buren and his allies plot to put what they think is
a sympathetic and malleable judge in charge of the case. Lengthy courtroom scenes
follow, with the Amistad defense stressing that the slaves are not property but are
humans, and, moreover, the Amistad rebels were not slaves on Cuban plantations as
the prosecution, Spanish government, and slave traders Ruiz and Montez claim. The
defense argues that their defendants are Africans who were captured in their native
land, sold into captivity, and brought to Cuba where they were purchased and sent on
the Amistad to journey to their new place of enslavement on the other side of Cuba.
The trial proceeds fitfully, and in one dramatic scene, Cinqué stands up and repeatedly
says “give us free, give us free,” dramatizing the element of struggle for freedom involved
in the case.13
The theme of “home”14 and return to home has long been a major theme in Spielberg’s
films and informs the thematic of Amistad. One of the most poignant sequences of the
film unfolds as Baldwin attempts to bond with Cinqué and learn about his home and his
experiences. Flashbacks in bright light show a happy Cinqué with his wife and children
in a green and verdant Africa, followed by harrowing scenes of his capture and the
infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas. This dramatic
sequence demonstrates the monstrous conditions of the Passage, with Africans packed
into a space below deck without proper food, water, exercise, or ventilation. One slave
is shown throwing himself overboard in utter despair. Another sequence shows the slave
traders flinging a packet of rocks into the ocean, followed by enchained slaves, drowning
individuals who were sick or they could not feed. In a courtroom scene, a British captain,
who had manned British slave patrol ships off the shore of Sierra Leone to intercept
illegal slave ships, testified that it was common to throw rebellious or sick slaves, or
those they could not properly feed, overboard, and that the inventory of the Tecora, the
slave ship that brought over the Amistad captives to Cuba, demonstrated that a
significant number of slaves had been discarded on the voyage.
The Amistad defense convincingly makes the case that the rebels are Africans who
were captured and enslaved against their will, and the young judge rules that Ruiz and
Montez are guilty of illegal slave trade and will be imprisoned at once, while the Africans
are free to go home at the expense of the American government. Their joy is short-lived,
for van Buren and the U.S. government appeal the ruling and the case goes up to the
Supreme Court. Again demonstrating the cultural difference and otherness between the
blacks and whites, Baldwin has difficulty in explaining the U.S. legal system to Cinqué,
who is understandably outraged by the decision but is heartened to learn that a “big
chief,” John Quincy Adams, a former President, will help defend him. A subsequent

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scene shows Cinqué meeting Adams in his beloved greenhouse, and an African violet
provides a bond of understanding between the two and hope that the Africans will
eventually be able to return home.
John Quincy Adams begins his appeal to the Supreme Court by noting that Baldwin
had clearly articulated the key issues in the case, but he makes a rousing presentation
that justice has not been done in the case. Adams notes that letters from Spanish Queen
Isabella constantly refer to our “incompetent courts” and Adams mockingly suggests that
she apparently wants a court that does what she wants. (The argument that the
independence of U.S. courts is a virtue of the system was made in the film earlier when,
as an aside at a dinner party, a Spanish diplomat complained about the problems with
the American “independent” courts and a gentleman affirms that this is precisely their
virtue, an argument made in the concluding scenes of Amistad.)
In the culminating crescendo to his speech, Adams deftly situates the trial in the
context of the American revolution, while answering an argument that had been made
recently in the U.S. government journal Executive Review: that slavery goes back to
ancient times and is the “natural state of mankind.” Adams’ retort is that it is freedom
which is the natural state, and “the proof is the lengths to which a man will go to regain
it once taken.” Raising his voice, Adams thunders: “He will break loose his chains. He
will decimate his enemies. He will try and try and try against all odds, against all
adversity to get home.”
Obviously, Cinqué and the Amistad rebels are the referent here and Adams concludes
his case to free them and allow them to go home by evoking the Constitution and
Declaration of Independence with its ringing affirmation that “All men are created
equal [with] inalienable rights . . . life, liberty and so on and so forth.” Recalling a
conversation with Cinqué the previous evening, he notes that “when the Mende
encounter a situation where there appears no hope at all, he invokes his ancestors.”
Clinching his argument, Adams appeals to American tradition, walking to a wall with
portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, his father John Adams, and other
founding fathers. Noting how he rarely invoked his father, Adams concludes: “We
desperately need your strength and wisdom to triumph over our fears, our prejudices,
ourselves. Give us the courage to do what is right and if it means civil war? Then let it
come. And when it does, may it be, finally, the last battle of the American Revolution.”
Shortly thereafter, the Supreme Court renders its verdict and the Amistad slaves and
their supporters nervously go to the Court, knowing that seven of the nine Justices are
Southern slave-holders. Justice Story brings down the gavel and renders the verdict,
first, addressing the property issue and ruling “they are not slaves, and therefore cannot
be considered merchandise.” This judgment captures the courtroom’s rapt attention as
the Chief Justice concludes that the Amistad Africans “are rather free individuals with
certain legal and moral rights, including the right to engage in insurrection against those
who would deny them their freedom. Therefore, it is our judgment, with one dissension,
that the defendants are to be released from custody at once. And, if they so choose, be
returned to their homes in Africa.”
Judge Story brings down the gavel, the courtroom disperses, and Steven Spielberg has
closed his argument, providing ideological legitimation of the U.S. system of justice. As
Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) attempted to demonstrate that the political process in the
United States works, through its detailed dissection of the complicated process whereby
President Lincoln and his team mobilized votes in Congress to pass the controversial
and divisive 13th Amendment,15 in Amistad, the narrative makes the argument that,

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despite all the complexities and competing interests, the U.S. legal and political system
is rooted in a functioning system of constitutional democracy that provides justice for
all. Such an ideological conclusion was contested by historian Eric Foner, who
argues that:

The film gives the distinct impression that the Supreme Court was convinced
by Adams’ plea to repudiate slavery in favor of the natural rights of man, thus
taking a major step on the road to abolition.
In fact, the Amistad case revolved around the Atlantic slave trade—by 1840
outlawed by international treaty—and had nothing whatever to do with slavery
as a domestic institution. Incongruous as it may seem, it was perfectly possible
in the nineteenth century to condemn the importation of slaves from Africa
while simultaneously defending slavery and the flourishing slave trade within
the United States.
In October 1841, in an uncanny parallel to events on the Amistad, American
slaves being transported from Virginia to Louisiana on the Creole seized control
of the ship, killing some crew members and directing the mate to sail to the
Bahamas. For fifteen years, American Secretaries of State unsuccessfully
badgered British authorities to return the slaves as both murderers and “the
recognized property” of American citizens. This was far more typical of the
government’s stance toward slavery than the Amistad affair.
Rather than being receptive to abolitionist sentiment, the courts were
among the main defenders of slavery. A majority of the Amistad justices, after
all, were still on the Supreme Court in 1857 when, in the Dred Scott decision,
it prohibited Congress from barring slavery from the Western territories and
proclaimed that blacks in the United States had “no rights which a white man
is bound to respect.”16

Not only does Amistad present an ideological whitewash and idealization of the
U.S. judicial system, but Spielberg and his team have hardly any women in the film
with active voice and participation. None of the major protagonists are shown
engaged in conversation with women and the only women portrayed are
abolitionists and black slave women who are positioned throughout as watching
history unfold, mute objects passively observing the male subjects grapple with
their society’s key issues, determining the fate of the nation and the Amistad rebels.
Thus, while it is highly salutary that Spielberg produced such a detailed and
engaging historical epic about a key episode in American history that had been
largely forgotten, his achievement is limited by the ideological and representational
limitations of Spielberg’s cinema.
Yet one can agree with the late Roger Ebert that:

What is most valuable about “Amistad” is the way it provides faces and names
for its African characters, whom the movies so often make into faceless victims.
The captive called Cinqué emerges as a powerful individual, a once-free farmer
who has lost his wife and family. We see his wife, and his village, and something
of his life; we understand how cruelly he was ripped from his life and ambitions.
(Since it was the policy of slavery to destroy African families, these scenes are
especially poignant.)17

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Spielberg’s cinema, however, is highly individualistic and highlights and idealizes Great
Men like Cinqué, John Quincy Adams, and Roger Baldwin, who rises in the film from
a mediocre real estate lawyer who initially see the Amistad trial as a property issue to
one who grasps the moral and political dimensions and bonds as a brother with the
noble Cinqué.18 While there appear representations of the abolitionist movement, the
leading abolitionists are bit players to the Heroic Men who dominate the film, as is usual
in Spielberg’s patriarchal male cinema.
Amistad ends with an ironic montage that presents the events that followed the trial
and historical fates of the major players. Spielberg shows the British Royal Marines
destroying the Lomboko Slave Fortress and freeing Africans from its dungeons, with the
British Captain Fitzgerald (Peter Firth) telegraphing U.S. Secretary of State Forsythe,
who had denied the fortress’s existence, that indeed the Slave Fortress no longer exists.
Graphic titles inform us that President Martin van Buren lost his re-election campaign
to William Henry Harrison, and that Queen Isabella II continued to demand the return
of the slaves and the Amistad—until the fall of Atlanta during the American Civil War,
when she gave it up. Heroic images and music reminiscent of Stalinist cinema show
Cinqué and his fellow Africans returning on a ship to their home, dressed in white, the
West African color of victory, accompanied by the translator James Covey. Yet a
postscript says that Cinqué returned to find his country embroiled in civil war and his
wife and child missing, likely sold into slavery.19
Amistad received mixed reviews and was ultimately one of Spielberg’s most unsuccessful
movies at the box office, with a lifetime gross of only $44,229,441.20 Although nominated
for Oscars in four categories, it received no Academy Awards. Historians criticized what
they found to be negative representations of evangelical abolitionists, exaggeration of
the historical significance of the Amistad revolt, and misrepresentation of some of the
historical figures and details of the episode.21 Spielberg, producer Debbie Allen, and
scriptwriter David Franzoni claimed in various reviews that they “consciously chose to
downplay the role of the white abolitionists and to concentrate on the Africans,
particularly the charismatic Cinqué,”22 wishing to avoid the narrative where the Good
White Man comes to save the blacks, although Amistad is not completely innocent of
that charge, as I note above.
In retrospect, the virtue of Spielberg’s Amistad is rescuing a forgotten historical episode
and bringing to public awareness the monstrosity of the institution of slavery, virtues
that would be replicated in the rediscovery of Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave.
Spielberg deploys the resources of the classical Hollywood cinema to make his film,
although moments are more modernist and the film is more didactic than most of his
Hollywood entertainment extravaganzas. These aesthetic and political strategies would
be replicated by Gordon Parks and Steve McQueen in their own cinematic resurrections
of a forgotten moment in U.S. history, with which I will engage in the next section.

Gordon Parks’ and Steve McQueen’s Constructions

of Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave
While it is admirable that Spielberg and his associates resurrected an almost forgotten
incident of slave rebellion and called attention to the monstrosity of slavery in Amistad,
the film did not really deal with the evils of slavery in the Americas. Blacklisted director
Herbert Biberman, who had directed the highly acclaimed 1954 film portraying a New
Mexican miners’ strike, Salt of the Earth, created Slaves, released in 1969, about a slave

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rebellion in Kentucky in the 1850s, but it got poor reviews and a truncated release.23
The same year, Italian director Gilles Pontecorvo’s Burn! starred Marlon Brando as a
British agent fomenting a slave rebellion in the Caribbean.24 Other memorable global
cinematic slave narratives of the era include Sergio Giral’s The Other Francisco (Cuba:
1975), which brilliantly counterposes ideological takes on slavery in Cuba with its brutal
everyday realities, and Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s The Last Supper (Cuba: 1976), which
deploys innovative modernist techniques to portray a slave rebellion in Cuba and its
violent suppression.25 No major film, however, portrayed the oppressive conditions of
slavery on a U.S. plantation until first Gordon Parks and then Steve McQueen provided
cinematic versions of Solomon Northup’s narrative 12 Years a Slave, which brutally
revealed the horrific conditions of slavery in the United States in the 1840s. Given the
current significance of McQueen’s film, I’ll start with an introduction to McQueen’s
work, will then turn to Gordon Parks’ 1984 PBS movie, and then will compare the two
versions of Northup’s narrative.
Steve McQueen was born Steve Rodney McQueen on October 9, 1969, in London,
England, of British-Grenadian descent. First emerging in the public eye as an artist,
McQueen attended Chelsea School of Art, London (1989–1990), followed by study at
Goldsmiths College, which is part of the University of London (1990–1993), and the
Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (1993–1994). Known for video
installations and short films, McQueen won the coveted Turner Prize in 1999 for his
film-installation work and exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in
London; I happened to attend this and recall powerful images of bodies, both in his
installations and short films.26
McQueen was awarded the O.B.E. (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the
2002 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for his services to the Arts, and served as the
Official War Artist for Iraq in association with the Imperial War Museum in 2003. In
2006, McQueen created a sheet of stamps of portraits commemorating the deaths of
British soldiers in Iraq, and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British
Empire in 2011 for his contribution to the visual arts. In 2013, at the time of the release
of 12 Years a Slave, McQueen was nominated as one of six finalists for the prestigious
Hugo Boss award.27
As a movie director, Steve McQueen created a highly acclaimed film, Hunger (2008),
that depicted a 1981 hunger strike by IRA militants and focused on the slow death
through hunger attrition of Bobby Sands, played by Michael Fassbinder (who would play
key roles in McQueen’s next two projects). Hunger was distinguished by long takes
focusing on Sands’ body, registering beatings, isolation, sores and wounds, and increasing
emaciation during the hunger strike, until Sands’ life literarily departed his body by the
end of the film. The beatings and emaciation scenes were intercut with sequences
depicting the everyday life of a guard, with one resonant image showing a guard turning
aside and crying during a brutal beating, and with scenes with Sands’ parents to whom,
at first, he tried to convince them that all was “grand.”
Hunger marked McQueen as a major cinematic talent, and his following film, Shame
(2011), also got excellent reviews and marked McQueen as a rising figure in world
cinema. Shame follows a New York corporate executive, Brandon (played by Michael
Fassbinder), who is sexually obsessed. The film focuses intensely on the character’s face
and body, often isolating him in long shots of a barren urban environment (apparently
denoting his alienation); these are interspersed by fragmentary and quickly edited images
of his repeated sexual coupling, and relieved by expository sequences showing him

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interacting with fellow workers, women, and his troubled sister (Carey Mulligan), who
comes to live with him. The focus on individual characters in long takes, and alternating
close-ups of their faces with interactions with their environment, happens in a modernist
aesthetic space that finds beauty and resonant images in multiple locations and
situations. These are punctuated by a highly fragmentary narrative. This style is
characteristic of McQueen’s first two films. 12 Years a Slave (2013) replicates this style,
yet deploys a more classical narrative structure than his previous films by following the
contours, if not always the letter, of Solomon Northup’s tale.
McQueen’s cinematic rendition of Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) has
indeed catapulted McQueen to the highest reaches of global cinema, with the film
winning major awards and critical acclaim for the director and cast.28 Reflecting on the
film’s origins and gestation, McQueen has noted:

Three and a half years before finishing the production of Twelve Years a Slave I
was lost.
I knew I wanted to tell a story about slavery, but where to start?
Finally, I had the idea of a free man kidnapped into bondage, but that’s all I
had. I was attracted to a story that had a main character any viewer could
identify with, a free man who is captured and held against his will. For months
I was trying to build a story around this beginning but not having great success
until my partner Bianca Stigter, a historian, suggested that I take a look at true
accounts of slavery. Within days of beginning our research, Bianca had
unearthed Twelve Years a Slave, by Solomon Northup.
“I think I’ve got it,” she said. If ever there was an understatement. The book
blew both our minds: the epic range, the details, the adventure, the horror, and
the humanity. It read like a film script, ready to be shot. I could not believe that
I had never heard of this book. It felt as important as Anne Frank’s diary, only
published nearly a hundred years before.
I was not alone in being unfamiliar with the book. Of all the people I spoke
to not one person knew about Twelve Years a Slave. This was astonishing! An
important tale told with so much heart and beauty needed to be more widely
recognised. I hope my film can play a part in drawing attention to this important
book of courage. Solomon’s bravery and life deserve nothing less.29

In an American Cinematique showing of 12 Years a Slave at which Steve McQueen did a

Q&A session,30 John Singleton introduced McQueen by claiming that this was the first
time that anyone had really shown what slavery was all about. Singleton cited the white-
washing of slavery in Hollywood films like The Birth of a Nation, which Singleton claimed
began the trajectory of modern American cinema, while also referring contemptuously to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin as another example of Hollywood’s inability to confront slavery. During
the Q&A, McQueen too claimed that Hollywood cinema had produced an idealized view
of slavery in films like Gone with the Wind, Showboat, and other white-washed versions of
slavery, while he asserted that he wanted to present a real and true depiction of its horrors.
McQueen marveled that he had never heard of Solomon Northrop; that he had been
disappeared from history. He also proclaimed the burning need to go back and cinematically
explore the 400-year-old history of slavery in the Americas, and noted that, while the four
years of World War II had generated hundreds, perhaps thousands, of films, the long
history and experience of slavery had generated few films.31

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Neither McQueen nor Singleton mentioned Gordon Parks’ relatively unknown PBS
“American Experience” movie of 1984, Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, also based on
Northup’s book 12 Years a Slave,32 nor did they mention Spielberg’s Amistad or other
efforts to represent slavery such as Herbert Biberman’s Slaves (1969), Gilles Pontecorvo’s
Burn! (1969), Sergio Giral’s The Other Francisco (1975), and Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s
The Last Supper (1976), all powerful depictions of slavery which also portray forms of
resistance. Yet McQueen has undeniably produced one of the most compelling
indictments of slavery in contemporary cinema, and to highlight his achievement I will
contrast it to Gordon Parks’ more modest 1984 Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, comparing
Parks’ classical realist aesthetic with McQueen’s more modernist modes of
representation.
The legendary Gordon Parks began as a photographer and visual artist, turning to
literature and then film to produce a well-received cinematic version of his novel of
growing up black in Depression-era Kansas (The Learning Tree 1969).33 Born Gordon
Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks
died March 7, 2006, at the age of 93, in New York City, after an illustrious life. After a
hard scrabble life during the Depression, Parks got a camera at the age of 25, won a
photography fellowship with the Farm Security administration (FSA) for an exhibition
of photos of a Chicago south side black ghetto, and trained with Roy Stryker on FSA
projects. After the war, Parks became a freelance photographer for Vogue, and eventually
became world famous for his work as a photographer and writer for Life magazine,
producing stories and award-winning pictures of African American political leaders,
everyday life, and the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, he participated in the Civil
Rights movement and became close to many of its leaders, including Malcolm X, who
named Parks godfather of one of his children.
In one of his several autobiographies, A Hungry Heart, Parks recounts his early life
and how he wrote and published The Learning Tree and then became the first major
post-1960s African American director with the film of his autobiography and then
Shaft (1971) and Shaft’s Big Score (1972). The latter became landmarks in the
emerging blaxploitation genre, which featured strong African American males
confronting a corrupt white power structure.34 These genre films were followed by a
biopic about the famous blues singer Leadbelly (1975), which Parks considered his
best film.35 Produced on a modest budget for public television, Parks then went on to
direct Solomon Northup’s Odyssey (1984), which deploys cinematic realism to provide
a low-key but moving version of Northup’s 12 Years a Slave. In A Hungry Heart, Parks
recalls:

I spent the next two weeks selecting my crew. It was a ticklish task. I had chosen
to shoot the film in the Deep South, especially in the areas where Solomon had
spent his gruesome time. I wanted a mixed crew, perhaps to show Southerners
how Whites and Blacks could work peacefully together. Hiro Narita, a Japanese-
American with great talent, was picked to be my cinematographer. The
producer and the assistant director were Black. A good part of the technical
crew was White . . . When we arrived in Savannah, Georgia, the Whites there
goggled at the strange mix of people. For a few days they watched with furious
eyes. Eventually they saw what was happening. Ink, amber, and honey were
flowing together peacefully. It had never occurred to some of the Whites that
these different races could enjoy eating beside one another.36

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Both Parks and McQueen follow fairly closely Northup’s narrative of how he was
kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841 and sold into slavery, working on plantations
in Louisiana for 12 years before his release,37 although they present distinct cinematic
renditions of the text. McQueen repeatedly stated at the American Cinematique Q&A
that he wished to find cinematic means of telling the story through an eyebrow, a tear,
objects, a sequence of images, and juxtaposition between the beauties of nature and
horrors of slavery. Shot by his recurrent cameraman Sean Bobbitt, McQueen’s version
of 12 Years a Slave was written by John Ridley, and premiered at the Telluride Film
Festival on August 30, 2013. The film was given a limited release in the United States
on October 18, 2013, with a nationwide release on November 1, 2013. McQueen told
the Q&A crowd that he shot the film in 35 days with one camera, but had long thought
of the story and worked with Ripley on the script, bringing in Hans Zimmer to do the
music once the shooting and editing was finished with the first cut.
Signaling his modernist aesthetic, McQueen’s 12 Years opens with a montage of
resonant images of slave life, including work cutting sugar cane in a plantation field,
followed by the transmutation of a bowl of ripe berries into ink with which Northup will
write his narrative, images that will be reprised in the unfolding of the film. McQueen’s
cinema has been marked by the search for resonant images that capture the heart of a
situation, alternating long takes with relatively quick cuts in a modernist aesthetic that
breaks the rules of narrative continuity and conventional cinematography.
After an opening montage, McQueen cuts to an idyll of Solomon Northup (played by
Chiwetel Ejiofor)38 as a free black man living in New York, who, accompanied by his
well-dressed wife and children, enters a shop where he is respectfully recognized by the
shop owner, signifying Northup’s comfort in his situation and status as a free man, while
a slave named Jasper appears dumbstruck at the sight of a free African-American family.
The film cuts quickly to a scene of Northup bidding his wife and children farewell as she
leaves to take a temporary position as a cook. Soon after, Solomon meets two men who
praise his talent as a fiddler and offer him money to join them with a temporary job in
the circus, for which they tell him that he will be well-paid. Soon after, Northup finds
himself in chains in a prison in Washington and rages in despair.
Hence, while Solomon Northup opens his 1853 narrative with a detailed genealogy
of the history of his family and how he became a free black man and then married, had
a family, and moved from a farm where the family had worked for some years to the town
where he hoped to advance himself as a carpenter and fiddler, McQueen chooses
fragmentary resonant images organized in a modernist collage to depict Northup’s fall
from freedom into the bondage of slavery.
Gordon Parks, by contrast, in Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, cuts from a moon shining
in a dark night to an interior with couples happily dancing to Northup’s exuberant
fiddling. Departing from the narrative of the book, Parks cuts to a home scene where
Northup argues with his wife about money, first forbidding her from accepting a job as
a cook that would force her temporarily to leave the house, and then attempting to
justify their move from farm to city and his inability to gain steady work as a carpenter.
This conflict is not presented in Northup’s book, which has but a few idealized
remembrances of his wife and family; Parks, by contrast, uses many flashbacks to
Northup’s happy life with his family and to his wife making efforts to find him and
procure his freedom. The need for family income motivates Northup, in Parks’ story,
into accepting the two strangers’ offer to leave his New York home and travel to
Washington, D.C., on a promise of employment as a violinist with a show. Hence,

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Parks deploys a more conventional narrative form to tell Northup’s story, providing
motivation for his actions, a sense of his relation to his wife and previous life, and more
conventional narrative pacing and continuity than the avant-garde modernist
McQueen.
Both Parks and McQueen depict Northup waking up in a prison in Washington, D.C.,
with Northup protesting his bondage and being beaten into submission, a beating
especially dramatized in McQueen’s powerful rendition. In a long take with darkness and
shadows, McQueen renders the sound of Northup being beaten with a wooden panel
after waking up in chains. Cinematographer Sean Bobbit noted in an interview:

We’re seeing Solomon’s reaction, but he’s hidden in the shadow. That allows us
to project our feelings onto him. The audience has to search the frame a bit.
Once you get them engaged like that, I think that heightens their emotional
involvement.39

Indeed, throughout the film McQueen deploys modernist strategies of excess to

demonstrate the horrors of beating slaves into submission, with repeated images of whips
loudly lashing black bodies, close-ups of bloodied scars and beaten and humiliated
humans, and the sounds of whips lacerating the flesh of the humans subjected to such
brutal violence. Finally, McQueen constructs an unsettling sound montage with Hans
Zimmer’s music interlaced by unnatural natural sounds of insects, birds, and ambient
nature pierced by sounds of bodies being brutalized and individuals screaming in pain.
Parks, by contrast, frames Northup’s sudden enslavement more ironically, cutting from
a close-up of the ivory white building of Congress, just minutes from the slave-pit where
Northup finds himself imprisoned. This follows Northup’s text, in which he describes
how

we passed, handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington

through the Capital of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests
on the foundation of man’s inalienable right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit
of happiness! Hail! Columbia, happy land, indeed!
(2013: p. 13)

The vicious trader Theophilus Freeman, played by Paul Giamatti in McQueen’s film,
beats Northup repeatedly when he refuses to utter his slave name and accept his status,
declaring: “My sentimentality extends the length of a coin”—capturing the nexus of
greed and pathological viciousness at the bottom of the slave trade. Indeed, the ironically
named Theophilus Freeman, played as utterly repellent by Giamatti, encourages
potential customers to check the auctioned slaves’ teeth, body, and reactions to detect
the value of the merchandise.
In both films, Solomon Northup learns of the extremity of his changed condition as
he is taken from a slave pen to go to the auction, learning that his new name is “Platt.”
Solomon is forced to accept the name for much of the rest of the story, dramatizing how
slavery stole name and identity from their rightful owners. Another trope of the utter
inhumanity of slavery occurs at the auction block in both films, when the children of a
slave woman, Eliza, are torn from her and sold to other owners, a story found in Northup’s
narrative which McQueen intensely dramatizes, showing Eliza writhing and screaming
in utter despair.

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Parks will later depict in some detail the slow workings of justice through which
Northup is eventually released, while McQueen takes him from one horror to another
until, in the depths of degradation and despair, suddenly lawmen show up to tell Northup
that he is free. Relatively early in the movie, when Northup discovers himself in
captivity, Parks presents a long narrative scene with Northup insisting to the slave pen
overseer that he was a free man, while the white man declares that he is a slave and the
property of his new owner, whipping him repeatedly when he claims he is a free man
and not a slave who is the property of someone else. The contrast between Northup, as
a free man, and a slave who is the property of others informs Parks’ narrative as a
leitmotif, frequently returned to and articulated.
McQueen, by contrast, tends to use images and not dialogue to delineate his themes,
deploying resonant images and montage to depict Northup’s sudden descent into a slave
pen and shipment south to New Orleans, where he is sold at a slave market and taken
into bondage, and from there to the horrors of plantation life in Louisiana. McQueen
filmed much of the location shots in a region where slaves once lived and worked the
land, and exploits the landscape, decaying Southern mansions, and sounds of the region
to use the aesthetics of the site as a backdrop to the unspeakable brutality and monstrosity
which his film will attempt to capture.
Both Parks and McQueen follow Northup’s narrative of contrasting the relatively
humane slave owners with those who were exceptionally monstrous. Following Northup’s
text, Solomon, now Platt, finds himself on the plantation of a well-meaning but
ineffectual owner, William Ford, who Northup says later becomes a Baptist minister.40
Played by Mason Adams in Parks’ rendition, Ford quickly recognizes Platt/Northup’s
abilities, especially when he supervises the building of a raft to ship lumber down a river,
a scene replicated by McQueen’s Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch).
Northup mentions the cruelty of a carpenter and overseer, John M. Tibeats, employed
by Ford (p. 39), and one of the most disturbing scenes in both films involves an episode
in which Platt/Solomon becomes involved in an altercation with Tibeats.41 McQueen
uses actor Paul Dano to play Tibeats’ over-the-top, excessive tormenting of Platt, and in
one scene McQueen has Dano singing a racist song, “Run, Nigger, Run,” as he lords
himself over the slaves. McQueen presents Tibeats as a crazed white tormentor of blacks,
revealing McQueen’s propensity for modernist shock and exaggeration techniques that
go beyond Solomon Northup’s text, or Parks’ more traditional realist mode of
representation.
In one telling episode, after being accused by Tibeats of using the wrong nails on a
house construction (whereas Platt/Northup insisted he used exactly the nails he was told
to), Northup finally explodes with anger after Tibeats began to lash him, and takes up
the lash and fiercely beats his tormentor in a scene that McQueen draws out at length.
After his outburst, Platt/Northup is seized and hung up on a tree, left dangling close to
death overnight. This is a scene which McQueen aestheticizes with resonant images of
Platt/Northup with his feet barely able to touch the ground in order to keep him from
hanging to death. The iconography of lynching and images of blacks hanging from trees
is, of course, a powerful and disturbing one that McQueen exploits to deeply instill the
horrors of slavery on the audience.
For both Parks and McQueen, Ford is shown as ineffectual and forced to sell his slaves
to Edwin Epps, a much harsher owner. Parks’ Epps (John Saxon) is shown as harsh and
uneducated and held in contempt by his higher class wife, but, while brutal, he is not
the absolute monster played by Michael Fassbinder in the McQueen version. At the

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Q&A, McQueen insisted that he wanted to portray Epps as a human, but in my repeated
viewings of Solomon Northup’s Odyssey and Twelve Years, Parks’ depiction of Epps
presented a more multifaceted human being, precisely in his limitations and foibles,
while McQueen/Fassbinder’s Epps is demonic in his viciousness. McQueen has a
character narratively describe Epps to Platt/Northup as a “nigger breaker,” and his Epps
is full of sadism, psychotic violence, and demonic evil beyond the human.42 The excess
in Fassbinder’s Epps, in contrast to the restraint in which the malevolent Epps is
portrayed in Parks’ film, comes out clearly during a night scene. In the Parks’ version,
Epps is shown genuinely enjoying dancing with the black slaves as Solomon plays the
fiddle, while in the McQueen version he dances maniacally, like a man possessed.
McQueen shows Epps sexually obsessed by a comely slave, Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), who
is portrayed by McQueen as the best worker, outpicking the male slaves everyday in the
cotton field.43 The theme of sexual obsession was the topic of McQueen’s previous film
Shame (2012), and it is played out to the extreme with Fassbinder’s Epps portrayed as a
vicious man in the throes of sexual passion and violence.
Patsey also attracts the hatred of Epps’ wife (Sarah Paulson), who McQueen initially
plays as sympathetic but who becomes increasingly monstrous herself as the plot evolves
and her jealousy explodes, driving her to demand that Patsey be whipped in a violent
scene that is almost unbearable in its intensity. Interestingly, Parks’ representation of
Epps’ wife is much softer, and for the disruptive character of Patsey Parks substitutes a
gentler character, Jenny (Rhetta Greene), who is shown turning to Platt/Northup for
affection and love when they find themselves newly enslaved on the plantation, but
who turns to Epps out of convenience and a desire to elevate herself.
In Parks’ rendition, Platt is ordered by Epps to whip Jenny to placate Epps’ wife, and
Platt takes her into a barn where he pretends to beat her, while in McQueen’s version
Platt is forced to whip Patsey repeatedly in an almost unbearable scene. The long takes
which show Patsey’s brutal beating, as well as other long takes that feature whippings,
beatings, and rape, point to a pornography of violence evident throughout McQueen’s
major films.44 As noted, Hunger features long takes of Bobby Sands being brutally beaten,
focusing on the effects and aftermath of his torture. The hunger strike scenes of Sands
feature interminably long takes of his emaciated body, sores, and sunken hollow eyes.
Strangely, the sex scenes and nude bodies of Shame, also fetishistically shot in long takes,
are not really pornographic in the sense of evoking arousal, while the images of violence
in Hunger and 12 Years are pornographic in their explicitness, overtness, and extreme
violence.
Yet the quasi-pornographic violence is interspersed in McQueen’s 12 Years with
moments of aestheticism bursting out in extended lyrical shots of plantation beauty and
Louisiana landscape, and a rich sound montage of natural sounds of a teeming southern
Nature, interspersed with Hans Zimmer’s haunting score. In an odd scene not found in
Northup’s narrative, Solomon goes to a neighboring plantation to fetch Patsey, who is
having tea with an African American plantation, Mistress Shaw (Alfre Woodard), who
has gained freedom of a sort by marrying a wealthy white plantation owner. This
highlights the bizarreness of plantation life in an almost surreal tableau.
To the criticism that his 12 Years aestheticizes violence, McQueen has answered in
reviews: “Think of Goya. He painted the most horrendous acts of violence of his era,
in the most beautiful way. The beauty was a way of saying, ‘Look at this, I want your
attention.’”45 Like Spielberg in Amistad, McQueen uses Goya-esque contrasts of
darkness and light, captivity and freedom, and powerful images of suffering and

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degradation, deploying aesthetics to convey messages about domination and liberation,

good and evil.
One might contrast the motifs of religion in Northup’s, Parks’, and McQueen’s
respective tellings of 12 Years. In his memoir, Northup has conventional remarks toward
God and religion, while both Parks and McQueen illustrate how slave-owners use the
Bible to legitimate slavery and to attempt to get slaves to submit to their unholy living
and working conditions. While Ford is presented in all three texts as a relatively humane
slave-owner, his use of scriptures to attempt to help his slaves come to accept their
condition is presented by McQueen as hypocritical and mendacious and there are few,
if any, hints of religious redemption in McQueen’s bleak cinemascape.
McQueen’s 12 Years portrays Platt/Northup as driven to the depths of despair, finally
thinking that it was impossible for him to escape, while Parks’ narrative, by contrast,
pictures Northup’s wife continually making efforts to rescue him and the narrative
movement depicts in detail the steps taken to finally rescue Northup. Parks’ film, for
instance, shows a letter sent relatively early in the film reaching his wife and encouraging
her to keep up the search for her missing husband. Later, in both Parks’ and McQueen’s
narratives, a sympathetic carpenter, Sam Bass, is taken into Northup’s confidence and
he tells him who he really is and implores him to send a letter telling his wife where he
is currently enslaved. In McQueen’s version, Bass (played by a very sympathetic Brad
Pitt, who also served as one of the film’s producers) is the one white person in the film
who connects to Northup on a personal level and promises to deliver his letter and take
up his case. He responds sympathetically to Northup’s plight and tells him: “Your story
is amazing, and in no way good.” Moreover, Bass is the one character allowed by
McQueen to articulate a critique of slavery, telling Epps that “If you don’t treat them as
humans, then you will have to answer for it,” an argument Epps is incapable of
understanding.46
In McQueen’s version, Bass leaves the plantation to seek work and adventures
elsewhere, and Northup falls into deep despair, believing that Bass, too, has failed to
come to his aid. A burning letter denotes the depths of Northup’s despair and
hopelessness—just before authorities arrive at the plantation to tell Northup he is free
and to take him back north, while Epps and his wife look on in amazement and anger
at seeing their idyll of ownership undermined.
Parks and McQueen both end their versions of 12 Years with Northup being happily
reunited with his wife and children, and both end with graphic titles noting that
Northup attempted to bring criminal charges against the kidnappers. The graphics in
both films indicate that Northup, as a black man, could not testify in court, pointing to
the continued ills of slavery and segregation after Northup’s liberation, a condition that
would lead to the Civil War and decades of unending civil rights struggles.
Yet, for a film that deals with such a politically explosive topic as slavery, McQueen’s
12 Years is curiously conventional in its explicit liberal ideology, focusing on the
individual male hero and his fate. Although McQueen breaks with many conventional
Hollywood narrative and aesthetic codes, like Spielberg he follows the individualism of
the classical Hollywood cinema with his intense focus on the narrative of Solomon
Northup and reverential close-ups of actor Chiwetel Ejiofor; there is a centering of the
central character in almost every scene. This epic of individual survival also features
the typical Hollywood happy ending, signaled in advance by those who know that the
title “12 Years a Slave” signifies a period of captivity which Northup survives and from
which he is liberated.

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In McQueen’s film, Northup embodies a largely conservative individualism concerned

above all with his liberty and family. When aboard a slave ship en route to the slave
market in New Orleans, a fellow black tells Solomon that if he wants to survive: “Tell
no one who you are. Tell no one you can read and write.” Responding, Northup insists:
“I don’t want to survive. I want to live.” Yet once he discovers the nature of his condition,
Northup is basically a survivor who throughout the film often acts in an aristocratic
manner with cultured diction and superior skills in many arenas, positioning himself as
a highly superior individual human being.
At the end of the narrative, once he is told that he is now free, McQueen’s version
has Northup absorb the wondrous looks of the other slaves, who will continue in their
miserable condition, wordlessly hug Patsey, and leave, alone, to freedom and a happy
reunion with his family. In Parks’ film version, Northup turns and tells an old slave, “I
won’t forget you.” Indeed, Northup did write his stunning narrative account of his
captivity that describes in detail the inhuman system of oppression that inspired
abolitionists and would be challenged in the Civil War. McQueen, however, renders the
dynamics of his liberation ambiguous, unlike Parks’ Solomon Northup’s Odyssey which
signals the eventual freeing of Northup and the process through which his wife and
white patron’s search for him are successful. Hence, despite the rigorous modernist
aesthetics and brutal depiction of the horrors of slavery, McQueen’s 12 Years provides a
rather conventional story of survival and endurance, a genre very popular in
contemporary Hollywood cinema, and also embodied in 2013 films such as Gravity, All
Is Lost, and Captain Phillips.
The most radical political films depicting slavery, like Gilles Pontecorvo’s Burn!
(1969) or Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s The Last Supper (1976), feature slave rebellion and
portray collective revolt, although they may have a leader like Cinqué in Amistad, or
José Dolores in Burn!. 12 Years, by contrast, is a narrative of survival and endurance
where, with one narrative exception, Solomon Northup/Platt accommodates himself to
the system in order to survive. Yet, in a deeper existential/political register, McQueen’s
film, like the works of Kafka and Beckett in Adorno’s analyses,47 expresses the horror
and monstrosity of slavery in ways that capture its pathology and obscenity and provide
no redemptive moments other than Northup’s survival. McQueen’s modernist aesthetic
produces images that burn into the deepest layers of the spectators’ minds and provide
an experience of a horrific history that has profoundly shaped American culture and
society to this day.

Notes
1 There is a scholarly edition of Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, co-edited by Sue Eakin and Joseph
Logsdon, Library of Southern Civilization: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. The book was
expanded and re-issued in August 2013 as Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve
Years a Slave, edited by Clifford W. Brown, and Rachel Seligman (New York Praeger, 2013). I bought a
reproduction of the original publication from Amazon brought out to coincide with the release of
McQueen’s film with the original publication material in the frontpiece, from which I’ll cite pages; the
subtitle of the original carries the eyebrow-raising Narrative of Solomon Northup, citizen of New-York,
kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River, in
Louisiana; I also draw from an online version of the original printed text at https://archive.org/stream/
twelveyearsslave00nortuoft/twelveyearsslave00nortuoft_djvu.txt (accessed December 15, 2013).
2 The conception of classical Hollywood narrative cinema that I will use is articulated in David Bordwell,
Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to
1960 (New York: Columbia University Press; reprint edition 1985). On modernism, I am using the

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concept delineated by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner in our Introduction to Passion and
Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, co-edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (New York:
Universe Books and Bergin Publishers (USA) and London: Croom Helm (England), 1983; second edition,
Columbia University Press, 1988). The Introduction is online at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/
Bronner_Kellner.pdf (accessed on December 20, 2013). See also Stephen Eric Bronner’s collection of
articles on modernism, Modernism at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, Utopia (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012).
3 For a clear narrative of the Amistad story, see Walter Dean Myers, Amistad: A Long Road to Freedom (New
York: Dutton’s Children Books, 1998). Myers, a five-time recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award and
winner of awards for “Outstanding Literature for Young Adults,” provides a clear, compelling, and engag-
ingly illustrated account of the Amistad struggle and its place within the U.S. civil rights and liberation
African-American struggles.
4 Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion. An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York: Viking,
2012) at 3ff. Rediker, author of the renowned book The Slave Ship: A Human History (Baltimore: Penguin
Reprints, 2008), wishes to tell the story of the Amistad rebellion from below (p. 12). He skillfully brings
to life the personalities and experiences of the rebellious slaves and situates their story within the context
of the global revolts going on at the time against slavery, of which the Amistad rebellion is an important
part. Rediker also provides a well-researched and compelling portrait of the abolitionist movement and
the specific American white and black individuals who helped the Amistad rebels in their struggle for
freedom and to return to their homeland in Africa.
5 On the DVD of Amistad, both Spielberg and producer Debbie Allen tell how Allen brought the story idea
to Spielberg. On the TCM movie site, David Sterritt notes: “The idea of filming the Amistad affair came
from actress and director Debbie Allen, who had run across some books on the subject. After running
into fund-raising problems, she brought the project to Spielberg, who wanted to stretch his artistic wings
after making The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), and was looking for a prestige production to direct for
DreamWorks SKG, the studio he’d recently co-founded. Spielberg was an unlikely person to tackle the
Amistad story, since his previous picture about black characters, The Color Purple, had been badly received
by the black community, its eleven Oscar® nominations (no wins) notwithstanding. ‘I got such a bol-
locking for The Color Purple,’ he told a New York Times interviewer, ‘I thought, I’ll never do that again.’
But Spielberg evidently saw great potential in the Amistad story, and decided to take it on, even though
his crowded schedule meant doing pre-production while DreamWorks was still being launched and post-
production while Saving Private Ryan (1998) was before the camera.” David Sterritt, “Amistad,” Turner
Classic Movies at http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/188770%7C0/Amistad.html (accessed
October 31, 2013). Allen had also acted in Roots; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbie_Allen
(accessed October 31, 2013).
6 On the production background of Amistad, see Lester D. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 269ff.
7 Rediker writes that “Cinque found a loose nail on deck and used it to pick the central padlock. Whether
the locks were broken or picked, it was significant that two of the forty-nine enslaved men were black-
smiths, who knew the properties of iron intimately from their work” (op. cit., p. 75).
8 On the influence of Goya on the look of parts of Amistad, see the “Making of” feature and the DVD, and
Frank Sanello, Spielberg: The Man, the Movies, the Mythology (Taylor Trade Publications, 2002), p. 272.
Available at http://books.google.com/books?id=A6hmQbfOeTAC&pg=PA271&lpg=PA271&dq=Spiel
berg+Janusz+Kaminski+Francisco+Goya.&source=bl&ots=afg3dtl14f&sig=vuQK35-pBkScZYQaO1ur1
T0V9rQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=cx51UrSgL6TAigK02YCABw&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=S
pielberg%20Janusz%20Kaminski%20Francisco%20Goya.&f=false (accessed October 2, 2013).
9 In Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), Natalie
Zemon Davis describes how Spielberg and his production team employed and consulted historians to try
to accurately portray the events depicted, and provides background on historical misrepresentations of
characters and events, as well as criticisms by historians of the film. See Davis pp. 72ff., on how Debbie
Allen brought the story to Spielberg and how they made use of historical advisors to the project.
10 Rediker indicates that Cinque and others of the slaves labored to learn English while incarcerated, and
that abolitionists used former African slaves, who had become freed and had been working on ships, as
translators. In an amusing scene in Spielberg’s film in which the African slaves are being introduced to
the abolitionist lawyers who will defend them, a University linguist who supposedly specializes in African
languages is utterly unable to translate the Mende dialect of the rebels, and in comic scenes mistranslates
completely what the Africans are saying. Soon, however, they will have their own translator, based on a

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historical figure, James Convey, and played by Chiwetel Ejiofor (see Rediker, op. cit., pp. 11ff., passim)
who stars in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, which I discuss below.
11 Spielberg’s Joadson character was a composite of several abolitionists, while Tappan was a major histori-
cal figure in the movement. Davis regrets that Tappan was not assigned a larger role in Spielberg’s
narrative (op. cit., p. 79), while many critics wish that the Joadson character and excellent actor Morgan
Freeman could have had a more expanded role in the film.
12 Rediker delineates the complex welter of legal issues that were adjudicated in various trials (op. cit.,
p. 131.) At the initial pre-trial hearing in the U.S. District Court, charges of piracy and murder were
dropped, “whereupon the claims of property became the key issue” (p. 132)—as it would in Spielberg’s
film. For a useful delineation of the subsequent trials leading up to the concluding Supreme Court deci-
sion, see Myers, op. cit., pp. 51–74).
13 According to Myers (op. cit., p. 65), Cinque did call out in English “Give us free!” As Davis points out
in her study of Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film about a Roman slave rebellion also uses the dis-
course of freedom as a counterpart to slavery as an organizing theme of the film; see Slaves on Screen, op.
cit., pp. 17ff.
14 On the importance of the theme of “home” which runs through Spielberg’s films, see the book and article
by Antonio Sánchez-Escalonilla, Steven Spielberg: Entre Ulises y Peter Pan (Madrid: CIE Dossat, 2005)
and “El primer regreso al hogar en el cine de Steven Spielberg,” Film Historia 19.1 (2009).
15 See Douglas Kellner, “Lincoln in Contemporary U.S. Culture and Politics,” Jump Cut, No. 55 (Fall 2013)
at http://www.ejumpcut.org/trialsite/KellnerLincoln/ (accessed November 5, 2013).
16 Eric Foner, “The Amistad Case in Fact and Film,” History Matters (March 1998) at  http://historymat-
ters.gmu.edu/d/74/ (accessed November 5, 2013).
17 Roger Ebert, AMISTAD, December 12, 1997, at http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/amistad- (acces-
sed November 5, 2013).
18 Davis claims that the historical Baldwin had worked for abolitionist causes and was from the beginning
strongly committed to the moral and political dimensions of the case; op. cit., pp. 79–80.
19 For Rediker’s description of the subsequent fate of the Amistad case participants, see op. cit., pp. 224ff.
20 See http://www.boxofficemojo.com/search/?q=Amistad (accessed December 21, 2013). Most of
Spielberg’s films gross hundreds of millions.
21 For a detailed analysis of the film’s reception and criticism by historians, see Friedman, Citizen Spielberg,
op. cit., pp. 269–282, and Davis, Slaves on Screen, op. cit, pp. 81ff.
22 Friedman, Citizen Spielberg, op. cit., p. 271.
23 As I write on January 1, 2014, Slaves is available on Amazon Instant Video, but I could not find a DVD
release, nor was there much critical discussion about the film—which I saw in Paris in the 1970s. I recall
it had a cult status in some circles.
24 On Burn! see Carlo Celli, Gillo Pontecorvo: From Resistance to Terrorism (Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press,
2005). Marlon Brando claims: “I did some of my best acting in Burn!” See Brando: Songs My Mother
Taught Me (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 364. I have not yet been able to consult Michael T.
Martin and David C. Wall, “The Politics of Cine-Memory: Signifying Slavery in the History Film,” in
Robert A. Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulesu, eds., A Companion to the Historical Film (New York and
London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 445–467).
25 Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s The Last Supper is analyzed in Davis, op. cit., and John D. H. Downing, “Four
Films of Tomas Gutierrez Alea,” in Film and Politics in the Third World, edited by John D. H. Downing
(Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 1987), pp. 279–302. Downing’s excellent anthology also contains
an interview with The Other Francisco director Sergio Giral who discusses his films and asserts that the
period of intense slavery in Cuba prior to 1868 remains a blind-spot in Cuban history; see Sergio Giral,
“Cuban Cinema and the Afro-Cuban Heritage,” op. cit., pp. 267–278.
26 McQueen’s artwork and short films are described in the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Steve_McQueen_(director) (accessed December 16, 2013).
27 Carol Vogel, “Steve McQueen among 6 Hugo Boss Prize Finalists,” The New York Times, December 12,
2013, at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/arts/design/steve-mcqueen-among-6-hugo-boss-prize-fina-
lists.html?_r=0 (accessed December 20, 2013).
28 After its showing at the Toronto Film Festival, critics were claiming that 12 Years had a lock on the Oscars
and other major awards. See Catherine Shoard, “Toronto: 12 Years a Slave premieres to ecstatic reactions
and Oscar lockdown. Steve McQueen’s account of a free man sold into slavery wins awards buzz, a
standing ovation, and praise for its director from producer/star Brad Pitt.” The Observer, September 6,
2013, at http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/07/12-years-a-slave-toronto-premiere (accessed

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September 16, 2013). For a compilation of early praise for 12 Years, see Anna Silman, “Review Roundup:
The Most Effusive Praise of 12 Years a Slave,” Vulture, October 18, 2013, at http://www.vulture.
com/2013/10/most-effusive-praise-of-12-years-a-slave.html (accessed December 17, 2013).
29 Extracted from the new edition of Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, published by Penguin Classics
(London, 2013), and cited from Steve McQueen, “Twelve Years a Slave: the Astonishing Book that
Inspired My Film”, subheading: “In trying to create a film about slavery I barely knew where to start—
until my partner, historian Bianca Stigter, uncovered a true account of slavery that blew our minds.” The
Guardian, December 2, 2013 at http://www.theguardian.com/culture/shortcuts/2013/dec/02/twelve-
years-a-slave-book-inspired-film-solomon-northup (accessed December 20, 2013).
30 I attended this Q&A which took place at the Aero Cinema in Santa Monica on December 13, 2013.
31 McQueen tells a similar story in an interview with Dan P. Lee, “Where It Hurts: Steve McQueen on Why
12 Years a Slave Isn’t Just About Slavery,” Vulture, December 8, 2013, at http://www.vulture.
com/2013/12/steve-mcqueen-talks-12-years-a-slave.html (accessed December 20, 2013).
32 The only comparison of McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave to Park’s Solomon Northup’s Odyssey that I have
so far found is Bilge Ebiri, “A Tale Twice Told: Comparing 12 Years a Slave to 1984’s TV Movie Solomon
Northup’s Odyssey,” Vulture, November 11, 2013, at http://www.vulture.com/2013/11/12-years-a-
slave-vs-gordon-parks-1984-solomon-northups-odyssey.html (accessed December 15, 2013).
33 On Parks’ life and work, see Gordon Parks, A Hungry Heart (A Memoir) (New York: Atria Books, 2005)
and The Learning Tree (New York: Fawcett, 1987).
34 On the blaxploitation genre, see Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan, Camera Politica: The Politics and
Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1988) and Mikel
J. Koven, Blaxploitation Films (London: Oldcastle Books, 2010).
35 Parks writes: “Although the box office did not agree, I will always feel that Leadbelly was my strongest and
most ambitious film. It was the story of a real-life musician called the King of the Twelve String Guitar.
Huddie Ledbetter’s sorrowful plight gave an honest look at the bigotry that was so overwhelming in the
1920s and 1930s” (Parks, A Hungry Heart, op. cit., p. 323). I recall Parks making similar claims for
Leadbelly during an exhibition of his work at the Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin, Texas, in the
1970s.
36 Parks, A Hungry Heart, op. cit., p. 333.
37 There is a scholarly edition of Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, co-edited by Sue Eakin and Joseph
Logsdon (Library of Southern Civilization: Louisiana State University Press, 1968). The book was
expanded and re-issued in August 2013 as Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve
Years a Slave, edited by Clifford W. Brown, and Rachel Seligman (New York: Praeger, 2013). For details
of the edition I am using, see note 1.
38 Chiwetel Ejiofor had the role of translator in Amistad and was achieving global renown in roles as an
African immigrant selling illegal body parts in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and playing
against type a flamboyant drag queen who saves a failing shoe factory from bankruptcy in Kinky Boots
(2005). It is his riveting role in 12 Years a Slave, however, that is propelling him to multiple award
nominations and superstardom.
39 Cited in Bilge Ebiri, “Horrendous Acts in a Beautiful Way: Behind the Scenes of 12 Years a Slave,”
Vulture, November 13, 2013, at http://www.vulture.com/2013/11/behind-the-scenes-of-12-years-a-
slave.html (accessed on December 15, 2013).
40 Northup, op. cit. p. 33. Northup says of Ford “there never was a more kind, noble, candid, Christian man
than William Ford,” although:
the influences and associations that had always surrounded him, blinded him to the inherent wrong
at the bottom of the system of Slavery. He never doubted the moral right of one man holding another
in subjection. Looking through the same medium with his fathers before him, he saw things in the
same light. Brought up under other circumstances and other influences, his notions would undoubt-
edly have been different.
(ibid.)
Here Northup reveals impressive insight into how social conditions produce values, behavior, and ide-
ologies, points articulated during the same period by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology and The
Communist Manifesto.
41 See Northup, op. cit., pp 40ff., for his narrative account of the episode. Northup’s text is more complex
and detailed than McQueen’s modernist film rendition with its long expository passages where Platt is

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rented out to Tibeats, who torments him, but whose labor is managed by an overseer, Mr. Chapin, whose
character is not fleshed out in McQueen’s condensed version.
42 Actually, Northup himself notes Epps’ “inhuman throng” from which he has escaped and describes Epps
in the same passage as:

a man in whose heart the quality of kindness or of justice is not found. A rough, rude energy, united with
an uncultivated mind and an avaricious spirit, are his prominent characteristics. He is known as a “nig-
ger breaker,” distinguished for his faculty of subduing the spirit of the slave, and priding himself upon his
reputation in this respect, as a jockey boasts of his skill in managing a refractory horse. He looked upon
a colored man, not as a human being, responsible to his Creator for the small talent entrusted to him,
but as a “chattel personal,” as mere live property, no better, except in value, than his mule or dog.
(Northup, op. cit., p. 75)
43 Northup also describes the almost superhuman features of Patsey in a relatively long passage in his nar-
rative (pp. 77–78), writing:

Patsey was slim and straight. She stood erect as the human form is capable of standing. There was an
air of loftiness in her movement, that neither labor, nor weariness, nor punishment could destroy.
Truly, Patsey was a splendid animal, and were it not that bondage had enshrouded her intellect in
utter and everlasting darkness, would have been chief among ten thousand of her people. She could
leap the highest fences, and a fleet hound it was indeed, that could outstrip her in a race. No horse
could fling her from his back. She was a skillful teamster. She turned as true a furrow as the best, and
at splitting rails there were none who could excel her. When the order to halt was heard at night, she
would have her mules at the crib, unharnessed, fed and curried, before uncle Abram had found his
hat. Not, however, for all or any of these, was she chiefly famous. Such lightning-like motion was in
her fingers as no other fingers ever possessed, and therefore it was, that in cotton picking time, Patsey
was queen of the field.
She had a genial and pleasant temper, and was faithful and obedient. Naturally, she was a joyous
creature, a laughing, light-hearted girl, rejoicing in the mere sense of existence. Yet Patsey wept
oftener, and suffered more, than any of her companions. She had been literally excoriated. Her back
bore the scars of a thousand stripes; not because she was backward in her work, nor because she was
of an mindful and rebellious spirit, but because it had fallen to her lot to be the slave of a licentious
master and a jealous mistress. She shrank before the lustful eye of the one, and was in danger even of
her life at the hands of the other, and between the two, she was indeed accursed. In the great house,
for days together, there were high and angry words, poutings and estrangement, whereof she was the
innocent cause. Nothing delighted the mistress so much as to see her suffer, and more than once,
when Epps had refused to sell her, has she tempted me with bribes to put her secretly to death, and
bury her body in some lonely place in the margin of the swamp. Gladly would Patsey have appeased
this unforgiving spirit, if it had been in her power, but not like Joseph, dared she escape from Master
Epps, leaving her garment in his hand. Patsey walked under a cloud. If she uttered a word in opposi-
tion to her master’s will, the lash was resorted to at once, to bring her to subjection; if she was not
watchful when about her cabin, or when walking in the yard, a billet of wood, or a broken bottle
perhaps, hurled from her mistress’ hand, would smite her unexpectedly in the face. The enslaved
victim of lust and hate, Patsey had no comfort of her life.
(Northup, op. cit., p. 77)

Parks’ substitution of a more understandable character, Jenny, for Patsey shows his use of more familiar
character types in a more classically realist narrative. McQueen, by contrast, goes for extremes and shock
effects, making his Patsey even more flamboyant and almost superhuman than the extravagant descrip-
tion in Northup, cited above.
44 McQueen’s film was dismissed as “torture porn” in an attack by Armond White, “Can’t Trust It,” City
Arts, October 16, 2013, at http://cityarts.info/2013/10/16/cant-trust-it/ (accessed December 16, 2013).
45 Steve McQueen, cited in Bilge Ebiri, “Horrendous Acts in a Beautiful Way: Behind the Scenes of 12 Years
a Slave,” Vulture, November 13, 2013, at http://www.vulture.com/2013/11/behind-the-scenes-of-12-
years-a-slave.html (accessed on December 18, 2013).
46 Northup presents Bass as “a man whose true heart overflowed with noble and generous emotions . . . He
was liberal to a fault” (op. cit., p. 111). Gordon Parks introduces Bass as a contrarian arguing against
slavery with Epps and a group of Southern gentleman on a plantation porch. Parks’ Bass good naturedly

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prods Platt/Northup on his views of slavery, and then befriends him as they work together, promising to
get word to Northup’s friends and family up North and getting documents that attest Northup was a free
man, which he does, making Bass a hero in the narrative of Northup’s liberation in the original text and
both films.
47 In “Commitment,” T. W. Adorno writes:
It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world,
which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads. . . Kafka’s prose and Beckett’s plays, or the truly
monstrous novel The Unnameable, have an effect by comparison with which officially committed
works look like pantomimes. Kafka and Beckett arouse the fear which existentialism merely talks
about. . . . The inescapability of their work compels the change of attitude which committed works
merely demand.
(Aesthetics and Politics, London: New Left Books, 1977, pp. 180, 191)

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 20
BLACK FRANKENSTEIN
AND RACIAL
NEOLIBERALISM IN
CONTEMPORARY
AMERICAN CINEMA
Reanimating Racial Monsters
in Changing Lanes
Michael G. Lacy

Frankenstein in popular American cinema, literature, art, and horror-comic parodies

continues to evolve and capture the attention of literary, critical rhetorical, media, and
cultural studies scholars. Picart (2004) argues that the evolving Frankenstein cinematic
sequels have dramatically deviated and evolved from Mary Shelley’s novel (e.g.,
Frankenstein now refers to both monster-maker and monster), transforming it into a
cinemyth, or “public performance spaces within which patriarchal and matriarchal
myths compete” and “conservative and progressive ideologies struggle against each
other in working through collective anxieties, traumas, and aspirations” (Picart, 2004,
p. 336). Rushing and Frentz (1989, 1995) contend that the evolving Frankenstein nar-
rative is a mythic narrative, reflecting a “dystopian shadow,” which expresses
unconscious cultural anxieties or repressed fears that an external human creation
(e.g., technology) is out of control and threatens to supplant, enslave, or kill humans
and destroy civilization (1989, p. 63). Furthermore, dystopian myths also have an infe-
rior or interior cultural shadow that expresses repressed fears of “dark races,” femininity,
freakish or “hystericized” bodies, or anything that deviates from rational Western con-
sciousness (Rushing & Frentz, 1995, p. 39; see also Picart, 1998, pp. 1–20; 2004,
p. 338). Monsters in popular films are not pure emanations from the culture’s collective
unconscious, but driven by commercial and aesthetic interests, thereby reaffirming or
subverting hegemonic projects, systems, ideologies, and values (Picart, 1998, 2004;
Rushing & Frentz, 1995, p. 36).
 LA CY

In her brilliant book Black Frankenstein, literary critic and scholar Elizabeth Young (2008)
argues that the black Frankenstein monster and metaphors have appeared frequently since
in American fiction, essay, oratory, painting, and visually, and later in film and other media
since the 19th century; and yet, little serious scholarly attention has been paid to black
Frankenstein’s “place in American culture” or its “racial resonance in the United States”
(pp. 4–5).1 Young (2008) contends that black Frankenstein emerges as powerful, frequent,
and recurring metaphor used by liberals and conservatives to critique hegemonic U.S.
government power and economic and political policies (e.g., slavery or slavery’s abolition),
regarding race, national identity, masculinity, and implicitly femininity.
In this essay, I propose examining black Frankenstein stories, monsters, and metaphors
in contemporary cinema and media productions in order to critique racial neoliberalism’s
effects, which has produced widening social and material inequalities between blacks and
whites in the U.S. Such studies might help us avert its tragic consequences, including
racial rebellion, revolt, violence, militaristic control and institutional oppression. First, I
synthesize Young’s work to show how the recurring black Frankenstein stories serve as
metaphors and allegories to critique oppressive, government-sanctioned political and
economic policies. Second, I contextualize the contemporary sightings of black mon-
strosities by specifying the persistence and widening of racial inequalities in the U.S. over
the past 25 years. Third, I describe what critical scholars call racial neoliberalism, the reign-
ing hegemonic project and racial formation, which promises to resolve black inequalities
by producing material assets and upward mobility for individual racial subjects. Fourth,
through a reading of the popular film Changing Lanes (2002), I demonstrate how neolib-
eral films exploit black Frankenstein’s narrative form, structures, and figures in order to
contain and redeem affluent white patriarchal neoliberalism. In concluding, I offer the
black Frankenstein framework as an analytical tool to examine, expose, and critique U.S.
neoliberalism in order to avert neoliberalism’s tragedies of widening racial inequalities,
monstrous black rage, and white monster-making by integrating the black matriarchal
consciousness into these patriarchal stories and American culture.

Black Frankenstein
In Black Frankenstein, Young (2008) argues that the powerful and radical use of black
Frankenstein metaphor has come from liberal or progressive critics (black and white) who
viewed the government-sanctioned political economies and practices (e.g., slavery) as
the monster-maker that created, enslaved, and oppressed blacks. Slavery ultimately trans-
formed blacks into what Frederick Douglass described as “the pet monster of the American
people” (p. 4). The black monster metaphor served to explain, justify, and prophesize
black slave revolts against their white masters, such as that of Nat Turner in 1821, the
most famous slave revolt in U.S. history (Young, 2008, p. 19). Turner’s revolt, murders,
capture, execution, and possible dissection were used by conservatives to caution or con-
demn rebellious black slaves. But like Shelly’s Frankenstein, Young explains, Turner’s
humanity is derived from his slave narrative (retold by sympathetic whites), tragically
highlighting the loss of his identity, dehumanization, abandonment, and abuse (p. 22).
America’s “pet monster” metaphor resurfaced a century later, Young (2008) observes,
in civil rights activist and satirist Dick Gregory’s critique of “the white man” for creating
the “monstrous ghetto life” and imperialistic wars during the 1960s and 1970s (pp. 4,
211–214). Gregory integrated his recollections of James Whale’s Frankenstein films into
his autobiographies, essays, comic parodies, and performances (see Young, 2008,

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pp.  211–215).2 For Gregory, the civil rights movement, black urban uprisings, and
anti-Vietnam War protests were all reflections of the monster (“Frankie Baby”) “turning
upon his creator” (p. 211). Similarly, the 1970s blaxploitation films featured black
Frankenstein monsters (e.g., Blackenstein), reconfigured with Black Power sensibilities
(exaggerated afro hairdos, clothes, and styles) and marketed to black audiences, in order
to critique white racism and the government’s abandonment of black soldiers’ bodies in
Vietnam. However, Young concludes that blaxploitation’s Frankenstein eviscerated its
political, satirical, and rebellious voice and possibilities by exploiting cheap humor,
misogyny, and grotesque violence (pp. 196–197).
Young (2008) argues that conservative critics (e.g., Thomas Dixon) used the specter
of black Frankenstein monsters as rapists to justify restoring white supremacy and re-
enslaving or lynching blacks in popular literary and cinematic recollections of the Civil
War and Reconstruction. Young (2008) contends that D. W. Griffith’s (1915) The Birth
of a Nation is best classified in the horror genre because of its comic-horror parodies,
claustrophobic interiors, empty exteriors, invoking of fear, organizing structure (order–
chaos–order restored), all narratively propelled by black monsters. Birth updates the
“most conservative allegories of the Frankenstein story: its condemnation of racial amal-
gamation and black revolt” (p. 170). The film explains that the U.S. government’s
radical experiment of abolishing slavery was a tragic mistake, unleashing black monsters
on the gentile Southern white populous. As in Frankenstein, the brutish black monsters
escape their creator’s control. In response, “white people” make “monsters of them-
selves” by forming the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) en masse to subdue, control, purge, and
lynch or kill blacks (Young, p. 171).
Young (2008) reaffirms queer studies scholar Eve Kosokofsky Sedgwick’s observation
that Frankenstein has an organizing tableau of “two men chasing one another across a
landscape” (cited in Young, 2008, p. 10), expressing white homophobic anxieties and
fantasies about black masculinity and sexuality. This intimate bond/murderous-amorous
struggle extends to homosocial and homoerotic Frankenstein parodies and interracial
male “buddy stories” plots central to the U.S. culture (p. 10). Black Frankenstein stories
have at least three distinctive elements: (1) the monster is amalgamated from corpses3
or body politics; (2) the monster is reanimated or revived; and (3) the monster revolts
against his creator (p. 5, 14). In addition, once abandoned by his maker, Frankenstein’s
monster is reanimated to pursue intimate relationships (e.g., a bride), but he is rejected
because of his unnatural or grotesque condition; and, therefore, he suffers, becomes
enraged, and goes on a murderous rampage against his maker.4
Black Frankenstein monsters and metaphors critique the horrors of hegemonic oppres-
sion experienced by black people, and white people’s fear of revolting blacks. I argue that
black Frankenstein narrative form and figures reemerge in contemporary American films
to both critique and redeem racial neoliberalism. However, before examining a more
recent sighting of black Frankenstein in popular film, I describe the political and eco-
nomic forces and racial neoliberalism projects that shape and animate monstrous racial
images and practices by highlighting the persistence of black inequalities in the U.S.
over the last 25 years.

Persistent Black Inequalities

Leading sociologists, historians, and social scientists have documented the persistence—
and even widening—inequalities, disparities, and gaps from whites in wealth, housing,

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schools, education, health, incarceration patterns, and other aspects of life during the
last quarter of a century. The starkest racial disparities are in wealth, which include real
estate, savings accounts, stocks, and bonds. In 2009, the Pew Research Center reported
that white families were almost 20 times wealthier than black families ($113,149 com-
pared to $5,677; see Taylor, Kochhar, Fry, Velasco, & Motel, 2011). The Institute on
Assets and Social Policy (IASP) reconfirmed that the main drivers of the racial wealth
gap are homeownership, income, unemployment, education, inheritance (Shapiro,
Meschede, & Orzo, 2013, p. 5). Homeownership comprises 53% of black families’
wealth and 39% of the wealth for white families; yet the overall wealth gap increased
due to the Great Recession (2007–2009) as the value of homes declined. African
Americans took on riskier subprime mortgage loans than whites (32.1% of blacks com-
pared to 10.5% for whites; see Sugrue, 2010, p. 106) and experienced twice as many
foreclosures as whites (Shapiro, Meschede, & Orzo, 2013, p. 4).
Since 2007, the unemployment rate for African Americans has doubled and remains
nearly twice as high as unemployment for whites, and length of black unemployment
lasts twice as long as for whites. In 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the
black unemployment rate was 13.8% and 7% for whites. In order to navigate and survive
unemployment, researchers have found family inheritance, networks, and retirement
assets to be essential factors (Shapiro, Meschede, & Orzo, 2013). On overage, whites
inherit five times more wealth than blacks (Shapiro, Meschede, & Orzo, 2013., p. 5).
The Urban Institute (2013) reports that during the Great Recession, black families lost
31% of their wealth and almost all of their retirement assets, while white families lost
11% of their wealth and experienced a slight increase in their retirement assets
(McKernan, Ratcliffe, Steuerle, & Zhang, 2013).
Historian Thomas Sugrue (2010) argues that from the 1920s through the 1990s, racial
segregation in housing and education hardened in spite of the enactment of 1968 Title
VIII of the Civil Rights Act (1968), banning housing discriminating nationwide
(p. 101). Regardless of income, studies show that blacks primarily live segregated in
large, economically depressed Northeastern or Midwestern metropolitan cities, marked
by racial and ethnic hostility from new Asian and Latin immigrant groups (Bobo, 2011;
Sugrue, 2010, p. 98). Sugrue (2010) explains that legal and cultural histories, legacies,
and customs of housing practices have created ongoing antiblack discrimination pat-
terns that are still practiced by realtors, homeowners, and landlords, essentially creating
color-coded neighborhoods and realities. Segregated housing and neighborhoods have
produced segregated school patterns, a legacy which dates back to the early 20th century
(Sugrue 2010, p. 102). Since the late 1970s, U.S. federal courts have abandoned the
mandates of Brown v. Board of Education, resulting in school districts resegregating by
race: whites moved to the suburbs, which resulted in the decline of tax resources for
“minority-majority” schools populated by black and Latino children in urban areas
(Sugrue, 2010, p. 101, 103). Racial inequalities, explains sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-
Silva (2010), affect black and brown people in jobs, housing, hospitals, physical and
mental health, restaurants, driving, buying a car, or hailing a cab—almost every aspect
of life (p. 210).

Racial Neoliberalism
While strong social science studies continue to document widening racial disparities and
ongoing antiblack discrimination, critical scholars highlight a new, reigning racial

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formation and hegemonic project to explain persistent racial inequalities: racial

neoliberalism (Omi & Winant, 1994; Giroux, 2003; Goldberg, 2009). Omi and Winant
(1994) argue that racial neoliberalism emerged as a hegemonic force during the late
1980s and early 1990s, as early neoliberals (e.g., President Bill Clinton and “New
Democrats”) no longer defended the government’s antiracist and antipoverty remedies
(e.g., welfare, social services, school desegregation orders, affirmative action, and minor-
ity set-aside). Early neoliberals remained silent about race-specific policies while
proposing universal or colorblind economic reforms that concealed the legacy of white
supremacy and the ongoing effects of antiblack racism (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 151).
More perniciously, early neoliberals appropriated the neoconservatives’ coded rhetoric
as trumped by President Ronald Reagan and a chorus of Republican politicians (e.g.,
“personal responsibility,” “family values,” and “the inner-city”), who blamed liberalism
and poor blacks for their economic distress, poverty, and violence (p. 150; see also Lacy,
2010). Such rhetoric appealed to white working class and suburban voters who resented
the antiracist policies or viewed them as “reverse racism” (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 28,
35). In their “quest to avoid divisive politics,” write Omi and Winant, early 1990s neo-
liberals “quite deliberately fostered the neglect of issues of race” (p. 152).
Racial neoliberalism encompasses neoconservative and early neoliberal claims by
seeking to dismantle and divest the welfare state’s antiracist and antipoverty programs,
while the state sanctions unfettered global market forces (free flow of capital, goods,
services, information, and laborers; Goldberg, 2009, pp. 332–333). Racial neoliberals
argue free market or laissez faire policies, programs, and practices will transform impov-
erished and underprivileged individual racial subjects (domestically and globally) into
prosperous ones, thereby eliminating structural “inequalities in employment, income,
education, health care access, etc.” (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 148). Critical scholars
Giroux (2003) and Goldberg (2009) argue that racial neoliberalism has reshaped the
discursive terrain in several ways, which makes its project crucial for understanding the
recurring black Frankenstein monsters in media productions:

1 Racial neoliberalism exploits popular commercial productions (especially cinema and

reality TV) that makes visible racialized subjects, bodies, identities, and figures in
colorblind or assimilationist contexts, controlled and centered by whiteness (Gray,
1995). Moreover, racialized subjects, identities, and characteristics are unnamed and
seem unremarkable to the characters in the narratives, implying that their worlds (pre-
and post-apocalyptic) are postracial realities (Lacy, 2014). Because racial neoliberalism
infiltrates popular commercial productions, such representations are devoid of political,
economic, or historical reference, language, or names (Goldberg, 2009, p. 24).
Unresolved and enduring racial traumas (e.g., slavery, colonialism, civil rights struggles,
and apartheid) appear, evolve, and reappear again in different form, without historical
reference or political significance, consequence, or critique.
2 Racial neoliberalism’s market compulsion serves to privatize racism, making it a matter
of individual character, prejudice, or hate, rather than the products of histories, legacies,
and ongoing structural conditions (Goldberg, 2009; Giroux, 2003). In neoliberalism’s
reign, writes Giroux (2003), racial problems are reduced to personal problems (p. 193).
Racial neoliberalism also seeks to privatize and commodify public and social spaces,
radically reducing the civic sites in which to discuss or imagine racial problems and
consider their complexities, and marginalizing social and collectivist movements that
seek to intervene or change social conditions (p. 193).

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3 Racial neoliberalism embraces and promotes individualism rooted in Social Darwinism

and a winner-take-all ethic (Giroux, 2003, p. 197). Therefore, racial neoliberalism
devalues the welfare state’s efforts to provide basic levels of security that enable upward
social mobility with progressive policies and programs (Zarefsky, 1986). The adoption
of rugged individualism rhetoric and performances also encourages racial and ethnic
groups in large urban contexts to see each other as combatants or scapegoats competing
for scarce resources (Lacy, 2010).
4 Racial neoliberalism’s desire to privatize the traditional emergency and social caretaking
function of the modern state (Goldberg, 2009, p. 332), and its anti-statist rhetoric
(Giroux, 2003), undermine the state’s efforts to intervene and rescue the historical
victims of racism and poverty in times of crises or disaster. In its place, racial neoliberalism
extolls the virtues of charitable giving and corporate philanthropy (Goldberg, 2009,
p. 332).
5 In sum, Giroux (2003) writes, “Racial justice in an age of market-based freedoms and
financially driven values loses its ethical imperative that embraces commercial rather
than civic values, private rather than public interest, and financial incentives rather
than ethical concerns” (pp. 195–196). In doing so, neoliberalism abandons liberalism’s
essential claim that government and civic interventions can solve enduring social
inequalities and antiblack racism, as we will see in Changing Lanes.

Seeing Black Frankenstein and Racial Neoliberalism

in Changing Lanes
I now turn to the popular film Changing Lanes (2002) to demonstrate how the black
Frankenstein monster resurfaces in contemporary popular film discourse as a means of
critiquing racial neoliberalism. Notably, Changing Lanes was not marketed as a horror
film, but as a “road rage” thriller (LaSalle, 2002), starring six Academy nominated or
award-winning actors. But the film contains elements of black Frankenstein narratives:
(1) the film’s tableau features two enraged men chasing each other across a landscape,
in New York City; (2) the neoliberal protagonist reanimates, abandons, and attempts to
digitally kill or erase the enraged black monster figure; (3) the enraged black Frankenstein
seeks revenge by trying to harm or kill white neoliberals; (4) in order to restore order or
white privilege, the white neoliberal protagonist transforms himself into a monster to
control and emasculate his black antagonist; and (5) finally, black Frankenstein horror
stories are moralistic:5 they serve as antiracist critiques against the state’s hegemonic
economic and political policies, or cautionary tales for revolting blacks or insecure
whites in power. Changing Lanes also draws on elements of atonement rhetoric at the
end of the film in order to redeem white patriarchal neoliberalism, while also using
neoliberalism’s tools (market forces, individualism, and charity) to remedy the indi-
vidual black subject’s injuries and rage.

Rehabilitating the Black Male Protagonist

In black Frankenstein stories, the monster must be amalgamated, stitched together, and
revived (Young, 2008). In Changing Lanes, the white male Alcohol Anonymous sponsor,
helper, and father-figure (William Hurt6) helps rehabilitate the film’s black male pro-
tagonist, Doyle Gibson (Samuel L. Jackson). Doyle suffers from Black Rage, or feelings
of anger, hate, frustration, anxiety, desperation, and depression, resulting from the legacy

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of white hegemonic oppression of blacks, leading to self-destruction (e.g., suicide,

substance abuse, abusive relationships, and divorce), explains psychiatrists Grier and
Cobbs (1992). Black rage is internalized self-hatred (p. 208), or what Dick Gregory
described as the “monster inside me” (Young, 2008p. 217).7 Doyle’s black rage and alco-
holism is fueled by his inability to successfully perform as patriarch by providing a stable
home for his two boys and estranged wife Valarie (Kim Staunton)—a theme echoed in
Doyle’s statement repeated throughout the film: “boys need their fathers.” Doyle’s story
serves as a metonymy for the four decade epidemic of absent black fathers in U.S. house-
holds (Kreider & Renee, 2011; see also Alston, 2008).8
Doyle’s AA sponsor and father-figure rehabilitates him by teaching pseudo-Christian
covenants, maxims (e.g., Serenity Prayer), and practices to reframe his injuries, trauma,
and black rage into his personal problem that he is responsible for transcending. Doyle
has been taught to disconnect his racial injuries and rage from larger economic and
political structures, and ideologies of white supremacy, white privilege, and antiblack
discrimination that materially affect his life. As Peck (1994) explains, (racial) neoliber-
alism fluidly unites and blurs Protestantism Christianity, therapy, popular psychology,
and free markets because such discourses promote autonomous individualism and per-
sonal transformations (pp. 95–96).
Under his AA sponsor’s tutelage, Doyle has become doctrinaire (e.g., repeating max-
ims and aphorisms), rule-bound, restrained, and uptight. He wears large thick black
plastic glasses and a tight necktie and clothes, including a dark raincoat that he never
takes off during the film. Doyle’s personal restraint includes sexual abstinence (e.g., tell-
ing his white female realtor that the master bedroom will be for the boys), thereby
subverting dominant stereotypes of black male hyper-heterosexuality while affirming
postracial sensibilities. Doyle works as an insurance agent in a congested call center
cubicle, reflecting his compliance and obedience to corporate logics. Oftentimes, media
images of call centers serve as metonymies of third world chaos, technological under-
development, and the outsourcing of U.S. jobs (Rowe, Malhotra, & Pérez, 2011), but
here it enables Doyle to qualify for a mortgage to buy a “fix-me-up” house for his two
boys and Valarie to live in; it is located next to an auto repair shop on a congested street
in Brooklyn, coded as a working class neighborhood. Recovering, at the beginning of
the film Doyle expresses “joy” and gratitude for “being alive!” to other AA members.

Reanimating and Reviving the Black Frankenstein Monster

Racial neoliberalism animates the film’s white neoliberal protagonist, Gavin (Ben
Affleck), to reengage and revive Doyle’s monstrous black rage by crashing his car into
Doyle’s car on the FDR highway during the morning rush hour. Doyle is due in family
court in hopes of gaining joint custody of his two sons. After the collision, Gavin offers
Doyle a blank personal check to fix his car (and later offers $10,000), but Doyle insists
that “they do the right thing” by exchanging insurance cards and notifying the police.
Gavin minimizes, depersonalizes, and perhaps dehumanizes Doyle and the situation by
saying “better luck next time,” as he hastily speeds off, leaving Doyle stranded on the busy
highway during rush hour. Against traffic, Doyle walks to court and arrives 20 minutes
late to find the judge awarding custody of the two boys to Valarie, so that she can pursue
a new job and life in Portland, Oregon. Still, Doyle clumsily reads a script detailing a plan
to take care of the boys and Valarie. Dismissive and unsympathetic, the white male judge
scolds Doyle: “If this was my marriage and it was so important, I would have been here

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on time. Everyone was on time, except you.” The family court scene was modeled after
family courts in New York City, explains Changing Lanes director Roger Michell (2002);
they are chaotic, crowded, and noisy with children crying, populated by dark people,
distressed white women, and white male police officers standing near the doors.
Second, Gavin revives the enraged black protagonist by coercing him. Specifically, in
a rush, Gavin left a legal file at the accident scene with Doyle. Gavin is a successful,
young, ambitious lawyer who was deployed by the partners in his corporate Wall Street
law firm to file Simon Dunne’s signature with the court; this authorizes their firm’s con-
trol over Dunne’s $107 million foundation and (unbeknownst to Gavin) makes the
senior partners trustees for $3 million. The senior law partners exploited Gavin’s ambi-
tion, naiveté, youth, and adulterous charm to encourage him to seduce his “friend,”
Simon Dunne’s granddaughter Nina Dunne, thus enabling him access to Dunne in order
to get him to sign over his fortune shortly before his death. Gavin confesses to his men-
tor, legal associate, former mistress, and helper, Michelle (Toni Collette), that Dunne
“didn’t know exactly what he was signing,” but that the senior partners assured him that
they were protecting Dunne’s fortune. In probate court, Nina Dunne contests that her
grandfather signed over control of his foundation and accuses Gavin’s firm of fraud. The
black female judge sternly gives Gavin until the end of the day to recover the file and
submit it to the court.
The Wall Street lawyers have abandoned liberalism’s essential claim that state, legal,
and civic interventions can resolve persistent social injustices and black inequalities
(Omi & Winant, 1995; Zarefesky, 1986) by doing legal pro bono work, such as nobly
(and futilely) defending black males on death row in Texas (a recurring anecdote in the
film). Instead, neoliberalism replaces liberalism’s antiracist goals and ethics and with a
utilitarian ends-justify-the means ethic. Senior law partner Stephen (Sydney Pollack)
explains to Gavin: “I can live with myself because, at the end of the day, I think I do
more good than harm.”9 Further, he argues that corruption is endemic to corporate life,
including within Dunne’s corporate philanthropic foundation, which sponsors a music
program primarily for black schoolchildren in New York City (seen in close-up shots at
the beginning of the film). Stephen sarcastically asks Gavin:

How do you think Simon Dunne got all that money? Do you think those
factories in Malaysia have daycare centers in them; or check the pollution
levels of his chemical plants in Mexico; or look at the tax benefits he got from
his foundation?

Hence, neoliberals rationalize stealing each other’s fortunes because their corporate phi-
lanthropies are products of exploiting third world brown people through unfettered
transnational and global economic policies.
Gavin’s moral ambivalence threatens the neoliberalism’s patriarchy, marriages, afflu-
ent lifestyle, and masculinity. In the beginning of the film, Stephen (senior law partner
and Gavin’s father-in-law) teases Gavin (the firm’s newest partner) that he cannot yet
handle a 50-foot yacht. The yacht serves as a phallic symbol of Stephen’s hyper-
masculine patriarchal power and wealth in contrast to Gavin’s desire. The film’s white
women (e.g., daughters, mothers, intimates, and lawyers) are complicit in white patri-
archal neoliberalism, which Gavin’s wife (Amanda Peete) refers to as “living on the
edge,” or using unethical means to acquire conspicuous displays of corporate wealth and
leisure, such as fine dining, museum art, yachts, and expensive shoes.10

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However, in Frankenstein narratives, multiple awakenings occur throughout, moti-

vating the characters to ignore them or take extreme corrective actions (Rushing &
Frentz, 1989). In a dramatic and sobering moment, Michelle explains to Gavin: “You’re
the attorney of record. You could actually go to jail (for fraud) for this! You need that
file!” To retrieve the file, Michelle introduces Gavin to a demonic character with back-
lit red ears. In a darkly lit closet-office with his children’s crayon-colored pictures hang-
ing on the wall, Gavin reluctantly pays Finch $5,000 to hack into and destroy Doyle’s
personal credit history and bankrupt him. Gavin then leaves a message on Doyle’s office
phone telling him that his credit will be turned back on once he retrieves and gives the
file back to Gavin immediately. The neoliberal uses new technology to unethically and
illegally coerce, mystify, and transform his black antagonist into zombie or “spirit with
a body,” says Gavin, which Doyle later calls “voodoo.”

Monstrous Black Revenge and White Monstrosities

Throughout the day, white male neoliberals confront, coerce, dismiss, abandon, or dig-
itally kill-off the black male protagonist (Doyle), but, on four separate occasions, Doyle
physically or intellectually dominates and defeats them. In the most chilling scene,
Doyle nearly kills Gavin. Doyle removes the lug nuts from Gavin’s Mercedes and taunts
him with the lug nut wrench while driving away in a taxicab, causing the wheel to come
off Gavin’s car. The car and Gavin spin out of control, crashing against the guard rail
along the FDR highway where the original collision took place. In a reversal, viewers
see Gavin visibly shaken, walking against the traffic past the wreckage of Doyle’s car.
After watching Gavin’s crash from the backseat of a taxicab, Doyle covers his mouth
after the crash, sickened by what he has done.
Racial neoliberalism reasserts its dominance over the black Frankenstein figure by
motivating Gavin to transform himself into a monster by using his elite white privilege
and antiblack male stereotypes to induce the police to arrest, control, and incarcerate
Doyle. Gavin goes to the public school that Doyle’s children attend to tell the Latina
American principal that Doyle lost custody of his children earlier that day and warn her
that Doyle will be coming to the school to kidnap and harm the children. The principal
expresses disbelief: “Doyle Gipson? Really?” She notes that Doyle “attends all the school
plays” and “teacher conferences.” In response, Gavin elevates his rhetorical style in
Shakespearean-fashion with high Latinate diction: “Doyle is a man of low honor, at
all—a low man . . . We are taught this fairy tale: The good end well and the poor end
badly. Do you believe that?” Gavin then sounds the alarm: “He is coming here. Be ready
for him!” Gavin then leaves Doyle an anonymous phone message, claiming that there
has been an accident at his children’s school. Once Doyle arrives, the principal assures
him that his children are safe. In disbelief, Doyle walks down the dark school hallways
calling “Danny and Stevie Gipson!” The principal orders her one white and two black
female secretaries to call the police. Two white male police officers subdue Doyle by
throwing him on the ground, handcuffing him, and arresting him in front of his chil-
dren. Watching Doyle being placed in a police squad car from across the street, Gavin
taunts Doyle like a Gangsta rapper: “Do you see what I can do to you? . . . Trying to kill
me? . . . Do you know who I am? Motherfucker! What’s up now?” Appropriating and
switching codes (from high Latin to low Urban Gansta), the elite white neoliberal
emasculates his black antagonist while also reaffirming his white privilege, superiority,
and dominance.

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However, unlike classic conservative Black Frankenstein narratives in which whites

transformed themselves into racial monsters en masse to restore white supremacy, racial
neoliberalism in Changing Lanes harbors liberal guilt about persistent black inequalities
and injury to the two black boys, perhaps proliferating future black monsters. After
Gavin sees the two black boys traumatized, crying, and being consoled by their mother
and the principal, the camera crosscuts between Gavin and the two boys. The scene
ends with a close-up shot of Gavin expressing shame.

Atonement
Each of Changing Lanes’ protagonists misuse Christian maxims to depersonalize and
absolve themselves of blame for their wrongdoing in order to justify chasing, harming,
and trying to kill the other. But, in the end, Changing Lanes exploits an ancient Judeo-
Christian rhetorical form by attaching atonement elements (Koesten & Rowland, 2004)
onto the film’s ending, thereby offering personal and religious motives to redeem neo-
liberalism’s morality and transcend black material inequalities.
In their zeal to coerce, emasculate, or kill each other, the protagonists recognize their
actions are harming other people. In the film’s most poignant scene of awakening,
Doyle’s AA sponsor bails him out of jail and reaffirms personal worth: “You are too
important to me!” Then, the AA sponsor angrily scolds Doyle and predicts: “Today you
almost killed some guy; tomorrow you might go all the way!” He explains that Doyle and
Gavin broke a universal “covenant” of “human decency” that requires Doyle resist irra-
tional animalistic impulses (“going batshit”) and reaffirm human suffering collectively
in a therapy. Doyle responds: “But I didn’t have a drink!” Annoyed, Doyle’s AA sponsor
obscenely responds: “Drinking isn’t really your drug of choice . . . You’re addicted to
chaos” and “hooked on disaster.” In sum, racial neoliberalism employs quasi-Christian-
therapeutic discourse to induce the black male subject to treat his racial injuries as small,
personal, isolated events, disconnected from histories, politics, and ideologies. As
Goldberg (2009) reminds us, racial neoliberalism induces “forgetting, getting over, wip-
ing away” the terms for conditions and structures that make racial oppression
apparent (p. 21).
Second, each humiliated protagonist confesses and apologizes for their transgressions.
But atonement requires insuring that wrongdoing cannot happen again (Koesten &
Rowland, 2004, p. 73). Gavin confronts and contains his father-in-law’s neoliberal
excesses. At dinner, Gavin slams Dunne’s original legal file down on the fine dining
table in front of his wife and in-laws and pointedly asks his father-in-law Stephen: “Can
you imagine how unpleasant it will be if the judge gets a hold of this file?” Gavin
explains. “I’ll be keeping the file in a safe place,” essentially blackmailing Stephen by
threatening to expose him to fraud charges. Stephen responds: “Don’t you fuck with
me!” “I’m not fucking with you, Sir,” says Gavin. Gavin’s “civility” emasculates the old
neoliberal patriarch in front of his wife and daughter. Gavin further subverts Stephen’s
authority by telling him that he’ll be doing “real” pro bono work from his office on
Monday by “helping a man [Doyle] get a house” and personally calling Nina Dunne to
“give back the $3 million” that the senior partners “stole from her grandfather’s founda-
tion.” Finally, Gavin confronts his wife: “I think I can do this. I found the edge. Can you
live there with me?” By threatening his wife and father-in-law’s greed and corruption,
Gavin affirms a new, more moral patriarchal identity for himself, while maintaining his
affluent lifestyle and white privilege.

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Third, atonement requires that the protagonists freely or independently offer

reparations to compensate for the losses they caused (Koesten & Rowland, 2004, p. 74).
Doyle startles Gavin by returning the file to his office. Gavin uses his elite white privi-
lege to convince the reluctant balding white male bank officer to re-secure Doyle’s home
mortgage. More dramatically, Gavin confesses his wrongdoing to Valarie. After dinner,
Gavin runs upstairs to Valarie’s apartment and contritely asks Valarie for five minutes:
“I owe your husband 20 [minutes]; I’m only asking for five with you.” Viewers never see
Gavin confess to Valarie; but in the film’s final scene, Valarie and the two boys are in
front of the house in Brooklyn waiting for Doyle. The camera shot crosscuts from Doyle
to Valarie and the children standing on the opposite side of the street, separated by traf-
fic. A close up shot of Doyle’s face reflects his surprise, while Annie Lennox sings Bob
Marley’s “Waiting in Vain,” thereby redeeming Valarie’s matriarchal morality as she
waits for Doyle to transcend his black rage. As the film concludes, the new moral white
neoliberal averts the tragic consequences of excessive racial neoliberalism by reuniting
the film’s injured black monster figure with his moral black matriarchal consciousness,
thereby transforming black Frankenstein into resident black father.
Although Changing Lanes was a critical and commercial success,11 some film critics
objected to the film’s ending because the atonement diverted it from a tragic ending. It
“turns what should have been a fast paced thriller into a cerebral sermon,” wrote Salon
Magazine’s Damien Cave (2002). “[It] was not tragic enough,” because “no one gets seri-
ously hurt—emotionally or psychologically.” Kenneth Turan (2002) of the Los Angeles
Times wrote that in spite of “its dystopian look at how quickly and decisively modern
society can disintegrate, Changing Lanes is ultimately timid” and “carefully pulls back”
from the “abyss.” Such reviews never acknowledge or take for granted that neoliberal-
ism’s atonement occurs personally, privately, and individually, while leaving the systemic
effects of structural racism intact. As Reed (2013) explains, neoliberal films dissolve
political economies and social relations into individual quests, leaving complex unar-
ticulated assumptions about material realities unexamined by critics, observers, and
scholars (p. 3).

Unearthing Black Frankenstein Studies

Young (2008) argues that scholarly examinations of recurring black Frankenstein mon-
sters and metaphors have been neglected, but they appears in art and film to critique
government policies regarding race, materiality, national identity, masculinity, and
femininity. My reading of Changing Lanes integrates the black Frankenstein monster into
evolving Frankenstein cinemyth in order to critique racial neoliberalism. I offer four
implications for future studies. First, just as the hyper-masculine or patriarchal struggles
in the Frankenstein myth imply extreme separation from humans and their creations
(Rushing & Frentz, 1989), Changing Lanes reflects extreme racial disparities in white
privilege and black family life. Such disparities in wealth are growing. Over the last 25
years, the IASP reports that the gap between white and African American families has
tripled, widening to $152,000 (Shapiro, Meschede, & Orso, 2013). Even with similar
education and professional achievements, black people’s wealth has receded over the
last 25 years, while the income of whites grew $240,000, thereby undermining neoliberal
democratic assumptions that equal opportunity and merit leads to financial assets,
Shapiro argues (cited in McGreal, 2010, p. 15). Such racial extremes suggest that more
monsters and anti-neoliberalism critiques are forthcoming, but, unlike the prototypical

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black Frankenstein monsters who were revolting black slaves, the monsters will be work-
ing and middle class blacks (or Latinos and whites constructed as black) and dark third
world people revolting against transnational neoliberalism.12 Doyle is a particularly
frightening monster figure for U.S. neoliberals because his pseudo-Christian restraint,
status, ethos, and aspirations enabled him to interact with whites while seeking revenge,
nearly killing affluent white males in contexts where they dominate or control.
Second, the Frankenstein myth reflects dystopian shadows that express interior fears
of black racial bodies, which are repressed, ignored, or denied (Rushing & Frentz, 1995).
In spite of widening racial disparities, President Obama and elected public officials
refuse to attack or target racial disparities for fear of seeming preoccupied with blacks’
interests while ignoring the white majority (Fletcher, 2013; Sugrue, 2010). Enck-Wanzer
(2011) explains that President Obama’s rhetoric embraces antiracialism (a form of white-
ness; see Goldberg, 2009, p. 22), which actively suppresses and excludes categories of
race and structural racism from political discourse, making them seem antiquated or
private (Goldberg, 2009, p. 23). Such suppression and repression gives rise to monstrous
cinematic expressions (including Frankenstein monsters, zombies, and vampires), which
combine with commercial interests to subvert, contain, or redeem racial neoliberalism.
After all, as Poole (2011) explains, zombies and vampires conjure up apocalyptic visions
that promote moral indictments, political satire, and social critiques of American racism
or war (e.g., Night of the Living Dead, p. 216).
Third, the evolving Frankenstein myth implicitly provides symbolic resources to avert
its tragic ends by integrating a matriarchal consciousness into the patriarchal story and
culture (Picart, 1998, 2004; Rushing & Frentz 1989, 1995). In Changing Lanes, the
absent black father is reunited with his estranged black matriarch to assume the central
patriarchal role as father to his boys. This is all made possible by the paternalist white
father-figure’s guidance and the young, white neoliberal’s atonement, thereby redeeming
white paternalistic neoliberalism, while implicitly blaming the enraged black male for
his condition. Similar mythic form and narrative structures can be seen in many popular
hegemonic commercial films (e.g., The Green Mile and The Horse Whisperer), Brummett
argues (2004). Told from a white liberal standpoint, this mythic narrative blames black
masculine injuries and rage on their refusal to accept superior technologies that whites
have given them (pp. 76–77).13 Neoliberalism is but the latest hegemonic project offered
to suffering, complicit, and enraged black males, which masks widening racial antago-
nisms and white power. In addition, the antagonistic struggles and homosocial bonds
between interracial “buddies” chasing across landscapes can be seen in popular revenge
fantasies such as Tarantino’s Django Unchanged (2012). In Django, the white German
father-figure frees and teaches the former rebellious black slave, Django, to reason,
shoot, kill, and become a bounty hunter, thereby enabling him to purchase, save, and
reunite with his wife, Broomhilda. As with racial neoliberal stories, black emancipation,
revenge (enabled by a paternalistic white father-figure) become individual heroic quests,
disconnected from the hegemonic force of white supremacy, or its legacy, structural
effects, or horrors.
Finally, the black Frankenstein metaphor can enhance scholarly explanations of jour-
nalistic (crime news) media discourse in order to expose and highlight hegemonic
projects and oppressive political economies. For example, Lacy and Haspel (2011) found
that in Hurricane Katrina’s wake, mainstream media reports argued that New Orleans
had been overrun by archetypal black monsters (subhuman, irrational, dangerous crim-
inals, and demonic rapists) in the form of looters, thereby justifying extreme militaristic

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policing measures and policies by the state. Such portrayals were based on erroneous
crime news reports, yet the dystopian images express deep collective cultural fears that
government cannot rescue even its most vulnerable citizens in times of crisis.
If the looters were black monsters, then who were the monster-makers? Did racial
neoliberalism’s commitments to anti-statism, laissez faire economic policies, and
individualism over the last quarter century (most recently rearticulated by the Bush
administration) create the conditions and motives to abandon the 29.7% poor, 67.3%
black, and 11.7% elderly New Orleans residents living in segregated neighborhoods
and parishes? How do we avert such tragedies and deaths in the future? The answers to
such questions for critical scholars who examine dystopian shadows and monstrous
forms lie in the horrors that haunt Americans but which they ignore, deny, or do not
understand. Our challenge is to unearth, highlight, and awaken policymakers, citizens,
and publics to such possibilities, which, without intervention, lead to real tragedy,
outrage, and death.

Notes
1 In her analysis of hybrid Frankenstein genres, Picart (2004) argues that the film Alien Resurrection (1997)
is “raced” in several ways: (1) whiteness is visibly marked, framed, and sexually desired and vulnerable,
while blackness is subordinate, grotesque, and sexually predatory; (2) Ripley’s black African American
defenders are sacrificially killed; (3) the “mixed race” female characters are fetishized, representing
fascination-repulsion desires and the trauma of miscegenation; (4) the colored male character (Ramirez)
is viciously murdered; (5) multiple liminal fantasies are played out upon white female bodies; (5) the
monstrous Alien Queen is black; and (6) whiteness trumps monstrosity.
2 See Gregory’s iconic album cover: Dick Gregory’s Frankenstein, featured in Young’s (2008) book (p. 213)
and book cover.
3 In his 1829 antislavery manifesto, African American David Walker argued that “slaves are like living
corpses made by white oppression” who were brought to life by rebellion. See Young (2008, p. 23).
4 Rushing and Frentz (1995) regard the “bride of Frankenstein” creation and reaction as essential elements
of the story. In Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein promises to create a bride for his threatening monster,
only to realize that he will be proliferating monsters and problems, so he destroys her. The enraged mon-
ster seeks murderous revenge, and Dr. Frankenstein realizes the monster must be permanently controlled
or killed (pp. 74–75).
5 Picart (1998, 2004) argues that classic horror films are moralistic in general, and even exaggerated or
heavy-handed in their moral condemnations.
6 William Hurt has played savior and helper in films such as Smoke (1995) and Children of a Lesser God
(1986). As Doyle’s AA sponsor, Hurt is seen receiving a phone call from Doyle in a television station,
offering an allusion to his elite status as a television anchor and executive in Broadcast News (1987).
7 Young (2008) also highlights James Baldwin’s references to monstrous horrors and black rage in Baldwin’s
essay Stranger in a Village (p. 198).
8 According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2009), 69% of black boys are growing up with nonresident fathers
(compared to 25% for whites); black boys with nonresident fathers have four times higher rates of poverty
(Kreider & Renee, 2011) and higher delinquency and teenage pregnancy rates than boys with resident
fathers (Holtzman, 2010). In many ways, Doyle’s desire to be an involved father reflects educational
psychology professor Rebeckah Coley’s research that a black father’s economic instability or the inability
to fulfill the central paternal role and psychosocial problems (e.g., alcohol abuse) contribute to absentee-
ism and interrupt positive involvement in family life (Coley & Hernandez, 2006; Coley & Medeiros,
2007). Notably, however, Coley and Medeiros (2007) also found that unmarried or nonresidential
African American fathers sustained more regular contact with their children than any other racial or
ethnic group. Absent black fatherhood has also been the subject of candidate and President Barack
Obama’s speeches and 1995 bestselling book Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
9 Pollack plays similar neoliberal elite characters in Civil Action (1998) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
10 Even though Michelle’s desk overflows with legal files, she is introduced to viewers by painting her toe-
nails and later trying on pairs of expensive shoes in her office. Consuming expensive women’s shoes

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signifies elite white female conspicuous consumption in New York City, a recurring metonymy also found
in the popular television series and films, such as Sex and the City (2008).
11 On April 12, 2002, Changing Lanes opened in the U.S. and became the nation’s number one box office
film that weekend, grossing over $17 million. See IMDB (n.d.).
12 Brummett (2004) contends that race is “not the literal presence of color,” but (“blackness”) emerges as
narrative element in the form or pattern of mythic American stories, popular culture texts, and seeming
disparate discourses, conversations, and practices (p. 75). These racial constructions confer systems of
hegemonic empowerment or disempowerment.
13 Brummett (2004) argues that the white Western U.S. myth’s angry and resentful male antagonist applies
to all people of color in the U.S. (e.g., Asian, African, Hispanic, or Latino; p. 77).

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 21
NONVERBAL SIGNALS
AS KEY TO HOWARD
HAWKS’ CINEMA
The Importance of Adaptors
in His Girl Friday
Paula Requeijo Rey

Introduction
This chapter focuses on the use of the nonverbal category of adaptors in one of Howard
Hawks’ films, His Girl Friday (1939). It is part of a doctoral thesis that studies intraper-
sonal, interpersonal and nonverbal communication in the cinema of this American
director through nine of his most emblematic movies: Scarface (1932), Bringing up Baby
(1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), To Have and Have Not
(1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948), Rio Bravo (1959) and Hatari! (1962).
Adaptors form a category within the kinesics field (the study of nonverbal communi-
cations using the body) that authors from different disciplines—such as the psychologists
Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen (1969, pp. 84–92; 2009, pp. 114–115), the ethnologist
Desmond Morris (1980, pp. 47–52, 92–93, 102–105, 110–111, 180–181) or the linguist
Fernando Poyatos (1994, pp. 211–223) have identified. Adaptors (also known as manip-
ulators) can be divided into four types: self-adaptors, object-adaptors, alter-adaptors and
somato-adaptors. This last type, very useful in the study of nonverbal communication,
has only been identified by Fernando Poyatos.
We start with Gerald Mast’s (1982) and Joe McElhaney’s (2006) studies, which point
out the way in which actors in Hawks’ films handle objects, and how those objects reveal
information about the characters’ inner world. We have also taken into account John
Belton’s article, “Hawks and Co.,” in which the author highlights “the consistency” of
the actors’ characterization and their “acting style”. This consistency is based on five
elements which include gestures and costume (Belton, in McBride, 1972, p. 103).
Some of the examples that Mast, McElhaney, and Belton offer are framed inside the
category of adaptors. Our goal is to analyze them in order to demonstrate the way in
which they play an essential role in Hawks’ cinema, particularly as regards the actors’
characterizations. They have precise meanings and are made with clear intentions. The
 NONVERBA L SI G N A LS A S KEY TO H OWA R D H AW K S ’ C I N E MA

use of this category and, in general, the use of nonverbal communication in an integrated
way with the verbal dimension, just like it happens in real life, is one of the elements
that gives Hawks’ films spontaneity and credibility, and enables them to demonstrate a
great knowledge of the human communication process.

Working with Actors to Achieve Naturalness

Through the interviews that Hawks gave and through the statements of some of the
actors that worked with him, we know his films were forged on the set and that he gave
a lot of importance to spontaneity when shooting. He believed one of the main tasks of
a cinema director was to represent scenes and dialogues in a natural way.

They talk about improvisation. That’s the most stupid word ever used in cinema
industry. What the hell they think a director does? How do you think we’re
going to take a story that is written in a room, go to the shooting place and do
everything word by word?
(Hawks, in McBride, 1988, p. 45)

An anecdote from Only Angels Have Wings exemplifies his tendency to change scenes
in the moment of shooting in order to attain naturalness. Rita Hayworth played the role
of Judy in this film. In one of the scenes, she had to pretend she was drunk, but things
were not working. Hawks asked for a pitcher of water with ice and indicated that Cary
Grant should throw it over Hayworth, taking her by surprise (Hawks, in McBride, 1988,
p. 54).
As part of this quest for spontaneity, Hawks also did not appear to mind if actors were
not loyal to the text in the script or that they talked at the same time, taking the risk
that some of their words were not understood. Cary Grant explained that when he first
started working in film, an actor could not interrupt another’s dialogue. However, he
and actress Rosalind Russell, who took the principal roles in Hawks’ film His Girl Friday
(1940), interrupted each other continuously (Grant, in Nelson, 2007, p. 97).
The freedom that Hawks gave to actors was based on his conviction that they could
contribute interesting details to their characters. Lauren Bacall recounts in her autobi-
ography that, while shooting To Have and Have Not (1944), she and Bogart read
through the script a couple of times with Hawks, and Hawks changed not only what he
thought was not adequate but also what Bogart suggested. They then went over the
pertinent scene on set and under the lights, trying to feel comfortable (Bacall, 2005,
pp. 130–131).
With some of the actors he worked with, he had a good rapport, to the point that he
started thinking of complete scenes taking into account the personality of the actor that
embodied the character. Gerald Mast offers an example of one of Hawks favorite actors,
Cary Grant:

What does it mean to “work out a scene for Cary Grant”? Certainly to find
something that Cary Grant can do well, and interestingly, and believably. But
also, certainly, something that Cary Grant can do in the guise of a particular
character, in a particular scene of a particular story that will serve to illuminate
that character and that story.
(Mast, 1982, pp. 52–53)

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The base of this understanding was in the fact that both of them wanted to reach an
interpretation that was as real as possible. Grant reached it, in part, thanks to his mas-
tery of the nonverbal (paralanguage and kinesics), and, specifically, through gestures
that suggested certain aspects of his characters. Different figures from the cinema world
agree in identifying this aspect as one of the keys to his success. The actor Douglas
Fairbanks, Jr., calls him “an authentic master of the technique ( . . . ) meticulous and
conscientious in each of his movements. He could seem impetuous or impulsive, but he
wasn’t; all was carefully planned” (Fairbanks, Jr., in Nelson, 2007, p. 87).
The director and cinema critic Jacques Rivette, one of the first people to reclaim
Hawks’ cinema, through his article “The Genius of Howard Hawks” (1952), uses the
adjective “expressionistic” to refer to “the artfulness with which Cary Grant twists his
gestures into symbols” (Rivette, in McBride, 1972, p. 72).
The director Stanley Donen considers that the basis of Grant’s “art” was in the fact that
he wrote down “the smallest details” of his character in the script (Donen, in Nelson,
2007, pp. 102, 103). He and director and scriptwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz consider that
one of the greatest interpretations ever made by an actor is that of Grant in His Girl Friday.
We will see that adaptors are essential to the building of Grant’s character, Walter
Burns, in His Girl Friday, as well as to Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson and Helen
Mack’s Molly Malloy. While we believe that in Cary Grant’s case, he and Hawks had a
similar way of understanding acting which created a special rapport between them,
Hawks worked with all of the actors to enable them to deliver certain nonverbal signals,
such as the adaptors, that conveyed important information about their characters. Here
we focus on His Girl Friday but, as we demonstrated in our doctoral thesis, this happens
in the most emblematic Hawks films: we refer to this as a “Hawksian trademark”.

The Importance of the Nonverbal and the Adaptors

The nonverbal dimension—corporal movements, facial expressions, postures, the use of
personal space, the tone, the rhythm, or the pauses that accompany our words—is fun-
damental to interpersonal communication and, therefore, to cinema.
As early as 1921, the cinema theorist and director Jean Epstein referred to the cinema
as “a means of mobilizing the spectator’s sensibility through direct contact with the
human organism (hands, faces, feet)” (Epstein, in Stam, 2005, p. 35). In the same
decade, the actor and director Jacques Brunius wrote that “film, like the dream, chooses
some gestures, defers or enlarges them, eliminates others” (Brunius, in Stam, 2005,
p. 57). Nonverbal communication is essential to determining the meaning of a face-to-
face conversation, both in real life and in the cinema. The actor, writer and filmmaker
Vsevolod I. Pudovkin explains it this way:

From the speech, not only the words interest: we know very well how stunning,
by the fullness of the image of the man who acts, gestures and mime are
connected with words ( . . . ) Sometimes, the full meaning of the word or phrase
is revealed in a gesture of the hand; other times, the eyes that close give an
unexpected poignancy to a word or phrase.
(Pudovkin, 1955, p. 25)

Poyatos speaks about a triple discursive structure characterized by the verbal, paralan-
guage and kinesics. We would also add proxemics. The category we’re interested in

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studying in His Girl Friday is, as we indicated in the Introduction, that of the
manipulators/adaptors. They are part of one of the three nonverbal communication
fields, kinesics, and are divided in four types: self-adaptors, object-adaptors, alter-
adaptors and somato-adaptors.
Self-adaptors involve the use of our own body. We talk about gestures such as rubbing the
hands, interlacing them, and touching the hair or lips. Morris calls some of the self-adaptors,
such as passing the tongue around the lips, “relic gestures” because “they take us back to our
childhood” (Morris, 1980, p. 102). We often use them to lighten the tension and anguish
in certain moments: that’s why they increase when the person’s psychological discomfort
grows. However, although it’s usual to utilize them to mitigate tension or anguish, it doesn’t
mean we don’t display them in other circumstances. In the cinema, we can see how actors
convey their mood or emotions to other characters in the story or to the public through the
way in which they use their own body or how they manipulate objects.
After observing and analyzing different political discourses and films, I consider that
in order to determine the sense of these gestures, or what they convey, it is absolutely
necessary, as with other nonverbal categories, to pay attention to the context in which
they are produced. I am not in favor of explaining nonverbal behavior in an isolated way.
If we do so, we would be denying that interpersonal communication is an integrated
whole in which verbal and nonverbal dimension converge.
The second type of adaptors, the object-adaptors, involve the use of an object. Some
examples are to suck a pen or fasten and unfasten one’s jacket. We use different objects
that we have around us. As in the case of self-adaptors, we don’t only use them in situa-
tions of tension or anguish. I use the term “object-adaptors” to refer to those times when
an actor uses an object as a vehicle to convey his or her emotions or inner world. Walter
Benjamin noted the connection between one’s mood and the way in which one may
utilize an object in real life, as well as cinema’s capacity for calling our attention to that.

The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly
know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this
fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its
lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and
accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to
unconscious optics as does the psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
(Benjamin, 1936/1992, p. 677)

The way actors manipulate objects, their facial expression, look, tone, etc. in a certain
context allows them to convey, for example, their mood or mental activity. Words can
support this significance or contradict it.
Objects don’t have to be used strictly as object-adaptors. For example, Poyatos talks
about somato-adaptors to refer to “objects and substances” that are “intimately bound”
to our body. We protect, satisfy, and modify its aspect (1994, pp. 220–221). They can
point to position or status and have associated movements. Costume and accessories
help us characterize, giving identity to characters who “need to be differentiated from
irregular figures” (Miller, 1997, p. 41). These objects end up defining and representing
them, so there are times in which a synecdochic relationship is established.
Professor and researcher James Naremore talks about the “expressive object” in the
same way that we refer to an object-adapter. He takes the expression from Vsévolod I.
Pudovkin, but narrows the range and relates it with the idea of the absence of limits

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between the human and the object sphere proposed by Jiri Veltrusky (Naremore, 1988,
pp. 84–85). However, we use the concept “expressive object” to refer to those objects in
a film that don’t need to be manipulated by the actor (object-adaptor) or characterize
them (somato-adaptor) but which are utilized in a certain context to provide valuable
information in relation to a character or story.
The last type of adapters, alter-adapters, involve touching another person, for exam-
ple, passing one’s arm above someone else’s shoulder or holding one of their hands to
show support.
We believe that Hawks was conscious of the strength and importance of using adap-
tors and objects in order to communicate information about his characters. He admits
that in A Girl in Every Port (1928) a character pulls another’s finger with the objective
of reflecting the friendship that unites them. In Rio Bravo (1959) he shows that the same
relationship exists between Chance and Dude through cigarettes: the first man rolls
them for the second because the latter’s hands tremble due to alcohol withdrawal
(Hawks, in McBride, 1982, p. 49).

Adaptors in His Girl Friday

We would like to start analyzing one of the film characters to whom scholars have paid
less attention, yet who strongly portrays the nonverbal: Molly Malloy. We believe
Molly’s character has a relatively significant impact in the film thanks to the brilliant
way actress Helen Mack embodies Molly and uses adaptors and paralanguage in order to
make the public identify with her character effectively. This identification is something
that, in our opinion, Mae Clarke and Carol Burnett don’t achieve in the other two films
that, as with His Girl Friday are also based on the Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur
play The Front Page (the 1931 version by Lewis Milestone and the 1974 version by Billy
Wilder, respectively).

Figure 21.1 Molly grabs her purse while she explains to the reporters that she doesn’t
have a romantic relationship with Williams

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Figure 21.2 Molly puts her hand on her face

Figure 21.3 Molly puts her hand to her mouth

In one of the movie scenes, the reporters accuse Molly of having a romantic relation-
ship with Earl Williams because he spent the night at her house the day before shooting
a black policeman. She tries to explain to them that she did so because she felt sorry for
him; she found him walking alone under the rain just after he was fired after working
nearly 14 years for the same company. The reporters ignore her and they continue with
their card game. The anguish that this provokes in her is translated by her voice and

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gestures. Her tone is one of despair and there’s a moment in which she sobs. She grabs
her purse by the edges (object-adaptor), grips a telephone (object-adaptor), she puts her
hand on her face (self-adaptor) and on her mouth (self-adaptor) and, finally, she grips
the telephone again (object-adaptor).
One of the reporters demands that she leaves and he even pushes and shakes her.
Hildy intervenes, taking her outside the press room—which remains in silence for
approximately 15 seconds.

Hawks executes an immense tonal shift, revealing that the men are aware of
their callousness, that their callousness (like that of the razzing men in Only
Angels Have Wings) is the camouflage that allows them to do their job . . . Then
Hawks breaks the silence . . . with the ring of the telephone.
(Mast, 1982, pp. 226–227)

This silence, together with the look and the adaptors that the reporters use, reflects the
guilt they feel. They all look down. One turn his cigarette around (object-adaptor),
throws it to the floor and wanders around the room with his hands inside his pockets
(self-adaptor). The one who is in front of the camera puts his cigarette out (object-
adaptor), touches his hat (object-adaptor), and clasps his hands (self-adaptor), holding
them in front of his face (self-adaptor). The third one puts an object that seems to be a
pencil in his mouth (object-adaptor). The one that has pushed her takes something from
the pocket of his shirt and throws it to the floor violently, puts his hands inside his
pockets (self-adaptor), and drags the tip of his foot (self-adaptor).
Shortly after this, Earl Williams escapes just as a psychiatrist, Max Eggelhoffer, is about
to examine him. Hildy and Molly hide him inside the press room bureau. The journalists
arrive there and are surprised that the door is closed and the blinds drawn. They try to
determine where Williams could have run to, and consider that he entered the press
room. In that moment, the camera focuses on Molly and Hildy. Molly looks at her with
an expression of fear and Hildy puts her hand on Molly’s shoulder (alter-adaptor) in order
to calm her. Molly strokes her neck with one of her hands (self-adaptor) and then fiddles
with something that she holds between her hands (object-adaptor).
Bruce’s mother arrives in the press room and explains that her son told her that Hildy
“has hunted down” a murderer. A close-up of Molly shows her fearful and surprised
expression at the same time she strokes the arms of the chair where she sits
(object-adaptor). Disconcerted, she looks at the bureau where Williams is locked. The
journalists harass Hildy and, suddenly, Molly stands up and runs towards another chair.
Holding the chair’s back with both hands (object-adaptor) she shouts: “Enough!” When
the journalists approach her, she takes her hands from the chair, shrugs (self-adaptor),
closes her right fist (self-adaptor) and hits it against her leg. One of the journalists holds
her by an arm and after she releases herself she holds her left hand with the right and
pulls with strength (self-adaptor). She makes a fist with her right hand (self-adaptor)
again and, after announcing what she intends to do, she jumps out of the window.
Molly thus stars in the most tense and dramatic moment in the film. Together with
her facial expression of fear and sadness and her paralanguage, object-adaptors and self-
adaptors are fundamental here for translating to us the deep anguish of her character.
James Walters considers that this derives, in part, from “her failure in the use of words
with conviction in a society where language is, perhaps, the strongest currency . . . Pushed
to the periphery, the jump puts her temporarily in the forefront” (2008, p. 93).

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The lack of empathy and scrupulousness of the reporters—already shown in the previ-
ous scene in which Hildy takes Molly out of the press room—verges on caricature at this
point: not even Molly’s shocking jump out of the window has moved them. They’re only
worried about whether she moves—if she is alive or not—so that they can report it in
their newspapers.
Adaptors displayed by Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson are key to understanding the
inner world and real feelings of her character. Throughout His Girl Friday, Hildy
announces several times that she is going to Chicago and quitting journalism in order
to marry Bruce and make a family with him in Albany. She states her wish to become a
housewife and be exclusively dedicated to the care of her husband and future sons.
However, the way she manipulates certain objects, and the contradiction between the
verbal and nonverbal dimension, communicate to us that is not what she really wants.
In one of the scenes, we see her entering the press room while the reporters are betting
on whether or not she will leave the city. She reproaches them for their attitude, boasts
of her new life (“I am going to live like a human being”), and announces that she is
leaving in that precise moment. Nonverbally she indicates, however, the opposite of her
words: she has just put her hat on, but she doesn’t know where it is. She leaves taking
her coat, but she is not capable of putting it on correctly. She puts her right arm in the
left sleeve and ends up putting only one arm inside a sleeve. The manner of her depar-
ture reveals her anguish instead of joy or excitement. This is not the mood of someone
who says she is pleased with the latest twist of her life.
Hildy’s meeting with Bruce’s mother persists in this vein. The old woman reproaches
her that she is playing cat and mouse with her son. Hildy uses then a pleasant tone and
alternates an alter-adaptor and two self-adaptors. She tries to put her hand on Mrs.
Baldwin’s shoulder (alter-adaptor) on several occasions, but she takes it back quickly for
not achieving a receptive attitude on her part. She interlaces and rubs her hands (self-
adaptors) in order to calm herself down. She will continue using these same gestures

Figure 21.4 Hildy uses an alter-adaptor with Mrs. Baldwin

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Figure 21.5 Hildy interlaces and rubs her hands

while the old woman mentions Earl Williams and her colleagues harass her. Finally, she
leans forward, looking for the mother’s compassion and approval.
Nonverbal communication also discloses that Hildy doesn’t want to marry Bruce,
something that we already suspect at the start of the film when she appeared at Walter’s
office. She knows Walter and wants him to retain her with his ruses. Thus, when she
explains to him that he will never be her “husband or boss” again, she looks down,
touches the brim of his hat (object-adaptor) and puts her cigarette out forcefully (object-
adaptor). This conveys that, contrary to her words, she is not pleased to leave Walter.
On the face of it, she shows Walter her engagement ring to demonstrate she will marry
another man in order to say that they should stop wasting time by arguing. However, her
goal is to see how he reacts to this knowledge. Her way of looking at him is what reveals
her true intentions. She is anxious to discover what her ex-husband feels when hearing
the news.
On the other hand, when she announces that she will marry, her facial expression and
her tone are of sadness. Against her usual fast-paced and energetic tone of voice, she
speaks slowly with a languid intonation. When stating that she has decided to move
away from journalism, she uses the same tone and rhythm, but also looks down and
begins to pinch one of his gloves nervously (object-adaptor). She replaces her purse
under her arm (object-adaptor) and rests her left hand on the back of a swivel chair
(object-adaptor). She moves it slightly, giving it a spin, and supports both hands (object-
adaptor). This set of gestures, which Hildy executes quickly, reveals to the spectator the
dissatisfaction that the engagement produces in her.
Walter is also dissatisfied with the situation. This, as well as his true intentions, is
revealed also through the nonverbal. When he realizes that she is wearing the engage-
ment ring, he stays silent for a few seconds. He looks at her surprised, then he looks at
the ring, then he looks at her again, then he takes her hand and looks at the ring again.
Still holding the finger on which she is wearing the ring, he looks away with an angry

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Figure 21.6 Hildy pinches one of her gloves

expression (his lips are tight). Then, he slightly lowers his gaze and fixes it on a point
while spinning a cigarette. The use of this object-adaptor, along with the nature of his
gaze, shows us that he is up to something.
Finally, Hildy pauses, puts her glove back on, lowers her voice and, with a tone of
sadness, asks what journalism is for. She changes her glove from hand to hand
quickly, grabs her purse, passes it in front of her body, and puts it under his back.
She hesitates and bites her lower lip. She cannot keep talking. She feels hopeless
and disappointed.
Shortly after, she gives more information about the wedding to Walter: it will be held
the next day. Walter’s surprise at the news is reflected through his facial expression and
the abrupt interruption of one self-adaptor to replace it with another that clearly reveals
his anxiety: he was stroking his tie and, suddenly, with his hand still on it, tightens the
fingers of his right hand against the palm, excluding the thumb, which remains stretched.
He takes several steps, rubs his hands, supports the right on the phone, and moves his
fingers quickly. He grabs a carnation, places it on his lapel, rubs it and drums his fingers
on it. Hildy approaches and rubs her hands again. Then, Walter puts his hands on
Hildy’s shoulders.
This quick choreography of self-adaptors and object-adaptors exposes that Walter is
plotting something. However, the alter-adaptor shows his interest in making Hildy
believe his words, because he states: “Look, honey, I just want to wish you everything I
couldn’t give you.” The alter-adaptors are very useful when it comes to deception and
winning “the confidence of others in many situations of daily life” (Poyatos, 1994, p.
216). Walter pretends to accept Hildy’s wedding when he prolongs his surprise and
wishes her the best. However, the nonverbal reveals his concern about the situation.
This is a perfect example of the concept of “ulterior transaction” described by psy-
chiatrist and communication theorist Eric Berne, and to the concepts of “expressions we

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give” and “expressions we give off” distinguished by sociologist Erving Goffman. They
both refer to the context of interpersonal communication. Berne speaks of a manifest or
social dimension, where there is intention and consciousness, and another psychologi-
cal, or hidden, dimension characterized by lack of intention and irrationality. Certain
aspects of the nonverbal may be essential when discovering this psychological dimen-
sion (1983, p. 257; 2002, p. 35; 2007, p. 40; 2010, p. 76). Goffman considers that with
the “expressions given,” the actor, through verbal symbols, knows he is communicating
information that he wishes the others to know. However, the “expressions given off”
reveal something about the actor that his interlocutor considers that he has executed
for different reasons to those intentionally transmitted (2009, p. 16).
We will not dwell on the importance of exchanging cigarettes as a way to express the
affinity or the bond between two characters in Hawks’ films because it’s something that
other authors, such as Mast (1982, p. 50) and McElhaney (2006, pp. 35–42), have
already analyzed. We will only say that in His Girl Friday, as in other Hawks films, the
manipulation of cigarettes is a key element because it shows what lies beyond words. The
affinity between Walter and Hildy is expressed through their exchange.
In addition to exchanging them, there is another aspect related to cigarettes that
reveals important information: the way a character looks, holds, or moves them. A good
example is offered by Walter when Hildy comes in his office at the beginning of the film.
He immediately thinks about how to approach her. This is revealed through the way he
stares at the cigarette he is holding, how he changes it from one hand to another, and
how the left one trembles slightly. Failing to get a receptive attitude from her, he moves
away. He puts his right hand inside his pocket, turns around, moves his cigarette slowly,
and looks at it carefully and with suspicion. Gesture and gaze now suggest to us his feel-
ing of defeat. Walter’s subsequent gestures and glances are designed to represent the
mental effort he is making to try to retain Hildy through several maneuvers. He goes
back and forth and spins a cigarette between his hands at full speed with a look of

Figure 21.7 Walter stares at a cigarette and spins it while he tries to think how to
approach his ex-wife

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Figure 21.8 Walter moves away and puts his right hand on his pocket

Figure 21.9 Walter supports both hands over the telephone

concentration. He takes a drag on his cigarette and the hand that holds it shakes slightly.
He supports the right over the phone while the fingers of the other hand move in a kind
of spasm, nervous and quickly. He puts the cigarette out and puts both hands on the
phone. The fingers of his left one move back quickly.
Other key adaptors in this film, as in other Hawks works, are the somato-adaptors.
They help to define characters by suggesting personality traits as well as the type of
relationship between characters.

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The first example is that of Hildy’s fiancé, Bruce Baldwin, who wears a raincoat
and rubber boots and carries an umbrella. These objects reveal a detail of Bruce’s
personality: he is a cautious man. It dawned cloudy and he decided to dress that way.
Our attention is drawn to these objects when Walter shakes the handle of the
umbrella instead of Bruce’s hand when they meet for the first time. Walter also takes
for granted that he will wear rubber boots, which Bruce confirms by looking at his
foot and lifting it.
Walter makes fun of him (“Good boy. A man ought to be prepared for any emer-
gency”), suggesting that he is an overly cautious person. Before meeting him, when
Hildy says he works as an insurer, Walter says that his is own job as a journalist is “risky
and romantic.” Ultimately, Bruce is portrayed as someone boring, a feature that is clearly
in opposition to the daily exciting adventures that a journalist’s work involves.
There is another character for which an umbrella functions as a somato-adapter to
reveal characterization. We refer to Pettibone, the officer in charge of delivering the
reprieve which the governor signed for Earl Williams. Like Bruce, he is a naive man. He
also has low intelligence, a fact that is suggested by his tone of voice (too high-pitched
and with highs and lows interspersed), the look on his face (he permanently has a goofy
smile) and the envelope he holds (the sheriff has already removed the envelope but he
continues to look into the pockets of his jacket). When entering the press room, he is
carrying an open umbrella and walks into the door frame. This movement, associated to
the somato-adapter, aims to reveal his clumsiness.
Another good example is that of the costumes worn by Walter and Louie. The former
wears a light suit and a dark carnation in the buttonhole of his jacket. His hat is also
dark. His appearance contrasts with that of Louie Peluso, the petty criminal used by
Walter to undertake various jobs. Louie wears a dark suit with a white carnation. We
can notice this contrast within the first minutes of the film, when we see Louie shaving
Walter. Several scenes reinforce it, such as the one in which both enter, one after

Figure 21.10 Walter’s and Louie’s clothing references their relationship

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another, the press room of the Court just at the moment Molly throws herself out of the
window. Their clothing suggests they are similar. Indeed, they represent two parts of the
same gear: Walter devises the ruses and Louie carries them out.

Conclusions
The characters reveal their inner worlds and personalities through, among other non-
verbal categories, the adaptors. There are some that are repeated and become familiar.
Walter, for example, employs alter-adaptors to approach someone and deceive. He, as
well as Hildy, holds, moves, strokes, puts out, or stares at a cigarette, which can have
different meanings: plotting something (in the case of Walter), calming their nerves,
reproducing their thought processes, etc., depending on the context.
In the case of Molly Malloy, object-adaptors and self-adaptors translate her distress
and nervousness. For Walter and Hildy, there are also times when these adaptors express
this, but, above all, they show us their true intentions and feelings. The contradiction
between these adaptors and other elements of nonverbal communication, and the verbal
communication shows that there are two dimensions: the social, where they try to pre-
tend one thing, and the psychological, which comprises their true intentions and
emotions. Walter says he wishes Hildy the best in her marriage but adaptors show his
nervousness and that he is up to something in order to prevent the marriage. Hildy says
she is delighted with her new life away from Walter and journalism, but adaptors trans-
late her concerns and discontent.
The statements in this chapter, besides reflecting the importance of the nonverbal
dimension in Hawks’ films and, in particular, the use of adaptors, also show the need to,
and interest in studying nonverbal communication in cinema in general. The fact that
Lacanian psychoanalysis and structuralism have dominated film theory has resulted in
a move away from interest in the nonverbal dimension and its interpretation. We do not
deny the usefulness of both approaches, which have provided interesting and valuable
studies, but we do believe that cinema has to be analyzed from all possible angles. Our
most immediate goal is to continue to determine the function of the different types of
adaptors as well as expressive objects in the work of other filmmakers.

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Naremore, J. (1988) Acting in the Cinema, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nelson, N. (2007). Conversaciones con Cary Grant a través de sus propias palabras y de quienes mejor lo
conocieron, Madrid: Notorius.
Poyatos, F. (1994) La comunicación no verbal: cultura, lenguaje y conversación, volumen 1, Madrid: Istmo.
Pudovkin, V.I. (1955) El actor en el film. Buenos Aires: Losange.
Rivette, J. (1953) “The Genius of Howard Hawks,” in McBride, J. (Ed.) (1972) Focus on Howard
Hawks, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, pp. 70–77.
Stam, R. (2005) Film Theory: An Introduction, India: Blackwell Publishing.
Walters, J. (2008) “Making Light of the Dark: Understanding the World of His Girl Friday,” Journal of
Film and Video, 60(Fall/Winter) 3–4, University of Illinois.

Further Reading
Bogdanovich, P. (1962) The Cinema of Howard Hawks. Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art. (A
short introduction—38 pages—to the figure of Hawks.)
Harrigan, J., Rosenthal, R., and Scherer, K. (2005) New Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behavior
Research, New York: Oxford University Press. (Coding and methodological issues for kinesics and
paralanguage.)
Knapp, M. L. (1972) Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction, New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston. (An introduction to nonverbal fields and categories.)
Poyatos, F. (2002) Nonverbal Communication across Disciplines. Volume 3: Narrative Literature, Theater,
Cinema, Translation, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. (For understanding the
importance of nonverbal communication in cinema and other disciplines.)
Wood, R. (2006) Howard Hawks, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. (A quick and entertaining
review of Hawks’ main films.)

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 22
THE LABOR OF
CLASSICAL MATERNAL
MELODRAMAS
Kathleen A. McHugh

This essay rereads a canonical generic cluster of classical Hollywood maternal

melodramas, augmenting critical approaches based on gender and genre to attend to
these films’ pronounced attention to domestic labor. Employing textual analysis and
social history, I examine the cultural work accomplished by three specific films and argue
that they address interrelated problems concerning domestic femininity, labor, and
social difference in the 1930s and 40s. Class emerges as a signal difference with which
these films grapple. Following from Thorstein Veblen’s adage that “obviously productive
labour is in a peculiar degree derogatory to respectable women,” these films visually
contend with this derogation and its implications (96).
Feminist scholars have explored the maternal melodrama and the signal identity at
its core from historical, psychoanalytic, mythological, ideological, intersectional, and
generic perspectives (Heung 1987, Kaplan 1990, Nelson 1977, Smith 1994, Williams
1988, 1990). This essay addresses a potent generic cluster—1930s and 40s melodramas
that feature mothers and daughters—rendered canonical through such extensive femi-
nist scholarship and critique: John Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1934), King Vidor’s Stella
Dallas (1937), and Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945). It explores the social and
cultural work these films accomplish, not through their representations of maternity as
identity or institution, but through the historical changes and moral structures they
articulate regarding the mother as laborer.
Maternal melodramas, especially those featuring mothers and daughters, frequently
confound what film scholars have identified as classical Hollywood’s predominant focus
on romance (Bordwell et al. 1985, quoted in Wexman 1993, p. 3) and the creation of
the heterosexual couple (Bellour 1988, p. 88, quoted in Wexman, p. 4). Maternal melo-
dramas frequently articulate the romance plot as secondary to or thwarted by the
maternal couple. That couple, linked and differentiated by genetics and generation,
renders femininity temporal and dynamic. Pathos inheres around the mother as past and
naturalizes the daughter as (speculative) future in relation to the films’ engagement with
housework and paid labor. The films thereby tacitly historicize cultural discourses con-
cerning female gender roles and labor, narrating them as conflicted generational
distinctions within the mother/daughter couple.
 M CH U G H

Classical Hollywood maternal melodrama flourished in a period of sustained

economic crisis that began with the Depression and persisted through the national
deprivation for the war effort. At the outset of this period, the genre acquires a spe-
cifically American character, eliminating the European influence that had dominated
it in the twenties (Vivani 1991, pp. 170–71). All three titles I will discuss derived from
American popular novels—Stella Dallas (1923) by Olive Higgins Prouty, Imitation of
Life (1933) by Fanny Hurst, and Mildred Pierce (1941) by James M. Cain. Each featured
a story of female class rise generated in whole or in part by their protagonists’ domestic
housekeeping skills—cooking and sewing—turned to either business enterprise
(Imitation of Life and Mildred Pierce) or to appearances of affluence (Stella Dallas). In
each instance, synchronic class and/or racial differences register in and through the
maternal couple and the mother’s and daughter’s distinct relationships to household
labor. Temporalized across these generational distinctions, the films consider changes
to domestic femininity aligned with and implicated in the contemporaneous connec-
tions developing among the cosmetics, clothing, and housewares industries and the
movies (Eckert 1978). The films depict, through distinctions between the housewife/
mother and her consumer/daughter, a primarily visual reorientation of public and pri-
vate amenable to the needs and social organization of late capitalism. As Glenna
Matthews observes, “Industrial capitalism requires a high level of consumer spending—
optimally of a rather indiscriminate nature—and this task has been ascribed to women”
(187). Implicitly intersectional, these films also pointedly consider how class and/or
race affect the changes to domestic femininity necessary to effectively link mass enter-
tainment and commodity culture (Berlant 1991).

Stella Dallas: Sewing versus Style

King Vidor’s 1937 Stella Dallas aligns three stories of class rise and fall: Stella Dallas, neé
Martin; her husband, Steven Dallas; and their daughter Laurel. As Linda Williams
argues, Stella Dallas appears to be a film about maternity, idealization, and loss (1990).
Yet the film also uses mother and daughter to represent and implicitly moralize different
class positions, values, and skills through a particularly appropriate figure for the inter-
section of labor, gender, and appearance: clothes. Clothes and style enable women,
much more so than men, to pass class-wise. Carolyn Steedman notes: “[T]he goods of
that world of privilege might be appropriated with the cut and fall of a skirt, with clothes,
the best boundary between you and a cold world” (1987, p. 38). Clothes and style liter-
ally and figuratively articulate women’s liminal and increasingly visual role in both
embodying and eluding the constraints of class difference. Stella Dallas locates this prob-
lem within a particular historical moment by finally representing the tragic difference,
the split between mother Stella and daughter Laurel, as that between low and high
fashion.
To make a better life for herself, Stella sews herself fine clothes and puts on an act for
the fastidious Stephen Dallas. Their daughter, Laurel, though separated from her father
and raised by her mother, nevertheless takes after him. The film compares mother and
daughter in very class-coded terms that subtly align cultural refinement with leisure and
passivity. Laurel is a good student; she likes books. She is charming and personable, but
she does nothing except to possess very good leisure skills—ping-pong, biking, tennis,
taking in museums, reading literature, and dancing. Stella’s desires and talents are much
more focused, pragmatic, and goal-oriented. Her early ambitions for cultured society

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fade after her husband leaves her and she focuses them on her daughter instead. She
studies the clothing in shop windows and sews excellent copies of them for her daughter,
who thereby passes as middle or upper class. Stella’s aspiration to the middle class
through her marriage fails. Her daughter does not have ambitions for class rise and
therefore succeeds.
The film visualizes Stella and Laurel’s different class rise narratives through their very
different taste in clothes. While Laurel always dresses very tastefully in tailored suits or
gowns with simple and elegant lines, Stella’s creations for herself are baroque sensations
of fur, loud pattern, and frill. Stella monstrously overdoes femininity’s ornamental
function (Williams 1990, p. 149) because she misunderstands class, thinking that it is
something one puts on, the more the better. With her clothes, her feigned performances
(her interest in love poetry and very clean glasses) and her exaggerated, affected ges-
tures, Stella produces feminine spectacle as failed class performance. The film’s very
pointed and duplicitous visual conceit is that it represents the distinction that Stella so
desperately seeks to put on as precisely invisible.
Considered according to their relation to labor—what they do, rather than who they
are—the film renders Stella’s active labor, production, and agency as bad taste in con-
trast to Laurel’s good taste: Laurel recognizes style even if she cannot buy it. Stella’s
clothing, her appearance, her ambition, her love of clubs and fun, and, much more
importantly, her skill with a needle, destine her for failure, not, ultimately, as a social
climber, but as a woman. She is not a woman, the film asserts, thus transforming ques-
tions that really concern class into issues of successful and failed domestic femininity.
Stella Dallas makes specific statements about women sewing their way into the middle
class in the waning years of the Depression. Though successful housewifery might sug-
gest that in times of economic duress, housewives sew and make do for themselves,
resisting the market, Stella Dallas emphatically weighs in against that option. In the
period between the two wars, the U.S. surged “well ahead of Britain and the rest of the
world” in the development of factory-produced, ready-to-wear fashion. Mass media
influenced the concept and implementation of ready-to-wear because it brought “uni-
formity of standards of taste among the populace.” Significantly, what had inhibited
technical developments in the U.S. fashion industry immediately after WWI had been
mercurial changes in fashion and women’s “desire for individuality” (Ewing 1974, pp.
119–38).
The film’s message—that even if Stella’s hideous taste bars her entrance to any refined
home, she is still a very good mother—veils another, more historically apt truism: that
Stella’s ability to sew the appropriate clothing for the class to which her daughter is
destined simultaneously identifies her as someone who could never be assimilated to
that class. Women of that class do not sew; they buy. Film critics noted the narrative’s
basic incongruity—Stella can make beautiful clothes for her daughter, but she cannot,
as Time’s critic quipped, “[just] wear quieter costumes” instead of “sending her daughter
to live with her father and his new well-bred wife” (Time 1937, p. 36). Yet, considered
from the standpoint of production and consumption, this incongruity makes commer-
cial, if not narrative, sense. Stella can sew, can make clothes, can produce: she just
cannot successfully consume. In the split the film describes between Stella and Laurel,
middle and working class become distinctions in high and low fashion, between follow-
ing the crowd, fitting in, or making it on your own. Stella’s individualist spirit—she can
pull herself up by her own sewing needle, she does not have to buy, she can produce her
own image—is condemned by the film not as immoral, but as pathetic.

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Stella Dallas narrates the convergence of film, fashion, and cosmetics industries in this
period as a meditation on clothing and household labor that ultimately construes class
(in the sense of refinement) as a passive, consumerist relationship to images. The film
culminates with Stella looking up at her daughter-become-image, not only as in cinema
(Brewster quoted in Williams 1990, p. 155) but also as in a shop window. In the tempo-
ralized class struggle cum maternal melodrama articulated between actively sewing or
passively recognizing style, the text resolves its conflict by presenting Laurel, launched
in marriage and affluence, wearing a wedding gown that her mother did not make. Even
if working class Stella, whose own clothing is now plain and subdued, cannot finally
inhabit upper class Laurel’s world, she can share the recognition of its taste and refine-
ment in an image.

Imitation of Life: Labor Segregation and

Commodity Integration
John Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1934) approaches women’s domestic and paid labor
through two mothers and their daughters, one maternal couple white—Bea Pullman
(Claudette Colbert) and her daughter, Jessie Pullman (Rochelle Hudson)—the other
black—Delilah (Louise Beavers) and her daughter Peola (Fredi Washington). In this
film, a comparative racial framework complicates the implicit temporality of the mater-
nal plot. Its subject matter compels the film to challenge Stella Dallas’s pat resolution:
feminine gender homogeneity fantasied and achieved through the commodity image.
Engaging a similar plot—female class rise through domestic labor—the film differenti-
ates its characters through their distinct relationships to labor, leisure, sexuality,
maternity, and the image.
Bea Pullman and Delilah meet and partner as two single mothers struggling to get by.
Delilah, who wants a position as a domestic in exchange for a home for her and Peola,
cooks Bea pancakes from a secret recipe. She solely aspires to domestic labor, “eager to
assume the position of an unpaid laborer”—to cook for and look after Bea and Jessie and
thereby care for Peola (Smith 1994, p. 47). Bea shares Delilah’s maternal aspirations, but
realizes them by monetizing Delilah’s pancake recipe, initially selling pancakes and then
boxing and selling the product as “Aunt Delilah flour.” Her labor is entrepreneurial.
Though the film narrates Bea’s career as a successful businesswomen, the image consist-
ently emphasizes her sexual allure over her business acumen, showing the businessmen
who pursue her and with whom she flirts in order to obtain equipment and loans to start
her business. The only two pancake house scenes in which she actually works depict pas-
sersby on the boardwalk captivated by her looks as she makes pancakes. When, finally
successful and established, she falls in love with Stephen Archer, their romantic coupling
is thwarted when Bea comes to understand that her daughter is also in love with him.
The resolutely personal and highly sexualized image standard that exists for Bea
extends to Jessie as well. Like Laurel Dallas, she has no narrative function other than to
shop, go out at night, take her boarding school classes very lightly, and fall in love with
the wrong man. Her entire characterization confines her strictly to leisure pursuits,
courtship, and heartbreak. Her image is utterly sentimentalized: a childhood photograph
of her indicates how grown up she is; in other words, sexually mature and ready for the
only future that awaits her—romance, marriage, and consumerist domesticity.
Delilah’s role as an unpaid domestic laborer extends her maternity to Bea and Jessie.
No sexuality is allowed her. Yet she has a public, iconic existence as a commodity icon

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and as a philanthropist (Berlant 1991, pp. 119–122). A neon Aunt Delilah sign graces
the New York skyline and a montage sequence depicts her face on hundreds of pancake
boxes. From Delilah’s first appearance, the narrative imagines racial relations as blacks
looking into, getting into, white homes—as servants and domestics. Aunt Delilah’s
pancake flour abstracts that imagining. Her role—as character, image, and product—is
to be consumed rather than consume. She signifies not sexuality, but service. As a serv-
ant in a box—Aunt Delilah makes it, the white housewife serves it—she “produces”
better food with less toil in economically strapped times. If people cannot afford the
cook herself, they can purchase her facsimile. The commodity fantasy of Aunt Delilah,
an absent presence based on labor rather than sexuality, signals in some sense the break-
down of the nineteenth century abolitionist fantasy of a familial, domestic assimilation
of the races under the aegis of enlightened white womanhood. Imitation of Life under-
scores the passing away of this fantasy and its replacement through the commodity form.
But the crux of the film lies elsewhere.
The masses of people that attend and participate in Delilah’s funeral are predomi-
nantly African American, indicating Delilah’s considerable presence in a civic,
community, and church life that greatly exceeds the white domestic life at Miss Bea’s.
The funeral scene registers a public African American context for Imitation of Life that
throws into striking relief the limitations of its heretofore wholly privatized, claustro-
phobic, and racially retrograde vision. Posthumously, her community emerges as a world
separate from and not contained by the white household whose location has controlled
the narrative.
The white household also cannot contain Peola. The film frames the question of
Peola’s appearance and identity both publicly and privately—in classroom and work-
place, and in front of the living room mirror. There she seeks an answer not to the ques-
tion of her beauty, but to the dilemma of looking white and being black—“Why can’t I
be white?” Peola is caught ‘passing’ by her mother at school and later at the restaurant
where she works. The film thereby locates the truth of racial identity in Delilah’s rather
than Peola’s face and body, thus framing the daughter’s difference from her mother, her
very appearance, as false (Berlant 1991, pp. 119–20). Peola cannot be assimilated into
the appearance standard, the image repertoire of white domestic femininity, because she
is not different enough within that repertoire. Mirrors and images ‘lie’ in Peola’s case, but
her photograph suggests another narrative, tellingly kept off-screen.
As Delilah is dying, she asks for Peola’s picture, which we never see. Looking at it, she
says, “It never did her justice.” While Jessie’s photograph signifies her sexual maturation,
Peola’s raises the question of justice. The photograph cannot apprehend Peola’s beauty
because the racial inscrutability of her appearance completely invalidates her femininity.
The metaphor of ‘justice’ gestures towards the impossible conjuncture/conjecture that
haunts and ruptures this film: that of an image of femininity that all women can inhabit,
which does all women justice.
Delilah dies; her funeral bringing together a community whose presence overwhelms
the domestic scope of the film up to that point. Yet her identity as a laborer and com-
modity icon recuperates her image and her community to that domesticity: Aunt
Delilah lives on, without a patronym, but with a familial role, as a domestic who ani-
mates both urban skylines and white kitchens as a reassuring domestic icon. Her daugh-
ter Peola, whom no image or reflection can adequately apprehend, and who will never
be a domestic servant, literally disappears from the visual register of the film after her
mother’s funeral.

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The funeral scene transitions to the final scene by way of Aunt Delilah’s neon sign—
repetitively flipping pancakes. This sign relocates ‘democratic’ representation from
benevolent white domesticity to the commodity scene. In its shadow, Bea and Jessie
linger in a garden, dressed in elegant gowns. Isolated from the public sphere and eco-
nomic industry (Bea has quit her job), they make an ornamental end to this narrative.
Bereft of domestic duties, marriage prospects and gainful employment, Bea retains her
maternal function, giving up her suitor for her daughter. Having no relation to utility,
drive, or desire, a mother and not a wife, she nevertheless looks very comely with her
daughter in their garden tableau. Jessie and Bea sit pretty in the shadow of a particularly
compelling, if (because) class-based and racialized consumer fantasy—that housework
will always be someone else’s labor, even if that laborer can only be acquired as an image
stamped on an inert commodity.

Mildred Pierce: Cooking and Consumption

Unlike Peola and Delilah, whose differences in appearance underwrite one of the
maternal tragedies in Imitation of Life, in Mildred Pierce mother Mildred (Joan Crawford)
and daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) appear to be mirror images of each other. From the
narrative moment when Veda becomes a woman, the film dresses and coifs the two
actresses very similarly, doubling their image to split their function: Mildred, an exces-
sively maternal and successful producer and Veda an excessively greedy and cold-hearted
consumer. In correlating mother and daughter in these terms, the film measures Mildred’s
extraordinary business sense (she tells the detective “everything I touched turned to
money”) by its maternal motivation and its deleterious consequences for the men in her
life—her intense devotion to her viperous daughter Veda gets one husband killed and
another unjustly framed for murder.
In some respects, Mildred Pierce retells the story of Stella Dallas, in that Mildred’s cook-
ing skills and consequent class rise assure her daughter’s superior social position. Yet
Laurel and Stella are distinguished by character and taste, while Mildred and Veda
assume opposite but complementary economic roles. In the doubling and splitting that
animate the drama of this maternal couple, anxieties about women’s roles as producers
and consumers are duplicitously interrelated—that is, the perfect and closed economic
unit constituted by Mildred’s production and Veda’s consumption, by Mildred’s mater-
nity and Veda’s greed, results in incest and murder. In the end, which is also the film’s
beginning, both the law and Mildred’s first husband must intervene to restore order.
Critical readings of Mildred Pierce relate its narrative and thematic contradictions to
its formal generic blend and contrast of the maternal melodrama and film noir (Williams
1988). However, the film’s locations indicate that even within the “evenly lit” melodra-
matic scenes, Mildred Pierce differs significantly from its thirties counterparts. While
Stella Dallas and Imitation of Life restrict their mise-en-scène primarily to domestic loca-
tions, Mildred Pierce emphasizes workplaces, which include Wally’s real estate office, a
lawyer’s office, the first restaurant where Mildred works, the waitresses’ dressing room,
and Mildred’s restaurants and offices. Even her opening voiceover emphasizes the home
as workplace: “I feel as if I had been born in the kitchen and worked there all my life. I
married Bert when I was seventeen. I never knew any other kind of life, just cooking,
washing and having children.”
Mildred’s words equate maternity with housework, the home with the workplace; the
Pierce family’s maternal and sexual interactions take place within a predominantly

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commercial sphere (from restaurants to racetracks) radically bifurcated by work

(production) and leisure (consumption). All of the ‘personal’ relationships in the film,
whether successful (Ida and Mildred, Mildred and Lotty) or troubled (all the other rela-
tionships), arise in the workplace, are based in shared labor, or are resolutely economic.
Though for very different reasons, both Mildred and Veda confuse money and love, even
as the narrative itself insistently fuses home and workplace. In its critique of Veda’s con-
sumption, Mildred Pierce signals an endpoint to the maternal melodramas’ meditations on
domestic femininity, labor, and consumption during the period from 1930 to 1945. While
Stella Dallas clearly wants to encourage women to be consumers in lieu of an individualist
impulse to make their own style and clothes, Mildred Pierce inveighs against the specter
posed by Veda: women’s consumer desire disarticulated from any interest in marriage,
maternity, or men, other than that motivated by economic gain for immediate consumption
(Matthews 1987, pp. 187–202). The film articulates this concern within a mise-en-scène
notable for its diversity.
Mildred Pierce has a very ‘democratic’ cast: Lotty, the African American maid, Ida, the
unmarried (lesbian) career woman, the working class waitresses, Monte’s Asian
American valet, white men differentiated by class (aristocratic Monte, entrepreneur
Wally, wage-slave Bert) and white women by function and morality (hardworking pro-
ducer/mother Mildred, psychopathic consumer/daughter Veda). Altogether they
allegorize a social order characterized by ethnic/racial, sexual, and economic diversity
and threatened by the white housewife out of place. After waitressing for six weeks,
Mildred “felt like she had worked in a restaurant all her life,” her words echoing her
earlier description of cooking in her own kitchen. The film pointedly racializes this col-
lapse of distinctions between public and private labor and roles (mother/waitress) when
Veda insists that Lotty, the maid, wear her mother’s waitress uniform. The uniform
indicates the class and race markers that clothes convey, here specifically in relation to
service labor. The opposite of Imitation of Life, where Peola’s clothing cannot cover
blackness that looks like whiteness, here Mildred, though white, can be dressed into
blackness. Both films attempt and fail to visualize and thereby secure distinct race and
class identities through their representations of leisure, labor, and consumption.
Unlike its predecessors, Mildred Pierce works hard to get its protagonist back with her
husband. Unlike Laurel Dallas and Jessie Pullman, whose lack of a father merely results
in an insipid and banal sweetness, Veda’s lack of father and excess of mother makes her
a homicidal consumer. The culture was rife with concerns about excessive mothering,
as evidenced by Philip Wylie’s vitriolic A Generation of Vipers, published in 1942. But
the larger point concerns the economic mystifications accomplished through references
to domesticity, labor, and the mother/daughter dyad. In the films before Mildred Pierce,
preservation of the daughters served as narrative motivation; in Mildred Pierce, both
daughters are sacrificed in favor of the husband’s reinstatement. Unlike maternal melo-
dramas, where moral parameters have emotional consequences, in film noir, moral
parameters have legal consequences. Thus, Mildred Pierce locates a splitting of genres in
its mother/daughter coupling, mother meeting murderer over the body of her dead sec-
ond husband. The war is nearly over; Mildred must give up her daughter and go home
with her first husband.
At film’s end, Mildred and Bert stand emblazoned in morning light, while in the
shadows, two working class women scrub the floors on their hands and knees, their faces
and identities obscured. Feminist critics have alternately read this scene as a metaphor
of Mildred and women in general being put back “in their place,” or, more literally, as

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depicting specifically working class women “in their place” (Nelson 1977, Williams
1988). As I read it, the film and the image assert quite directly that the two cannot be
separated. That is, the image positions a now correctly normative domestic femininity
(represented by Mildred) against intra-gender difference (working class women), the
former romantically lit and narratively foregrounded and the latter in the shadows,
keeping the margins clean. The “new dawn” for Mildred is literally just the end of the
workday for the cleaning women. The narrative registers that other women do work,
must work, have always worked in public. As with Peola, this maternal melo/noir del-
egates “other” women to the public obscurity of service jobs or labor, while white women
provide the face of appropriate domestic femininity.

Conclusion: The Iconic Labor of White Femininity

Douglas Sirk’s acclaimed 1959 remake of Imitation of Life replaces domestic with iconic
labor by changing Bea Pullman to Lora Meredith, a struggling actress who becomes a
star. Femininity itself becomes labor, and that labor is very, very white. Lana Turner plays
Lora, setting a seal on a decade where impossibly blond blonds dominated the movies
and the definition of stardom—‘sex bombs’ Turner, Monroe, Mansfield, and Malone,
and domestic icons Reed and Day. Imitation of Life narrates a star being a star, her mater-
nity utterly eclipsed by her iconic function; in a climactic confrontation scene between
Lora and her daughter Susie (manic blonde Sandra Dee), Susie says “Oh mother, stop
acting!” Sirk’s Imitation of Life sets the symbolic bankruptcy of white femininity and its
affect-laden appearance standard against the quiet altruism and dignity of Annie
Johnson (Juanita Moore). In Annie’s funeral scene, Sirk underscores her public and
private good works, and, in the character of Mahalia Jackson, introduces the only real
person in the very false world of Imitation of Life (Dyer 1991; Heung 1987). His film
signals the end of the maternal melodrama’s labor; the end of a fantasy of leisured white
beauty and white morality blended in the same iconic maternal entity. Presaged in
Stahl, Sirk’s staging of the funeral scene implies that the woman off-screen, the black
woman who has died, is much more important than the blond woman, her employer,
who weeps for her, and who might only be acting as she does.
As the films I have discussed demonstrate, the kindred mystifications of domestic
labor and social difference secured by white domestic femininity break down, fragment-
ing that womanhood and using generational difference to naturalize and manage
differences in race and class. Significantly, these differences, articulated as they are
across the mother/daughter coupling, are a cause for pathos and not political engage-
ment. In choosing to deal with mothers and wives, and simply using daughters as the
motivation for their mothers’ ambition, the films select roles about which women have
considerable and increasingly more choice (whether to become wives or mothers) and
make these roles seem inevitable. This inevitability then haunts the social distinctions
treated by the films through its mothers and daughters.
The use of textual analysis and social history reveals the ways that these films map
challenges within the contemporaneous social structure, resolving their impact through
an affect-driven morality focused on the maternal couple. Certainly, these films encour-
age complex forms of identification: pathos for the vibrant yet ultimately failed or
un-representable characters marked by class and racial difference, Stella and Peola; ulti-
mately ornamental and banal roles for the mothers who cannot have it all, Bea Pullman
and Mildred Pierce. Tellingly, the most insipid roles are saved for the white daughters,

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Laurel Dallas and Jessie Pullman, whose future, these films project, will consist of them
becoming happy and pretty wives and mothers who consume rather than produce. Veda
Pierce foretells what will become of this fantasy.
Imitation of Life, Stella Dallas, and Mildred Pierce resolve historically specific cultural,
social, and economic ambivalence about women’s productive labor by emphasizing their
female protagonists’ function as images or icons—for one another, for male admirers, for
the film audience, all rendered in relation to the commodity scene. These films attempt
to resolve the paradox of women’s economic agency, at the same time grappling with class
and racial differences among women, by evaluating women’s production and consump-
tion within an overarching ethics of the visual. Maternal melodramas express and con-
tain this duress in the pathos of mothers and daughters torn apart by conflicts between
love and money. In a vale of tears, these conflicts were resolved in a very self-reflexive
direction: for some women, success lay in affect, consumption, and a thrall to images.

References
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 23
AGITPROP RAP?
“Ill Manors” and the Impotent
Indifference of Social Protest
Miguel Mera

Introduction
In Music and Politics (2012) John Street argued that the protest song is both a form of
political communication and a mode of political representation, and he suggested that
the former is only possible because of the latter: “It is not enough to be able to speak up;
you must also be able to speak for a people or a cause” (2012: 42). This theorization
nuances R. Serge Denisoff’s classic but problematic text, Sing a Song of Social Significance
(1983), where protest songs were defined as either “Magnetic” or “Rhetorical”.
“Magnetic” songs, according to Denisoff, attract people to movements and promote
group solidarity, and “Rhetorical” songs are intended to change public opinion.
In this chapter, I will examine Plan B’s protest song “Ill Manors” (2012) which was
composed in response to the riots that took place in England in August 2011. The track
explores both the causes and the consequences of the riots, focusing on societal attitudes
towards an underprivileged youth population. Guardian columnist Dorian Lynskey
described it as “the first great mainstream protest song in years” (2012). The song,
together with an album and feature film of the same name, were part of a project initi-
ated by Plan B that aimed to address what he perceived as an increasingly alienating
class divide. I will focus here only on the song and its accompanying music video (which
incorporated actual footage from the riots), although much could be said about the
integration of music, narrative, and the rhetoric of protest over the entire “Ill Manors”
project.
The central claim I hope to advance is that, despite its musical and lyrical brilliance,
the song was neither effective magnetically or rhetorically, or, using Street’s formulation,
that “Ill Manors” was a masterpiece of political communication that could never succeed
in encouraging change because it did not sufficiently realize its potential as a mode of
political representation. The reasons for this are complicated but relate to the incoher-
ence surrounding the riots themselves, which Winlow and Hall have defined as “both
political and apolitical; destructive, but also strangely conformist” (2012: 149). Those
who rioted were not driven by an ideological vision or progressive political agenda.
There appeared to be no conscious desire to bring about social change or a more equi-
table world (Carter 2011; Prasad 2011a, 2011b). The riots were ultimately characterized
 “ I LL M A N O RS” A N D S O C I A L P R O T E S T

by opportunistic looting with fifty percent of the recorded offences acquisitive in nature
(Singh 2012).
In fact, the riots seemed to encapsulate Slavoj Žižek’s notion of post-politics, where
the political is not repressed but foreclosed. Žižek argued that in a post-political age we
increasingly see irrational and excessive violence “grounded in no utilitarian or ideo-
logical reason” (Žižek 1999: 201; see also Žižek 2008). The anti-capitalist elaboration of
this concept by Zygmunt Bauman (2007) and an amplification by Winlow and Hall
(2012) provide useful scaffolding to investigate how the vestiges of political protest
could be seen to be assimilated by nihilistic consumerism. The incomprehension in the
debate surrounding the causes of the riots also muddied the waters. Mainstream politi-
cians predictably denounced the anti-social criminality as entirely savage and indicative
of a society in the throes of moral decay. Prime Minister David Cameron’s one-
dimensional analysis of the riots was that that they demonstrated “criminality, pure and
simple” (2011a) and provided evidence of a threatening and amoral underclass.
Subsequent analyses revealed a much more complex picture of the motivations, class,
age, race, and social make-up of the rioters which was far from uniform or coherent
(Rusbridger & Rees 2011).
Emerging from this sometimes contradictory and convoluted discussion, “Ill Manors”
skillfully expressed a subconscious desire for change, but it could not promote group
solidarity because there was no group to speak for. The crowd had dispersed and only
confused individuals remained who did not understand what, if anything, had unified
them in the first place. In short, this was the right song in the wrong place at the wrong
time. Plan B’s articulate rage followed a series of inarticulate violent acts formed in an
age of political indifference. This raises important questions about the impact of the
social protest song in a contemporary society where violence carries an implicit admis-
sion of impotence. We will consider the mixture of impotence and indifference, and
how this framed the riots and, consequently, limited the capacity of the song to speak
for its cause.
The term ‘agitprop rap’ is, of course, loaded. I use it in its very broadest sense, refer-
ring to political agitation and propaganda through artistic means. It is a form of
communication that aims to influence the attitude of the community by focusing on a
particular (one-sided) aspect of an argument. Agitprop is a portmanteau of the
Agitation and Propaganda Section of the Central Committee Secretariat of the
Communist Party in the former Soviet Union in the years after the 1917 revolution. It
has typically conjured negative connotations. I encourage a broader, perhaps somewhat
indulgent, reading here that emphasizes political activism in an era where there is
constant evidence of eroding public confidence in the institutions of representative
democracy, as well as other signs of public cynicism and lack of trust in politicians.
Furthermore, “Ill Manors” makes extensive and dazzling use of samples derived from
Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, popularly known as the Leningrad Symphony
(1942). Along with many other artists at the time, Shostakovich faced constant
censorship and scrutiny. His music was even denounced as ‘formalist’ by the Soviet
authorities and was banned on several occasions (Fay 2000, 2004). Yet the Seventh
Symphony, with its narrative about the defense of Leningrad from the Nazis during
WWII, enhanced his reputation as a Soviet patriot, at least temporarily. The connec-
tions between the sampled material and its adapted cultural context provide some
insights into the strategies of rhythmic and textural ‘agitation’ and techniques of irony
that are employed in “Ill Manors.”

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Riots of Impotence and Indifference

In the summer of 2011, between August 6 and 10, an estimated 13,000–15,000 people
were involved in riots in several London boroughs and in cities across England. The riots
followed the police shooting of Mark Duggan on August 4. The Metropolitan Police
stated that officers were attempting to arrest Duggan—a black male—on suspicion of
planning an attack. They stated that he was in possession of a handgun which he had
fired first before police acted in response. Subsequent evidence suggested that Duggan
was not armed when he was shot. Ballistics tests revealed that a bullet that had lodged
in a police officer’s radio had in fact come from a police firearm. The incident was imme-
diately referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). Overnight,
differing media accounts appeared, some representing Duggan as a ‘gangsta,’ others
showing him as a family man.
Unsatisfied with a lack of transparency and clarity surrounding Duggan’s death, a
protest was arranged by the local Broadwater Farm residents on August 6. The
Broadwater Farm estate already had a history of tension between the black community
and police and was the scene of riots in 1985 (Gifford 1986). Local community support-
ers and members of the family gathered outside Tottenham police station. Initially the
protest was peaceful but, later in the evening, violence broke out. Some of this was
motivated by racial tension surrounding restrictive law enforcement practices, but
increasingly the trigger for the violence became a distant memory as opportunistic loot-
ing took hold. By Sunday, August 7, the riots had spread to twelve areas within London
and by Monday, August 8, the riots had spread nationally. Social media was seen as
catalysing the unrest, with debates surrounding the role of technology resulting in the
moniker the “Blackberry Riots” (Economist 2011; Baker 2012). Rioters made use of
Blackberry smartphones whose encrypted Messenger Service allowed private group
messages to be sent simultaneously to users’ contacts. There were different phases and
different motivations for the riots in different places and, ultimately, the entire series of
events was characterized by genuine disorientation (Angel 2012; Gorringe & Rosie
2011; Briggs 2012a, 2012b).
The British Prime Minister interrupted his holiday and returned to the UK to oversee
the Government response. Police leave was cancelled and Parliament was recalled on
August 11 to debate the situation. According to the official report, 66 areas experienced
rioting, 5 people lost their lives, and widespread arson and looting caused severe damage
to businesses and local communities (Singh 2012).
By mid-October there had been 4,000 arrests, 2,000 people had been charged and
over 600 cases had already reached a final court outcome, with more than half resulting
in an immediate custodial sentence (Rusbridger & Rees 2011). The legal system was
required to work under extraordinary pressure, with all-night court sittings, and the use
of severe prison sentences for many of those convicted of riot-related offences.
The outbreak of explanations and solutions was almost as incoherent as the riots
themselves, as politicians, journalists, academics and other commentators attempted to
make sense of what had happened. The Conservative-led Government were quick to
condemn the riots and blame gang culture and moral decay. David Cameron had already
referred to “broken Britain” throughout his campaign for the 2010 general election, and
thereafter continued to refer to marriage and a stable two-parent family as central to
mending a sick society (Mooney & Neal 2009/2010: 145). In a speech on August 15
outlining the Government’s response to the riots, Cameron argued that the riots were

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not about poverty but rather about behavior, perpetrated by “people showing indifference
to right and wrong” and with a “twisted moral code.” Cameron was quite sure that many
of the rioters had “no father at home”; that it was standard for them to grow up without
a male role model “looking to the streets for their father figures, filled up with rage and
anger” (2011b). Key to Cameron’s agenda was reform of the welfare system, because he
argued that it encouraged the worst in people who could “be as irresponsible as they like
because the State will always bail them out” (2011b). A further extraordinary response
from the Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, referred to the rioters as a “feral underclass”:

What I found most disturbing was the sense that the hardcore of rioters came
from a feral underclass cut off from the mainstream in everything but its
materialism. Equally worrying was the instinctive criminal behaviour of
apparently random passers-by. . . . In my view, the riots can be seen in part as
an outburst of outrageous behaviour by the criminal classes—individuals and
families familiar with the justice system who haven’t been changed by their past
punishments.
(Clarke 2011)

The discourse surrounding poverty and social class in British society, therefore, was
grossly simplified and distorted, but did align with some longstanding Conservative
political values. By highlighting deviancy and instinctive criminality, a fundamental
belief in the concept of pure meritocracy was maintained. The ‘underclass’ existed
exclusively through choice and lack of ambition rather than any other root causes, thus
emphasizing the role of the individual and absolving the State of any responsibility.
Efforts to present a united front over the riots became strained when the Conservative
Party’s coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, warned of dangerous knee-jerk reac-
tions. They had focussed their rhetoric on causes related to dependency and isolation,
but also believed that the precise reasons for the various acts of disorder were compli-
cated and needed to be carefully understood. It was only as a concession to the Liberal
Democrats that the Prime Minister agreed to a public enquiry. In his contribution to the
debate, the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, said it was important to recognize
that both “culture” and “opportunity” (i.e. values and poverty) were determining factors
(Miliband 2011). He also emphasized inequality, explaining that the rioters were not
the only people guilty of immoral greed, citing several exemplars including bankers tak-
ing huge bonuses even as the taxpayer bailed out financial institutions following the
subprime mortgage crisis (2008), the MPs’ expenses scandal (2009), and the News
International journalists involved in the phone hacking and bribery scandal (2011).
Miliband argued that there was a societal gap “glorifying those who make millions while
others struggle to keep up” (Miliband 2011). The discussion surrounding inequality was,
of course, especially designed to make Conservative politicians feel uncomfortable,
because it had obvious socialist connotations in clear opposition to free market ideology.
With each of the three main political parties taking somewhat predictable positions but
also touching on relevant issues, the debate failed to provide any substantial insight into
the riots or its underlying causes. The common factor beyond political point-scoring was
utter incomprehension.
The concept of impotent indifference is one way in which the riots can be understood
as simultaneously political and apolitical. The writing of Zygmunt Bauman is particu-
larly helpful in framing this discussion. The consistent use of the term ‘underclass’ in the

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discourse surrounding the riots would, for Bauman, reinforce his prescient theorization
relating to the commodification of the individual and its inevitable impact on society.
He argued that the consequence of the new social landscape, where a society of produc-
ers had been transformed into a society of consumers, was the creation of a sizeable
‘underclass’ with little or no ability to consume or be consumed.

The ‘underclass’ evokes an image of an aggregate of people who have been

declared off-limits in relation to all classes and the class hierarchy itself, with
little chance and no need of readmission: people without a role, making no
useful contribution to the lives of the rest, and in principle beyond redemption.
People who in a class-divided society form no class of their own, but feed on the
life juices of all other classes, thereby eroding the class-based order of society.
(2007: 123)

Bauman dismantled the controversial concept of an ‘underclass’ as a politically con-

venient way of grouping an otherwise disparate range of individuals, reduced to a single
entity as a parasitic threat to the rest of society. But he went further and argued that
ubiquitous consumer values affected all aspects of social life, so that, in order to succeed,
people had to follow consumerist principles or suffer humiliating exclusion. In a world
that evaluates everything by its commodity value, the ‘underclass’ were failed consum-
ers, the “walking symbols of the disasters that await fallen consumers” (2007: 124). If,
as Bauman suggested, individuals are connected to the social whole primarily through
their capacity as consumers, then the rioters could be understood as “collateral casualties
of consumerism” (2007: 117). These were not the riots of an ‘underclass’, these were the
riots of “defective and disqualified consumers” (Bauman 2011a).
Others made similar observations about the victory of liberal capitalist ideology
(Grover 2011; Moxon 2011; Varul 2011) and argued that the nihilism of the riots may
have had the external appearance of protest, but in fact had simply provided evidence
of compliance with the underlying values of the free market society. There were, to be
sure, deeper symptoms of unresolved social problems, but not genuine protest. Somewhat
countering and nuancing this viewpoint is one of the most sophisticated and provoca-
tive theoretical analyses of the riots to date, provided by criminologists Winlow and
Hall, who argue that post-modern subjectivity provided a framework for the “profound
sense of lack” exhibited by young people (2012: 154). Their insistent dissatisfaction
triggered by consistent social and economic marginality stimulated the rage that
exploded when an occurrence in the shared social experience provided the catalyst.
Frustration at limited opportunities and urban social conditions certainly played a role
in framing the riots, but the nihilism of the looting suggested a broader malaise
contextualised, but not entirely subsumed, by consumer society. There were underlying
political motivations to the riots, but, because of an absence of genuine political alterna-
tives, “the unconscious dissatisfaction the rioters felt about their place in the world
could only be expressed by further engagement with the meaning system of late capital-
ism” (Winlow & Hall 2012: 162).
The concept of impotent indifference, then, allows us to consider ideas of engagement
and disengagement, protest and opportunism, even the sense of ‘moral’ justification that
some rioters maintained. Naturally indifference follows impotence, but both are formed
by pointlessness. With a feeling of impotence there is no point in trying because the
subject knows they are powerless to effect any change. This leads to indifference because

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the subject is convinced of his or her own insignificance and no longer cares. In the
English riots of 2011, impotent indifference, framed by an increasing sense of marginal-
ity, did not mean that the desire for change was absent; rather, the subconscious protest
could not find its voice because there was no political opposition to contemporary lib-
eral capitalism and, in any case, nobody really understood this as a problem. So the riots
were certainly about inequality, and greed, and opportunism and many other factors, but
they were also about the inability to be heard resulting in the inability to speak. As
Winlow and Hall stated, “the riot is a distraction from the humdrum reality of everyday
life, momentarily absorbing, but in the absence of real politics, incapable of yielding the
progressive change that the subject subconsciously desires” (2012: 155).

Articulate Musical Rage

Within this framework, it is useful to consider Plan B’s assessment of the riots. He made
it clear that he did not condone the riots, but wanted society to understand why so many
young people did not feel that they had a future or did not care about receiving a
criminal record. Endeavoring to stand up as spokesman for urban youth, Plan B argued
that “society needs to take some responsibility for the cause of these riots.” He also
argued that there was “very public prejudice towards the underclass,” which made him
and others feel alienated: “These kids have been beaten into apathy. They don’t care
about society because society has made it very clear that it doesn’t care about them”
(Plan B 2012).

An example of this is the word ‘chav’ that means council housed and violent,
a derogatory phrase that is openly used by certain sectors of middle England to
label and define people from poor backgrounds. It’s a derogatory phrase no
different in my opinion to the ones concerning race or sex. The difference is
that the papers use it publicly. If they did the same with racial or sexist
derogatory terms it would be deemed, and rightly so, as offensive and politically
incorrect.
(Plan B 2012)

The term ‘chav’ here is presented as a bacronym, because it was originally derived from
the Romany Gypsy word chavi, simply meaning child. In its pejorative and stereotypical
extension it has become associated with an antisocial subculture of vulgar, poorly
educated, lower-class youths who typically wear imitation designer clothes. Several com-
mentators, along with Plan B, have identified the term as an example of highly offensive
class abuse (Jones 2012; Toynbee 2011). It is from the perspective of the ‘universal chav’,
playing on middle class nightmares, that Plan B takes an ironic stance to form his acer-
bic political musical commentary. The aggressive chorus, “Oi! I said Oi! What you
looking at, you little rich boy!” represents predatory underclass youth, but also puns on
the sick society tropes perpetuated by politicians and the media with the recurrent
phrase “My Manor’s ill” (see Fig. 23.5 for the song’s complete lyrics). The music video
contains heavily stylized, caustic images of, for example, Plan B dressed in a ‘hoodie’
preparing to attack an old lady (Fig. 23.1). The overall strategy is one of satirical dis-
tance, perpetuating the stereotype while simultaneously dismantling it. The constant
duality is one of the reasons for the song’s intensity and insight. By comparison, Bloc
Party’s song “Kettling” (2012), for example, also presented the rioters’ perspective but

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was so naively one-sided that it seemed only to glorify violence without providing any
depth or critical distance. Plan B, however, repeats the cultural myths and tells us that
they are all true, but his tongue is firmly in his cheek as he swaggers his way through a
series of unresolved contradictions.

Keep on believing what you read in the papers

Council estate kids, scum of the earth
Think you know how life on a council estate is,
From everything you’ve ever read about it or heard
Well it’s all true, so stay where you’re safest
There’s no need to step foot out the ‘burbs.

Allan Moore reminds us that “a musical persona, from whom the protest comes, always
exists within a musical environment” (2013: 397). This seems especially relevant to “Ill
Manors,” where a musical as well as a lyrical analysis reveals how rigorously rhythm and
texture are controlled to generate an underlying, simmering tension in the verses that
leads inexorably to musical explosions in the choruses.
The musical material in “Ill Manors” features samples taken from Shostakovich’s
Seventh Symphony. This was not an original idea, as Peter Fox’s song “Alles Neu”

Figure 23.1 Plan B: “Get your bloody tools out”

Figure 23.2 Leader of the pack

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(2008) employed virtually identical accompaniment. A comparison of these two tracks

is beyond the scope of this chapter, but suffice it to say that borrowing as homage is a
common practice in Hip Hop. We can also observe that Peter Fox’s track is much more
aspirational and is much less concerned with rhythmic and timbral agitation than “Ill
Manors.”
One wonders if Plan B was aware of the context of Shostakovich’s Symphony, which
was dedicated to the citizens of Leningrad, who had suffered relentless German bom-
bardment during WWII. Shostakovich hoped that the Symphony would receive its
first performance in Leningrad, but the première was held in Kuybïshev and performed
by the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra in March 1942 because both the Leningrad
Philharmonic and Shostakovich had been evacuated. The propagandist potential of
the Symphony was fully understood and it was quickly adopted as a symbol of heroic
struggle with repeat performances in several Soviet cities. Anti-Fascist sympathizers
in the West also saw the Symphony as an important icon of resistance. A microfilm
of the score eventually found its way out of the Soviet Union and the piece was per-
formed by Sir Henry Wood in June 1942 at the Proms in London and then in July by
Arturo Toscanini with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in New York. The Symphony
was first performed in Leningrad in August 1942 while the city was still under siege.
With the Radio Orchestra down to only fourteen players, the city mustered the per-
formance by recalling musical reinforcements from the front. In an audacious example
of psychological warfare, this performance was defiantly broadcast to the German
forces (Fay 2000: 133).
The sampled material in “Ill Manors” is derived from a rather isolated section in
the fourth movement between measures 337–367. There are obvious surface links
that could be made to a city under siege, or a call to arms in the face of relentless
assault. More interesting, however, is the way that the agitation and claustrophobia
contained within the sampled material itself is amplified to generate a sense of relent-
less tension.
Figure 23.3 shows how the sampled Shostakovich material is applied. Verse 1 and
Verse 2 are alternating two measure phrases that form the musical accompaniment
throughout the verses. The immediate challenge is to find a way to fit Shostakovich’s
‘irregular’ 7/4 patterns into a 4/4 song structure, a process that inherently generates a
sense of internal rhythmic dissonance. Different cells of sampled material derived from
measures 337 and 343 are combined and their organization emphasizes waves of rhyth-
mic tension and release. There is clear demarcation of the beat at the beginning and
ends of the two bar phrases and disruptive rhythmic syncopation in the middle. In Figure
23.3 this is represented by crosses showing strong beat reinforcement and dotted lines
indicating rhythmic dissonance against the beat. The basic musical pattern used
throughout the song is, therefore, inherently unstable and generates a sense of insistent
unease. A half-time drum pattern frames the nervous energy created through the sam-
pled sources. Furthermore, Plan B’s ‘flow,’ or the rhythmic style of rapping, seamlessly
shifts between “speech effusive” and “percussion effusive” styles (Krims 2000: 48–54)
with moments of rhythmic stability contrasted with rapid acceleration. Overall this cre-
ates three multi-faceted, constantly shifting, rhythmic layers between the voice, drums
and instrumental accompaniment.
The concept of rhythmic dissonance is further developed in the immediate build to
the chorus, where it is as if Shostakovich’s 7/4 figures can no longer be contained within

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Ill M an ors: Verse [T] 111 M anors: V erse[2]

+ + -

Shostako vich : m easu re 343 Shostakovich: m easure 337

111 M anors: B u ild to C horus

Figure 23.3 “Ill Manors” sample construction derived from Shostakovich’s Symphony
No. 7, Fourth Movement

the 4/4 rhythmic structure. At the bottom of Figure 23.3 the sample construction of the
four measures before each chorus are shown. Derived from repetitions of Shostakovich’s
measure 337, the dotted boxes show appearances of the 7-beat motif that vies for rhyth-
mic dominance against the 4/4 pulse. The song’s symmetrical drum pattern and the
asymmetrical samples trip over each other, resulting in a powerful sense of escalation on
the journey towards the chorus.
If these are minor skirmishes, then the build up to the final chorus results in an
almighty explosion. To demonstrate this we can use a sonogram analysis. This is a visual
representation of the spectrum of frequencies in a sound as they vary over time. The
vertical axis represents frequency (from low to high, 0 to 22,000 Hz), the horizontal axis
represents time (mins/secs), and a third aspect indicating the amplitude of frequencies
at particular times is represented by the intensity or color of each point in the image.
Figure 23.4 shows the build up to and the beginning of the final chorus between
02:47–03:12. Only the instrumental accompaniment is shown in the sonogram itself:
the text of the vocal parts appears above. Initially, the mangled sound groans at the
lower end of the spectrum, the first and only time in the track where the instrumental
frequency range is intensely concentrated well below 4000 Hz. Four heightened snare
drum strikes then cut through the texture, leading to an intense accumulation of sound
covering the entire frequency spectrum (20,000 Hz is generally considered the upper
range of human hearing). This accumulative spectral tension is further emphasized by
the interplay between Plan B and the crowd. Throughout the song, both visually and
aurally, Plan B has been presented as the leader of the crowd (see Figure 23.2). Typically,
his solo rapping in the verses is contrasted with the entry of the group who join him in
the choruses. In the last section, this interplay is further developed with increasingly
rapid call and response between the crowd and the rapper that eventually merges into
one collective body before the entire crowd bellows the final chorus.
There is much to commend in the articulate musical rage of this bold, politically
incisive, protest song. Its bellicose lyrics play with ironic distance and its agitated, unset-
tled rhythmic and textural development acts as a visceral representation of underlying
tension that relentlessly and unavoidably leads to rupture.

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PLAN B: We've had itwith You bloody rich kids There's no such thing We're just bloody What needs fixing is the system, Riots on the television, You O i'IsaidOi'
these politicians never listen as broken Britain broke in Britain Not shop windows down in cant put us all in prison
Brixton

CROWD: Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oi Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oi! Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil Oil............ Oil 1said Oil

(Hz) 20000

18000

16000

12000

8000

6000

4000

2000

(Hz) 20000

16000

16000

14000

12000

R 10000

8000

6000

4000

2000

0
2.47 2.48 2.49 2.50 2.51 2.52 2.53 2.54 2.55 2.56 2.57 2.58 2.59 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12
Time (mins/secs)

Figure 23.4 Spectrogram showing the build to the final chorus in “Ill Manors”

Conclusions
“Ill Manors” is a musical and lyrical masterpiece of political communication, but I have
also argued that the song could not act as a mode of political representation in the cli-
mate of impotence and indifference into which it emerged. On April 7, 2012 the song
entered the UK singles chart at number 6 but dropped to number 23 the following week
and then rapidly descended out of the Top 40. At the time of writing, its official music
video had the lowest YouTube hit rate of the UK’s top twenty songs from April 2012;
this included two ‘local’ artists, Olly Murs and Rizzle Kicks. By aligning itself with the
rioters, the song presented a specific perspective that was intended to galvanize a mar-
ginalized youth and open the eyes of middle England towards the impact of some of its
own prejudices. The song sought to challenge the notion of the ‘underclass’ which still
underpins discourses of disadvantage and poverty in the UK. Yet, perceptions of Britain’s
disenfranchised youth have not changed, there does not appear to be an alternative
perspective.
However unreasonable and mistaken the actions of the rioters were, the mediatiza-
tion and politicization of the riots further entrenched beliefs in a maladjusted, defective
and broken society that have not been shaken. Perhaps it is unfair to expect music to
bear the responsibility for changing these kinds of attitudes. Protest songs probably do
not have such an overarching degree of influence, but they are more likely to make an
impact when there is an underlying consensus, or when a song identifies something
that has been persistently troubling society. The successful protest song emerges at the

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“Ill Manors” Lyrics

Verse Verse

Let’s all go on an urban safari
We might see some illegal migrants
Oi look there’s a chav
That means council housed and violent
He’s got a hoodie on give him a hug
On second thoughts don’t you don’t wanna get
mugged
Oh sh*t too late that was kinda dumb
Whose idea was that . . . stupid ***t
He’s got some front, ain’t we all
Be the joker, play the fool
What’s politics, ain’t it all
Smoke and mirrors, April fools?
All year round, all in all
Just another brick in the wall
Get away with murder in the schools
Use four letter swear words ’cause we’re cool
We’re all drinkers, drug takers
Every single one of us burns the herb
Keep on believing what you read in the papers
Council estate kids, scum of the earth
Think you know how life on a council estate is,
From everything you’ve ever read about it or heard
Well it’s all true, so stay where you’re safest
There’s no need to step foot out the burbs
Truth is here, we’re all disturbed
We cheat and lie it’s so absurd
Feed the fear that’s what we’ve learned
Fuel the fire, let it burn
Chorus
Oi! I said Oi!
What you looking at, you little rich boy!
We’re poor round here, run home and lock your door
Don’t come round here no more, you could get
robbed for
Real (yeah) because my manor’s ill
My manor’s ill
For real
(Yeah) you know my manor’s ill, my manor’s ill!
You could get lost in this concrete jungle
New builds keep springing up outta nowhere
Take the wrong turn down a one way junction
Find yourself in the hood nobody goes there
We got an eco-friendly government,
They preserve our natural habitat
Built an entire Olympic village
Around where we live without pulling down any flats
Give us free money and we don’t pay any tax
NHS healthcare, yes please, many thanks
People get stabbed round here, there’s many shanks
Nice knowing someone’s got our backs when we get
attacked
Don’t bloody give me that
I’ll lose my temper
Who closed down the community centre?
I kill time there used to be a member
What will I do now until September?
School’s out, rules out, get your bloody tools out
London’s burning, I predict a riot
Fall in fall out
Who knows what it’s all about
What did that chief say? Something ’bout the kaisers
Kids on the street no they never miss a beat, never
miss a cheap
Thrill when it comes their way
Let’s go looting
No not Luton
The high street’s closer, cover your face
And if we see any rich kids on the way
We’ll make ’em wish they stayed inside
Here’s a charge for congestion, everybody’s gotta pay
Do what Boris does, rob them blind
Chorus
Transition
We’ve had it with these politicians
You bloody rich kids never listen
There’s no such thing as broken Britain
We’re just bloody broke in Britain
What needs fixing is the system
Not shop windows down in Brixton
Riots on the television
You can’t put us all in prison!

Figure 23.5 Lyrics to “Ill Manors”

By Vincent Schlippenbach, David Conen, Pierre Baigorry, Dimitri Schostakowitsch, Benjamin Paul Balance-
Drew And Al Shux. © 2012 Soular Music Gmbh & Co. Kg (Gema), Hanseatic Musikverlag Gmbh & Co Kg
(Gema), Edition Fixx & Foxy Publishing (Gema), Hans Sikorski Musikverlag Gmbh-Co (Gema) and Unknown
Publisher (ns). All Rights on behalf of Soular Music Gmbh & Co. Kg and itself administered by Hanseatic
Musikverlag Gmbh & Co Kg. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

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perfect moment and seems to express the core values that a community had been
unable to articulate before it appeared. The identification with a specific socio-
economic group in “Ill Manors” was both necessary and problematic: necessary because
the majority of the rioters did come from impoverished communities, but equally prob-
lematic because the riots were infinitely more complicated than a rich-boy-politicians-
versus-poor-kids narrative. Even though these ideas were skillfully placed within an
ironic musical context, irony is a very dangerous weapon when riots seem like a parody
of political activism, or when political responses to the riots seem like a parody of pub-
lic engagement.
The issues at the heart of “Ill Manors,” however, are profound and worthy of further
debate. The sense of social unease that Bauman and others have identified was both
the provocative initial spur and the reason for the ultimate weakness of the song.
Bauman argued that the “underclass is not merely an absence of community; it is the
sheer impossibility of community” (2011b: 152). Following the English riots of 2011,
there was no self-conscious community to stand up for. The rioters were not actively
pursuing a progressive political agenda—many were unable to reconcile their actions.
In this sense, both the riots and the musical response expressed “a spirit of revolt with-
out revolution” (Žižek 2011): an explosion of anger that could only be disappointingly
self-defeating.

Postscript
On January 8, 2014 the inquest into the death of Mark Duggan reported its findings. By
a majority of eight to two the jury found that Duggan was “lawfully killed by police,” yet
eight members of the jury also stated they were sure that Duggan “did not have a gun in
his hand” when he was shot (http://dugganinquest.independent.gov.uk). At the time of
writing, Mark Duggan’s family are appealing the decision against police practices follow-
ing the fatal shooting.

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 24
WORLD MUSIC
The Fabrication of a Genre
Timothy D. Taylor

All the world’s music is world music. It is only the globally dominant Anglo-American
music industry that relegates some musics to the category of world music.
This wasn’t always the case. For decades, the western music industry paid little atten-
tion to the music of its Elsewheres; it was more interested in selling its wares than taking
the music of elsewhere seriously. The American and European recording industry was
thus global almost from the beginning (see Gronow 1998). One effect of this, apart from
the exploitation of new markets (which has been a powerful driving force of American
capitalism since its beginning), was that people from elsewhere heard western musics,
including popular musics, which encouraged people around the world to begin to learn
European and American popular music. Learn it, emulate it, and let it affect their own
local and regional musics. Locally produced popular musics seldom caught the ear of a
western record label representative or fan, but after World War II an increasing number
of popular musicians and genres began to be noticed in the west.
There were some precursors. Occasionally a popular song from elsewhere has found a
western audience, as can still happen (the most recent example being Psy’s “Gangnam
Style,” which took the world by storm in 2012). Before this, there were periodic US and
European interests in musics not lumped into the world music category—“Latin” musics
of various kinds have found large audiences in several periods in US history (see Roberts
1999); the Argentinian tango was a European craze in the 1920s and has enjoyed several
waves of popularity since (see Savigliano 1995); Hawai’ian music and musical instru-
ments have found mainstream audiences from time to time. All of these musics are now
frequently lumped into the “world music” category (except for “Latin,” which enjoys its
own status as a freestanding category, unless it is folk or traditional music, in which case
it is categorized as “world music”). But each wave, or each song, failed to have a substan-
tial effect on the western music industry, which, if it paid attention to non-North
American or non-European musics at all, tended to relegate these musics to marginal
categories (there was a “Hawai’ian” category even in the 1920s, part of the mainland
US’s fascination for the islands it annexed in 1898).
One of the earliest examples of a nonwestern song becoming well known in the west
was a 1939 song called “Mbube” (“Lion”) by the South African Solomon Linda, which
became known variously as “Wimba way” or “Wimoweh,” and later as “The Lion Sleeps
Tonight.” The first US recording was by The Weavers in 1951 (Alan Lomax having
 W O RLD M U S I C

introduced Pete Seeger to the original recording), with perhaps the most famous version
by the doo wop group The Tokens in 1961; and Disney used the song in The Lion King
(1994). There were significant issues of copyright and ownership, to be addressed below.
Following this, some nonwestern musics periodically burst into western conscious-
nesses. The South African singer Miriam Makeba (1932–2008) became fairly well
known to international audiences, with hit songs such as “Pata Pata” (released in
South Africa in 1957 and in the US in 1967). And Harry Belafonte (1927– ) helped
popularize calypso music (originally from Trinidad and Tobago) with recordings such
as Calypso (1957).
But all of these were just flashes in the pan, musics or musicians heard and understood
as exotic, different, Other. Beginning in the 1970s, however, nonwestern popular musics
begin to sound increasingly like western popular musics. The distribution of western
recordings to the rest of the world has a long history, but the rise of rock and roll and
other forms of popular music had a profound effect on musicians around the world.
Access to instruments and quality recording studios lagged behind the west (see Wallis
and Malm 1984) but, nonetheless, recordings were made that sounded like western
popular musics.
The first of these to gain notice was the Cameroonian Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa”
from 1972, regarded by some as the first disco recording (see Shapiro 2005). The song
had a cult following through happenstance in New York City, then found airplay on a
New York City radio station. The original single was licensed by Atlantic Records in the
US and released on that label, where it reached #35 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and
was widely covered by many bands.
With this and other popular songs, nonwestern musicians’ emulations of, and inter-
pretations of, western popular musics began to be noticed by the American- and
European-dominated music industry. Beginning in the 1980s, as more and more popular
music outside the west began to be produced that sounded like music produced in the
west (though not sung in English or a European language other than a colonial language,
sometimes), western listeners began to realize that there was music that needed to be
paid attention to. Some western rock stars, given their positions of power in the music
industry, could come into contact with some of these recordings, given to them by oth-
ers in the music business.
An early and perhaps the most influential example of this was Paul Simon’s (1941– )
recording Graceland (1986), which makes use of various popular musics from the African
continent. Simon, like all western stars who record with nonwestern Others, professes
to love the music, and attempts to establish authority by demonstrating that he heard
this music before most others did; he writes in the liner notes to Graceland that:

In the summer of 1984, a friend gave me a cassette of an album called Gumboots:

Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II. It sounded vaguely like ’50s rock ‘n’ roll out
of the Atlantic Records school of simple three-chord pop hits: “Mr. Lee” by the
Bobettes, “Jim Dandy” by Laverne Baker. It was very up, very happy music—
familiar and foreign-sounding at the same time. The instrumentation
(accordion, bass, drums and electric guitars) and the name of the record label
(Gallo Records) made me think that Gumboots probably hadn’t been recorded
by an American or British band.
(Simon 1986; emphases in original)

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And political considerations were of no concern. Simon violated a United Nations

boycott on trade with South Africa to make the recording, casting himself as a simple
musician and nothing more:

The idea that interacting with musicians from another culture could be viewed
as cultural imperialism never occurred to me. I was reacting musically. I liked
certain kind of music, I wanted to play with those musicians, I wanted to
interact with those musicians and I treated them with my utmost musical
respect. At the very minimum I was paying people very, very well.
When it became an issue, I said, “Wait a minute, this has been going on
forever. Musicians have always played with other musicians.”
(Quoted in Gonzalez 1990: §B, p. 25)

Later, he said:

The big issue approaching another culture is respect. That’s the key. If you
come in with respect, as someone who doesn’t know and doesn’t pretend to
know everything, I found that, overwhelmingly, people are friendly and
open. But you must understand that you’re a guest and you are privileged to
be there.
I am a white, Anglo, Jewish male, but I’m also more than that. We can
transcend our little ghettos. People can communicate. It’s hard, it takes work,
it takes time, but it happens. And when you break through and make contact,
the experience is exhilarating.
(Gonzalez 1990: §B, p. 25)1

Such attitudes aren’t unusual. All western stars who work with nonwestern musicians—
whether Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Ry Cooder, or others—profess love and respect for
the musicians with whom they work, setting aside all other considerations. And world
music artists have frequently benefited from the curatorship, brokership, or collabora-
tion (see Meintjes 1990) of these western stars.

“World Music”
With the success of recordings such as Graceland and the continuing flow of nonwestern
popular musics to western metropoles, for the first time the western music industry
sought to create a new category into which to place these new but familiar sounds—
world music. What we now call world music had a significant presence on minor and
independent labels before the 1980s, which is when world music began to take off.
Connoisseurs and ethnomusicologists knew many of these recordings, which were
devoted to particular regions, or genres, or more.
But by the late 1980s, it was clear a new label was needed. The old label of “inter-
national,” with German polkas or ethnographic field recordings of folk and traditional
musics, no longer worked. So, in the late 1980s, a group of journalists and DJs in the
UK got together to devise a term. The influential British DJ Charlie Gillett recalled:

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We had a very simple, small ambition. It was all geared to record shops, that was
the only thing we were thinking about. In America, King Sunny Ade (from
Nigeria) was being filed under reggae. That was the only place shops could
think of to put him. In Britain they didn’t know where to put this music—I
think Ade was just lost in the alphabet, next to Abba. In 1985 [sic] Paul Simon
did Graceland and that burst everything wide open, because he created an
interest in South African music. People were going into shops saying: “I want
some of that stuff” and there wasn’t anywhere for them to look.
(Denselow 2004: 10)

With the rise of world music as a “genre” of music recognized by the music industry, the
industry began to create an infrastructure to recognize sales and manage it. Billboard
magazine, the weekly chronicle of the music industry, began to track world music sales
in world music charts, established in 1990; the National Academy of Recording Arts
and Sciences, which bestows Grammy awards, created a Grammy Award for Best World
Music Album in 1992. In 2003, it created a new award, so the two awards were named
Best Traditional World Music Album and Best Contemporary World Music Album,
but, a few years later, believing there to be too many small awards, they reverted to the
original configuration of a single Grammy Award for Best World Music Album in 2012
(see Taylor 2012).
Retailers began creating spaces in their stores, both brick-and-mortar and online, for
world music recordings. It wasn’t well known in the 1980s and 1990s just who the world
music audience was, though this became better known as record companies solicited
information from their purchasers. They began to realize that the audience for world
music was largely an educated and middle-class one, and the world music infrastructure
began to shift to recognize this. One of the first magazines devoted to world music,
Songlines, which began publication in 1999, started life the size of an academic journal,
though it assumed the size of a glossy popular magazine later. And in at least one case, a
major retailer discontinued its classical music section, which had been in a separate sec-
tion of the store, and moved in the world music recordings, a particularly clear example
of the declining interest in classical music among educated middle-class people and its
replacement by world music.
Also demonstrating its connection to this particular social group, world music has
become a staple on college radio and university campuses in concert series. Major con-
cert halls frequently feature world music series, as well.
In Europe, more so than the US, world music has also established an important pres-
ence at festivals. The earliest and still one of the biggest is the World of Music and
Dance (WOMAD), founded by Peter Gabriel and others in the UK in 1980 and held
there and globally since 1982. In an era of declining sales of recorded music, these
festivals offer musicians important venues and sources of employment, even as they
occasionally continue to tie into western stereotypes and fears of the Other.

World Musicians
For their part, musicians relegated to the world music category are ambivalent at best
about it. Some claim to like it because it gives them a recognizable place in which west-
ern fans can find them. Others don’t like it because they feel like the category is
marginalizing or ghettoizing: they want to be rock or hip hop or rhythm and blues

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musicians, not in a minor category. And they recognize the ways that the world music
category perpetuates old stereotypes about nonwestern Others, particularly those from
the African continent (see Taylor 1997). For example, the great Beninoise singer
Angélique Kidjo (1960– ) said, “There is a kind of cultural racism going on where peo-
ple think that African musicians have to make a certain kind of music” (Burr 1994: §H,
p. 28). Elsewhere, she said:

I won’t do my music different to please some people who want to see something
very traditional. The music I write is me. It’s how I feel. If you want to see
traditional music and exoticism, take a plane to Africa. They play that music
on the streets. I’m not going to play traditional drums and dress like bush
people. I’m not going to show my ass for any fucking white man. If they want
to see it, they can go outside. I’m not here for that. I don’t ask Americans to
play country music.
(Wentz 1993: 43)

With the growth of a recording industry infrastructure in many parts of the world, how-
ever, and the growth of festivals, it is increasingly possible for subsequent generations
of musicians who once would have been classified as “world music” artists to make a
living, or at least attempt to, without much regard for the western music industry. Many
musicians from the African continent today are less interested in western stardom, or
even acceptance, than making a music that makes them feel a part of a global African
diaspora (Appert 2012), and that speaks to local, regional, or continental aspirations.
As a Malian hip hop musician Amkoullel said recently, “We don’t have an American
Dream. We have an African Dream.”

Digital Technologies
The rise of world music as a category of music recognized by the western music industry
occurred at the same time as new digital technologies that made it possible to sample
(that is, copy digitally) pre-existing recordings, and so new genres of electronic music
(usually grouped under blanket terms like “techno” or “electronica,” or, more recently,
EDM, “electronic dance music”) quickly sprung up that made use of samples of world
music. Some of these (sub)genres were built on the idea of sampling of world music, such
as “ethnotechno” (see Pareles 1996) and psychedelic trance (see Taylor 2001), both of
which were characterized by danceable beats combined with world music samples. This
sampling practice was mainstream almost from the beginning.
The first successful recording that featured samples of world music was Deep Forest,
released in 1992; it sold over 3 million copies. The liner notes convey the continuing
colonialist ideologies of the time:

Imprinted with the ancestral wisdom of the African chants, the music of Deep
Forest immediately touches everyone’s soul and instinct[.] The forest of all
civilizations is a mysterious place where the yarn of tales and legends is woven
with images of men, women, children, animals and fairies. Not only living
creatures, but also trees steeped in magical powers. Universal rites and customs
have been profoundly marked by the influence of the forest, a place of power
and knowledge passed down from generation to generation by the oral traditions

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of primitive societies. The chants of Deep Forest, Baka chants of Cameroun, of

Burundi, of Senegal and of Pygmies, transmit a part of this important oral
tradition gathering all peoples and joining all continents through the universal
language of music. Deep Forest is the respect of this tradition which humanity
should cherish which marries world harmony, a harmony often compromised
today. That’s why the musical creation of Deep Forest has received the support
of UNESCO and of two musicologists, Hugo Zempe [sic] and Shima [sic] Aron
[sic], who collected the original documents.
(Liner notes to Deep Forest 1992)

All this—including, of course, the music—constitutes a remarkable text. Not only

are the names of the prominent ethnomusicologists (Hugo Zemp and Simha Arom)
misspelled, the notes seem to strive to touch all the most revered buttons of western
modernity: the mysterious Other, the universal cultural practices, the Other’s unique,
idealized kinship to nature, the totalization of the Other—different tribes from different
parts of the African continent become “pygmies”—not to mention the use of the word
“primitive” without quotation marks.
French producers Michel Sanchez and Eric Mouquet construe the source music as
raw material, thought to be unpalatable to western listeners with sophisticated tastes.
It is viewed so much as a natural resource to be exploited that, as is typical in such
cases, the permissions of the original musicians was not sought, and not all of the
original musicians were credited on the album (see Feld 1996). So it is backgrounded,
encompassed, surrounded by up-to-date synthesized magic and drum machines. Most
of the source music on Deep Forest is unrecognizable; it has been so manipulated, so
smoothed over, so covered up by the western synthesizers, that whatever might be
“universal” about the music is subsumed under a western totalizing ideology of univer-
salism, which manifests itself musically by pushing the original music into the
background. The music of the “pygmies” becomes zoo music: put behind bars (barlines,
that is), behind western harmony, made accessible to today’s western listener who only
wants to spend money and dance. Evidently it has been sufficiently altered so that the
two main forces behind the album, Eric Moquet and Michel Sanchez, are listed as the
“songwriters” after each track.
“It was just for our pleasure in the beginning,” says Mouquet. “We just put all the feel-
ing that we wanted into this music, and after we saw the success, we were very proud”
(Geitner n.d.). According to Mouquet, his partner, Michel Sanchez, found some tapes
of Pygmy chant recorded decades ago and played them after dinner one night. “It was
very quiet, very beautiful,” said Mouquet, who then came up with the idea of combining
the sounds with their own music (Geitner n.d.).
The success of this album resulted in the creation of Deep Forest not just as an album
title but as a band which has released several more albums under the name Deep Forest;
their Boheme (1995) sold over 4 million copies and won the Grammy Award for Best
World Music Album. Subsequent releases have fared less well as the global music indus-
try has suffered and, perhaps also, as the band’s popularity has waned.
But their attitudes toward the music they sampled betrays longstanding western
ideas of the nonwestern Other, who emits music naturally that is fit to be appropri-
ated and refined—either electronically as in the case of Deep Forest, or acousti-
cally, as in the case of Paul Simon and Graceland—made fit for sophisticated
western tastes.

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Ownership
Almost since the beginning of “world music” in the 1980s (and in isolated cases before,
such as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”), there have been cases of exploitation of nonwestern
musicians, either through the misappropriation of ownership rights of copyrights, or
representations, or both. Solomon Linda was paid less than $1 in today’s money for the
rights to “Mbube” (see Malan 2004) and it wasn’t until a lawsuit decades later that his
heirs received some degree of recompense (La Franiere 2006). Deep Forest did not seek
the permission of the people whose music was sampled, and failed to credit everyone on
the album. No share of their profits were returned to the original musicians (Mellor and
Janke 2001; Feld 2002). Paul Simon was also accused of exploiting the musicians with
whom he worked, though, for their part, the musicians indicated that they were seeking
an international reputation and Simon was their means to this end (see Taylor n.d.).
These are complex issues, even when it is clear who owns the copyrights. But legal
ownership of a copyright does not necessarily lead to treatments of sampled musics that
many would consider to be ethical.
Partly as a result of these sorts of appropriations, there has been a global movement
in the last few decades towards the protection of some folk and traditional music and
dance (and other) practices under the rubric of “intangible cultural heritage.” This is a
designation agreed upon by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) at a convention in 2003. Since then, it has named many
musical genres such as the tango and instruments as “Masterpieces of the Oral and
Intangible Heritage of Humanity.” While this designation is intended to protect these
cultural forms, it can have the unwanted effect of advertising them, with the result of
increasing tourism and raising the cost of musical instruments beyond the means of
many (see Taylor 2014).

Genrification and Standardization of

World Music Today
World music has never enjoyed very high sales, roughly about the same as the minuscule
sales of classical recordings; the Recording Industry Association of America, the indus-
try lobbying organization which keeps track of sales and consumer data, has never
broken out world music as a separate “genre” category in its annual tally of sales of
various genres.
Nonetheless, world music has become increasingly ubiquitous, whether in recorded
form as samples, soundtracks and commercials, or as live music in concert series and
festivals. As a result, some knowledge of world music has become necessary for workers
in the commercial music industry. Clients, whether advertising agencies or television or
film studios, are increasingly familiar with various world music sounds and genres, and
thus may request that composers and performers write or perform in a particular world
music genre or performance style. Composers in the realm of commercial music need to
be able to emulate many styles of music (see Taylor 2012).
This—along with the neoliberal movement of profits in the cultural industries up
toward management and away from the workers, resulting in the outsourcing of studio
recording jobs to cheaper cities such as Prague—has unemployed many musicians, and
made it necessary for those who remain to become increasingly versatile. There is now
the utility musician who can emulate a variety of sounds, including those considered to

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be “world music.” It is cheaper and easier to hire a musician who can sound like anyone
or anything than to attempt to find an authentic musician from a particular tradition
for a spot of local color.
This trend towards the utility musician includes singers, who also must sing in a vari-
ety of styles. One singer, Marissa Steingold, who works both in commercials and film,
described how the process works.

A lot of times they’ll ask, “Can you do this?” “Can you sound like a
Bulgarian . . . ?” “Okay,” and I’ll just listen to one YouTube example and just
sort of make it up. I’ve had to do a lot of Celtic stuff, just hoping I’m pronouncing
things correctly.
(Steingold 2009)

And she provided an illustrative anecdote:

I had this gig not too long ago for Coca-Cola. They had this Indian singer who
they really liked and so they gave me a recording in advance of her doing some
wonderful chanting, and they said, “We want you to sound like her, but, it’s a
Coca-Cola commercial and there are lyrics in English.” So I called up my friend
from Bangladesh and had her do an impression of an Indian person speaking
English who just doesn’t speak English that well, and tried to absorb that
without being really offensive. It’s quite difficult, sometimes I have to be
“Asian,” and I’m just praying that no one in Asia is listening. There’s no time
to really work it out.
They kind of need people like me who are not genuine, not genuinely black,
or not genuinely Indian, or whatever, because it would be offensive to ask an
Indian person to sound less Indian.

Steingold also discussed the singer Lisa Gerrard, who gained fame from her performance
on the soundtrack for Gladiator (2000), on which she sang in nonsense syllables. It
sounded like world music, but it was fabricated.

I think of two singers as a spectrum and one’s on each end. Usually on one side
you’ve got Enya, and then on the other side you’ve got Lisa Gerrard, and she’s
much more intense. And so often I’m having to play this dance, so if I start to
get too intense, earthy, too ethnic then it’s got to go to the Enya side. I think
part of the reason why she’s been so successful is, she’s still pretty white. It’s an
“other”—it’s Celtic, but it’s still something that we can handle.
(Steingold 2009)

Another commercial singer, Randy Crenshaw, said:

When you get the call they’ll say, “We’re looking for someone who can sing
authentically in Farsi, are you good at that? Or do you know somebody who’s
good at it?” So you come pre-approved, but once you get called for that you’re
expected to come in there and really sound quite authentic. I’ve had to do
things where I had to come in and do, you know, Sufi devotional music. I’ve
had to come in and sing things that were in Hindi, or things that were in

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Sanskrit, or things in Indonesian, where they said, “Okay we have kind of a

Gamelan orchestra and we need you to sound authentically like . . . ” and
they’ll play me samples of stuff.
In a lot of cases producers are still looking for a pastiche thing that has the
flavor of it without the genuine article. But, in enough cases they’re true
aficionados of a musical style and when they say they want Bulgarian women,
they really do want it to sound just like the record they have of the Bulgarian
women. So it’s made us be a lot more broadly based eclectic music makers,
instead of what we used to be, which is really highly technically great tone
generators.
(Crenshaw 2009)

Crenshaw also said:

I have a library of probably 3,000 CDs and 2,000 LPs, you know, of the vinyl
variety that nobody knows about any more? I still have a wall full of them, and
I purposely took samples of virtually every vocal style that’s known to exist. I
try and actually have a listening library so that when somebody says that they
me want to sound like Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn, or whoever it is, I’ll say, “Okay,
sure” and then I go and listen.
(Crenshaw 2009)

The kinds of demands faced by these musicians part of the music industry’s drive to
genericize world music, to put it in its place, so that it can be knowable, manageable,
manipulable, and, of course, profitable.

Note
1 For more on Paul Simon and Graceland, see Taylor (n.d.).

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Crenshaw, Randy. 2009. Telephone interview by author. 10 October.
Denselow, Robin. 2004. “We Created World Music.” The Guardian, 29 June, p. 10.
Feld, Steven. 1996. “Pygmy Pop: A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis.” Yearbook for Traditional Music
28: 1–35.
———. 2002. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture 12: 145–171.
Geitner, Paul. n.d. “African Pygmy Chants go Europop in Deep Forest.” http://www.deepforest.co/
dfpress_94-03-23PygmyChantsEuropop.htm.
Gonzalez, Fernando. 1990. “Paul Simon’s World Beat.” Boston Globe, 14 October, §B, p. 25.
Gronow, Pekka. 1998. An International History of the Recording Industry. Translated by Christopher
Moseley. New York: Cassell.
La Franiere, Sharon. 2006. “In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory.” New York Times, 22
March, §A, p. 1.
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Meintjes, Louise. 1990. “Paul Simon’s Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical
Meaning.” Ethnomusicology 34(winter): 37–73.
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Savigliano, Marta E. 1995. Tango: The Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview.
Shapiro, Peter. 2005. Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. New York: Faber and Faber.
Simon, Paul. (1986). Liner notes to Graceland. Warner Bros. W2-25447.
Steingold, Marissa. 2009. Interview by author. Los Angeles, California, 15 October.
Taylor, Timothy D. 1997. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. New York: Routledge.
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the International System: Global Histories of International Organizations, edited by Madeleine Herren.
Berlin: Springer.
———. n.d. “Music on the Move, as Object, as Commodity.” In The Cambridge History of the World,
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Wentz, Brooke. 1993. “No Kid Stuff.” Beat magazine, pp. 42–5.

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 25
THE SHIFTING
BOUNDARIES OF JAZZ
AND/IN POPULAR
CULTURE
Silvio Waisbord

Examining the relation between jazz and popular culture inevitably runs into slippery
semantics and the politics of cultural classifications. Musicians and critics have ques-
tioned the purpose of master definitions of jazz, and some even dismissed the point of
the perennial question “What is jazz?” Its musical voraciousness explains its lack of a
gravitational, identity core that neatly draws boundaries with other musical genres. Jazz
has been identified with a particular musical sensibility, marketing category, cultural
perception, and sonic structure. Its constant reinvention and plasticity have historically
made any attempt to outline jazz essence and boundaries elusive. Jazz can swing or not,
be commercial or not, be political or not. Jazz is an open-ended, multifaceted, ever-
changing idea (Ake, Garrett & Goldmark 2012: 6).
Likewise, defining popular culture is not easy either. As this collection demonstrates,
the meaning of popular culture is ambivalent. Even if we subscribe to anthropological
notions of culture, Geertz’s “webs of sense-making” and “a way of life,” “popular” is equiv-
ocal because it is embedded in different theoretical premises and normative frameworks.
“The popular” remains a contested notion (Grindstaff 2008). Does it refer to cultural
expressions widely shared among a population? The product of cultural industries driven
by market considerations and measured by industrial benchmarks? Pre-industrial folk
culture uncontaminated by commercialism, corporations, and commoditization? The
open-ended process of consumption, (re)signification, and reproduction of cultural forms?
Different ways of conceptualizing “the popular” give us different perspectives and conclu-
sions. Therefore, determining jazz’s relation and position in popular culture isn’t simple
because we are dealing with one concept that cannot be defined (“jazz”) and the other
(“popular”) that is understood in different and opposite ways.
The argument here presented is as follows: the complexity of the relations between
jazz and culture shows the artificiality and fluidity of cultural categorizations. Just as
there no single way of conceptualizing jazz or popular culture, there is no unanimous way
of understanding their relation. The volatility of jazz coupled with the ambiguity of
popular culture confronts us with the impossibility of establishing permanent, stable
 TH E SH I F TI N G BO U N D A R I E S O F J A Z Z

relations between them. One could certainly argue, as Simon Frith (2007) has eloquently
done, that “jazz is popular music,” but his position is embedded in a specific understand-
ing of what defines “popular” music and culture—namely, how people express their
identity and learn about themselves and others, as well as challenging power. Alternately,
it could be argued that jazz was once central to popular culture, at least in the US, but
its position dramatically shifted due to transformations in society, culture, music, and
industry. Jazz was a popular African-American form that became something different—
art, classical music—due to the combination of changes during the past half century, A
third interpretation is that, despite such transformations, jazz has maintained a continu-
ous relation with popular culture. It stands as a quintessential popular music in the US.
It remains the backbone of the American songbook, the foundational stone of popular
genres such as R&B, soul, rock, hip hop, and others.
So, what argument is right? All are right, depending on how “popular” is defined.
Because “popular culture” is elusive, and remains an analytical and normative construc-
tion, jazz cannot be pigeonholed in it or, for that matter, in any other cultural
classification. Given the elasticity of jazz and its refusal to be classified, it is a poor can-
didate to be boxed in the conventional categories of cultural hierarchies.

The Making of Jazz as Art

A common argument found in cultural studies and popular criticism is that jazz transi-
tioned from a popular form into art, from the lives of ordinary African-Americans to the
pantheon of the American arts; to use that hideous leftover from phrenology, jazz went
from “lowbrow” to “highbrow” during the second half of the 20th century. Underlying
this narrative is the understanding of popular culture as cultural expressions that are
“widely shared” in a population. From this standpoint, cultural manifestations that cir-
culate widely among considerable number of people are “popular,” but those that are
consumed by limited numbers aren’t. Jazz was born as popular music in the late 19th
century in the midst of African-American culture in New Orleans, first, and then
elsewhere. It was the music steeped in “tent shows, brass bands, drum and bugle corps
players, vaudeville and variety, work songs, field hollers, and dances” (Lipsitz 2007:
87–88). It eventually defined popular culture and music in the 1920s (“the Jazz Age”),
and became incorporated, mainstreamed, and defused by white America. A musical
genre, steeped in the traditions of a dominated minority, was integrated by a society that
remained racist and segregationist. If “popular” is determined by massivity—how widely
certain musical expressions circulate in the population—then jazz was unmistakably
“popular” music. During the 1940s, jazz performed by white artists dominated Billboard’s
list of number one singles.
If popular refers to musical expressions produced and consumed by “the people” or
industrialized and marketed products for a mass audience, jazz was unquestionably pop-
ular, too. This is the jazz that both champions and critics consider popular. It is the jazz
that Theodore Adorno (1989) memorably indicted for its complicity with capitalism.
From an essentialist conception about art and popular culture, with obvious racist and
elitist elements, Adorno condemned jazz because it failed to meet his litmus test of true
art: challenging rationality, raising consciousness about suffering, and staying autono-
mous from mass commercialism. Jazz was dismissed as the crass product of the cultural
industries, designed to sell and subject public minds rather than to stimulate critical
reflection (Markus 2006). That “popular” jazz was what Eric Hobsbawm (1975; see also

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Bounds 2012) championed against his narrow-minded comrades in the Communist

party who believes that true art was only revolutionary if it fitted conventional expecta-
tions: blatant, in-your-face anti-capitalism. Dissenting with his fellow political travelers,
Hobsbawn found jazz lively and subversive, but feared that it may become artistically
frozen and politically defanged by the forces of commercialism and the “high arts.”
Then, the big transition happened during the 1950s. Jazz began losing popularity as
measured by typical industry benchmarks such as recording sales, live performances, and
radio ratings. It occasionally reached high points in popular music, such as the remark-
able success of Dave Brubeck in the charts in the late 1950s and the ubiquity of jazz
tunes and composers in television and film soundtracks into the 1960s. Jazz, however,
couldn’t buck the trend and, in retrospect, its fortune was sealed. Some observers have
determined that 1959 was the year when jazz, if not dead, reached a turning point that
forever changed its place in American culture. Having been an indelible part of the
fabric of popular culture during the first decades of the century, jazz mutated into
“American classical music” or “high art.” Recent data reflects jazz’s position in the spec-
trum of American music: it is the ninth most popular commercial radio format (Arbitron
2013), the sixth most popular genre (Taylor & Morin 2009), and the eleventh genre in
record sales (Nielsen 2012).
What happened? What explains “the great transformation” of jazz? Three comple-
mentary arguments have been made to answer these questions.
One position suggests that the waning popularity of jazz was the result of jazz musicians’
own decision to abandon conventional popular music, oppose commercialism, and
embrace “jazz as art.” The rise of bebop in the 1940s and subsequent subgenres such as
“tonal jazz” steered jazz away from “popular music” by abandoning “swing,” and instead,
cultivating more artsy sensibilities. Jazz deliberately severed its linkages to popular music,
namely, danceable music played for entertainment or played at community events and
parties. Under the assumption that “dancing” is a defining element of popular music, this
position concludes that “the turn to art” made jazz something to listen rather than to
dance to, and forever changed its position in the music industry and US society. By jet-
tisoning dancing, as some observers have ruefully remarked, jazz eventually killed itself.
Trumpeter Nick Payton (2011) decreed that “jazz died in 1959” after it deliberately
“separated itself from American popular music.” The search for more introspective,
experimental, and musically ambitious sound tore jazz away from the mainstream.
Canonical jazz figures purposefully sought to drive a wedge between themselves and pop
music by cultivating abstraction, virtuosity, and artistic merit regardless of popularity. Jazz
was no longer interested in entertaining by making people dance. It still had Ellingtonian
swing but it was not dancing music that moved young masses. What had started as dance-
hall music at the beginning of the century evolved into art. Frequent commentary has
made reference to Miles Davis’ signature “back-to-the-audience” playing as symbolic of
the uninterest of jazz in endearing itself to the masses. And so, jazz gradually moved to
the margins of popular culture, a situation that basically remained unchanged as jazz went
through several phases and engendered numerous sub-genres—fusion, free, ambient,
postbop, avant-garde, and others. This state motivated critics and scholars to ponder the
same questions (“Is jazz dead or alive?”), perform musical and social autopsies, and specu-
late about whether and how jazz could be (or should be) resuscitated (Nicholson 2005).
A second argument draws attention to deeper social and musical trends that drove the
shift of jazz from “popular” to “art.” Jazz may have contributed as musicians experi-
mented with sound directions away from conventional danceable music, but the

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explanation for jazz’s rapidly changing fortunes were the combination of the steamroller
effect of rock and roll in white popular culture, particularly after the British invasion,
and the popularity of genres that appealed to African-American youth (doo-wop, rock
and roll, and others in the 1950s; soul, R&B, and funk in the 1960s). Jazz could not swim
against the strong currents in the music industry and mass taste among both whites and
blacks. Faced with unprecedented competition from other musical genres that attracted
attention (and made young people dance), it was not able to maintain the dominant
position it had during previous decades in popular culture. The loud roars of other
musics shook up the cultural/musical landscape of white and black audiences, and suf-
focated jazz to the point that they pushed it out of popular culture.
A third argument suggests that the “political” turn in jazz in the 1950s and 1960s
reinforced its drive away from mainstream popular music. The fact that musicians pub-
licly identified themselves with the Civil Rights movement, Black Consciousness and
Africanism further alienated jazz from the mainstream of white American society. Along
these lines, record marketing foregrounded the black identity in jazz music in tune with
the growing public stand of musicians in support of black politics (Smith 2010). Together
with other African-American musical genres, jazz was central to the cultural vocabulary
and identity of black activism. By embracing civil rights and black politics, jazz shunned
conventions of popular music and previous jazz genres, as free jazz did in the 1960s
(Anderson 2007). The radical politics of jazz musicians further severed its ties with
popular music given pop’s fear and cautiousness of politics that challenge racial and class
power (Brown 2010; Kreiss 2008; Appelrouth 2011). The “Black Arts movement”
espoused by jazz musicians represented a break with popular culture, both black and
white. The espousal of radical politics generated considerable debate among musicians
and critics who warned about the danger of breaking away completely from mainstream
American society (Rustin 2006; Heble &Wallace 2013).
As jazz removed itself from the conventional boundaries of popular culture, it became
progressively incorporated into standard conceptions of the arts. This shift was the
results of various forces at work. Jazz musicians themselves claimed the sacred mantle of
the “classical” tradition. From Ellington to Quincy Jones to Billy Taylor, a long list of
jazz musicians (as well as African-American actors and performers) proudly stated that
jazz is America’s classical music: “Jazz is America’s only true indigenous art form. It’s our
classical music, you’ve got to remember that. It’s the heart and soul of American music
and we can’t afford to let it slip into obscurity” (Chilton 2012). Such pronouncement
represented the search for social recognition that American society owed to African-
American music and musicians. Also, cultural makers such as arts institutions and critics
donned the “legitimizing” trappings of arts onto jazz in the way they labeled jazz musi-
cians (“maestro,” “genius”) and compared musical compositions to the standards of
Western classic music (Cohen 2004).
Simultaneously, the economy of jazz became analogous to classical music and opera,
too. Options for funding music are basically the marketplace, philanthropy, or public
subsidies. As the marketplace became less important for jazz, public subsidies (as well as
philanthropic funding) became increasingly critical (Anderson 2002), just as it is for
classical music, operas, and the arts. For example, the National Endowment for the Arts
funds programs such as Jazz in the Schools, Jazz Masters Live!, and the Smithsonian Jazz
Oral History. Additionally, jazz’s position in programs in highly-regarded institutions of
the American arts, such as the Kennedy Center and the Lincoln Center in New York
City, further cement its place in “high culture,” giving jazz legitimacy and visibility

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(Gray 2005). Given jazz’s precarious position in the commercial market, critics have
insisted on the need to protect a treasured musical expression through public and philan-
thropic subsidies (Nicholson 2005). This shift reflected jazz’s various cultural transitions,
from subversive to accepted music, from jiving joints to premier arts institutions, from
musical disorder to musical organizations, from folk art to commercialism to arts.
Just like classical music and opera, jazz has a well-established canon with “classical”
composers and “standards” (DeVeaux 1991). Annual sales and audience numbers are
similar. In England, for example, its annual audience is estimated at 2.5 million com-
pared to 1.6 million for opera and 3.3 million for classical music. A National Endowment
for the Arts survey found that the number of Americans attending live jazz concerts had
declined precipitously and consistently over a 26-year span. The consumption of jazz as
art also shows clear class and racial markers. There has been a steady increase in the
level of education among African-American jazz consumers, for whom jazz is a cultural
vehicle to reaffirm racial and class belonging compared to both white culture as well as
working- and lower-class black culture (Banks 2010; Graham, R. 2011).
In summary, the historical trajectory of jazz from popular culture to arts could be inter-
preted in terms of the forces of cultural hierarchy at work (Lopes 2002). Just as classical
music and drama became central to the politics of cultural distinction and taste in the
late 19th century and early 20th century (Levine 1989), jazz experienced a similar transi-
tion in musical/cultural hierarchies in the United States. In the 1920s, white America
saw jazz as a moral and musical threat in the cultural, radicalized wars of the time. Cultural
tastemakers saw it as dangerous because jazz threw into question long-standing distinc-
tions grounded in race, class, and ethnicity (Hersch 2007; Savran 2009). Fast-forward to
the height of the Cold War and jazz occupied a different position. Perhaps the most
emblematic example of this swift transition was the participation of several jazz greats as
“cultural ambassadors” for American “freedom” around the world (Carletta 2007). By the
time Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and others participated in “jazz diplomacy” in the
late 1950s, it was clear that jazz had crossed cultural boundaries. Certainly, jazz refused to
be depoliticized or repoliticized as the pristine flag-bearer of American liberty. Although
its “democratic” ethos of individual creativity amidst collective performance was rhe-
torically celebrated, its “blues” thread signifying racial oppression was deliberately
excluded. This tension was reflected by Armstrong’s famous cancellation of a diplomatic
trip to Moscow in protest of President Eisenhower’s refusal to send federal troops to Little
Rock, Arkansas, to enforce school-integration laws. Armstrong, whose affable image and
major star status were central to the US government’s propaganda, resumed his diplo-
matic commitments only after the National Guard was sent (von Eschen 2009). Also,
Gillespie’s refusal to attend a State Department briefing about “race relations” conveyed
a similar message: jazz maintained a complex status vis-à-vis attempts to vindicate its
democratic thread as symbol of Americanness. Both anecdotes illustrate that jazz
remained, both politically and culturally, in a fluid position even after it increasingly
gained legitimacy from the political-cultural establishment around mid-century. While
the creativity and improvisation of jazz were deemed contrary to “proper” musical stand-
ards a few decades earlier, those same virtues were championed as the paragon of
American individualism and freedom against Soviet propaganda and mind-control.
The transformation of jazz into “America’s classic music” meant that it had to acquire
the key elements of any conventional canon, with its standard pieces and geniuses. Its
history was reconstructed to fit the narrative of art with its foundational, turning-point
moments and “genius” artists in the pantheon (Laver 2009). The 1987 Jazz Preservation

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Act (JPA) approaches it as “a black American art form” that needs to be protected
because it is part of the national heritage and embodies essential American values
(Farley 2011). In contrast to the Cold-War era trope that foregrounded its “musical
freedom,” the JPA emphasizes a different conception of “Americanness” in jazz, more in
tune with multiculturalism and success, by highlighting its reflection of difference, its
role as a cultural bridge, and its position as a major example of the achievements of
African-Americans. Additionally, the proliferation of jazz programs in US colleges and
universities over the past decades (73 in 2013) and the consolidations of “jazz studies”
also certified its bona fide arts credentials and its sure move into the cultural establish-
ment (O’Meally, Edwards & Griffin 2004).
The trajectory of jazz confirms that cultural classification is not based only or mainly on
the “property of the text,” as literary critics would put it, but rather, that cultural distinc-
tions and hierarchies are artificial. They are intended to establish and maintain social
differences and cultural capital; that is, jazz means what arbiters of cultural taste and dis-
tinction builders want jazz to mean. The cultural properties of certain forms of art
(including music) are not fixed but are part of constant struggles for power to define cer-
tain patterns of acceptability and taste. Consequently, labeling jazz as popular, art or clas-
sical music entails a complex construction by which certain cultural expressions become
identified with certain classes and groups (Lopes 2005). Pegging music to cultural catego-
ries with unmistakable normative connotations is part of the dynamics of social stratifica-
tion. It is a process of cultural engineering interested in establishing symbolic demarcations
about production and consumption that reflect class, racial, and ethnic ambitions to affirm
difference. Rather than assuming that cultural expressions have fixed properties that place
them in a certain box, this position assumes that they move across time and society as they
are (re)constructed by certain organizations—museums, promoters, critics, funders, gov-
ernments, and so on. Cultural works do not belong in certain categories out of intrinsic
characteristics, but, rather, due to the dynamics of cultural hierarchy. The cultural uses
determine their place and perception. The symbolic value of cultural works shifts as cul-
tural entrepreneurs, driven a range of interests, pursue resignification of their position.

Betwixt/Between
Is jazz only art? Can a music that has historically taken pride on being fluid, and on
challenging and changing all types of boundaries, be neatly boxed in the categories of
popular/high culture or popular/art music given its place in the political economy of
culture? Can jazz, a quintessential global hybrid music, be categorized in well-defined
cultural hierarchies across the world, given different contexts of reception and activa-
tion of musical and social meanings (Jordan 2010; McKay 2006)? Isn’t any attempt to
classify jazz contrary to its very fluid essence?
Jazz may be consecrated in the holy soil of the arts in American society in the company
of opera, ballet and museums, but it is not its only place. If the uses and places of consump-
tion determine the hierarchy of any given music (or cultural expression), then the fact that
jazz is listened to in everyday places may further support the artificiality of jazz as elite art.
Its presence in myriad places—from “muzak” to commercial advertising, from summer
festivals to cruises, from corporate branding to hip-hop—suggest that it is not only
ensconced in elite, artsy locales. Sure, it is unlikely that Ornette Coleman might be cued
in the speakers of supermarket aisles or that bands aboard ships sailing in the Caribbean
play Mal Waldron or Sun Ra. They are more likely to play pieces identified with “light

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jazz” and “pop jazz” rather than dissonant jazz, musical idioms that conform better with
commercial criteria and pop aesthetics. The “repurposing” of jazz across a variety of social
places, played or distributed for consumption, puts different marks on its cultural belonging
in contemporary society. The continuous popularity of military and high school jazz bands
hardly suggest that it only belongs in the hallways of “highbrow” culture.
The popularity of performers loosely grounded in the jazz tradition—from Diane Krall
to Esperanza Spalding, from Herbie Hancock to Chris Botti—also call into question
whether jazz, in its vast diversity, fits neatly common divisions between popular and art,
and popular and elite culture. The frequent appearances of jazz-infused musics, particu-
larly the “American songbook” in the market charts, from Jamie Cullum to Michael
Bublé, from Tony Bennett to Rod Stewart, hardly convey that jazz is firmly locked in the
“arts.” It still finds room, albeit occasionally, in popular culture as commercial culture.
Also, constant referencing to jazz in hip-hop samples not only have helped to revitalize
some performers and recordings among younger audiences, but also speaks of the multi-
ple ways in which jazz remains present in popular culture.
These examples suggest the perpetually unstable position of jazz in American popular
culture. While it has been entrenched in the political economy of the arts, its social uses,
as well as exchange value as cultural marker, have been much more ambiguous. Just as
it may convey social respectability and classicism by association with the “high arts” in
the US, it continues to be identified with tropes of danger, non-conformism, and rebel-
lion. Representations of jazz in popular cultural forms such as literature, movies, and
television shows have insisted on associating jazz with countercultural spirits and “devi-
ant” behavior (Lopes 2005) as well as with notions of authenticity (George 2012).
If the permeability of cultural divisions reflects their constructed nature, the shifting
relations between jazz and popular culture attest to the slippery character of jazz and
cultural hierarchies. There are no fixed standards or appreciations but, rather, a perma-
nent process of attaching certain works and authors to an artificial canon wrapped with
the trappings of popular or high culture. From this perspective, the case of jazz is particu-
larly interesting because it has been historically viewed as straddling conventional
distinctions between high/low culture, black/white music, and dancing/listening music.
Jazz has been impossible to pin down in a single category, whether musical, social, or
racial, because it traversed and dissolved boundaries. Any effort to place jazz in either
“popular” or “elite/arts/industrial” culture violates its slippery essence and its rejection
of being classified in binary options. Because jazz remains an “unstable object” (Tucker
2012), its relation with/in popular culture is not straightforward. It is embedded in dif-
ferent ways in which people make music, express identities, and wage political battles,
corporations manufacture lifestyles and sell music, and critics establish cultural hierar-
chies. Furthermore, jazz, the perpetual dissolver of cultural hierarchies, reflects the
artificiality and dynamics of cultural distinctions. This is why we should cautiously
approach jazz’s relation with popular culture, arts, and other conventional classifica-
tions. Just as jazz defies classifications given its omnivorous musical appetites, it also
makes it problematic to attach to it any definition of the “popular.”

References
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Ake, D., Garrett, C. H. and Goldmark, D. (2012) “Introduction,” in Ake, D., Garrett, C. H. and
Goldmark, D. (eds.), Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries. Berkeley: University of California
Press, pp. 1–12.

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Anderson, I. (2002) “Jazz Outside the Marketplace: Free Improvisation and Nonprofit Sponsorship of
the Arts, 1965–1980,” American Music, 20(2), pp. 131–167.
Anderson, I. (2007) This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Appelrouth, S. (2011) “Boundaries and Early Jazz: Defining a New Music,” Cultural Sociology, 5(2), pp.
225–242.
Arbitron (2013) How America Listens to Radio. Available at: <http://www.arbitron.com/downloads/
Radio_Today_2013_execsum.pdf> [Accessed 21 November 2013].
Banks, P. A. (2010) “Black Cultural Advancement: Racial Identity and Participation in the Arts
among the Black Middle Class,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(2), pp. 272–289.
Bounds, P. (2012) “From Folk to Jazz: Eric Hobsbawm, British Communism and Cultural Studies,”
Critique, 40(4), pp. 575–593.
Brown L. (Ed) (2010) John Coltrane & Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and The Music.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Carletta, David M. (2007) “‘Those White Guys are Working for Me:’ Dizzy Gillespie, Jazz, and the
Cultural Politics of the Cold War During the Eisenhower Administration,” International Social
Science Review, 82(3/4), pp. 115–134.
Chilton, M. (2012) “Jazz is celebrated by stars of music and film,” The Telegraph, 1 May. Available at:
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/worldfolkandjazz/9238184/Jazz-is-celebrated-by-stars-
of-music-and-film.html> [Accessed 21 November 2013].
Cohen, H. G. (2004) “The Marketing of Duke Ellington: Setting the Strategy for an African American
Maestro,” The Journal of African American History, 89(4), pp. 291–315.
DeVeaux, S. (1991) “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,” Black American Literature
Form, 25(3), pp. 525–560.
Dougherty, C. K. (2007) “The Coloring of Jazz: Race and Record Cover Design in American Jazz, 1950
to 1970,” Design Issues, 23(1), pp. 47–60.
Farley, J. (2011) “Jazz as a Black American Art Form: Definitions of the Jazz Preservation Act,” Journal
of American Studies, 45(1), pp. 113–129.
Frith, S. (2007) “Is Jazz Popular Music?” Jazz Research Journal, 1(1), pp. 7–23.
George, C. (2012) “Keeping It ‘Reals’: Narratives of New Orleans Jazz History as Represented in HBO’s
Treme,” Television & New Media, 13(3), pp. 225–234.
Graham, R. (2011) “Jazz Consumption among African Americans from 1982 to 2008,” Journal of Black
Studies, 46(6), pp. 993–1018.
Graham, T. A. (2013) The Great American Songbooks: Musical Texts, Modernism, and the Value of
Popular Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gray, H. (2005) Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation, Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Gridley, M. (2007) “Misconceptions in Linking Free Jazz with the Civil Rights Movement,” College
Music Symposium, 47, pp. 139–155.
Grindstaff, L. (2008) “Culture and Popular Culture: A Case for Sociology,”  The ANNALS of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science, 619(1), pp. 206–222.
Heble, A. and Wallace, R. (eds.) (2013) People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz Is Now! Durham: Duke
University Press.
Hersch, C. B. (2007) Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Hobsbawm, E. J. and Newton, F. J. (1975) The Jazz Scene, Cambridge: Da Capo Press.
Jordan, M. F. (2010) Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Kreiss, D. (2008) “Appropriating the Master’s Tools: Sun Ra, the Black Panthers, and Black
Consciousness (1952–73),” Black Music Research Journal, 28(1), pp. 57–81.
Laver, M. T. (2009) “‘The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever’: Pierre Bourdieu and the Shifting Ontology of
Bebop,” Critical Studies in Improvisation, 5(1).
Levine, L. (1989) “Jazz and American Culture,” The Journal of American Folklore, 102(403), pp.
6–22.

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Lipsitz, G. (2007) Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Lopes, P. D. (2002) The Rise of a Jazz Art World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———(2005) “Signifying Deviance and Transgression: Jazz in the Popular Imagination,” American
Behavioral Scientist, 48(1), pp. 1468–1481.
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Eleven, 86(1), pp. 67–89.
Maxwell, W. J. (2004) “Ralph Ellison and the Constitution of Jazzocracy,” Journal of Popular Music
Studies, 16(1), pp. 40–57.
Mckay, G. (2006) Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain, Durham: Duke University
Press.
Nicholson, S. (2005) Is Jazz Dead?: Or Has It Moved to a New Address, London: Routledge.
Nielsen (2012) The Nielsen Company & Billboard’s 2012 Music Industry Report. Available at: <http://
www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130104005149/en/Nielsen-Company-Billboard%E2%80%
99s-2012-Music-Industry-Report> [Accessed 21 November 2013]
O’Meally, R. G., Edwards, G. H. and Griffin, F. J. (eds.) (2004) Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz
Studies, New York: Columbia University Press.
Payton, N. (2011) “On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore,” Nicholas Payton, [blog] 27 Nov. Available at:
<http://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/on-why-jazz-isnt-cool-anymore> [Accessed 21
November 2013].
Peretti, B. W. (2011) “Jazz, Culture, and Race in the New Deal Era,” Reviews in American History,
39(1), pp. 156–162.
Rustin, N. T. (2006) “Cante Hondo: Charles Mingus, Nat Hentoff, and Jazz Racism,”  Critical
Sociology, 32(2/)3, pp. 309–331.
Savran, D. (2009) Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class, Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Smith, J. A. (2010). “‘Sell It Black’: Race and Marketing in Miles Davis’s Early Fusion Jazz,”  Jazz
Perspectives, 4(1), pp. 7–33.
Taylor, P. and Morin, R. (2009) Forty Years After Woodstock, A Gentler Generation Gap, Pew Research
Center. Available at: <http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2009/08/12/forty-years-after-woodstockbra-
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Tucker, S. (2012) “Deconstructing the Jazz Tradition,” in Ake, D., Garrett, C. H. and Goldmark, D. (eds.)
Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 264–284.
Von Eschen, P. M. (2009) Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Walls, S. C. (2009) “Jazz Is Dead. Long Live Jazz,” Newsweek, 21 Dec. p. 68.
Whyton, T. (ed.) (2011) Jazz (The Library of Essays of Popular Music), Farnham: Ashgate.
Williams, J. A. (2010) “The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hip-Hop Music,” The Journal of
Musicology, 27(4), pp. 435–459.

Further Reading
Ake, D., Garrett, C. H. and Goldmark, D. (eds.) Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Anderson, I. (2007) This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Heble, A. and Wallace, R. (eds.) (2013) People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz Is Now! Durham: Duke
University Press.
Lopes, P. D. (2002) The Rise of a Jazz Art World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Townsend, P. Jazz in American Culture. Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press.

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 26
BODY, SPACE, AND
AUTHENTICITY IN
SHAKIRA’S VIDEO FOR
“MY HIPS DON’T LIE”
Anamaria Tamayo Duque

Released in 2006 as the second single from the album Oral Fixation Vol. 2, the song “My
Hips Don’t Lie” was performed by Shakira with Haitian singer Wyclef Jean in a video
directed by Sophie Muller and filmed in Los Angeles, California.1 In this video, Shakira
presents herself in diverse ways, each one appealing to different pop-music markets. In
this chapter I will address the ways in which her body creates and re-creates her persona
to address and enter the United States’ English-speaking market and, at the same time,
asserts her identity as exotic, non-white Latina in order to keep her space in the Latin
American music market. Each body presented in this video creates a new layer of sig-
nificance that makes the singer’s corporeality an overflow of meaning, and each body
presents itself as “authentic.” This corporeal multiplicity speaks about how the intercon-
nected, fluid, and relational identities circulate in the public sphere.

Multiple Bodies
The video starts outdoors within what seems like a colonial old town (Barranquilla)
with crumbled and washed out walls. The setting is a parade with people sitting at the
sides and figures of the Barranquilla carnival dancing in the center.
The scene cuts to Shakira’s torso dressed in golden scales. This is Shakira’s first body,
and appears for brief moments throughout the duration of the video. The only thing we
see is a naked back adorned with golden scales, golden hair, and golden-sparkling skin.
This female torso softly oscillates with the music, making sinuous movements from one
side to the other and giving a few glances towards the camera. She is the serpent-like
goddess; mysterious: she doesn’t reveal all and does not speak or sing when in this dress,
only moving softly with an “out-of-this-world” glance. Her body is immanent, ideal,
perfect.
The second body is the carnavalera’s body; she is dressed all in red with her hair flow-
ing wild, bare arms, and flowing ruffled skirt, the very incarnation of the sexy Latina.
She is resting against a wall that is painted with bright colors resembling the Colombian
 DU Q U E

flag, but this paint has a washed out old look. The setting is easily recognized as a street
in a low income neighborhood in Barranquilla, her birth place, albeit that in the video
she is placed in this neighborhood even though Shakira belongs to the upper classes in
Barranquilla social structure.
Sitting in a chair or sometimes standing, she is dancing sensually, opening and closing
her legs, isolating her torso, rotating her head, touching her lips. These enticing move-
ments are directed to Wyclef, who is placed in a similar location—a little shack as
weather-beaten as Shakira’s neighborhood—but his location references back to Haiti.
Both appear to be connecting from their places of origin, Barranquilla and Haiti, in
parallel socio-cultural contexts; both places are rich with long traditions of carnival
celebrations and both are located in the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993: 58).
When she dances in this piece, the moves used are those popularized in her early
works in Colombia and Latin America as a way to connect with her Spanish-speaking
longtime fans: doll-like moves (from the videos for her first albums) and belly dancing
reference her past.
These movements also make Wyclef take some interest in the Spanish language:
Shakira’s dance moves make visible Spanish-speaking Latin America, at least for Wyclef,
for whom it was devoid of interest prior to Shakira:

I never know she could dance like this

She makes a man want to speak Spanish
Como se llama . . . Shakira! Shakira!

This sexy Latin Shakira sings to Wyclef, looking at him and dancing for him, most of
the time ignoring the camera and giving her body and her movements the possibility
to speak truth:

Oh baby when you talk like that

You make a woman go mad
So be wise and keep on
Reading the signs of my body.

In this moment she points at her hips, shaking them with short and rapid movements
and also swinging them from side to side . . . those are the signs of her body. Wyclef
must constantly read the signs she is sending through her corporeality.
Both spaces change and Shakira and Wyclef are in a place filled with light transparent
pieces of fabric with which they play; the fabric layers can be recognized later as mos-
quito nets, a staple in any Caribbean town. They are looking for each other but are
unable to encounter them. Meanwhile, the lyrics intensify the sense that only through
dance could their mutual sexual attraction unfurl. Clearly, dance is the medium to get
noticed and to establish some kind of agency and presence. Once again, the lyrics
emphasize the power of the body to convey the truth and assert her presence in a space;
Shakira’s moves are the ones that give her the possibility of action.
Shakira also notices Wyclef when he directs his gaze to her, and, just like he desires
her, she also expresses her desire for him: she sits opening and closing her legs and mov-
ing her torso side to side. The background colors compose a Colombian flag that frames
her red dress. Both singers are presented as (mildly) wild creatures, exotic others filled
with passion, equals as outsiders pining for each other. Shakira cannot express with

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words her feelings. Is this why she asks him to read the signs of her body? Every time
Shakira sings this phrase about her body there is an obvious emphasis—in a very defined
movement of the hips—on where her truth lies.
Suddenly, a chorus of “baila en la calle de noche, baila en la calle de dia” (“dance in
the street at night, dance in the street in daylight”) cuts to Shakira as the center of a
circle of Barranquilla carnival characters who are clapping and dancing in the streets.
Her outfit is not one of the traditional carnival characters; rather, she keeps her belly
dancer reference and references the middle East with bustier, trousers, and a belt from
which hang veils. She sings, with the rest of the group, “Baila en la calle de noche, Baila
en la calle de día,” an invitation to dance on the streets day and night.
The street is finally the place of encounter: Wyclef is also in the street but on the
other side and is accompanied by the characters from the Haiti carnival. As they sing,
they come closer together as two carnivals become one. The carnival traditions of
Barranquilla and Haiti and the flows and circuits of the Black Atlantic are the com-
monalities that bring these two together, but, in order for this encounter to happen,
Shakira first had to prove herself via her moves and her hip shaking.
Another proof of her authenticity as Colombian and a Caribbean woman is needed,
so Wyclef asks her to prove her “Colombian moves”:

Senorita, feel the conga, let me see you move like you come from Colombia.

With a clarinet melody signaling a cumbia rhythm, the scene changes and Shakira is
dressed all in white, surrounded by white-skinned and white-dressed dancers. She is
wearing a trousers-dress combination and is dancing the cumbia, a dance known as the
national dance in Colombia for the last 50 years. The choice of white for the color of
the dress creates a strong contrast with the red dress of the Caribbean Shakira, espe-
cially given that usually the cumbia dancer’s attire is made with red and white gingham
fabric or with a variety of prints in vibrant colors.
In a semi-circle of dancers, she is placed in the middle, torso very upright, dancing
softly and slowly in contrast with the strong sudden movements of belly dancing and hip
hop portrayed in other parts of the video. Here the hips are also emphasized as a source
of power and affirmation but in a subtle way, through slow and delicate oscillation; yet
this is coupled with a strong, direct, kind of challenging gaze at the camera.
Cumbia is the embodiment of the Colombian nation’s creation myth. Born of a
love story between a black man and an Indian (indigenous woman), she is the womb
of the nation, giving birth to the prototype of the Colombian mestizo population.
Even though the cumbia dance is to be danced by a couple, in the video there are
only women, presented as angelic, their whiteness emphasized by their dress. This
fact cannot be overlooked because it reifies the mestizo project of whitenization of
the modern nation in Colombia, and presents cumbia dancers as a homogeneous
group, all light-skinned and mestizo looking, erasing differences present in Colombia’s
diverse population.

Mira en Barranquilla se baila así, say it!

Mira en Barranquilla se baila así.

“That is how one dances in Barranquilla,” exclaims Shakira, moving her long wide skirt
side to side in a way that loosely resembles the cumbia moves.

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The fact that Shakira danced the cumbia in the video attracted a lot of attention from
the Colombian media, and was seen as a strategy to assert her Colombian-ness locally
and abroad. Ever since her international success, Colombian fans felt betrayed by
Shakira’s international face, and, in her pursuits of the Anglo market, her first fans felt
forgotten. This cumbia-dancing Shakira is a way to present her ancestors, state her
authenticity as Colombian, and reconnect with the local market and fans.
“How exactly one dances in Barranquilla?” This phrase uttered in the video created
some controversy on YouTube where people responded to her video by posting their own
ideas about how one “really” dances in Barranquilla. Most of these responses highlighted
the values invested in the ideas of tradition and authenticity. The video responses were
of all kinds and portrayed different scenes of what people considered Barranquilla’s style
of dancing: spontaneous dancing in a Christmas gathering, an older couple dancing in
a bar, and another dancing champeta (Afro-Caribbean rhythm) in the street. The one
that obtained most commentaries and “likes” was the video of an anonymous tambora
dancer in one of the celebrations of the Barranquilla Carnival. In this video there is a
body framed most of the time from the neck down, shaking hips, shoulders, head and
torso, the dancer’s body creating a dialog with the drums, having fun and smiling while
dancing on a plastic table surrounded by a ring of other dancers clapping and cheering.2
The commentaries on the YouTube page compared the “authentic” dancing mulata
with the “whitewashed” dancing companions of Shakira’s video. The video responses to
Shakira’s “My Hips Don’t Lie” redress a process of erasure introduced by a climate of
social ambivalence towards the historical facts of the black experience in Colombia.
Ironically, this diversity engenders a process of erasure and assimilation of blackness in
Colombia (Wade 2009; Cunnin 2003).
The YouTube response videos suggest a new way to locate the national body in
Colombia. Dance and musical movements like champeta, salsa, and “traditional” dances
like mapalé, populated with aesthetic sensibilities of the African diaspora, are being
gathered to answer cumbia’s citational processes, which silence the hips with a false,
benign, multi-ethnic body-past.
After the cumbia dancing scene, Shakira returns to the street, finally meeting with
Wyclef. Shakira and Wyclef sing in the middle of the street, which is crowded with
dancers from both carnivals (Haitian and Barranquilla) and from hip hop dancers, as
well.

She’s so sexy every man’s fantasy a refugee like me back with the Fugees from a
3rd world country
Why the CIA wanna watch us?
Colombians and Haitians
I ain’t guilty, it’s a musical transaction
No more do we snatch ropes
Refugees run the seas ’cause we own our own boats.

The idea of a pan-Caribbean identity connects the criminalization of Colombians and

Haitians in the U.S.; both singers are refugees “from a third world country” for dif-
ferent reasons, migrating in search of the American dream. This narrative show both
Colombians and Haitians as not so different, since the sameness is in the body, in the
moves; the Afro-Caribbean heritage is present in festivities, dances, traditions, and ways
of living. That is why Shakira sings in the chorus that “this is perfecto”; it is the perfect

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match of two communities, in this case two individuals in the same situation—trying to
succeed in the Anglo market—being labeled as exotic, non-white other. In this case the
video looks like a test for Shakira, to see if she is authentic enough, Caribbean enough,
but also transnational enough to deserve Wyclef’s support, since, by the time the video
was released, he was a known face in the English-speaking music scene in United States.
Paul Gilroy shows how authenticity enhances the appeal of selected cultural commodi-
ties and has become an important element in the mechanism of racialization necessary
for making non-European and non-American musicians acceptable in an expanded pop
market. The discourse of authenticity has been a notable presence in the mass market-
ing of successive black folk-cultural forms for white audiences (Gilroy 1993: 98).

Oh, you know I am on tonight and my hips don’t lie

And I am starting to feel it’s right
The attraction, the tension
Baby, like this is perfection.

Conclusions
The bodies, then, are taken for vessels or sites of production and re-production of cul-
ture; objects and subjects to be guarded, regulated and closely observed. In Shakira’s
video for “My Hips Don’t Lie,” the body is the place of authenticity, its home base, and
a place of encounter. This song constantly places truth and authenticity in the moving
body because “my hips don’t lie” and also presents it as a source of communality, placing
Haiti and Colombia side by side, connected in a pan-Caribbean identity united through
carnivals.
In this video, four different bodies are being constructed. Each addresses issues of
ethnicity, identity, racialization, gender, national identity, and transnational spaces.
These bodies allow the circulation and re-creation of meanings that dance around the
concept of authenticity; in this case, as Shakira points out, the “signs of my body.” They
are inscribed with the narrative tropes associated with latinidad, exoticism, and the
pan-ethnic other (Molina and Valdivia 2004: 206).
The first body is the exoticism embodied, the mysterious and dark other, animalis-
tic, unattainable; this is the body of the excess, sexualized and objectivized. It is placed
in such a way as to allow the gaze; an object to look at, rarely displaying any agency since
it almost doesn’t look at the camera and only at the very end sings.
The second body, the Caribbean carnavalera, utilizes the tropicalism trope of the sexy
loud Latina: seductive, using red colors, with curvaceous bodies and long wavy hair. Her
sexual desire and availability are on display, as the camera centers its attention on her
navel, hips, and torso oscillations. Shakira portrays the sensual stereotype of the Latina
woman as sex incarnate, part of the popular class, still with some wild undertones. She
is barefoot and dances in a space very much like the lower neighborhoods of a Caribbean
town. She is the one born from the pueblo, the “authentic” Latina. As Molina and
Valdivia point out, “dance, especially the type involving movement below the waist, is
often racialized and sexualized within mainstream U.S. culture and not surprisingly
linked with the dynamic construction of latinidad” (2004: 213). This stereotyped con-
cept of latinidad operates in two ways, homogenizing and erasing specificities of Latin
American migrants in the United States, but at the same time creating a common
ground of encounter for dissimilar Latin American populations. This Caribbean

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carnavalera displays the “common denominator” in Caribbean countries and highlights

the cultural flows of the Black Atlantic.
In contradistinction with the sexy, red, devilish carnavalera, the cumbia dancing
Shakira is all dressed in white and surrounded by young virginal looking-dancers. What
is particularly interesting about Shakira’s cumbia dancing style and her outsider/insider
status as Colombian is the place of her version of Colombian identity. The idea of
Colombia as a nation, and Colombian nationalism, has been eroticized and constituted
in gendered terms, utilizing “fictional strategies” (Sommer 1990) that render gender,
race, and class conflicts invisible, just like the discourse on mestizaje in the cumbia myth.
(This eroticization can be seen in many other Latin American countries.) Cumbia can
be seen as a cultural practice that reproduces ideals of modernity, assimilation, upward
mobility, and urban citizenship, especially as practiced in the Barranquilla Carnival.
Whether the hip gyrates or moves from side to side; whether the beat is played before
the movement or if it is softly distributed throughout the movement, the oscillation, of
the hips; the way in which the shoulder movements respond to and interact with the
drums; or how softly or strongly one moves: all of these are social cues about cumbia’s
ethnic identity. The shoulders, the hips, the oscillating hips, the synchronicity between
movement and rhythm, the ways in which the space is used and the interaction between
the dancing and the music are factors that racialize the dancing bodies, setting them
within a specific racial structure of the Colombian Caribbean.
Shakira’s cumbia uses strong accents on the hips and soft, almost imperceptible, torso
movements. The dancers in the back adopt the aloof and soft gaze and positioning of
the head, while Shakira contrasts this with a fierce look toward the camera. This is
somewhat contradictory, since, while trying to display her authenticity, she chooses to
set herself apart from the cumbia dancers by adopting her own style of cumbia. Is this
particular style what created the controversy about Barranquilla dancing style?
The choice of dancers and dress clearly speak of an upper class barranquillera cumbia,
akin with the whitenization and Europeization of Colombia, but the YouTube responses
were always showing the “other side”: not the upper class, white-mestizo take on cumbia,
but the dancing style of the popular classes, the social dances in bars and in the street.
Not the cumbia myth displayed in official ceremonies or festivities but the everyday
dancing practices.
The fourth body could be called the “transnational pan-Caribbean ambiguous Other.”
This is a more palatable other than the first goddess-like body, less stereotyped as the
carnavalera body and not as essentialized as the cumbia dancing body. This one circu-
lates easily between many ethnic denominations. Shakira’s ambiguous body can belly
dance, dress as an odissi dancer, and sing a South African pop song (waka waka); in
short, she can occupy the space of the tame exotic Other in the western popular culture.
Her multiple body produces a fluid identity, shaped by migrations (of people, music, and
dances), marginalization, and mobilities.
Her body is marked as non-white and categorized and “we the refugees” by Wyclef
Jean, but at the same time it is whitenized, hair highlighted and language changed. Her
personal choices of love interests also contribute to her transnational mobility and whit-
enization. Her identity is as fluid as her torso movements; it resists classification.
This is the body that operates in the west always as a body of color, marked and exotic,
capable of many ethnic and racial denominations but not determined by any of them.
This body is exotic and mysterious, but not dangerous, unknown, nor as wild as others.
In a way this is an acceptable difference, a tamed otherness. Shakira states over and over

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in the song that she has the truth, the authenticity, in her exotic body, and specifically
in her hips. Even though this may be the claim of the song, it is not an issue of truth or
authenticity because, if Shakira’s dancing body is the place of fluidity and multiplicity,
it cannot be labeled authentic or true to anything. It will never be constructed as
authentic but as continually shifting and ambiguous. Let us then keep on reading the
signs of her body.

Notes
1 www.sonymusic.com, accessed December 10th, 2012.
2 Some video responses to the phrase “en Barranquilla se baila asi” are: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=3uxJK4_kUMQ, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=YkOm8qqMvQM
&NR=1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgY-3Fnt4CE, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endsc
reen&v=g4u8ww3RP8E&NR=1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3WZty_xAYg.

References
Cunnin, Elizabeth (2003) Identidades a flor de piel, lo negro entre apariencias y pertenencias: mestizaje y
categorías raciales en Cartagena (Colombia). Bogota: Universidad de Los Andes.
Gilroy, Paul (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.
Molina, Isabel and Angharad N. Valdivia (2004) Brain, brow, and booty: Latina iconicity in U.S.
popular culture. The Communication Review, 7(2): 205–221.
Sommer, Doris (1990) “Love and Country in Latin America: An Allegorical Speculation.” Cultural
Critique 16: 109–28.
Wade, Peter (2009) “Defining Blackness in Colombia: Razas y Articulaciones Raciales Trayectorias y
Debates Metodológicos.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 95(1): 165–184.

Further Reading
Beltran, Mary (2002) “The Hollywood Latina Body as Site of Social Struggle: Media Constructions of
Stardom and Jennifer Lopez’s ‘Crossover Butt.’” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 19(1): 71–86.
Blanco Borelli, Melissa (2009) “A Taste of Honey: Choreographing Mulatta in the Hollywood Dance
Film.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 5(2/3): 141–453.
Cepeda, Maria Elena (2010) Musical Imagi-Nation: US-Colombian Identity and the Latin Music Boom.
New York: New York University Press.

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 27
“WE CANNOT LIVE
IN OUR OWN
NEIGHBORHOOD”
An Approach to the
Construction of Intercultural
Communication in
Television News
Leonarda García-Jiménez,
Miquel Rodrigo-Alsina, and
Antonio Pineda

As a medium, television talks little about intercultural communication; that is, about
what happens when two different cultures interact. The dominant trend when discuss-
ing phenomena involving interculturality is to represent cultural minorities as such
(e.g., as immigrants): what they do, how they live, how they perceive their host coun-
try, etc., isolated from other cultural groups. Through the study upon which this chapter
is based, we have detected that television as a medium shows little interest in covering
the relationships forged among the different cultural minorities or between the minor-
ity and the majority. In addition to this underrepresentation of intercultural commu-
nication itself, a second factor which we shall examine in this study is the idea that
when television does address intercultural interaction, it tends to do so within a frame-
work of conflict, such that intercultural communication, encounter, and dialogue
between that which is culturally different is framed as an impossible reality that is
difficult to achieve. Other perspectives—possible interculturality or even unresolved
interculturality—fit even less into the television discourse. This issue becomes a true
social problem if we bear in mind television’s capacity to construct our knowledge of
reality, and therefore reality itself (Berger & Luckmann 1967). Despite the influence
and increasingly clear consolidation of digital communication, the traditional media
 I N TERCU LTU RA L CO M M U N I C AT I O N I N T V N E W S

are still powerful social institutions due to their strong symbolic capacity to construct
meaning (Thompson 1998). For this reason, if the audiovisual medium does not believe
that intercultural communication is possible, the discourse on intercultural conflict
becomes hegemonic and further complicates the not always easy cross-cultural
encounter. This ultimately promotes and constructs a more violent, exclusive, and
uncommunicative world.
For all of these reasons, in this chapter our goal is to methodologically address the
research problem we are presenting. The first step in any research is to define the key
concepts and issues and to present the state of the question; that is, what has been writ-
ten and researched to date on the topic that interests us, in our case, the media’s
construction of interculturality. Based on that, the second step is to choose the method-
ology and perspective with which the subject of study shall be addressed. To this end,
when a researcher is faced with a social problem, critical perspectives more accurately
portray reality; since they are committed to those who are (materially and symbolically)
excluded (Van Dijk 2009), they enable us to provide clearer answers to existing social
problems and to build a better (more communicative) world.
In this sense, Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA) is a perspective of study
committed to the inequalities generated by the media. It is thus the ideal perspective for
addressing the social problem embodied by the conflictive representation of intercul-
tural communication. To use CDA to analyze television discourse, we have chosen a
clear methodology which we shall illustrate with multiple examples organized into
tables, which will help both undergraduate and graduate students to conduct audiovisual
analyses from critical perspectives. Based on the results presented, we shall finally set
forth how television as a medium can construct inclusive discourses that promote a more
interculturally communicative world.

Basic Concepts and the State of the Question

Intercultural communication is the interaction that takes place between people from
different cultural backgrounds based on their nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation,
or gender. As Lustig and Koester (2003: 51) state, “intercultural communication occurs
when large and important cultural differences create dissimilar interpretations and
expectations about how to communicate competently.” Thus, interculturality is a
concept that has been linked to deep-seated social transformations, so much so that
interculturality is considered not only at cultural roots but also in processes of globaliza-
tion (García Canclini 1999). As Sorrells has stated:

In the context of globalization, our choices and actions are always enabled,
shaped, and constrained by history; relations of power; and material conditions
that are inextricably linked to intercultural dimensions of culture, race, class,
religion, sexual orientation, language, and nationality.
(2013: 20)

In fact, some authors talk about the interculturalization of the world (Demorgon 2000)
and suggest that interculturality is located precisely in third spaces (Bhabha 1994),
interstices (Silva Echeto 2013), hybridizations (Burke 2010; Silva Echeto & Browni
Sartori 2004), creolization (García Canclini 1999), and racial and ethnic mixing
(Rodrigo-Alsina 2012).

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As Fontana (2005: 101) reminds us: “Europe is the outcome of ethnic mixing that has
gradually assimilated and fused the human masses that arrived from the different Asian
or African invasions.” In a world characterized by interculturality, it is interesting to
study this phenomenon in a country which is a veritable crucible of interculturality:
Spain. This southern European country has gone from having 200,000 immigrants in
1982 to more than 4 million foreign-born people today, becoming the largest host to
immigrants among all the European Union countries and the second largest in the world
after the United States in terms of the absolute number of immigrants received (Martínez
Guillem 2013: 624).
Once we have identified the basic concepts around which this article revolves, as well
as the geographic context in which we have conducted our fieldwork, we must now
answer the following general research question: How do the media represent intercul-
turality? Even though there is a large body of studies on the representation of identities
(immigrants, ethnic, minorities, etc.) in the media (Bañon 2002; Alonso Belmonte,
McCabe, & Chornet-Roses 2010; Castelló 2008; Chan 2012; Granados Martínez 2013;
Martínez Lirola 2008; Mihelj, Bajt, & Pankov 2009; Sampedro Blanco 2003; Sowinska
& Dubrovskaya 2012), research into intercultural interaction still presents a gulf in
knowledge.
With regard to intercultural interaction, the analyses have centered primarily on
interpersonal and group spheres, more from psychological, sociological, and educational
perspectives (Sharifzadeh 2013; Lee 2012; Sakuraia, McCall-Wolfa, & Kashimab 2010;
Reiter & Gee 2008) than from communicative perspectives (Pekerti 2003). They have
focused to a lesser extent on intercultural interaction in the media, the subject of study
in this chapter. In this sense, we find few studies that have analyzed how the media
construct and/or represent the interaction among different cultures, as do Roy (2012)
in the case of the press and Kuppens and Mast (2012) and Martínez Guillem (2013) in
the realm of television. In short, the construction of intercultural communication on
television is a subject of study whose surface has barely been scratched. Below we shall
answer our research question using a methodological approach based on Critical
Discourse Analysis.

Methodology
Along with the general research question posed above (How do the media represent
interculturality?), we can formulate a series of secondary research questions to be
answered, namely: What are the main topics in the television discourses on intercultur-
ality? Who features in these discourses? How are the main subjects presented in the
news? What actions do these subjects take?
The answers to these questions imply a series of theoretical and methodological deci-
sions. First of all, within the different traditions of thinking, specifically perspectives
that have researched communication (Craig 1999), our approach draws from both the
sociocultural tradition and the critical tradition. The sociocultural approach theorizes
communication as a symbolic process that produces and reproduces shared sociocultural
models, mores, and patterns (Craig 1999: 144). What is more, individuals act in society
and in their relations with others based on these assigned meanings (Blumer 1969). On
the other hand, the critical tradition is based on the idea that communication tends to
generate inequalities, exclusions, and domination: “Communication conceived in this
way explains how social injustice is perpetuated by ideological distortions, and how

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justice can be restored through communicative practices that enable critical reflection
or consciousness-raising in order to unmask those distortions” (Craig 1999: 147).
The first tradition fits our research goal, given that mediated interculturality can be
a matrix of meanings and sociocultural patterns that guide the individual’s behavior in
society; likewise, the second tradition leads us to choose the Critical Discourse Analysis
(CDA) methodology, which has already been applied when studying the media. The
medium studied the most from the CDA perspective is the written press (Tracy et al.
2011). With regard to the topics of these studies, in order of importance they have
included ethnic/national minorities, gender, sexual orientation, and finally social class
(Tracy et al. 2011: 249). Therefore, we find that the topic most studied is minority iden-
tities in the press, as in Sowinska and Dubrovskaya (2012), Alonso, McCabe, and
Chornet-Roses (2010), and Chan (2012). More recently, the exploration of identity on
television is becoming a topic of increasing interest (Johnson et al. 2010; Mihelj, Bajt, &
Pankov 2009).
CDA is an analytical inquiry into discourse that primarily studies how the abuse of
social power, domination, and inequality are practiced, reproduced, and occasionally
combated by texts and speech in the social and political context (Van Dijk 2009: 149).
As noted by one of the leading scholars in the field, Teun A. Van Dijk (2009: 121), in
Critical Discourse Analysis it is essential to account for the relationships between dis-
course and social power. In the case of the media representation of interculturality, this
approach becomes crucial given that it can provide us with tools to check whether media
texts legitimize asymmetrical power relations in a context of interaction among cultures.
Critical Discourse Analysis starts with a social problem; in our study, the element
which is the target of criticism and discussion is the media-television construction of
“conflictive interculturality.” In conflictive media interculturality, the minorities do not
participate in constructing the discourse, and they are presented based on (and in con-
trast to) the features of the cultural majorities. This is because the white elites control
the production of discourse, while the ethnic minorities have hardly any access to it
(Van Dijk 2009: 13). A stereotyped, ethnocentric description of third world nations and
peoples is usually given (Van Dijk 2009: 100). Therefore, we find dominant civilizations
(the ethnic status quo) pitted against dominated civilizations because the minority
groups have limited access to the media discourse, and therefore the discourse of opposi-
tion has very limited room in the media (Van Dijk 2009: 175).
Based on this situation of domination and inequality, CDA tools help us to see how
intercultural interaction is represented on television, how the discourse of intercultural-
ity is constructed by the media, and, more specifically, what the intercultural media
representation of the in-group and out-group(s) is like (Van Dijk 1995: 248–249),
namely Us versus Them, which is important when gaining a descriptive picture of the
relationship between preeminent and subordinate groups. To organize the analysis, we
suggest a model of analysis organized on two levels (see Table 27.1): (1) macro, that is,
the ideas that articulate the news overall, and (2) micro, meaning how the specific
actions and subjects are presented. Let us now examine these two levels in greater detail.

Table 27.1 Matrix for analyzing television newscasts

Macro level: Topics Micro level (use of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and images)
Subjects Actions

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Macro Level
At this level, we must examine the topics; that is, the general ideas articulated in the
television discourse. They are the issues which give the discourses overall coherence:
according to Van Dijk (2003: 152), the topics represent “what the discourse is about,”
since they generally include the most important information in a discourse and explain
the coherence of the texts and conversations. The topics are “semantic macrostruc-
tures” derived from (micro-)structures of meaning or particular positions expressed in
the text.

Micro Level
The first factor to bear in mind at this level is lexicalization. According to Van Dijk, this
consists of analyzing the meanings of the words (Van Dijk 1995: 259). In this context,
it is important to bear in mind the nuances of meaning in our analyses: “Lexical analysis
distinguishes among subtle shades of meaning” (Johnson et al. 2010: 248). At this lexi-
cal micro-level, we analyze sentences, nouns, adjectives, and verbs to determine how a
discourse whose topic has previously been defined at a macro semantic structural level
has been constructed.
Lexicalization implies paying attention to the nouns and adjectives used in the
news narrative, as well as their implications; that is, the implicit information that
can be inferred from a text even if it has not been explicitly expressed (Van Dijk
2003: 155). These elements also shed light on how the Us and Them have been
constructed. This is probably the most crucial aspect of the micro level when detect-
ing the dominant idea or topic in the news story. In the same vein, we must also
examine what has been called the propositional framing, which is based on assigning
roles to certain actors:

In a social conflict, different social groups may be attributed different types or

degrees of responsibility or involvement in positive or negative actions. ( . . . )
ingroup actors will typically be selected as responsible Agents of positive acts,
and non-responsible Patients of negative acts of Others, and vice versa for out-
group actors.
(Van Dijk 1995: 258)

From an analytical standpoint, the elements we shall bear in mind at this micro level
are:

a The subjects-nouns that are featured in the news item; that is, the collectives that
are involved in the cultural interaction. Along with linguistic tools like
lexicalization, it is important that we also examine the images, i.e., how television
audiovisually constructs the interacting subjects.
b Actions-verbs used and their implications. On this point, the analysis should focus
on questions like: What kinds of actions do the main subjects perform? Are the
actions violent? Institutional? Do they promote intercultural encounters or, to
the contrary, do they render them impossible? What lexicalization is used through
the verbs that appear in the news item?

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Topics, Subjects, and Actions of

Intercultural Communication
The fieldwork was conducted with a sample of news items extracted from the television in
Spain. The sample was drawn from a selection of newscasts for six Spanish television sta-
tions. The set of newscasts collected for the study comprises all those broadcast in the
evening at primetime on Monday, Thursday, and Sunday, between May 15th and July 15th,
2012. The six stations selected included Antena 3, Canal Sur, Telecinco, Telemadrid, La1,
and TV3. Represented were broadcasts from both national (Antena 3, Telecinco, and La1)
and regional television stations (Canal Sur, Telemadrid, and TV3), as well as public (Canal
Sur, Telemadrid, La1, and TV3) and privately-owned (Antena 3 and Telecinco) stations.
All these stations offer general programming in Spanish, except for TV3, whose main lan-
guage is Catalan. The three national stations lead the audience rankings within the country,
with shares of 13.9% (Telecinco), 12.5% (Antena 3), and 12.2% (La1) (Kantar Media
2012). On the other hand, the broadcast areas for the three selected regional stations cover
the three most heavily populated regions in Spain: Andalusia, 17.88% (Canal Sur);
Catalonia, 16.02% (TV3); and Madrid, 13.75% (Telemadrid) (INE 2012).
The sample analyzed in this study consisted of televised newscasts that discussed inter-
actions among different cultures, which is why we have considered any story showing
interaction, dialogue, communication conflicts, or misunderstandings between people
with different cultural references in a broad sense. In this vein, there were 157 stories
on interculturality in the newscasts out of a total of 4,184 news items broadcast in the
sample. This initial figure in itself provides significant information on our subject of
study, since only 3.75% of the news items covered interactions among different cultures.
With regard to the first macro level of analysis, based on an initial screening of all the
videos, we determined the possible topics on intercultural communication. As a result,
we formulated three macro-topics, namely:

1 Possible interculturality. This is based on the televised news that constructs a friendly,
possible, desirable, necessary interculturality. There is no polarized and/or subordinated
Us versus Them, but instead collaboration and coordination or, in the worst-case
scenario, at least peaceful interaction. The minorities, who tend to have a voice in
the story, are constructed more independently than in the other macro-topics.
2 Conflictive interculturality. In this discourse, interculturality is not feasible, and
intercultural interaction is an impossible encounter among civilizations (which implies
failed communication, misunderstandings, etc.). Interculturality is polarized interaction
between a dominant Us (in-group) and a minority Them (out-group) defined by the
status quo. Fights, murders, drug trafficking, and other negative issues are situations in
which the dominant idea is that intercultural encounter is a pipedream.
3 Unresolved interculturality. This third macro-topic encompasses those news stories
that do not fit into the other two propositions on interculturality. It addresses
interculturality in a neutral, aseptic way. After seeing a story in this category, the
audience is not sure whether interculturality is desirable or not, whether it is possible
or not, or whether it will ultimately lead to failed interaction.

Judging from this first macro level, as mentioned above, television as a medium seems
largely uninterested in the process of intercultural communication. Yet what is more,

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and when it does turn to this topic, it is to present fundamentally conflictive intercul-
tural communication marked by misapprehension (see Table 27.2).
As we have posited in the social problem upon which this study is grounded, there is
a hegemonic discourse constructed on television that frames interculturality from the
majority vantage point and as a conflictive encounter. This manifest meaning, which
appears in the news stories in which interaction with ethnic or national minorities is
clearly problematic (such as clashes between immigrants and the Spanish police), con-
nects with the latent and more transcendent meaning: the (total or partial) denial of the
possibility of intercultural communication. One news story broadcast on Antena 3 on
June 18, 2012, very aptly summarizes this hegemonic idea. In it, the televised newscast
presented a street brawl of Latin gangs in which a young Latin American was murdered
in one neighborhood in the city of Barcelona. Due to this situation, the president of the
neighborhood association declares: “Stabbings, car break-ins, brawls . . . We residents of
this neighborhood suffer from it all. We cannot live in our own neighborhood.”
Within the topic of conflictive interculturality, the subjects are clearly polarized into
an Us, which is usually made up of members of Spanish culture (in-group), versus a
Them (out-group), which tends to be made up of minority cultural groups (see
Table 27.3). Thus, the Us is the police, neighborhood associations, Spanish fishermen,
or Spanish victims (of thefts or murders), in contrast to a Them made up of gypsies,
Romanians, sub-Saharan Africans, Poles, Latin American gangs, and Dominican
Republic nationals. This Them tends to be accompanied by adjectives such as “illegal,”
“trafficking,” “furtive,” and “criminal.” The actions of Us tend to involve defense, in an
Us in which the State security forces are an oft-recurring theme that “dismantles,” “acts
against,” “defends,” or “protects” the Spanish people from the threat of that which is
culturally or ethnically different. In contrast, the Them that threatens this Spanish
majority “works illegitimately,” “attacks,” “acts recklessly,” “destroys,” “traffics,” “steals,”
“murders,” “gets involved in street fights,” and “exploits.” The images support the dis-
courses and sometimes stress the degree of violence, including real scenes of the conflict
being reported on (such as the clash between the police in Gibraltar and the Spanish
fishermen in the Strait of Gibraltar).
With regard to the second most recurring topic, “possible interculturality,” when
there is a peaceful intercultural encounter based on understanding, it is often situated
within the framework of institutions: intercultural film festivals (TVE1, 6/17/2012;

Table 27.2 Distribution of topics by television station

Station Conflictive Possible Unresolved Total
interculturality interculturality interculturality
Tele 5 14% (22) 5% (8) 3.1% (5) 22.2% (35)
Telemadrid 12.7% (20) 3.1% (5) 1.9% (3) 17.8% (28)
Antena 3 4.4% (7) 2.5% (4) 0 7% (11)
Canal Sur 1.2% (2) 5% (8) 1.9% (3) 8.2% (13)
TVE 1 17.2% (27) 10.1% (16) 3.8% (6) 31.2% (49)
TV3 7.6% (12) 4.4% (7) 1.2% (2) 13.3% (21)
Total 57.3% (90) 30.5% (48) 12.1% (19) 100% (157)

314
Table 27.3 Subjects and actions on the television newscasts within the topic of
“conflictive interculturality”
Broadcast Us (in-group) and Them (out-group) and
date actions performed actions performed
TELECINCO
20/05/2012 Spanish victims Colombian hitmen
21/05/2012 Black immigrants
21/05/2012 Police, the Spanish state Clan, mafias, gypsy drug traffickers
28/05/2012
28/05/2012 The police are harassed by Senegalese illegal street vendors
immigrants and immigrants attack Spanish
police
03/06/2012 The police dismantle Chinese workers exploited by their
underground sweatshops where fellow countrymen in subhuman
Chinese nationals exploit their conditions
fellow countrymen
04/06/2012 The Spanish police dismantle a
gang of robbers whose products
end up in supermarkets run by
Pakistani nationals
31/05/2012 Spanish merchants complain Chinese massagers work on the
about unfair competition beach illegally
28/05/2102 Young Russians act recklessly on
the streets of Spain
09/07/2012 Young Malian men wreak
destruction and sow chaos in a
neighborhood of Palma de
Mallorca
TELEMADRID
18/06/2012 Police take action against a gypsy Gypsy drug dealers
clan selling drugs
21/05/2012 The police fight against clans of Gypsy mafias illegally occupying
drug-dealing gypsies Spanish houses
31/05/2012
28/05/2012 The police defend themselves Attacking African immigrants
against an attempted lynching
by African immigrants
24/06/2012 Madrid residents enjoy the river At the same time, Romanians
during the summertime illegally fish in the same river
28/05/2012 Gypsy junkmen and foreigners rob
Spanish industrial estates
07/06/2012 Chinese hospitals deal in organs
removed from living and
executed prisoners
(continued)
Table 27.3 (continued)
Broadcast Us (in-group) and Them (out-group) and
date actions performed actions performed
10/06/2012 Polish citizens involved in a fight
over cutting weapons
24/06/2012 Dominican nationals arrested in a
street brawl using cutting
weapons
25/06/2012 Latin gangs commit murder or get
involved in street brawls
10/06/2012 Legal Spanish lorry drivers Pirate foreign lorry drivers who
condemn the unfair work outside of legal regulation
competition from illegal foreign
drivers
ANTENA 3
12/07/2012 The Spanish police protect Romanian minors who have been
Romanian minors who have sexually exploited by their own
been sexually exploited by their families
own families
18/06/2012 Residents complain about the Latin gangs involved in street
noise and constant fights fights and brawls
caused for years by Latin gangs
in a Barcelona neighborhood
24/05/2012 Spanish fishermen and police feel Gibraltar police and fishermen
threatened by Gibraltar’s police harass Spaniards
in the Strait of Gibraltar
27/05/2012 Spanish agents cornered and Sub-Saharan immigrants threaten
harassed by sub-Saharan the Spanish police “with a
immigrants in a Madrid slipper”
neighborhood
31/05/2012 Spanish tobacco merchants are Romanian criminals attack tobacco
robbed by Romanian criminals shops owned by Spanish
merchants
TVE 1
10/06/2012 A judge/the Spanish justice Most organized crime has
24/05/2012 system fights against organized international connections
crime in the part of the
European Union headquartered
in Spain
24/06/2012 Spanish police attacked African immigrants attack Spanish
police officers in an internment
centre and flee
TV3
12/07/2012 Regional police close driving Chinese citizens with language
schools which engage in illegal problems illegally secure their
practices driver’s licenses at Catalan
driving schools
 I N TERCU LTU RA L CO M M U N I C AT I O N I N T V N E W S

CanalSur, 5/31/2012), an exhibition featuring the work of a Lebanese artist (TVE1,

6/24/2012), the Ibero-American conference on constitutional justice (CSur,
5/17/2012), and the United Nations’ search for young adults to work in the organiza-
tion (TVE1, 7/8/2012). This implies top-down interculturality orchestrated by the
(political, cultural, economic, etc.) elites, given that what is “natural” outside these
standardized settings seems to be the impossibility of normalized, peaceful interaction.
Other non-conflictive contexts of possible interculturality are characterized by eco-
nomic interaction (such as international investments), festivals in which the in-group
and out-group interact peacefully, or interaction based on summer tourism. In this case,
the Us is once again made up of Spaniards, but their presentation is not characterized
by the heavy polarization which we noted in the topic of “conflictive interculturality.”
The Them is made up of tourists, foreign citizens, and investors or international artists,
and the adjectives used to define them are much less loaded than in the previous topic.
The actions are defined by verbs such as “invest,” “get rich,” “enjoy,” “celebrate,” “tri-
umph,” and “inspire” (see Table 27.4).
Finally, the third macro-topic of “unresolved interculturality” had the lowest empiri-
cal presence in the television coverage of intercultural communication. This is once
again indicative of a deeper trend: television offers a closed discourse on interculturality,
one that is not open to other possible interpretations by the audience. In the news items
on this topic, the media does not “resolve” whether or not intercultural encounter is
possible, if it actually takes place, or, to the contrary, whether it will continue to be
characterized by conflict. Thus, once again, the Us versus Them is polarized (just like
in the “conflictive interculturality” topic), yet in this case as an action open to
subsequent future development. However, this development will rarely be known to the
audience because of the heavy present-time focus and obsolescence of the information
that characterizes the audiovisual media. In the majority of cases, this is an Us which
“condemns,” “protests,” or “issues statements” in favor of working with or protecting a
Them which has suffered from situations of inequality (see Table 27.5).

Working towards a “Possible Interculturality”

As we have seen in the analysis, “conflictive interculturality” is the most common
hegemonic discourse, one that has even come to colonize the discourse of “possible
interculturality.” Let us recall that the latter has mainly appeared in extraordinary con-
texts (institutional, festivals, economic, etc.) that are dissociated from everyday life.
This situation of impossible cultural relations constructs a more conflictive world. What
is more, audiences that have more exposure to television will show a more violent per-
ception of interculturality, as noted by Gerbner and Gross (1976) in their cultivation
theory on televised media violence.
Critical discourse analysis takes an explicit stand and strives to effectively contribute
to resisting social inequality (Van Dijk 2009: 149). Based on this idea, we believe that
Spanish media stories are constructed by a white, hegemonic majority which does not
believe in (or is unable to understand) intercultural encounters beyond the institutional
canons or relations with rich, powerful nations. In this vein, we should also bear in mind
the logic of televised news production, which is characterized by instantaneity and brev-
ity, leaving little room to contextualize or more deeply examine the information.
Another factor to take into account is that spectacular images are naturally going to
have greater pride of place on televised newscasts, regardless of whether they are valuable

317
Table 27.4 Subjects and actions on the television newscasts within the topic of
“possible interculturality”
Broadcast date Us (in-group) and actions Them (out-group) and actions
performed performed
TELECINCO
03/06/2012 Valencians (region of Spain) Russian tourists and airline which
will offer “direct weekly flights
between Valencia and Moscow”
03/06/2012 Spaniards Wealthy foreigners, “tourists and
07/06/2012 investors with high purchasing
15/07/2012 power ensconced in the Costa
del Sol” (Andalusia)
Chinese nationals who get rich in
Spain
08/07/2012 Spaniards Foreign nationals (of the U.S.)
who come to enjoy the running
of the bulls in Pamplona
12/07/2012 Young Spaniards and British tourists who “disembark in the
Benicassim music festival” (Valencia)
15/07/2012 Spaniards Tourists who send traditional
postcards despite the surge in the
new technologies
15/07/2012 Spanish businesspeople and London-based and Asian investors
citizens who invest in London’s in the British real estate market
real estate market
TELEMADRID
17/05/2012 Prince Felipe calls for a Latin American space
strengthening of democracy in
Latin America
21/05/2012 Madrid natives who live in China Chinese citizens living in the
and are participating in the TV province of Guangzhou
show “Spaniards around the
World”
17/06/2012 Spaniards who enjoy U.S./ United States (represented by
Western culture in a Spanish cultural elements, not a group)
city (Algete)
ANTENA 3
08/07/2012 Europeans celebrate the French– “Non-Europeans”
German reconciliation after
World War II through the
figures of Angela Merkel and
François Hollande: “We
Europeans”
28/05/2012 Spaniards Foreigners who enjoy Spanish
products: “Spanish food is
popular abroad”
 CANAL SUR
17/05/2012 The Prince of Asturias advocates Latin Americans
closer ties between Spain and
Latin America
17/05/2012 Spanish artists: Sara Baras and Charlize Theron, who learned how
Juan Lebrón to dance flamenco from a Spanish
teacher, will participate in a
documentary aimed at spreading
flamenco around the world
27/05/2012 Andalusian artist Lara Bello finds New Yorkers and artists like Lou
success in New York Reed and Patti Smith
27/05/2012 Cultural mixing and intercultural encounters at a Moroccan music
festival. Spanish artists such as Lole Montoya are inspired by
Moroccan culture
31/05/2012 Spanish film producers who are Foreign producers who are
participating in the participating in the international
international Cinemas of the Cinemas of the South festival
South festival
TVE 1
28/05/2012 Spanish food and beverage Foreign consumers
industry grows and creates jobs
in the midst of a recession

Table 27.5 Subjects and actions on the television newscasts analyzed within the topic
of “unresolved interculturality”
Broadcast Us (in-group) and actions performed Them (out-group) and actions
date performed
TVE 1
21/05/2012 The police have issued a circular that Immigrants
bans mass arrests and indiscriminate
raids of immigrants for ethnic reasons.
The police are advocating
proportionate, respectful identifications
CANAL SUR
21/06/2012 A human rights association of Sub-Saharan immigrants have
Andalusia condemns Spanish police been arrested and have suffered
abuses of sub-Saharan immigrants from mistreatment by the police
TV3
11/06/2012 The regional police, social Latin American associations
organizations working with headquartered in Catalonia. The
immigrants, and the public Latin American gangs are involved
administration are calling for more in street clashes, and in this context
music mediation experiences to the Latin Associations are advocating
promote the integration and the continuation of integration
appeasement of Latin gangs projects that encourage peaceful
coexistence among gang members
 G A RCÍ A - J I M ÉN EZ, RO DRI G O - A L S I N A , A N D P I N E D A

or not, which ultimately means that news stories which are less important but have
enormous visual impact are featured. For example, we could cite the clash between
armed police officers and sub-Saharan immigrants in the centre of Madrid. What in
theory is nothing other than a situation of tension found on any workaday police beat
ended up becoming a news story and placed sub-Saharan immigrants who were selling
CDs in the center of Spain’s capital at the heart of the controversy.
Bearing these factors in mind, we have started with the proposition that the media
can be used to strive to transform conflicts. The Berghof Handbook for Conflict
Transformation (Melone 2002) explores the possibility that instead of being a source that
exacerbates conflicts, the media can instead seek a way to facilitate intercultural dia-
logue. How can we facilitate intercultural dialogue from the media? How can we foster
a true “possible interculturality” in which the minorities are not constructed from the
majority but instead independently? Based on our study, we are going to close this chap-
ter with three comments that partly answer these questions.
Firstly, we have to call on television professionals to become more aware of the social
problem presented in this chapter. This greater awareness would then act to more effec-
tively filter the news on conflictive interculturality and would encourage them to better
contextualize the news stories which cover intercultural conflict. This, in turn, would
enable audiences to get “the whole picture,” as heralded in the slogan of The Guardian.
A decline in news items on “conflictive interculturality” and a clearer focus on “possible
interculturality” and even the polyphonic news stories that usually characterize “unre-
solved interculturality” would foster the intercultural dialogue mentioned by the Berghof
Handbook.
With regard to the subjects, we should overcome the dichotomous category of Us
versus Them, a major conceptual polarization in CDA. This dichotomy places the inter-
locutors in separate spaces from which it is trickier to construct communication,
understood in its phenomenological sense as communion, encounter, empathy, and
identification with the other. What is more, overcoming the binary Us/Them logic
would enable minority cultural identities to be constructed under equal conditions as
the hegemonic majority identity. Voice must be given to the cultural and ethnic minor-
ities as an independent symbolic force, not only based on the beliefs held by those who
have the power to construct the story.
Finally, the subjects and actions that appear tend to be very homogeneous, as dis-
cussed in the previous section. For this reason, we must also construct more diverse
subjects and verbs and a range of interlocutors and actions that would better reflect a
reality which, as we know, is actually polyhedral and complex. For example, the repre-
sentation of ethnic and/or cultural minorities in professional milieus, universities,
homes, or free-time settings would be one way of applying similar criteria of noticeabil-
ity to both majorities and minorities. And this is one way television can become a clear
mediator and constructor of an intercultural encounter that is both possible and
necessary.

Acknowledgements
This research project, “Analysis of Audiovisual Narratives on Civilizations and
Cultures: Representations and Interpretations of Television News Narratives,” was
supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of Spain (grant number CSO2011-
23786).

320
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 28
ONLINE TABLOID
NEWSPAPERS
David Rowe

Introduction: News and the Popular

The place of the news media within popular culture – including, of particular relevance
to this chapter, newspapers – has long been a matter of disputation. This is a question
that goes to the heart of what it means to classify some forms of culture (such as rock
music) as popular and so typically associated with unreflective commodified regimes of
bodily pleasure, while other implicitly unpopular forms of culture (such as orchestral
music) are traditionally regarded as having a more serious and, indeed, higher purpose
of moral and spiritual edification (Rowe 1995). Newspapers are implicated in such
hierarchies of culture (which are, of course, contested) because they bear elements of
different cultural forms of varying degrees of distinction and so cultural capital (Bourdieu
1984). They are commercial enterprises, have mass readerships, and contain a good deal
of lowbrow content about travel, sport, fashion and social events, but historically their
principal rationale as institutions of modernity is as part of the crucial fourth estate that
safeguards society as a whole by acting as a watchdog on those in power on behalf of the
citizenry. Newspapers are expected to temper their commercial interests, such as to
sponsors, advertisers and even to their own proprietors and shareholders, by practicing
objective journalism, the crucial “textual system of modernity” (Hartley 1996: 34), in
pursuit of the wider public interest.
One way of dealing with these contending pressures has been to divide newspapers
into two types—the broadsheet/quality versus the tabloid/popular—with the former
assuming cultural superiority as purveyors of serious, politically significant news over the
latter, which is in turn regarded as devoted to the trivia of everyday life and, especially,
to gossip. Placing broadsheets and tabloids at opposite poles of a quality spectrum has
enabled not only judgments to be made about their respective seriousness, but has also
suggested that a process exists by which changes in their cultural value can be measured.
This process is termed tabloidization, and is the subject of considerable debate in popu-
lar culture and communication and media studies (Australian Journal of Communication
2011; Dahlgren and Sparks 1992; Johannsson 2007; Sparks and Tulloch 2000; Turner
1999). For example, can the tabloid be precisely measured, and does it correlate neces-
sarily with newspaper size, especially now that many former broadsheets have shrunk to
the mid-sized Berliner format (such as the The New York Times and The Guardian) or
even gone fully to tabloid proportions (like The Times and The Independent)? Does
 ROW E

tabloidization apply to media other than newspapers and so constitute a wider process
(Langer 1998)? And is ‘the tabloid’ necessarily a marker of inferiority? Perhaps its flour-
ishing is a positive indication that the old-style class-, gender- and ethnicity-based
elitism that traditionally characterizes a broadsheet sector dominated by upper-class,
Anglo, Western males is now in decline (Lumby 1999). Interpreted in this way, tabloidi-
zation might be regarded as a favorable move towards a more open, inclusive and
democratic institutional media.
These questions are important not only for media and popular culture scholars but for
any citizen of the world, irrespective of whether they read paper-format news (a practice
in decline in most affluent societies but actually still on the rise in nations with rising
rates of literacy: Rowe 2011). What is currently happening to newspapers in the most
advanced media markets is an important test case for developments in popular culture
in general. Current sweeping changes to information and communication technologies
and to the dynamics of cultural production and consumption are disrupting familiar
patterns of popular cultural pleasures and uses. They apply also, of course, to other media
such as broadcasting, film, books and recorded music, where the processes of making,
evaluating and using popular cultural texts are also being re-fashioned (Gauntlett 2011;
Jenkins 2006) in what has been broadly conceived as an emergent “network society”
that has further undermined the already shaky sender-receiver-response model of mass
communication (Castells 2000). But newspapers have a special place as the longest
established mass medium for news and entertainment, as the largest employers of jour-
nalists and as the primary creators of news content on which other institutional media
(notably broadcasters and news websites, the latter also now operated by major newspa-
pers) and social media (such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Tumblr) substantially rely
for the information on which they elaborate and comment. By now operating in mul-
tiple formats—paper, online, tablet and mobile—the label newspaper is now something
of a misnomer and its forms, applications and audiences more fluid than was conceivable
barely a decade ago. What have been the engines of these thoroughgoing changes, and
what are its popular cultural implications?

New Technologies, Reader Experiences, Spaces

and Audiences
Newspapers, like vinyl music discs, were once highly—and exclusively—tactile forms of
popular culture. But while record lovers could view highly designed covers and read
elaborate sleeve or liner notes, they still needed an electronic device to hear the music.
By contrast, news in paper form is determinedly low-tech. Despite the increasingly
sophisticated design, layout and high-resolution photography embedded in their produc-
tion, by the time the newspaper reaches its user it is simply print on the page. It can only
be navigated by the physical act of turning those pages, guided by a modest index and
the habits of reader use and familiarity. Readers can savor the pleasure of this physical
engagement with the newspaper, especially in the leisurely practice of reading the large
weekend editions, which traditionally contain less ‘hard’ news and more reviews of
music, theatre, film, restaurants, recipes and so on than the weekday editions, as well a
greater number of ‘soft’ human interest stories. Splitting up the newspaper into supple-
ments or tear-outs facilitated newspaper reading as a social practice, enabling several
people to read its different sections simultaneously, and often in the same room (see the
Sally Mann photograph reproduced in Hartley 1996: 15). The experiential materiality

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 O N LI N E TA BLO I D N E W S PA P E R S

of engaging with the newspaper has not only been important to readers, but also to many
(especially older) editors and journalists, who relish getting “ink on their fingers” as a
sign of occupational authenticity (Rowe 2005).
Newspapers are not homogeneous in their structure, but have various common fea-
tures with significant permutations. The front page, with its signature masthead and lead
story headline, is matched by a back page that often contains the primary sports cover-
age. Thus, the physical newspaper can be read easily ‘in reverse’ according to reader
disposition and taste. The so-called ‘front end of the book’ contains the news stories
deemed by editors to be the most important, with the rest of the newspaper divided into
a range of sections, including the opinion, letters, features and domestic and interna-
tional pages, interspersed with display advertisements. Newspapers once contained very
large sections of small ‘classified’ advertisements for jobs offered or wanted, services,
houses, second-hand cars and other home goods paid for by companies and individuals.
These were the ‘rivers of gold’ that, along with large advertisements, subscriptions and
an everyday cover price, made major newspapers such as The Sydney Morning Herald, The
New York Times and The Washington Post highly lucrative media properties. As has often
been pointed out, classified and display advertising revenue has been reduced in propor-
tion to the extension of Internet use, and the ‘rivers of gold’ have been reduced to
tributaries (Tiffen 2009).
Newspapers have typically served different spaces and social strata. They could be
national (and even some, like the International Herald Tribune or the South China Morning
Post, aimed, respectively, at an international travelling or multi-nation regional reader-
ship), regional, civic or local, and tailored to different occupational and educational
levels (again tending to follow the lineaments of the broadsheet/quality and tabloid/
popular spectrum). Their readerships—reached through a daily subscription to the
home/workplace (distributed in countries such as Britain via suburban newsagent stores
employing a casual workforce often comprised of schoolchildren), via the newsstand
(with their prominent street presence) or through street news vendors noisily announc-
ing availability through the repetition of the newspaper’s name—were fairly predictable
and ‘loyal’ to one or other newspaper. Newspapers are printed in a range of morning,
afternoon and evening editions, with the products of their printing presses put onto
trucks and trains to their various distribution hubs. This industrial process of making and
circulating printed paper involves a division of labor between textual content producers
(editors, journalists and photographers) and production personnel (compositors and
printers) that were once largely co-located in large industrial complexes and sometimes
clustered in signature newspaper precincts (such as London’s Fleet Street, which became
a metonym for Britain’s newspapers in general). The following discussion will focus on
the newspaper industry in that country as an especially notable case of a long-established
and internationally significant newspaper industry that has been transformed in the last
four decades, with important politico-cultural consequences for the UK and beyond.
It is readily apparent that the focus on the paper-based product that once governed
the newspaper world is shifting in information and communication technology (ICT)-
rich environments. The development of new technologies, especially computerization,
disrupted the occupational division of labor as journalists acquired the ability to input
their text directly and paper layout became easier. This created tension between
partially-unionized journalists and the fully-unionized printers who had managed to
perpetuate, late into the 20th century, the restrictive craft practices (advantaging mainly
working-class white males) that, for example, allowed sons to inherit their fathers’ jobs

325
 ROW E

(Negrine 1994, Chapter 4). The notorious 1986 Wapping dispute, in which, with the
strong support of the Thatcher Conservative government, the Rupert Murdoch-led
News International broke Britain’s newspaper’s industrial order, was a significant sign-
post to the future of newspapers (and heralded the passing of Fleet Street as its spatial
center and spiritual home). After leaving Fleet Street for the Docklands area using the
ruse of establishing a new newspaper, Murdoch introduced new technologies that
destroyed many ‘processing’ jobs and sacked those who went on strike, replacing them
with a strike-breaking workforce from overseas and from rival unions. With journalists
now using computers to do many of the tasks once performed by other staff in the cre-
ation of newspaper content, the later rise of the Internet provided the ‘immaterial’
means that bypassed the need for paper in the distribution and circulation of the now
anomalously named newspaper (Marjoribanks 2000). It is difficult to imagine how
mounting a blockade, to prevent workers from entering the plant to produce newspapers
and trucks from leaving it to deliver them, as occurred in the ‘Siege of Wapping,’ could
have such pivotal importance in the digital present. In the current context, the blockage
would have to be of the Internet ‘pipes’ through which dispersed global communication
networks of digital newspaper producers and readers connect with each other.
This brief description of the changing conditions of newspaper format, production,
distribution and reader habit has had the flavor of the past tense not because they have
entirely disappeared—far from it—but because they are in retreat in many countries and
are now supplemented by many alternatives. Digitization has turned the one-
dimensional, one-directional text of the newspaper into a multi-functional cultural site.
Whereas readers of the paper version were required to rely on the Letters Page Editor’s
selection of a minority of reader responses for publication, online newspapers enable
readers to publish their responses directly on the site. This practice has, in turn, recon-
figured the scope of the relationship between journalists as producers and readers as
consumers. Journalists are now expected to develop closer relationships with readers in
a manner analogous to their cultivation of news sources. Readers can now be enlisted as
co-producers, not just through the old method of supplying story ‘leads’ to journalists,
but by doing some of the journalistic footwork themselves (Allan 2006; 2013). Large
reductions in journalists’ numbers in many newspapers, and the expectation that those
who remain produce many more stories in different formats (Hutchins and Rowe 2012,
Chapter 6), have, along with new media technologies, helped stimulate journalism and
news commentary by many more people who are not professional journalists, and who
usually receive little or no remuneration. Blogging and citizen journalism allow wide-
spread communication via online and social media, but major newspaper mastheads like
The Guardian and The New York Times still act as powerful audience attractors, especially
through their websites. In this task they are assisted by the media convergence that has
enabled them to embed audio-visual texts and links via the World Wide Web to sundry
other websites.
The globalization of communication and media, then, potentially extends audiences
well beyond the confines of the cities, regions and nations that newspapers were
established to serve. By these means—finding new sources of income through online
subscriptions and digital advertising—newspapers hope to compensate for falling sales
and advertising revenue. This has been a slow and fraught process, with losses in print
revenue considerably outweighing gains from digital activities (Rosenstiel and Jurkowitz
2012), while readerships accustomed to accessing newspapers in online form for free
(apart from specialist organs such as The Wall Street Journal) are reluctant to pay an

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‘electronic cover price,’ especially in an online environment stacked with news

aggregators and free news websites offered by newspaper rivals and, among other com-
peting entities, commercial and public broadcasters. The Murdoch press, in particular,
has been highly vocal about what it sees as state-subsidized competition from public
service media organizations such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which not only offer alternatives to its
broadcast products, but also to the subscription versions of its online newspapers
(McKnight 2012). Having split News Corporation into two entities in 2013, 21st
Century Fox (focused mainly on television and film) and News Corp (predominantly
newspapers and publishing), the latter, less profitable, entity has sought to extend its
newspaper paywalls beyond ‘qualities’ such as The Times of London and The Australian
to tabloids like The Sun (in the UK) and the Australian Daily Telegraph. Other newspa-
per organizations, such as the Telegraph Media Group, Fairfax Media and The New York
Times Company have used online ‘metering’ which allows readers to access a limited
number of online stories in a particular period (usually a month), after which they are
required to pay for the content.
But other newspapers, such as the quality Guardian and the tabloid Daily Mail in the
UK, are pursuing a different business model that involves a continuation of nationally-
based paid paper versions coupled with rather different, free global online versions and
local online customization in other English-speaking markets such as the UK, USA and
Australia. The Daily Mail is worthy of particular attention because it connects with the
earlier discussion of tabloidization in a way that reveals how even the most conservative,
inward-looking, nation-based newspapers can become international (if not global)
online sites with much wider audiences in response to another well-advanced 21st
century process – celebritization (Rojek 2012; Turner 2004).

The Daily Mail Becomes the MailOnline

Something strange might be said to have happened in the cultural sphere of newspapers
when a quintessentially ‘little Englander’ publication like the Daily Mail becomes a seri-
ous player in global digital media. Established in 1896 by the redoubtable tabloid press
baron pioneer Lord Alfred (born Harmsworth) Northcliffe and, following his death in
1922, run by his brother Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere (along with
other newspapers, including the Daily Mirror for a period), the Daily Mail is owned by
the Daily Mail and General Trust and currently chaired by Harold’s great grandson
Jonathan, the 4th Viscount Rothermere). It developed across the 20th century into a
classic media mouthpiece of the “authoritarian populism” described by Stuart Hall
(1979) during the period of Thatcherism. In a British newspaper landscape divided by
format (although, as noted, with a general trend towards shrinking size) and political
orientation, the Daily Mail is a so-called middle market tabloid (having been a broad-
sheet until 1971), located in between the staid, conservative broadsheet Daily Telegraph
and the tabloid Sun’s combination of page 3 soft core imagery, gossip, sport and aggres-
sive political campaigning. In a crowded newspaper market, the Daily Mail has been
successful in articulating an appeal to ‘traditional’ English values framed around such
key anchor points as monarchism, capitalism, patriotism, militarism, nostalgia for the
high-point of British imperialism, celebration of the heterosexual nuclear family, con-
demnation of the post-1960s ‘permissive society,’ opposition to social welfare, distaste
for trade unions, and hostility to immigration, multiculturalism and Britain’s membership

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of the European Union. This approach chimed well with Margaret Thatcher’s hybrid,
contradictory brand of patriotism, free market philosophy, social conservatism and ‘there
is no such thing as society’ individualism (Miller 2014). But having a sizeable chunk of
a diminishing national newspaper market was ultimately unsustainable, and the Daily
Mail increasingly has sought revenue from global digital content.
This move, as with other newspapers, has rendered the broadsheet/tabloid differen-
tiation as now less important than paper/online. When The Independent printed in both
broadsheet and tabloid formats for the convenience of its commuting readers (later to
go exclusively with the latter), it insisted that they would be the “same newspaper,
different size.” Similarly, the News Corp titles that went tabloid sought to avoid its
pejorative connotations by declaring that they were “compact with impact” (Rowe
2011). But it was immediately apparent that this could not be the case, as the greatly
reduced amount of print space per page (which would also have to incorporate mast-
heads, headlines, photographs, illustrations, advertisements, stories, ‘teasers,’ ‘news
bites,’ content indices, and so on, as well as new clean design protocols involving more
text-free white space) produced an unwieldy number of tabloid pages. The different
spatial availability and reading experience of the online version (as opposed to the more
conventional appearance of subscription-based newspapers designed for tablets) has cre-
ated a considerable gulf with any other paper-based form. This difference was prompted
by the much more dispersed and differentiated readerships that were not based or focused
on the nation that produced the paper.
In this new digital media environment, the MailOnline (and its Mail on Sunday sister
paper) has evolved into a very different cultural item from the Daily Mail that, in its
main UK version, continues to address its audience as living there and sharing its strong
support for the Tory Right and loathing of the Socialist Left, while, especially in its
right-side column, ironically offering a steady diet of the sexualized, gossip-based mate-
rial that it routinely condemns elsewhere on its website. To take a fairly typical example,
one recent edition of the MailOnline carries a stern article entitled “‘Reality TV shows
The Only Way Is Essex and Made in Chelsea make children ‘aim to be stupid,’ says top
headmistress” (Harris 2013). The article quotes the blog of “mother-of-three” Mrs. Jo
Heywood, head of girls-only Heathfield School in Ascot, Berkshire, a private boarding
school with fees of approximately £31,000 (US$51,000) per term, with notable former
pupils including Tiggy Legge-Bourke (nanny to Princes William and Harry), Her Royal
Highness Princess Alexandra, The Honourable Lady Ogilvy, cousin of The Queen, and
the actress Sienna Miller. Her fulmination against popular television is a classic Daily
Mail class-inflected cultural critique, complaining that the Conservative–Liberal coali-
tion government’s “education reforms are being jeopardised because appearing ‘dumb’ is
seen as a good way to make a fortune rather than working hard.” She criticizes “‘lazy’ TV
executives for ‘cross-pollinating’ shows, with Joey Essex appearing on I’m a
Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here, for example,” going on to lament that “The reality
TV circus has come full circle because the rise of celebrity culture, the bedfellow of real-
ity TV, has meant that our children have started to mirror some of those traits and they
have become less respectful to their elders and peers” (quoted in Harris 2013).
The giving of such prominence to a private schoolmistress’s blog is a clear indication
of the MailOnline’s endorsement of her attack on the “reality TV circus” and its associated
“celebrity culture.” But, contradictorily if not hypocritically, the MailOnline enthusiasti-
cally covers and promotes this culture. Indeed, inserted into the story is a link to another,
“That’s a bit cheek-y! TOWIE star Jasmin Walia posts sexy bikini shot to Instagram as

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she dreams of a return to Las Vegas,” which shows a Reality TV “star,” a “pretty brunette
(who) uploaded a very saucy picture to her Instagram account which showed off every
inch of her stunning curves” wearing “nothing but an orange bikini which skimmed her
pert bottom” (Davison 2013). Running alongside the story and the 167 reader com-
ments that it received, are several panels under the heading “Don’t Miss” that are vivid
examples of the “celebrity culture” that it condemns, including stories about people
involved in Strictly Come Dancing, Made in Chelsea and The Apprentice, and candid, often
soft core picture-led celebrity stories about Jennifer Aniston, Cheryl Cole, Michael
Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Miley Cyrus and so on.
The MailOnline emerges as a tabloid pastiche that combines the traditional Daily Mail
concerns with British ‘benefits cheats,’ ‘foreigners’ using the National Health Service
and the socially destructive effects of divorce with copious quantities of salacious mate-
rial indistinguishable from that of Britain’s ‘red tops’ and the U.S.’s ‘supermarket’
tabloids. The quantity of available material via links is vast, including a dedicated U.S.
site and others for Sport, TV & Showbiz, Video, Femail and so on. The resultant loss of
coherence is exchanged for the generation of traffic—the principal currency of the
online newspaper. Thus, the co-presence of material suited to the mainly national audi-
ence of the paper version (both news and entertainment-based) with other material that
is much less rooted in national discursive space makes navigating the newspaper a much
more complex process. It might be ignored by or even alienate those readers who do not
share concerns with, on the one hand, specifically British issues, while, on the other
hand, the more “tabloid” concerns with gossip and celebrity may have a corresponding
effect on its more traditional middle-England readership. The MailOnline takes the risk
of this dissonance through a media smorgasbord approach that relies on readers landing
on its website finding something that makes them ‘stick.’
A striking case of this dissonance is the provocative September 2013 story, ‘The Man
who Hated Britain’ (Levy 2013), a trenchant attack on the late Marxist philosopher
Ralph Miliband, father of two prominent British Labour Party politicians—David (a
former Foreign Minister in the Blair Labour government, now departed from politics)
and Ed, who in 2010 defeated his brother in the ballot to become the opposition Labour
Party’s leader. The story, which resulted in two Daily Mail editorials, further articles
(notably Greenhill and Ellicott 2013), a published reply by Ed Miliband, a television
debate, and many comments in other media, sought to trace what it called “Red Ed’s”
views and policies directly to those of his father. In support of its claim (in part based on
his diary as a 17-year-old) that Ralph Miliband hated the country in which he had set-
tled as a refugee from the Nazis, the Daily Mail proffers its vision of Britain:

[W]hat is blindingly clear from everything he wrote throughout his life is that
he had nothing but hatred for the values, traditions and institutions – including
our great schools, the Church, the Army and even the Sunday papers – that
made Britain the safe and free nation in which he and his family flourished.
The constitutional monarchy, the bicameral legislature, property rights,
common law . . . even ‘respectability’ and ‘good taste’ – all were anathema to
this lifelong, unreconstructed Marxist who craved a workers’ revolution.
(Daily Mail Comment 2013)

This neat encapsulation of Britain’s virtues, as seen by the newspaper, bears, as was
noted earlier, little resemblance to most of what it covers in the MailOnline. But it also

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evokes—in an online media space given to largely de-historicized appeals to traditional

British values, coupled with celebrity culture—the history of the newspaper itself. As
several critics have pointed out, the Daily Mail’s history also includes a period in which its
anti-Bolshevism led it to sympathize with Nazism. In January 1934, Harold Rothermere
wrote articles in support of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists—‘HURRAH
FOR THE BLACKSHIRTS!’ in the Daily Mail and ‘GIVE THE BLACKSHIRTS A
HELPING HAND’ in the Daily Mirror—and was described by Hitler as “one of the very
greatest of all Englishmen” (quoted in Dudley Edwards 2003: 77). Although Rothermere
subsequently withdrew his backing for Mosley and claimed that he had cultivated Hitler’s
friendship, including giving him “priceless gifts,” by “painting himself as a fellow-traveller
in order to obtain information useful to British government” (p.77), his behavior and the
Daily Mail’s “perplexing and apparently contradictory line” (p.77) on Fascism hardly
placed the newspaper in a strong position to attack the patriotism of Ralph Miliband,
who had volunteered for the Navy in World War II. That in 1968 Northcliffe’s and
Rothermere’s nephew, Cecil Harmsworth King, when Chairman of the International
Publishing Company (IPC) that then published the Daily Mail, had been implicated in
an attempt to remove the Wilson Labour government by extra-Parliamentary means and
install Lord Louis Mountbatten as head of an Emergency Government (Dudley Edwards
2003: 367–73), further problematized the newspaper’s historical commitment to the
British “values, traditions and institutions” that it celebrates. But it is difficult to know
what the readers drawn to the online paper’s coverage of Kim Kardashian would make of
its quarrel with a late Marxist professor and his politician son.

Conclusion: Cultural Politics and the Popular

Online Newspaper
Despite the movement from print to online newspapers leading to an increase in the
proportion of stories with little apparent political significance, and the rise of “click bait”
newspaper economics, major mastheads such as the Daily Mail still seek to wield politi-
cal influence, and also have a significant history of which their dispersed, heterogeneous
readerships are likely to be unaware. Those readerships may be indifferent or uncompre-
hending with regard to the political agenda and history of the newspapers, which in
global form become increasingly detached from the national socio-political environ-
ments in which they were first formed. To still be recognizable as newspapers, however,
they must continue covering what is conventionally regarded as prime news, and their
digital revenues are required to support its delivery. This revenue is increasing, with the
MailOnline’s rising by 45 per cent in the financial year 2012–3 (Reynolds 2013), but it
is still a small part of overall company revenue. In order to find new revenue streams,
but also to make customized content more relevant in key markets, the U.S. version of
the MailOnline was supplemented in 2014 by an Australian online edition (a joint ven-
ture with Mi9 and Nine Entertainment Company). These are expensive investments,
but crucial to the development of “the Daily Mail’s global website MailOnline [which] is
the world’s biggest English-language newspaper website with 57.3 million monthly
unique visitors globally” (MailOnline 2013) and to its achievement of overtaking the
much more sober (and metered) New York Times in reader views. The production of
local content forms part of the cluttered three-column homepage, with the crucial right-
hand sidebar inviting a vertical scroll and impossibly long headlines for search engine
optimization (Montgomery 2013).

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In earlier times, the online tabloid’s almost-randomized mixture of disparate elements

might have been described as “postmodern” (Hartley 1996). That the MailOnline is both
greatly disparaged and much read—sometimes by the same people—is clear (Jewell
2013). It is, as noted, by no means the only case of a newspaper seeking to reinvent itself
to survive in the digital era (for example, The Guardian has done likewise, although with
much less tabloid-style emphasis), but it has been selected here for particular attention
in view of its combination of right-wing campaigning, moralism, and unreconstructed
tabloid titillation in moving from paper to digital, national to global. The Daily Mail is
a salutary case of the need to understand how influential newspaper websites are formed,
and their ideological orientations, histories and economic strategies. Many new
MailOnline readers drawn to its celebrity sidebars may not be aware that they are being
enlisted in a political project that pursues a reactionary agenda while pinning its com-
mercial future on the very media content and cultural consumers that its editors and
columnists deplore. The analysis of the politics of seemingly de-politicized popular cul-
ture remains no less important, then, in the digital than in the pre-digital age.

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 29
MEDIA REPRESENTATION
OF SCIENCE AND HEALTH
The Case of Coma
Jenny Kitzinger

Introduction
Media representation of science and health are a key area of concern for researchers
interested in the potential of the media to influence society – whether through helping
to shape individual behaviours, public debates or the policy agenda. This chapter uses
research on ‘coma’ (and associated conditions such as the vegetative state) as a case
study for exploring the range of ways in which media coverage can be analysed. I show
how researchers from different backgrounds (e.g. film and cultural studies, sociology of
science and scientific/clinical practice) have approached such research and highlight
their different research designs and findings. I conclude by highlighting the need to take
such disciplinary divisions into account – both when reviewing research into the media
representation of science and health and when developing such research oneself.

Researching Media Representation of Scientific and

Health Issues: Questions and Methods
Scholars interested in the representation of science and health issues ask questions such
as: How do media accounts compare to the scientific or clinical ‘facts’, or the experience
of patients or the range of diverse ethical or political perspectives in society as a whole?
Specific analysis may examine: Which issues are given prominence? How are ideas
framed? What ‘facts’ are given credence? Whose voice is heard? How is expertise
accredited? How are key players represented (e.g. the scientist, medics, patients or their
families)? Such scholars are interested in the forces that help shape representation and
also, implicitly or explicitly, concerned about the potential impact on individual or col-
lective ways of thinking, talking or acting, or the impact on wider public discourses or
policy priorities. Such research includes both quantitative and qualitative analysis and
the object of analysis can be any text, including, for example, news reports, magazines,
soap opera, science fiction films, home videos or new media. Research designs may sim-
ply focus on media texts, but can also include talking to, or observing, media producers
(e.g. science journalists), examining source activity (e.g. press releases from science
 KI TZI N G E R

funding bodies) and looking at ‘public’ opinion or audience reception (e.g. attempting
to assess any potential influence upon health behaviours).
The focus of any individual research project, and the methods adopted, often
depends on the disciplinary background of the researchers or the priorities of the fund-
ing bodies. For example, science organisations often fund research that documents and
tries to change the ways in which science is represented, a health charity may particu-
larly want to explore the stigma associated with particular health conditions, and an
academic working in a department of bioethics is more likely to be concerned with
the framing of the ethics. The variety of questions asked and approaches adopted is
well illustrated in media-related research on coma and the vegetative or minimally-
conscious state.

Why Is ‘Coma’ Such an Important Science/Health Story?

Coma is a fascinating case study through which to examine research into the representa-
tions of science and health, and has increasingly attracted media attention over the last
few decades. News stories track the tragic injury of celebrities and headlines profile
‘right-to-die’ cases and scientific ‘breakthroughs’ into investigating consciousness. Coma
also serves as a popular plot device in soap opera (conveniently suspending an actor’s
role in the series or introducing dramatic tensions), and features as a central focus of
some science fiction, crystallising concerns about the uses of modern medical technol-
ogy (Belling 2010). The possibility that someone may be kept alive, but without any
consciousness or agency, makes ‘coma’ (and conditions often associated with coma, such
as the vegetative state) have significant ramifications. Coma is implicated in debates
about the nature of the mind or soul, personhood, dignity, choice and the meaning of
life itself, and the ability of modern medicine to sustain people in coma-like states means
that this is an issue of increasing social importance (with significant economic, social
and moral costs) and a key site of contestation.
Public debates about this issue can be traced back to the 1970s – when conditions
such as ‘brain death’ and ‘the vegetative state’ started to become the focus of medical,
ethical and public concern (e.g. in relation to organ donation and end-of-life decision-
making). The medical thriller Coma was written (and converted into a film) in the
1970s, but the issue of the vegetative state did not gain particular public attention until
more recently when it burst onto the public scene in the US with the ‘Schiavo case’.
Debate centred around a young woman (Terri Schiavo) who had suffered a cardiac arrest
in 1990, leaving her in a vegetative state; she became the subject of a series of court cases
from 1998 onwards. Her husband and her family were in dispute over her level of con-
sciousness, and whether or not she would have wanted life-sustaining treatment. Schiavo
was eventually allowed to die in 2005 after her feeding tube was withdrawn. The case
became a political and legal minefield and attracted huge amounts of media attention
and resulted in controversy across the US and internationally.

Some Definitions: A Briefing on Clinical Diagnoses

Before discussing the media representation of Terri Schiavo’s case in particular, and the
issues more generally, it is necessary to step back and provide definitions of key medical
terms. This is important not least because general understanding (and media representa-
tion) of this field often confuse clinically distinct conditions.

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A coma is a term which usually only applies to the first few weeks of unconsciousness
in most brain injured patients. A comatose patient who does not die (or ‘wake up’) in
the first few weeks usually enters either a vegetative or a minimally-conscious state [‘VS’
or ‘MCS’]. ‘Brain death’ is something entirely different, as is ‘locked in’ syndrome, so
these terms are not discussed here.
Patients in vegetative states have all their automatic functions, such as being able to
breathe, and are usually independent of all machines apart from the one delivering
artificial nutrition and hydration. They display cycles of eye opening and closing (a
sleep-wake cycle), and have reflexes such as retracting from pain; however, they have
no apparent awareness of themselves or their environment (RCP 2013). The
‘minimally-conscious state’ is a relative new diagnosis only formally defined in 2002. In
these cases patients appear unconscious much of the time, but occasionally show some
minimal awareness e.g., saying words or showing emotional responses to family members
(Giacino et al. 2002).
In the past, all such patients would have simply died (e.g. because they cannot
swallow); however modern technologies, and the way they are deployed, allow some
patients to survive. Patients can now be ‘brought back to life’ after the initial crisis
(e.g., being resuscitated after a cardiac arrest) and can then be sustained indefinitely
(especially because of improvements in the provision of artificial nutrition and
hydration). Advances in medicine ensures some patients have the chance of recover-
ing to a quality of life they would consider worth living (e.g. fully conscious but with
limited mobility or memory), but leave others suspended in limbo in a state they
would not have wanted. After 12 months in a vegetative state, gaining full conscious-
ness is considered highly unlikely (hence the term ‘permanent vegetative state’: PVS).
Patients can recover full consciousness after much longer in MCS (perhaps even after
several years); however, even if they recover full consciousness they are likely to be
left with severe physical and mental disabilities (e.g. dependent on 24/7 care, with
minimal, if any, ability to communicate, and incapable of making their own
decisions).
The distinction between vegetative and minimally-conscious conditions is impor-
tant not only because it has implications for prognosis (e.g., likelihood of a return to
full consciousness, however impaired), but because it can have implications for care
(e.g., the provision of pain relief) and legal ramifications (e.g., in relation to treat-
ment withdrawal and being allowed to die). However, diagnosis at the borderline of
the vegetative state and minimally-conscious states is often very challenging and
there is a high rate of misdiagnosis. This may be not least because of the fluctuating
nature of awareness for patients in MCS (and potential complicating conditions such
as blindness or deafness). It is the difficulty of diagnosis and the intensity of ethical
debates that makes this issue very complex and challenging, and means there is a
great deal of interest in the conditions from media, academic and practitioner
stakeholders.

Research on Coma in the Media: Three Strands of Work

Reviewing the existing literature on media coverage of coma and the vegetative or
minimally-conscious state identifies particular clusters of enquiry from researchers from
diverse backgrounds. Such work can be broadly mapped into the following, far from
mutually exclusive, often overlapping, approaches.

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Film and Literary Studies

For some literary theorists, coma serves as an exemplar through which to explore broader
bioethical or political issues. One commentator, Richard Doyal, for example, is a
Professor of English, and former editor of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric; he is inter-
ested in how ‘the narratives and practices of molecular biology have shifted the very
concept of “life” at play in contemporary culture, as distinctions between “living sys-
tems” and “machines” have begun to blur and morph’. He argues that:

Comatose bodies cultivate yet another, singular execution of an informatic

body. Accompanied by more than the visualization of an EEG and the machinic
yoga of life support – breathe in! breathe out! – coma victims are connected to
multiple rhetorical machines that would govern this strange flesh and enable
its narration.
(Doyal 2001: 15)

His article aims to ‘map out some of the capacities and threats posed by those bodies
whose vitality is articulated as a signal, “wetwares,” through and by which contemporary
informatics operate’ (Doyal 2001: 15). Other literary or film theorists have focused on
specific films (Belling 2010), books (Hall 2014), or high profiles stories (such as the
Schiavo case, e.g., Walker 2006) to draw out the implications for broader theoretical
concerns. One interesting collection of articles brings diverse analytical tools to examin-
ing the videos of Terri Schiavo released by her family ‘purporting to show consciousness
and responsiveness’ (Waldman, 2006: 1). These family videos were widely disseminated
through news outlets including CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, as well as online ‘under
the assumption that they make it self-evident that Terri could “react purposefully with
her environment,” that she was not in a persistent vegetative state as neurologists had
diagnosed’ (Waldman, 2006: 1). This prompted critical academic engagement with the
videos, the stills which circulated, and the online commentary the images attracted, and
led to a special issue of Jump Cut (a journal dedicated to ‘looking at media in its social
and political context’). This special issue included an analysis of the legal, medical, and
political context of the widely-seen Schiavo video excerpts, engagement with the pre-
ferred reading offered by the family and their supporters (Waldman 2006) and a ‘cultural
biography’ of the Schiavo images taken together as a ‘media event’ (Preston 2006)
which aimed to

help us understand the social, cultural, religious, economic, and academic traf-
fic in images: How does analyzing various images of Terri Schiavo help us
understand the issues involved in the struggle over this woman’s right to die/
right to live? What part might images play in that struggle? What practices or
beliefs can be said to have contributed to a cultural or at least social preference
for the images that became salient?
(Preston 2006: 1)

This collection includes contributors pointing out that ‘the visual is not self-evident.
What the viewers bring to the image is extremely influential in what they see’
(Staiger 2006: 1). Staiger’s analysis, for example, highlights how, although her par-
ents were offering the videos as evidence of some mental viability for Schiavo – in

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opposition to allowing her to die – others disputed the images as displaying con-
sciousness or were horrified by, or dismissive of, anyone being kept alive in such a
state (Staiger 2006).

Sociology of Science/Health Reporting

The interest of academics has also been engaged by scientific developments in the assess-
ment of vegetative patients, especially attempts to detect consciousness. One of the
most high-profile developments has been fMRI – functional magnetic resonance imag-
ing – which allows researchers to look at more than simply the physical structures of the
brain, giving insight into brain functioning (e.g. blood flow to different parts of the brain)
in relation to different stimuli. The PR around, and media representation of, such
science/technology is of interest to researchers concerned about the social and ethical
implications of science in general, and neurotechnologies in particular. Such researchers
are often concerned with analysing issues such as the anticipatory discourse around the
promise of neuro-therapies (Pickersgill 2011) and the need for a ‘neuroethics’ (Illes et al.
2003). Such commentary also links to research interests in the ‘sociology of expecta-
tions’ and related work on the ‘political economy of hope,’ which includes work
highlighting how a ‘political economy’ or ‘rhetoric’ of hope has now become the domi-
nant discourse of science, and research and development is justified by ‘the promise of
finding miraculous cures for debilitating illnesses’ (Moreira & Palladino 2005: 67).
One example of research pursued under this rubric is the study by Samuel and
Kitzinger (2013) which focused on two ‘breakthrough’ studies where fMRI was used
to detect brain activity, or even establish ‘communication’ with patients with a veg-
etative diagnosis. The research was presented in press releases from the funding body
with titles such as “Brain Scan Gives Vegetative State Patient the Power to Say Yes
and No” (MRC press release 3 February 2010) and generated headlines such as “A
Voice for the Voiceless” and “Brain Damage Patients CAN ‘Talk’” (cited in Samuel
and Kitzinger 2013). Samuel and Kitzinger argue that both the press releases and the
media reporting of this work involved some over-simplification and ‘hype’. They high-
light the way in which some representations of the story failed to distinguish between
vegetative and minimally-conscious patients, exaggerated representations of the
patients’ potential for recovery and promoted a one-dimensional view of family
responses. Samuel and Kitzinger contextualise their analysis of source activity and
media reporting by also drawing on interviews with family members. Such work shows,
for example, that families with experience of serious brain injury don’t simply react to
‘breakthroughs’ such as fMRI with excitement and hope: some dread the idea that
their loved-one may have any awareness, and feel that this is a ‘fate worse than death’
and that any signs of consciousness will only mean the person is trapped for longer in
a more intolerable position than if they were entirely vegetative (Samuel and Kitzinger
2013). Other work with family members also highlights that some are sceptical about
the powers of technologies such as fMRI to give ‘a voice to the voiceless’ or provide
people with the ‘power to say “yes” and “no’” given their experience in care homes at
the bedside of their severely brain injured relatives. One mother, for example, said she
hoped her daughter (who was diagnosed as ‘vegetative’) was entirely unconscious, and
would remain so, as she had seen how those who ‘recovered’ were treated. She referred
specifically to one young man in her daughter’s care home who had been given a com-
munication aid:

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He had one of these machine and he could say ‘I need some attention’ and then
press the button and in the end, because he liked playing with it, [. . .] they
would switch his machine off, because he was doing it all the time [. . .]
Yeah, ‘you’ve got a voice, now you haven’t’.
(Kitzinger and Kitzinger 2013)

In contrast to the optimistic claims of scientific PR statements about new inventions/

technologies/discoveries, families thus locate such inventions in the everyday context
of the social, legal, political and economic realities on the ground.

Practitioner Assessments of Representation

The third strand of work produced in this area focuses on the representation (or mis-
representation) of facts in the news media and in documentaries. This is often a
primary concern for scientists and clinicians in the field of brain injury, sometimes
working in multi-disciplinary teams (e.g., with neuroethicists), and such analysis is
often published in science or medical journals. This includes commentaries on the
impact of high-profile cases – for example, several articles focus on exploring the
implications of the Schiavo coverage (Racine et al. 2008) – and examining issues such
as whether the coverage encouraged people to consider Advance Care Planning to
record their own wishes in such situations (Sudore et al. 2008). It also includes a
substantial body of work on fMRI, such as a discussion of the problems of public out-
reach when doing brain imaging work (Illes, Lau, & Giacino 2008), a scientist’s reac-
tion to an academic critique of some such outreach (Nachache 2014), and an editorial
in the British Medical Journal challenging a TV documentary for the claims made about
fMRI’s unique diagnostic contribution (Turner-Stokes et al. 2012). Articles in the
clinical journals also criticise journalists for using distinct terms like ‘brain dead’,
‘persistent vegetative state’ and ‘coma’ interchangeably (Wick and Zanni 2009: 874)
and highlight the media’s failure to represent the profound disabilities that are the
most likely outcome after many weeks in a ‘coma’. For example, analysis highlights
how the media fail to show that survival with catastrophic brain injury is a possible
outcome of resuscitation (and over represent the success of such interventions) (Diem
Lantos, & Tulsky 1996), and give excessive or misleading news coverage of ‘miracle
recoveries’.
A second recurring issue in this literature is the problem of misrepresentation in fiction.
Casarett et al. (2005), for example, examined nine soap operas broadcast in the US
between January 1995 and May 2005 and identified 64 characters who experienced ‘a
period of unconsciousness lasting at least 24 hours’ (with some characters waking up or
dying while still in a coma, and others entering vegetative states for prolonged periods).
This study showed that mortality was significantly lower than would be predicted in real
life. Recovery was also unrealistically positive: ‘On the day that patients regained con-
sciousness most (49/57: 86%) has no evidence of limited function, cognitive deficit, or
residual disability needing rehabilitation’ and all ‘eventually regained full function’
(Casarett et al. 2005: 1). Casarett and colleagues point out that such recovery is very
unusual: for instance ‘typical rates of full recovery from coma after a non-traumatic injury
[e.g. a stroke or cardiac arrest] are usually less than 10%’ (Casarett et al. 2005: 2) –
and these rates are even lower if the person has moved from being in a short-term coma
to conditions such as the vegetative state. A patient in a vegetative state for more than

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a few months is unlikely ever to be able to live independently again, and most will
always need 24/7 care.
Similarly unrealistic representations of coma and vegetative states have been found
in movies, which often show sudden ‘awakenings’ from even long comas (i.e. vegetative
states), with an immediate ability to talk and walk and with fully intact cognitive func-
tions (Wijdicks & Wijdicks 2006). A study of 30 movies featuring ‘prolonged comas’
also found that the representation of what a person looked like when they were in such
states was very misleading, highlighting how all actors (with one exception) remained
beautifully groomed, often muscular and tanned, and no muscle wastage, contracture,
evidence of double incontinence, or even feeding tubes (Wijdicks & Wijdicks 2006).
Patients are also shown peaceful, as if asleep, whereas patients in vegetative or mini-
mally conscious states may grimace and appear distressed (e.g., struggling to breath,
moaning or retracting from painful stimuli) and may cough and choke (because they
cannot swallow their own saliva). Another key finding of this study was that with one
exception all patients were portrayed with their eyes closed – although a defining feature
of the vegetative state is eye-opening. This is only rarely represented by the media, but
can have profound implications for family members who associate eye-opening with
‘waking up’ and the return of consciousness (Nettleton et al. under review).
Wijdicks and Wijdicks accompanied their analysis of film with surveys and found that
many people thought such grossly over-optimistic images were realistic and reported that
it would influence their own decision making if they ever had a family member in such a
state (Wijdicks & Wijdicks 2006: 1006). Wijdicks and Wijdicks’s concern echoes those
raised by other clinicians/scientists and those working closely with families of brain injured
patients that fictional representations could be associated with ‘unrealistic expectations of
recovery’ which ‘often contribute to disagreements about treatment’ (Casarett et al. 2005:
1) – a view given support by findings from Kitzinger and Kitzinger who conducted an in-
depth interview study with families. They found that many interviewees reported that the
media images of coma had left them ill-equipped to face the real challenges of the situa-
tion, misinformed them about the possibilities of recovery, and hence led them to insist
on life-sustaining treatments they now regret. Interviewees also described feeling isolated
because friends and acquaintances had no real understanding of the situation and reiter-
ated misleading ideas from the media (Kitzinger & Kitzinger 2013).
However, other commentators argue that it is important to acknowledge that fictional
representations should not simply be judged against clinical realities. Rather, it is impor-
tant to assess fictional fantasies of ‘waking up’ against social assumptions that vegetative
patients have no potential for recovery and are ‘as good as dead’ (or ‘worse than dead’).
Jo Fins is one key commentator here – both as a practising physician in the field and as
president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. He responded to the
Wijdicks and Wijdicks analysis of films by arguing that:

Cinematic ‘distortion’ can also be understood as a compensatory artistic device

that counters societal perceptions about brain injury which themselves may be
inaccurate. From this broader cultural context, poetic license on the part of a
filmmaker could be construed as a corrective.
(Fins 2006)

Fins highlights the ‘metaphorical’ power of the film to allow for hope and argues that a
film criticised by Wijdicks and Wijdicks:

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anticipates the emerging diagnostic and prognostic significance of distinguishing

the vegetative state from the recently described minimally conscious state.
Patients who are minimally conscious may make gains that allow for the
recovery of functional communication and some degree of reintegration with
their families despite overwhelming levels of disability, generating complex
ethical questions about what constitutes an acceptable clinical outcome.

He concludes that ‘the power of film to inspire and instruct may be lost when the critic’s
gaze is directed too literally at manifest medical content’ and suggests that ‘A broader
cultural lens is required to consider neuropalliative goals of care’ (Fins 2006).

Recommendations for Future Research

The brief overview of research into media reporting of ‘coma’ highlights patterns echoed
in coverage of other science/health issues, both with regards to the richness of diverse
approaches and with regard to the debates around them. Research on ‘coma’, like that
around many other science and health issues, addresses a wide range of media genre and
analytical questions – from the issue of misrepresentation to the issue of fantasy.
This overview highlights the need to locate any analysis of ‘media representation’ of
a scientific/health issue within the history of that particular issue as well as contextual-
ising the coverage through an understanding of the surrounding scientific, clinical or
cultural debates. It also suggests how students might read such literature with attention
to the research design and the disciplinary background of the studies’ authors, as well as
highlighting how researchers might pursue cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collabora-
tion to expand and refine their studies.

References
Belling, C. (2010). The living dead, horror and bioethics. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 53(3),
439–451.
Casarett, C., Fishman, J., MacMoran, H., Pickard, A., & Asch, D. (2005). Epidemiology and prognosis
of coma in daytime television dramas. BMJ, 331(7531), 1537–1539.
Diem, S., Lantos, J., & Tulsky, J. (1996). Cardiopulmonary resuscitation on television: Miracles and
misinformation. New England Journal of Medicine, 334, 1578–82.
Doyal, R. (2001). A coma speaks: dead zones of media and the replication of family value. Poroi: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis, 1(1), 15–5.
Fins, J. (2006). The portrayal of coma in contemporary motion pictures. Neurology, 66. https://www.
neurology.org/content/66/9/1300/reply.
Giacino, J., Ashwal, S., Childs, N., Cranford, R., Jennett, B., Katz, D. I., Kelly, J. P., Rosenberg, J. H.,
Whyte, J., Zafonte, R. D., & Zasler, N. D. (2002). The minimally conscious state: Definition and
diagnostic criteria. Neurology 58(3), 349–53.
Hall, A. (2014). Representing chronic disorders of consciousness: Voice in Isabel Allende’s Paula.
Literature and Medicine, 32(1): 133–147.
Illes, J., Kirschen, M., & Gabrieli, J. (2003). From neuroimaging to neuroethics. Nature Neuroscience,
6(3), 205.
Illes, J., Lau, P., & Giacino, J. (2008). Neuroimaging, impaired states of consciousness, and public
outreach. Nature Reviews Neurology 4, 542–543. Doi:10.1038/ncpneuro0888.
Kitzinger, J., & Kitzinger, C. (2013). The “window of opportunity” for death after severe brain injury:
Family experiences. Sociology of Health and Illness, 25(7), 1095–1112.

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Moreira, T., & Palladino, P. (2005). Between truth and hope: On Parkinson’s disease,
neurotransplantation and the production of the “self.” History of the Human Sciences, 18(3), 55–82.
Nachache, L. (2014). Context, conspiracy, pseudonyms and self-report data: Discussion of reporting
consciousness in coma. JOMEC Journal: Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. Available at http://
www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/jomecjournal/3-june2013/Kitzinger_Samuel_Naccache.pdf
Nettleton, S., Kitzinger, J., & Kitzinger, C. (2014). A diagnostic illusory? The case of distinguishing
“vegetative” and “minimally conscious” states. Social Science and Medicine, 116, 134–141.
Pickersgill, M. (2011). “Promising” therapies: Neuroscience, clinical practice, and the treatment of
psychopathy. Sociology of Health Illness, 33(3), 448–64.
Preston, C. (2006). Emergency analysis: The academic traffic in images. Jump Cut: A Review of
Contemporary Media, 48. Available at http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/SchaivoPreston/
index.html.
Racine E., Amaram R., Seidler M., Karczewska M., & Illes J. (2008). Media coverage of the persistent
vegetative state and end-of-life decision-making. Neurology, 71, 1027–1032.
Royal College of Physicians. (2013). Prolonged disorders of consciousness: National clinical guidelines. RCP,
London. Samuel, G., & Kitzinger, J. (2013). Reporting consciousness in coma: Media framing of
neuro-scientific research and the response of families with relatives in vegetative or minimally
conscious states. JOMEC Journal. Available at www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/research/consciousness/
publications/index.html.
Staiger, J. (2006). The cutting edge: Emergencies in visual culture. Jump Cut, 48. Available at http://
www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/SchaivoStaiger/
Sudore., R., Landefeld C., Pantilat S., Noyes K., & Schillinger D. (2008). The impact of a mass media
event among vulnerable patients: The Terri Schiavo story. Journal of General Internal Medicine,
23(11), 1854–7.
Turner-Stokes, L., Kitzinger, J., Gill-Thwaites, H., Playford, E. D., Wade, D., Allanson, J., & Pickard,
J. (2012). fMRI for vegetative and minimally conscious states. British Medical Journal, 345, e8045.
Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.e8045.
Waldman, D. (2006). Schiavo videos: Context and reception: Timely triage. Jump Cut, 48. Available
at http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/SchaivoWaldman/text.html.
Walker, J. (2006). The videographic persistence of Terri Schiavo. Jump Cut, 48. Available at http://
www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/SchaivoWalker/index.html.
Wick, J., & Zanni, G. (2009). Removing the feeding tube: A procedure with a contentious past. The
Consultant Pharmacist: The Journal of the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists, 24(12), 874–883.
Wijdicks E., & Wijdicks C. (2006). The portrayal of coma in contemporary motion pictures. Neurology,
66, 1300–1303.

Further Reading
Samuel, G., & Kitzinger, J. (2013). Reporting consciousness in coma: Media framing of neuro-scientific
research and the response of families with relatives in vegetative or minimally conscious states.
JOMEC Journal. Available at www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/jomecjournal/3-june2013/Kitzinger_
Samuel_coma.pdf

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 30
MASS MOVEMENT
Popular Culture and the
End of the Corset
Sarah Berry1

From the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, most Western women wore a
corset every day, often from a young age. Rich and poor, urban and rural, even incarcer-
ated and institutionalized women wore corsets (Summers 2001: 19). The rejection of
the corset after centuries of use is one of the most significant transitions in modern
Western dress, but it’s never been entirely clear what made the un-corseted body fash-
ionable. There are two very good, but somehow incomplete explanations. One is that
the late-nineteenth-century “New Woman” gained greater access to non-domestic work,
education, and physical activity, giving leverage to dress reformers who’d criticized cor-
sets for years (Cunningham 2010). But practicality alone doesn’t change taste in dress;
women had worked and exercised in corsets for generations. The other explanation is
that Victorian artists made un-corseted dressing sophisticated, inspiring modernist cou-
turiers to copy their Orientalist and neoclassical taste (Wilson and Taylor 1989: 31). But
twentieth-century fashion was influenced by populist trends as well as bohemian and
high-society ones. This essay looks at the role of popular performance, social dance, and
visual media in the refashioning of women’s bodies. Drawing on research from the U.S.,
England, and France, I argue that popular practices were central to the aesthetic shift
from a static to a dynamic body ideal – a shift that finally made the corset look passé.
Debates among fashion historians over corseting illustrate how dress expresses both
personal and social values. Valerie Steele, for example, argues that corseted women
weren’t fashion victims, but rather had a wide range of motives for wearing corsets over
their long history (Steele 2001). Leigh Summers is less sanguine, and emphasizes wom-
en’s lack of choice around corseting as a convention of femininity that was socially
enforced in a variety of ways (Summers 2001). As Katha Pollitt notes in a review of their
work, “fashion is not an autonomous realm of self-expression, but a manifestation of an
unequal, gendered social order” (Pollitt 2002: 33), and this was particularly true in the
centuries before Western women had political rights. Causal arguments about changes
in fashion are as often as open to debate as interpretations of fashion’s social meanings.
This essay doesn’t aim to narrow discussions of the corset’s rejection, but to broaden
them and include greater understanding of how popular practices contributed to revi-
sions of ideal femininity.
 PO PU LA R CU LTU RE A N D TH E E N D O F T H E C O R S E T

Stay: The Corset as Frame

In 1892, the dress reformer Frances Russell asked whether women’s dress could “evolve”
beyond the corset, and noted:

It does so already in high art circles when, for the leisure of the drawing room,
it abolishes the modern gown with its fashionable skirt and close fitting bodice
and bones and substitutes Greek drapery. It does so already in our colleges for
women for at least one hour a day when the daughters of the first families of the
nation practice gymnastics in a suit which has no curtain like skirt over its full
Turkish trousers.
(Russell 1892b: 502)

How did this “evolution” travel from artists’ salons and homes of “the first families” to
the general population? In 1940, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge wrote in The Long
Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939 that daring changes in women’s
fashion moved “from brothel to stage, then on to Bohemia, to Society, to Society’s
maids, to the mill-girl and lastly to the suburban woman” (Graves and Hodge 1994: 29).
While astute in their recognition that fashion innovation travels up the social ladder as
well as down it, this model of direct social emulation leaves out the ways that popular
culture can invite, disseminate, and accelerate social change.
In spite of its omnipresence, the corset was an object of controversy from the mid-
nineteenth century until its demise. For dress reformers like Frances Russell, the corset
spoke for itself:

Woman’s dress says “Stay in the house.” For one hour a day fashion allows her
to lay aside her drapery and be clothed for physical culture. . . . During the
other waking hours of her day she is expected for beauty’s sake to wear raiment
which is tacitly conceded to be antagonistic to physical development and
healthful beauty. Fashion says that the chief use of woman is to exhibit dry
goods fantastically arranged on her person.
(Russell 1892b: 500)

She concluded that women’s clothing was designed to foster physical dependence on
men: “He must help her up stairs and down, in the carriage and out, on the horse, up
the hill, over the ditch and fence, and thus teach her the poetry of dependence (Russell
1892a: 327). But if, as a more conventional fashion writer wrote of dress reform, “Its
ugliness defeated its good intentions” (Ingersoll 1895: 292), femininity spoke louder
than comfort for most women. My primary question concerns how corset-free dressing
went from being perceived as un-feminine and unflattering to signifying youthful moder-
nity. This process happened very gradually through interaction among high and low
cultural practices, and my exploration begins by looking at the early aesthetics and
cultural meanings of the corset.
In the sixteenth century, the semiotics of aristocratic posture began to emphasize
“rigidity and rectitude” as well as geometric form (Vigarello 1989: 155). Historian
Georges Vigarello has described how concern with corporeal proportions as a microcosm
of universal geometry influenced both women’s adoption of the corset and the use of

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swaddling on infants. The child’s body was seen as “malleable clay” that must be wrapped
tightly in order to grow into the appropriate shape; young girls, in particular, were
corseted very early as part of the “pedagogical ‘language’ of uprightness” (Vigarello 1989:
168, 174). Early corsets were structured by “stays” (strips of whalebone or horn sewn into
thin vertical pockets) and had a slightly wider slat of bone or wood called a “busk” in
the center of the torso to keep the corset flat and firm in front. In this way the corset
allowed the female body to display clothing in a static, presentational mode, and “pro-
duced a rigidly flat front forming a canvas to display costly silks” (Manchester Art
Gallery 2013).

Figure 30.1 Portrait of Catherine Parr, 1545, by Master John. National Portrait Gallery,
London

In the mid-1500s, Catherine de Medici made corsets de rigueur in French court society
(Lord 1868: 75), including steel corsets that, from a modern perspective, look like
instruments of torture. But according to William Barry Lord, author of The Corset and
the Crinoline, they were actually corset covers that functioned like a dress form:

[T]he steel framework in question was simply used to wear over the corset after
the waist had been reduced by lacing to the required standard, in order that the
dress over it might fit with inflexible and unerring exactness, and that not even
a fold might be seen in the faultless stomacher then worn.
(Lord 1868: 75)

The corset was thus an external body technology that signified an internal state of rec-
titude, but also one that enabled the conspicuous display of wealth and status (Steele
2001: 28). The association of uprightness with grace and comportment became, in the
seventeenth century, a “code of elegance” in which physical uprightness took on increas-
ing nuances of both economic power and social propriety. This is seen in the highly
formalized, masculine arts of military riding and fencing, and in the corseted woman’s
representation of self-control and modesty (Vigarello 1989: 176). Seventeenth-century
fashions of uprightness extended to the stiffened ruff worn at the neck, held firm by a

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 PO PU LA R CU LTU RE A N D TH E E N D O F T H E C O R S E T

“supportasse” or “pickadil” to frame the face by keeping the neck held rigid (Kelly 1916:
249–250). The female torso was thus neither exclusively disciplined nor the only part
of the body to be externally modified; corsets were part of an architecture of dress asso-
ciated with both male and female rigidity as a bodily discipline.
By the nineteenth century, however, pedagogies of the genteel body had a gendered
split between active and passive grace: heterosexual masculinity was athletic, while
femininity continued to be physically constrained. Vigarello notes that “Victorian-era
medicine liberated the masculine body but corseted that of the middle-class
woman . . . she was presented as weak and hypersensitive” (Vigarello 2005: 358–359, my
translation). In addition to corsets, women began wearing hoops under skirts by the end
of the 1500s, which further restricted mobility (Gernsheim 1963: 44). Variations on this
aesthetic simply shifted constraints from one part of the body to another: rigid neck ruffs
went away in the eighteenth century, but “by 1841 tight sleeves were almost universal
and were set in so low at the shoulder . . . that the wearer could scarcely raise her arms”
(Gernsheim 1963: 27). In the nineteenth century enormous hoops were replaced by
bustles that forced women to sit sideways on chairs. What remained was that women’s
clothes structured the body for presentational display rather than conforming to the
ergonomics of a body in motion.

Dance Revolution
The first decades following the French Revolution saw a brief digression from corseting
in France and England. Begun by French trendsetters, the adoption of a high-waisted
“Empire” silhouette later traveled to England during the Regency period. This toga-like
style of dress had an unstructured bodice that hung from the shoulders and a loose,
columnar skirt: “Stiffly boned corsets . . . had become a relic of the ancien régime . . . wo
men . . . adopted sheer white ‘Grecian’ dresses of clinging gauze or muslin cut close to
the body” (Le Bourhis 1989: xi). The style celebrated Greek and Roman democratic
ideals and was used to deflect suspicion towards former aristocrats, who protected them-
selves by embracing a range of democratic costumes and accessories (Cage 2009: 192).
The Empire waist coexisted with corsets, which continued to form the dominant silhou-
ette (Cage 2009: 194), but the “Grecian moment” had ongoing influence. The trend
began with dancers, opera singers, and actors, and even after the fashion had waned,
uncorseted gowns remained on stage (Cage 2009: 202). Ballet and opera flourished in
seventeenth-century France, with dancers wearing neoclassical costumes in stories from
Greek and Roman myths (Victoria and Albert Museum 2013). Female performers’
gowns reflected a “blending of Boulevard costume practices with the Opéra’s,” as both
elite and popular performance began to emphasize “the revelation of the female body”
(Chazin-Bennahum 2002: 370).
As ballet adopted neoclassical and “boulevard” costume, it allowed more expressive
types of movement, abandoning the “steppy sequences of Baroque forms” and emphasiz-
ing “height, length and grandeur of movement” (Chazin-Bennahum 2002: 384). In
1796, the popular ballerina Mlle Parisot “created a stir by raising her legs far higher than
was customary for dancers,” a gesture made possible by the costume’s high waist and
flowing skirt. Her exposed legs drew the ire of British clergy and was satirized in the
press, but the popularity of ballet signaled a significant shift toward acceptance of greater
freedom of movement and body exposure among female performers (Chazin-Bennahum
2002: 384; Shteir 2004: 13). Thus, though the Empire silhouette passed out of favor after

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Figure 30.2 Jean-Simon Bertélemy’s costume designs for Le Triomphe de Trajan, an

opera by Louis-Luc Loiseau de Persuis and Jean-François Le Sueur, 1807.
Bibliotèque national de France

failing to become an ongoing alternative to the corset, it took root in the performing
arts, a sub-cultural enclave from which it would later emerge as “artistic dress.”

Sway: The Crinoline and the Ankle

Ever-present even during the “Grecian moment,” the hourglass ideal became even more
pronounced in the mid-1800s when crinolines (concentric steel hoops held vertically
with tape or steel ribs) became the rage and remained popular through the 1870s
(Gernsheim 1963: 45). In spite of their cage-like construction, crinoline hoops were
lighter and cooler than layered petticoats, which hung heavily from women’s corsets.
They did, however, take up even more space and were hazardous—catching on fire, in
carriage wheels, or in a gust of wind that could blow the wearer off her feet. As a fashion
writer, Helen Ingersoll, noted in 1895:

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 PO PU LA R CU LTU RE A N D TH E E N D O F T H E C O R S E T

Figure 30.3 Madame Parisot, in a caricature from 1796, displaying her risqué dancing
style. The “Q” in the title is the Duke of Queensbury. Isaac Cruikshank,
British Museum

The pages of Punch about 1860 are filled with caricatures of the crinoline,
showing the havoc caused by a maid-servant’s hoops as she swirls among delicate
bric-à-brac, or the disastrous effect of a lively breeze upon the voluminous
draperies of her mistress.
(Ingersoll 1895: 293)

But the dangers associated with these lightweight hoops were related to their allure: they
swayed.
Floor-length hoops may not seem provocative, but as a writer in the Pall Mall Gazette
complained in 1865, the bouncy lightness of crinoline could create a spectacle, with its
tendency toward “swaying about and exposing the wearer’s limbs at every motion of the
body” (cited in Cook et al. 1865: 437). Women’s ankles became more visible in the mid-
nineteenth century thanks not only to flirtatious hoops, but also the walking dress.
French Empress Eugénie is credited with popularizing a slightly shorter dress to make
some accommodation for outdoor activities (Gernsheim 1963: 51). Women began loop-
ing up their skirts and showing off colorful petticoats while in the country, at the beach,
or while playing croquet and archery. By the end of the 1870s, “the upper skirt was
drawn up still higher and towards the back where it developed into the bustle, the pet-
ticoat becoming the main skirt. The dress was still worn over a kind of decadent small
crinoline called ‘crinolette’ . . . but the true crinoline was dead, and unmourned by those
who had worn it so long” (Gernsheim 1963: 58). Not only could a woman now look
refined without isolating herself in an island of fabric, she could also walk outdoors
without having to kick her skirt forward with each step in order to avoid stepping on it.
What followed was an obsession with women’s exposed ankles. Seen later in numerous

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 BERRY

“ A r a b e l l a M a r i a , 41 O n l y to t h in k , J u l i a dear-, t h a t o u r M o th e r s w o r e s u c h r id ic u lo u s fa s h io
s th e se I”
lio T ir . “ TTa! h a ! h a ! h a !”

Figure 30.4 A satirical cartoon from the July 11, 1857 issue of Harper’s Weekly.
Caption:
Arabella Maria: “Only to think, Julia dear, that our Mothers wore such
ridiculous fashions as these!”
Both: “Ha! ha! ha! ha!”
Courtesy of the Picture Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

early films from France, England, and the U.S., this delight in the unveiling of legs had
been fueled in the preceding years by the tantalizing movement of swaying crinoline and
the walking dress.

Dance Madness
The increasing popularity of women’s physical culture in the mid-nineteenth century
resulted in shorter dresses, but women still wore corsets for exercise (Summers 2001:
176). While it’s clear that athletics challenged the restrictions of the corset, popular
dance is often overlooked as a factor in this period. The skirt dance, which brought bal-
let’s “legmania” to the popular stage, also required a looser bodice in order for dancers
to make high kicks. Skirt dancing featured voluminous skirts held aloft in a tantalizing

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 PO PU LA R CU LTU RE A N D TH E E N D O F T H E C O R S E T

veiling and unveiling of the performer’s legs. The skirt dance had little to do with the
grace or narrative of romantic ballet; it was closer to the French cancan, a working class
version of the quadrille that became popular in the 1820s (Parfitt and Prickett 2008:
29). Similarly, the skirt dance was looked down upon as vulgar by dance connoisseurs,
and in 1897 George Bernard Shaw wrote scathingly of it for the Saturday Review:

The stage . . . is always liable to the incursions of beauteous persons whose

misfortune it is to be unable to dance at all. . . . Some excuse being necessary
for the exhibition of their charms on the boards, an unskilled accomplishment
had to be invented for them. And this was the origin of the skirt-dance, or
dance which is no dance, thanks to which we soon had young ladies . . . laboriously
hopping and flopping, twirling and staggering, as a nuclei for a sort of bouquet
of petticoats of many colors.
(Shaw 1897: 38)

Two years after Shaw’s review, the London Gaiety Girls arrived in the United States and
inspired countless imitators. Bob Skiba writes in the Philadelphia Dance History Journal
that the craze for skirt dancing was seen “at recitals and soirees at the homes of the social
set,” and cites this article in The Philadelphia Inquirer on how “[t]he muscles of the skirt

T h e m u scles o f a skirt d a n cer a re so

K notted Muscles,
B la ster w ere g ra c efu l exp on en ts is out
o f date. T h e s w e llin g c a lves , fluted
S w iss ruffles and low c o rsa g e a re ael-
dom seen on the sta g e; instead, com e
a sw ish o f silken ac co rd ion pleated
sk ir ts, h igh heeled slippers, flo w in g
slee v e s and th e tin g o f a tam bourin e.
“ T h e reason o f th e c h a n g e in p o p u la r­
it y is a lso a question o f expense and
h e a lth .” said g ra c e fu l A n n ie St. T el,
w h o is on e o f the m ost talen ted y o u n g
g ir ls o f the profession. “ A m e ric a n
and E n glis h g ir ls refuse to stu dy b allet
dances on accou n t o f th e le n g th o f
tim e it tak es to a cqu ire a p resen tab le
efficien c y in th e art and the exp en s e
in cu rred in learn in g. So th e public,
fo rc ed to accep t w h at th e y cou ld get.
n o w think ou r s tyle o f d a n cin g qu ite
th e p r ettiest on any s ta ge , an cien t
o r m odern.”
sy m m e tric a lly d evelop ed th a t there
Is no touch o f u n gainlin ess abou t the
p h ysica l fo rm . T h e u n a ttra ctive lum ps
th a t a re p a in fu lly visib le in the legs
o f th e p ir o u e ttin g F ren ch da nseuse a re
rep la ced b y lo n g slim lin es th a t bend
g r a c e fu lly as a reed.
T h e plum p w om an m u st b ow to her
slim s iste r’s su p er io rity in this p ro ­
fession. as e v e r y teach er o f the a r t
w ill confess. “ T h e thinn er she is the
m ore y a rd s o f d ra p e ry I can bu ild
on h er to add to her g r a c e ,” sa ys one
o f the best k n ow n Instructors.
H e r p re fe r a b le w eig h t is JM> pounds,

M u ch o f h e r e x p la n a tio n is true.
P r a n c e was the le g itim a te hom e o f
th e b a llet. A m erican g ir ls w h o d esired
to m ake a liv in g as dancers w ere
fo rc e d to g o to P a r is to stu d y th eir
steps, ju s t as artists and m usicians do.
A g a in th e y w ere com pelled to com ­
m en ce v e r y you n g if th e y decided the ir
lif e in th is direction. T h e m uscles of
the le g s m u st be supple and u n d e ve l­
oped to bear the strain o f th e teaching,
oth e rw ise it w ou ld take y ea rs to undo
w h a t n atu re has a lread y finished In
the w a y o f g row th .

So, a re b ellion arose in the m ind o f

on e c le v e r w om an , b rin gin g h e r to the
de cis ion th a t she w'ould begin a school
o f h e r ow n . She learn ed from an o r ­
d in a r y d a n c in g m as ter som e g ra c efu l
c h a ra c te r steps, put on lo n g skirts, for
she w a s sle n d e r ly form ed, draped her
blou se up to h er co lla r bone, fashioned
lo n g a n g e l s lee ves th at g a v e h e r hands
som eth in g to do, and th e th e a tre was
re sp ec ta b ly filled w hen she w a s a d ­
ve rtise d .
The Modern Dancer.

Figure 30.5 “Skirt Dancing and Its Charms,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 3, 1895.
Vol. 132, no. 62, p. 13. © NewsBank and the American Antiquarian
Society, 2004

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 BERRY

dancer are so symmetrically developed that . . . the unattractive lumps that are painfully
visible in the legs of the pirouetting French danseuse are replaced by the long slim lines
that bend as gracefully as a reed” (Skiba 2012).
The skirt-dancer’s willowy legs were even more visible in another dance craze that
soon followed: the tango. By 1905, the tango had migrated from Buenos Aires to Paris
and then London, where Tango Teas introduced society women to the style (Evans
2013: 50–53, Davis 2006: 83). Caroline Evans details the extent to which “tango was a
format perfectly suited for adaptation to the fashion show” (Evans 2013: 52). The fash-
ion show itself was a new form of feminine body discipline and performance, and by
1913 the tango craze inspired designers to create gowns suited to the dance and replace
the “mannequin walk” with tango when showing them (Evans 2013: 52). As Evans
shows, fashion modeling played a significant role in the creation of a mobile femininity,
and popular dance helped transform the mannequin from a “static object” into a “vis-
ceral body . . . tuned to the rhythms of modernity” (Evans 2013: 55). By 1910 tango had
reached the United States through the huge success of Vernon and Irene Castle
(Knowles 2009: 76; Studlar 1996: 159). The Castles became a sensation in New York
and their 1914 book Modern Dancing spread the dancers’ influence. Irene Castle became
a fashion icon in her short hair (transforming the “tango bob” into the “Castle bob”)
and streamlined dance gowns designed by Lucile. Fully aware of their impact on fashion,
the Castles argued that dancers, not designers, allowed women to reject “long cruel
corsets” and “the tight snakiness of the hobble skirt” (Castle and Castle 1914: 144–5).
American “dance madness” had its share of critics; ragtime and tango were considered
“animal dances” by many church leaders (Knowles 2009: 59). In addition to the racism
of many critics of popular dance, its impact on women’s mobility (both literal and figu-
rative) did not go unnoticed. When associated with women’s fight for the vote, dance
inspired deep social anxieties, as when a character in the Robert Chambers novel The
Restless Sex (1918) rants that “We’re drifting toward Babylon. That’s the trend since the
dance craze swept this moral nation off its moral feet into a million tango joints . . .”
Chambers’ character sees the craze as a direct reflection of the “nation-wide movement
for suffrage” (Chambers 1918: 222). Without belaboring the double meaning of “move-
ment” in this context, it’s clear that by allowing them to loosen their bodices and slit
their skirts, popular dance changed both women’s physical and social experience.

“Little Pictures That Danced”

The variety of ways in which women could be seen to move expanded dramatically in
the late nineteenth century. Before the 1870s, photographic portraits required the sub-
ject to remain motionless and formally posed. Mass-produced cartes de visite had begun
circulating images of entertainment celebrities and their fashions after 1854, but with
the introduction of faster emulsions in the 1870s, photographers and Impressionist
painters began to capture figures in the gestures of a moment, and soon studio-based
portraits looked old-fashioned by contrast. Artists of all genres were increasingly obsessed
with the expressivity of movement (McCauley 2013: 199, 207). Impressionism also
celebrated the textures and colors of clothing and a new consumer culture of urban
fashion. Similarly, the chronophotography of Jules Etienne Marey and Eadweard
Muybridge made the analysis of everyday movement a cultural preoccupation. Several
of the female models who worked with Muybridge on his motion studies were dancers
and wore the neoclassical “diaphanous drapery” of dance costume. The effect was to

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 PO PU LA R CU LTU RE A N D TH E E N D O F T H E C O R S E T

“show off the movement of their bodies but at the same time add to the overall sense of
their movement” (Mathews 2005: 79). Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement
built on a Pre-Raphaelite style of late-Victorian “artistic dress” (also called aesthetic
dress). These movements gave dress reform an added élan of bohemian rebellion against
the “impoverishment of beauty created by the rise of industrialization” (Cunningham
2010: 104). The mainstream influence of artistic dress was apparent by the 1870s, seen
in the success of consumer outlets like Liberty of London, which opened in 1875 and
sold reproductions of classical Greek dresses and tea gowns—unwaisted dresses “increas-
ingly worn informally at home by women of fashion” (Levy 1986: 24; Wilson and Taylor
1989: 64).
Early cinema captivated viewers with its naturalistic images of bodies in motion.
Edison once called his Kinetoscope “a machine to make little pictures that danced”
(Gunning 2005: 163), an apt metaphor given the popularity of dance acts on film—from
skirt dancers to exotic world’s fair performers. Women’s physical culture contributed to
the appeal of these films, since François Delsarte’s system of aesthetic gymnastics had
been widely adopted among middle class American women at the end of the nineteenth
century (Brannigan 2011: 75–76). Susan Manning argues that women related to early
modern dance in America because many had “experienced the same movement tech-
niques” as the dancers and could thus “identify the dancer’s flow of bodily motion as
reflective of their own” (Manning 1997: 164). She cites Roger Copeland’s suggestion
that the work of dancers like Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan was about “kinetic empa-
thy” as much as visual experience (Manning 1997: 155). Fuller transformed the skirt
dance into a much-imitated danse serpentine, recreated by countless performers in short
films, including lush tinted versions that emulated Fuller’s innovative stage lighting
techniques (Garelick 2009: 134). Fuller was a maverick who flouted both aesthetic and
social convention; Isadora Duncan is often credited with rejecting the corset in her daily
life, but Loïe Fuller preceded her in this (Thomas 2004: 61).
Cinematic dance helped popularize the aesthetics of women in motion, and perform-
ers like Irene Castle and Isadora Duncan made corset-free dressing accessible to
American women who wanted to look modern. Elizabeth Kendall has suggested that
Duncan’s affinity with loose, flowing dress came from her upbringing in California,
where late-Victorian bohemian dress was “almost a uniform for the artistic set of San
Francisco in the 1890s” (cited in Thomas 2004: 61). In Europe, the influence of artistic

Figure 30.6 Woman Dancing, 1887, by Eadweard Muybridge. Animal Locomotion

series. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

351
Figure 30.7 Loïe Fuller Dancing, ca. 1900, by Samuel Joshua Beckett. Metropolitan
Museum of Art

Figure 30.8 Isadora Duncan, ca. 1915–1923, by Arnold Genthe. Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division
 PO PU LA R CU LTU RE A N D TH E E N D O F T H E C O R S E T

dress was apparent even before Paul Poiret began to replace traditional corsets with
streamlined foundation garments. As Caroline Evans describes, “the redesign of the
female body began with the introduction of two new dress shapes: Paquin’s Empire line
in 1905 and Margaine Lacroix’s Sylphide dress in 1904, sometimes called a Directoire
dress when it had a slit skirt (Evans 2013: 202). When these styles, along with Worth’s
Directoire line, arrived at Wanamaker’s New York show in 1908, they were seen as mod-
ern but not avant-garde. Fashion writers wrote that the gowns “clung to the lithe figure
without immodesty or eccentricity” (Evans 2013: 203). The un-corseted body was no
longer scandalous. By the time Irene Castle starred in a 1917 film serial, her elegant,
un-corseted, ankle-length dresses were being copied by a young Gloria Swanson, and
soon cinema was celebrating the “jazz-age kinaesthetics” of 1920s flappers (Finamore
2013: 1; Landay 2002: 221).

Conclusion
As is often pointed out, rejecting the corset did not mean the end of oppressive body
ideals and undergarments. Some argue that the “cruel corset” was rejected only to be
replaced by an equally oppressive ideal of slenderness. The irony that women gained
freedom of movement only to become slaves to the gym is clear, but our current obses-
sion with being thin wasn’t an inevitable result of giving up the corset. The French
fashion writer René Bizet is quoted as saying that “Every revolution begins with a change
of clothes” (Davis 2006: 1). I’d argue, however, that it begins with the popular inclina-
tion to (mis)behave in ways that embody and perform new possibilities.

Note
1 The author thanks the organizers of the 2013 fashion and film research workshop: Louise Wallenberg,
Marketa Uhlirova, Caroline Evans, and Jane Gaines (with support from the Centre for Fashion Studies,
the Section for Cinema Studies at Stockholm University, Colombia University in New York, and the
Fashion History and Theory Research Group at Central Saint Martins/University of the Arts London).
Participants included Ian Christie, Marina Dahlquist, Mila Ganeva, Tag Gronberg, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen,
Mariann Lewinsky Sträuli, Timothy Long, Jan Olsson, Marlis Schweitzer, Michelle Tolini Finamore, and
Alessandra Vaccari. I’m grateful for the conversation and insight these scholars shared with me. Caroline
Evans kindly read and commented on early draft.

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 31
SHIRLEY TEMPLE
Child Star
Geoff Lealand

The act of being a star, basking in stardom, is defined by Google as “the state of being a
very famous or talent entertainer or sport player.” Richard Dyer, in his influential studies
Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (1986) and Stars (1998), writes of stardom being
the outcome of social and industrial forces, developed within a matrix of semiotic and
psychological meanings. At a more fundamental level, “Stars are made for profit [and]
are part of the way films are sold” (Dyer 1986: 5), and in large part are a phenomenon
of the American film industry (aka ‘Hollywood’). But we should also acknowledge that
other national cinemas also rely on star power, such as French cinema, Hong Kong
cinema and Bollywood (Indian popular cinema).
It is also possible to argue that the heyday of the film star was the 1930s and 1940s,
when a major studio such as MGM could declare that it possessed, under contract,
“More stars than there are in heaven.” Some decades later, Richard Dyer was declaring
that “gradually through the Thirties and Forties, and emphatically since the Fifties, the
stars have come down to earth. They are just like you and me” (Dyer 1981: 1101). This
fall from the heights coincided with the collapse of the old studio system, when stars
were contracted to and effectively owned by particular studios, which shaped their iden-
tity and controlled all important aspects of their lives. With this collapse, stars became
more like mere mortals, and more open to the possibilities of re-shaping their personas—
but also more susceptible to scandal resulting from a less-protected life, and, in a number
of cases, premature death (Monroe, James Dean, Judy Garland). As Dyer argues, “From
having once represented ideals of human happiness and aspiration, by the Sixties star-
dom almost came to represent the defeat of those ideals” (Dyer 1981: 1103).
In the ensuing decades, the idea of the film star has waxed and waned. It is possible
to argue, for example, that the 1980s and 1990s provided another heyday for the male
film star (Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brad Pitt) and there are exam-
ples aplenty of famous film stars in 2013 (Tom Cruise, Daniel Craig, Scarlett Johansson).
Nevertheless, there is now something very different in the nature and meaning of the
film star. They no longer have the resonance, resilience and lustre of the stars of the
1930s and 1940s; we know too much about them through gossip websites and
the shrinking spaces between the public and the personal. The eager readership for
paparazzi photos of film stars caught off-guard (their cellulite and unruly hair empha-
sised) is one manifestation of this.
 SH I RLEY TEM PLE: C H I L D S TA R

In respect of public profiles of stars, Alberoni (1962) has argued that they “have no
access to real political power,” but this is contradicted by stars who have attained high
political status (Schwarzenegger, Ronald Reagan), as well as the recruitment of stars for
political campaigns, or their ready alignment with social causes.
The state of being a star has also increasingly become confused with the state of being
a celebrity—the hordes of the “overly untalented” (as British musician Morrissey puts
it) who now divert and distract public attention through performances of the ordinary
and banal. In an era of the event film and dominance of computer-generated imagery,
the human figures who populate the filmscapes of Avatar, Transformers or The Hobbit
now have to compete with the fantastic worlds and effects conjured up by digital tech-
nology. In a world where it is possible to cast a film completely with virtual actors, the
film star is a threatened species.
But until it is possible to completely and convincingly replicate the subtleties and
nuances of human movement and facial expression, we still wish to gaze upon the
human form in the cinema, in both familiar and idealised representations. Conventions
of beauty still prevail and stardom still favours the young, most particularly females in
the age band of 20 to 35 years, even though numerous male stars have greater longevity,
and can extend their stardom in middle age or even senior citizenship (Clint Eastwood
and Harrison Ford, for example).
General observation of contemporary mainstream cinema suggests that despite nota-
ble exceptions Helen Mirren, Judi Dench and Susan Sarandon, the young, comely and
female dominate film screens. Even though its focus is on a particular form of film
(Adult Cinema), a 2013 content analysis of 10,000 profiles on the Internet Adult Film
Database found that females in this particular industry started a career at the age of 22
and remained in the business for about three years (“The average female pornstar?”
MailOnline, 2013).
One can expect to find a similar age profile in the more respectable branches of the
global film industry; a poll of “The 100 Sexiest Movie Stars 2013” in Empire magazine
concludes that the 50 females in the poll were primarily in their 20s and 30s, with two
long-dead stars (Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe) being the rare exceptions. In the
days when film stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Bette Davis ruled, many of these
young women might well have been considered ‘starlets’—a significantly diminished
role.
Generally, we can consider ourselves to be living in an age of instant, ephemeral
stardom, where the electronic media (the internet and television talent shows) can
create overnight sensations such as Justin Bieber, who generate followings equivalent in
volume to the numbers who doted on the film stars of earlier decades. It is interesting,
for example, to note how ‘celebrity studies’ has now largely displaced ‘stardom studies’
in academic circles.
But we cannot really understand how we have got to this point of our history without
firstly understanding what stardom meant in the past and how it has shaped what it
might mean now. The history of the film star, dating from the construction of the ‘First
Film Star’ Florence Lawrence in 1910, illuminates the continuing relationship of audi-
ences with screen fictions, as well as persistent norms of gender, physical beauty and
artistic talent.
The twentieth-century phenomenon of the film star also helps explain the two nota-
ble exceptions to the convention of young male and female stars, namely animal stars
and child stars. It is probable that we are now less likely to respond to anthropomorphised

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animal characters such as Rin-Tin-Tin, Lassie or Flipper so popular in the 1950s and
1960s; in recent decades animal characters are more commonly found in elaborately
produced animated features such as The Lion King (1994) or Ice Age (2002). Children in
character roles remain more of a staple in mainstream cinema, from their earliest appear-
ance as babies (Raising Arizona 1987; Three Men and a Baby 1987), into childhood and
early adolescence.
These child actors perform in film and television under a set of special provisions,
which reflect the constraints and protection which broadly apply to children in Western
societies. For films shot in California, for example, child actors must secure an entertain-
ment work permit before accepting any paid performing work and have to comply with
special provisions regarding work hours and the need to continue with formal education.
A portion of their earnings has to be allocated to a special trust account, a provision
dating from the 1939 Coogan Act, after the millions of dollars earned by child star
Jackie Coogan were squandered by his parents. Displaying proprietorial attitudes which
would be greeted with alarm today, Coogan’s mother declared, “No promises were ever
made to give Jackie anything. Every dollar a kid earns before he is 21 belongs to his
parents. Jackie will not get a cent of his earnings” (“The Strange Case of Jackie Coogan’s
$4,000,000,” Life, 25 April 1938).
These provisions, and ways in which children are still represented on the screen,
reflect the broader cultural norms and expectations regarding the place of children in
contemporary society. Scholars now generally accept that ‘childhood,’ as we know it
now, is a relatively recent invention and largely a consequence of the twin forces of
industrialisation and urbanisation in the late ninetieth century. According to Wikipedia,
childhood as we know it now had its origins in the Victorian era:

The Modern attitude to children emerged by the late 19th century; the
Victorian middle and upper classes emphasized the role of the family
and the sanctity of the child—an attitude that has remained dominant in
Western societies ever since.

It is interesting that the evolution of the modern child has roughly paralleled the rise of
mass media, firstly through vaudeville, then the popular press and film. There has long been
a synergy between these two social phenomena. For example, Cook (2004) points to the
emergence of the ‘toddler’ as both a sub-category of childhood and a marketing strategy in
the 1930s, through the immense popularity of child stars such as Shirley Temple, who was
defined not only by her age (she made her first film appearance aged three) but also by her
appearance, clothing and relationship with older children and adults. Cook suggests that
the state of ‘toddler-hood’ was not so much about a child displaying independent mobil-
ity, but more to do with a new life-phase point and marketing category. In latter decades,
following similar dynamics, other marketing categories emerged: the ‘teenager’ in the late
1940s and 1950s, and ‘tweenies’ (aspirational pre-adolescents) in the 1990s.
In general, representations of children and childhood in film have reinforced and
reiterated the dominant discourse of society, whereby children are situated within a
dichotomous framework: imagined as innocent and in need of protection (as in ‘child-
like’), or imagined as little devils or wild creatures, in need of control and constraint (as
in ‘childish’). As Kathy Merlock Jackson (1986) points out, the child stars who emerged
in the 1930s were both precious and precocious; both pre-adult and often wiser than
those adults around them.

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More than a hundred years of film has produced many child stars who have
represented such prevailing notions of childhood and its changes. They have included
silent cinema stars such as Jackie Coogan and stars of the studio hey-day such as Jackie
Cooper, Mickey Rooney, Freddie Bartholomew and, most importantly, Shirley Temple.
There were later stars into the 1950s and 1960s (Elizabeth Taylor and Ron Howard, for
example) but just as the era of the adult film star was in decline by the Fifties, the days
of the child film star was very much over a decade or more before. As Holmstrom
(1980: 2012) argues:

By the end of the Thirties the great period of child stars was over. Cooper,
Bartholomew and Temple had faded in turn—though Rooney was doing nicely
out of his prolonged adolescence. In Europe, most of the best performances
came from children who were not stars and made no career . . . No more major
American child stars emerged.

Timothy Shary, in his comprehensive 2012 article, “Oppositions of Aging: Stories

About Children in Movies,” argues that “very few child actors have ever been able to
maintain their success and visibility as they grow into adulthood” (7). He attributes
this to the possibility that “audiences have difficulty accepting child stars’ physical and
mental changes as they transform into adults themselves.” Exceptions to this seem-
ingly inevitable decline into obscurity are rare and include a few child stars such as
Elizabeth Taylor “whose fame only increased as she aged beyond adolescence’” (12).
Jackie Coogan, in his adult years, gained some late fame as Uncle Fester in the perverse
US sitcom The Addams Family (ABC 1964–66). More recent examples of child stars
include Jodie Foster and Drew Barrymore but Macaulay Culkin, the only boy star who
achieved any prominence in the 1990s, has faded from the public gaze.
Shary argues that child actors in contemporary film have once again become secondary
to the action:

[T]he American film industry’s promotion of child stars in recent years has
continued to rely upon their abilities to act within adult contexts, as opposed
to the child-centred vehicles that were more common before the 1950s . . . one
popular plot was kids comically tormenting their parents and other adults.
(17)

Shary (2012) further suggests that “In this second century of cinema, child actors remain
dependent upon the marquee value of adult stars in order to propel their careers,” just
as “the record shows that all children will likely face serious obstacles in maintaining
their value as they age” (18). But this was not always the case in the first century of
cinema, when there were child stars aplenty and one particular child star without peer.
This brings us to Shirley Temple. As Holmstrom (1980: 211) writes:

The year of 1932 saw the arrival on the Hollywood scene of the most
famous little girl star in cinema history. Shirley Temple (b. 1928) was the
moppet to end all moppets—and end them she did . . . Temple had the luck
to arrive at exactly the right moment, the first brand-new child prodigy of the
talkies. In fact, she and the cinema uttered their first sounds almost
simultaneously.

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Eckert (1974: 1) suggested that Shirley Temple had received little serious attention in
film scholarship because:

Shirley was, first of all, a child (and therefore uncomplex, innocent of history)
and secondly because the sense of the numinous that surrounds her is unlike
that which surrounds culture heroes or political leaders in that it is deeply
sentimental and somehow purified.

Eckert challenges these assumptions and suggests that a close analysis of Shirley—to
“begin to chip at her surface”—can illuminate the historical, political and ideological
meanings of this child star, and the significant times in which she prevailed. She was
more than just a star of the screen; she was a phenomenon without precedence and she
provides a lens which can examine ideas of childhood (its shifting forms, commodifica-
tion and objectification), stardom and fandom, and the discourses of film.
Since Eckert’s attempt to redress the neglect of Shirley Temple scholarship, there has
been a small but growing body of literature. Some of this has been autobiography
(Shirley’s own Child Star, 1988) and biography (Anne Edwards, Shirley Temple: American
Princess, 1988). But, after prolonged neglect, there has been recent work with cultural
studies or film studies perspectives, such as Gaylyn Studlar’s chapter “Cosseting the
Nation; or, How To Conquer Fear Itself with Shirley Temple” in her Precocious Charms:
Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema (2013); Kristen Hatch’s contri-
bution to camera obscura, “Discipline and Pleasure: Shirley Temple and the Spectacle of
Child Loving” (Hatch, 2012); and Karen Orr Vered “White and Black in Black and
White: Management of Race and Sexuality in the Coupling of Child-Star Shirley
Temple and Bill Robinson,” in the film journal Velvet Light Trap (Orr Vered, 1997).
These latter examples of writing engage with the difficult topic of Shirley and sexual-
ity, and illustrate the possibilities but also the constraints of understanding such a
phenomenon from the advantage of contemporary perspective. Studlar and Hatch place
some emphasis on the libel suit against the British novelist Graham Greene in 1937, a
case which speaks volumes about the extraordinary popularity of Shirley in the 1930s
and what she might mean in 2013. In 1937, Green published a review in the British
journal Night and Day of a Temple film (Wee Willie Winkie, 1937), which generated great
outrage. He suggested that

The owners of a child star are like leaseholders—their property diminishes in

value every year . . . Miss Shirley Temple’s case, though, has peculiar interest:
infancy with her is a disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult . . . watch
the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity . . . Her
admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious coquetry,
to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous
vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between
their intelligence and their desire.
(Reprinted in Edwards 1988: 363–364)

Learning of this review, Temple’s ‘owner’ (Twentieth Century Fox) issued a case for libel
against Greene and Chatto & Windus, the publishers of Night and Day, which resulted
in a trial at the King’s Bench of the High Court of Justice in London on March 22, 1938.
The case was won and damages awarded of £3,500; the judges declared that it “was one

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of the most horrible libels that one could well imagine,” from a “beastly publication”
(Edwards 1988: 359–361).
There were other consequences resulting from the judgment: it ensured the demise of
Night and Day, and Greene was forced into exile. The official line was that he had been
sent to Mexico by the Vatican to investigate human rights violations but there has been
more recent speculation that he fled there to avoid further prosecution and possible
imprisonment (Johnson 2007). There is certain irony that his exile resulted in Greene
writing The Power and the Glory, one of his finest novels, which was turned into a film,
The Fugitive, directed by John Ford—who had directed Wee Will Winkie.
It is difficult to know whether Shirley Temple knew of the court case and the contro-
versy it stirred for she was only nine years old at the time of the review appearing. There
is some evidence, recorded in her 1988 biography Child Star, that she learned about it
in her later years and indeed reached an accord with Greene.
The most important aspect of this libel case is that it is still regarded by many to be
the first significant challenge to normative responses to Temple, and a pioneering
moment for feminist critiques of gender representation. Indeed, Studlar suggests that a
number of feminist film scholars (such as Ana Osterweil, Molly Haskell and Nadine
Wells) have followed Greene’s cue, to regard Temple as “the pedophile’s muse” (Studlar,
2013: 64). She writes that “contemporary film scholarship presumes Temple’s film and
screen persona to be pedophilic in their textual construction and primary appeal, yet her
films are barely analysed” (65).
Intending to redress this neglect, Studlar provides a close analysis of Temple’s feature
films, concluding that instead of eroticising Temple through a so-called cinematic ‘male
gaze,’ these films present narrative patterns of inter-generational reconciliation, or
repeated stories of how the innocent love of a little girl rescues isolated, emotionally
older males from themselves. She argues that this happens in Temple’s films through the
recurrent theme of ‘cosseting’; interactions between a young ‘innocent’ girl and embit-
tered or reclusive older males which result in the emotional reawakening, reviving,
restoring and reinforcing of a love of a father (or substitute father) for his child.
According to Studlar, Temple’s films privilege the more innocent sentiments of pater-
nalism over baser male instincts. Hatch (2012) also argues that the core theme of
Temple’s films, the “Shirley Temple formula,” governs how “the child functions sym-
bolically as a corrective to the potential shortcomings of patriarchal rule” (131).
Additionally, attention should be paid to the issue of race relations in Temple’s films,
in respect of her on-screen and off-screen relationship with co-star Bill “Bojangles”
Robinson, who appeared alongside Shirley in four of her feature films. A legendary tap
dancer, and rare black man in Hollywood films of the 1930s, Robinson’s relationship
with the young girl star comprised a unique friendship, and a very rare representation of
race mingling. As Hatch (2012) suggests, “the image of Temple and Robinson then
seemed indicative of the civilizing power of the sacralised child . . . in which ‘the first
interracial couple’ functioned for American audiences” (143).
Nevertheless, the modern gaze is strongly inclined to discern something more perverse
or unsettling in the ways images of Temple were displayed and promoted during her
youngest years. For example, Hatch describes a publicity still used to promote Temple’s
1938 film Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which co-starred Jack Haley:

Haley is on his hands and knees, straddled by the child, who swishes ariding
crop against his backside and loosely holds a leather strap around his neck.

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Temple’s famous dimples and curls frame a face that seems too knowing for such
a young girl. Her half-closed eyes look slyly at the man, while her lips turn up
into a disconcerting grin. How could we not see in this a pedophilic fantasy of
domination and submission?
(127)

Hatch also points to the potential difficulties resulting from an encounter with this
image, more than 80 years after its first appearance. She argues that it is capable of

producing two entirely different sets of meanings, because our culture has
undergone a paradigm shift regarding childhood. Whereas we now understand
children to be imperilled by adult male sexuality, childhood innocence once
seemed inviolable. Just as it is very difficult for us to see anything other than
pedophilia in this photograph, it would have been equally difficult for early
twentieth-century audiences to see the same image as anything but
benign . . . For early twentieth-century audiences, the image is likely to have
represented child loving rather than pedophilia.
(128)

Pedophilia is a very loaded term in the early twenty-first-century; the focus of public
alarm and media-fuelled moral panics, which regularly erupt around numerous cases of
the disappearance, murder or rescuing of young girls from capture. There is also a paral-
lel discourse around feminist critiques of beauty pageants for young girls, with the two
critiques merging in respect of JonBenet Ramsey, the beauty pageant star who was mur-
dered in 1996, aged six.
There is also a broader discourse about the commodification of childhood, the influ-
ence of role models (Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, et al.) on the socialisation of young
girls, the emergence of new marketing categories such as ‘tweenies,’ and the earlier
sexualisation of girls (getting older, younger). For example, David Buckingham (2011)
points to claims that “Consumerism, it would seem, is destroying the fundamental values
of childhood—and, in the process, it is making children’s and parents’ lives a misery.”
In contrast to life today, the years of the 1930s in which Shirley Temple reigned
supreme indeed seem a very different place. In those years, battalions of mothers and
grandmothers across the globe were combing and grooming their children and grand-
children to look like Shirley. In far-distant Christchurch, New Zealand, for example, a
Shirley Temple ‘double’ competition in June 1935 led to 467 little girls aged between
four and five years parading on the stage of the State Theatre, dressed and coiffured to
resemble Shirley. A full page feature in the daily newspaper The Sun (Christchurch) on
June 22, 1935, proclaimed Betty Vial (aged 4 years 2 months) as the winner of the top
prize of NZ£10, with autographed photos of Shirley as consolation prizes.
Similar competitions took place in other counties (including Australia and France),
usually accompanying the release of a new Temple film. But such adoration was not just
for mothers and daughters. As Anne Edwards (1988) declared, in the blurb of her 1988
biography,

At the age of five, she became the world’s most famous and acclaimed
child . . . By the time she was ten, she had either met or had received words of
admiration from almost everyone of distinction. Nine tenths of the planet could

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recognize her on sight. She single-handedly cheered an entire nation caught in

the firm grip of the Depression.

With great faith, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared, “As long as our country
has Shirley Temple, we will be all right” (“Shirley Temple: The Superstar,” Daily Mail
n.d.). Temple’s studio, Twentieth Century Fox, was particularly grateful for Shirley for
she rescued them from imminent bankruptcy, whilst reigning as the world’s number
one box-office star for four years in a row and occupying the top slot in the world’s top
ten money-making stars by 1935. During these years, she continued to be awarded a
monthly ‘pocket money’ allowance of $US13.
But, unlike other child stars who slid into obscurity or insolvency, Temple attained
greater control over her career, which lasted well past her childhood years, with young
adult roles and a range of television involvements in Shirley Temple’s Storybook (1958)
and The Shirley Temple Theatre (1961). As an adult, she entered politics, which led to
roles as the US Ambassador to both Ghana and the United Nations, and the first female
Chief of Protocol in the White House in 1974.
As a cultural phenomenon, Temple informs us about the prevailing values of an
important period of American history, as well as her extraordinary impact across the
world during those years. As Holmstrom (1980: 212) notes, “Now that all the ballyhoo
of Shirley-mania is history, one can enjoy her films as the amazing period-pieces they
are—products, however minor, of Hollywood in its full confident prime.”
Nevertheless, her presence still resonates into the twentieth-first century, not just
through the continued circulation of her films nearly eighty years since their first release
but also the ways in which her representation of girlhood lingers in the popular imagina-
tion, providing sharp contrast to the lives of young girls today.
One recent example of this is an internet meme which circulated widely in 2013,
coupling a familiar image of Shirley with an image of Alana Thompson, aka Honey Boo
Boo, child star of the American reality television show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo
(TLC, 2012– ). Hatch (2013: 1) explains that “Reality television’s first fully-fledged
child star has been likened to Shirley Temple, if only to bemoan the differences between
the most popular girl of the Great Depression and the most talked-about girl of the
Great Recession.” Although both girls display a head of golden curls, the differences
could not be more dramatic. Shirley was demure and consistently well-behaved. Podgy
Alana (Honey Boo Boo), Shirley’s dark nemesis, chatters, farts and sneezes unapolo-
getically, whilst being held in the abundant embrace of what many would label ‘a poor,
white trash’ family. This family and its extended members displays little regard for mid-
dle-class, polite niceties in respect of parenting, nutrition and lifestyle.
But, just as Temple can be read politically in respect of the financial deprivations of
the 1930s, Alana and her family provide a commentary on the light of the new American
under-class in the early twenty-first century, as Hatch (2013: 3) argues:

Whether one responds to Honey Boo Boo, Mama June, and their family with
admiration or disgust, however, this focus on their personal behaviour helps to
obscure the larger problem that the show inadvertently exposes: the failures of
neoliberal policy, and the violence it enacts on America’s poor.

Although there probably will never be a child star like Shirley Temple again, there are
claims about the emergence of a “new wave of high-powered child stars” (Clarke 2010).

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Examples include Jaden Smith (son of black film star Will Smith) and Chloe Grace
Moretz (star of Kick-Ass), but these actors started their careers at a much later age than
Shirley, and they remain defined through their relationship with adults, or they take
on quasi-adult roles. There really is no child in contemporary cinema to compare with
Shirley in a world in which innocence is viewed with suspicion and threats to child-
hood seem more prevalent.

References
Alberoni, F. (1962) “L’Elite Irresponsible: Theorie et Rechurche Sociologique sur ‘le Divismo.’” Cited
in Dyer (1988), p. 7.
Buckingham, D. (2011) The Material Child: Growing Up in Consumer Culture, Cambridge: Polity.
Clarke, C. (2010) “Act Your Age: The New Wave of High-Powered Child Stars.” Available at www.
theguardian.com/film/2010/jul/22/new-child-actors (accessed 8 October 2013).
Cook, D. T. (2004) The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the
Child Consumer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Daily Mail. (n.d.). “The average female pornstar.” Available at www.dailymail.co.uk/female/
article-2280750/ (accessed 26 November 2013).
Daily Mail. (n.d.) “Shirley Temple: The Superstar Who Had Her Childhood Destroyed by Hollywood.”
Available at www.dailymail.co.uk/ . . . /Shirley-Temple-superstar-childhood-destroyed-Hollywood/
(accessed 18 December 2013).
Dyer, R. (1981) “Stars in New Courses.” In The Movie: The Illustrated History of the Cinema 56, London:
Orbis Publishing, pp. 1101–1103.
———(1986) Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: Macmillan.
———(1988) Stars. London: British Film Institute.
Eckert, C. (1974) “Shirley Temple and the House of Rockefeller.” Jumpcut, no. 2, pp. 1, 17–20.
Edwards, A. (1988) Shirley Temple: American Princess. New York: William Morrow & Co.
Empire Magazine. (2013). “The 100 Sexiest Movie Stars 2013.” Available at www.empireonline.
com/100sexiest2013/ (accessed 7 January 2014).
Greene, G. (1937) “Review of ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ in Night and Day, October 29, 1937.” Reprinted in
Edwards, A. (1988), pp. 363–364.
Hatch, K. (2012) “Discipline and Pleasure: Shirley Temple and The Spectacle of Child Loving.”
camera obscura 79, 27(1), pp.127–155.
__________ (2013) “‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’ and the Spectacle of the Ungovernable Child.”
Available at http://flowtv.org/2013/05/here-comes-honey-boo-boo/ (accessed 5 May 2013).
Holmstrom, J. (1980) “Babes in Hollywood: The Juvenile Giants Who Took Hollywood by Storm. In
The Movie: The Illustrated History of the Cinema 11, London: Orbis Publishing, pp. 218–212.
Jackson, K. M. (1986) Images of Children in American Film: A Socio-Cultural Analysis. Metuchen, NJ:
Scarecrow.
Johnson, A. (2007) “Shirley Temple Was the Real Reason Grahame Greene fled to Mexico.” The
Independent, 18 November. Available at www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/shirley-
temple-scandal-was-real-reason-graham-greene-fled-to-mexico-400856.html (accessed 6 March
2013).
Life Magazine. (1938) “The Strange Case of Jackie Coogan’s $4,000,000.” 25 April.
Orr Vered, K. (1997) “White and Black in Black and White: Management of Race and Sexuality in
the Coupling of Child-Star Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson.” Velvet Light Trap, 39 (Spring),
pp. 52–65.
Shary, T. (2012) “Oppositions of Aging: Stories about Children in Movies.” Interdisciplinary Humanities,
29(1), pp. 7–20.
Studlar, G. (2013) Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

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Temple, S. (1988) Child Star: An Autobiography. New York: McGraw-Hill.

“Trial Transcript of High Court of Justice, Libel on Miss Shirley Temple, March 22, 1938.” Reprinted
in Edwards, A. (1988), pp. 359–361.
Wikipedia. “Childhood.” Accessed 28 November 2013.

Further Reading
Gaylyn Studlar’s Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2013) provides the most recent and comprehensive investigation of
the female child star, whilst D. Buckingham in The Material Child: Growing Up in Consumer Culture
(Cambridge: Polity, 2011) examines contemporary notions of childhood and media. Shirley
Temple’s Child Star: An Autobiography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988) and A. Edwards’ Shirley
Temple: American Princess (New York: William Morrow & Co, 1988) respectively provide a first-
person and a fan’s perspective on the life of this unique child star.

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 32
RETRO IN
CONTEMPORARY
BOMBAY CINEMA
Ranjani Mazumdar

Indian cities have, in the last two decades, witnessed major transformations. The rise of
innovative architectural designs, new forms of infrastructure and the ubiquitous presence
of technological gadgets have marked this moment as globalization. This transformation
has created a dense visual and aural landscape in which the sound of the cell phone fol-
lows us everywhere along with new surfaces and objects that pervade the city. It is this
juncture that has triggered a cinematic re-visiting of a pre-globalized retro Bombay,
through urban ‘sets’ created by production designers that are either constructed in studios
or generated via a transformation of real locations, to adapt to the time of the films.
Production designers work with a material memory—magazines, films, photographs,
memoirs, paintings, architectural manuals and music. In this world carved by production
designers, we see competing visions of Bombay through an intricate weaving or a tangled
web of memories associated with sites, events, objects and cinema. Can these retro images
culled from the history of popular culture provide an account of Bombay’s past and pre-
sent? As I will show, the pasts deployed by three Bombay films of the 21st century offer
us three distinctly different urban landscapes. In Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om (2007) we
journey into the Bombay film world of the 1970s. In Mani Ratnam’s Guru (2007) we view
the city’s past from the point of view of one of its most powerful industrialists. In Milan
Luthria’s Once Upon a Time in Mumbai (2010), we move through the labyrinthine by-
lanes of Bombay’s underworld history. To evaluate these journeys into the recent past, we
need to first understand the political and material dimensions of retro.

The Retro Turn and Production Design

Design historian Elizabeth Guffey offers a remarkable set of features associated with the
cultural politics of retro (2006). For Guffey, retro is a backward glance that signals a
major shift in our popular relationship to the recent past. As an aesthetic disposition,
retro tends to combine personal taste with love of old technology, fashion, architectural
surfaces, décor and music. This fascination for the material culture of the past can be the
result of an inherent suspicion of contemporary social and political developments or a
conservative desire to revive the traditions of the past. Guffey, however, argues in favor
 RETRO I N CO N TEM PO RA RY B O MB AY C I N E MA

of retro’s ability to critically engage with the present (2006). Simon Reynolds is less
generous with retro, seeing it more as a cultural crisis caused by overcrowding, the digi-
tal explosion and historical confusion (2011). For him, retro as a force erupts at the
intersection of mass culture and personal memory. The relationship to living memory
and some precision in the act of recall is important, since documentation in the form of
photographs, video, music recordings and the internet become easily available
(Reynolds, 2011).
Guffey notes that retro’s engagement with the artifacts of popular culture tends to be
ironic, unsentimental, bemused and unconcerned with historical accuracy. Retro views
the past with a sense of detachment, shying away from heroic examples to shuffle
“through history’s unopened closets and unlit corners” (2006). In this sense, retro creates
the space for “historicist fantasies” in everyday life and draws from both high and low
culture.

Retro, in fact, is dominated by technology and its most popular manifestations:

its slogans are culled from syndicated television episodes and the movies of
yesteryear; its anthems from second hand records and obsolete advertising
jingles; its visual vocabulary from defunct cars and household appliances. It
evokes a memory of days that are not quite so distant, embodied in forms that
are antiquated yet vaguely familiar.
(Guffey, 2006: 25)

In the context of American popular culture, Fredric Jameson has criticized Hollywood’s
engagement with the past in films such as American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) and
Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974). Jameson positions these “nostalgia films” as dis-
tinctly different from the larger context of historical films. Nostalgia here is viewed as a
symptom of postmodern pastiche; a commodification of the past (Jameson, 1991). Pam
Cook has a different view on this, arguing that if fantasy plays a role in nostalgia and
memory, it does so even in the realm of historical writing (2005). Conventional
approaches have tried to position history as a legitimate form of inquiry distinct from
that of nostalgia and memory. Cook suggests that we view these terms within a con-
tinuum “with history at one end, nostalgia at the other and memory as a bridge or
transition between them” (3). Elements that are usually suppressed by history are fore-
grounded in nostalgic accounts and draw our attention to the processes involved in
remembering the past. Instead of viewing nostalgia as a reactionary and sentimental
condition, we need to see it as a process that helps connect the past with the present
(Cook, 2005: 3–4). Christine Spengler also looks at the critical dimension of nostalgia
in cinema by drawing attention to the mise-en-scène, objects and costume or what she
defines as the regime of “visual pastness” (2011: 2).
The debate on nostalgia has tended to veer between these two positions, where it is
either seen as a commodified form that is unable to deal with history (Jameson,
Reynolds) or, on the other side of the spectrum, as a form that can offer deeply historical
critiques (Cook, Spengler). Moving away from this fixation with history, Elisabeth
Guffey recasts the debate to position retro as “nostalgia with a modern cast, a non-
historical way of knowing the past” (2006: 26). Retro is a symptom of popular culture
and several artists, designers, architects and writers draw on this recent past as uncon-
ventional “freelance historians” (26). The role of practice and practitioners becomes
important in this formulation but in her list of professions and art forms, film does not

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hold as much sway as the other arts even as it is one of the most powerful sites for the
expressive force and circulation of material culture. The role of the production designer
is, as we will see, critical to this circulation and play with sites and objects in cinema.
Production design involves planning and construction of the entire spatial landscape
of any film. This includes the creation of sets with the help of art directors, the mobili-
zation of props and objects and the selection of actual locations for the shooting of
particular sequences.1 The designed set is usually meant to evoke an expressive regime,
a sensorial space within which the narrative unfolds. Sets are an important material
element of the cinematic image built to stage the mis-en-scène. They are either con-
structed to draw attention to the unfolding spectacle or they are made to blend in with
the narrative.

[S]et design is fundamentally hybrid and fluid, both as a profession and as a field
of study. It blurs the distinction between the filmic and the pro-filmic, and
between the domain of the image and the narrative. It is moreover a field that
draws as much on the distinctive properties of the cinematic apparatus as it does
on pre-filmic disciplines such as architecture, design, and painting, and on the
medium and working practices of the theatre.
(Harris, Bergfelder, & Street, 2014: 15)

For many films, décor only suggests a realistic backdrop that organizes time, place and
mood with a level of authenticity (Affron & Affron, 1995). Then there are sets that are
carved to draw attention to a heightened order of stylization and spectacle. The idea of
embellishment becomes important here, requiring from the production designer a higher
degree of stylistic input and effort.2 Films about the recent past require such an interven-
tion or a “design intensity” (Harris, Bergfelder, & Street, 2014: 19). The walls become
particularly significant as they are washed, layered and dressed with the traces and mark-
ings of the past. Objects are highlighted for their temporal relationship, as in the heavy
use of abstract expressionist paintings on the walls in Mad Men, which reflects the cur-
rency of this art form in 1960s New York. In Mani Ratnam’s Guru, the use of the
gramophone and the old Mercedes draws attention to technological objects of another
time. As I will show, in their formal deployment of the past, Once Upon a Time and Om
Shanti Om appear as typical retro films playfully dealing with the storehouse of popular
culture, while Guru operates somewhat differently. These distinctions will help in estab-
lishing the specific tensions in contemporary popular culture’s engagement with its
urban past.

Designing Bombay’s Recent Past

Om Shanti Om was released amidst much fanfare in 2007. In a review of the film, The
Times of India critic wrote that “Farah Khan’s re-birth saga literally makes an art of retro
and paints the seventies pop culture in Andy Warholish strokes” (Kazmi, 2007a). The
playful engagement with the cinematic past was hailed as a triumph by most reviewers.
Om Shanti Om takes a popular reincarnation story to splinter the film industry into two
moments of the present and the recent past. The film tells the story of Om (Shahrukh
Khan), a junior artist in the Bombay Film Industry of the 1970s who is in love with
Shanti Priya (Deepika Padukone), a big star in a secret marriage with a film producer,
Mike (Arjun Rampal). Shanti is brutally murdered by Mike because he wants to marry

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an industrialist’s daughter. The murder takes place at a palatial set that is burnt down by
Mike, leaving Shanti locked inside. Om is a helpless witness to this and is finally killed
in an accident when he tries to get help. This story is largely set in the period of the late
1970s and early 1980s. We then move to the present and the story of reincarnation. Om
is now a young man and a big star known as Om Kapoor (O.K.), also played by Shahrukh
Khan. In the second half of the film, O.K. recalls his previous birth in flashes. The cli-
max of the film is staged in the same palatial set with Mike, now a major Hollywood
producer who has returned to India to resume business. A lookalike of Shanti (also
played by Deepika Padukone) becomes the bait through whom O.K. takes his final
revenge, killing Mike at the same site where Shanti was murdered.
There is nothing original or unique about this predictable and familiar story but it
becomes the vehicle for Farah Khan’s journey across film memory, insider knowledge
and genre mythologies. Some have referred to her as a historian of popular culture who
brought to life an imagination of cinema set in the quintessential 1970s and early 1980s,
even as some of the insider stories go back even further to the 1950s.3 In its rendition of
a playful retro aesthetic and in its temporal construction of two significant moments in
the recent history of Bombay’s film culture, Om Shanti Om inadvertently managed to
present a space of work that is rarely visible in a star-studded cinema. While the film’s
particular play with costumes and songs has been carefully evaluated through debates on
pastiche, parody, cinephilia and nostalgia (Wilkinson Weber, 2010; Walia, 2011), it is
the role of production design that lends the film a powerful layer, providing an account
of a film practice that existed prior to its current form. Thus, throughout the narrative,
we are made to see the role of stunt artists, music directors, junior artists, set designers
and various other kinds of work. Khan manages to use the two different periods of the
film to showcase the changing landscape of cinema, stardom and other working prac-
tices of the industry. In the first part, posters, costumes, gestures and dialogues evoke the
high melodrama associated with the 1970s. Bela Makhija (Kiron Kher) as Om’s mother
is a caricature of the mother phenomenon popular in the cinema of the 1970s. But
behind this performance is the fact of identity, that of junior artists who live and work
on the periphery of the industry. The film is clearly interested in foregrounding this
world of work that exists beyond stardom, even if it is in the form of a feel-good fairytale
and revenge narrative.
It wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that Sabu Cyril, the production designer of the film,
performed the role of a playful historian of design, architecture and objects. The recrea-
tion of a material world temporally distanced from our present was staged in Om Shanti
Om with an explicit desire for fantasy and irony, never to attempt realistic verisimili-
tude.4 The role of sets is something the film highlights throughout. We are taken through
these artificially constructed structures in Bombay’s Film City and the frames are busy
with people moving objects and wood panels.5 The set becomes the temporal connec-
tion between the past and the present and is the place of memory and recall. The set is,
in fact, created, burnt down, and then recreated for the final climax. The staircase, high
ceilings, the chandelier, and the use of dazzling light draw on the space of the typical
Hindi film living room associated with an earlier time. In the studio we move through
a maze of make-up rooms, editing rooms and projection rooms, drawing us into an invis-
ible world of film production practices. Sabu Cyril created an ensemble of surfaces to
mark the 1970s—from billboards advertising products such as Exide batteries to Ovaltine
placed next to a banner of Sholay (“Flames”; Ramesh Sippy, 1975), a major blockbuster
of the 1970s. Cyril’s detailing of the set was geared to enhance the director’s mobilization

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of film culture as the backdrop for the story.6 For instance, the Sholay billboard says at
the bottom “still running,” marking the film’s temporal world a few weeks or months
after its release in 1975. Cyril also presented a series of vignettes such as the art deco
facades that dot Bombay’s urban scape. As someone who has one of the largest collec-
tions of design books, Cyril did extensive research to present the audience with the
texture and identification marks of well-known Bombay buildings (such as the New
India Assurance Company on Bank Street) but combined these with his knowledge of
Miami deco. Bombay deco’s original inspiration was always the Miami form, and in
combining building facades from both cities to create a hybrid texture, Cyril evoked a
fantastical art deco architectural imagination for Om Shanti Om.7 The theatre where
Shanti Priya’s film is premiered is sculpted by the camera to highlight its art deco ceil-
ings, its facades and the single screen experience.
The first part of Om Shanti Om has a fairytale form that turns awry. In the second half
we are introduced to film culture associated with the contemporary period especially via
song sequences. In a comic sequence, Om Kapoor, now a superstar, arrives with great
pomp to the studio. The crew has been waiting for a while. As soon as the star arrives,
he is told by the director that he has to perform grief as the woman he loves is being
married off to someone else. Om is informed by the director that he is playing the role
of a deaf, dumb and blind person with amputated arms! Om reacts to this and says the
film will flop with such a handicapped hero. He then suggests that an “item number” be
introduced (a typical song and dance performance commonly deployed as an attraction
in mainstream Indian cinema). Though item numbers have traditionally been associated
with women, in Om Shanti Om, Shahrukh Khan as the star performs the dance in a
dream sequence. It was for this item number that the star worked on his body for over
six months, something that was released as information during the publicity campaign
for the film. The very popular song “Darde Disco” (“The Disco of Heartache”) was used
for the performance and became one of the high points of the film. This comic moment
presents spectators with a bizarre set of mannerisms where the narcissistic hero demands
an item song to which he can dance with a bevy of item girls. This sequence in a sense
also establishes the two different moments of filmmaking staged in the film. The circu-
lation of information about Shahrukh Khan working to build his body for the song
generated considerable discussion, clearly showcasing the centrality of stardom and star
discourses in the making of Om Shanti Om’s song sequences.
One of the significant features of retro is a loss of faith in the future which translates
into a collective Utopian and visual memory of the recent past (Guffey). This is where
Om Shanti Om emerges as a film embodying the past and the present, playfully reminding
audiences of a celluloid film experience that is slowly disappearing. The overwhelming
play with the aesthetics of art deco architecture is a reminder of the single screen expe-
rience and a surface façade that is now being transformed by the multiplex regime. The
film’s combination of ironic storytelling and exhibition of film culture via sets, costumes
and songs was unique for its time. It also joins a number of films about the film industry
made by directors with insider knowledge. There is generational memory in the film, of
the makers, the production designer and the audiences. The film’s success and pull, its
reflexive moments and ironic stance depended on this connection. For its temporal
marking of a certain moment of industrial transformation in film culture, Om Shanti Om
will continue to fascinate historians of cinema in the years to come.8
This desire to memorialize a disappearing film culture also drives Milan Luthria’s Once
Upon a Time in Mumbai, which develops a panoramic view of Bombay drawing on the

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mythic qualities of the city and its intersection with cinema. This is the story of the rise
of Mumbai’s underworld, inspired by the real life stories of gangsters Haji Mastan and
Dawood Ibrahim, active in the city since the 1980s.9 Sultan Mirza (Ajay Devgan) is a
gangster with a good heart while Shoaib (Emran Hashmi) is unscrupulous. This tale of
conflict is located within the aesthetic universe of 1970s cinema, a connection that is
directly established via Sultan’s lover, Rehana (Kangana Ranaut), a film actress.
Through her we enter the landscape of 1970s style costume, cinema and architecture.
During a premiere of one of Rehana’s films, the older single screen theatre experience is
established. The sequence was shot in Mumbai’s Eros Cinema located at Churchgate.
Eros was designed as an art deco theatre by Sohrabji Bhedwar and opened in 1938,
showcasing its dramatic form both in its façade and its interior. In the sequence of the
premier, we first see the interior of the theatre with its Rexine-upholstered seats. When
Sultan enters the theatre, Rehana gets up dramatically to join him. As they walk out
into the white and black marble foyer, the camera is placed at a low angle and reveals
the elaborate texture of the theatre’s art deco ceiling with its little traces of gold. The
upper floor, connected by a marble staircase with chromium handrails, is used for
Rehana’s dramatic descent in another sequence of the film. Like in Om Shanti Om, the
use of Eros in Once Upon a Time in Mumbai provides spectators with an experience of
cinema going associated with Mumbai’s pre-multiplex past.
Nitin Desai, the production designer for Once Upon a Time, worked systematically to
showcase a decorative impulse, lush visuality and elaborate mise-en-scène.10 A cinephilic
love of the aesthetic universe of 1970s cinema is obvious throughout the film. The New
Empire Cinema, one of the old theatres, is also identified with a reference to Raj
Kapoor’s Bobby (1973), a major film of the early 1970s. A popular song of the 1970s,
“Monica O My Darling” is recorded again as the soundtrack for a dance performed at an
imagined art deco nightclub. There is a particular use of color, plastic surfaces, light and
music. The nightclub is designed to affectively generate a playful memory through these
intersecting elements. One reviewer said of the film, “It’s like watching a retro fashion
show with some cool gun battles thrown in” (Kaveri, 2010). It is indeed interesting how
the texture of art deco becomes a repository of urban and cinematic memory, highlighted
in both Om Shanti Om and Once Upon a Time, drawing attention to retro’s material
manifestations.
In its reflections on Bombay’s underworld, Once Upon takes us back to the 1970s and
the changing social fabric of the city. The film positions the Robin Hood style gangster-
ism of Haji Mastan against the new form associated with Dawood Ibrahim and terrorism.
Once Upon opens with a policeman’s (Randeep Huda) narrative, as he blames himself
for having created a monster. This narrative is the arc that tracks Sultan’s entry into the
city, his emergence as a powerful underworld figure, his friendship and conflict with
Shoaib and his murder. Sultan is first introduced standing dramatically by the sea, almost
suggesting that Bombay can only be ruled via control of the sea around it. It is clear that
Sultan Mirza owns and loves the city; he helps the poor and becomes a god-like figure
for them. We learn that Sultan only smuggles material goods and no drugs. In one dra-
matic sequence we see a politician come to Sultan’s neighborhood to campaign for his
election. The space is Muslim dominated and was constructed artificially in a studio by
Nitin Desai.11 In a narrow street with congested hutments and shops on both sides, we
see shop fronts, banners with Urdu text, simulated Islamic architecture and general
activity. The politician makes his way through the street with its dense and silent crowd.
He stands up in his jeep to hesitantly address them. Suddenly, the sound of loud cheering

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pierces the air as Sultan enters the same street in his car. This warm greeting is clearly
contrasted with the politician’s entry as the two have a sardonic exchange with one
another. Sultan’s entry into the street, the low angle shots of him emerging from his car
and his walking style are reminiscent of 1970s action films. The set is also evocative of
the way the ‘public’ was created in the 1970s streetscape of popular cinema.
Unlike Sultan, Shoaib is arrogant, unscrupulous and determined to rule Bombay. Shoaib
ends up as the outlaw who manages to dominate the city via remote control. Shoaib’s
dream to control Bombay is established in relation to the city’s most iconic image: Marine
Drive and its glittering form at night. Shoaib was placed on the balcony of a high-rise
building along with a friend and it is in this space that he first talks of his desire to control
and dominate the city. The night-time image of Marine Drive is referred to as the ‘Queen’s
Necklace’ since with the lights on, the curved drive looks like a diamond necklace. This
image in many ways captures the seductive and powerful position of Bombay in the popu-
lar imagination, reproduced by innumerable photographs, films, posters and paintings. The
Queen’s necklace is viewed by a camera from Shoaib’s point of view on the balcony, show-
ing the city glittering in the background. Central to this moment is Shoaib’s destructive
imagination standing in contrast to the spatial imagination associated with Sultan. The
contrast between the streetscape for Sultan and the high-rise for Shoaib operates in the
film as the architectural clash linked to two visions of the city, established through produc-
tion design. All this staging is then connected to the underworld’s links with terrorism,
which become associated with Shoiab’s vision of the city.
After masterminding Sultan’s murder, Shoaib’s unethical rule spirals into an uncon-
trollable force. Once Upon a Time ends with a dramatic sequence: Shoaib sitting alone
on a rooftop as the camera zooms out to generate an aerial simulation of what appears
almost like a Google map. The police officer’s voice, which frames the entire film, comes
to a close, accepting partial responsibility for having created a monster, and for the
police’s inability to make distinctions between Sultan and Shoaib. The text superim-
posed on the image says “Beyond the myth lies Mumbai’s greatest betrayal.” The voice
refers to the way the mafia now has remote control over the city. The police officer’s
narration framing the end as a betrayal lifts the retro structure of the film to a critique
of the forces that ultimately led to Bombay’s future as a city constantly hunted by ter-
rorists. Though terrorism or terrorists are not mentioned explicitly anywhere in the film,
its specter was visually inscribed in the paper and poster campaign for the film.
In several highly stylized posters produced and designed explicitly with the aesthetic
imagination of retro, we see the architectural presence of the Taj Hotel in the back-
ground. A combination of Mughal and gothic elements located in the South of Bombay,
the Taj was rocked by the violent events of 2008 November when terrorists took over
the hotel as part of a series of attacks on the city. During the three days of the attack,
information on the hotel flooded television channels as people expressed shock at the
violence that unfolded at the site. More than 164 people died and the building itself
suffered tremendous damage. The photographic circulation of the Taj in the aftermath
of the attack rendered the site with an expressive charge, an architectural reminder of
what the city had experienced. The Taj has absolutely no presence in the film; its
appearance in the retro poster campaign operates like a clue to the underlying thread of
connections between Bombay’s past and present. The retro aesthetic attempts to make
sense of and provide a commentary on the discussion of terrorism in the media.
Released in 2007, Mani Ratnam’s Guru is based on the life of business tycoon Dhirubai
Ambani and his rags to riches journey to become a powerful player not only in the city

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of Bombay but in the country. Ambani made his money through petrochemicals and the
trade of polyester. He set up Reliance Industries in 1966; it was later divided into two
companies following a split in the family. Ambani has been referred to as the Polyester
Prince by his biographer (McDonald, 1999). The film dwells on the drive, intelligence,
corrupt practices and ambitions of its protagonist to consolidate a position for himself
as an industrial giant. The aesthetic drive deployed in the film only serves to introduce
Bombay as a dream city where you can make it big if you have the grit and drive to do
so. Guru functions as a nostalgic film with retro elements but it does not have the
bemused ironic distance that Once Upon a Time and Om Shanti Om have.
The film is dotted with sequences that offer the spectator access to different kinds of
interiors of the 1950s and 60s—newspaper offices, homes of the elite, etc. There is also
a desire to present a range of technological objects. Horse-drawn trams were introduced
in Bombay by the British in 1874. The first electrified tram was introduced in 1907 and
the service finally closed down in 1964 because of the advent of the trains. Sameer
Chanda, the production designer for Guru, constructed a set with tracks for the tram,
introduced only briefly in the film. Yet it is through this trace of the obsolete that the
set is placed within a temporal order.12 Guru animates its frames with such material signs
of the obsolete—a record player playing an old film song, an older model of the Mercedes,
a telephone and a typewriter—each one of these now antique pieces appears estranged
from the new kinds of music systems, cars, computers and cell phones that now consti-
tute the environment in which we live today. The use of the newspaper throughout the
film to stage the sensorium of political events, intrigue and conspiracy also stands in
contrast to the role television plays today. The marking of time is also addressed through
a popular memory associated with cinema and advertisements. So how do we understand
the coordinates of time generated by these vignettes in Guru?
The world of Om Shanti Om and Once Upon a Time is drawn from the history of popular
film with an explicit desire to play with its idioms, style and mass phenomenon. The
narratives are not devoted to some idea of “truth” but draw on the visual abundance and
mass form of the cinematic past. This is where the retro drive of the two films, with their
primary desire to dig through the landscape of popular culture, remains strong. Guru, on
the other hand, was made with a desire to capture the life of an industrial giant. The New
York Times referred to the film as “an epic paen to can-do spirit and Mumbai capitalism”
(Webster, 2007). The Hindustan Times said “Ratnam and Bachchan Jr. have given you a
film that’s as close to life as, say, business is to politics” (Mohamed, 2007). The film was
referred to as a biopic and the discourse of authenticity in the portrayal of an industrial-
ist’s rise to power was the underlying thread in most commentaries on the film. The Times
of India review was one of the few to highlight the moral ambivalence of the film and the
narrative of justification it deployed to glorify the role of the central character (Kazmi,
2007b). In this glorification of a corrupt industrialist’s story, the film draws on the cine-
matic imagination of the “angry man” image of the 1970s associated with the actor
Amitabh Bachchan. In an uncanny moment we see Guru sitting and then standing by
the window of a high-rise office building that faces Bombay’s Maine Drive. In the mid-
1970s we have a similar shot in Deewar (Yash Chopra, 1975), with Amitabh Bachchan
playing the role of Vijay, sitting and then standing by the same window showing exactly
the same view.13 The two films are separated by 32 years and yet these shots were taken
from the same floor and window of the Air India Building on Marine Drive. Deewar drew
on a working-class imagination with the rebel “angry man” as its protagonist while Guru
focuses on the consolidation and story of capital. These two contrasting narratives, pulled

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together through the techniques of production design, play havoc with the material
dimension of urban memory. This use of the image from Deewar is clearly instrumental:
a desire to draw on the template of heroism associated with the “angry man” phenome-
non of the 1970s, yet bereft of its political charge. Production design in Guru was driven
to showcase a biopic structure highlighting “great work” and “great love” (Levy, 2002) in
the life of an industrialist who became powerful by the most corrupt means. The past is
the site of the pioneering achievements of an authoritarian businessman whose empire
continues to remain powerful. The primary referential world for this film was the life of
Dhirubhai Ambani; there was an explicit desire to authenticate his ‘real life’. For Om
Shanti Om and Once Upon a Time, on the other hand, the primary theme was drawn from
the store house of popular, to narrate its idioms, styles and gestures. Yet through this nar-
ration there is desire to connect with a popular mass form that has increasingly become
fragmented under the multiplex regime. The retro drive is for a popular ethos that
depended heavily on a connection with its audiences; a cinema of the ‘masses’. The one
moment where Guru unconsciously draws on a filmic past, to connect with this idea of a
‘mass’, is where its moral ambivalence shows up strikingly.
Bombay has been undergoing widespread urban renewal and major transformations in
its built form. Just at the moment when an economy attempts to reinvent itself, we have
seen the release of several films trying to create cinematic memoirs of Bombay. The films
foreground the struggle over the production of memory. As production designers of these
films generate the material presence of a world belonging to a different time and space,
they participate in creating different kinds of memory. The retro drive in Guru presents
us with one kind of journey about Bombay’s capitalist history while Om Shanti Om offers
a view of the cinematic past. Once Upon a Time navigates the events of Bombay’s recent
past to provide a perspective on the city’s underworld history. The production designers
of these films operate as critical cartographers, bringing to life a spatial experience linked
to restless energies of the past. Reframing the landscape of popular culture, the films
emerge as tactile maps—created by the concrete practices of art direction and design.

Notes
1 See Affron & Affron (1995).
2 Interview with production designer Wasiq Khan, Bombay, July 2011.
3 Interview with director Anurag Kashyap, Bombay, January 2008.
4 Interview with production designer Sabu Cyril, Bombay, July 2011.
5 The Film City in Bombay is an integrated studio built by the Maharshatra State Government to help the
film industry. The space is landscaped and has lakes, rivers, grounds, mansions, recording spaces and many
other facilities.
6 Interview with Sabu Cyril, Bombay, July 2011.
7 Interview with Sabu Cyril, January 2012. See also Mushtaq Shiekh (2008).
8 See Rosie Thomas (2013) for an account of film culture prior to its current ‘Bollywoodized’ avatar.
9 For background information on Bombay’s underworld history, see Zaidi S. Hussain (2012).
10 Interview with production designer Nitin Desai, Bombay, January 2012.
11 Interview with Nitin Desai, Bombay, January 2012.
12 Interview with Sameer Chanda, Delhi, September 2009.
13 For accounts of the “angry man” persona played by actor Amitabh Bachchan, see Madhava Pasad (1998)
The Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Reconstruction, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
pp. 117–159; Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, Routledge, 2002; Ranjani Mazumdar
(2007) Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
pp. 1–40; and Valentina Vitali (2008) Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, pp. 184–229.

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References
Affron, Charles and Mirella Affron. (1995) Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative. Rutgers
University Press.
Bamzai, Kaveri. (2010) “Grimy Crime Meets Bolly Glam in Filmy Film.” India Today, July 30.
Cook, Pam. (2005) Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Film. Routledge.
Guffey, Elizabeth. (2006) Reto: The Culture of Revival. Reaktion Books.
Harris, Sue, Tim Bergfelder and Sarah Street (eds.). (2014) Film Architecture and the Transnational
Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema. Amsterdam University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. (1991) Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press.
Kazmi, Nikhat. (2007a) “Review of Om Shanti Om.” The Times of India, November 10.
———. (2007b) “Review of Guru.” The Times of India, January 13.
Levy, Lisa. (2002) “Storytelling: Great Love and Great Work in the Biopic.” Radical Society, 29(2),
87–101.
McDonald, Hamish (1999) The Polyester Prince: The Rise of Dhirubhai Ambani. Allen & Unwin.
Mohamed, Khalid. (2007) “Guru: Good Value for Money.” The Hindustan Times, January 12.
Reynolds, Simon. (2011) Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. Faber and Faber.
Shiekh, Mushtaq. (2008) The Making of Om Shanti Om. Om Books International.
Spengler, Christine. (2011) Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary
American Film. Berghahn Publishers.
Thomas, Rosy. (2013) Bombay before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies. Orient Blackswan.
Walia, Ramna. (2011) Flash Forward: Memory, Technology and the Bombay Film Remake. M.Phil
Dissertation, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Webster, Andy. (2007) “Polyester and Power at Play for a Mogul and His India.” The New York Times,
January 15.
Wilkinson Weber, Clare. (2010) “A Need for Redress: Costume in Some Recent Hindi Film Remakes.”
Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, 1(2), 125–145.
Zaidi, S. Hussain. (2012) Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia. Roli Books.

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PLA C E S
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 33
THE PERSONAL
IS POLITICAL
The Political Economy of
Noncommercial Radio
Broadcasting in the United States
Robert W. McChesney

In this essay, I look at the problems facing progressives and those on the political left in
the United States in participating in political analysis and debate in mainstream jour-
nalism and the news media. I focus on radio broadcasting, as this is where much of
political discussion takes place in the United States. Radio broadcasting is the least
expensive of the media for production and reception, is ubiquitous, has adapted itself to
the Internet, and is uniquely suited for locally based programming. I leave aside the
matter of the Internet, as this is an issue I address in detail elsewhere; while the digital
revolution is of indubitable importance, it does not alter my basic argument appreciably
(McChesney 2013). I also stay away from television, cable TV news networks in par-
ticular. While those channels are important, they too do not affect my core points. I look
specifically at my own experience at hosting a weekly public affairs program on an NPR-
affiliated radio station in Illinois from 2002–2012. This was, to my knowledge, the only
NPR series ever hosted by a socialist in the network’s history. But before I draw from my
personal experiences, some context is necessary.

Prolegomenon
Considerable scholarship has examined the range of legitimate debate in the U.S. news
media. In short, the range tends to be bounded by the range of debate among political
and economic elites; when they agree on a topic it is pretty much off-limits in the news
media and various discussion programs (Herman & Chomsky 1988). As Jeff Cohen, the
founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, puts it, the range of debate tends to
extend “all the way from GE to GM” (Cohen 2005). When non-mainstream views do
get attention, they tend to be misrepresented, ridiculed or trivialized. Occasionally, dur-
ing periods of social upheaval and powerful social movements, dissident views can get a
 M CCH ES N E Y

hearing, even a respectful one, but when the momentum recedes, the coverage declines
sharply qualitatively and quantitatively.
For those firmly ensconced inside the mainstream, this tends to be no more a concern
than drowning is to a fish; it barely warrants consideration as an issue. For those outside
the mainstream, addressing the too-narrow range of legitimate discourse has been a
constant problem, and an issue of almost singular importance. For much of American
history, the emphasis was upon creating independent media that could provide a forum
for dissident views. By the middle of the 20th century, the emphasis came to be on gain-
ing access to mainstream media and elite media discourse, as they dominated the
political environment, and independent media, such as they existed, were increasingly
marginal and ineffectual.
For modern societies as a whole, elite-driven media debate may not be an especially
enormous problem in political democracies with high voter participation, relative eco-
nomic inequality, vibrant political cultures and economic growth and stability. As none
of those criteria apply to the contemporary United States—and it is arguable how much
the last criterion has applied since the 1980s—the nature of media and media systems
is a very big deal.
To be precise, the ideological barriers are stronger in journalism and explicit public
affairs coverage than in the balance of the media culture. Commercial entertainment
allows a bit more wiggle room for dissident and left-wing ideas, though that point should
not be exaggerated. It is striking, too, that celebrities from the entertainment world can
get an audience in mainstream media to discuss ideas outside the mainstream in a man-
ner that scholars or activists could only dream about. But, again, that point should not
be exaggerated. It is only “open” in comparison to the lockdown in place for the range
of debate in the news media.
Much of the explanation for the constricted range of debate in mainstream journalism
points to the commercial basis of the industry: private ownership supported by com-
mercial advertising as the revenue base. This gives journalism an implicit small “c”
conservative bias. Such a news media, especially as the firms get larger, the owners
richer, and the markets less competitive, tend to have a built-in bias toward the status
quo; this point has been understood for a good century. Even those analyses that empha-
size the crucial role of professional ideology in setting the values for the field often
acknowledge that the professional values emerged in an environment where the com-
mercial and political values of the owners were internalized. This critique began with
newspaper journalism and was extended to commercial broadcasting as it became per-
vasive by the middle decades of the 20th century.
Indeed, from the 1930s through the 1970s commercial radio and, later, television
broadcasting tended to be almost devout in their commitment to staying close to the
middle of the road and not veering outside the boundaries of elite debate. (This is what
is meant by neutrality or objectivity in journalism.) The principle was encapsulated in
the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, which was formally
adopted in the 1940s.
The political right found such a journalism insufficiently sympathetic to their world
view and political program, and a detriment to their prospects of political success. In the
1970s, it began an intense campaign to make the mainstream news media be more sym-
pathetic to the right, and it specifically sought to overturn the Fairness Doctrine, which
required stations to provide balance in their coverage of public affairs (Nichols &
McChesney 2013). The right got its wish when the Reagan FCC overturned the Fairness

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Doctrine in the 1980s. Soon thereafter, Rush Limbaugh and a legion of charismatic
far-right blowhards all but monopolized the commercial airwaves with regard to political
chat, generally mouthing the same Republican Party talking points ad nauseum. If one
were to visit the United States anytime after around 1990, and one assumed commercial
radio provided an accurate reflection of the nation’s political temperament, one might
logically conclude the USA was the most extreme right-wing nation since the defeat of
fascism in 1945. An outsider might be surprised that Pat Buchanan or Michele
Bachmann did not win the presidency with 90 percent of the vote.
Moreover, with regard to structural and core economic issues, the range of political
debate has shifted far to the right in the United States since the 1970s. This has been
driven to a large extent by aggressive campaigns by moneyed and corporate interests to
assert their domination of the political process (Hacker & Pierson 2010). Issues that
once were accepted as mainstream—e.g., public education, progressive taxation, labor
unions, social security, the need for full employment—are now subject to withering
criticism and their future is in jeopardy. Inequality has increased sharply, and the polit-
ical system is awash with institutionalized corruption. As both parties have followed the
money trail, the flag of centrism has been pushed toward the right field foul line. This
has accentuated the problem of journalism and media for progressive activists, and for
citizens who wish to assert democratic values and practices. As may be evident by now,
I fall under that heading.
Ironically, mainstream discussion of the parties emphasized how they have “polar-
ized,” with each party moving further to extremes. That is inaccurate, if not preposterous.
The alleged “polarization” refers to how the parties no longer overlap, as white southern
Democrats have stopped getting elected while moderate and liberal Republicans have
become extinct; but both parties have moved appreciably rightward on core structural
issues. The lack of overlap in a system where the two parties have made it virtually
impossible for there to be effective third parties contributes to making the governing
system degenerate, an outcome that apparently is no great concern to the moneyed
benefactors who pay for the politicians. Democratic voters, on the other hand, have not
moved to the right—in anything, the opposite is the case—which is a recurring tension
in the political system, and a basis for hope.
In the United States there have been two forms of broadcast media since the 1960s
that have been created to counter the problems in the commercial system, for journal-
ism, public affairs and entertainment. Both were born of a more liberal era, when the
notion of generating media to expand awareness and political participation was consid-
ered a legitimate public policy objective. The Public Broadcasting Act was passed in
1967, which established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and eventually
the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television network and National Public Radio
(NPR). Beginning in the mid-1970s, scores of community radio stations were created,
joining the handful of stations like the Pacifica network stations that were established
prior to the 1970s.
Although both NPR and community radio stations depend upon CPB support to
sustain their operations, they each followed a different logic. The NPR stations began
in a time when they were envisioned as providing a forum for dissident voices, for those
precluded from the commercial system. Political pressures made that an impossibility for
public broadcasters early on. NPR stations settled into the role of being a main source
of political information and discussion online. With the disappearance of commercial
radio journalism in the United States by the end of the 1990s, NPR stations often

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became the only game in town. NPR journalism and public affairs programs tend to
avoid the salaciousness, idiocy and asininity of the commercial broadcasting world—
which is no small contribution—but they stay resolutely within the boundaries of elite
debate. They are perpetually in fear of budget cuts driven by the political right with its
endless jihad against “liberal” bias. NPR stations are firmly lodged into a relatively well
established niche of the media system.
Community radio stations, on the other hand, have a more fragile basis for existence.
There are fewer of them, they largely rely on volunteer labor, they can struggle to find
effective management systems, and many of them are one bad pledge drive away from
catastrophe. At the same time, the community stations as a rule have a much broader
range of political ideas; they are the broadcast media that are not constrained by the
range of elite debate. It is where one can go to get real criticism of corporate capitalism
or U.S. foreign policy, or where one can go to get thorough discussion of the environ-
ment; that is impossible with NPR or commercial stations. The entertainment, too,
tends to be far more eclectic than can be found elsewhere on the dial. The downside:
with meager resources, the patchwork of stations is barely visible to the great mass of the
population.

Enter the Professor

Much of the above is reflected in the critical scholarship on media, journalism and
politics. Some of it draws from my own research on the political economy of communi-
cation. As my career advanced, since the mid-1990s, and I had a few books that attracted
considerable attention for academic titles, I experienced firsthand how the interview/
talk programs worked. Between 1993 and 2013 I did approximately 1,000 guest appear-
ances on radio programs. Only a smattering were on commercial radio stations, where,
without exception, the interviews were brief and/or I was paired with a mainstream
person to provide “balance.” Such balance is never required of mainstream guests.
(How I would have adored seeing Thomas Friedman, some retired general who serves
as the “expert” on all cable news channels, John McCain or any other mainstream pun-
dit paired with Noam Chomsky or any informed critic during some debate on U.S.
foreign policy! It never happens, even on NPR stations as a rule, even when history
demonstrates, as with the 2003 Iraq invasion, that the closer one gets to war, the more
the mainstream explanations approach being adulterated half-truths and lies. Someone
like Christopher Hitchens was persona non grata in mainstream media when his views
were stridently critical of U.S. foreign policy; when he became a firm proponent of U.S.
military intervention in the Balkans and Iraq and the loudest and most articulate critic
of the antiwar movements, he became a household name. The quality of his writing and
thinking did not change; only his political views.)
The rest of my 1,000 radio interviews were split between community stations, NPR
affiliates and interviews with foreign public service broadcasters. The community sta-
tions were hit and miss; some interviewers were unprepared and unfocussed while many
of the shows were absolutely first-rate. Those interviews were respectful and serious, and
perhaps the best I have ever had. The NPR stations tended to be more professional, but
the hosts were and are much more cautious. Again, many of the programs were tremen-
dous, and the callers on the NPR call-in programs were sympathetic and discerning.
There was nothing whatsoever like this on commercial radio in the United States. That
is where ideas and thoughtful discussion go to die.

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In 1995, I began my own career as a radio host. I was teaching in Madison at the time
and I was asked to do a shift hosting a public affairs program every second week on
WORT-FM, the local community station. I was a volunteer. I sought out guests who had
little exposure in the media but I knew had a good deal to say. Many were academics
whose work had a political orientation. I had complete liberty to select guests, and the
responsibility to do so. When I accepted a teaching position at the University of Illinois
in 1998 I stepped down from the show. I soon realized that I missed doing the show; it
was fun being on the other side of the table.
What I especially enjoyed about doing hour-long interviews on noncommercial sta-
tions was that I could give guests an opportunity to really lay out their positions and
explain themselves. This is something that is rare for critical scholars and progressives,
who invariably struggle with the “sound-bite cliché Olympics” on commercial media.
Critical ideas outside the mainstream need time to be explained. Mainstream views can
generally invoke deeply ingrained cultural references images; e.g. free enterprise, entre-
preneurs, markets, America, choice, etc. I wanted to give those dissident voices—often
the truth-tellers—an opportunity to speak, and give a starving audience the opportunity
to hear them.
Because I had ample time to explain my own views in my own writings and in my own
interviews where I was guest, I had little desire or need to use my position as host to
make my own views the heart of the show. To the contrary, I treated my guests exactly
the way I liked to be treated when I was a guest: I read their books and/or articles, tried
to assist the guests in getting their main ideas communicated clearly, and I let them
explain their work and their ideas. Having been interviewed a great deal gave me a sense
of what a good interview entailed. I recalled how baseball legend Ted Williams responded
when asked if he—arguably the greatest hitter in the game’s history—could possibly
manage pitchers. “I was a great hitter because I studied pitching, so I think I can coach
it.” To do the job well was a lot of work. I generated a great deal of respect for the good
hosts I had dealt with over the years. It requires a lot of preparation and the ability to
be a good listener. Lots of local radio hosts, like Ian Masters, Marc Steiner and Sonali
Kolhatkar—to name but a few—provided a model for my work. At the national level, I
learned a lot by listening to Amy Goodman, David Barsamian, Bill Moyers, Terry Gross
and, curiously enough, Larry King.
An incident in the summer of 2000 reinforced to me why my approach to doing pub-
lic affairs radio was necessary. I began writing a column that year for the Silicon Alley
Reporter, a trade publication started by Jason McCabe Calacanis for the Internet boom
in New York City. My book Rich Media, Poor Democracy had just been published, and
Calacanis wanted me to provide a critical take on Internet matters, which I gladly
obliged. (The column was titled “Homage to Catatonia.”) Before the dot.com crash
threw the magazine out of business by 2001, it was a big deal, and each issue was fat with
advertising. In the summer of 2000, at its peak, the Silicon Alley Reporter hosted a one-
day conference in Westchester County, New York, for the movers and shakers in the
New York Internet economy. Several hundred people paid a pretty fee to attend, and I
was flown in to be one of the plenary speakers.
Instead of giving speeches, the four plenary speakers were interviewed on a stage, in
a theater packed with hundreds of people, by Charlie Rose, then, as now, the host of a
daily PBS interview program. Rose apparently had a close connection to Calacanis or
others high up at Silicon Alley Reporter. At that point Rose’s PBS show was at its peak,
and many academics and public figures considered it the premier interview show in

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American media. It was a show that exemplified the constricted range of debate in
American mainstream media: corporate CEOs and mainstream thinkers dominated.
Thomas Friedman had what seemed like a second residence on the set. It was the voice
of the establishment. Dissidents were generally restricted to entertainers and artists, and
were often “balanced.” I confess I was intrigued by the idea of having 30–45 minutes
with Rose by myself. In the back of my mind I thought that perhaps once Rose saw what
a good interview I was he would have me on his TV show. I could dream, couldn’t I?
My excitement increased when I watched Rose interview the plenary speaker before
me. The person who immediately preceded me on stage was a Yale professor whose
claim to fame was having been a victim of one of the Unabomber’s mail bombs a few
years earlier. I discovered during the course of Rose’s interview that this professor had
right-wing views, though I had never heard of him before, nor have I subsequently. At
any rate, Rose peppered this guy with softball questions right down the middle of the
plate. To hear Rose, one might think this guy was the greatest genius of the 20th cen-
tury. Most of the questions were seemingly prefaced by Rose stating something along
the lines of, “Because you are such a great genius and wonderful human being . . . ” I
suspect some people in the audience contemplated naming their next child after the
Yale professor. I was salivating at the thought of getting a round of those questions and
smacking the answers over the centerfield fence to the thunderous applause of the
audience. Yee haw!
Instead, Rose’s tone changed perceptibly the moment I came on stage for my inter-
view. Batting practice was over and the questions were more like bushbuck pitches or
beanballs. Rose had little apparent sympathy for my position and less interest in allowing
me to explain myself in my own terms. He was civil, don’t get me wrong, and the inter-
view went smoothly. But I was dealing with his trip—being the border policeman for the
range of legitimate debate—and never getting much of a chance to explain what I was
about. It confirmed what I already knew: there needed to be a place for progressives and
those outside the mainstream to have the voices heard and reach a larger audience than
that provided by the smattering of community radio stations. It did not exist in America.
To some extent, that impulse motivated my political work in the subsequent years. In
2002 and 2003, John Nichols, Josh Silver and I formed Free Press, the media policy
reform group. Free Press exploded into prominence during the Iraq war in 2003 when it
became public knowledge that the same media conglomerates whose news divisions had
uncritically reported the official lies that got the United States into the war were
attempting to change rules so they could own even more media outlets. Free Press has
been active since then on a number of issues that are all about democratizing the media
system and expanding the range of legitimate debate beyond that sanctified by Wall
Street, political elites and corporate America.
But as important as policy activism was for reforming the system, in the meantime
there was work to be done or else the prospects for structural reform on any issue, includ-
ing media, would lessen. In 2001, I approached officials at WILL-AM, the NPR affiliate
associated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and broached the idea
of my doing a weekly public affairs program, with an emphasis on media issues. I knew
it was a long shot as no other NPR station had a program like the one I proposed. But I
also knew that the saying went that the further one got from salt water, the better the
chances that an NPR station would be open-minded. That was certainly the case with
WILL. The management responded positively, listened to tapes of my WORT program
from the 1990s, and, when an opening came in the schedule, I went on the air in April

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2002. The program, Media Matters, ran every Sunday from 1–2PM central time for the
next 10½ years, until the final episode in October 2012.
The reason the show worked was that WILL gave me carte blanche to do as I pleased.
I was solely responsible for selecting (and procuring) guests. The station provided me
the engineer to be in the studio, but I provided my own labor for free and I was respon-
sible for getting and paying my producer with my own funds. My guests over the 500 plus
weeks included a who’s who of progressives, including Andrew Bacevich, Sherrod
Brown, Sundiata Cha-Jua, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Fletcher, Jr.,
Thomas Frank, Janine Jackson, Chalmers Johnson, Lawrence Lessig, Toby Miller,
Michael Moore, Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders, Norman Solomon, Gore Vidal, and
Howard Zinn. I had many of the finest journalists of our era on the program on a routine
basis, people like Robert Scheer, Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, Katrina vanden
Heuval, Jeremy Scahill, Michael Hastings, Naomi Klein, John Pilger, Glenn Greenwald,
Chris Hedges, Salim Muwakil, Matt Taibbi, and Alexander Cockburn. Despite their
accomplishments, many of those people could not get an hour-long audience on an NPR
station. Nearly all of them appeared at least twice, and many of them appeared at least
once every year or two. My occasional co-author and journalist John Nichols was a guest
33 times, in part because he always co-hosted my twice-annual pledge drive shows.
Probably one-half of the programs were with more obscure guests who I wanted to
bring into the public eye. Occasionally my show was able to increase the visibility of an
important writer making an original argument with compelling evidence. In 2009, for
example, I had Wendell Potter as a guest. Potter had been a former health insurance
industry executive who provided an inside-account of the nefarious practices in his
former industry. Potter would later get national attention. In 2011, I had Michelle
Alexander as a guest to discuss her astonishing book, The New Jim Crow. At the time
barely anyone knew about it; within a year it would be a bestseller. I was also delighted
to have Diane Ravitch on the program to present her eloquent defense of public educa-
tion and her critique of school privatization efforts. It was then, as now, a voice rarely
heard in the mainstream media. In all of these cases I received a flood of feedback in the
days following the broadcasts.
A recurring theme among my guests was the state of the economy, the nature of eco-
nomic policy debates and how the news media covered the economy. The guest roster
included multiple appearances by Paul Krugman, John Bellamy Foster, Joseph Stiglitz,
Dean Baker, Mark Weisbrot, James Galbraith, Michael Perelman, Robert Reich, Robert
Kuttner, Juliet Schor and Robert Pollin. There were scores of other times I knew the
program was providing material not available elsewhere, and that it had an effect. It
reinforced the importance of blasting open the media system.
The show was surprisingly non-controversial. I suspect part of that was due to my
approach: I did not use the program to push my own views and ideas; it was about the
guests. Casual listeners who did not know of my work otherwise would have been
unlikely to know much about my specific political positions or writings. I disliked inter-
viewers who inserted themselves into the limelight. I tried to let the guests speak about
what they knew best and I gently guided them. Nor were my guests doctrinaire; they
ranged all the way from Democratic Party liberals and progressives to socialists and
beyond. I even had a few non-political and mainstream guests when the topic was appro-
priate. If all my guests had appeared in the same room at the same time, some explosive
arguments would have certainly ensued. Only on a few occasions did I really challenge
a guest to back up a statement I found far-fetched. I figured that was the listeners’ job as

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this was a call-in show. And most weeks the phone lines filled up at WILL; the callers
often asked better questions than I did.
This is not to say that WILL did not get complaints about my show, especially its
political orientation. In the first few months, the station management kept me apprised
of the criticism; thereafter they kept me in the dark, saying there was very little to worry
about. So I will never know how much flak the station received. The only serious attack
came in 2008 or so, when a prominent far-right winger who makes a career red-baiting
progressives (and who has never lived in Illinois) tried to raise a ruckus about the left
leanings of my guests. The right-winger claimed this was an abuse of public broadcasting
and any NPR show should have what he deemed to be balanced guests lists or be tossed
off the air. I explained to the right-winger and my station manger that my bias was
toward guests who were mostly unavailable in the commercial and public media other-
wise. Since one could listen to endless far right-wingers on the AM radio coast to coast
24 hours per day—in fact, they were almost impossible to avoid—there was no case that
I needed to offer them a slot on my measly show. My program, in fact, was the beginning
of a real balance at NPR and in the broader media culture. The station manager at WILL
gave me unconditional support. It made it a pleasure for me to work there.
This support gave me an added incentive to help raise money for the station during
pledge drives. As it developed, Media Matters became a barnburner during pledge drives,
invariably raising far more money than any other program on the station. Listeners
wanted to send an emphatic message to station management that the show had a strong
following, and the message was received loud and clear. Moreover, at one point the
WILL person responsible for such matters told me that Media Matters was the top-ranked
program in the area in its timeslot for listeners aged 25–54. I was told at another point
that one-half of all the Internet traffic or downloads for the station were attributed to
Media Matters. Thanks to podcasting, the audience for the program was national, even
international, and a significant portion of the audience did not listen in real-time. We
got callers from all over the nation and the world. When I decided to discontinue the
program to have more time for other projects in 2012, I was inundated with emails and
letters and messages from fans from across the planet: literally hundreds of them in a few
weeks. By just about any measure, for an NPR program it was a smash hit.
I was especially moved by the significant number of young people who contacted me
to describe how they had stumbled across Media Matters and how it introduced them to
a world they did not know existed. It changed their lives. It reminded me how, when I
was 14 years old, I saw a TV interview with Gore Vidal in which he described the
United States as an empire. Later that same year, I saw another interview on local TV
where someone described racism in Cleveland, Ohio, where I grew up. Those two events
shook the foundations of my world and helped push my life in a very different direction.
Media matters. The right-wing gets it, the mainstream gets it. Progressives have got to
get in the game. Except for the various incarnations of Bill Moyers’ superb programs on
PBS—which are still going strong in 2014—progressive voices are all but non-existent
in public media. In commercial television—including MSNBC—political viewpoints
are on increasingly shaky ground as one heads to the left of the leadership of the
Democratic Party.
Therefore perhaps the most sobering feature of the Media Matters experience has been
that no other NPR station, not a single one, has attempted to emulate it. One might
think that given its popularity by all measures, other NPR stations might be looking to
do something like it in their own communities. It is not like these stations are setting

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the world on fire with their present offerings. If anything, programs like Media Matters
can be money-makers, possibly cash-cows, because they reach a large, underutilized and
appreciative audience. Nor is it the case that I am the only person capable of hosting
such a program; the country is crawling with talented people who could do a bang-up
job. And, as I discovered, there are extraordinary guests—I barely scratched the surface
of what is out there—who richly deserve to be part of the public conversation in the
United States. Our media and our nation are much weaker for their absence. Yet there
has been zilch interest by anyone else in doing such a show; indeed there was no interest
by other NPR stations to pick up Media Matters when WILL management briefly pur-
sued the matter a few years into the show’s run, when they saw how popular it was with
listeners. I am left with the conclusion that the left politics scared the pants off NPR
officials outside of Champaign-Urbana. If there is an alternative explanation, I am—to
invoke Ross Perot—all ears. My program was the exception that proves the rule.

References
Cohen, J. (2005) Personal conversation with author.
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Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, New York: Simon & Schuster.
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McChesney, R. (2013) Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against Democracy,
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Destroying America, New York: Nation Books.

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 34
LITTLE HOLLYWOODS
The Cultural Impacts of
Runaway Film Production
Vicki Mayer

Speaking of a year of financial turmoil and governmental gridlock, U.S. President

Barack Obama called Hollywood the bright spot of the U.S. economy in 2013. Not only
were exports up, he explained, but in the film industry “no matter where you come
from . . . you should be able to make it.” This American Dream “is one that Hollywood
has glorified and held up, but I actually think it’s true” (Wheaton 2013), he said, fusing
the industry, its physical hub, and its guiding myth. Standing in the DreamWorks studio
in Los Angeles, Obama paid tribute to the industry’s core, but not its peripheries.
Hollywood has always been a global industry. Encompassing ancillary industries
ranging from talent agencies and music licensing to special effects and audience meas-
urement, Hollywood speaks to the strength of a network of organizations that span the
world in search of an economy of scale. In the nodes of these networks, the film industry
imports international labor and investment and then exports films and other properties
to international markets. Perhaps with the exception of a scant few decades during
which Southern California was the operational center of the network, a period also
known as the Golden Age of Film (approximately 1920–1950), film history has been
marked by the nomadism of these industries in search of both cost-saving measures and
capital generators. Today the notion of cities as “media capitals” (Curtin 2003) does not
speak so much to the physical locations of production as to the trade hubs that manage
the development of legal properties and flows of financing to locations elsewhere.
Obama could have just as easily been standing in Georgia: as in Atlanta or Tbilisi.
Through tax credits in the former city, cheap labor, and “free filming in the streets” in
the latter (filmcommission.ge), these have become little Hollywoods, aspirants to the
dream Obama proffered.
Yet Hollywood is also a place. Annexed by Los Angeles in 1903, the area was
unknown to the public until the 1920s. By then, the public relations machinery for the
film industry commanded the transformation of the ho hum place into a symbol of
glamour, wealth, and excess. It was both plain and fantasy (Hozic 2001), a fact that
remains today. While the real Hollywood encompasses unimpressive t-shirt shops, con-
venience stores, and apartments, the physical sign is an icon of a place that can stand
for economic and mythic success. “The Hollywood sign immediately evokes the movie
 LI TTLE H O LLY W O O D S

capital it looms over, and the configuration of its letters has been imitated by cities and
towns everywhere to trumpet their own imitative uniqueness,” writes Leo Braudy
(2011: 3).
This flexibility in terms of naming Hollywood has been one of its most potent elixirs
over economic development policy in the last twenty years. While Hollywood’s global
expansionism has been a rallying call for governments to prevent “runaway production”
since at least the 1960s (Guback 1969), far more governments have looked to lure film
projects to boost lagging local economies and flagging social morale. Currently, nearly
every U.S. state, Canadian province, and most Australian provinces offer from some
kind of public incentive for private film and television production. These can be added
to federal subsidies and rebates in 30 countries, including the U.S. Taken as purely an
economic phenomenon, the balance sheet for these incentives to date seems to tip in
the favor of Hollywood, which is able to leverage its name in favor of efficiency and
savings (Christopherson and Rightor 2010). Many states and cities have dropped these
programs when their coffers ran dry, but Hollywood’s response has always been to simply
relocate again to the next willing host. While the debate continues over economic
impacts (cf. Pratt and Jeffcut 2009; Storper 2013), the cultural impacts of these little
Hollywoods are also surfacing.
The rest of this chapter focuses on these cultural impacts of film economies on local
places. While quick to promote the potential economic benefits, creative economy poli-
cies do not reveal the encroaching ways that Hollywood, both the industry and its aura,
transform localities in terms of unique histories, geographies, and their senses of “place”
as their defining gestalts. While difficult to aggregate and quantify, these impacts are
perhaps the ones we feel most present in our daily decisions around where to go and how
to live. Over time, the cultural impacts of political economies shape how we define com-
munities and our own membership within them in terms of time, space, and place. In
sum, these impacts are important because they point to the personal and social aftermaths
that should accompany any discussions of the political economy of popular culture.

Time
The element of time refers to the rewriting of history to better serve the film industry
and its self-promoting expansion.  This history derives from Hollywood’s own public
relations machinery: a network comprised of city boosters, industrial elites, and media
makers. It is represented in trade publicity, memoirs, and in popular culture itself.
Vincent Brook (2013) describes Hollywood as a palimpsest, a text that has been erased,
written over, and recycled over the past century. The multiple retellings of the Ramona
myth in print, on stage, and on screen wrote over the extinction of the indigenous tribes
that lived in the real location of the Hollywood with images of a paradise that could be
claimed (Ibid.: 28–35). The railroad commissioned the earliest promotional reels to
attract train riders with sun and beaches, virgin lands for development (Shiel 2013). By
the 1920s, a spate of self-referential films sealed Hollywood’s image as the repository for
the United States’ displaced desires (Braudy 2011), fueling the idea that the film indus-
try virtuously can generate local wealth and employment for all. By emphasizing different
elements of the tale over time, policymakers have followed in the footsteps of film his-
torians and geographers in making the story of Hollywood’s beginnings into a model for
the future development of film economies around the globe.

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This early story of Hollywood has all the makings of a screenplay.  There are a handful
of protagonists: creative entrepreneurs who were willing to risk exile from the booming
Eastern production, distribution, and exhibition markets in search of a new home.  Some
accounts have their own antagonists. An early critical history names litigious lawyers
for the Edison trust and censorious reformers as motivations for migration (Jacobs 1939),
though these reasons do not seem either exclusive to the East or to exclude the West.
More important is the role of the land itself. Southern California, with its varied loca-
tions and mild climate, allowed the entrepreneurs to settle in relative proximity on
cheap swathes of land. By this accounting, Hollywood begins in 1907 when the Chicago-
based filmmaker Georg Selig, enamored with the geography, sets up the first film studio
in the region. Within a decade, word of Los Angeles’ natural advantages had lured the
dominant New York-based studios and a handful of independent producers. They cre-
ated wealth and a new labor market, drawing aspiring talent and creating a skilled
workforce from the ground up. By 1920, they made Hollywood synonymous with the
entertainment capital of the world.
The lessons to policymakers have been clear: attract enough film and media entrepre-
neurs to your region and eventually the laws of clustering will produce the next media
capital, complete with good jobs and the enviable name recognition worthy of a
Hollywood. This is a production-centric account of the film economy. Policymakers’
version of the Hollywood story is embedded in an array of strategies under the banners
of creative economy and innovation (cf. Pratt and Jeffcutt 2009). These regional
schemes range from direct payouts and credits, to free infrastructure and amenities, to
the promise of capable workers who already consume lots of upscale products, a.k.a. the
creative class (Florida 2004). Based on temporary incentives and homegrown infrastruc-
ture, regions would attract the new pioneers of the film and media economy, namely the
growing numbers of smaller firms dedicated to the operations that the major studios
have outsourced over the past twenty years. The story of Hollywood’s past thus takes an
Orwellian twist, guiding the future through its instrumental application in the present.
In this form, however, the story of Hollywood’s ascendancy lacks several plot twists
and key players in the development of a film economy. Geographers agree that the
movie colony of Hollywood, once established, became a self-perpetuating industry
(Scott 2005; Storper 2013). Finance investors and venture capitalists followed the film
successes from across the country. The pioneers benefited from the proximity of new
studios; the aggregation of firms allowed each one to reduce costs, while generating a
deep pool of skilled labor. There is no consensus, however, why the industry ultimately
located there over other viable locations, such as Jacksonville, Florida (Miller 2013).
Whatever freedom producers gained from legal or other entanglements back East also
meant isolation from the major financial investors, distribution and exhibition markets,
raw film stock and technology sellers, as well as the known pools of labor and theatrical
talent that existed in abundance in other cities. For the range of boosters in Hollywood
had ironically little to offer their first filmmakers but cheap land and labor. Taxes were
low and wages were reportedly 25-50 percent lower in Los Angeles than in New York
(Miller et al. 2005: 127). Dirt streets connected Los Angeles with arid brushscapes,
which lacked electricity, water, or any other infrastructure needed to grow a “creative
industry” until after 1910 (Braudy 2011: 11–12). The risk of fire and earthquake were
year-round threats. Despite the current associations between the film economy and a
creative class of entertainment consumers, Los Angeles was the opposite of exciting.
Boosters targeted white Midwesterners to live the wholesome life based on prohibition

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and Protestant values. Anti-Semitic housing covenants kept many of the film pioneers
outside of established neighborhoods. These cultural conditions need to be considered
as part of Hollywood’s creation myth.
Also hidden behind the story of creative entrepreneurs of silent cinema were the
already propertied elites in Los Angeles, in particular the real estate and transportation
barons who looked to make fortunes speculating on migrants’ fantasies of a better life.
To this cabal add the newspaper editors and small business owners who stood to benefit
both from the good press and an expanded local consumer base. Movie exhibitors in
particular had learned how to make good use of advertising buys in the local paper in
exchange for industry coverage. The film exhibitors, the projection houses that catered
to the mass audiences, are relatively powerless in this story. So too, local, state, and
federal authorities are relatively invisible in these tales of seeding the industry. Given
that historians have documented very well the local crackdowns and progressive reform
efforts towards movie theaters and nickelodeons at the time (Olsson 2008), it seems odd
how relatively separate producers are from either officials or other elites in their loca-
tions, not to mention the local residents who would ultimately benefit in the master
narrative of the film driven economy.  
These seemingly literary absences have real ramifications. As each region crafts policy
in pursuit of the goose that lays the golden egg, the story of a film economy which grows
untethered to other realms of political, economic, or social life is highly desirable. The
public incentives at this moment offered to Hollywood could hardly be offered to the oil
or gas companies, hotel chains, or real estate development corporations, even if these
businesses benefit indirectly from them. Behind the hype, these strategies may be more
or less effective in gaining film projects; when so many cities undercut each other in
pursuit of the same benefit, the project can simply move to a better host. Just as impor-
tant, however, is that not every city can be a winner in this race to the bottom. The
history of Hollywood’s triumph in the early twentieth century forgets other regions and
nations which lost their thriving film economies. As Ben Goldsmith, Susan Ward, and
Tom O’Regan (2011: 29) explain, film economies are bound up in “a multitude of local
problematics (affairs and situations) tied up with histories, politics and cultural dynam-
ics that are specific to a city, a place, a region and a country.” The singular story that
motivates seeding a film economy obscures all the other winners and losers affected by
chasing Hollywood. These dynamics can be evidenced in a discussion of space.

Space
Unlike biomedical parks, fashion studios, sports arenas, or any of the other high status
postindustrial industries that policymakers seek, the film industry outside of its core cit-
ies makes intensive use of the physical landscape and built environment. In the era of
easy transport and tech, film crews can swoop into a city neighborhood and transform
it to look like anywhere. This mobility has ironically been touted by some as part of a
new economy built on a weightless speed and efficiency, a production process that leaves
no physical traces behind (cf. Elmer and Gasher 2005). Yet for the people who inhabit
production territories, the spatial impacts can be felt in both daily routines and longer
term transformations. 
The quotidian use of space by film crews is most often experienced as frustration, as
location based shooting disrupts the ways people move through urban spaces. From the
temporary takeover of streets and sidewalks to shuttering entire city blocks, the private

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leasing of public spaces forces residents to recognize the power of the film industry and
their own complicity in ceding public space. In some instances, the disruption of spatial
uses has spurred momentary resistance to the film economy. A government giveaway of
beaches in Sydney, for example, stirred resident ire as the coasts have always been a
public resource (Miller et al. 2005: 146). Further, film crews have not always been so
inconspicuous in their stead. The blockbuster Titanic notoriously left an environmental
disaster in its Northern Mexico wake (ibid.: 165–166). The waters were so polluted by
the replica ship built for the set that local fishermen became servants of a new economy
dedicated to Titanic tourists. 
The traces of the film economy indeed have relied on tourism as a residual economic
gain, turning ordinary space into the extraordinary commodity. Film location tours,
book series, and fan sites map the paths of the film economy through uptowns and
downtowns, resignifying streets and structures. Home circulars for local newspapers
cover movie properties much as the early twentieth century papers hyped the aura of the
silent cinema trade. These places have become sites of everyday pilgrimage, rituals
through which visitors can come into contact with and pay tribute to media power. In
these cases, media power is visibly manifest over space (Couldry 2000). The rise of film
tourism uses the language of the film stories to imbue local architecture and ethnic
spaces with romanticism to draw visitors to production places spaces after the final wraps
(Hao and Ryan 2013). New Zealand has become so attached to its image for filming The
Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogies that the national tourism bureau has rebranded the
entire country the “Home of Middle-Earth” (http://www.newzealand.com/us/home-of-
middle-earth/). The state works with corporate hotel and transportation providers to
provide itineraries through the countryside as if one was a character in the movie plots.
Less visible but perhaps most enduring are the slow social transformations that film
economies exert on neighborhood space when film infrastructure and personnel settle
there. The draw of cheap production sites brings an influx of new land users, from the
crew members who relocate temporarily to the celebrities looking for another home,
and less tax burdens. Transportation hubs must accommodate the mobility of the
highest paid workers, while neighborhoods in cheaper locations provide luxury living
while sheltering taxable income. Film workers have been part of the transformations
in inner city enclaves in Vancouver, Budapest, and Cape Town. Abandoned ware-
houses from the industrial era have become culturally resignified and economically
reassessed as properties, often in depressed neighborhoods. Wellington, New Zealand,
has been redrawn with the addition of a sprawling film studio and digital effects com-
plex, while the capital city of Auckland boasts entertainment celebrity residents and
a throng of young aspirants to join their ranks (Cieply and Barnes 2012). In pursuit of
Hollywood co-productions in Paris, EuropaCorp retrofitted an Art Deco-style thermal
power plant to house an entire shooting and postproduction complex, along with a
film school in the working class, immigrant suburb of Saint-Denis. The area, which
has a 30 percent unemployment rate, also now boasts a renaissance of art galleries and
exhibition halls directed at the cultural elite (Sciolino 2012). Conversely, the ruins
of a General Motors complex sits as a beacon of blight in Pontiac, Michigan, after a
heavily-subsidized film studio conversion went bankrupt (Story 2012). The arguments
for and against gentrification should be brought to bear in any discussion of an emer-
gent film economy as an urban renewal strategy (cf. Goldsmith and O’Regan 2005).
Yet beyond how migrant creative workers drive up housing rents and land values, at
the end of the debate it is clear that the biggest winners of gentrification are those

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who can afford to speculate on space. Meanwhile the biggest losers cannot shoulder
the risk of the market’s ups and downs.
As with the story of Hollywood’s past, film policy impacts the material present in
terms of space. The ways residents buy, borrow, and move through space are impacted
by the ways cities lure location based film projects. The political importance of platforms
for building infrastructure and for labor capacity infers spatial uses that extend beyond
the repurposing of factories into studios. They extend into residential neighborhoods
and commercial locations. The reconfiguration of urban space may as well be a lesson
to citizens that in order to attract a film economy, space is both a key incentive for bring-
ing industry and a key source of its future capital generation. The self-reinforcing logic
of film economy policy speaks to the privatization of space, both in the ways space is
commodified and in the private ways people experience it.

Place
Places are the territories where people live and which they invest with symbolic mean-
ings, both personal and social. Film production acts both to deterritorialize the meanings
associated with places and reterritorialize them to fit a project script. In other words,
production not only makes some places look like other places, it can alter the ways
people see places in the aftermath of the film. Some places the industry purposely con-
structs as such. The pioneer Selig built a zoo at his first Hollywood studio to reinforce
the realism in his jungle movies. In location shooting, the film industry modifies places
that already have their own histories, even when the location and place are ostensibly
the same. After all, the industry’s ability to create stories is what gave Hollywood the
place its mythical status. How people react to these transformations of place is impos-
sible to universalize, but there are clear class implications.
The role of film in place-making appeals to policymakers, particularly when the
fantasy is bigger and more exciting or attractive than the actual woods, warehouse, or
wharf. Drawn into film boosterism, another replay of the silent era, local elites support
the film economy’s place-based associations. Local newspapers feature enthusiastic cov-
erage of red carpet premieres and celebrity sightings. Local businesses highlight their
cameo appearances and homemade props in productions. A study of local business own-
ers in Toronto’s Distillery District stressed the positive sense of distinction that film
projects have given the neighborhood, superseding the history of the place with an
imagined positive association with Hollywood (Matthews 2010). New Zealand Prime
Minister John Key has been known to schedule his calendar with film set visits and joint
public relations events. Only The Waikato Times criticized Key, accusing him of remak-
ing New Zealand into the “51st state” (Cieply and Barnes 2012).
Public debates about film incentives frequently focus on these subjective senses of
place and value. Film productions write over memories of place, emphasizing some
aspects of a place over others. While these emphases mainly point to well-known asso-
ciations, they also tend to displace, even erase, other associations. The history of
Hollywood film locations in New Orleans, Louisiana, emphasizes jazz music, the super-
natural, and “moral lapses,” reducing the diverse culture in the city to a string of
stereotypes for a non-Protestant America (cf. Harris 2012). Conversely, Hollywood can
help erase place-based pasts. Co-produced films based in former Soviet bloc countries
rarely make reference to a dictatorial past, even when they are sited directly in relics of
the old regimes. The fact that governments are so willing to rearrange space and

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renarrate history for filmmaking merely reinforces the sense that even when a set is
based on a particular place, it is meant to be malleable to the needs of the script.
Changes to a place can become permanent when the filmic versions are more eco-
nomically viable than the real. Aurora Wallace (2011) questions the longstanding
impacts of Hollywood filmmaking on Toronto, where the local film commission offers
to build spaces to suit film producers’ specifications and downtown has been refashioned
into a simulation of a film set of New York City. New construction projects have been
named Soho, Manhattan, and NY Towers, a clever play on New York and North York.
The “Manhattanization” of Toronto has become a double-edged sword, according to
Wallace, generating capital at the expense of the city’s sense of self: “If visibility is a
concern for Toronto, then arguably the city is rendered less visible through these repre-
sentations than if none had been made at all” (Ibid.: 175). At the same time, these new
places may attract new dwellers who consider them their own. Speaking of a stretch of
Alpine National Park, Australia, used in the 1988 film The Man from Snowy River, Sue
Beeton (2010) admits that the history of the place and the film had merged in her life.
Working as a guide in the local film tourist economy created by the film, “I was not
simply playing a role,” she reflects, but she had become part of a new population of
urban-based horseback guides, drivers, and cooks, some of whom still volunteered to live
the “tough mountain men culture” portrayed in the film (Ibid.: 117–118). In cities spur-
ring recurring Hollywood investment, returning film producers become like long-term
business tourists, using the cities’ theme parks and consumer destinations for work and
pleasure (Ward and O’Regan 2009). Their investments in places further fuel the image
that film projects sustain creative cities.
Whether rewriting places, or creating new hybrids of places, critics and promoters of
Hollywood film production are beset by the contradictions that equate modernity with
generic representations of “anywhere U.S.A.” and its opposite with everywhere else.
These images that become reality are not lost on critics who have wondered if Hollywood
makes Canada’s cities less Canadian, or even outposts of U.S. imperialism, though the
reality seems far more ambiguous (Gasher 1994). As Camille Johnson-Yale (2008: 128)
points out, “there is an acceptance that the Canadian film industry’s independence may
be predicated on its ability to replicate the U.S. media’s production methods and aes-
thetic.” Similarly, ruminations on New Zealand as “Middle Earth” also speak to the
contradictory sense that the films have both emphasized the country’s uniqueness and
flattened it into another node for global capitalism (Zanker and Lealand 2003).
Ultimately, the malleability of time and space underscores the priorities that govern-
ments have in their place-based initiatives.

Conclusion
My thesis has been that runaway film economies contribute to the transformation of
time, space, and place in their home geographies. That is, their political and economic
structures have distinct cultural impacts as well. These can be felt in very real ways, such
as when one’s park is rented out to a studio, or as a more subjective impression, such as
the ways we think about our home as also a movie set. This is a different argument about
film economy policies from those that are focused solely on the jobs and revenues cre-
ated and their costs to state coffers. Those debates rely on competing notions of how to
count and calculate economic indicators, which themselves are kinds of social

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construction. Rather, this chapter has focused on a different set of social construc-
tions around Hollywood as a privileged kind of industry, one that can rework cities to
further concentrate capital, but under the guise of something better. These constructions
of Hollywood have intimate implications by infiltrating the ways we identify with the
places we call home.
The push for film, as well as other creative industries, to revitalize cities is of course
part of a wider set of planning strategies to revitalize regions in the wake of political and
economic troubles. These include neoliberal policies that have eroded tax bases and
protected the concentration of wealth as well as the global shifts in labor markets and
employment clusters. In the stead of these unpopular processes, the popularization of a
celebratory film development narrative, based on early Hollywood, seems to provide
both economic solution and political salve. In fact, though, the ways that film economies
modify space demonstrate the ways Hollywood is not only a product of this destabilizing
political economy; its role in reproducing social and spatial stratification will have to be
considered in the long term.
Most importantly, the problem with cities such as Sophia, Dublin, Rio de Janeiro, or
Detroit pursuing a film economy is that it crushes other political ambitions or creative
visions in the city. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, countries with strong public-
service media and indigenous film traditions, have ceded funding these in an effort to
become more “film friendly” to Hollywood. Tax breaks and freebies for film-led renewal
further displace public demands for tax justice and infrastructural investments. The lack
of an alternative politics of place is perhaps the least visible consequence in little
Hollywoods, where the aura of Hollywood can exert such contradictory feelings, even
among otherwise critical thinkers.

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 35
THE NEXT RONALD
REAGAN?
Celebrity, Social
Entrepreneurism, and the
Case of Brazilian TV Host
Luciano Huck
Bruno Campanella

Taking the participation in social and humanitarian campaigns of TV host and social
entrepreneur Luciano Huck as a case in point, this chapter investigates how new models
of celebrity civic engagement are becoming increasingly popular in Brazil. Huck belongs
to a growing group of Brazilian celebrities who combine the support for social causes
with private economic interests. Just like Angelina Jolie, Bono Vox, and George
Clooney, Huck is frequently promoting humanitarian and environmental campaigns
aiming at some of the most challenging problems facing society. The eradication of
hunger in poor regions, support for actions to protect the environment, and the lessen-
ing of natural disasters are some of the most recurrent examples of civic engagement by
celebrities (Boykoff & Goodman, 2009; Brockington, 2008; Chouliaraki, 2013; Martín,
2010; Panis, 2012; Richey & Ponte, 2008). However, for Huck, these issues should be
tackled with the assistance of the private sector. He is a champion of social entrepre-
neurship. His profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are frequently used to give
visibility to companies that partner with his philanthropic projects.
Huck’s intensive participation in social and humanitarian awareness campaigns con-
tributes to his almost unanimous status of contemporary hero in Brazil. In 2011, Veja
news magazine, one of the most influential publications in the country, featured a cover
story on him, “The Reinvention of Do-Goodery,” suggesting that he and his wife
Angélica—who is also a TV hostess—formed “the perfect celebrity couple for a politi-
cally correct world” (Veja, 2011). Shortly afterwards, Alfa, a monthly magazine directed
to men with “intelligence, elegance, and attitude,” placed a photo of Huck in the cover
and posed a question to its readers: “Huck: Savior of the Nation?” (Alfa, 2011). The
article even insinuates that his “obsessive presence” in national affairs will probably
make him a future president. “I am one of those who know that I am dealing with the
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next Ronald Reagan,” declares a close friend of Huck to the journalist, in reference to
the North American president who also worked in the entertainment industry before
entering politics. With over 11 million “likes,” Huck’s personal fan page on Facebook
ranks third nationwide, just behind football player Kaká and book writer Paulo Coelho,
who, unlike him, are celebrities with global reach.
Yet, why is the host of a TV show that offers a mix of entertainment and charity so
admired in Brazil? What makes his involvement in social and humanitarian projects
crossed with economic interests a model for celebrities who want to “make a difference”?
These are some of the questions this chapter will focus on when exploring new forms
of celebrity participation in humanitarian campaigns. First, the chapter will offer a short
account of the phenomenon—the embryonic initiatives, the Live Aid experience as a
global event in 1985, and its latter developments in the 2000s. This contextualization
is crucial for understanding how the individualization of society and the decline of civic
engagement in political and communitarian affiliations (Bennett, 1998; Putnam, 2000)
have contributed to the expansion of what Lipovetsky (2005: 110) calls “media benefi-
cence.” It is probably no coincidence that celebrity participation in humanitarian causes
became so popular in the 1980s, when traditional institutions and structures of society
started to fade away. The consolidation of neoliberalism and the expansion of the
entertainment industry were followed by a generalized mistrust in governments and a
simultaneous trend of individual investment in the promotion of personal lifestyles
(Bennett, 1998). It is thus unsurprising that feel-good music concerts, decentralized
action, and ethical consumption became popular ideas championed by celebrities that
want to be seen as socially engaged.
Luciano Huck’s huge reputation is part of this frame of reference. His promotion of
social entrepreneurship associated with economic interests is inherent in the new spirit
of capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007; Chouliaraki, 2013) that is becoming wide-
spread in Brazil.

Celebrity Participation in Social and

Humanitarian Campaigns
It is difficult to establish the precise moment when celebrities’ societal engagement
started. Nonetheless, the embryo of this phenomenon was perhaps the participation of
radio and film stars in concerted appeals to persuade US citizens to buy war bonds during
World War II. Despite the fact that names like Kate Smith and Bette Davis were acting
on behalf of a government and not “distant sufferers”—as happens with most of contem-
porary humanitarian campaigns—this was probably the first time celebrities played a key
role in a media crusade aimed at big challenges facing society. The radio marathon
promoted by CBS with radio star Kate Smith in September 1943 was analyzed in pioneer
research coordinated by Robert Merton. In Mass Persuasion (2004 [1946]), Merton
investigates how the audience responded to Smith’s 18-hour live broadcasting appeal.
Smith’s visible commitment to the cause, manifested in her tireless effort to answer
phone calls from listeners during the marathon, was perceived as key to the success of
the campaign. At the end of the lengthy hours, an unprecedented $40 million of bonds
had been sold. According to Merton, this event is a perfect example of the power of mass
persuasion. Different from propaganda, which is based on a one-way communication
model, persuasion works as a conversation, a two-way system. The broadcasting of doz-
ens of live phone dialogues between Smith and the listeners created an aura of personal

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relationship between the radio star and the audience. Merton sees this experience as
manipulative, as it did not try to elucidate the reasoning behind the war bond campaign
(an anti-inflationary strategy). Instead, the intimate atmosphere created by the broad-
casters appealed to the emotions of the listeners rather than focusing on the economic
principles behind the war bonds. Merton found that “the prospect of a personal, even
though ephemeral, contact with the celebrity played a conspicuous role in their decision
[of buying bonds]” (131).
In fact, the separation between emotion and reasoning was not exclusive to the radio
marathon drive conducted by Kate Smith. This feature is the hallmark of most celebrity-
led humanitarian and environmental campaigns organized in the later decades.
Bob Geldof’s Live Aid, for example, was structured on the creation of a highly emotional
atmosphere intended to stimulate donations for its cause. Organized in 1985, Live Aid was
an unprecedented international effort, with large performances happening simultaneously
at JFK stadium in Philadelphia and Wembley Arena in London, whereas smaller acts were
performed in Australia, Germany, the former Soviet Union, and Japan. For the first time
in history, some of the most important names in rock and pop music joined together for
the sake of a common social cause: the hunger that overwhelmed millions of people in
Ethiopia. Singers Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Madonna, Mick Jagger, and Eric Clapton
are examples of artists who took part in what was then the widest intercontinental broad-
casting by satellite in the history of mass media. According to Richey and Ponte (2008:
61), Live Aid was watched by about two billion people and raised over $150 million,
unprecedented figures in the history of humanitarian campaigns.
The authors suggested that the successful use of celebrities in Live Aid has changed
the logic of independent campaigns for social, humanitarian, and environmental inter-
ventions around the world. From that moment on, support and fundraising for this kind
of action would become intimately connected to the use of both regional and interna-
tional media personalities. Live Aid stage performances, for instance, were alternated
with the presentation of highly touching television images, displaying the critical situ-
ation of the Ethiopian population. In one of these moments, singer David Bowie showed
a short video—exhibited not only on the huge screen in the back of the Wembley stage
but also on the television sets of everyone who watched the concert at home. The video
interwove images of undernourished children on the verge of death, or even already
deceased, and images of adult refugees with tragically empty, hopeless gazes.1 Although
the performances of the greatest stars from the pop world were meant to create a ludic,
festive atmosphere, the videos dragged the audience to the harsh reality of global ine-
qualities, hence creating a powerful mixture of sadness and guilt that almost challenged
people to intervene on the situation by means of financial contributions or appealing to
their government.
Since the 2000s, however, campaigns with civic engaged celebrities follow different
strategies. Negative feelings have lesser space. Instead of resorting to explicit displays of
world evils, poverty, and diseases, Richey and Ponte (2008: 61) suggest that today’s great
humanitarian crusades prefer to focus on cool, desirable products whose revenues are
partially destined to the causes they support. The contemporary individual is therefore
emotionally connected to other peoples’ misfortunes without having to confront
unpleasant realities. More than this, he/she is invited to intervene in a positive way in
humanitarian causes by means of conspicuous consumption; that is, instead of guilt and
discomfort as engagement strategies to fight global misfortunes, they are offered pleasure
and style. Rather than raw emotion, there is also consumerism.

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The release of Product RED in 2006, at a party held in the Swiss mountain city of
Davos, home of the World Economic Forum, is emblematic. Product RED is the trade-
mark created to draw attention and raise donations for the Global Fund, which supports
the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. The partnership between the compa-
nies associated with the endeavor was stitched by a trio of celebrities who were veterans
in campaigning for humanitarian causes. Bono Vox, Jeffrey Sachs, and Paul Farmer
provided the endeavor with credibility and took part in the release of the RED products
in initiatives thoroughly covered by the media. The numerous articles released by the
partner companies included a special series of RED watches by Emporio Armani, RED
iPods by Apple, and RED mobile handsets by Motorola.
Different from traditional “ethic and sustainable” campaigns marked by an impersonal
“audit culture,” RED products were supported by drives aiming to legitimize them by
reference to the three mentioned celebrities. With Bono Vox providing the products
with a “cool” factor, economist Jeffrey Sachs working as a symbolic guarantor of the
efficiency of the investment of the funds raised with Product RED, and the presence of
the acknowledged medical anthropologist Paul Farmer, the message was that the main
diseases affecting Africa could be fought. The three men’s life narratives were retold in
several articles as part of a strategy to persuade readers to buy RED products. In other
words, the debate on causes, consequences, and policies regarding the eradication of
such diseases—which could have resulted in a demand for more effective governmental
actions—did not happen. It was replaced by the disclosing of the private life details of
Bono, Jeffrey, and Paul as a means to sell t-shirts and mobile phones. Although less than
0.6% of donations to the Global Fund between February 2006 and December 2007 were
derived from RED products—the rest was given by governments and nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs)—the campaign has relayed the message that “socially engaged”
companies and consumer actions could potentially change the world. According to
Richey and Ponte, “Product RED is about individual consumption, not about public
engagement in activism or advocacy. It is a private commitment showcased by wearing
RED products in public, with Bono guaranteeing the cool quotient” (2008: 62).
While Product RED is one of the most successful humanitarian campaigns using
celebrities to promote the purchase of “conscious products,” it is just one of the more
visible ones among numerous similar initiatives.
The consumption of celebrities’ lifestyles and the products they endorse is offered as
the answer to some of the deepest problems in society. At the same time, the mecha-
nisms responsible for the creation of humanitarian or environmental crises are not
discussed. In other words, the current political and socioeconomic systems’ limitations,
intimately connected with the (re)generation of precariousness over the most diverse
spheres of life, are blurred by the investment in the “personal.” The private space, either
for the celebrity or the consumer, becomes the arena in which distortions found in soci-
ety must be articulated. Ulrich Beck (1997) draws on the concept of “subpolitics” to
describe this type of organization outside traditional party arrangements. With a similar
perspective, Bennett (1998) argues that we are witnessing the replacement of a tradi-
tional model of citizenship—marked by the engagement in political and communitarian
affiliations—by personal projects intended to manage complex identities.
Giddens (1991) also suggests that late modernity is characterized by a process of
increasing individualization, in which consumerism and the establishment of certain
lifestyles are central to the articulation of the individual in society. That is, the project
of the self is becoming deeply commodified. In a similar fashion, Bauman (2005: 26)

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holds that today “the roads to self-identity, to a place in society, to life lived in a form
recognizable as that of meaningful living, all require daily visits to the market place.”
In this context, celebrities constitute models for the production of narratives of the
self. Their effective participation in benefit music concerts, television charity shows, the
endorsement of “conscious goods,” and other forms of civic engagement that promote
the consumption of (politically correct) lifestyles fit perfectly in contemporary models
for self-expression and societal activism. The famous definition of celebrity made by
Daniel Boorstin in the early 1960s—“a person who is known for his well-knownness”—
no longer applies (Boorstin, 1992 [1961]: 57). Celebrities nowadays are known for the
good causes they champion. In fact, it is currently almost impossible to talk about estab-
lished media personalities who have not engaged in some kind of support for civic
engagement (Littler, 2008).
Although this type of activism is traditionally conducted by celebrities themselves or
in association with nonprofit organizations, it is becoming rather more common to see
celebrities partnering with private enterprises on behalf of humanitarian and environ-
mental causes.

The Case of Luciano Huck

In Brazil, TV host Luciano Huck is responsible for one of the most successful marriages
between entrepreneurship, social commitment, and fame. On Saturday afternoons at
Globo Network, the largest TV broadcaster in Brazil, his show Caldeirão do Huck (liter-
ally, Huck’s Cauldron) offers a balanced mix of entertainment and charity. Two of the
main Caldeirão segments are franchise versions based on restoring the houses (Lar Doce
Lar) and cars (Lata Velha) belonging to ordinary people who are short on money. These
local variations of internationally known shows Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and
Pimp My Ride invest in the sentimental narratives of less fortunate individuals who usu-
ally describe their lives in terms of personal or family-related struggles. The emotionally
charged atmosphere of the accounts, usually emphasizing the feelings of participants
toward their worn houses and cars, are key to the success and longevity experienced by
the show. Every year, Globo Networks receives close to one million letters from people
requesting to take part in Huck’s shows (Veja 2011). Lar Doce Lar, Lata Velha, and the
other charitainment formats found in Caldeirão offer Huck a powerful opportunity to
present the audience with his (assumed) socially engaged credentials.
When the TV host is not working on the production of the show, he uses his spare
time to disclose news about philanthropic initiatives he supports, pictures from holiday
travels around the world with his family, segments from his TV program, and even
awards for personal achievements—like when he was a 2011 Man of the Year nominee.2
The birth of his daughter Eva in late 2012, for instance, deserved an enthusiastic post
from Huck on Facebook, communicating the news to his millions of followers. That
piece of news, given by the father himself over the social network, obtained more than
470,000 “likes” and was commented upon by almost 100,000 people on his Facebook
profile alone, in less than 48 hours.3
Huck takes his online activities very seriously indeed. In early 2013, he posted a mes-
sage on Facebook reaffirming that he personally takes care of everything published on
his profiles. “Any [published] topic that is not personal or related to Caldeirão has to
have a reason. This one has; and it is this community of 9 million people [his followers
on Facebook at the time of the post] who will benefit. If it is good for everybody is good

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for me.” Huck was referring to an endorsement contract he signed with a credit card
company for supporting a campaign entirely structured on the popularity of his Twitter
and Facebook accounts. His followers were invited to write a message on Huck’s profiles,
naming expenses they wanted to have paid by the sponsoring credit card. Those who
were chosen had half the cost of the chosen expense funded by the financial institution.
Among the many fortunate individuals selected by the TV host was a mother who could
not afford the tuition fees of her son’s school, a man that cried out for a new mare, a
bride who dreamed of a beautiful wedding party, and a woman that wanted a new note-
book.
Luciano Huck claims that all he wants is to help others, especially if this is done with
some sort of business perspective. “It [the business perspective] crosses all my work,” he
declared to Veja magazine.
Nonetheless, his efforts to renovate the image of the traditional benefactor have been
financially rewarding for him as well. It is speculated that his annual earnings from
Globo Network alone is around $5 million (Alfa, 2011). Huck’s intensive participation
in TV shows and campaigns that carry some kind of social aura has also resulted in
multiple endorsement contracts with dozens of businesses that want to build a socially
concerned image. It was recently disclosed, for example, that one of his sponsors, a big
Brazilian bank, pays him $2 million per year. The same source revealed that his partici-
pation fee for single one-day events is usually more than $100,000 (Alfa, 2011).
Often, civic initiatives supported by Huck have some kind of connection with
business interests. For him, the solutions to some of the deepest problems faced by soci-
ety should start from private initiative. When the TV host defended indigenous tribes
in the Xingu region in 2013, or when he showed support to the World Environment Day
that same year, he did so by advertising themed t-shirts specially designed to be sold in
his own online clothing shop.4 This pattern also applies to small crusades, such as the
campaign he supported to combat litter dumping on the streets of Brazil, which was cre-
ated and publicized by Rock in Rio, an international music festival franchise.
Yet, Huck’s combination of humanitarian action and economic interests is not always
free from controversies. Early in 2011, catastrophic landslides caused by torrential rains
in the mountain region north of Rio de Janeiro were responsible for hundreds of deaths
and thousands of homeless families. The natural disaster, the worst in Brazilian history,
triggered a wave of solidarity throughout the country. Different spheres of government,
NGOs, media organizations, and ordinary citizens together made concerted efforts to
alleviate the pain of those worst hit by the tragedy. Like many others, Luciano Huck was
also touched by the pain of the sufferers. Faithful to his convictions, the TV host became
involved in a support campaign created by a private corporation. He used his Twitter
account to disclose a fund raising drive for the flood victims organized by a Brazilian
deal-of-the-day website called Peixe Urbano. The message that reached millions of peo-
ple read: “You want to help, and help a lot, the landslide victims of Rio de Janeiro. Via
@PeixeUrbano, you buy a coupon and donation is done. http://pes.ca/gZ2Ibb.”5
In the beginning, the reactions to his efforts were fairly upbeat. The fact that Huck
was offering a positive visibility to Peixe Urbano, thus indirectly helping a corporation
with economic interests, was not seen as problematic. Trouble started when news sur-
faced that Huck himself was one of the co-owners of the company. As this information
gained more prominence in social networks, he was accused by some of cheap opportun-
ism for profiting in the shadow of a catastrophe. He did not seem to be disturbed, though.
The TV host promptly responded to his critics: “There are people who, instead of trying

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to help, would rather stay home with their soft butt on the sofa criticizing others. I don’t
have time for this type of person” (Alfa, 2011).
Considering his unabated popularity in Brazil, it is clear that Huck’s reputation was
not affected by the incident. On the contrary, not long after the episode, two of the most
influential magazines in the country published laudatory cover articles on his allegedly
exemplary role for Brazilian society. His regular support for actions combining charity,
consumerism, entertainment, societal activism, and business interests have resulted in
general admiration not only in Brazil but also abroad. When US president Barak Obama
visited the country in 2011, Huck was selected master of ceremonies for the president’s
main speech event. A couple of years later, the TV host was invited as a speaker, one of
only two from South America, at the prestigious Google Zeitgeist Americas forum.6
The considerable interest revolving around Huck’s private and public lives, and the
successful ways he has found to channel it to raise awareness to key social issues, seems
to indicate, at a first glance, that celebrities indeed have an important role to play in the
contemporary world. The fact that their attitudes and lifestyles can be used to draw
attention to important issues is often celebrated as a democratizing force. When discuss-
ing the implications of television culture in the formation of citizenship, John Hartley
proposes that TV “teaches ‘the amelioration of manners,’” as well as “various ethical,
ideological, and moral precepts” (Hartley, 1999: 155). The author praises the creation
of new forms of citizenship deriving from a supposed “democratization of the public
sphere.” Democratainment (that is, the combination of democracy and entertainment)
is, for Hartley, one of the most important positive consequences of today’s television
(and celebrity) culture.
However, Couldry and Markham (2007) have undertaken research, based on empiri-
cal data, which led to different conclusions about the role of media culture in society.
Their investigation, conducted in the United Kingdom, combined semi-structured
interviews and diaries which were completed by the participants. The aim was to inves-
tigate, through a broad perspective, how celebrity culture interferes with how people
make sense of the world. The results suggest that individuals who devote more time in
their lives to news and content involving celebrities are exactly those who are less con-
cerned about debates of a political nature or those regarding public matters.
They also suggest that it is necessary to be careful about beliefs that lack empirical
support, expressing a shallow optimism toward social benefits deriving from greater
celebrity participation in issues of public interest. The authors conclude that “if peo-
ple’s engagement with celebrity culture is part of a turning away from concern with
issues that require public resolution (away from, in our definition, ‘public connection’),
then no amount of well-crafted messages will make a difference” (Couldry & Markham,
2007: 418).
Starting from a distinct perspective, Lilie Chouliaraki (2013) has avoided delving into
the efficiency or sustainability of public interest debates led by celebrities. Instead, she
is more preoccupied with understanding the transformations in the ethics of solidarity
which shape humanitarian interventions. According to Chouliaraki (2013: 4), we are
witnessing the replacement of theatrical structures of solidarity—in which the space
between spectator and vulnerable others is marked by ethics and politics—by a mirror
structure, basically involving a self-reflected western individual. Nowadays, humani-
tarianism is articulated with the market sphere and narcissism. In Chouliaraki’s account,
contemporary humanitarian interventions are not about conviction or about others, but
about choice, lifestyle, and ourselves. This post-humanitarianism “manages to turn the

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ever-expanding realm of economic exchange into a realm of private emotion and

self-expression and, in a dialectical move, to simultaneously private emotion and phil-
anthropic obligation” (2013: 5–6).
Chouliaraki offers two illustrative examples of such transformations. She compares
the interview performances of actresses Audrey Hepburn—UNICEF Goodwill
Ambassador from the late 1980s until her death in early 1990s—and Angelina Jolie,
who was appointed UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador in 2001.
For Chouliaraki (2013: 91–93), Hepburn’s strategy to legitimize her role as a Goodwill
Ambassador was constructed based on the following two main principles: decelebrization
and ethicalization of her persona. The former was achieved through an effort to distance
herself from all forms of expertise and distinction. When working as a Goodwill
Ambassador, Hepburn would constantly make reference to her celebrity status as some-
thing belonging to a distant past. Moreover, she frequently portrayed herself as someone
without any kind of special knowledge other than of a mother who travels enough to feel
moved by the suffering of distant others. Ethicalization was realized through her identifica-
tion with a universal condition of suffering. The former film star mentioned in several
interviews the theme of her modest childhood in Europe. “I can testify to what UNICEF
means to childhood, because I was among those who received food and medical relief
right after World War II.” Her capacity to break the barriers that separate her persona
from the sufferers, on the one hand, and the ability to transmit emotion to the public, on
the other, was fundamental to her humanitarian project. In a way, Hepburn’s emotional
first-hand testimony of the dire life conditions in Somalia is not very different from Kate
Smith’s strategy to persuade US citizens to buy war bonds during World War II. They
both gained legitimacy through a personal relationship established with different others.
Angelina Jolie, however, represents a different model. In contrast to Hepburn, Jolie’s
strategies of humanization relied upon hypercelebrization and a process of ethicalization
based on utilitarian solidarity. Similar to Luciano Huck, she is permanently overexpos-
ing details of her private life, such as her double mastectomy intervention, her child
adoptions, and pregnancies. Jolie encourages the portrayal of her personal choices as a
kind of political statement, unlike Hepburn, who maintained a discernible separation of
her intimate private life and her role as UNICEF ambassador. The blurring of these
boundaries can also be perceived in the ways Angelina personifies the suffering of the
other. She communicates it with visible signs of emotion through her body, in a confes-
sional way. Jolie often burst into tears during interviews related to her humanitarian
activism. Rather than dispassionately delivering facts, she “speaks from the heart”; she
seems to be authentic (not simply sincere, like Hepburn). Chouliaraki sees these
elements as part of a utilitarian form of solidarity. For the author, Jolie engages in
humanitarian causes not simply for pity or to provoke rational responses from society
but as an opportunity for self-enlightenment. In other words, Angelina’s participation
in societal causes should be understood as a self-growing experience, which is the key to
the autonomous individual of contemporary world. Her humanitarianism is “more than
a professional commitment to an organization; it is a conscious lifestyle choice that
permeates all aspects of her existence” (Chouliaraki, 2013: 97).
Jolie and Huck’s professional lives are also key aspects of this new model of humani-
tarianism. Unlike Hepburn or the rock and pop musicians of the 1980s, new celebrity
activists break the divisions separating work and humanitarian engagement. Whereas
Jolie has played parts in films addressing human right issues, like Beyond Borders (2003)
and A Mighty Heart (2007), Luciano Huck’s professional life is largely associated with

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some kind of activism. Be it the charitainment show he hosts at the Globo Network, the
social issues championed by his own companies, or the “conscious products” he endorses,
Huck is parading his benefactor credentials in all walks of life. He even created a chari-
table NGO, Instituto Criar, dedicated to the formation of television professionals coming
from economically deprived backgrounds. The Brazilian TV host is a perfect example of
the social entrepreneur, who reflects the “autonomous creativity and assertive individu-
alism of a new capitalist spirit that, dedicated as it may be to the humanitarian project,
ultimately stands above, rather than within, a communitarian duty to a larger collectiv-
ity” (Chouliaraki 2013: 100).
As Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) suggests, capitalism is always finding new ways to
legitimize its own structure. It must supply moral reasons that justify people’s actions
within its general framework and, at the same time, condemn certain configurations that
transgress its spirit. Contemporary forms of celebrity societal engagement are good
examples of these dynamics. On the one hand, they lay bare social imbalances created
by neoliberalism, but, on the other, they simultaneously offer a rationalization that
safeguards it against anti-capitalist critiques. The social entrepreneurship advocated by
Luciano Huck represents a self-serving form of civic engagement based on consumerism,
lifestyle, and entertainment, which not only is incapable of changing the structures that
create social inequalities but also actually reinforces them. Yet, this model has been
internalized and praised in Brazil as an example of individual action capable of tackling
some of the biggest challenges faced by contemporary society.

Notes
1 This can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZG3ZLQ4MO8
2 http://revistaalfa.abril.com.br/homens-do-ano-2011/
3 https://www.facebook.com/LucianoHuck/posts/463744117011821
4 Luciano Huck owns an online clothing shop called Usehuck (usehuck.com.br).
5 https://twitter.com/LucianoHuck/status/26377814122962944
6 This can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/user/zeitgeistminds/Zeitgeistminds?x=/event/
6398745356795904

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 36
SOLIDARITY MATTERS
Global Solidarity, Revolution
and Indigenous Peoples in
Latin America
Roy Krøvel

Introduction
For generations, Latin American revolutionaries have attracted the attention and
admiration of Northern leftists of all kinds. From the time of Emiliano Zapata and
Pancho Villa to the times of Ernesto Che Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos, revo-
lutionaries from south of the Rio Grande have stimulated the imagination and creativity
of film producers, musicians, journalists, authors and political activists all over the
world. Revolutionary movements, in fact, see influencing Northern media and journal-
ism as integral parts of their strategies.
Since the mid-1980s, however, such inspiration has increasingly come from indige-
nous peoples and indigenous movements fighting exclusion and oppression in Mexico,
Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador and elsewhere. The rise of a global indige-
nous movement has coincided with the decline of the former hegemonic understanding
on the left in the global North of class struggle as the decisive antagonism in world
history.
But the co-existence of indigenous movements and revolutionary organizations has
not been uncomplicated in Latin America. Numerous conflicts between Latin American
revolutionaries and indigenous peoples have put international solidarity under pressure.
Similarly, journalists, media and film-makers have struggled to understand the conflicts,
and to report and represent them truthfully and fairly.
The chapter will discuss this form of global solidarity. Solidarity activists usually
believe that solidarity activism matters and can have an influence on the issue at stake.
This type of long distance solidarity, however, is one which depends heavily on mediated
information.

Definitions and Key Concepts

According to the philosopher Roy Bhaskar, universal solidarity is possible; humans have
the capacity to identify with others. For Bhaskar, the possibility of universal solidarity
 KRØV E L

underpins “critical realism.” It is a principle or axiom for critical realist thinking about
human emancipation (Bhaskar, 2009; Bhaskar, Naess, & Høyer, 2011).
Solidarity with groups and individuals in other countries or continents, however,
depends heavily on processes other than personal interaction with and experience of the
reality of the individuals or groups with which the activists identify. It is therefore
necessary to consider the role of mediation and hermeneutics in this type of solidarity
activism. Understanding the reality of the issue at stake that underpins solidarity action
is—at least in part—built on mediated information. In addition, the mediated informa-
tion will be understood and interpreted by solidarity activists based on their horizons of
knowledge and experience (Gadamer, Weinsheimer, & Marshall, 2004). Horizons of
knowledge and experience are always historically and contextually situated.
Over the last few years in Media Studies, much critique has been directed against the
ways in which the media portray groups or communities from a particular ideological or
value perspective (Gentz and Kramer, 2006; Hammer, 2009). Media representations
should not be seen as simply mirroring “reality”; they serve instead to “re-present” and
create a new reality. Historically, the media representations of Native Americans illustrate
how negative media depictions of groups and peoples can serve to exacerbate negative
attitudes which, in turn, can make life harder for excluded and oppressed groups.
The term “Indian” or “Native Indian” has long been controversial in Latin America,
as it reflects the arrogance of a distant view incapable of, or uninterested in, distinguish-
ing between the many peoples that supposedly belong to this broad grouping. According
to King, American Indians have seldom been represented as peoples – instead “they
have been shadows of themselves, mirrors of the dominant society” (King, Echo-Hawk,
& Rosier, 2006). In the 1970s, however, a new type of “Indian” organizations emerged
in Northern countries and in Latin America that rejected hegemonic discourses about
indigenous peoples. Organizations such as El Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca
(CRIC) and Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE) insist
on employing the term “indigenous peoples.” A new breed of local and regional indig-
enous organizations have formed global networks that have sometimes succeeded in
shifting the balance of power between indigenous peoples and regimes (Brysk, 2000).
Most notably, in 1989 the United Nations adopted a legally binding international
instrument (International Labour Organization Convention No. 169) which deals spe-
cifically with the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples. The Convention has had a
considerable effect on the Latin American Human Rights system, including domestic
and international courts (International Labour Organization, 2009). It has been fol-
lowed by other documents and declarations such as the United Nations Declaration on
the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in
2007, which is not a legally binding document but still reflects “the commitment of the
UN’s member states to move in certain directions” (Permanent Forum on Indigenous
Issues, 2007).
A number of scholars have argued that indigenous groups have more extensive claims
to special and permanent rights than other groups (Føllesdal, 2004). Kymlicka (1996),
for instance, says that such minority groups deserve unique rights. Claims of unique
rights to land and territories, for instance, have often come into conflict with strong
national sentiments in many countries. It has sometimes led to accusations of “separa-
tism” or “fragmentation.”
Revolutionary organizations in Latin America have also seen media as important for
the revolutionary process, although they typically considered media ownership in the

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hands of a few capitalists to be a major obstacle. Guerrilla organizations, for instance,

developed diverse strategies to attract media attention to their causes and activities.
Ernesto “Che” Guevara contributed to revolutionary thought mainly by two proposals,
building on his experience in participating in the Cuban revolution (1956–1959)
(Guevara, Loveman, & Davies, 1997; Guevara and Deutschmann, 2003). First, he
argued, it was not necessary to wait until the situation was “ripe” for a revolution; a
group of armed revolutionaries (a guerrilla) could create the necessary conditions.
Second, the key issue for the armed guerrilla was to demonstrate that the regime was not
invincible. To achieve that, it was necessary to broadcast the activities and successes of
the armed organization.

Historical Perspectives on Representations of

Revolutionary Organizations
The history of journalists visiting and living with rebel movements is understandably
long, as is the history of Northern journalists in Latin America. John Reed, for instance,
joined and reported on Pancho Villa’s campaign during the Mexican Revolution (1910–
1920). Fidel Castro also understood the importance of building a sympathetic audience
in Europe and North America, and invited journalists to visit the Cuban guerrillas fight-
ing the Batista regime. Such communication played a pivotal role in the downfall of the
authoritarian Cuban regime because it contributed to the gradual undermining of its US
support.
Many guerrilla actions since the Cuban Revolution (1959) should be understood in
light of Guevara’s theory on the role of an armed guerrilla to demonstrate regime weak-
ness in Latin America and the importance of media coverage: for instance the spectacular
attacks by the Sandinista Army of National Liberation (FSLN) in Nicaragua on the
house of Chema Castillo (1974) and the Nicaraguan Congress (1978), and the 19th of
April Movement’s (M-19) assault on the Palace of Justice in Colombia (1985). The
need to attract media attention is probably also part of the reason why the Farabundo
Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) took the battle in El Salvador to the Sheraton
Hotel in San Salvador (1989).
Media play an important part in guerrilla strategy, and so does international solidarity.
Over the years a large number of authors, film-makers and journalists have visited and
reported sympathetically on Latin American revolutionary movements and their struggles.
The French philosopher, journalist and academic Jules Régis Debray was among the
first to report in detail from Cuba after the revolution. He later joined Ernesto Guevara
on his failed and fatal mission to instigate revolution in Bolivia (Debray, 2000), and
survived him. His article on the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, deals specifically
with the issue of indigenous peoples (Debray, 1996). Debray’s version of indigenous
peoples is oppressed, but proud, free and democratic by nature. The Zapatista Army of
National Liberation (EZLN) is said to be built on the Indian communities’ nature, in
which power flows “from below.”
Among the reports from the Nicaraguan revolution, Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar
Smile stands out for its colourful language and vivid descriptions (Rushdie, 1997). At the
time, however, it was criticised for being uncritical, and blind to the already visible
authoritarian tendencies of the Sandinista government. The violent conflict between
the Sandinista government and indigenous groups on the Atlantic Coast is subsumed
within the meta-narrative of Nicaraguan liberation from US imperialism.

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Far more nuanced pictures of a revolutionary movement were painted by Nobel

Laureates Jose Saramago (Saramago, 1999) and Gabriel García Márquez (García
Márquez, 2001) in Mexico after the Zapatista uprising in 1994. Both took the opportu-
nity to reflect on the relationship between revolutionary organizations and indigenous
peoples.
These examples also illustrate the importance of such reporting for the emergence of
a large transnational solidarity movement. Reports and documentaries were read and
seen by a large audience. The information produced by these and other journalists and
authors thus contributed to building solidarity with struggles against authoritarian
regimes in Latin America.

Indigenous Peoples and Revolutionary Movements

The revolutionary organizations mainly employed a Marxist language and discourse to
understand and explain the societies of Latin America. For them (at least in the first
three decades after the Cuban revolution), the antagonism between capitalists and
workers was the driving force in history. Little attention was directed towards under-
standing, for instance, cultural diversity and indigenous perspectives—which is not very
surprising, perhaps, as most of the leaders were recruited among students and academics
at universities, army officers and trade unions (Krøvel, 2011). Growing up in sharply
divided societies, few had any real experience of indigenous peoples and their ways of
life. This often led guerrilla organizations to operate with negative stereotypes such as
seeing indigenous peoples as backward or reactionary.
In Guatemala, the guerrilla understood that a revolutionary war could not succeed
without the support of the majority of the population that belonged to indigenous
groups. This led activists to recruit intensively among indigenous peoples in the rural
highlands (Payeras, 1983, 1987, 1989, 1991). The guerrilla succeeded in winning the
support of a large section of the indigenous population in some highland regions in
the early 1980s, but failed to prepare the population for the brutal repression in which
the military regime annihilated dozens of villages and murdered tens of thousands of
civilians in the ensuing counter-insurgency campaign.
In Nicaragua, a conflict between the Sandinista regime and indigenous organizations
erupted into full-blown civil war in the early 1980s. The Sandinistas reacted by violently
“evacuating” dozens of Miskito villages along the Rio Coco River, placing the villagers
in “secure” villages, sometimes locked in for months behind barbed wire. The Sandinistas
feared, not without reason, that the disaffected Miskitos would help the contra-
revolutionary forces that operated along the Northern border with Honduras. The
indigenous organizations, however, felt that the Sandinista government lacked respect
for indigenous cultures and ways of life. One important cause for the conflict was the
misunderstanding resulting from the youth and inexperience of the Sandinista
leadership—they did not have the knowledge and experience necessary to communicate
well with the indigenous peoples (Ortega Saavedra, 1979; Cabezas, 1986; Hale, 1994;
Gordon, 1998; Ramírez, 1999).
In Colombia, the violent conflicts between indigenous organizations and guerrilla
organizations have continued to this day. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) continues to use threats, kidnappings and violence against indigenous organiza-
tions. Human rights organizations have documented a substantial number of killings of
indigenous leaders and activists by the guerrilla organizations (see, for instance, Human

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Rights Watch, 2009). The Zapatistas in Chiapas, however, represent a watershed in the
history of revolutionary movements in Latin America. What began as an attempt by a
Cuban-influenced organization to establish a guerrilla in a remote area, over time devel-
oped into something very different, as radical indigenous leaders gradually took control
over the organization (Holloway, 1998; Tello Diaz, 2001; Hayden, 2002; Ross, 2006;
Krøvel, 2009). The traditional dichotomy between guerrilla organizations and indige-
nous peoples seems to have been overcome in this instance.

The Rise of a Global Indigenous Movement

In the 1970s, emerging indigenous struggles in North America and Northern Europe
helped to question the entrenched international stereotypes of indigenous peoples. At
the same time, local and regional indigenous organizations in Latin America became
increasingly vocal, demanding not only equal rights but also respect for the right to be
different. For instance, in 1971 a number of local indigenous governments (“cabildos”)
formed the Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) to resist abuse and exploitation from
big landowners. CRIC soon became an important force, driving the further organization
of indigenous peoples in Colombia. Similarly, in Ecuador, the Confederation of
Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), founded in 1972, grew increasingly
influential as a voice for indigenous perspectives.
These local and regional developments were further aided by the growth of a truly
global network of indigenous peoples and the emergence of an international human
rights system to which local organizations could turn. The indigenous movement became
a transnational movement, although most indigenous organizations had firm local roots.
Conflicts, such as that in Nicaragua between Sandinistas and indigenous organizations,
were important for the development of a global network of indigenous groupings with a
sense of shared interest and solidarity. Some North American indigenous activists par-
ticipated alongside Nicaraguan indigenous leaders in campaigns and activities, and
Nicaraguan indigenous leaders travelled to Europe to seek support.
In 1992, the festivities planned to mark the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s “discov-
ery” of America was in many places turned into a massive protest against racism,
exclusion and genocide. The governments of Latin America reacted to the growing
protests by establishing Fondo Indigena (an institution designed to become “the only
international organization for cooperation between indigenous peoples and govern-
ment”) with the aim of furthering indigenous peoples’ rights (El Fondo para el Desarrollo
de los Pueblos Indígenas de América Latina y El Caribe, 2013). The fund was to support
education, including higher education, for indigenous peoples. A number of programs
for indigenous studies appeared at Latin American institutions, but many indigenous
organizations, such as CRIC and CONAIE, demanded more. Instead of depending on
“Western” universities to produce relevant knowledge for indigenous peoples, the indig-
enous organizations themselves wanted to develop indigenous and communitarian
institutions of higher education.
The Network of Indigenous and Communitarian Universities (RUIICAY), with
members in several Latin American countries, is one of the expressions of this desire.
The largest of the indigenous and communitarian universities, the University of the
Autonomous Regions of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua (URACCAN) is situated
on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, in the regions where indigenous peoples and the
Sandinista government fought a violent war in the early 1980s. The university has

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been accepted as a full member of the national board of universities in Nicaragua.

More recently, CRIC and CONAIE have established higher education institutions.
The movement of indigenous and communitarian higher education institutions grew
in number and influence during the 1990s and the 2000s, and has over the last few
years contributed significantly to the understanding of indigenous peoples in Latin
America.

Critical Issues, Current Contributions and Research

The problems of media representations of indigenous peoples are relevant for a number
of important issues in Media Studies. Studies have demonstrated that indigenous peo-
ples have historically been excluded and misrepresented in mainstream media.
Misrepresentation is closely connected to prejudice and stereotypes. Recently, similar
criticism has also been raised against alternative media.
In the 1980s, for instance, a large number of Norwegian activists—for example, doc-
tors and nurses—travelled to Nicaragua in solidarity with the revolutionary govern-
ment. These activists also produced information about the conflict and sent it back
home. The European and North American solidarity network was successful in organ-
izing support for the Sandinista revolution. In the Norwegian case, the network played
a pivotal role in establishing diplomatic ties between the two states, and also succeeded
in mobilizing a number of NGOs to provide development aid to Nicaragua. The solidar-
ity activities mattered. The information campaigns, however, were often plagued by the
same stereotypes and misrepresentations of indigenous peoples as those of the main-
stream media. A group of Norwegian doctors and nurses argued that “the role of the
indigenous peoples” is to be “protagonists” in the Nicaraguan revolution. If the indige-
nous peoples did not themselves understand the responsibility of being “protagonists,”
it should be up to the Sandinista government to take necessary steps to make them
understand (Sættem, Bergholz, & Lie, 1983). This, and other examples, illustrates how
activists in the global solidarity movement employed ideological perspectives from home
in the interpretation of the conflict in Nicaragua. The ideological perspectives served
to frame the understanding of the conflict and the information about it. The conflict
was interpreted in light of the existing narratives of US imperialism and popular libera-
tion struggles—and indigenous perspectives were excluded from the view.
However, only a few years later, the dominating frame of understanding broke down
as the Sandinistas themselves realized that they had been mistaken in their approach to
the conflict with the indigenous groups and ethnic minorities on the Atlantic Coast
(Hale, 1994; Gordon, 1998). The Sandinistas apologized, and embarked on an ambitious
project to give the regions on the Atlantic Coast autonomy. In 1987, two autonomous
regions were established, and the Constitution was amended to accept the fact that
Nicaragua is a multi-ethnic state.
These developments led to much soul searching and re-thinking in the global solidar-
ity movement. The process was pushed on by the protests against the celebrations in
1992. As the Zapatista uprising began in January 1994, the conditions for building a
global solidarity movement had changed dramatically. The combination of indigenous
roots and a revolutionary discourse succeeded in activating a large and global movement
of solidarity (Castells, 1996, 1997; Leyva, 2001; Krøvel, 2006). In 1994 and 1995,
demonstrations in Mexico and internationally played a significant role in halting two
military campaigns against the Zapatistas. Again, solidarity seemed to matter.

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In the wake of the global solidarity actions, however, critical voices were heard.
Starting with the Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz, a long list of Mexican authors has criti-
cized not only the Zapatistas but also what they perceive to be an uncritical embrace of
the armed insurgents (Paz, 1994). Paz particularly decried what he believed was a new
and postmodern form of politics, where image mattered more than argument and reason.
From a sympathetic perspective, Berger warned against the dangers of romancing the
Zapatista struggle (Berger, 1998/9). A similar type of argument has been put forward by
Hellman, according to whom the global solidarity movement has contributed to
producing a “‘flattened’ picture of the actors and events in Chiapas” (Hellman, 2000).
Many of the problems and challenges discussed here have been reflected in recent
post-development studies. Arturo Escobar, for instance, has argued that the problem
with “development” is that it is based on the model of the industrialized world (Escobar,
2008, 2011). Escobar is influenced by post-structuralist theories, and notes a shift
towards interpretivist approaches to development studies. To some extent, the Zapatista
leader, Subcomandante Marcos, has resisted such a shift in approach in history and
method (Gilly, Subcomandante Marcos, & Ginzburg, 1995), although he accepts the
importance of focusing on symbols and interpretation. Reflecting on the history of the
EZLN, Subcomandante Marcos concludes: “In reality, the only thing we proposed was
to change the world; the rest we have improvised. We had our rigid concepts of the
world and revolution thoroughly dented in the encounter with the indigenous reality of
Chiapas” (Gilly et al., 1995).
Similarly, a long list of studies has questioned nationalism in Latin America and
especially the understanding that there is a national identity resulting from the encoun-
ter between indigenous peoples and descendants of Europeans (“mestizaje”). Landmark
studies of nationalism and multicultural identity have been produced by scholars such
as Charles Hale and Edmund Gordon (Hale, 1994; Gordon, 1998).
The critical issues discussed here are also relevant for theory and methodology in
Media Studies. Although theories on framing, narratives and mythologies continue to
be useful for the studies of media and media representations, the conflicts between
indigenous peoples and revolutionary groups underline the problematic aspects of such
theories. As this brief article shows, the understanding of indigenous peoples changed
dramatically between the mid-1980s and 1994. For a “frame” to be accepted as such in
framing theory, it must be relatively stable over time. In many ways, the media
representations of indigenous peoples in Latin America can be understood as driven by
mechanisms that resemble the framing mechanisms described by Entman (Entman,
1993) and van Gorp (van Gorp, 2007), but they also indicate some weaknesses of some
social constructionist approaches. The frames were not merely social constructs pro-
duced in isolation from reality; they must simultaneously also be seen as attempts to
grasp, understand and say something important about that reality. The frames therefore
broke down in cascades (Goldstein, 2012) as journalists and activists realized that they
hindered deeper understanding of the reality. The encounters between solidarity activists
and indigenous peoples are therefore also a testament to the ability of communities and
individuals to learn and to self-organize. Building the analysis on hermeneutics instead
of framing theory can be useful. The solidarity activists had to build on previous experi-
ence to interpret and understand the situation and reality of indigenous peoples and
revolutionary organizations. Beliefs, ideology, myths, narratives, etc. played an impor-
tant role in the hermeneutical process and should in this case be seen as resilient—it
took much experience and new information before the solidarity movement became

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willing to question already existing prejudices. However, when it happened, collective

learning led to new forms of self-organization which opened up for a deeper understand-
ing of solidarity and its emancipatory potential.

Recommendations for Future Directions

Who will produce the independent and autonomous knowledge necessary for the future
of indigenous peoples in Latin America? The emergence of indigenous and communitar-
ian universities in Latin America is currently the most promising development for future
studies. It promises to situate the production of knowledge within indigenous communi-
ties, thus avoiding many of the problems related to outside perspectives on indigenous
peoples.
However, it also looks increasingly important to investigate the authoritarian aspects
of many indigenous communities. Here, building on the research done by Rus (Rus,
Castillo, & Mattiace, 2003) and Collier (Collier and de Leon Pasquel, 2001) in Chiapas,
Mexico, could potentially enrich the study of the media representations of indigenous
peoples. Critical perspectives are clearly needed.
Finally, if alternative and community media is to fulfil its potential to provide impor-
tant and useful information for solidarity activities, more critical research on alternative
and community media also needs to be undertaken. So far, a large part of the research
on alternative and community media has been dominated by an approach that cele-
brates alternative media for its capacity to “empower” citizens. Although this approach
is important, the problematic aspects of media representations should not be excluded.

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Føllesdal, A. (2004) The special claims of indigenous minorities to corrective justice. In Meyer, L.
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Rus, J., Castillo, R. A. H. & Mattiace, S. L. (2003) Mayan lives, Mayan utopias: The indigenous peoples
of Chiapas and the Zapatista rebellion. New York: Lanham.
Rushdie, S. (1997) The jaguar smile: A Nicaraguan journey. New York: Picador.
Sættem, G., Bergholz, M. & Lie, M. (1983) Klokt å tvangsflytte miskito-indianere [Wise to remove
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Further Reading
On revolutionary organizations in Latin America: Guevara, E., Loveman, B. & Davies, T. M. (1997)
Guerrilla warfare. Wilmington, DE: SR Books.
On the global indigenous movement: Brysk, A. (2000) From tribal village to global village: Indian rights
and international relations in Latin America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Global solidarity and emancipation: Bhaskar, R. (2009) Scientific realism and human emancipation.
London: Routledge.

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PERFORMING NATIVE
IDENTITIES
Human Displays and Indigenous
Activism in Marcos’ Philippines
Talitha Espiritu

Introduction
In 1974, the Marcos regime enlisted 20,400 citizens and 50 tribal groups to reenact the
history of the Philippines in a mass ceremony called Kasaysayan ng Lahi (History of the
Race). But between 1974 and 1983, the Kalinga and Bontoc mountain peoples—two of
the indigenous groups showcased in that mass ceremony—were the targets of militariza-
tion in the name of “national development.” A spurious program in natural resource
extraction threatened the destruction of their ancestral lands, even as these communi-
ties were conscripted to perform their indigenous identities for tourists. With only a
handful of defiant journalists in the controlled media to publicize their causes, these
communities fought at a disadvantage for their cultural survival.
The touristic staging of native identities in the Kasaysayan ng Lahi mass ceremony
brings into relief the longevity of colonial discourses and the representational violence
that continues to impose limits on the identities of indigenous groups. But the activism
of the Bontoc and Kalinga presents a grassroots model of cultural revitalization that
destabilizes such performances of “nation” and subsequently reveals the importance of
sub-national practices of collective remembrance in the formation of indigenous
identities.

Colonial Expositions, Human Displays and

Heritage Tourism
It is widely held that colonial expositions utilized the classificatory and narrative tech-
niques of the evolutionary sciences of empire and contributed to the modern public
museum’s technologies of collection and display (Bennett 2004; Breckenridge 1989;
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1998; Rydell 2006). The encyclopedic orientation and teleolog-
ical narratives of expositions are often juxtaposed with their commercial operations as
popular amusements. For Tom Gunning, colonial expositions were laboratories where
 ESPI RI T U

new visual technologies of an emergent mass culture were expressly tested, and where
“the act of spectating” was elevated into a civic duty (Gunning 1994: 423).
Colonial expositions proffered for civic delectation and popular consumption a par-
ticular visual commodity: live human displays of colonized peoples. Until this practice
fell out of favor in the 1930s (to be replaced by ethnographic films), these displays
provided object lessons on the purported moral, racial and scientific superiority of
Europeans. The literature on the topic underscores the exploitative dynamics at play in
these theatrical performances premised on the spectacularization of racialized bodies
(Corbey 1993).
Against interpretations of world fairs as visual schoolrooms charged with displaying
the orderliness of empire (Breckenridge 1989; Corbey 1993), revisionist histories of
World’s Fairs foreground the profoundly incoherent aspects of expositions. The blur-
ring of cultural uplift and popular sensation, the irreconcilability of the imperialist
agendas of colonial bureaucracies and the nationalistic aspirations of their indigenous
collaborators, and the complex problems of social management opened up by the
presence of “disorderly” native bodies in the colonial metropolis—all coalesced to
transform the spectacle of native subjects into a “highly contested cultural encounter”
(Mathur 2000: 494).
Recent revisionist histories suggest that colonial subjects had far more agency than is
usually allowed in the literature on colonial expositions (Henare 2005; McCarthy 2009).
McCarthy’s historical reconstruction of the staging of a model Maori village at the 1906
New Zealand International Exhibition underscores the potential for indigenous social
empowerment posed by such collaborative productions. Appropriating white settlers’
discourses of patrimony and salvage, the Maori transformed the ethnographic exhibit
into a living symbol of their cultural revitalization (McCarthy 2009: 137).
Indeed, one may find in McCarthy’s account of the Maori exhibit a heritage tourism
blueprint for developing nations. Within this script, the staging of indigenous tradi-
tions constructs a patrimony for the post-colonial state, generates cultural tools for the
memory and identity work necessary for cultural revitalization, and converts tourist
expenditures into much-needed social resources. But, to borrow Barbara Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett’s terms, it is one thing to use ethnographic objects to secure these ambitious
goals and quite another matter to use people as the medium of national representation
and touristic exchange. What happens when subaltern subjects “perform themselves”
at home for tourists, becoming “living signs of themselves”? (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
1998: 18).
Dean MacCannell’s influential work on ethnic tourism captures the reciprocal
exchange between self-performing “tourees” and the modern tourist seeking an authen-
tic experience through travel: hosts package their culture—and themselves—to appeal
to tourist fantasies, in effect creating a “staged authenticity” (MacCannell 1979). The
heritage industry critique, which attacks stage-managed authenticities for promoting
reactionary nostalgia and for stifling creativity, leaves little conceptual room for the role
that the disciplinary discourses of empire have played in the construction of heritage
(Smith 2006). This blind spot is ironic given the crucial role that these discourses played
in that spectacular harbinger of modern tourism—colonial expositions.
Post-colonial states using live ethnological displays to attract tourists inherit the clas-
sificatory and narrative techniques of the colonial exposition. They inherit as well the
internal contradictions that have historically destabilized the disciplinary agendas and
economic logics of the human exhibits of the past. In the particular case of the Marcos

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regime’s staging of Kasaysayan ng Lahi, the unruliness of the spectacle was grounded in
two critical developments: the emergence of indigeneity as a political force and the
increasing importance of tourism to the state’s economic agendas.

Kasaysayan ng Lahi and Heritage Tourism

Kasaysayan ng Lahi was occasioned by an international media event: the 1974 Miss
Universe Pageant in Manila. Preparations for the ceremony in fact coincided with a
massive effort to package Manila as a global city. To borrow Néstor García Canclini’s
terms, the Marcos regime anticipated two types of “symbolic yield”: it expected to build
legitimacy and consensus by appearing as the rightful articulators of the nation’s history
and cultural patrimony; and it hoped to project a “disinterested” image of the state’s
global economic ambitions via a discourse of uplift (Canclini 1995: 59).
The ceremony encapsulated the mutually informative dynamics of heritage produc-
tion and place making. In these conjoined productions, tourism, to paraphrase Keith
Hollinshead, is the medium that activates the “we” of national self-representation; it also
emerges as the performative space for the vocalization of “local distinctiveness” so crucial
to place signification and site production (Hollinshead 2005: 319, 301). But in featuring
the folkloric traditions, ethnic history and cultural celebrations of the nation’s “tribal
groups,” the ceremony belied the sub-national struggles that often accompany the tour-
istic production of places, pasts and peoples.
The Marcos regime displayed a keen interest in the nation’s indigenous groups—
which it referred to as “cultural minorities.” At the time of the Kasaysayan ng Lahi cer-
emony, there were 4.25 million cultural minorities represented by 68 ethno-linguistic
groups spread across the islands (Rocamora 1979a). These groups were the targets of an
aggressive assimilation campaign during the 1960s and 1970s. To facilitate this cam-
paign, Ferdinand Marcos created the Presidential Assistant on National Minorities
(PANAMIN) in 1968. The agency was charged with creating taxonomies of the nation’s
indigenous groups.
It bears emphasizing that the regime’s ethnographic endeavors transformed indige-
nous heritage into resources of power. Indigenous groups had used heritage claims to
demand ancestral lands and other social resources. The expert knowledge produced by
the agency created an indigenous certification system that was now being used to grant
or withhold legitimacy to such claims (Presidential Decree 1414, Section 6, June 9,
1978).
Meanwhile, indigenous traditions were being packaged as tourist attractions.
PANAMIN’s collections of indigenous artifacts were housed in the Museum of
Philippine Traditional Culture, located in a cultural park called Nayong Pilipino
(Philippine Village), which opened in 1973. The Museum of Philippine Traditional
Culture and its theme park were located minutes away from the Manila International
Airport. Directly facing the park was the 300-room Philippine Village Hotel. The
hotel, the theme park and the museum were harbingers of an emerging tourism com-
plex requiring massive public outlays.
For the Kasaysayan ng Lahi mass ceremony, the regime ordered the rush construction
of the Folk Arts Theater, an ultra-modern amphitheater that was built in just 77 days.
To borrow Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s terms, these edifices of culture and the indigenous
“content” displayed therein conveyed a dual message: they were state-of-the-art cultural
technologies that broadcasted an image of “powerful modern statehood”; but such

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symbols of modernity also made rhetorical appeals to the past (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett

1998: 65). In the case of the mass ceremony, this involved the projection of indigenous
peoples as symbols of a pre-modern, pre-colonial past untouched by globalization. Its live
human displays served to fix these communities in an ever-receding anterior time,
thereby transforming them into a living and eternal Filipino folklore.
A government-produced film by the same name lends coherence to the ephemeral
text of the July 7, 1974 event (Kasaysayan ng Lahi 1975). In the film, the ceremony
formally commences with the image of tribal figures playing native bugles. Seen only as
silhouetted figures standing atop the roof of the Folk Arts Building, the bugle players are
imaged as twilight figures from a distant past. They are turned out in loincloths and
feather headdresses, archaic figures that stand out against the modernist lines of the Folk
Arts Theater. Suddenly, the sonic rumble of fighter jets fills the soundtrack. We watch
these jets swoop down from the sky to perform precision drills for the audience. The
diptych of indigenous culture and military might fuses two notions of the authoritarian
state: it is a cultural state that secures social order and economic development via the
instrumentalization of indigenous heritage; but it is also a repressive state that needs
military muscle to guarantee the smooth extraction of value—both economic and socio-
cultural—from this heritage culture.
Within the next 60 minutes, the film unwinds the official history of the Philippine
nation. After an extended sequence displaying “authentic” tribal groups performing
native dances before the grandstand, we watch colorful floats simulating the vintas,
junks, galleons and steamers on which alien traders and colonizers first arrived on
Philippine shores. Ksaysayan ng Lahi orders these vignettes into an evolutionary narra-
tive rehearsing the Philippine struggle for independence against Spain; the nation’s
political growth under U.S. trusteeship, its political decay after formal independence in
1946; and finally, its “rebirth” following Marcos’ declaration of martial law in September
1972. At this climactic moment, we are given a military tableau, with officers of the
Armed Forces of the Philippines performing synchronized drills before the grandstand.
I want to flag these two images: the “untouched” indigenes with which the ceremony
begins and the military drill with which the ceremony ends. These two images encapsu-
late the two endpoints of the ceremony’s teleological narrative, which in fact re-enacted
a colonialist object lesson presented earlier, and to quite different ends, at the 1904 St.
Louis World’s Fair.

The St. Louis World’s Fair

Held just five years after the U.S. acquired the Philippines, the St. Louis World’s Fair
was “the nation’s first opportunity to display itself as a colonial power” (Gonzales 2009:
151). The very centerpiece of the St. Louis World’s Fair was the Philippine Reservation.
Spread over 47 acres of woodland in Forest Park, the reservation had 75,000 catalogued
exhibits, including 1,100 “representatives of the different peoples of the archipelago”
artfully organized into live human displays (Vergara 1993: 129).
The Igorot village was the most talked-about attraction in the Philippine Reservation.
Over 100 Igorot lived there in houses they themselves built from “wood and thatch that
had been shipped from the Philippines” (Afable 2004: 446). They gave daily demonstra-
tions of blacksmithing, weaving and metalworking, and performed dances set to gong
music. But what brought in the most gate receipts to the Philippine Reservation were
the Igorot dog feasts staged several times a week at lunchtime. Meanwhile, in close

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proximity to the Igorot Village stood the barracks of the Philippine Scouts and the
Constabulary. The 413 scouts and the 200 constabulary officers performed daily rifle and
calisthenics exhibitions for visitors. The following statement from Walter Stevens,
Secretary of the Exposition, specifies the intended meaning of the juxtaposed indige-
nous and martial spectacles: “The civilization and the barbarism of the Archipelago are
shown side by side . . . Contrasts are many and edifying in the Philippine Exposition”
(Vergara 1993: 142). The object lesson was in fact the structuring principle of the fair’s
opening ceremony.
The fair itself opened with a parade of 1,100 Filipinos performing the story of
America’s civilizing mission in the islands. At the head of the parade walked a team of
exposition officials, followed by Philippine Scouts, who were trailed by a cortege of
“savage” Negirtos, Moros and Igorots. This particular syntagma of parade subjects—
beginning with symbols of American authority followed closely by “assimilated”
Philippine Scouts, and ending with the racialized bodies of yet-to-be civilized Filipinos—
conveyed in one object lesson the colonial project in the Philippines (Kramer 1999: 91).
Kasaysayan ng Lahi reprised the 1904 parade, but in reverse: beginning with
“untouched” indigenes, it climaxed with the martial display of the authoritarian state.
This crucial reversal served to present the Marcos regime as the fulfillment of America’s
civilizing vision. Nevertheless, there is a crucial continuity between the two parades,
and this has to do with the important work of making indigenous groups legible. Both
parades mobilized what Deirdre McKay has described as the tribal slot: the simplified
framing of identity that emerges when “the apparatus of government” takes up the clas-
sifications produced by certain experts in order to “administer peoples previously outside
the state’s sphere of influence” (McKay 2005: 479). In the case of the 1904 parade, these
experts included “academics, missionaries and travelers,” who described indigenous
Filipinos via comparisons to North American Indians.
During the Spanish colonial era (1575–1898), indigenous groups who had resisted
colonization were referred to as tribus independientes (Yogaswara 2004: 144). When the
United States took over, the first American administrators simply applied the labels used
by the Spanish to designate specific “independientes.” For example, the Spanish referred
to the people of the Cordillera region in Northern Luzon as Igorot. In the local dialect,
“I” translates as “people of,” and “gorot” translates as “upland.”
Under the Americans, the tribal slot “Igorot” was buttressed by new racial taxonomies
that assumed empirical correspondences between geographical setting (the Cordillera),
human physiques (they were said to have “vermillion skin” and taut, muscular bodies)
and moral character (they were said to be “brave warriors”). American scientist and
colonialist Dean C. Worcester had photographed and written profusely about the Igorot
since 1898. He popularized the two most enduring images of the Igorot: the head-
hunting warrior and the bare-breasted woman (Gonzales 2009: 153). But of all of
Worcester’s photographs, the one that has commanded the most scrutiny is a sequence
of three images that was widely circulated by 1915, most famously in Frederick
Chamberlin’s The Philippine Problem 1898–1913. The first photograph depicts a bare-
chested and longhaired Igorot male of indeterminate age, sitting in profile; it is captioned
“1. Bontoc Igorot on entering the service, 1901.” The second photograph is of the same
man sitting in more or less the same position, but this time wearing a white jacket. The
caption reads “2. After a year’s service, 1902.” The last photograph shows a man wearing
the full regalia of the Philippine Constabulary, sitting more erect and with his hair
clipped short. The caption reads “3. After two years’ service, 1903.” Chamberlin’s

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captions invite us to read the sequence as a visual documentation of the transformation

of a Bontoc indigene from abject savagery to martial civilization. Indeed, the sequence
is titled “Educational Value of the Constabulary.” The sequence thus presents a clear
narrative of “imperial progress” (Kramer 2006: 320), which captures in miniature the
teleological narrative of the 1904 Philippine parade.
Kasaysayan ng Lahi clearly mimicked the visual technologies of the 1904 Philippine
Exposition. Various tribal Filipinos were presented according to the colonialist fantasy
of a well-ordered collection of separate, productive communities, all moving towards an
end state of “civilization.” The mass ceremony itself commemorated the creation of a
disciplinary cultural state in Marcos’ so-called New Society. But as Mark Rice reminds
us, the “preferred reading” of colonialist object lessons is secured by their public perfor-
mances: how these images are reproduced and circulated in certain formats (e.g. books,
articles, government reports, illustrated lectures, etc.) with accompanying texts which
specify how such representations should be read. And it is often the case that colonial
photographs “exist prior to, and outside of, their performances” (Rice 2010: 54).
In the case of Worcester’s Igorot sequence, the subject of the first photograph was Don
Francisco Muro, a Bontoc Igorot who led a delegation of Igorot to Manila. They came
to meet with Worcester and other members of the Philippine Commission to air their
grievances about political corruption in Bontoc Province. Muro had in fact traveled to
Spain as part of the 1887 Madrid Exposition; he spoke Spanish, Latin, and other Igorot
dialects, and had “vast knowledge of geography and commerce” (Rice 2010: 57).
Ironically, the last photograph in the sequence is of a man just released from Bilibid
prison. He had spent a year in jail—not two years in the Constabulary, as the photo-
graph’s captions would lead us to believe. It is unclear if the man in the last photograph
is Muro. That Muro had been to Spain; that he spoke Spanish; that he may have spent
time in prison—all these biographical elements disrupt the intended message of the
famous Igorot sequence. As Rice succinctly puts it: “Complexity interferes with propa-
ganda” (Rice 2010: 57).
The complexity that Rice compellingly reveals to be buried in the famous Igorot
sequence finds an analogue in the gap between rhetoric and reality in Kasaysayan ng
Lahi. Some of the most glaring fissures revolved around two indigenous communities
from the Cordillera region: the Bontoc and Kalinga. While the ceremony transformed
these tribes from “troublesome” warriors to native performers, the Marcos regime was
expropriating their ancestral domains in the name of national development.

Bontoc and Kalinga against Militarization

The Bontoc and Kalinga are among the eight Igorot tribes officially recognized as
“rooted” in the Cordillera region (they are joined by the Ifugao, the Kanakana-ey, the
Yapagao, the Ibaloi, the Tingguian and the Isnug) (Ting et al. 2008: 78). The construc-
tion of the Bontoc and Kalinga as “untouched” indigenes rests in large part on the
natural geographical barrier of the mountains of the Gran Cordillera Central (McKay
2005: 460). Here, the Bontoc and Kalinga cultivated the now world-famous Rice
Terraces, the spectacular terraced rice paddies climbing the steep mountain slopes of the
Gran Cordillera along the Chico River. Built by hand several hundred years ago, the
Rice Terraces constituted a complex and well-balanced eco-system that singularly dom-
inated the communal organization—indeed, the whole way of life—of the Bontoc and
Kalinga.

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At the time of the Kasaysayan ng Lahi ceremony, the Marcos regime had just initiated
a new development project, the so-called Chico River Basin Development Project,
which involved the construction of four dams. These were promoted as a means of cut-
ting down the nation’s dependence on oil imports. But the project required the flooding
of Bontoc and Kalinga lands—including the rice terraces.
From the start, the Bontoc and Kalinga actively resisted the Chico Dam project;
PANAMIN quickly moved to “pacify” these resistant tribes. In 1974, the agency began
herding them into “reservations,” a euphemism for the agency’s armed camps. By 1977,
the agency had forcibly relocated 2.6 million tribal Filipinos—or more than half of the
total population of tribal Filipinos—into 400 such reservations (Rocamora 1979b).
Especially for the Bontoc and Kalinga, whose unique relationship to the land was the
very linchpin of their heritage claims, the destruction of the Rice Terraces was
tantamount to the destruction of their cultural identities as indigenous peoples. For
generations, they struggled for recognition of their ancestral domains, and, alongside
this, recognition of their rights to administer these domains according to their tradi-
tions. The Marcos regime, on the other hand, wished to persuade these groups of the
“backwardness” of these traditions, particularly the Bontoc and Kalinga practice of
cooperative farming. In the words of Presidential Executive Secretary Alejandro
Melchor: “we owe it to [the Bontoc and Kalinga] to help liberate them from certain
aspects of their culture and tradition as they become anathema to their continued sur-
vival, progress and happiness” (Winnacker 1979: 24).
Ironically, a policy of cultural salvage allowed the regime to “preserve the more archaic
and ‘colorful’ aspects of their culture for tourists” (Rocamora 1979a: 3). In what can only
be described as a system of enforced primitivism, they were required to wear tribal cos-
tumes and to live in primitive huts in PANAMIN reservations (Rocamora 1979b: 18).
Throughout 1974, the Kalinga and Bontoc had tried without success to meet with
Marcos to protest the Chico Dam project. In 1975, 150 Bontoc and Kalinga leaders
made a historic pagta ti bodong (peace pact) outlining the conditions under which the
two tribes would oppose the project. Indeed, Bontoc–Kalinga resistance to the dams was
so strong that by July 1978 Marcos pulled PANAMIN out of the region. This was a bit-
ter victory for the tribes. The 60th Constabulary battalion took over from PANAMIN,
unleashing a reign of terror in the Chico river region.
Throughout the 1970s, the Marcos-controlled media suppressed information
concerning the Chico Dam project. By 1980, however, reports of the ongoing struggles
of the Bontoc and Kalinga against militarization began to appear even in the controlled
media. This new turn to indigenous advocacy in the media was the result of an emerging
alliance between oppositional journalists and the Bontoc and Kalinga. But what started
it all was the murder of Kalinga leader Macli-ing Dulag.
Dulag was a pangat (village chief) of Bugnay, Kalinga. He was employed as a road
worker for the Bureau of Public Highways, for which he earned PhP405, or roughly $52,
a month. On weekends, he farmed eight rice paddies with his wife and six children. In
1975, he was part of the delegation of Kalinga and Bontoc who initiated the peace pact
mentioned earlier. To further unite the Kalinga and Bontoc against the dam, he initiated
two other peace pacts in June 1978 and December 1979. The 1979 Bodong was particu-
larly significant. In that conference Dulag emerged as the “official spokesperson for the
entire opposition” (Villanueva 1985).
Dulag was painfully aware that PANAMIN’s certification system made it impossible
for his people to obtain titles to their own land: government prescriptions and

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restrictions—and the fact that the Bontoc and Kalinga were socially and politically
marginalized—made it so that his people were set up to fail. He challenged the martial
law state:

You ask if we own the land. And mock us. “Where is your title?” When we
query the meaning of your words, you answer with taunting arrogance. How can
you own that which will outlive you? Only the race owns the land because only
the race lives forever.
(Ting et al. 2008: 82)

On April 24, 1980, not long after issuing this statement, Dulag was brutally murdered by
the military in his own home. Reports of the murder appeared in two news publications,
WHO and Panorama, in June 1980. These reports triggered a series of military interroga-
tions of journalists. But Dulag’s story proved to be impossible to kill. Almost overnight,
the Kalinga leader became an icon of indigenous opposition against the Marcos regime.
Dulag’s death ultimately bolstered an emerging collective identity of indigenous peo-
ples in the Cordillera. A new coalition, the Cordillera People’s Alliance, has since
emerged to defend indigenous ancestral domains. The memory of Bontoc and Kalinga
activism against the Chico Dams is at the heart of this new Cordillera identity. No bet-
ter proof of this exists than the annual celebration of Cordillera Day on April 24. The
annual event commemorates Dulag’s death; this exercise of local collective remem-
brance must indeed be seen as a necessary corrective to the “nationalistic” narrative and
global economic ambitions of the Marcos regime’s 1974 mass ceremony.
As we have seen, Kasaysayan ng Lahi symbolically “tamed” the indigenous warriors of
the Cordillera by placing them in a tribal slot dictated by American understandings of
the Igorot Indian. We have seen, as well, that the ceremony’s nationalistic narrative was
far less stable than its public performance would lead us to believe. Buried underneath
its touristic production of national history and identity were the actual struggles of the
Bontoc and Kalinga against militarization.
Colonialist representations like Kasaysayan ng Lahi matter because, as McKay points
out, they “delimit the ways local people can become legible to government” (McKay
2005: 483). Kasaysayan ng Lahi’s visual representation of indigenous groups (as existing
in the past) and its performance of indigenous heritage (as a resource to be commercially
exploited)—all these have survived the Marcos regime. In her 2005 visit to the
Cordillera region, then president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was reportedly offended by
the “increasing number of modern structures marring the beauty” of the Rice Terraces,
which were officially recognized as a World Heritage Site in 1995. Arroyo was referring
to shanties built by Igorots who maintain the rice terraces. She ordered the relocation
of these “squatters” from the World Heritage Site (McKay 2005: 484). Nothing much
has changed since the Marcos era, and the ghosts of Macli-ing Dulag and Don Francisco
Muro cry for retribution.

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Chamberlin, F. C. (1913) The Philippine Problem 1898–1913. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co.
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University of California Press.
Kramer, P. (1999) “Making concessions: Race and empire revisited at the Philippine exposition,
St. Louis, 1901–5,” Radical History Review, vol. 73, pp. 75–114.
_________ (2006) The Blood of Government, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
MacCannell, D. (1979) “Staged authenticity,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 79, no. 3. pp. 589–603.
Mathur, S. (2000) “Living ethnological exhibits,” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 492–524.
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___________ (1979b) “The Political Uses of PANAMIN,” Southeast Asia Chronicle, 67, pp. 11–21.
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Smith, L. (2006) The uses of heritage. London and New York: Routledge.
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Further Reading
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (2004) “Intangible heritage as metacultural production,” Museum
International, vol. 56, nos. 1–2, pp. 52–64. (A useful analysis of the performative aspects of heritage
tourism.)
Miller, T. & Yúdice, G. (2002). Cultural policy. London: Sage. (An extended analysis of the cultural
policy implications of heritage culture.)
Russell, S. (1989) “The Grand Cañao,” Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 247–263. (A case study
of Igorot heritage tourism initiatives in Baguio City, Philippines.)

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“LIKE” IT OR NOT
The impact of Facebook and
Social Networking Sites on
Adolescents’ Responses to
Peer Influence
Drew P. Cingel and Ellen Wartella

Nearly one decade ago, “The facebook” debuted as a site designed to connect students
at Harvard University to one another. In time, Facebook opened the site to other
Boston-area universities, universities throughout the United States and the world, and,
eventually, all individual users older than age 13. During this time, the number of indi-
viduals on Facebook has grown exponentially; in 2004, Facebook reported one million
individual users on the site each month. In March 2013, Facebook reported 1.11 billion
users on the site each month, a 23% growth from the year before (Associated Press,
2013). During this period of immense growth, a large and continually growing body of
research has been done on individuals’ motivations for using the site (Raake & Bonds-
Raacke, 2008), their attitudes toward the site (Gangadharbatla, 2008), and the effects
of use on their social (Valkenburg, Peter, & Schouten, 2006) and mental wellbeing (see
Valkenburg & Peter, 2011; Wartella, Lauricella, Cingel, & Connell, in press), for exam-
ple. A large portion of this research has specifically examined adolescents’ and emerging
adults’ Facebook use, given their developmental needs and the sheer popularity of the
site among this age group (e.g., Valkenburg & Peter, 2008).
Indeed, there is little question that adolescents are the leaders of a growing trend to
use social media in high quantities and on a daily basis (e.g., Lenhart, 2009a, 2009b;
Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010). Recent studies examining adolescent
Internet use have found that more than 90% of all 12–17 year-olds use the Internet and
73% of adolescent Internet users spend time on social networking sites, an increase of
nearly 20% since 2006 (Lenhart et al., 2010). A far smaller percentage of adolescents
(24%) use Twitter. While some recent research has indicated a waning interest in
Facebook among adolescents (see Bercovici, 2013), other research has indicated that,
while adolescents are creating profiles on other social networking sites, they are main-
taining their Facebook profiles as well (Madden et al., 2013). Additionally, research by
Beasley and Conway (2011) found that a majority (59%) of adolescents aged 8 to 17
SO CIAL NETWO RKING SITES AND ADOLESCENTS’ RESPONSES TO PEER INFLUENCE

check their Facebook profile page more than twice daily, compared to just 20% of adult
users over the age of 18. It is important to note that Facebook and other social network-
ing sites are international in scope and are popular among adolescents throughout the
world (boyd and Ellison, 2007; Livingstone, 2008; Valkenburg & Peter, 2008).
Additionally, social networking sites, led by Facebook, have clearly become an impor-
tant part of adolescents’ lives and have changed the way they communicate with their
friends and acquaintances (Whitlock, Powers, & Eckenrode, 2006). Given the ease in
connection among adolescents and their friends on social networking sites, this last
consideration has garnered more attention recently, as researchers have begun to con-
sider the role of online peer influence on adolescent behaviors. Therefore, in the present
chapter, we will consider the importance of peers to adolescents, the presence of peer
influence on Facebook, the effects of such influence across three domains of adolescent
behavior, and offer directions for future research on this important topic.

Research on Peer Influence

Research in Psychology and Communication, among other disciplines, has long consid-
ered the role of social influence on individuals’ behaviors (e.g., Burnkrant & Cousineau,
1975; Spears & Lea, 1992). Considering the importance of peer relationships among
youth (Sullivan, 1953), a large body of this research has considered the effect of peer
influence on adolescent behaviors. Prior to the advent of the Internet, and specifically
social networking sites, this research generally occurred in offline contexts, examining
the effect of peer influence on adolescent identity construction (e.g., Meeus & Dekovic,
1995), eating behaviors (Story, Neumark-Sztainer, & French, 2002), and engagement
in risky behaviors (Mounts & Steinberg, 1995), among many others, for example. Due
to the growth in reach of the Internet, and adolescents’ heavy adoption of social net-
working sites, research has increasingly turned to examining the influence of peers on
adolescent outcomes in online spaces. This is not particularly surprising when
considering the popularity of social networking sites among adolescents.
While research on offline peer influence on adolescents has occurred for decades (e.g.,
Biddle, Bank, & Marlin, 1980), given the relative newness of the Internet, far less
research has examined online peer influence. Therefore, the present chapter will focus
on three outcomes of peer influence among adolescents: the role of peer influence on
identity development, engagement in risk-taking behaviors, and responses to advertising.
Prior to examining the literature on these outcomes, however, it is important to first
consider the importance of peer relationships and interpersonal communication among
adolescents.

Adolescents, Peer Relations, and Interpersonal

Communication
For decades, the extant literature has noted the great importance of both the creation
and maintenance of interpersonal peer relationships on the health and wellbeing of
adolescents (e.g., Greenberg, Siegel, & Leitch, 1983; Raja, McGee, & Stanton, 1992;
Sullivan, 1953). For example, both adolescents (Goodnow & Burns, 1988; Youniss &
Smollar, 1985) and researchers (Hartup, 1992) agree that close friendships are important
to adolescents’ normative development. More specifically, Sullivan (1953) notes the
importance of perceived intimacy in adolescents’ relationships with peers and the

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methods by which adolescents seek to create interpersonal intimacy. One such method
is through interpersonal communication, which in a peer-group setting can be quite
persuasive to the adolescent as they attempt to build or remain secure and supportive in
a group membership (Erikson, 1968).
Interpersonal communication has a number of functions (Rubin, Perse, & Barbato,
1988). Every day, humans use interpersonal communication to shape their self-concept,
to share information about themselves and others, and to express ideas. It is important
to note that while these three facets of interpersonal communication can be applied to
all age groups, they are perhaps most important during adolescence. In early to middle
adolescence, the adolescent separates their identity from that of their parents and cre-
ates their own self-concept (separation-individuation; Lapsley, FitzGerald, Rice, &
Jackson, 1989). Next, they move through the stages of adolescent egocentrism to a more
advanced and adult-like understanding of their thoughts and the thoughts of others
(Piaget, 1952), and regulate their behavior by basing it on the perceived behaviors of
like-others (Elkind, 1967). During middle to late adolescence, adolescents simultane-
ously work to create a cohesive identity while building intimate relationships with
others (Erikson, 1968). Thus, peer relations play an important role across adolescent
development. The question remains, however: how do adolescents work toward building
peer relations?
Here, research indicates that interpersonal communication is important in building
and maintaining friendships and peer-group relationships, especially during normal
developmental trajectories of adolescence. It is also clear that this can occur in both
offline and online contexts. First, research has shown that adolescents use social media
to share and learn information about themselves and others, a key component of build-
ing relationships. On Facebook, for example, adolescents can post status updates about
what they are doing or plan to do, post pictures, write information or ask questions on
friends’ walls, or provide information about their self on their own profile page.
Importantly, they can “like” company pages, allowing them to present information about
themselves and their preferences for certain companies to their friends. To learn infor-
mation about and reduce uncertainty toward others, they can read information from
others’ profile pages, chat with them, or send them a direct message, among other things.
Research by Lenhart and colleagues (2010) clearly shows that adolescents engage in all
of these behaviors, and often at high rates. Additionally, through online self-disclosure
and other markers (such as number of likes, for example), reputations and trust can be
built among individuals, another key component of friendships (Henderson & Gilding,
2004). Finally, research has indicated that online communication can be used to exper-
iment with one’s self-concept, which is subsequently used in friendship creation (e.g.,
Valkenburg & Peter, 2008). Importantly, while the previously cited research deals with
online communications, other studies have found support for the role of interpersonal
communication in offline friendship building as well. For example, verbal interpersonal
communication with others has been found to shape children’s self-concept and support
and build their friendships (e.g., Kostelnik, 1993).
Finally, research indicates that interpersonal communication, both online and off,
allows adolescents to express ideas. Research has shown that in offline contexts the
expression of ideas can help to build relationships, as it puts individuals in contact with
similar others in terms of preferences and beliefs (see Rawlins, 1992). In terms of online
contexts, Pempek, Yermolayeva, and Calvert (2009) found that college students use
social networking sites to express personal ideas about topics such as religion and

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politics. Although this study was completed with an older sample, it can be assumed
that adolescents would take advantage of these tools on Facebook as well, as they
explore their own identity and how best to express it to the world. The act of “liking”
certain company pages and product pages could also be used by adolescents to give
others an impression of the ideas and beliefs that they value. Overall, then, research
clearly indicates that interpersonal communication serves an important role in adoles-
cents’ lives, as it allows them to build and maintain relationships with others. Therefore,
we will consider and compare the outcomes of peer influence on adolescent identity
development, buying behavior, and engagement in risky behavior in both online and
offline contexts.

Peer Influence on Adolescent Identity Development

As noted by Erikson (1968), during adolescence, individuals search for a cohesive,
relatively stable identity. Until this is reached, however, adolescents engage in identity
experimentation (Harter, 1999); they act out various identities and ways of thinking
about the self, before achieving one unified self (Marcia, 1993). Decades of research has
consistently indicated that peer influence plays an important role in adolescent identity
development, and occurs in both positive and negative directions (Steinberg & Morris,
2001). Similar to offline peer influence, research has begun to indicate that online peer
influence, specifically through social networking sites, can play an important role in
adolescents’ identity experimentation and development (see, for example, Valkenburg &
Peter, 2008). These authors argue that the Internet, and social networking sites in par-
ticular, allow adolescents to reach a much wider number and variety of people than ever
before. This allows, then, for increased opportunities for identity experimentation and
self-discovery. More specifically, Burke, Marlow, and Lento (2009) found that users of all
ages added more content to their pages if they perceived that their friends posted a large
amount of content on their pages, suggesting the importance of perceived norms and
indirect peer influence on Facebook posting behaviors. Additionally, research has indi-
cated that social networking profiles provide a great opportunity for online impression
formation (Walther, van der Heide, Kim, Westerman, & Tong, 2008). These authors
found that favorable and unfavorable statements about the profile owner were related to
his or her perceived attractiveness among other Facebook users. Similarly, Antheunis and
Schouten (2011) found that adolescent Facebook users were judged as being more attrac-
tive if they had attractive Facebook friends, and if their wall posts were generally positive
in nature. These findings regarding impression formation are important, given that other
research has found that users will interpret the profiles of highly regarded others, seeking
to understand or craft their own self in ways that fit with the normative beliefs of their
Facebook community, and, thus, imprint a favorable impression of themselves onto oth-
ers (McLaughlin & Vitak, 2012). Taken together, this literature would seem to indicate
that users, in particular adolescents, select and interact with media based on who they
are, who they would like to be, and, perhaps most importantly, who they think they
should be (Moreno, 2010). To this conclusion, Cingel, Wartella, and Krcmar (in press)
found that social networking site use was related to heightened comparisons between the
self and others, and these comparisons were related to increased customization of one’s
profile. It was not clear, however, if these customizations were actually identity experi-
ments, although research by Valkenburg and Peter (2008) found that adolescents engage
in identity experimentation quite readily in online settings.

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In a recent article on adolescent use of social networking sites, Moreno (2010) notes
key attributes of Facebook, such as the perceived accuracy of posted information among
Facebook users, which causes Facebook to act as what she calls a media super-peer, a
term used earlier by Steele and Brown (1995). This media super-peer is seen as a con-
struction of all of the normative beliefs of users within an online social networking
community and has been shown to influence the behaviors of others on these sites
(Moreno, 2010). For example, using focus groups of 11 to 18 year-olds, Moreno, Briner,
Williams, Walker, and Christakis (2009) found that adolescents interpret displays of
alcohol use or attitudes toward alcohol use posted on social networking sites as the real
thoughts and behaviors of others. Additionally, it has been argued that Facebook, as a
form of media, may be particularly influential among adolescents due to its combination
of interpersonal and mass communication (Fogg, 2008). Therefore, it would seem that
perceived social norms may play an important role here, such that adolescents may
customize their Facebook profile to reflect the values of those in their circle of friends
in an effort to fit in and perhaps initiate relationships with others. In fact, qualitative
research complied by Moreno (2010) suggests that adolescents perceive alcohol-related
pictures posted on others’ profiles as an effort to appear “cool.” It stands to reason then,
and was argued by Moreno et al. (2009), that these representations may cause users to
alter their beliefs, such that their beliefs come to match the normative beliefs of the
online community. In short, adolescents adapt their profiles, read those of their friends,
engage in social comparison, and then further adapt their profiles to fit in with the
norms of the community. In all, research clearly indicates that adolescents are influ-
enced by the information posted on the profiles of those in their friend networks,
especially those from their peer groups, which has important implications for their iden-
tity and self-concept (Valkenburg & Peter, 2008).

Peer Influence on Adolescents’ Engagement

in Risky Behavior
Given the potential for impacts of peer influence on adolescents’ engagement in risky
behaviors, and the possible negative effects thereof, a large body of research has exam-
ined how peers influence adolescent underage drinking and smoking behaviors. Finally,
research has examined the impact of online social influence on adolescents’ engagement
in risky behaviors. As noted, above, adolescents perceive displays of alcohol consump-
tion on social networking sites as real thoughts and behaviors, and may be persuaded to
engage in such behaviors themselves (Moreno et al., 2009). Additionally, Litt and Stock
(2011), after showing adolescents social networking site profiles of older teens drinking
alcohol, found significantly higher levels of adolescent intentions to use alcohol, more
positive attitudes toward underage drinking, and less perceived vulnerability when com-
pared to adolescents who viewed profiles that did not feature alcohol consumption.
These authors argue that when adolescents perceive that drinking is normative among
their online friend group, they are at risk for the types of cognitions that are associated
with underage drinking behaviors (Litt & Stock, 2011). It is important to note, how-
ever, that these authors did not test the impact of overt peer influence on adolescents’
drinking behaviors or attitudes toward drinking, focusing instead on indirect peer influ-
ence through perceived norms. They also do not address the likelihood of an adolescent
seeing alcohol use on social networking sites. A content analysis conducted by Moreno,
Briner, Williams, Brockman, Walker, and Christakis (2010) on social networking site

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profiles found that over half of all sampled adolescent profiles featured overt alcohol
consumption, heightening the possibility of an adolescent viewing such information on
a social networking sites. Importantly, the most common motivation found for alcohol
consumption was peer pressure, providing support for the notion of online peer influ-
ence and problem behaviors among adolescents.
Finally, Mikami, Szwedo, Allen, Evans, and Hare (2010), in a longitudinal design,
found that the more well-adjusted adolescents in their sample at ages 13–14 reported
more social networking site use, higher quality interactions between themselves and
online friends, and less problem behavior at ages 20–22. Conversely, less well-adjusted
adolescents, while reporting less overall social networking site use, did report less posi-
tive online relationships and more problem online behaviors. Taken together, then, this
research indicates that, at least among less well-adjusted adolescents, social networking
site use may be related to exposure to problematic friends and subsequent problem
behaviors, including smoking and underage drinking, stemming from such exposure.

Peer Influence on Adolescents’ Responses to

Advertising and Buying Behaviors
Originally, anecdotal evidence from retailers indicated a general worry or disdain for packs
of adolescent shoppers (see Andreoli, 1996), perhaps brought about by the characteriza-
tion of this age group in the popular press as “mall rats.” As noted above, far less work has
examined the role of peer influence on adolescents’ responses to online advertising than
adolescent identity development, for example. This research, however, still indicates a
possibility for peer influence to effect adolescent buying behaviors and attitudes toward
products. Although a large body of this research solely examines children’s and adoles-
cents’ cognitive and affective responses to “advergames,” which are not necessarily linked
to peer influence (e.g., van Reijmersdal, Rozendaal, & Buijzen, 2012), research has just
begun to grow in this area. Indeed, media literacy researchers have noted that advertisers
have tapped into social networking sites as a means of reaching adolescents. For example,
Montgomery and Chester (2009) write that the advertising industry “is purposefully
exploiting the special relationship that teenagers have with new media, with online mar-
keting campaigns that create unprecedented intimacies between adolescents and the
brands and products that now literally surround them” (Montgomery & Chester, 2009,
p. 18). One of the industry’s reasons for doing so, they write, is due to the instantaneous
and near-constant contact with peers in online environments, which can be used for
additional marketing pressure on adolescents. Clearly, this is an important area for future
research, considering concerns about the obesity epidemic in the United States (see Wang
& Beydoun, 2007), and Facebook’s recent push to open the site to children younger than
age 13 (D’Arcy, 2012). Recent research has clearly demonstrated that children do not
share the same advertising competencies as adults, and do not necessarily understand the
persuasive intent of advertisements until adolescence (Rozendaal, Buijzen, & Valkenburg,
2010); thus, research should consider adolescents’ and younger children’s attitudes and
purchase intentions following peer influence in online environments.

Conclusion and Directions for Future Research

Clearly, Facebook and other social networking sites play an important role within the
current milieu of popular culture. As demonstrated here, however, such sites are perhaps

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more important to adolescents and young adults, considering their stages of cognitive
and social development. As social networking sites allow for the creation and mainte-
nance of intimate relationships, given the importance of intimacy between adolescents
and their peers, such sites have been incorporated into adolescents’ daily lives at high
rates. With this growth in use has come an increased interest from researchers on the
effects of this heightened use. Indeed, a large amount of this research has examined the
effects of peer influence, found on social networking sites, on adolescent behaviors. In
the current chapter, we have highlighted three areas of this research: effects on adoles-
cent identity development, engagement in risk-taking behaviors, and responses to
online advertising. While current research implicates the role of online peer influence
on adolescent behavior, future research should examine the processes by which peers
can influence adolescents’ responses to advertising and purchase intentions online, with
a specific focus on responses to both healthy and unhealthy food products. As noted by
Montgomery and Chester (2009), social networking sites allow for a blend of adoles-
cents, friends, foods, and other commercial products, which may have important
implications for subsequent adolescent buying behaviors. Additionally, this body of
research on the effects of social networking site use on adolescents must begin to exam-
ine younger adolescents and children, as Facebook works to open the site to users
younger than age 13. Currently, reports indicate that 7.5 million children and adoles-
cents younger than age 13 have Facebook profile pages (D’Arcy, 2012); thus, a
consideration of the effects of online peer influence and social networking site use on
this age group is warranted. As this body of literature grows, researchers will gain a bet-
ter understanding of the processes by which online peer influence work to change
adolescent behavior, the affordances offered by social networking sites which drive these
effects, and the differential impacts of these effects across different age groups of chil-
dren, adolescents, and young adults.

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 39
GALLIPOLI, TOURISM
AND AUSTRALIAN
NATIONALISM
Jim McKay and Brad West

In 1915, the ‘Anzacs’ – an acronym for the all-volunteer Australian and New Zealand
Army Corps – withdrew from the Gallipoli peninsula after nearly eight months of grue-
some fighting against the victorious Ottoman Turks. At the beginning of the centennial
of the ‘Great War’, this chapter analyses why this event continues to be such a potent
myth (Barthes 1973) in Australian popular culture, and particularly how it resonates
with younger generations through transnational memorialisation and tourism.

Defeat and Memory: The Case of Anzac

Most countries base their nationhood on a revolution, civil war or peaceful transition
to independence that occurred on home soil. Australia and New Zealand are unusual in
having their foundation myths shaped significantly by a bloody defeat in Turkey after
becoming independent nations. This curious situation began at the Battle of Gallipoli
during WWI. By the end of 1914, the British War Cabinet was frustrated by both a
stalemate on the Western Front and a blockade of the Dardanelles Strait by the Turks,
which denied Russia its crucial route to and from the Black Sea. After joint Anglo–
French naval bombardments in February and March 1915 failed to open the Dardanelles,
the Cabinet formed the British–French Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) for
an amphibious attack. The MEF consisted mainly of British and French units and the
Anzacs. Just before dawn on 25 April, the Anzacs invaded the Aegean coast of the for-
midable Gallipoli Peninsula on the European side of the Dardanelles. Shortly afterwards,
British troops landed on five beaches at the southern tip, while the French led an attack
on the Asian shore across the Strait. Amongst military scholars this campaign is known
as one of the most incompetent, costly and futile operations in history (Prior 2009). It
was a debacle from the outset: the MEF failed to acquire its key objectives on the first
day; the Turks pinned down the invaders in small pockets for almost the entire cam-
paign; and the conflict resulted in high casualty rates, with an estimated 392,000 killed
or wounded on both sides (Department of Veterans’ Affairs 2010). The most successful
MEF manoeuvre was evacuating its troops with only a few casualties between December
1915 and January 1916.
 GA LLI PO LI , TO U RI SM A N D AU S T R A L I A N N AT I O N A L I S M

It seems difficult at first to imagine how such a tragedy could be transformed into a
powerful foundation myth. However, social definitions of failure, sacrifice and redemp-
tion are determined not just by the outcomes of military campaigns but also by myriad
narratives that surround wars (Macleod 2008). In newly independent Australia (1901)
and New Zealand (1907), the defeat became a core part of national identity by focusing
on inept British political and military leadership. In this selective account the Anzacs
were valorized for their ‘blood sacrifice’ that ended colonial inferiority and signified both
nations had come of age on the world stage (Macleod 2004a). The campaign was prin-
cipally commemorated through official Anzac Day public holidays that were established
in Australia and New Zealand on 25 April 1916. By 1928 in Australia they were desig-
nated as the official, state military day of commemoration and took on their current
character of dawn vigils followed by veterans’ marches and reunions. Services were held
at various sites that emanated from the cult of memorialization following WWI. These
ranged from grand Shrines of Remembrance in capital cities to cenotaphs in small
country towns and villages throughout the nation. These sites acted both as official
monuments to war and surrogates for individual graves, as few relatives of the dead could
afford to visit battlefield cemeteries on the other side of the world (Inglis 2008). Inglis
(1987: 36) estimated that over 2,000 memorials were built in Australia following WWI,
each representing about 30 of the 60,000 soldiers who died in the conflict.
Like the collective memories of war in other Western nations during most of the 20th
century, Australian versions attained relevance through various, entwined modernist
tropes: an exaltation of white, masculine nationhood; Christian motifs of sacrifice and
redemption; imperial notions of manly travel and adventure; archetypes about frontier
men, Social Darwinism; eugenics; Romanticism; sport; sexism; and racism (Ball 2004;
Crotty 2001; Phillips 1996). In Australia and other settler societies, such narratives also
manifested a ‘collective amnesia’ (Walsh 2001) about the violent dispossession, decima-
tion and dehumanization of indigenous people (Howe 2012; Moreton-Robinson 2010;
Reynolds 2013). The Gallipoli campaign not so much prompted such meanings but
provided a vehicle for advancing them. White (1981: 128) summarized the conjunctural
nature of events in stating that, ‘[W]ith the landing at Gallipoli . . . the ready-made
myth was given a name, a time and a place’.
These modernist narratives were always contested, especially during the 1960s, by
which time interest in Anzac was at a nadir and its standing seemed to be, as one war
historian put it, ‘in a state of terminal decline’ (Beaumont 2005: 144). More recently,
pacifists and feminists have stridently criticized the links among Anzac, war, nationalism
and masculinity (McKay 2013a). However national myths are highly resilient to criti-
cism and even declining and dormant ones can be revived (Kelsey 2012). This occurred
in both Australia and New Zealand in the late 20th century with unexpected events
like increased media attention to Anzac and growing participation in public commemo-
rations. On the eve of Anzac Day in 1965 – the 50th anniversary of the Gallipoli land-
ings – The Sydney Morning Herald devoted a full-page to the question ‘Can Anzac Day
Survive?’ (Broadbent 2011). On Anzac Day 2013 there were record crowds for ceremo-
nies at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, the nation’s capital, which has a
population of 370,000, with attendances of 35,000 for the Dawn Service and another
17,000 for the National Ceremony (Australian War Memorial 2014). On Anzac Day
1961, Australian author Betty Roland, who was staying on the nearby Greek island of
Lesbos, was the only foreigner to visit the Gallipoli battlefields (Fewster, Basarin, &
Basarin 2003: 10) and 20 years later only a handful of Australians had made their way

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there. In 1995, 11,200 Australians and New Zealanders visited the battlefields (Bademli
1997: 37) with the records of one local tour guide indicating approximately 70% were
Australians (Efe 1998). By 1996 there were an estimated 4,000 visitors on Anzac Day
alone (Bademli 1997: 38); and around 30,000 Australians and New Zealanders attended
the 90th anniversary of the battle in 2005 (Inglis 2005).
How do we account for this Anzac resurgence in an era when many scholars point to
a general ‘waning’ of national narratives? For many Australian commentators, the revi-
talization of Anzac is to be explained by a combination of political opportunism and
generational shifts. Anzac, for example, has been a core aspect of the so-called ‘history
wars’ (Clark 2013). These were particularly acrimonious under a succession of federal
governments led by arch-conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard (1996–
2007), who was described by one of his critics as the ‘chief story-teller in Anzac mythol-
ogy’ (McKenna 2003: 196). During Howard’s regime, conservatives promoted an
idealized, sentimental and Anglophilic form of nationalism that was intended to reso-
nate with ‘ordinary’ Australians. They also attacked critics of this patriotic scheme for
being ‘politically correct’, ‘un-Australian’, and ‘elites’ who espoused a ‘black armband’
view of history. Similar tensions have resurfaced recently with prominent members of
the new conservative federal government claiming the national school curriculum has
a ‘partisan bias’ and does not adequately ‘celebrate’ Australian history and give signifi-
cant recognition to ‘important events in Australia’s history . . . such as Anzac Day’
(Hurst 2014).
In some ways, these conflicts are examples of the ‘culture wars’ which Hunter argues
constitute a meta-divide in Western societies between political orthodoxy and progres-
sivism. Those in the former camp believe in an external and clearly defined notion of
truth and authority that ‘is predicated upon the achievements and traditions of the past
as the foundation and guide to the challenges of the present’ (Hunter 2006: 14). In
contrast, progressives are ‘defined by the spirit of the modern age, a spirit of rationalism
and subjectivism’ (Hunter 1991: 44). This scenario is consistent with debates over the
motivations of young Australians who visit Anzac battlefields. For example, while
attending Anzac Day services at Gallipoli in 2000, Howard suggested the desire of young
Australians to be on there on Anzac Day indicated that today’s youth were not as cyni-
cal about history as those 30 years ago (The Courier Mail 2000: 6). His parliamentary
colleague, David Smith, even made a case for retaining the Union Jack on the Australian
flag, citing that ‘[O]ur young people visiting Australian war graves overseas, in search of
Australia’s story and national identity in ever-increasing numbers, carry the flag on their
backpacks’ (Harvey 1998: 6). However, social commentator Anne Coombs (2000: 17)
drew a different conclusion in asking disparagingly, ‘[W]hat is going on in a country
when thousands of its young people make a pilgrimage to a remote foreign shore, a place
of human slaughter . . . expressing awe when they should be expressing outrage?’
However, the resurgence of Anzac transcends binary politics. At the level of party
politics, it is one of the few national motifs that receives multilateral support. Anzac
myths have also been appropriated by all Prime Ministers for the past three decades.
Howard’s conservative manoeuvres were preceded by populist renderings of Anzac by
Australian Labor Party (ALP) Prime Ministers Bob Hawke (1983–1991) and Paul
Keating (1991–1996), and their party successors, Kevin Rudd (2007–2010, 2013) and
Julia Gillard (2010–2013) (Clark 2002; Kelly 2011; Manne 2009). Such attempts exem-
plify Stuart Hall’s observation that, ‘there is no guarantee that the popular is either
radical or conservative’ (Hay, Hall, & Grossberg 2013: 24). Moreover, explaining the

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popularity of Anzac by the machinations of politicians simplifies the exceedingly

complex and conjunctural nature of both social memory and commemorative practices,
which are reproduced, contested and mediated by myriad interest groups outside the
state sphere: veterans’ associations; religious organizations, artists, academic and popular
writers, humanitarian clubs, the mass media, museums and tourists (Keren & Herwig
2009; Rechniewski 2010; Walsh 2001). As Beaumont (2009: 300) puts it, ‘the construc-
tion of memory is a dynamic interactive process between individuals, organisational
stakeholders and the state.’ This fluid process is even more intricate and unpredictable
at places like Gallipoli, where popular memory and commemoration are also shaped
powerfully by transnational exchanges (McQuilton 2004; Ziino 2006a).
We can also point to empirical evidence showing that Anzac has widespread appeal
in everyday Australian life. In two studies Phillips and Smith reported that Australians
consistently approved of the Anzac tradition (Phillips & Smith 2000; Smith & Phillips
2001) and a national survey found that Anzacs were associated with national identity
by 90% of respondents. Furthermore, there was relatively little variation according to
age, gender and ethnicity in the way Australians viewed Anzacs (Donoghue & Tranter
2013). Our own research has shown that the ongoing appeal of the Anzac legend, par-
ticularly for young Australians, is not based on a reversion to orthodox narratives but
on emerging, progressive practices (McKay 2013a, 2013b; West 2008a, 2008b). By
expanding on this work, for the rest of the chapter we will focus on how global mobility,
tourism practices and memorialization on the Gallipoli battlefields has led to more
enlightened, inclusive and empathetic narratives about the campaign.

Gallipoli: From Dormant Myth to Tourist Hotspot

International travel has been an important force in reimagining our social worlds
(Kaplan 2000). Clifford (1989: 177), for example, has argued travel is ‘a figure for dif-
ferent modes of dwelling and displacement, for trajectories and identities, for storytelling
and theorizing in a postcolonial world of global contacts.’ In the case of Gallipoli, such
processes have facilitated the development of identities and practices consistent with a
more progressive view of nationalism. After WWI, travel had little influence on the
Anzac legend. Visiting the Gallipoli battlefields was too costly and remote for most
Australians and until the 1980s access was highly restricted by Turkey’s designation of
the area as a military zone. Consequently, Australian visitation consisted of small groups
of grieving pilgrims, some one-off tours by veterans following WWII and official staff
inspections from the Imperial, now Commonwealth, War Graves Commission (Davis
2009; Ziino 2012). International travel, of course, has been closely tied to WWI mythol-
ogies in other ways. As Fussell (1975) showed, the Allies’ mobilisation for war and
subsequent narration of battles were heavily infused with romantic notions of travel and
adventure. Such sentiments were particularly strong in Australia, with the war offering
the opportunity for working-class men to see parts of the world with which European
Australians were culturally connected but geographically distant. The journey itself was
also appealing, involving modern forms of transportation, such as the steamships and
automobiles that at the time were infused with Utopian notions of progress. Studies
have also found this travel discourse was prevalent in how Australian soldiers under-
stood their time on the frontline (Thomson 2013; White 1991; Ziino 2006b). Over the
past three decades, Australian travellers have reshaped the remembrance of WWI. We
highlight two interrelated aspects of this process at Gallipoli: the emergence of a new

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Australian nationalism in the 1980s and the development of Turkey as a mass tourism
market in the 1990s.
The 1980s saw a significant reengagement with Anzac, as political leaders and the
mass media increasingly put a local spin on how Australia was being reconfigured by
global flows (Fiske, Hodge, & Turner 1988; McKay 1991; Turner 1994). Some examples
were the promotion of World Series Cricket with its catchy ‘Come On Aussie, Come
On’ advertising campaign, international tourism promotions of Australia featuring
comedian Paul Hogan, celebrations associated with the 1988 bicentennial and an array
of Australian films and TV programs that flowed from increased federal government
funding of the arts. The latter ventures included the miniseries The Anzacs (1985) and
the feature film The Lighthorsemen (1987), both of which directly connected with
Australia’s participation in WWI. However, the most significant popular representation
was Australian director Peter Weir’s multiple award-winning film Gallipoli (1981).
Weir, who was inspired by visiting the battlefields, used artistic licence to dramatize
a series of suicidal charges by the Australian Light Horse that both denigrated British
military leadership and glorified archetypal Anzac traits, although the film is also open
to an antiwar reading (Broadbent 2011; Leonard 2009; Ward 2004). The film was highly
popular at the time and has had an enduring influence, with one film historian contend-
ing that it ‘probably had more impact on contemporary attitudes toward Anzac than any
other single source’ (Reynaud 2007: 185). Nearly 25 years after its release, an image from
Gallipoli with leads Mark Lee and Mel Gibson in the trenches was used on the front
cover of British historian Jenny Macleod’s (2004b) important book on the campaign.
These representations provided a way of relating to the collective memory of the
campaign independent of participation in the traditional modern and militaristic form
of commemoration on Anzac Day. But the enduring significance of elements of the new
nationalism of the 1980s does not alone explain the cultural relevance of Anzac today.
While popular interest in the Anzac legend rose significantly in the 1980s, this had lit-
tle effect on halting declining participation in Anzac Day parades that were organized
by the politically conservative Returned Servicemen’s League (RSL). For example,
Davison (2003: 79) estimated the number of spectators at Anzac Day parades across
Australia in 1984 was a mere 50,000, and national figures remained relatively low until
1995, when they reached about 200,000. To explain such developments, we argue that
the principal enduring significance of popular re-engagements with Australian history
in the 1980s is how they prompted new travel rituals that both provided an alternative
form of engagement with Gallipoli, and, in turn, also resulted in a cultural shift in com-
memorations in Australia.
The key turning point in these developments was the ‘media-driven frenzy’ of the
75th anniversary commemorations on the Gallipoli battlefields (Bastiaan 2010: 9). This
was initiated by populist ALP Prime Minister Bob Hawke, who arranged to be accom-
panied by 58 WWI veterans, 46 of whom served at Gallipoli. In broad terms, this ‘return
to Gallipoli’ was the product of the disjunction between the Hawke government want-
ing to connect with the new nationalism of the 1980s, while dissociating itself from the
RSL and its anachronistic stewardship of the Anzac Day tradition. This event was
organized similarly to Anzac Day ceremonies in Australia, but differed in two important
ways.
First, a foreign context for Anzac commemorations demanded a new type of diplomatic
engagement with Turkey. As was evident in Weir’s Gallipoli, Turks had not previously
featured significantly in Australia’s collective memory of the campaign, with the focus

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being on the Anzacs’ relationship with British high commanders (Fewster, Basarin, &
Basarin 2003). But engaging with Turkey involved a dialogical remembering of the war
that significantly altered collective memories in both nations over the next decade
(West 2008a). This was evident in Hawke’s praise for Atatürk, the Turkish commander
during the campaign. Atatürk’s brave and skilful leadership at Gallipoli and critical roles
in both winning the War of Independence (1919–1922) and founding the autonomous
Turkish republic (1923) made him a national hero. Consequently, he was given the
name ‘Atatürk’ (‘Father of the Turks’) and is the most revered person in Turkey nearly
75 years after his death, with images of him omnipresent. Hawke also stressed that
Gallipoli ‘was not a conflict which engendered lasting hatred’ but ‘had imbued the
adversaries with a deep and abiding respect for the courage, prowess, endurance and
self-sacrifice of the other’ (Fewster, Basarin, & Basarin 2003: 11).
This recognition of the hitherto Other by Australians would also become memorial-
ized on the battlefields. The efforts of the War Graves Commission between the wars
had resulted in a significant memorial presence on the battlefields, with cemeteries and
cenotaphs scattered over the peninsula marking battle sites. However, in the lead up to
the 75th anniversary, various new memorials were established, giving the site a mixture
of neo-classical forms of remembrance and those that engaged with contemporary paci-
fist logics (West 2008b). For example, the Kanhsirt memorial is a bronze statue of a
Turkish soldier carrying a wounded Allied captain, with the memorial’s plaque telling
the story of how he was rescued by a Turkish soldier who carried him to the safety of an
Allied trench (Taylor & Cupper 2000: 179). This was part of a wider reciprocity of com-
memorative recognition between Australia and Turkey. For example, in 1985 the
Turkish government officially renamed Ari Burnu, the beach where the Anzacs first
landed, as Anzac Cove and a symbolically significant sandstone monument engraved
‘ANZAK KOYU’ and, underneath, the English translation ‘ANZAC COVE’ was erected
there. The Australian government, in turn, unveiled memorials to Atatürk in Canberra
and Western Australia and sanctioned the construction of a variety of Turkish memori-
als on frontline territory that is controlled by the Allies under the Treaty of Lausanne
(Taylor & Cupper 2000: 163). These events later became significant in allowing the
Turks to develop an attachment to the land campaign, expanding its traditional com-
memorative focus on their victory over the British and French navies in the Dardanelles
prior to the land invasion (West 2008b).
A second key aspect of the 75th commemoration at Gallipoli was the participation
by young Australians, which prompted a new form of travel to the battlefields. While
the event was centrally planned as a one-off spectacle with mainly political and military
representatives, it was augmented by the unexpected arrival of an estimated 5,000
mostly young Australians and New Zealanders, who were part of a rapidly expanding
global backpacker tourism market (Inglis 2005). This type of independent travel
involves frugal expenditure and extended visits to less economically developed nations
and emerging tourism regions (Cohen 2003). This combination of elite and popular
involvement, along with extensive media coverage, has helped to make Gallipoli a
favourite destination for many Australian and New Zealander tourists (Scates 2006,
2009). The exponential growth of this niche market also coincided with Turkey becom-
ing one of the world’s top ten tourist destinations; between 1985 and 2009 tourist arrivals
in Turkey increased from 2.6 million to 27.1 million (Cos˛kun & Özer 2011).
The demand for places at the Gallipoli ceremony on Anzac Day became so strong that
in 2000, with the generosity of the Turkish government, Australia and New Zealand

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opened the Anzac Commemorative Site on North Beach, adjacent to Anzac Cove. The
mainly Australian and New Zealand crowds for the annual Dawn Service there now
exceeds 10,000, which is larger than for ceremonies at war memorials in some Australia
capital cities. It is now de rigueur for Prime Ministers and high-ranking state functionar-
ies to attend the Anzac Day service at Gallipoli and deliver speeches acknowledging the
generosity of Turks toward their former enemies. Both this event and local marches are
telecast live in Australia. Anzac Day services in Australia also had to recognize Turkish
accounts and become less exclusive and militaristic. This can be seen in the RSL
changing its rules for marches by allowing children to join veterans, having relatives
participate in the absence of forebears and including Turkish representatives.
Anzac Day commemorations at Gallipoli have stimulated more dialogical practices
and a revival of interest among younger people. At the same time, these ceremonies
replicate the structure of those in Australia, beginning with a dawn service that coin-
cides with timing of the invasion and driven by the speeches of politicians and other
dignitaries. While Australians often refer to travelling to Gallipoli for Anzac Day as a
‘pilgrimage’, it does not follow the typical processes of this ritual so has limited potential.
For example, the commemorative form of Anzac Day has resulted in Turkish authorities
capping Australians’ attendance for the Anzac Day centennial in 2015 at 8,000, a
fraction of the people who wanted to attend. A former Minister for Veterans’ Affairs
(DVA) stated there were strong claims for places by close to one million Australians:
descendants of veterans who fought at Gallipoli, veterans of other wars, widows, current
members of the military and young people with an interest in military history (Snowden
2012). This has resulted in a controversy concerning who should be Australia’s
representatives and what should be the criteria for the public ballot being conducted by
the DVA (Stewart 2013).
While Anzac Day ceremonies garner most of the media attention, the majority of
travellers do not go to Gallipoli on this occasion. Visits to the battlefields outside of
Anzac Day are more akin to a pilgrimage and have made an important contribution to
progressive Anzac narratives. There are a number of stages to the development of tour-
ism in most areas, with backpacking being an important early stage around which a more
extensive infrastructure is developed, facilitating the establishment of more mainstream
forms of tourism. This has been the case at Gallipoli, with Australian backpackers facil-
itating a variety of mainstream Western-orientated forms. The tourist hub of Çanakkale
is now filled with Anzac-themed hotels, bars and restaurants, street vendors selling
Anzac souvenirs and travel agencies offering packaged tours of the Anzac battlefields
and the ‘open-air museum’ of the Gallipoli peninsula (Bastiaan 2010: 17).
However, it is backpackers as a type of ‘alternative’ or ‘post-Fordist’ traveller who have
been most significant in generating the progressive meanings which have become
attached to this ritual. Turkish tour guides have been particularly important in portray-
ing the history of Gallipoli to this market segment. Given the distance between the
battlefields and nearby townships, the majority of travellers undertake a paid tour,
which, under Turkish law, needs to be led by a licensed guide. These tour leaders play a
dual role in narrating the battle for visitors and also in explaining the cultural signifi-
cance of the battlefields to locals, helping to dampen concerns about the negative effects
of tourism. By using recent dialogical memorials on the peninsula, the guides amplify
the worldviews and desires of backpackers by giving them a selective and heavily
narrated history which counters many of the textbook myths and silences about the
campaign. This includes relating local Turkish accounts of the battle and the experience

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of Anzac soldiers in ways that deemphasize the patriotic motivations for enlistment,
stereotypes of the enemy and various war crimes, including the fate of captured enemy
soldiers. Instead, the soldiers’ motivations are portrayed in ways that resonate with con-
temporary Western youth, emphasising the reluctance of those on both sides to kill. The
rationale of locals is communicated as protecting their families and homes, while it is
stressed that the Anzacs found themselves in the trenches as a consequence of wanting
to see the world. Such narratives have entered the Australian public sphere both directly
via these tourists’ stories, particularly by teachers, and via accounts in the popular media.
We conclude by outlining the cultural significance of the more mainstream tourists
on the increasing number of packaged excursions to Gallipoli. Compared to backpack-
ers, these are ‘mass tourists’ in a highly differentiated market, but with distinctive
qualities. These organized tours are one of the less discussed tourist forms at Gallipoli
but, like the backpacking tradition, also emerged from the 75th anniversary spectacular.
The event was extensively covered by Australia’s only national daily broadsheet, The
Australian, which is owned by arch-conservative Rupert Murdoch, who has personal
affiliations with Gallipoli. His father, Keith, was a journalist who sent scathing reports
on the incompetence of British commanders at Gallipoli to politicians in Britain and
Australia; these reports are often credited with prompting the withdrawal of the MEF.
Murdoch also provided private funding of Weir’s iconic film Gallipoli through his pro-
duction company, R&R Productions.
On the back of these connections and increased sales of the newspaper during its
coverage of the 75th anniversary, The Australian began sponsoring an organized tour of
Anzac Day that was led by the Australian War Memorial’s senior historian, Michael
McKernan, who first travelled to Gallipoli for the 75th anniversary. These tours pro-
vided an important niche for less independent tourists, typically older history buffs.
Despite organized tours often being criticized for not engaging with local cultures, in this
instance they played an important role in facilitating Australian–Turkish exchanges.
This has principally occurred by Australian historians achieving a dialogue with Turkish
tour guides and academics. The most prominent case is guide and local university tutor
Kenan Çelik, who crafted his tours around information he learned from visiting
Australian historians, who also mailed him English language books on the campaign
unavailable in Turkey (West 2008b). These personal associations led to Çelik coming
to Australia in 2000 as a visiting scholar at the Australian War Memorial, where he gave
seminars on a Turkish perspective of the war (Çelik 2000). The same year, Çelik was
also awarded a rare honorary Medal of the Order of Australia, the nation’s highest civil
honour, for his service to Australian–Turkish relations. Another important joint initia-
tive was the establishment of the Turkish Australian Culture Centre at Çanakkale
Onsekiz Mart [18 March] University to enhance cultural relations between the two
nations. Australia’s then Foreign Minister stated, at the Centre’s opening on the eve of
Anzac Day in 2009, that it would ‘allow future generations to explore the people-to-
people, business and academic linkages from a relationship born in adversity, but founded
on a shared desire for peace and understanding through communication and coopera-
tion’ (Smith 2009).
In addition to these high-level schemes, there are burgeoning cultural exchanges and
educational tourism (McKay 2013a), with one example the Tears of Gallipoli (2011)
student exchange program among Australian, New Zealand and Turkish students. As
part of a general rise in Gallipoli tourism, various foreign companies offer organized tours
with progressive aims. Australian Military History Tours (MHT), for example, has

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organized a surf boat race among Australian, New Zealand, and Turkish teams for the
centenary in 2015. Although this sport has traditionally been associated with masculine
definitions of Australian nationalism, the lead-up has involved men’s and women’s
crews with the Australians and New Zealanders training their Turkish counterparts in
lifesaving skills. This event also involved memorial services on the battlefields, which
engendered empathy for soldiers on both sides of the war among the citizens of all three
nations (McKay 2013b).

Conclusion
In this chapter, we have analyzed how Gallipoli has retained relevance in Australia in
an era when many national narratives in the West are subject to incredulity. For decades,
Gallipoli’s modernist valencies had popular appeal and then declined to the point of
extinction, only to return unexpectedly in a recombinant form through an unforeseen
concatenation of political, cultural and economic events. We have argued the much
maligned popular activity of tourism has played a key role in this development by gen-
erating pacifist, reflexive and empathic understandings of the campaign. It would be
hazardous to forecast Gallipoli’s future, especially given the recent volatility of Turkish
politics. However, both the labile properties of myths and contestations of memory by
various interest groups means that other, unanticipated, narratives will emerge. A key
event in this respect will be the commemoration of the Anzac Centenary between 2014
and 2018, on which state and federal governments in Australia will spend over AUS$325
million, twice the amount Britain is spending on its commemorations (Brown 2014).
Tourist companies have already sold all their excursions for the centennial of the landing
at Gallipoli on Anzac Day 2015, which is likely to be ‘the largest peacetime gathering
of Australians outside of Australia’ (Kelly 2011). The centennial of the landing will also
be a classic ‘media event’ (Dayan and Katz 1992) that will attract one of the biggest TV
audiences in Australian history. This will be just one of numerous mass media represen-
tations, with three Anzac-related miniseries alone screening in 2014 and 2015 (Knox
2013; Meade & Brook 2012). However, there have already been allegations that the
federal government has mismanaged the Anzac Centenary, and an Australian tourism
operator has proposed holding a ‘rebel’ ceremony at Gallipoli on Anzac Day 2015 to
protest official arrangements for the Dawn Service (Kelly & Walters 2012; Shanahan
2012; Wroe 2013). For at least the short-term then, Gallipoli will continue to resemble
Stuart Hall’s (1981: 223) apt metaphor of the field of culture: ‘a sort of constant
battlefield . . . where no once-for-all victories are obtained but where there are always
strategic positions to be won and lost.’

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 40
‘CREATIVITY IS FOR
PEOPLE – ART’S FOR
POSH PEOPLE’
Popular Culture and the
UK’s New Labour Government
Kate Oakley

This chapter considers both the understanding and treatment of popular culture in a
particular period of British political history, that of the New Labour government,
1997–2010. Widely seen as popularizing, through identification with pop musicians and
football (soccer), as well as through initiatives such as the Millennium Dome (McGuigan
& Gilmore 2002) and the National Centre for Popular Music (Brabazon & Mallinder
2006), the chapter argues that in fact New Labour struggled with popular culture, much
as its predecessors had. While seen as useful for the branding of a ‘young country’, par-
ticularly in the early days of the Administration (Blair 2004), and for differentiating
themselves from Conservative predecessors with the latter’s concern for heritage and
what was seen as a nostalgic understanding of Britain’s culture, New Labour’s promotion
of popular culture, with the interesting exception of film, was largely symbolic. For the
most part, cultural funding supported the institutions it has always supported (Jancovitch
2011), the interests of rights-owners were consistently preferred over those of popular
culture audiences, and popular cultural ‘tradition’ was left to the mercy of the market-
place in a way that would have been unthinkable for ‘high’ cultural forms. Yet, far from
being a specifically New Labour problem, the chapter argues that this represents a long-
term tension in the Labour party (Bianchini forthcoming 2014), and on the British Left
in general, and a public policy failure that is characteristic not only of the UK.
New Labour politicians were sensitive to the claim that the party was obsessed with
presenting itself as modern. Shortly after entering office in 1997, the then culture min-
ister Chris Smith complained that talk of ‘Cool Britannia’ gave the impression that, in
cultural terms, New Labour felt “anything modern is good and anything traditional bad”
(Smith 1998: 4). It was an irritation he repeated when we interviewed him in 2012: “I
got quite frustrated by the fixation that quite a lot of the media had on this notion that
the Blair era was part of some new esprit du temps that, actually, was not related to what
was going on.”1
 O A KLE Y

What was going on, according to Smith, was a desire to break down the distinction
between high and popular culture, a desire which would be channeled into New Labour’s
favored buzzwords of ‘access’ and ‘excellence’, with the unfortunate and unintended
consequence that the former term was associated with popular culture and the latter
with high culture. Smith would have recoiled from any suggestion that popular culture
could not be excellent and indeed there is some irony in the fact that New Labour fig-
ures were routinely mocked by their critics for liking popular music or football, as if such
tastes could never in fact be genuine but must spring from a mistaken desire to seem like
one of the masses.
However, as Looseley argues (2011) in his comparison of French and British
approaches to popular cultural policy, while an admirable aspiration, in fact the discus-
sion of breaking down distinctions is often simply a way to avoid questions of quality,
judgment, or even meaning in culture – questions that British cultural policymakers
have sought to duck since Lord Melbourne’s heartfelt remark, ‘God helps the Minister
that meddles with art’, back in the 1840s. While judgments about quality in the tradi-
tional art forms could safely be left to experts, applied to popular culture, policymakers
seem to struggle with the notion of expertise, too often falling back on the representa-
tives of the larger cultural industry firms who, having ‘cracked’ the market for pop music
or videogames, were assumed to be its guardians.
When it came into office in 1997, New Labour inherited a tradition of cultural policy
interventions, many deriving from the urban cultural policy initiatives of cities like
London and Sheffield, which took popular culture seriously and sought to support it
with public funds. Since 1994, with the birth of the National Lottery, the arts had expe-
rienced something of a boost (Putnam and Ellis 1998). In regions such as the North
West of England, regional arts funders had seized an opportunity to support different
sorts of cultural organisations – small businesses, as well as not-for-profits – in popular
culture, as well as subsidised arts organizations (O’Connor and Gu 2013). In part, this
was determined by the politics and social orientation of many of those active in local
arts and cultural scenes; popular culture as the culture of the people was more likely to
be able to respond to and express the problems people were facing, from unemployment
to sexism or racism. It was not that traditional art forms could not address these issues
– even the highest of high art forms does so – but that widening and deepening the
canon allowed communities and individuals expression that had hitherto been denied
or marginalized.
This was New Labour’s inheritance, but it was not necessarily New Labour’s under-
standing. Wary of anything that could be seen as class politics (or at least as working
class politics), and of attachment to tradition, New Labour’s cultural politics owned
more to the postmodernism of Marxism Today magazine than it did to the traditional
culture of the British Left. While such a hinterland could offer improved understandings
of race, sexuality, and gender relations, it was less attuned to the politics of place, which
had animated The Specials’ Ghost Town, or the TV series Boys from the Blackstuff, as part
of their concern about unemployment. Unemployment, in these expressions, was not a
general evil to be inveighed against, but a specific concern of people in particular places,
and indeed it was suffered by particular people in particular places. Yet, as Rutherford
argues (2013), the desire to see identity as a continually shifting category meant disen-
tangling the subject from ‘cultural locatedness’. Instead, as he argues, having ‘lost’ the
battle of English identity (not Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish identity, which have dif-
ferent narratives) to the New Right and to Margaret Thatcher, New Labour came to

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power still fearing England as “a reactionary country” (2013: 13). In this context, where
Doreen Massey had argued (1994) that any seeking after a sense of place was suspect,
New Labour’s “mixture of social liberalism and economic liberalism led to a post-
national cosmopolitanism which tended to valorise novelty, the global and change, over
the ordinary, the local, and belonging” (Rutherford 2013: 23).
Instead, New Labour sought a popular culture that was detached from place and par-
ticularity. The narrative that became the creative industries and later still the creative
economy, consistently stressed the dynamism of the marketplace. In several Arts Council
documents of the period, the vibrancy of the commercial cultural world is contrasted
with what is perceived to be the precarious state of public arts funding. “The state of the
arts in Britain in the 1990s is characterised by an apparent paradox of, on one hand,
financial instability within the public arts sector and on the other, thriving commercial
success within the wider cultural industries” (Hitchen 1997: 1).
For organizations such as the Arts Council, the danger was being relegated to the
‘ghetto’ of subsidised culture when the opportunity was perceived to lie elsewhere. In a
note of the meeting between the Brunswick Public Relations company and the Arts
Council’s Strategy Group at the dawn of the New Labour administration (Brunswick
1997), the need to identify the arts as part of the creative industries was made clear,
“Creativity is for people – art’s for posh people,” it stated. While music, design and the
fashion industry were described as “dynamic and innovative”, the public arts economy
was seen as unstable, heavily under-resourced and suffering from personnel problems
exacerbated by low pay, weak training and development (Hitchen 1997: 2). The solu-
tion, (and one could easily imagine others), was to place the not-for-profit sectors of the
arts within the wider creative industries or creative economy, identifying them with the
‘democratic’ notion of creativity. By the same token, the traditional ‘arts’ seen as need-
ing subsidy were therefore not popular culture, despite a long history on the Left that
might suggest otherwise (Samuel 2006; Bevir 2011).
Chris Smith, New Labour’s first Secretary of State for Culture claimed that this
approach was in part about “bringing democracy to culture” (1998: 2), which he saw not
as challenging the traditional makers and gatekeepers of culture, but as promoting access
to culture that had already moved beyond distinctions of ‘high’ and ‘low’. In his praise for
the vibrancy of commercial culture, Smith seems to suggest a different notion of cultural
democracy from that which had been developing, albeit unevenly, at the local and
regional level in the UK. As O’Connor (2009) argues, that idea required public interven-
tion in the marketplace for popular culture to try and ensure a more democratic culture
based on embedded local markets. Smith’s line, however, echoed by Arts Council docu-
ments at the time, was in danger of conflating popular culture with democratic culture
and, therefore, markets with democracy. Smith’s argument was concerned with placing
the subsidised arts sectors not at the side of, or as an alternative to, commercial culture,
but very much within “a vibrant, resourceful and robust cultural economy” (Hitchen n.d.:
4). But it assumed that having done so they would thrive rather than wither, and,
moreover, that the type of public intervention necessary was consistent with the broadly
de-regulatory market-based approach that New Labour took to other areas of economic
policy. It was not laissez faire, but the focus was on supply-side measures, help for small
business start-ups, skills training for workers, and subsidized work spaces. Intervention in
terms of ownership, pricing, or restricting market power was off the table.
This can be seen most clearly in what can be described as New Labour’s popular cul-
ture policy. To describe it as such may suggest a more coherent approach than in fact one

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can point to, and of course popular culture policies can range far and wide, from
broadcasting to sport to urban regeneration without necessarily being labeled as ‘popular
culture’. But it is worth considering some of the popular culture interventions of the
period to see if one can determine how the understanding, described above, dictated
policy.
Given its view of popular culture, that it was essentially commercial culture, there
should be little surprise that New Labour took its cue on policy from those who ran suc-
cessful commercial businesses. The Creative Industries (CI) Taskforce was established
after New Labour took office, with a remit to recommend steps to maximise the eco-
nomic impact of the UK’s creative industries at home and abroad (DCMS 1998). In
addition to the civil service representatives of various Government departments, mem-
bers were largely drawn from commercial cultural businesses. They included fashion
designer Paul Smith, Eric Salama of advertising giant WPP, Gail Rebuck from publishers
Random House, and Robert Devereux from Virgin Media, as well as longtime Labour
supporters such as film director David Puttnam and Waheed Ali (founder of the TV
production company Planet 24).
Smith described this as “a way of bringing in people from the outside world who knew
what they were talking about”, but what they were talking about in this case was a par-
ticular sort of large, transnational cultural industry business. Alan McGee, as founder of
Creation Records and as a Scot, might be seen as one of the few representatives of non-
metropolitan culture, though his days as an independent record company boss were long
over by 1997, and there were no examples of local or regional cultural organizations on
the Taskforce. The first output of the Taskforce, known somewhat inaccurately as
Mapping Documents (DCMS 1998, 2001), were notable for the national lens through
which they viewed the creative industries, and it was not until 2000, following reports
on export promotion (DCMS 1999a, 1999b), that a sub-group considered the issue of
the creative industries at a regional level (DCMS 2000).
The information resources and, hence, arguments were thus dominated by larger
cultural businesses, with civil servants in particular, in a new and weak Government
department, having little in the way of what Bevir would call a ‘tradition’ (Bevir 2000)
or policy narrative to counter or even add to that of the Taskforce. Smith described the
first meeting of the Taskforce thus:

All the ministers came along with their briefs prepared by the civil servants and
as we were going around the table with everyone contributing, they would read
out their briefs, as ministers sometimes do. And then the outsiders started
contributing and saying well, actually it doesn’t happen like that at all. This is
what’s important and this is what’s happening and this is what’s going on.
(Author’s interview with Chris Smith, October 2012)

In this case, an asymmetry of informational resources was fairly clear from the start and
“what was going on” was not deemed to require input from small cultural business, indi-
vidual practitioners, not-for-profits, arts advocates, or trade unions.
The irony of New Labour’s policies for the newly-dubbed creative industries, however,
was that, having completed its work by 2000, the CI Taskforce was wound up and the
UK’s Culture Ministry, in the words of one of its own Secretaries of State, rather
“dropped the story” of creative industries policy.2 Instead, most policy activity, in the
sense of funding decisions and organizational creation, went on at the local and regional

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level, though the inheritance from the Taskforce was a clear, ideological one. Popular
culture was commercial culture, the creative industries as a notion was a useful expres-
sion of this culture and its presumed dynamism, and market mechanisms were the
primary ways of assisting that dynamism.
Thus, in terms of policies for popular culture, a pro-market approach was generally
favoured. While the Broadcasting Act 1996, which was passed just before New Labour
came into office, enabled the Minister for Culture to ensure that certain sporting
events (such as the FA Cup Final and Wimbledon) were kept on free-to-air TV, little
effort was made to extend the list or to respond to the concerns of those who saw the
huge drain of live sports such as Test Cricket from free-to-air to pay TV. Ticket prices
for cultural events such as the Glastonbury Festival or Premiership football were
allowed to find a (high) market level, though ticket prices for classical performances
and the opera remained subsidised. And, as Cloonan argues, the secondary sale of tick-
ets for popular music remained legal, suggesting again that the ‘protection’ of popular
music, however important a part of British culture it is felt to be, was rarely taken seri-
ously (Cloonan 2011).
In terms of outlets for popular culture, while the loss of record shops from the high
street was part of a wider shift to online consumption, rather than a failing of New
Labour, little effort was made to tighten planning legislation in favour of small book and
record shops, pubs or nightclubs, all crucial elements of the urban cultural ecosystem.
Similarly, for live music, the 2003 Licensing Act made licensing a requirement even for
small-scale musical events in pubs. Although the chilling effect of this was not as bad as
had been feared, and there was some response to the vigorous campaign against the Act,
its passing hardly suggested a deep concern for the traditional wellsprings of popular
cultural taste formation.
In terms of funding, while elements of popular culture undoubtedly benefitted from
some creative industry support, particularly that channeled by Regional Development
Agencies (RDAs) to workspace, training, and other industry support, as Jancovitch has
argued, core arts funding showed little shift (Jancovitch 2011; Gilmore 2013). In 2005,
85 per cent of money to cultural organisations went to those who had been funded
before New Labour came to power. Many such organisations were no doubt doing a great
job – and long-term reliable funding would help with that – but the lack of recognition
for what Gilmore calls, “ordinary, ‘quiet’ and everyday forms of cultural participation” is
apparent (Gilmore 2013: 92).
The huge growth in the use of digital technology during the New Labour period
and the birth of social media did lead, along with the coining of ugly neologisms such
as ‘prosumers’, to an explosion of interest in the cultural activities that people, par-
ticularly young people were undertaking online. But this focus arguably obscured
interest in forms of non-digital participation. More significantly, cultural surveys
throughout the period, particular the government-funded Taking Part survey, 3 which
measured people’s participation in formal cultural activities, tend to portray ‘non
participation’ in culture as a problem to be solved (Miles & Sullivan 2010; Jancovitch
2011; Gilmore 2013). Instead of starting from a consideration of what activities peo-
ple get up to in their spare time, such surveys tend to present certain activities as
cultural and others as not, fixing in policymakers’ minds a deficit model that can only
be solved by prescribing more formal cultural activities – and thus consistently avoid-
ing questions such as ‘What do people like to do?’ and ‘What constitutes popular
culture in this place?’

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An example of the popular culture ‘problem’ in the UK can be seen in the case of
government policy on videogames, one of the more significant cultural developments of
the period. In the late 1990s, British-developed games accounted for about 12 per cent
of the US market and 25 per cent of the European, and the UK ranked second only to
Japan in authoring computer games software (Leadbeater & Oakley 2001). Having
somewhat accidently acquired a burgeoning videogames sector, the tone was often cel-
ebratory, but in reality policymakers had little idea what to do with an activity with clear
economic potential, but, to them, uncertain cultural merit.
Subsequent policy accounts of this period (see, for example, Bakhshi, Mateos-Garcia
& Gatland 2010) have often lamented the fact that the UK gave away what was appeared
to be an economic advantage in a growing industry, but considerably less attention has
been paid to the fact that it also gave away a cultural one. When I was interviewing UK
games developers in the late 1990s, they often made reference to what they saw as the
specific culture of British games: its links to the rave/club culture of the 1990s, fondness
for fantasy or so called ‘god’ games (the first ‘god’ game is generally considered to be
Populous, developed in 1989 by British videogames auteur Peter Molyneux), and a gen-
eral preference for original story material over, for example, sports franchises. Developing
original material, however, unless it could be pursued into a highly successful series such
as Grand Theft Auto, was always going to be a less profitable business than developing
existing franchises, but many developers, Molyneux amongst them, often showed a pref-
erence for working in smaller firms on original material, rather than developing larger
ones. As such, the UK videogames industry suffered the fate of other UK cultural indus-
tries, with lots of small development companies but no large publishers who could support
development; hence developers went from project funding to project finding, essentially
working for hire, and found it difficult to hold on to their intellectual property rights and
build up a secure revenue stream. As the industry developed throughout the 2000s, the
growth of mobile and online gaming required higher levels of investment which many
British development studios found difficult to support, and the UK industry was seen to
suffer in comparison with counties like France and Canada, who established videogames
sectors somewhat later than the UK had, but provided them with a good deal of public
support (Bakhshi, Mateos-Garcia & Gatland, 2010).
At the time of writing, the UK is still awaiting its first tax relief for video games (it is
delayed by European Union concerns about state aid), though the legislation to intro-
duce it was brought in by the current Coalition Government, along with other ‘creative
industry’ tax reliefs for animation and ‘high end’ television, on a model that had been
operating in the film industry since 2007. The first attempt to secure a tax relief for the
videogames industry, however, started around 2000 and foundered not on economic but
on cultural grounds. When the independent games developers industry body, TIGA,
began to lobby for an extension of the tax reliefs available for research and development
for issues such as the ‘look and feel’ of games characters, the then Department for Trade
and Industry, the UK’s industry ministry (subject to a bewildering change of names since
then) refused on the grounds that while there was a cultural argument for specific tax
breaks for the film industry, no such arguments existed for games. And, indeed, this was
hardly surprising as such an argument had rarely been made. Even those organisations
supportive of the videogames sector, such as the publicly-funded National Endowment
for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), were generally promoting the supposed
economic and job-creating credentials of the sector; cultural arguments about the par-
ticularity of UK games, the need for diversity in the games markets, and the importance

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of a variety of voices in cultural production were not made in the case of videogames.
Moral panics about the downsides of gaming culture could, in part, account for this, but
in addition there was a consistency in the perception of videogames that has been
applied to other popular cultural forms in the past. Videogames were viewed as techno-
logical gizmos; gamers were alternately celebrated and suspect (Miller 2006), but the
meaning of games, and what games might have to tell us about the world, were subjects
fit for discussion only among fans.
The communications regulator, Ofcom, floated the idea of public funding for content
development beyond broadcasting and cross-digital platforms in 2007 (Ofcom 2007).
Sometimes described as ‘the public service publisher’, this might have held out the pos-
sibility of a great pluralism in videogame content, but the idea, already constrained as it
was by the belief that only markets can drive innovation and quality, never came to
fruition (see Freedman, 2009, for a discussion), and the majority of public funding for
games development was for so-called ‘serious games’; in other words, ones that are of use
to the military.
The failure to engage with the question of meaning in popular culture, and hence
with debates about quality or value, meant not only that popular culture was often left
to the mercy of the market, as described above, but that the terrain on which the debate
was held was never shifted. New Labour’s creative industry policies supported a variety
of popular cultural activities, but, beyond populist gestures, the case for why the state
should take a role in popular culture was made only as an economic one. And that case
was weakened by the fact that advocates were constantly over-claiming for the eco-
nomic success of these sectors, thus raising the question – and not just in the minds of
skeptical Treasury officials – ‘Why should the state put public money into something
that was allegedly booming anyway?’
So far has the creative industries notion now drifted from any notion of cultural
meaning that the latest attempt to revive the debate – NESTA’s ‘Manifesto for the
Creative Economy’ (Bakhshi, Hargreaves & Mateos-Garcia, 2013) – defines the creative
industries as “those sectors which specialise in the use of creative talent for commercial
purposes”, which not only presumably rules out sectors such as television, which in many
countries is a mix of commercial and public provision, but completes the fusion of
popular culture with the commercial.
This tendency not to ask questions about the nature of popular cultural extended most
profoundly to questions of quality. Although unavoidable in terms of the media (debates
about the ‘dumbing down’ of BBC output being a permanent feature of British life),
politicians – even those who seek to engage in questions of culture, as some New Labour
ministers did (Jowell 2004) – tended to avoid talk of quality as inherently elitist. The
cultural – later, creative – industries were valorized by policymakers largely because of
their presumed economic dynamism, but also because they promised a way out of the
excellence/access impasse: in the cultural industries the consumer was sovereign and
market could rule (Looseley 2011).
This, of course, leaves cultural policy free to return to its home base of support for the
traditional arts, or at least those art forms seen as unable to make it in the market. This
process had already begun under New Labour, as Looseley notes (Looseley 2011), with
Culture Minister Tessa Jowell’s wrestle with ‘Government and the Value of Culture’, a
‘personal essay’ written in 2004 (Jowell 2004). In it, she again seeks to reject distinction
of high, low, popular, or elitist, but replaces this with the less-than-satisfactory notion
of ‘complex’ culture, which seems to equate to the traditional high arts; the complexities

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of popular culture, and, indeed, the time required to grapple with them, seeming to not
require government intervention. Later in the New Labour period, further signals were
given that the language of ‘excellence’ was again favoured in cultural policy (McMaster
2008), and this was generally taken to equate to high culture; this trend has generally
continued under the current Conservative/Liberal Coalition, as might be expected.
A 40-year experiment not just to democratize access to traditional art but to value
popular culture and understand the relationships between culture as art and culture as
way of life (without necessarily collapsing them) seems to be at an impasse, and not just
in the UK. The economic crisis, particularly in Europe, has seen huge state spending
cuts which are likely to continue for some time, and a beleaguered arts sector has
retreated to a comfort zone of excellence, with an eye to the market for wealthy tourists:
‘posh’ people, indeed. Despite routine evocations of internet-inspired emancipation, the
popular cultural industries are as far from being democratically owned or controlled as
ever, and the aestheticisation of daily life appears to have become permanently enmeshed
with an image of wasteful consumption. Creativity might be for the people, but turning
that into beneficial public policy seems some way away.

Notes
1 Interview with Chris Smith, October 2012.
2 James Purnell, speech to the Institute of Public Policy Research, London, June 16th 2005.
3 The Taking Part survey, which has been running since 2006, is the UK’s largest survey of cultural par-
ticipation. See https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-culture-media-sport/series/
taking-part.

References
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NESTA.
Bevir, M. (2000). On Tradition. Humanitas, 13: 28–53.
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 41
THE POLITICS AND
POSSIBILITIES OF
MEDIA REFORM
Lessons from the UK
Natalie Fenton and Des Freedman

Introduction
Never has the gap between what the media could and do provide to citizens been greater.
Given the attention, money and time that are invested into media production and
consumption (Ofcom 2013), one might expect a vast range of diverse, high quality and
independent content to satisfy our cultural appetites and equip us with the knowledge,
enjoyment and skills to perform citizenship more adequately. In particular, with the roll-
out of social media technologies that proffer huge new opportunities for content creation
and sharing, the possibilities for communicative abundance and interactivity appear to
be limitless.
Yet this potential for rich diversity, for breadth and depth of content, for citizen media
to be produced and citizens’ voices to be heard remains largely underdeveloped. Instead,
audiences find that formulaic programmes dominate broadcast schedules at the expense
of innovative or risk-taking content; that news outlets, ever aware of the bottom line,
prioritise sensationalist and celebrity-driven agendas over hard news (Fenton 2010);
that where politics is presented, it is often driven by narrow corporate or state agendas
that reflect powerful interests in the home state (Dean 2011; Nichols & McChesney
2013); that the internet, instead of privileging new and previously marginalised voices
and distributing them equally, is rapidly being colonised and dominated by some of the
planet’s largest companies (Curran, Fenton, & Freedman 2012; McChesney 2013;
Murthy 2012); and that social media, while providing new possibilities for monitoring
the state, has also provided governments with the ability to monitor us (Morozov 2011).
In the light of the unfolding crises of accountability, accessibility, legitimacy and fund-
ing facing media systems across the world, there are significant opportunities for media
reform: for re-imagining, restructuring and reviving our means of communication in the
public interest. In a whole range of countries, from Australia to Argentina and from
China to the US, we are seeing campaigns – from the hyper-local to the national – to
secure more democratic, responsive and representative media systems and forms of
 TH E PO LI TI CS A N D PO SSI BI LI T I E S O F ME D I A R E F O R M

media coverage. The need to redistribute cultural resources on a more equitable and
transparent basis is rapidly becoming associated with wider movements for social justice
not just in opposition to state-sponsored surveillance systems and concentrated owner-
ship but also in resisting the corporate grab of the internet, supporting public-oriented
journalism and pressing for more accountability, participation and diversity in our media
systems.
This chapter is designed to provide an introduction to media reform by offering a
framework for understanding its various components, some examples of media reform in
action and a call for media reform to be better integrated into pedagogical discussions
and policy-making contexts concerning the media.

What Is Media Reform?

Media reform refers to three different yet interlinked approaches that broadly focus on
initiatives concerning media critique, media practice and media policy.

Know the Media

The first definition of media reform relates to attempts to critique the content and
structures of the mainstream media and therefore to delegitimize them as ideologically
committed to supporting the power relations to which they are tied. In many countries,
broadcast systems are dominated by commercial interests and therefore pursue strategies
that are designed to minimise risk and maximize ratings. In countries like the UK, there
is a more mixed media economy in which there is a main public service broadcaster, the
BBC, that is publicly funded and yet is institutionally tied to elite structures and increas-
ingly mirrors the outputs of its commercial rivals. To ‘know’ the media in any single
context means analysing its institutional base, funding structures, routines, production
cultures, sources, regulatory environments, texts and consumption patterns. There are,
of course, very different schools and approaches to securing this knowledge from politi-
cal economy critics who focus on the unequal distribution of resources and structural
constraints which shape the dynamics of media systems – including the levels of owner-
ship concentration which mean that media are more likely to reflect the corporate and
ideological interests of their owners – to more culturally focused accounts which talk
about the distortions of symbolic power and the exclusion of voices and audiences from
creative decision making.
One of the most influential tools for critiquing mainstream media as part of a media
reform project is the propaganda model, developed by Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky
in their powerful condemnation of US elite media coverage of foreign affairs in
Manufacturing Consent (Herman & Chomsky 1988). Herman and Chomsky work with
an understanding that the media produce propaganda – sets of ideas that are necessary
to secure, in the words of Walter Lippman, ‘the manufacture of consent’. Propaganda is
used to naturalise the ideas of the most powerful groups in society and to marginalise
dissent. Their propaganda model depends on five ‘filters’ working on the media that
ensure a structural bias in favour of dominant frames: concentrated private ownership,
the power of advertising, the domination of elite sources, the use of ‘flak’ (sustained
attacks on oppositional voices), and the construction of an enemy, whether communism
during the cold war or fundamentalist Islam today. Mainstream media perform an ideo-
logical role – none more so than the ‘liberal’ media who foster the greatest illusions

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precisely because their liberalism produces a deceptive picture of a pluralistic media

system when, in reality, there is none. All media, whether ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’, are
tied to current relations of power and involved in distorting, suppressing and silencing
alternative narratives to capitalist power.
Despite criticisms that it is too focused on the US and that it does not allow suffi-
ciently for challenges to media power, the propaganda model has been taken up by an
increasing number of academics and activists, from the prolific watchdog site Media
Lens in the UK to the annual survey of ‘the news that didn’t make the news’, Project
Censored.
One particularly valuable form of knowledge for media reform activists is that no
media system is ‘natural’ and that all have been created to reflect particular interests at
specific times. Reflecting on the US media system, Robert McChesney argues that just
as it was structured to benefit private interests, one of the main jobs for the media reform
movement is ‘to make media policy a political issue’ (2008: 57) so that publics can
demand that it should be reconstructed instead to benefit the public interest. This is
both an historical and a contemporary project, in that media reform is predicated on the
possibility of progressive social change. All too often, however, we fail to appreciate the
‘constructedness’ of our media systems and therefore ignore the possibility that, as they
were designed one way, so they can also be re-designed another, to suit different values.
Della Porta, writing about the relationship between social movements and the media,
makes the important point that both media studies and social movement theory
‘consider both political institutions and mass media as given structures’ (2013: 28)
when, in reality, they have been moulded by powerful interests to appear as ‘desirable’
and ‘immutable’.

Be the Media
The second dimension of media reform is that, in the knowledge that we cannot rely on
the mainstream media to represent our lives as they are lived, we are forced to make our
own media. This relates to the theory and practice of alternative media which draws on
participatory accounts of democracy to produce media that better reflect the diversity
of the population. Alternative media aims to produce content that forgoes the false
objectivity of mainstream news and the sensationalist formats that dominate schedules,
through methods that are more democratic and with institutions focused not on profit
or control but empowerment.
The great German playwright Bertolt Brecht was one of the first theorists to think
about the democratic possibilities of the emerging mass media. In the 1930s, he com-
bined a critique of its predominant use – he argued that radio was generally used to
‘embellish’ daily life; that simply reproduced already existing events in decorative and
‘inconsequential’ ways – with a view that technology, if used properly, might become a
means through which ordinary people might become aware of, and then challenge, the
oppressive conditions of their daily lives (Brecht 2000). Brecht saw radio not as a sim-
ple transmission belt where a few people distribute their ideas to the ‘masses’, but as a
way of connecting people to each other. Radio, he believed, could provide people with
a means to speak and not just to listen. This approach was adopted some forty years
later by the German activist and theorist Hans Magnus Enzensberger in the context of
developments in electronic technologies which he believed offered publics the possibil-
ity of mobilisation as well as entertainment and information. ‘For the first time in

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history’, he wrote (Enzensberger 1970: 13), ‘the media are making possible mass
participation in a social and socialized production process, the practical means of which
are in the hands of the masses themselves.’ Contrasting the ‘repressive’ and de-
politicised uses of traditional media to the ‘emancipatory’ possibilities of what he saw
as new, decentralised media, like pirate radio and community video, he urged activists
to build new channels of communication on the basis that ‘every received is a potential
transmitter’ (1970: 16).
In the age of digital media, we are better able to realise Enzensberger’s vision of a
horizontal and interactive communications system that allows for the mobilisation of
audiences as producers and for the possibilities of content that defies an artificially nar-
row consensus. Social movement theory has a particular role to play here in considering
the communicative competences, performances and structures that are necessary to pub-
licise, organise and galvanise movements for social justice (Atton 2002; Cammaerts,
Mattoni, & McCurdy 2013; Castells 2012; Downing 2000). We have a whole host of
platforms, technologies and practices in place – from ‘hacktivism’ to citizen journalism,
from protest masks to protest music, and from ‘culture jamming’ to community media –
that both challenge the agendas and narratives of mainstream media and allow ‘ordi-
nary’ media users to take control of the technologies.

Change the Media

In their classic account of social movements, della Porta and Diani (1999: 213) note
that social movements ‘depend on the mass media to get their message across. The pos-
sibilities of access for challengers will be greater the more autonomous and pluralistic
the media structure.’ In other words, it matters to the movements themselves – to their
opportunities to speak and be heard – about what kind of system it is. It makes a differ-
ence whether you are dealing with a state-controlled authoritarian system, a highly
commercial model which presents different forms of controls, a public service system
with a mandated yet very elitist system of pluralism, or one with a strong community
and non-profit core like the one recently legislated for in Argentina (Mastrini, Becerra,
& Marino 2013). Media reform, in this context, has to aim to secure the optimal condi-
tions in which a plurality of voices and perspectives can flourish.
Building, therefore, on a critique of the limitations of the mainstream media, and
buoyed by efforts to communicate independently of the mainstream, there is a third
strand of media reform which is perhaps the most contentious: efforts to democratise
actually existing media through initiatives like diversifying media ownership, campaign-
ing for new forms of funding for marginalised content, opposing surveillance practices,
challenging existing copyright regimes and pressing for more ethical forms of journalism.
This requires an engagement with official structures – with formal legislative processes,
with parliaments and policy-makers, with lobbyists and lawyers – in other words, with
the very constituents of the system that are responsible for a diminished and degraded
media culture – in order to press for media policy change.

Media Reform in Practice: Lessons from the UK

It is this last aspect of media reform – seeking to identify and change structures that
bolster undemocratic media – that has been the focus of media reformers’ attention in
the UK over the last few years. It reached a new intensity in recent times because of

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particularly high profile and egregious behaviour by certain sections of the press exposed
by The Guardian newspaper.
In the summer of 2011, The News Of the World, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News
International, stood accused of illegal, unethical behaviour through the systematic
phone hacking of politicians, members of the royal family, celebrities, and murder vic-
tims and their families. Murdoch subsequently closed down The News of the World and
several ex-editors and journalists found themselves under criminal investigation. The
Prime Minister, David Cameron, publicly embarrassed by his employment of Andy
Coulson (a former editor of The News of the World), as his director of communications,
who was arrested by the Metropolitan Police Service in July 2011 on allegations of cor-
ruption and phone hacking, then called for a public inquiry chaired by Lord Justice
Leveson to investigate the issues involved. This very public shaming of certain sections
of the media, combined with political circumstances that motivated a very public
response from the Prime Minister, sparked a reinvigorated approach to media reform in
the UK.
Hackgate, as it became known, revealed in full Technicolor, through the live web-
streaming of courtroom evidence, the mechanisms of a system based on the corruption
of power – both of governing and mediating elites and the relations between them.
During the Leveson inquiry it was revealed that a member of the Cabinet had met
executives from Rupert Murdoch’s empire once every three days on average since the
Coalition was formed.1 The Inquiry also heard that on 7 October 2009, the day before
David Cameron addressed the Conservative Party conference, Rebekah Brooks, then
chief executive of News International and former editor of both The News of the World
and The Sun, sent Cameron the following text message:

But seriously I do understand the issue with The Times. Let’s discuss over country
supper soon. On the party it was because I had asked a number of NI [News
International] people to Manchester post endorsement and they were
disappointed not to see you. But as always Sam was wonderful – (and I thought
it was OE’s [Old Etonians] that were charm personified!) I am so rooting for you
tomorrow not just as a proud friend but because professionally we’re definitely
in this together! Speech of your life? Yes he Cam!
(Quoted in Media Reform Coalition 2013)

The Brooks–Cameron relationship is particularly indicative of a culture of press–

politician mutual interest in which media executives and party leaders work together in
‘pushing the same political agenda’, in Cameron’s words (cited in Media Reform
Coalition 2013). The inquiry also revealed the systematic invasions of privacy by head-
line-hungry journalists that wrecked lives on a daily basis, the lies and deceit of senior
newspaper figures, and a highly politicised and corrupt police force (Cathcart 2012).
Rebekah Brooks admitted to paying police for information in a House of Commons
Select Committee in 2003 but denied it in 2011 (Robinson 2011) and we discovered
that over a quarter of the police public affairs department were previously employed by
The News of the World (Warrell 2011).
The reasons phone hacking took place are complex. They emerge from myriad issues
that have been documented over many years by studies of news and journalism but that
have been brought into shocking close-up with this scandal. Phone hacking did not
happen just because those who did it knew they could get away with it, and editors

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thought on balance it was a business risk worth taking (in other words, that any
subsequent payouts to victims would be easily offset against increases in sales). Many
editors denied that they had any knowledge of illegal practice occurring. The problem
reaches much broader and deeper than any slippage in ethical practice would seem to
suggest and rests not with the individual journalists but with the system of news produc-
tion of which they are part. The reasons hinge on the increasing entanglement of
political and media elites as news coverage has taken on an ever more important role in
policy-making and elections (Coleman 2012; Davis 2002) and fewer and fewer people
vote; the failure of the Press Complaints Commission (the newspaper industry watch-
dog) to uphold ethical standards and enable adequate self-regulation of journalists
(Phillips, Couldry, & Freedman 2010); and, alongside this, the broken business model
of newspapers with plummeting circulation and readership figures and the migration of
classified advertising to online sites such as Craigslist in the US and Gumtree and eBay
in the UK (Fenton, 2010; Levy and Nielsen 2010).
In the last decade there has been a tremendous growth in the number of news outlets
available, including the advent of, and rapid increase in, free papers, the emergence of
24-hour television news and the popularisation of online and mobile platforms. News is
produced and distributed at a faster rate than ever before and often takes place on
several platforms at once. This has provided the newspaper industry with some real chal-
lenges. In a corporate news world it is now difficult to maintain profit margins and
shareholder returns unless you employ fewer journalists. But fewer journalists with more
space to fill means doing more work in less time, often leading to a greater use of unat-
tributed rewrites of press agency or public relations material and the cut and paste
practice that is now commonly referred to as churnalism (Davies 2008) – a practice that
does not lend itself easily to transparency and accountability.
Combine the faster and shallower corporate journalism of the digital age (Phillips
2012) with the need to pull in readers for commercial rather than journalistic reasons
and it is not difficult to see how the values of professional journalism are quickly cast
aside in order to indulge in sensationalism, trade in gratuitous spectacles and deal in
dubious emotionalism. These economic drivers cannot be underestimated, but they do
not tell the whole story. Rather, the concerns spring from a thoroughly marketised and
deregulated newspaper industry, many parts of which have long since relegated the
motive of the press – as fourth estate holding truth to power – to the sidelines. As Trevor
Kavanagh, associate editor of The Sun, noted in his own evidence to Leveson: ‘news is
as saleable a commodity as any other. Newspapers are commercial, competitive busi-
nesses, not a public service’ (Kavanagh 2011).
News in these formulations is primarily for profit – a marketplace that operates on
commercial principles. Treating news in this way is part of a much broader political shift
in focus from citizenship to consumerism and from states to markets. But of course, news
is no ordinary commodity – it offers the possibility of directing the public conversation
and hence is of relevance to politicians keen to convince voters of the benefits of their
particular policy formulations. This puts news proprietors in a particular position of
power. The owner of London Evening Standard and The Independent, Russian billionaire
Evgeny Lebedev, tweeted after his appearance at Leveson: ‘Forgot to tell #Leveson that
it’s unreasonable to expect individuals to spend £millions on newspapers and not have
access to politicians’ (cited in Media Reform Coalition 2013).
When news proprietors accumulate excessive power and influence, the problems
associated with this power are exacerbated. A thoroughly marketised and deregulated

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newspaper industry has led to unchecked media concentration over several decades,
allowing some media groups to accumulate vast amounts of revenue along with social
and political influence, with adverse consequences for ethical journalism and democ-
racy. Such market dominance of news media results in an excess of power and unruly
political influence that breeds fear. Fear in politicians scared of their careers being
wrecked and lives ruined by negative publicity, along with their party’s chances of re-
election. Fear in employees too intimidated to stand up to a bullying culture in which
market-oriented managers place commercial priorities above journalistic responsibility
and integrity. Most recently, with the threat of compulsory redundancies at The
Independent newspaper, Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the National Union
of Journalists, has commented that a workforce that is paid ‘bargain basement
salaries . . . is fearful and compliant’ (quoted in Turvill 2013). Excessive media concen-
tration also leads to inadequate policing and toothless regulation – who will challenge
the ambitions of News Corporation when the political stakes are so very high? Not
many, as we now know.
But it is not only journalists whose freedom is circumscribed by corporate compli-
ance. Our ability to exercise our own democratic freedom as ordinary members of the
public is premised on the basic fact that governments are not distorted by the private
interests of multi-media conglomerates. When governments as well as journalists are
beholden to corporate power then freedom is hard to come by for all but the most
powerful. Rupert Murdoch ‘and family’ were recently positioned at number 33 of Forbes
magazine’s list of the world’s most powerful people, with a net worth of $13.4 billion
(Forbes 2013). Just three companies control nearly 70 per cent of UK national news-
paper circulation, while only five groups control more than 70 per cent of online news
consumption as measured by browsing time. These problems – concentration of media
ownership, lack of media pluralism and unethical journalism – are intimately linked,
and any solution must take account of both the structure and funding of media that
best serves their democratic and social purposes. But campaigning for change in all
three is fraught with difficulties.
It is on the above analyses that the two main media reform campaign groups in the
UK came into being: the Media Reform Coalition (MRC) (formerly the Co-Ordinating
Committee for Media Reform) and Hacked-Off (born out of the Media Standards
Trust). The Media Reform Coalition was set up in September 2011 to coordinate the
most effective contribution by civil society groups, academics and media campaigners to
debates over media regulation, ownership and democracy in the context of the phone
hacking crisis and proposed communications legislation. The intention from the outset
of this group was to build an alliance of partner groups and supporting individuals to
produce research and to organise campaigning activities aimed at creating a media sys-
tem that is more plural and more accountable, and which seeks to support investigative
and local journalism, in particular (these were deemed to be suffering the most in the
current economic context of newspapers). From the outset, the work of the MRC had
three main strands of activity: plurality, ethics and funding.
Hacked-Off began in 2011 as campaign that was part of the Media Standards Trust
that helped bring about the public inquiry into press practices. In the summer of 2012
it became a separate campaign group by the same name and registered as a not-for-profit
company. The director of the Campaign, Professor Brian Cathcart, a former journalist,
published a book Everybody’s Hacked Off: Why We Don’t Have the Press We Deserve and
What To Do about It (Cathcart 2012) and Hacked Off set about helping victims of press

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abuse tell their stories about the experience of phone hacking, stalking, bullying and
harassment, and campaigning to ensure that independent and effective regulatory mech-
anisms for dealing with such transgressions were put in place (2).
After an exhaustive inquiry lasting nearly a year and a half, Lord Justice Leveson
delivered his recommendations in November 2012. The lengthy report (Leveson 2012)
discussed in detail how the newspaper industry had become too powerful and that mean-
ingful reform was needed to restore public confidence in the press system. However,
Leveson needed to convince the industry that his recommendations had taken account
of their concerns – that this was about enshrining press freedom and ensuring that any
subsequent regulatory system was independent from government. He also needed to
satisfy the many victims of press abuse that his recommendations would bring about an
independent regulatory system with teeth that could hold the industry to account when
necessary while also being effective in responding to the public’s concerns. Finally, he
needed the recommendations to be politically palatable so that the Prime Minister
would not be pressurised by the press into brushing it off as unsustainable and fatally
flawed. Leveson did this in two ways: first by focusing largely on journalism and develop-
ing a system for complaints against transgressions in journalistic practice. This was a
response to the immediate concerns of the victims of press abuse, but one which lacked
any systematic attempt to redress more structural inequalities in influence and power
through tackling issues of ownership concentration and plurality concerns. Second,
Leveson located his recommended system in independent self-regulation underpinned
by statute, thereby responding to the industry’s concerns over governmental interference
in press freedom yet still ensuring that the press could not, as was popularly remarked,
“mark their own homework”. Thus, the framework for reform was clearly established
around a somewhat narrower set of issues than previous academic analyses had assessed as
vital for substantive change to take place. Notably, media plurality was sidelined and the
funding of news all but ignored in favour of a rather more modest focus on a mechanism
for complaints (albeit an effective and independent mechanism that had never before
existed) that now dominated the agenda.
Nonetheless, the focus of the Leveson report spoke directly to the concerns of both
media reform groups and, most forcefully, to the work of Hacked Off, who then set about
campaigning in support for the Leveson recommendations. This involved making the
case for the implementation of Leveson’s proposals amongst the wider public as well as
within parliament by ensuring that key politicians understood the issues, were aware of
strong public feeling and had the means and tools to implement Leveson. This work
involved a combination of parliamentary drafting, public polling and then highlighting
public opinion, lobbying and persuading politicians and parliamentarians, media moni-
toring and rebutting, mobilising supporters and supporting victims of press abuse, per-
suading and debating with journalists and the public, and then briefing and reporting
on all aspects of this work. They worked closely throughout with victims of press abuse
in the face of relentless and often bitterly hostile resistance from leading national news-
paper groups who initially appeared to be sympathetic to at least some of Leveson’s
recommendations but over time repudiated most of them.
Media reform was, therefore, suddenly a big political issue and the public wanted
change. The core strength of the various campaigns was the public support behind them
with constant polling showing high level of support for media reform and a firm rejec-
tion of press manoeuvring. Social media helped in this regard, but mainstream broadcast
media was certainly far more important in garnering mass support.

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One of the main sticking points with the press industry was a simplistic knee-jerk
response to so-called government interference in the workings of the press. This
prompted the Prime Minister, David Cameron, who had initially said he would imple-
ment the Leveson recommendations unless they were ‘bonkers’, to state that even
statutory underpinning – a law to enact the costs and incentives of a new system with
no interference whatsoever in the actual running of, or decision-making of the new self-
regulatory body – would be ‘crossing the Rubicon’. In other words, the sacrosanct
position of a free press in a free society would be irreparably undermined: there would
be no going back.
Invoking the language of free speech became the default position of the press lobby.
Of course, nobody would dispute the freedom of the press to hold power to account but
this does not put the press themselves beyond accountability. Freedom without account-
ability is simply the freedom of the powerful over the powerless, which, one could argue,
is precisely what the press were trying to preserve: freedom to run roughshod over peo-
ple’s lives causing harm and distress for the sake of increased newspaper sales.
Furthermore, freedom has always been enshrined in law. The press, for example, is pro-
tected by the right of freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention
of Human Rights. Article 10, however, is not absolute but conditional and qualified by
Article 10.ii:

The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities,
may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions of penalties as are
prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of
national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention
of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of
the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information
received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the
judiciary.
(ECHR 1953: Art 10.ii)

Article 10 is also subject to Article 8 of the Convention, which covers the right to
privacy.
Media reformers hit back, arguing that freedom works both ways and that freedom of
the press had to be balanced by freedom of the public to assess and challenge the nature
of that communication: freedom shared, not power abused. In other words, they argued
that democratic practice requires protective and enabling legislative form which is why
it exists in other areas of public life. But, with a general election creeping ever closer,
Cameron bowed to the rhetoric of ‘press freedom’ and opted to set up a new press self-
regulatory body not by statutory underpinning, but by Royal Charter – an archaic pro-
cess that nobody seemed to fully understand and was far less democratic than anything
that actually had to go through due parliamentary process. This created a political
dilemma. A Royal Charter could deliver a new system of self-regulation that was inde-
pendent and effective, in other words, Leveson-compliant, but it was by via a circuitous
route that was itself undemocratic. At a point when it seemed like this was the only offer
on the table and it looked like the press lobby were willing to swallow it, Hacked Off
decided to support the Charter. Powerful press interests soon backtracked and found
excuses to repudiate this mechanism, making it quite clear that they had no intention
of ever agreeing to a system that they were not able fully to control.

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Understanding the role of the news as an industry and news organisations as corporate
entities in these very public debates is crucial to our understanding of how ‘freedom’ can
be more easily claimed by some to the detriment of others. ‘Freedom of the press’ as an
ethical practice does not somehow magically transcend the market or render invisible
the power base to which it is connected. Rather, ‘freedom of the press’ is embroiled in a
particular political-economic system. This is a system that tells us that productivity is
increased and innovation unleashed if the state stays out of the picture and lets busi-
nesses get on with it. This is particularly important for multinational corporations who
do not want to be stymied by trifling national policies that threaten to scupper their
growth. Productivity in the market and hence news as a commodity takes precedence
over the social and political concerns of news as a mechanism of democratic process. In
other words, the less ‘interference’ in the form of regulation, the more liberalised the
market, the better the outcome (Jessop 2002). Media reform, in other words, is con-
nected to the form and structure of capitalism just as much as it is about journalism.
Once this is understood then it is far easier to appreciate why funding of the news indus-
try and concentration of ownership struggle to get on the agenda and why we frequently
end up applying a band-aid rather than treating the wound.

Conclusion: Media Reform Is Part of Wider Reform

Media reform, therefore, cannot be separated from other types of democratic reform.
The problem is that the term has been hijacked in recent years: education reforms,
health reforms, welfare reform – all these have been about the further implantation of
market values into public services rather than the democratising of these institutions.
But of course these are not examples of genuine reform so much as attempts to concen-
trate power and wealth in fewer hands. Just because political reform has been re-branded
does not mean that we should abandon the struggle for democratic reforms. The whole
point of the anti-slavery movement, attempts to organise labour in the 19th century,
struggles for the vote for women in the early 20th century and the struggle for civil rights
later on in the 20th century was that these were reforms that were really fought for by
different groups of people using hugely varied tactics from the polite and the parliamen-
tary to the far more risky and revolutionary. That is the nature of reform movements:
they combine people who are happy to stick to the immediate demands with those who
want to go much further; they consist of fragile coalitions between people who think
that the system as it exists can deliver reforms that will satisfy enough people and those
who think that there are structural inequalities that cannot be ironed out given the
priorities of capitalism.
According to Bob Hackett and Bill Carroll, democratic media activism is both defen-
sive and pro-active (2006: 13); in other words, that it is both reform-oriented in practice
but also revolutionary and autonomist in spirit. Media reform for them involves a redef-
inition of the very idea of democracy to include new rights such as the right to share
meaning as well as an increased emphasis on participation and equality through acts of
media-making. The objective for media reformers is ‘to build coalitions and campaigns
to engage with and transform the dominant machinery of representation, in both the
media and political fields’ (2006: 16). Indeed, it is harder and harder to insulate media
reform from political reform, in particular, because of the lack of autonomy of the media
‘field’ from the actions of the state and the market despite the fact that the media still
retain the power to affect the operations of other social actors.

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Bob McChesney, in his work on media reform movements (McChesney 2008), echoes
this link between media and political reform. He argues that the contemporary US
media reform movement was triggered by the anti-globalisation struggles that took place
from the late 1990s and which raised serious questions about the incorporation of the
right to communicate within neoliberal frames and policies. The movement had to ‘bed
in’ before taking to the streets.
Media reform, in this situation, has to be pursued using a range of different tactics and
organising in two distinct but complementary ways.
First, we need to engage with the process as it is and not simply as we would like it to
be – or, rather, we use our vision of what the media might look like in order to deal with
how they are currently constituted. We have to use all available channels to spread our
messages, including more formal political channels inside Parliament or Congress. We
need to understand, and sometimes to speak, the language of the opponents of reform;
to grasp the nature of the political cycles and opportunities that exist; to provide ‘facts’
and data to back up our case; and to develop objectives that are not just a series of ulti-
matums. However, this means little unless we have a simultaneous second approach.
We have to be radical as no meaningful campaign for media reform is likely to be
supported by the media itself or, indeed, by any people in positions of power. Of course
there are exceptions, such as the recent movement against NSA surveillance, where
some corporate interests have an interest in being part of a coalition, not least in order
to win back some credibility. But the point is to create the conditions not simply in
which we frame modest demands in the hope of them being accepted but to campaign
hard for a shift in the public’s attitude to these issues precisely in order to apply pressure
on the politicians and regulators who have the formal power to act. Confining reform
demands to very modest and narrow proposals is unlikely to stave off opposition by the
media or politicians. Indeed, the primary audience for media reform is not simply politi-
cians and policy-makers but publics: ordinary citizens whose needs are not being met
and whose communicative rights are being undermined.
For those who want to see a fundamental shift in media power, then media reform is
necessary even if we need to recognise that it can take very different forms, from single-
issue lobbying exercises (‘reform from above’) to more radical demands for media change
as part of wider social change (‘reform from below’). Media reform should not be reduced
exclusively to parliamentary campaigns, although it would be equally short-sighted not
to engage with parliamentary processes as part of a reform campaign. There is, after all,
little point in aiming only at the band-aid, just as there is little point in refusing at least
to treat the wound. We need to delegitimise and pose alternatives to the power struc-
tures that created these problems in the first place but we also need to pay close attention
to the problems themselves. Media reform allows us to do this if we build the necessary
coalitions and if we pursue the right strategies.

Notes
1 Twenty Cabinet ministers met senior Murdoch executives 130 times in the first 14 months of office. See
the full list on Number 10’s website: http://www.number10.gov.uk/transparency/who-ministers-are-
meeting/
2 It should be noted that Des Freedman was Chair of the Media Reform Coalition and Natalie Fenton was
on its steering committee, as well as being on the Board of Directors of Hacked Off, at the time of going
to press.

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 42
SPACES OF EMOTIONS
Technology, Media and
Affective Activism
Inka Salovaara

On 21 February 2012, a group of women wearing colourful balaclavas entered the

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. They proceeded to the front of the cathedral,
where they performed a song entitled ‘Mother of God, Drive Putin away!’ The perfor-
mance by Pussy Riot, later categorised as a ‘Punk Prayer’, lasted less than a minute, after
which security guards seized the performers. A digital recording of this performance was
then used as a music video and was posted on YouTube and various social networks,
quickly gathering over 800,000 clicks. The video itself went viral and caught the atten-
tion of the international media. The group later announced that their performance
sought to criticise the close relationship between the church and the authoritarian state.
On 4 March 2012, the day of the presidential election, two members of Pussy Riot,
Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolonnikova, were arrested and charged with hooligan-
ism motivated by religious hatred. In due course, they received two-year sentences in
corrective labour prisons. The ‘Punk Prayer’, however, created a transnational wave of
activism which included human rights organisations and activist groups, was avidly fol-
lowed by the international media, and lasted until the two members were finally released.
This chapter explores affective activism in urban and digital environments. Firstly, it
examines how affective activism is using space for political action in urban environ-
ments. Secondly, it looks at network mobilisation and digital network action as producing
new political spaces. Thirdly, it reflects on material and immaterial participatory spaces as
assemblages of affective activism. For examples, this chapter looks at transitional socie-
ties where recent affective activism has been particularly visible, such as Pussy Riot and
Voina in Russia, as well as the feminist group Femen in Ukraine.

Affective Activism and Space

In recent years, studies on affective and participatory activism have become more con-
scious of their cultural and social geography. The ‘spatial turn’ has opened up the field
so that human geographers and media scholars can work together within a range of
topics across the humanities and social sciences. New concepts and ideas, such as topol-
ogies, liminal places, fluid spaces, and emotional geographies have gained currency in
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the vocabulary of cultural studies. Concurrently, the humanities have witnessed a surge
of interest in questions of affect, leading to efforts to address the psychosocial dimensions
surrounding activism in urban and digital spaces (Karatzogianni & Kunstman 2012;
Merrifield 2013).
As an environment, the city is a particularly important venue for subversive action,
spontaneous intervention, and emergent political processes, which have been inten-
sively studied as a stage for political protest (Mayer 2009; McFarlane 2011; Lopes de
Souza & Lipietz 2013; Wallace 2014). Simultaneously, interest in digital geographies,
participatory cultures (Brown and Pickerill 2009; Roelvink 2010; Møhring Reestoff
2013; Molnár 2014), and digital network activism related to urban movements has
revolutionised our understanding of networked activism (Allison 2009; Lemos 2010;
Bennett & Sederberg 2012; Timm Knudsen & Stage 2012).
Most of this work centres on the new concept of affective activism, which refers to
the younger generations’ way of channelling their political energies through a variety of
ad hoc activities. These are increasingly conducted via new participatory movements
and internet activism. Affective activism can be broadly defined as political participa-
tion in which the agencies of loyalty move increasingly to agencies of choice: mobilising
affect and combining politics with digital activism. This type of activism is understood
as the art of producing the politics of ‘now’, for which the goal is not just to describe and
criticize social reality, but also to change it. Hence, affective activism has a strong tradi-
tion within feminist and LGBT studies where dilemmas are associated with transformative
action, including issues of patriarchy, authoritarianism, gender, age, and ethnicity-based
‘invisibility’ and inequality.
Specific to new affective activism is its techniques of using space in order to mobi-
lise public attention and affect. The affective activism of groups such as Pussy Riot,
Voina, and Femen create performances in the urban, as well as in the digital space.
Through connective digital networks, these groups utilise social and digital media to
circulate performances and political messages. Finally, by combining urban and digital
spaces, they can merge into an affective assemblage of networks, things, and objects,
which is a characteristic of the new political participatory cultures of affective activ-
ism. Through these assemblages, affective activism enhances emotion, such as quests
for social justice or the right to express oneself, and translates into broader transna-
tional movements.

Affective Activism and Use of Urban Space

It is unsurprising that the urban environment has traditionally been the primary space
for affective activism and political protest. As Nigel Thrift (2007: 171) compellingly
argues, ‘cities can be seen as roiling maelstroms of affect’. In the urban environment,
anger, joy, fear, and the mundane frustrations of the everyday life float in time-spaces,
such as in networks of transportation and public places. In this context, affect is not
merely an individual emotion, but refers to a broader collective line of force that can be
translated into a motion of people, bodies, and collective volition.
For Roelvink (2010: 111), affect relates to the ‘increase or decrease of a collective
body’s capacity to act’. Just as certain politics can enhance feelings of hope, such as dur-
ing Obama’s election campaign, affect can create feelings of possibility in the context of
repressive ideologies and hopelessness. Hence, affect expands the political field by intro-
ducing an awareness of the endless possibilities of change in every moment and bringing

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attention to practices that might capture some of the possibilities to create change
(Roelvink 2010, Anderson 2006: 73).
Arising especially out of the expressive powers of the body, the mobilised collective
affect enables each moment to be open to political possibility. Judith Butler (1993;
1997), in her discussion of performativity as an (political) instrument, argues that per-
formance provides a model for thinking about not only performative utterances, but also
about social processes (in space) more generally.
Pussy Riot, Femen, and Voina use the urban environment for their performances so
that the city as the site of everyday life produces a political space. The urban activities
of the groups range from symbolic stunts in public places to performance art and ‘street
art’ as a way to raise awareness of social injustice and inequality.
Pussy Riot, a spin-off from the Russian street performance group Voina (in Russian,
‘Boh̆ha’ [‘War’]), are known for their provocative performances in Moscow and St
Petersburg. For their political protests, both groups use urban space in multiple ways. In
2008, Voina laser projected a skull and crossbones design onto the wall of the State
Duma (the Russian Parliament building). In order to criticise the close relationship
between the Orthodox Church and the government, a Voina member dressed up as a
priest to openly shoplift in order to show the ‘invulnerability’ of certain groups. In 2010,
the group spray-painted a sizeable phallus on a Saint-Petersburg drawbridge; it became
‘erect’ when the bridge was lifted to face the front of the city’s Federal Security Bureau
headquarters. In the same year, as part of the ‘Palace Revolution’ performance, Voina
members overturned several police cars containing drunken and sleeping officers in
order to highlight the corruption of the Russian police force (Karlin 2012).
The performances of Femen and Pussy Riot provide a more traditional feminist instru-
ment against patriarchalism and political suppression. Femen exercises a new form of
feminist ‘actionism’; specifically ‘sextremism’ in the form of topless protests. In Femen’s
performances, the ‘truth’ of patriarchalism is delivered by the ‘body-posters’ (naked
female bodies) in public spaces. In March 2014, in front of the EU consulate, a Femen
topless protest called upon European leaders to ‘look at Putin with a clear look, but not
stay blind from gas’ (Femen 2014).
Pussy Riot conveys their political message through ad hoc punk performances in
public places. Before the ‘Punk Prayer’, their ‘breakthrough’ performance ‘Putin Zassal’
(‘Putin Chickened Out’) criticised structural sexism, and was performed on the Lobnoye
Mesto, the Place of Skulls, in Moscow’s Red Square. For both groups, Putin’s govern-
ment and Russian domestic and foreign politics has been a common signifier, combining
authoritarianism, corruption, and patriarchalism.
Through these performances, the urban environment becomes an increasingly
political area in which using space translates into political and subversive utterances.
The public places and spaces which they use (Red Square, Duma, Federal Security
Bureau, and official EU buildings) become sites of power and counter power whilst the
performances are mapping out the corruption and nihilism in the city and beyond. In
this context, urban spatiality can be understood through Massey’s (1993) concept of
‘power-geometry’; that is, uneven and asymmetric constellations of power that are con-
stituted by binding together a space and time in different ways in their political historical
context.
These performances and their use of space can be analysed on two levels. Performance
is a means of theorising the day-to-day wrongdoings of a system, which are the means
by which the ‘now’ is produced in space. On another level, performance acts as the

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practical means for a subversive utterance, an ideological texture in urban space that can
be captured, digitally distributed, and archived beyond their improvised nature.
Hence, in terms of new participatory geographies, urban performances are means of
communication that move away from the purely textual and become spatial. In so doing,
they provide new means of expression, as well as develop new political communities to
reach out to. Apart from mobilising affect, these performances also make the power
distribution visible in urban space (such as dominating and controlling space by polic-
ing and state surveillance) and administrative divisions of space, as well as highlighting
the authoritarian architecture of public places and buildings. Due its ability to stage
events and its corresponding ability to involve the digital and social media for progres-
sive ends, affective activism requires the production of digital space in assembling the
urban and the digital network action.

Affective Activism and Producing Digital Spaces

The most salient feature of affective activism is its dependence on and ability to use
digital media. The mediatised logic of political protest and performance is widened via
social and digital mainstream media (especially through columns, blogs, videos, and
online sites) into a broader sphere of attention. This is especially important in transi-
tional or authoritarian countries, such as Russia and Ukraine, where the mainstream
media are controlled by the state or business interests.
Whilst using urban space for political action, affective activism produces new spaces
through digital sites and networks in which the performances are circulated and shared.
Affective politics is multiplied in those social networks where the micro-politics of every
day takes place. Digital and connective time-spaces, where political registers are acti-
vated, point out and catch the individual frustrations and sense of alienation inside the
political and ideological system beyond national borders. In other words, they create a
topological (digital) space that has a global reach.
According to Law (1994: 643), topological notions of space move away from topo-
graphical space in which there are fixed geographical coordinates. Hence, topology can
be defined as spatial construction where spatial objects are not localised, but where both
are constituted and also displaced by (digital) networks (Mol and Law 1994: 647). These
networks combine networks with weak and strong ties in relation to objects and people
(such as official sites, social media networks, and organisations).
Through strong ties, topologies of networks often include one’s closest social media
networks, including family and friends. Thus the networks serve to make people familiar
with information and facilitate attachment to a cause, piece of information, or an issue.
Through weak ties, people receive new information that has not yet formed part of social
reality and that potentially activates new nodes within the network topology. The topol-
ogy has different rules for localising in a variety of coordinates since spatial relations are
performed in networks around issues and nodes that constitute the network (Murdoch
2006: 86).
In terms of digital media topologies and network action, there are a number of
characteristics that are important for understanding their nature, such as density, con-
nectedness, and orientation. Network density is important because it indicates an
empirical relationship with the relative distance of points within the network from their
nearest node, thus having implications for accessibility. Network connectivity identifies
whether movements can be made between locations and network, such as ‘in the move’

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when mobilising public protest. In its orientation, a network might be structured,

intentionally or unintentionally, in such a way that some directions of movement are
better served than others.
Pussy Riot’s ‘Punk Prayer’ is a good example of creating topological space. During
autumn 2012, the Pussy Riot trial dominated news coverage of Russia in both The
Guardian and The New York Times. Although the Pussy Riot phenomenon was first
streamed through culture blogs and soft coverage, it turned into hard news to depict
Russian politics in a certain manner for an international mainstream audience. The case
was publicised and supported on official platforms, including Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, and the International Federation of Human
Rights. These organisations served as nodes for activating their extensive human rights
networks.
A broad coalition of international musicians and artists, such as Sting, Madonna,
Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney, and Björk backed the Pussy Riot and brought in new, net-
worked publics, such as the music industry, producers, consumers, and fans. European
and American cities experienced solidarity actions by radical feminists and liberal left-
ists. Western intellectuals joined forces in signing a petition for immediate release.
These groups added feminist, left-wing political organisations, and liberal universities
into a widening network topology. Public individuals and politicians, such as Lech
Walesa, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Angela Merkel supported the group by criticising the
Russian judiciary. These individuals made the ‘Pussy Riot case’ a symbol of democracy
and freedom of expression, adding other transitional societies with authoritarian govern-
ments to the overall network topology.
Pussy Riot also generated over thirty supportive Facebook pages and had several
hashtags through which their narrative and political statements were tweeted. Pussy
Riot and Voina themselves had several official pages, such as Free Pussy Riot and The
Voice Project, as well as a Wikipedia page documenting all their performances, political
statements, and core ideology.
Through the generation of a dense, broad, and accessible digital network around the
activism, with high connectivity, and serving access through to multiple access points,
Pussy Riot was able to amass network power. Hence, it is an example of a new type of
affective activism in which a new type of political power is conducted within network
formations. The main element of this power is publicity that, through various networks,
can mobilise action and pressure. Moreover, as Bruno Latour (2005) and other network
theorists argue, (Latour & Wolgar 1979, Law 1999) the fact that such networks mix
human actions into non-human actions and materials, such as digital spaces, online
platforms, institutions, recorded performances, petitions, ideas, and digital archives,
allows networks to endure beyond the present and remain stable across space and time.
Producing new political spaces uses the techniques of connecting digital space and
translates that into network spaces and assemblages. Affective technologies, such as
social media, weave new spatial and affective textures, creating socially dense assem-
blages. This also shows how connecting embodied technologies, such as mobile devices
and social media, with organisations and groups’ websites can become powerful ideo-
logical fabrics. There are ‘turbulent passions’, which Thrift (2007: 26) defines as, ‘the
realm of political feeling by concentrating the affective technologies (structures or con-
texts) through which masses of people become primed to act’. Affective technologies
also include the logics of networks and connecting technology that merges material and
immaterial contexts into assemblages.

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Affective Assemblages and Space

Affective activism engages intuitively with the act of assembling and gathering people,
emotional attachment, digital sites, narratives, and networked communities around a
group of issues and performances. Assemblage can be understood in the sense of arrange-
ment, referring to the ontological diversity of grouping of (human and non-human)
agents and the distribution capacities of the agencies involved (Deleuze & Guattari
1987; DeLanda 2006).
When the protests, messages, statements, and performances are archived digitally,
they produce an archaeological site which simultaneously establishes them as part of the
digital political memory of networked communities. Hence, affective activism is in a
state of being continuously assembled. This consists of a widening collection of people,
pages, memes, digital nodes, web archives, artefacts, documents, performances, sites, and
various network logics of topological spaces. It is a composition consisting of an arrange-
ment of miscellaneous digital and material objects, as well as digital networks consisting
of topological spaces.
Topological space created by digital technologies also has very different properties
for political interaction and mobilisation. It enables, for example, digital network
action (DNA) through multiple ways of connecting, sharing data, launching petitions,
and mobilising action and affect through social, organisational, and media networks
(Bennett & Segerberg 2012). The concept of digital affordance is the key to an inter-
actional understanding of participation in technologically enabled environments.
Gaver (1992: 2) defines affordance as, ‘the concept that focuses directly on the rela-
tions between properties of the environment and possibilities for (inter)action’. The
digitally enabled media spaces and their situated possibilities for interaction and activ-
ity depend on agents attuning to constraints and possibilities in that specific
environment. As digital agency is interactive and networked by nature, attuned to
more personalised content sharing across networks, it enables affective attachment as
part of the interaction that often merges the private and public space of interaction.
Hence, the power of affordances lies in the heterogeneous materials assembled in net-
works in accordance with preferred action (political, technological, ideological, and
psycho-social).
Networks also have the ability to draw materials together into new configurations.
Hence, the heterogeneous quality of digital networks enables network action to reach
beyond the small scale to the large scale. Therefore, the network approach to spatiality
and affective activism directs our attention to places where spaces are made and mate-
rialised inside networks, showing how spatial scales are distinguished from one another
in line with the priorities of networks, their orientation, accessibility, and density.
Through the network approach, affective digital spaces can be seen in the production
of new ideological and subversive spaces where the Utopian plans, politics of hope,
mobilisation, ontologies, radical spaces, and spaces of desire find a platform. They also
offer new visual mapping opportunities, where spaces of representation for new political
and ideological vocabularies emerge and the production of new digital infrastructures
takes place. At the same time, the affective assemblages around a digital activism delete
the ‘here and now’ to persistently archive the action and digitally imprint it in the
political memory of the assembled networks. These spaces interact intimately, as the
digital topologies are mobilising affect, acting as archives for otherwise fleeting perfor-
mances, and, hence, help to potentially construct (new) political narratives.

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Affective Activism and Future Research

The spatial order of the daily life of human communities arises from the (social) produc-
tion of space, the construction of meaningful human geographies that both reflect and
configure being in the world. Affective activism can be seen as creating social assem-
blages that form themselves into meaningful human geographies. That is, they are both
cultural and spatial texts through the performances in space, and unique (digital) subcul-
tures through their assembled social and digital networks. When social activism and
affective politics take place in urban and digital environments, they construct their own
emotional geographies.
Affective activism provides new political movements with digital tools and perform-
ative strategies for manipulating material and immaterial spaces for selected purposes.
Michel de Certeau (1984: 93) writes on the strategies of the powerful, practised by ‘the
imposition of power through the disciplining and organization of space’. Tactics of the
weak can be seen as practices to remake the world, converting it to the purposes of
ordinary people. This is de Certeau’s well-known distinction between the strategies of
the powerful and the tactics of the weak that lies behind the power of new political
protest movements and, especially, affective activism.
According to Doreen Massey (1999), no space, however, is a coherent system of dis-
criminations and interconnections, a grid of proper ‘places’. Space always has a deep
systematicity of historic-geographical materialism that is formed and transformed
through countless productions, practices, and performances. Hence, according to
Massey, any space necessarily entails plurality and multiplicity. It follows that spatial
formations, both material and immaterial, involve and invite ‘happenstance juxtaposi-
tions’ and ‘accidental separations’ (Gregory 2000: 772).
Digital topologies and assemblages are produced and constituted in these accidental
separations and happenstance juxtapositions through action and interaction with immate-
rial and immaterial spaces. These affective spaces connect the everyday life to the ‘political
and ideological’, as everyday life becomes continuously open to the emerging possibili-
ties and interventions in the present tense, constituting the networked ‘social’ fabric.
Against the traditional understanding of emotions – which are solely located in the
private sphere and in opposition to the ‘rational’ public sphere where ‘real politics’ take
place – one can argue that new digital and networked public sphere(s) are intimate,
interactive, affective, and yet ‘real’ (Kuntsman 2012). In case of these networked spaces,
affective is not the opposite of cognitive.
As Thrift argues, affects can be

understood as a form of thinking, often indirect and reflective, but thinking all
the same. Similarly, all the manner of spaces that they generate must be thought
of in the same way, as weans of thinking and as thought in action. Affect is a
different intelligence about the world, but it is intelligence nonetheless, and
previous attempts to either relegate affect to the irrational or raise it up to the
level of the sublime are both equally mistaken.
(2007: 36)

In order to understand and explore these affective modes of spatiality as an ‘active’

context and determinant of human life and communication, future research openings
include a range of issues, such as conceptualisations related to the formation of agency

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in participatory politics, the nature of affect in collective formations, the role of reason
and emotion in (digital) democracy theories, and the location of affective politics.
Debates in the field of ‘between the political and the affective’ could include ques-
tions such as, what is the location and scale of ‘politics’? Can it be found only in grand
events, moments of crisis, and scenes of conflicts? Should research focus on the banal,
the ordinary, the fleeting, and invisible instead of obvious sites of subversion? What are
the spaces and affective registers of new political geography? How so the concepts of
rationality and deliberation as part of networked cultures of ‘demos’ relate to affective
politics?
Theoretically, affective activism and participatory geographies also offer new interdis-
ciplinary openings within the area of cultural geography, technology, and social theory.
In emphasising creativity of participation and affective activism, one returns to
Aristotelian ideas of phronesis, of the production of practical wisdom, combining it with
an alternative track that stresses many skills and processes that cannot be found in tra-
ditional theories of participatory politics and representations of political power, but
which are addressed on non-representational theory (Thrift 2000: 556).
Non-representational theory stems from human geography and focuses on mobile
processes, questions around performativity, body, and practices engaging more active
understanding of space. Its commitment to the process approach steers a focus on
meanings and values emerging from practices and events in the everyday life. Non-
representational theories also work with a ‘associate account’ of the ‘social’ drawing from
actor network theories and their relational-material nature (Anderson & Harrison 2010,
13). This relates closely to, for example, Manuel DeLanda’s (2006) assemblage theory,
and social complexity that stems from Deleuze’s theory of assemblages (2001; also
Deleuze & Guattari 1987). These openings negate a way of seeing social reality from
either individual micro perspectives or the societal macro level, to consider social reality
as consisting of social assemblages that themselves create the meaningful ‘social’ reality.
Hence, far from being the fixed and frozen – the dead – these new affective spaces and
assemblages are now, more than ever, becoming fully involved in the modulations of
tensions and transformations in theories of human sciences, adding new pieces to our
understanding on politics, technology, and affect as part of current popular cultures.

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Further Reading
Anderson, Ben & Paul Harrison (Eds.) (2010) Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and
Geography. Farnham: Ashgate.
Garde-Hansen, Joanne and Kristyn Gorton (2013) Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Karatzogianni, Athina & Adi Kuntsman (Eds.) (2012) Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion:
Feelings, Affect and Technological Change. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Thrift, Nigel (2007) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge.

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ASIAN POPULAR
CULTURE REVIEW
Anthony Y. H. Fung,
John Nguyet Erni and Frances Yang

Introduction
The academic significance of popular culture studies has been already legitimized. This
phenomenon is closely related to the mainstreaming of cultural studies in communica-
tion studies, and sociology and anthropology as well; meanwhile, the changing nature
and perspectives of popular culture itself have contributed to its increasing importance
in academia (Lent & Fitzsimmons, 2013). As in cultural studies research, the qualitative
method, like historical analysis, discourse analysis, ethnography (participant observa-
tion), textual analysis and in-depth interviews are intensively utilized in studying
popular culture. The first book that covered Asian popular culture broadly was Asian
Popular Culture (Lent, 1995); the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements was
launched in 2000, following the first Inter-Asia Cultural Studies conference in Taipei
in 1998 (Chen & Chua, 2007). In the last decade, Cultural Studies, the International
Journal of Cultural Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, the European Journal of
Cultural Studies, the Journal of African Cultural Studies and the Journal of Latin American
Cultural Studies have all appeared within the SSCI journals by Thomson Reuters.
Therefore the importance of popular culture studies in academia has been consolidated.
Cultural studies aims to understand and explore the ideology behind social phenom-
ena and contradictions through examining the cultural representation of the individual
or the collective. The historical development of Asian popular culture will not be reiter-
ated in this article (for that, see Fung, 2007).
What is Asian popular culture? The chimera of Asian popular culture is perhaps per-
ceived as stereotypes: something cute, something eerie, something fancy, and something
exotic—as opposed to the complex and well-established symbols and icons of Western
popular imagination. However, ‘Asian’ should not be conceptualized as culturally homo-
geneous. In the globalizing age, Western academia still dominates the world’s trends and
popular culture studies in Asia traditionally fall under the globalization theoretical
framework. Within this context, a study of the relationship between Western—espe-
cially American—popular culture and Asian popular culture is indispensable. Chun
(2012) believes that anti-hegemonic and anti-colonial approaches to culturalism are
inadequate; the Americanization of popular culture in Asia seems to be taken-for-granted
 F U N G , ERN I , A N D YA N G

as a coherent whole and thereby unproblematized. On the other hand, Asian popular
culture exports its own cultural products. In Fung’s (2013) Asian Popular Culture, the
terminology of continuity/discontinuity is used to explain popular culture in Asia.
Global (dis)continuity specifically refers to the degree of continuity of the modes and
structures of operation of the transnational cultural corporations which conventionally
dominate in the transplantation of cultural products from the West to Asia, and in
which local adaptations and modifications arise. Compared with iconic signs and imag-
inaries in the West, like Batman, Harry Potter, Lady Gaga and Hollywood movies, Asian
popular culture finds itself with the characteristics of discontinuity in the global main-
stream culture; for instance, Japan’s pop cultural Kawaii fantasy. Previous research has
mainly focused on the Western mainstream, the output of Hollywood being one of the
more significant. Yet more and more cultural production companies emerge outside
European and American districts, in places like Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong, among
others. These countries own outstanding production capability and mature distribution
networks that can spread their outputs to other regions and districts. South Korea’s
cultural productions, for example, have measurable impact on the American market.
Japanese comic image “Pokemon” is a successful cultural output from Asia to European
and American markets. In 1990, Pokemon swiftly seized Europe and America after its
craze in its homeland, for it takes both traditional cultural intimacy and the accumula-
tive characteristics of capitalism. The tide of “Gangnam style,” originating from South
Korea, swept around the world in 2012; many world stars, including Madonna, perform
Gangnam style in their global concerts. Gangnam style, therefore, has been a classic case
of Asian popular cultural discontinuity. Nevertheless, Asian popular culture has been
studied by reference to global/Western culture; in this aspect, it is never separated from
global mainstream cultural studies.
In Asia, the cultural flow is also changing. In recent years, South Korea has become
a dominating cultural flow, exporting its cultural products abroad, like the band Girl’s
Generation in popular music, and Dae Jang Geum, a TV drama. Moreover, these popular
cultural products are not only being consumed as entertainment, but are more and more
connected with local/indigenous culture. During the 1980s, Japan was the most signifi-
cant popular culture exporting country in Asia. “Japanese cultural productions are seen
as adaptable models and as a means for advancing local popular culture production”
(Otmazgin, 2008: 90–92). Japan provides a popular culture production model that satis-
fies both Asia and the West.
Around 1997, South Korea “waved.” “In the so-called “Korean Wave,” Japanese
production formats were extensively extracted and used in the production of Korean
television dramas and Korean pop music (see, for example, Siriyuvasak and Shin, 2007;
Otmazgin, 2011). In 2005, at the WTO Ministerial Conference, Hong Kong, Dae Jang
Geum’s theme-song was adopted as a protest strategy. The ‘use’ of Korean popular cul-
tural products enriched and complicated the affect subjectivities within the social
movement, and the success of Korean protesters in the mobilization of the Hong Kong
public’s affect epitomizes the hegemonic flow, or soft power, of Korean TV dramas in
Asian popular culture (Leung, 2009).
It is clearly suggested that the struggles and interactions between Western (powerful)
popular culture and other (weaker) districts are still the core subject in popular culture
research. The most significant two topics are: first, the relation of popular culture to
the modernization process, including the construction of modern identity; and, second,
its direct or indirect influences on people’s daily lives and consumption. As Chen

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(2010) puts it, “America” and “American-ness” as concepts are subjectively perceived
within the Asian body politic which helps to construct the non-Western modern sub-
jectivity. Shin (Korea) and Ho (Taiwan) (2009) suggest that popular music is one of
the discourses reflecting the regional ideology. They analyze US influences on South
Korea and Taiwan from the value-laden concept of Americanization. Boulou Ebanda
de B’béri (2008) “examines conceptual tensions between black cultural and political
identity in order to discern new conjunctural ‘practices of identity’ occurring, specifi-
cally, in some black films.” In the globalization context, different regional popular
cultures influence and change people’s daily lives and consumer/consumption culture.
Bao (2008) explores the relationship between consumerism and contemporary
Shanghai urban popular culture.

Three Approaches to Studying Popular Culture

In many instances, mass communication studies deal with popular culture forms such as
television, movies, comics, advertising, and the Internet, and the concepts and theo-
retical frames of mass communication fit popular culture as well. Therefore, three basic
approaches are found in the study of popular culture: the production, the text and the
audience. Marx proposes that cultural outputs produced on the basis of superstructure/
economic base binary relation directly embody the interests of the privileged, and they,
in turn, gain more profits from the organizations for cultural production. In this regard,
popular culture functions as a social relation mechanism. According to the Marxist
paradigm, popular culture should be considered as a “production mode,” and the text
and practices should be situated in the historical context of cultural production in order
to understand the socio-economical background of reception and consumption, and
further examine the political, social and cultural ideology, and foresee the future.

Production Studies
The analysis of cultural production primarily focuses on the cultural production industry.
For example, Nieborg and van der Graaf (2008) make explicit the relationship between
non-market game developers (modders) and the game development companies through
game technology, and examine the particular marketing and industrial discourse in this
area.
In cultural production studies, the music industry especially has gained much atten-
tion. Percival (2011) investigates the relationship between music radio and the record
industry in the UK to examine industry structure and agency, so that how the produc-
tion of popular music is shaped can be further discussed. Meanwhile, the relationship
between technologies and popular cultural production is a matter of significant atten-
tion by the scholars. In Asia, the popular music industry keeps changing since digital
technologies have become mature. Lee (2009) analyzes how digital technologies
reorganized the Korean music industry, and how they have impacted on the way the
audience experiences the music. In that case, popular music culture will be diversified
in the future and its nature may be redefined. In the globalization context, comparative
paradigms are widely used to study the popular culture industries in different countries.
Shin & Ho (2009) compare the specific practices of domestic popular music develop-
ment in Korea and Taiwan to examine the workings of Americanization in relation to
popular music as a value regime, and analyze, within the historical comparative

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framework of the article, the economic, social and cultural forces at work in South Korea
and Taiwan.

Text Studies（文本研究）
Until now, text has been one of the most dominant perspectives/aspects in cultural
studies research. Text includes all cultural genres, including TV, films, popular music,
novels and games. Decoding and analyzing texts help us to explore contemporary
society. Lei (2009) applies textual analysis to study the Taiwanese TV idol drama
Green Forest, My Home, and examines the Occidental myth and its discontents hid-
den in the texts. Focusing on texts also contributes to our understanding of cultural
differences in a geopolitical context: Kim (2009) analyzes the place of Korean dramas
in the various discourses of Japan, Hong Kong and mainland China in order to under-
stand the relationship between trans-cultural practices and the local societies in which
they take place. Identity is a significant issue in text studies. Teo (2008) examines the
interrelationships between Hong Kong cinema and its mainland Chinese counterpart
through the texts and considers whether or not the ideal of an Asian cinematic iden-
tity is realized.
Law (2008) puts forward “collaborative colonialism” as a political-cultural formation
that is associated with the identity perception of Hong Kong local people as represented
in undercover series of films. By studying the texts of inter-medial songs, films and print
sources, Fornäs (2010) indicates four positions in the successive integration of both jazz
and identities, from separation to fusion. Merayo (2012) is interested in the socialising
function exerted by the medium of television; his analysis of two Spanish telenovelas
identify some of the semantic keys used today by the television media. We do not have
space in this article to bracket all of the cultural studies focusing on texts. However, we
should highlight that texts other than those which are European and American draw
academic attention: Warwick (2000) analyzes identity issues in the South Asian com-
munity in Toronto through the medium of Bhangra Music.

Audience Studies
As part of communication studies, the significance of audience research has risen since
World War I, the point at which it became regarded as an indispensable area of study.
However, differing from the traditional audience studies in the mass communication
field, audience studies in the popular culture field orient the focus to fandom. Fandom
is a common feature of popular culture in industrial societies (Fiske, 1992). Compared
to the ambiguous position and function of the “traditional” audience, the role of fans of
popular culture attracts more discussion and analysis.
Fandom is typically fascinated with cultural forms that the dominant value system
denigrates or suppresses; thus it is always associated particularly with those disempow-
ered by any combination of gender, age, class and race (Fiske, 1992). Fandom has always
intersected with gender and politics in Asian popular culture. Fans of a certain pop star
or a cultural product re-perceive or consolidate their gender identities through consum-
ing the stars and products. The Asian diva Faye Wong, who comes from Beijing and
found success in Hong Kong, is considered a popular heroine, especially among young
women seeking alternative lifestyles and fantasizing about gender relations outside the
well-worn conventions of the pop music industry:

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Faye’s ambitions seem to resonate with fans who are negotiating tensions between
their own public personae and the traditional expectations of women in Chinese
societies. This process of identification has produced a fandom around which
homologies of public discourse crystallize, unexpectedly providing semiotic
resources for feminist and proto-feminist ideologies (Shepherd, 1991; Shepherd
and Wicke, 1997; Kumar and Curtin, forthcoming [2002]).
(Fung and Curtin, 2002)

Not only is the perception of gender identity influenced by the fandom culture, the
relationship presented in the popular culture forms is re-narrated by the fans to expand
the gender studies with new disciplines. The re-narration of cultural products is always
realized/worked out in the fan community. An online fan-fiction community is devoted
to the pairing of the contestants of the 2006 season of Super Girl, “an entertainment
program featured on Hunan Satellite TV that enjoys great popularity in the Sinophone
world” (Yang and Bao, 2012). In this case, Super Girl fans “mobilize their emotional
capital to create a space of female homosociality, intimacy and affect in which a new
generation of young Chinese women actively enact friendship and female subjectivity
in a way that refuses the normalization of gender, sexuality and social relations” (Yang
and Bao, 2012). The great agency of fans is most apparently manifested in redefining
the boundaries in gender through the consumption of pop stars or popular culture prod-
ucts. In Korean Wave studies, the transcultural and ambivalent desires of audiences in
the various regional markets multifariously reconstruct and re-identify South Korean
masculinity.
Fandom culture can be also discussed within the politics discourse. Still, in the famous
case of Super Girl, the power relationship between the media and the audience has
altered with the fans’ active involvement (Cui & Lee, 2010). The “affect mobilization”
(Leung, 2009) extracted from Korean TV drama Dae Jang Geum is utilized in the social
movement. The emotional investment and engagement of fans can contribute to recon-
figuring the relationships between the public, popular and political in inter-Asia cultural
traffic (Tsai, 2007). Fan communities are almost always founded online with new digital
technologies through which they have carved out alternative practices in the circula-
tion, production and consumption of popular culture products. In the case of online
Chinese fans of Japanese TV drama, “the online Chinese fans are guerrilla fighters in the
politics of autonomy, network and low-cost digital technology; they are attempting to
break down time-space constraints and the official distribution hierarchy” (Hu, 2005).

Trends
Case Studies/Individual Phenomena
Popular culture in Asia is not only studied at the macro-level; more and more outstanding
individual cases are studied in examining both the global continuity/discontinuity and
domestic cultural flows in Asia. Japan is regarded as the first center of Asian popular
culture. It is suggested that Japanese popular culture has long proliferated outside that
country’s boundaries, particularly in East and Southeast Asia since the late 1970s
(Iwabuchi, 2004). In the early 1990s, Japanese popular culture, from animations, comics,
pop music, and TV dramas to computer games, food, fashion and idols, spectacularly
spread and became loved throughout the Asian region. Research on Japanese culture

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has dominated Asian academia. Lent and Fitzsimmons (2013) state that in the 1980s
and 1990s, Japan was awash with English-language, popular culture-oriented books.
However, since the first Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference in Taipei in 1998 and
the launch of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements in 2000, Asian popular culture is
authoritatively conceptualized in Asian academia. In this mature discourse, the “Korean
wave,” which many consider has prevailed since the late 1990s, is studied thoroughly at
both macro and micro level. Unlike studies on Japanese popular culture, individual
Korean cultural production is a matter of significant concern by scholars; such outputs
include successful pop stars, such as Rain, Bae Yong Jun and Boa; series of TV drama,
such as Dae Jang Geum, Winter Sonata and My Sassy Girlfriend; and some particular
cultural phenomena, like Gangnam Style. South Korea is not unique: after 2000, “pop
music stars” in Hong Kong and Taiwan became a significant site in which to elaborate
popular culture. Hong Kong divas Sammi Cheng and Faye Wong are examined from
gender perspective (by Fung and Curtin, 2002), whereas Jay Chou from Taiwan is ana-
lyzed as part of an enquiry about geopolitics in the globalization context (Fung, 2008).
During 2004–2006, the reality TV show Super Girl, produced by Hunan TV China,
gained unprecedented success in the market and drew scholars’ interests at the intersec-
tion of audience research and emotional geography (Yang and Bao, 2012), democratiza-
tion (Jian and Liu, 2009) and media power studies (Cui and Lee, 2010).
The significance of case studies/individual cultural phenomenon in Asia popular cul-
ture is due to the link with global cultural production. The global discontinuity becomes
more and more active and today it is used to redefine what Asian pop culture is. In the
process of resisting global continuity and exporting culturally indigenous forms, “some
Asian popular culture productions consciously disconnect and distinguish themselves
from the West and stand out in the global market” (Fung, 2013). The export of popular
culture forms from West does not only consist of stars or specific products, but more
importantly, the producing mechanism/model, like TV formats. By contrast, the discon-
tinuity of Asian popular culture is manifested through individual cultural product or
phenomena, such as Pokeman in Japan, which serves as an example of how cultural
products can be stripped of their Asian identity and marketed to the Americas and
Europe, and Gangnam Style, widely discussed by the Western mainstream (mainly
American) media and scholars who reflect on whether the Korean Wave has attained
global recognition.

Globalizing Context
These case studies on the one hand demonstrate prominent achievements in Asian
popular culture production, but, on the other hand, one question is left: Are there any
production formats or systematic producing models that can be exported besides the
individual cases? The study of Asian popular culture should be situated in a globalizing
context, set against the Western world (mainly America) as the reference. We list four
dominating issues/trends/perspectives to understand Asian popular culture in the glo-
balization discourse.
Firstly, under the dominance of global continuity, cultural localization and adaptation
become a main part to construct the contemporary Asian popular culture. It describes
and prescribes how global popular culture is being transplanted in Asia; it is perhaps
perceived as Americanization or Western modernization. The popular culture being
transplanted generally retains its original nature and global content; the forces of

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localization can be comprehended to economic and/or political interests, and this

cultural adaptation indicates a negotiated outcome between the forces of globalization
and market needs.
In the mass media scope, TV format exporting from the West is localized in order to
satisfy the political demands and market; Fung and Zhang 2011 examine how the
Chinese adaption of the US show Ugly Betty, Ugly Wudi, is situated in a more politically
restrictive but rapidly liberalizing economic climate. An emerging trend of global con-
tinuity can also be seen in the global magazine businesses’ operations in Asia. Through
the observation and analysis of the management and operations of Trends Group, Ma
(2013) addresses that the localization can be understood as China dictates which aspects
of modernity they desire through the mediation of growing consumer market. In respect
of other popular culture forms John Erni has conducted a (2013) empirical study of
Harry Potter consumption in China, where it is viewed as a symbol of power, liberation,
creativity, and, above all, a world of fantasy that offers the Chinese an escape from their
own shifting social environment, which defuses the social contradictions that the gov-
ernment may be unable to permanently solve at the moment. Due to the belief that
“becoming global” is inevitably related to Chinese youths’ personal development and
the national development of China, Harry Potter is a perpetuation of globalization in
China; it is the case of the West entering an Asian market.
Secondly, though desegregated from the global business structure, “the emerging
Asian cosmopolitan, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore has pro-
duced local pop culture that absorbs heavily and readily global cultures in its trajectories
of development” (Fung, 2013). These emerging cosmopolitan areas have found new
potentialities primarily through connecting their indigenous culture and contextual spe-
cialties to global cultures, aesthetics, technologies and more. Popular music is one of the
common domains in Asia that illustrates this local cultural absorption of global culture.
On the basis of adopting reggae of all forms, a new music style has been established in
Thailand (Sawangchot, 2013) which blends together local and global elements that
satisfies the local market. In Taiwan’s online gaming industry, it can be found in the huge
popularity of massive multi-player online role-playing games of American origin (Chi,
2013). Chi perceives that the success of Asian popular culture products can be attrib-
uted to the rise of modern technologies (introduced mainly from West) and their close
implantation into local communities as a localized popular culture. Some popular cul-
ture products, perceived as successfully blending the global and local elements, become
aggressive in pursuing presence and achievements in the Western market (mainly in
America). For example, K-pop (Korean pop) star Rain attained temporary commercial
success in the Asian market but finally failed in America. “There exists a serious diffi-
culty in commodifying Asian pop in the American market, which is not only a global
market at the abstract level but also a specific geocultural market at the concrete level
(Hesmondhalgh 2002: 180), which cannot be solved by presenting aesthetic difference”
(Shin, 2009).
Thirdly, the mode and tendency of cultural flows inside Asia is always changing. From
the late 1980s to early 1990s, Japan was regarded as the forerunner of exporting popular
culture to other Asian countries.

In Asia, Japanese cultural productions are seen as adaptable models and as a

means for advancing local popular culture production (Otmazgin, 2008:
90–92). Some scholars suggest that in the so-called Korean Wave, Japanese

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production formats were extensively extracted and used in the production of

Korean television dramas and Korean pop music (see, for example, Siriyuvasak
and Shin, 2007).
(Otmazgin, 2011: 266)

Studying the Korean Wave will contribute to the exploration of the relations between
Korea and other Asian countries; pop music and TV dramas are the most prominent
cultural forms. Among all the Korean TV productions, Dae Jang Geum has aroused the
greatest interest. Kim (2012) has examined how Dae Jang Geum drives Chinese,
Taiwanese, Japanese, and Thai audiences to screen-tourism, and Leung (2009) analyzed
its affective mobilization function in a social movement in Hong Kong. According to
Kim (2009), Winter Sonata, like Dae Jang Geum, is another successful TV drama capable
of powerfully affecting audiences’ behavior. Reception studies is another approach that
can be used to examine Korean cultural impacts on other Asian regions. Huang (2011)
analyzed the consumption of South Asian “Hollywood” films & East Asian trendy dra-
mas in Taiwan, with special reference of Japan-mania and the Korean Wave. Chan and
Xueli (2011) have studied how Singaporean women perceive themselves as female sub-
jects while watching Korean TV dramas in a gender-hierarchical society. Vu and Lee
(2013) investigated whether Vietnamese women’s perception of South Korea through
watching South Korean soap operas influenced their intention to marry a South Korean
man. “For decades, Hong Kong’s popular culture has succeeded in exporting popular
culture products through creating and perpetuating an abstract kind of Chinese nation-
alism and identity for a global audience” (Lo, 2005). Nowadays, in terms of production
and export capacity, Hong Kong and Taiwan is regarded as occupying the same in-
between position as the South Korean popular cultural industry (Chua, 2006). Infernal
Affairs (2003–2004), co-produced by Hong Kong and mainland China but set entirely
in Hong Kong with Hong Kong actors, achieved great market responses and successfully
sold the format to Hollywood. At nearly the same time, in 2000, Taiwan reproduced a
Japanese manga story into a television series, Meteor Gardens. The series was an instant
and long-term success throughout East Asia, for Japan itself, South Korea, and mainland
China all reproduced localized versions in succession.

Modernity
Gender

Queer theory is increasingly emphasized in studying Asian popular culture. It is widely

used in explaining popular cultural phenomena, especially in examining the relationship
of homosexual, bisexual, or transgender people that is beyond the heterosexual main-
stream discourse; for instance, the cultural representation of queer in TV or movie texts
(Soe Tjen Marching, 2008; Yuen Shu Min, 2011; Frederik Dhaenens, 2012). More
importantly, popular culture in Asia has become a common cultural form to record the
development of queer politics. Asian popular culture also offers a perspective from which
to analyze gender. It creates a new discursive space to re-define/reconstruct masculinity/
femininity beyond the Western discourse. For instance, in academia, the issue of
masculinity and gender roles is much studied in the West. The dominant forms of mas-
culinity are always configured by Western scholars i.e., “Hegemonic masculinity can be
defined as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted

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answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy” (Connell, 2001) or “dominant

forms of masculinity can be economically exploitative and socially oppressive” (Jackson,
1991). However, masculinity is categorized and re-identified into soft, global, and post-
modern masculinity in South Korean popular culture (Jung, 2010: 7), according to the
different contextual relationships between South Korea and each region, post-modernism
(Japan), trans-pop-consumerism (Singapore), and neo-Orientalism (the West). Moreover,
in some regions, such as Indonesia, the hegemonic masculinity is fragile and in transition.

Studies on Piracy

According to Jean Baudrillard, the concept of forgery is basically a product of modernity:

it was around the 19th century that copying began to be considered illegitimate and no
longer art (1981: 103). Piracy was central to the foundational spirit of Western moder-
nity. In the globalizing era, piracy is one of the most distinctive characteristics of Asian
popular culture. It consists of two levels, the first being the consumption of piracy of
popular culture products, from TV dramas and films to luxury brands; and the second
being the piracy-related activities themselves. “Media piracy markets in East Asia play a
conspicuously important role in fuelling the regional confluences of popular culture by
facilitating and accelerating the diffusion of related products throughout restrictive con-
ditions” (Otmazgin, 2005: 514) such as pirated cassettes (Manuel, 1993). Some scholars
(Sundaram, 2009; Hu, 2008) suggest that pirate/recycling electronic cultures help define
the Asian engagement with contemporary modernity dominated by the Western world.
Actually, the current hysterical celebration of the new is extremely recent, and is
grounded in the new economy and its legal basis. This urgent anxiety to minimize the gap
and time lag between Asian developing technology manufacturing and Western-style
globalized consumerism creates Chinese Shanzhai culture, which is comprehended as an
alternative modernity that is taking place in a developing country such as China. In Asia,
China is understood by the world as a pirate nation. From this perspective, it is concluded
(Hu, 2008) that the power struggle between authenticity and counterfeit, brand name
and no-name, legality and illegality, state and municipality, and the rural/industrial and
urban/modern is part of the ongoing process of the modernization of China.

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 44
CAPITALS WITHOUT
COUNTRIES
Cairo and Beirut in English
Jenine Abboushi

Global English is a form of popular culture. It is distinct from Anglophone English,

perhaps surprisingly, as Anglophone cultures are by definition transcultural. Yet
Anglophone cultural forms, originally grounded in former British colonies, are, when
addressing bilingual publics, paradoxically less easily transmittable globally. In contrast,
narratives written in global English are remarkably monocultural, particularly in terms
of social class. Contemporary narratives writing cities in global English are perhaps the
clearest examples of this phenomenon, as they seek to represent the nation and, in so
doing, paradoxically unground it. Both Ahdaf Soueif’s Cairo: My City, Our Revolution
and Zeina El-Khalil’s Beirut, I Love You—works written directly in English—write third-
world capitals with no countries. In fact, these texts are strangely ungrounded in either
Cairo or Beirut, and seem to cede into an extra-geographical realm of global culture.
They are marked by interesting differences, however, and these differences help clarify
some of the new forms and politics of global English in media and culture.
Expression in global English involves full translation. Critic Lawrence Venuti notes
that with the world dominance of English comes an increasing insularity of English-
speaking countries; a decreased interest in things foreign, foreign writers, or translations
of anything (231). Global English writings suggest easy cultural access. In this way, their
cultural function is contrary to what Wael Hasan calls “translational texts,” or texts that
suggest what is left out, texts that are at the crossroads of two or more languages. In
contrast to global English texts, then, translational texts suggest untranslatability, which
anthropologist James Clifford identified as important to mark the impossibility of easy
cultural access or total comprehension (754; 764). On the notion that anything can be
translated, Susan Sontag writes: “communication is a euphemism for trade” (344).
Global English implicitly represents interlinguistic, translational zones, and yet it
engages in what critic Sherry Simon calls a commerce of cultural exchange, a model of
multiculturalism in which each fends for him/herself in “an empire of respected differ-
ences” (1999: 10). Texts representing interlinguistic zones (like Cairo and Beirut) can-
not reasonably be represented in such humanistic terms of “inter” but must be “trans,”
allowing for “contamination,” cultural transformation, a wide range of histories, and
new cultural paradigms (Simon 1990: 30).
 CA I RO A N D BEI RU T I N E N G L I S H

Ahdaf Soueif’s Cairo is written for an English readership, and not an Anglophone or
bilingual one that knows Arabic, and that partakes in the country or region in one way
or another. The title tells of a two-part genre: it is both an urban chronicle, a first-hand
account of the revolution at Tahrir Square (“our revolution”), and a memoir of Soueif’s
Cairo (“my city”). The publisher’s directives are almost palpable; solicitations to write
it (“the time for your book on Cairo has come,” the publisher tells Soueif over the phone
as she stood in Tahrir at the beginning of the uprising), as well as instructions to person-
alize it for an English readership, to give an account of her direct participation in the
revolution, as well as of the experiences her family members, people she knows or
encounters, and weave into this her childhood and youthful memories of place and
personal moment.
Beirut, I Love You is a youthful, fantasy memoir by Zena El-Khalil, written from the
perspective of a privileged, Americanophone Beiruti who has lived in (a Lebanese-
colonized part of) Africa, NYC, London, Beirut. The memoir is part native, part exilic
in its sensibility, full of shallow, self-indulgent fantasy, as well as humor and insight. The
genre is counter-intuitive: a memoir written by a young woman, accounts of her own
overlaying “memories” of war, loss, love, and devotion that exceed her life span in both
directions. What is striking about Beirut, I Love You is the way in which it expresses the
sensibilities of a new generation of post-war Ras Beirutis that is fully fluent in no lan-
guage; that properly commands no native tongue.
In fact, El-Khalil’s work is one of a growing body of writings that combine creative
and journalistic genres, often text and image, using local, minority Englishes by bi- or
trilingual twenty-something writers. The new Beirut magazine The Outpost, for example,
creatively explores these regional popular cultural terrains. It is published in Beirut and
sold in regional capitals and in Europe, and its projects seem unencumbered by national
boundaries, identity, or even language. Yet because of this editorial will to offer a forum
for writings in such a “trans” mode, The Outpost is all the more grounded in a dominant
Beirut youth culture sensibility. One issue has contributors deliberately get lost for
24 hours in four regional cities, and narrate each. In a piece titled “Where Do You
Belong When You Don’t Belong,” an expatriated Lebanese living in Lebanon, feeling
American without being one or without ever having lived in the United States, recounts
of her retort to a psychiatrist in Lebanon who diagnoses her with culture shock: “But
how can my own culture shock me?” She splits an inseparable expression, as non-native
English often does, thus ironizing and displacing the subject. The popular band Mashrou`
Leila also takes on Beirut, war, memory, as well as sexual politics, incorporating local
musical cadences (Armenian) with global forms, particularly by singing Arabic as if in
English (omitting consonant stresses and playing semantic registers) with humor and
brilliance. Media and performance artist Rabi’ Mroué builds works around ironic differ-
ences between Arabic, English, and French, the languages as well as political and
cultural meanings. In his installation at the Rivington Gallery in London, “The People
Are Demanding,” the awkward English title, evoking traditions at once of French
Republicanism (le peuple demandent) and Arab nationalism (el-sha’ab utalib), is visibly
displayed under revision and “construction.” By these examples, I refer to a growing
cultural and media production in a kind of anti-fluent global English, at its best self-
conscious and wry, that is gaining attention both internationally and locally.
These interestingly ungrounded uses of English relate to critic Ruth Morse’s idea of
the scope, influence, and geographic reach of not the English language per se, but the
“idea” of English:

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Not only is English readily available to more than just some people, the idea of
the availability of Englishes is pervasive. Music and the movies, subtitles and
supertitles, bilingual editions . . . all encourage a new state of biglossia that is
not like the long sway of Latin.
(127)

These new forms of cultural production in minority Englishes also conform to what
French philosophers Deleuze, Guattari, and Brinkley define as minority literature: lit-
erature a minority makes in a major language (16). Indeed, the production in minority
Englishes discussed above “deterritorialize” English; find its “non-culture and underde-
velopment, the zones of linguistic third-worlds through which a tongue escapes . . . ”
(27). Deleuze, Guattari, and Brinkley describe the social and political conditions which
lead to what they call minority uses of major languages: “How many people live today
in a language that is not their own? Or else, no longer even know their tongue—or do
not know it yet—and know a major tongue which they are forced to use poorly (19)?”
For Deleuze, Guattari, and Brinkley this relationship of immigrants and minorities
to dominant languages and cultures is a condition that should in fact be cultivated by
others: “becoming a stranger in one’s own language, attaining the nomad and the immi-
grant and the gypsy in our own language,” is a means to create revolutionary change:
the new (18). An idea implicit in this argument is that minority Englishes that are not
consciously and purposefully fashioned (presumably from a standpoint of social and/or
intellectual privilege), but are instead consequences of actual socio-economic and
cultural conditions, would not necessarily be capable of inaugurating hoped-for revo-
lutionary change.
In other words, new forms of knowledge and social practices seem to depend on not
simply being a minority, nomad, communicating third-world English, but of artfully
developing such conditions and forms of communication. The examples of The Outpost,
El-Khalil’s memoir, and Mashrou` Leila’s Anglified Arabic, Mroué’s art installations and
what he calls “textual” performances combine both (necessarily communicating in
third-world Englishes and artfully doing so). Communication in minority global
Englishes paradoxically also depends on “small distance” translation—Simon’s impor-
tant idea that she develops in a cultural study of linguistically divided Montreal. For one
thing, the close proximity of urban interaction ensures that languages are not kept
separated (the desire of Québéqois culture); they “contaminate” one another, but also
expose what Deleuze, Guattari, and Brinkley refer to as “the polylingualism of your own
tongue.” Morse rightly declares that “familiarity damages attention.” She argues that
being bilingually aware—of thinking bilingually—ensures the kind of “slow-motion
defamiliarization” necessary to correct the impediment of native speakers who are too
aware (127–128).
Cultural representations of third-world cities in particular raise anxious questions, on
a global stage, about the link between language choice, publics, and national and cul-
tural representation. “Translated” third-world city literature (journalistic memoirs and
fiction) sits at the heart of these crossroads. For one thing, “there has never been a
unilingual city,” as Simon writes, pronouncing an obvious but skirted fact. More impor-
tant is the distinction she makes between the normative cosmopolitan multilingualism
of metropolises and linguistically divided cities. In the examples I discuss, English
cultural forms forge divides, not physical ones (as in Simon’s Montreal), but implicit
separations and omissions of language, readership, and national as well as cultural

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representation. Never far away from these separations and omissions is the question of
the cultural and political work of popular genres, particularly narratives about war-torn,
geopolitically strategic cities, as well as the question of the relationship to dominant
media representations of city, language, people, culture. In other words, the cultural
politics of linguistic separation and national/cultural representation in such works can
parallel dominant Western media representations.
“Translated” is in quotes because both Soueif’s Cairo and El-Khalil’s Beirut are written
directly in English, not translated from an Arabic original, even though these works are
written by natives of the respective capitals of predominantly and historically Arabic-
speaking countries. Soueif, known for her Anglo-Arab literary writings, political
writings, and journalism (she writes for The Guardian and El-Shorouq), writes Cairo
exclusively for an English readership. El-Khalil, less known, but whose writing finds
company with a burgeoning number of artists, writers, and singers using minority
Englishes, primarily addresses a new generation of Americanophone Lebanese (and
eventually a more general English-speaking readership). Both works are not comparable
to Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, written in Turkish (and then translated) for local and global
readerships simultaneously. (El-Khalil’s uses of English bears some similarities, however,
in style and narrative tone to The Bastard of Istanbul by Turkish writer Elif Shafak, who
writes in English as well as Turkish.) Pamuk anticipates both native and global reader-
ships when he writes in Turkish. In her fiction exclusively, Soueif does the same, but
with strategies different from those of Pamuk. Her fictional work, especially In the Eye
of the Sun, is notable for its Arabic-inflected prose, bicultural knowledges, how she often
writes “in translation,” and how she herself considered her novel already translated.
One would think that the rhetoric and linguistic strategies that create the discomfort
and foreignness, sometimes provocative, of In the Eye of the Sun, would give a rocky
quality. The rhetoric of the novel is at times unconventional (her strategies of literal
translation from Arabic, untranslatable idioms, experiences, references), and yet it is
smooth. The rhetoric of Cairo, a non-fictional work written for global English media
publics, is, in contrast, not smooth, and yet it is uncomfortable for entirely different
reasons. This is ironic because it is straightforward, written in simple language to a single
readership, and with a clear goal: to illuminate her Cairo and the revolution for those
who know little about its contexts. In Cairo, Soueif does not write Arabic into English,
does not write “in translation,” and does not anticipate a bilingual readership that
belongs to her worlds (in the plural) in addition to the explicit English readership. In
other words, it is not just that Cairo is directed to a general English readership, but it
excludes bicultural audiences that are interested and implicated, and cannot be reason-
ably be blocked. There is nothing wrong, per se, with writing a work about revolutionary
Cairo that targets a broad public, but it must also anticipate an Arabic-Anglophone
readership that partakes in the world she illuminates.
What I am suggesting is odd: a monolinguistic work about Cairo, and especially Cairo
in turmoil, must anticipate bilingual and bicultural readerships. There are several rea-
sons for this: first, they will necessarily constitute a large part of the readership. Second,
and more importantly, the monolingualism of the text (which is not “translational”),
and particularly the one-dimensional readership anticipated by Soueif, pulls the subject
matter and what she has to say about it, onto a flat plane, losing diversity, complexity,
and depth. There is something wrong, for example, with the pronouns in Cairo. This is
unprecedented in Soueif’s writing as a whole (her fiction and compelling political com-
mentary), as her writings always anticipate multiple audiences (European and Arab),

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which are sometimes incommensurate, difficult to negotiate. And Soueif normally does
this well. At once writing in English to England and Europe and imagining being read
in Egypt and the Middle East is not only possible but imperative when writing in English
about Arab contexts and experiences. And this dynamic is rhetorically staged, evident
in the language of a text. This imperative goes for Robert Fisk, too, who has been living
in Beirut off and on for decades (and so writing to multiple audiences is not a condition
for Arab writers only in such contexts): it would be unlikely he could produce, in
English, knowledgeable works without also anticipating being read by Arabophone
readers who are a part of and engaged in the worlds about which he writes.
The function of pronouns is disturbing in Soueif’s Cairo. Throughout she writes “we”
of Tahrir Square, and her vision and rhetoric expresses little social consciousness or
awareness of social divides. Soueif consistently identifies Egyptians in the singular,
“some of us died,” or “millions of us died.” “We” and “my” are roughly interchangeable
in the book, as in “my beloved Abu El-Ela Bridge,” and “my city is mine again” (41).
The city is personified as a woman, and the rhetoric is even sappy: “and through it I
loved her, and I loved her more,” and “my city is degraded and bruised” (43–45). She
writes of long “shying away” from writing about Cairo, and she does so in the sentimental
terms of love and loss (“it hurt too much”):

The city puts her lips to our ears, she tucks her arm into ours and draws us close
so we can feel her heartbeat and smell her scent, and we fall in with her, and
measure our step to hers, and we fill our eyes with her beautiful, wounded face
and whisper that her memories are our memories, her fate is our fate.
(9)

This kind of language perhaps has Arabic undertones in terms of sentimental, emo-
tional, flowery style, but typically has more depth as such modes in Arabic have rich and
diverse rhetorical histories.
There is an almost hilarious lack of social consciousness in Cairo. Soueif and her
nieces, participating in the uprising at Tahrir Square, eyes streaming from teargas, think
of a “nip” into the Ramses Hilton for tea. In her book, family members are ennobled,
made a microcosm of an idealized Egyptian populace, Together, her family members
seem to represent all that Egypt needs: Soueif’s mother Fatima (“Fifi”), the brainy, intel-
lectual;  Soueif’s aunt Awatif (“Toufi”), the keeper of tradition; Soueif’s brother, who
put together initiatives to “dismantle the security establishment” and “overhaul pre-
university education” (20); Ali, the heroic son of “our [Soueif’s] help” Um Nagla;
Soueif’s own son, Ismail, who orchestrates media contacts in London; and her sister,

a force of nature, a rebel child who became the backbone of the family; a
brilliant mathematician who dedicated her professional life to saving her
students . . . a radical Romantic who has spread her sheltering wings over
friends and family and brought up three children who’ve shown like comets in
the skies of our revolution.
(129)

The nicknames familiarize the reader, inviting entry into a charming authentic
Egyptian family. Ironically for a work exclusively targeting English publics, there is a
mixed and confused sense of audience in Cairo. By the sentimentalism, Soueif seems

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to confiscate other identities, and her family members are set up to represent all of
Egypt.
For a bicultural readership, Soueif’s rhetoric is insupportable, and the only memorable
parts are quotes from others around her. Interestingly, when she directly translates
Arabic quotes of those around her in Tahrir Square, these same methods (collective
identity expressed in the singular, personification of the city) gain color, emotion, depth,
and humor. A man near her declares, in amusement and with contagious enthusiam: “Ya
Masr (Oh Egypt!), it’s been a long time. We have missed you” (9). And about Mubarak’s
regime: “Before they open their mouths they’re liars; they breathe lies” (15). The “young
Cairene” voices she leaves us with at the end of her book, like Mona, whose account—
about a boy name Amr, arrested by the police, whose arm she let go of—bears the mark-
ings of Arabic:

When I learned he’d been sentenced all I could think of was that I should not
have let go of him. My mind keeps replaying the same shot: my hand letting go
of his arm, letting him get into the car. I shouldn’t have let him go. I should
have listened to that voice inside me, that uneasy voice that said hold on to
him. But this is my story and this is my destiny and this is where I started . . . .I
am asking you to share their journey (the 12 thousand Amrs). And to take it
personally. 
(188–189)

Soueif’s son is one of the voices of Cairo we are left with at the end of the book, and his
closing narrative is analytical, unremarkable. It is the incidental descriptions of Cairo
by others that are the most vivid (like one who explains how the older districts of Cairo
are oriented so you catch the slightest breeze when you walk through the streets (185).
The cultural politics of Cairo is naive, quite strangely for Soueif.
What happened? Is it nationalist ideology and feeling that influenced Soueif to pre-
sent a flat, sappy, idealized Egypt? Or is the problem the linguistic and cultural ideology
of English with its impoverished vocabulary in terms of social class and inequities?
(Perhaps American English, especially, with its divisions of the “middle,” “lower middle,”
and “upper middle” classes.) Is there something about global English in particular that
encourages homogenous, “personalized,” representative identities that erase social
divides, foreignness, and shorten any need to travel, discover, or to be transformed? In
her weekly columns in Shorouq, written contemporaneously, she does not sound as sen-
timental, but her Arabic is inflected with English, and reads more like her political
commentary in The Guardian and less like the rhetoric of Cairo.
One thing that El-Khalil’s and Soueif’s urban chronicles have in common is they read
something like diaries. There is little social consciousness in either work; one difference,
though is that El-Khalil unabashedly represents and embraces her own youth culture in
Beirut and does not attempt to colonize other identities, particularly of the poor. She
does not pull this in. Another similarity between the two texts is that we get little
description or sense of the physical cities of Cairo and Beirut. Soueif orients her reader
in terms of monumental buildings, boulevards, mythic neighborhoods—Al-Mougamma’,
Zamalek, Qasr e-Nil Bridge, Embaba, the museum, the Midan, Abu Za’bal, Tal’at Harb,
the Dakhiliyya—but we have more of a sense of her experience, nostalgia, and loss of
references (and of those around her) than the actual physical city before her. Al-Khalil’s
Beirut is hardly physical: we get more a sense of her generation and social class experience

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of, and relationship to, the city, of social practice, and of her personal feeling than of the
actually physical Beirut. Pamuk remarks that in writing the city of Istanbul he, in fact,
writes people. His theme of melancholia and loss of references, personal and national,
would apply to both El-Khalil’s and Soueif’s urban worlds.
Narratives about war-torn cities are unfinished because the cities are unrealized
“translational zones” of strife, and also positively conceived zones where translation can
become “an active participant in cultural history,” where discomfort can be turned into
style (Simon 2002: 16, 21). In Beirut, the narrator’s perspective uses superimposed trans-
parencies of urban cartographies, real and fantasy; of places lost, and yet still somehow
manifest. Al-Khalil envisions a Beiruti apocalypse in romantic terms, personifying the
city by imaginatively reconfiguring Druze reincarnation beliefs:

Years from now someone may read this, and not even be able to find Beirut on
the map. She will be the lost city of Atlantis. She has built herself seven times,
but how long can this charade go on? One day it’s all going to end. And when
it does, it will be beautiful. I will walk down to the beach it will be clean. Maya
will be there, waiting for me. The two of us will sit down and watch the last
sunset. Then come morning, my great-grandfather Nassif will rise from the
Mediterranean and take my hand. He will apologize for letting go the first time
and promise to never do the same again. We will walk into the water and I will
not be afraid. Anything is better than war. Even death.
Beirut is too big to wear a wedding dress.
She cannot live forever.
Beirut, I love you.

In terms of her chosen language, El-Khalil’s book reads like a translation with no original
text (or language). This remark is not about linguisitic competence, but about an ironic
sensibility that has fun with both local and international readerships:

My backpack swished back and forth as I ran, irritating the small of my back
that was drenched in Arabian sweat. Arabian sweat smells like orange blossoms
and car exhaust. As I walked into the moldy arts and science building in search
of my history class, the stench of old books and aging professors crept into my
nostrils. The color of the walls—a yellow ochre—stung my eyes. The classrooms
did not have walls separating them from the main corridors, but rather decaying
arabeque cement marshabiyyahs. The corridors had strange names that were
neither Arabic or English. Maybe it was the language of formica. And old fava
beans.

Another similarity between Cairo and Beirut is the romantic, sentimental nationalism,
albeit Soueif’s is quite serious, and El-Khalil’s is playful, slyly self-conscious, at once
critical and enthusiastic. Naoki Sakai asks: “Why do people want to explain their own
culture, and to whom do people wish to explain it?” (8), and notes the needed “mecha-
nism of sentimentality” to “diffuse” a sense of “we Japanese” (in the case of his subject)
(17). Sontag goes further, and writes of “lethal myths of national distinctiveness.” (And
she expresses no sympathy for her Bosnian theater collaborators’ nationalist insistence
on waiting for the completion of a new translation, in an ostensibly Bosnian idiom, to
stage Beckett in the midst of battle.) El-Khalil’s nationalism centers on a city as opposed

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to a nation, but what overrides naive nationalism is more structural, in a linguistic and
cultural sense, than geographic, enabled by her non-native, “biglossic” English. This
practice opens the possibility for not only a bilingual readership but an unpredicted one
that critic Wai-Chee Dimock calls “an unexpected web of allegiance” that can occur
only when the domain of the nation-state is evaded (489).
The new, rather insouciant cultural production in minority, third-world Englishes (as
opposed to the defiant postcolonial ones) seems to pull English into south by south com-
munication. This could interrupt the “regimes of circulation” that Gaonkar and Povinelli
study, as well as the traditional south to north language translation that may consolidate
“global hegemonies” (393). Sakai refuses to accept nationalism as “the sole exit to colo-
nial subjugation,” and teaches us that nationalism has always been a restricted derivative
of transnationalism (15). Alternatively, then, and richly, we could think of this cultural
communication in third-world Englishes as new forms of transnationality that both
“predate” and surpass nationalism.

References
Deleuze, G., Guattari F., & Brinkley, F. (1983) “What Is a Minor Literature?” Mississippi Review, 11(3):
13–33.
Dimock, W. (2003) “Planetary Time and Global Translation: Context in Literary Studies. Common
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 45
LA SAPE
Fashion and Performance
Dominic Thomas

On January 15, 2014, the latest television commercial in Guinness’ “Made of More”
campaign was aired in the United Kingdom. On this occasion, the commercial, directed
by acclaimed Danish photojournalist Nicolai Fuglsig, focused on Congolese “sapeurs”
(see also The Men inside the Suits 2014). The sapeurs are adherents to and practitioners
of La Sape, an acronym that designates the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes
Elégantes (The Society of Elegant Persons), whose membership is essentially constituted
by young men from Brazzaville (Republic of Congo) and Kinshasa (Democratic Republic
of Congo). As Stephen O’Kelly, marketing director of Guinness Western Europe
explained:

What we love about the Sapeurs and drew us to them was not only the vibrancy
and color, but at its core, their story is one of dignity and self-expression.  In the
spirit of Made of More we wanted to capture the story of a group of men whose
integrity and character shone through despite the challenges they face. Dressing
well can symbolize many things, but for the Sapeurs, fine clothes stand for
peace, integrity and honor.
(Campaign Brief 2014)

Locating La Sape in the broader context of colonial history, postcolonial politics, fash-
ion, music, transnational migration, and gender politics will be helpful in understanding
the particular appeal of this transnational practice as well as its popularity, as confirmed
by the millions of hits recorded on YouTube where the commercial has been uploaded.
This analysis will also provide insights on the various transformations it has undergone
through its engagement with globalization while simultaneously becoming globalized,
while also examining how it has been strategically adapted and adopted as an element
of a global marketing strategy.
Explored by anthropologists and sociologists, cultural historians, and literary scholars,
as well as in works of fiction, most notably in the novels of Franco-Congolese writer
Alain Mabanckou, La Sape, as Janet MacGaffey and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga have
demonstrated in their book, Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law,
offers “a new perspective on a little known and altogether different facet of relations
between the local and the global, one focused on individuals and their counter-
hegemonic activities rather than on nation states and large companies” (2000: 3).
 LA S APE: FA SH I O N A N D P E R F O R MA N C E

Likewise, the relationship between the national spaces on the African continent from
which La Sape hails—the Republic of Congo (capital Brazzaville) and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (capital Kinshasa)—and France is a symbiotic one to the extent
that La Sape, as Justin-Daniel Gandoulou has shown in his studies Au cœur de la sape:
Mœurs et aventures de Congolais à Paris (1989a) and Dandies à Bacongo: le culte de
l’élégance dans la société congolaise contemporaine (1989b), does not essentially exist out-
side of these spaces. In fact, as Mabanckou has argued:

two antagonistic tendencies are to be found: authenticity and La Sape. For the
sapeur, there is no such thing as authenticity since La Sape downplays the
importance of the ‘local’, endorsing instead the idea of crossing, of travel to
Europe and of a returning triumphantly to the native land having undergone a
complete bodily metamorphosis.
(2009: 299–300)

There is some disagreement concerning the historical origins of La Sape and the
corresponding movement that emerged from this phenomenon.1 Nevertheless, one finds
consensus around the general notion that the cult of appearance known as La Sape as it
manifests itself today can be associated with similar cultural and vestimentary trends
going back as early as the 1930s. Indeed, as historian Didier Gondola has argued,
“Contemporary sapeurs represent at least the third generation of Congolese dandyism”
(1999a: 27). Clubs and meeting places, whose adherents were predominantly working
or lower middle class youth, grew in prominence considerably during the Marxist-
Leninist era in the Republic of Congo (1969–1991) and Mobutu’s rule in the Republic
of Zaire (from 1970 onwards), especially among increasingly disenfranchised youth.
According to Janet MacGaffey and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga:

The movement of La Sape emerged among unemployed youth in Brazzaville in

the 1970s. They competed for status by acquiring French designer clothing and
wearing it as part of an ostentatious lifestyle. This movement brought young
people into trade in the 1970s, as they sought the means to go to Paris and buy
expensive clothing that identifies them. The cult of appearance soon spread to
the youth of Kinshasa and has become part of the popular culture in both
Central African countries. Through their trade and other activities, the traders
protest and struggle against exclusion.
(2000: 3)

Clearly though, colonial influences were inextricably linked to transitions in

vestimentary codes. Imported fashion codes were not, however, adhered to in any kind
of homogenous manner. Rather, clothes were systematically employed as a way of estab-
lishing markers of autonomy and differentiation, and analogous phenomena could be
found in pre-colonial Africa. Comprehensive analyses of these transformations are avail-
able in Jean Comaroff’s book Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance, through the examination
of “the reciprocal interplay of human practice” (1985: 3) and in Phyllis M. Martin’s
highly pioneering study of Brazzaville, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville, in which
she showed how “The presentation of self in outward display was an important aspect of
pre-colonial society and it was a tradition transferred and transformed in the urban area”
(1995: 155). Having said this, colonial influences cannot be underestimated, not only
for their transformative powers, but also for the counter hegemonic practices they
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generated. Indeed, “Interaction with Europeans also influenced tastes in clothes.

According to informants, their fathers and grandfathers wanted to dress as much like
Europeans as possible, for this was the mark of an évolué” [colonized subjects who,
through exposure to colonial educational and assimilationist mechanisms, had internal-
ized French cultural and social norms] (Martin 1995: 158–159).
Given the process of othering that is intrinsic to colonial discourse, and the accom-
panying recognition of otherness that coincides with the realization of the impossibility
of assimilation, this generated conscious attempts at demarcating difference. Clothing
thus provided the occasion for the subversion of established modes and the rejection of
the dictates of accepted norms. The attempt at controlling the colonized body through
a standardization of clothing was challenged by the refusal to partially assume the exter-
nal appearance of the other, and the adoption of alternative aesthetic codes presents
itself as a symbolic gesture aimed at reclaiming power.
The discourse on clothing as a symbol of assimilation has perhaps been most pow-
erfully exemplified in the transformation of Jean de Brunhoff ’s eponymous hero,
Babar the King (1963). The connections between de Brunhoff’s stories from broader
social discourses and colonial ideologies is now widely accepted, and has perhaps
been most articulately and persuasively addressed by Ariel Dorfman in The Empire’s
Old Clothes (1996). In this work, Dorfman demonstrated how “no sooner has he
[Babar] lost his horizontal nakedness and seen his clothed twin in a mirror, than he
becomes aware of his stature, his skin, his clothes” (1996: 18). Indeed, having himself
successfully assimilated—the adoption and adherence to Western style clothing
serves as the explicit symbolical marker of this—Babar disseminates the code: “Today
Babar keeps his promise. He gives a gift to each elephant and also serviceable clothes
suitable for work-days and beautiful rich clothes for holidays” (de Brunhoff 1963: 14).
To this end, Homi Bhabha’s work on mimicry provides a useful paradigm for further
exploring this dimension. In his “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial
Discourse,” Bhabha illustrates how “mimicry emerges as the representation of a dif-
ference that is itself a process of disavowal . . . mimicry is at once resemblance and
menace” (1994: 86).
Fashion then, as evidenced in La Sape, serves to juxtapose assimilation and hegemony
with a range of subversive and resistance practices. As Achille Mbembe observes,

In the postcolony, magnificence and the desire to shine are not the prerogative
only of those who command. The people also want to be “honored,” to “shine,”
and to take part in celebrations . . . in their desire for a certain majesty, the
masses join in the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power
to reproduce its epistemology.
(2001: 131–33)

La Sape thus engages discursively and semiotically with dominant, hegemonic norms
and standards, thereby inaugurating the space for a counter-hegemonic semiology, useful
in recontextualizing as a way of deciphering various codes as they pertain to the colonial
and postcolonial context, urban elites, diasporic populations and minority populations.
“In their appreciation of the powerful symbolism of clothes and the significance of dress
in mediating social relations, modern-day Brazzavillois are celebrating a tradition that
stretches back into the pre-colonial past but which town-life has only strengthened”
(Martin 1995: 172).

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Similarities between the colonial and postcolonial era are, in fact, striking. For
example, when individuals were allowed to select their own clothing during the colonial
era, evidence suggests that “On these occasions clothing and ornamentation not only
conveyed the moment in time but also personal taste, resources and status” (Martin
1995: 154), and that, significantly, “European dress was more and more adopted as the
preferred attire of townsmen . . . newly arrived workers were looked down on, as
European styles, refashioned in line with local tastes, became the norm” (Martin 1995:
165). A similar dynamic is evidenced between the sapeurs and the other migrant com-
munities they encounter in France. The sapeurs travel to France (or, increasingly, other
European destinations) in order acquire designer clothes as part of a broader identitarian
agenda that is inscribed in the eventual return to Africa and as an integral component
of a transcontinental adventure that functions as a prerequisite for access to the
enhanced social status conferred on them as a result of the successful completion of the
cyclical mission. Economic migrants are thus categorized as “peasants” and relegated to
an inferior status that reproduces colonial hierarchies pertaining to distinctions between
rural and urban communities.
The tenuous relationship between “Parisians” (sapeurs) and “Peasants” (economic
migrants) is the subject of Franco-Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou’s novel Blue White
Red, in which the former group endeavors to keep its distance from the denigrated latter:
“He isn’t elegant. He doesn’t know what elegance is” (2013: 59). In this instance, we
find contemporary forms of colonial patterns when “the young men of the colonial
period blended their fascination for clothes with the formation of mutual-aid associa-
tions. . . . Through their ‘cult of elegance’ young men sought to define their social
distinctiveness, while at the same time deriving a great deal of personal pleasure from
wearing stylish clothes, admiring each other’s dress and, hopefully, attracting girls,” and
then later, of the counter-culture evidenced in the ’60s and ’70s, “when fashion became
a statement against economic deprivation and attempts at political dominance by the
party youth organization” (Martin 1995: 171). The pertinence and applicability of the
historical framework to the contemporary circumstances of postcoloniality are unques-
tionable, and serve as indicators and precursors to more recent developments. Clearly,
however,

as the movement spread beyond its origins to other African countries, sapeurs
increasingly emphasized the “art of dress” and claimed a kind of cultural
expertise and connoisseurship that could not be simply brought. Modernity was
expressed through progressively nuanced performances of taste, and the sapeurs
sought to differentiate themselves from other African mimeticians through the
maintenance of a specifically Congolese national relationship to fashion.
(Newell 2012: 18)

Parallels can be established between African American culture and the Chicano/a
framework. Catherine Ramírez, for example, in the essay “Crimes of Fashion: The
Pachua and Chicana Style Politics,” showed how “style politics” can be constructed as
“an expression of difference via style” (2002: 3). Considering the example of the zoot
suit, Ramírez was able to locate the role of “zoot subculture of the early 1940s” as defin-
ing “in the politicization of Mexican Americans and in the creation of an oppositional,
rather than assimilationist, Chicano cultural identity . . . the zoot suit functioned as a
sign of defiance and difference” (2002: 1-2). Obvious similarities with the African

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context emerge from this analysis, whereby “To wartime working-class youths, especially
recent transplants from rural areas to urban centers, the zoot suit may have functioned
as a status symbol because its wearers were working-class and urban, rather than poor
and del rancho” (2002: 7). Entry into urban centers clearly implements divisions between
social groups, much in the same way as migration from rural areas had functioned in
colonial Africa, and subsequently in the manner the sapeurs condescendingly demarcate
themselves from the economic migrants they classify as peasants.
As Phyllis Martin was able to show, colonial employees often chose to wear their
shirts outside their pants rather than tucking them in. Hildi Hendrickson has addressed
these questions, given that the “[p]ossibilities for resistance lie in the fact that this semi-
otic process can never be fully controlled, even by a dominating colonial power”
(1996: 15). For the famous Congolese musician Koffi Olomidé, it is precisely his “look”
that renders him recognizable and confers a status upon him:

He takes special pride in his appearance and in selecting his clothes. His suits
are usually close to red in color. These colors stand out on stage and for the
cameras when his movie clips are being shot. Like most Congolese artists, Koffi
Olomidé is an amateur of fine clothes. He is a “Sapeur.”
(Tagne 1999)

Furthermore, as Roland Barthes argued in The Fashion System, the “vestimentary code”
reveals various principles through which practices are coded, and of course the sapeurs
have their own conventions and message (1990).
Initially, the sapeurs gathered in clubs and groups for the purposes of showing off their
outfits:

The display of these clothes conforms to specific practices, including the “dance
of designer labels” and the issuing of “challenges.” The first entails showing off
the labels of the clothes one is wearing by means of gestures. The second occurs
when an argument arises between two sapeurs and their friends put an end to it
by proposing that the two protagonists present themselves the next day at an
appointed place, superbly dressed. These friends (also well dressed) make up the
jury, which passes judgment on which of the two is better turned out,
pronouncing on the merit of his clothes, according to price, quality, etc. and
deciding whose are the best . . . The challenge is thus taken up in a symbolic
conflict in which the weapons are clothes.
(MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000: 140)

One can only be reminded of similarities between these conventions and “Bling” in
America, whereby “jewelry, material showoff, glitter of diamonds” are evidenced
(Westbrook 2002). The sapeurs appropriate clothes made by a plethora of international
designers such as J.-M. Weston, Valentino, Gianni Versace, and Yves Saint-Laurent:
“The clothes were worn in dancing halls and dance moves were especially choreo-
graphed by music groups to allow the dancers to exhibit their shoes or European designer
labels on their clothes” (Goldschmidt 2002: 222). The sapeurs, writes Justin-Daniel
Gandoulou, now “initiate the dance of designer labels, that consists in allowing the
protagonists to dance and show off their clothes and designer labels” (1989a: 209). This
exhibition takes on the form of a “ritualized” performance (Gandoulou 1989b, 106),

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“similar to the concept of ‘battling,’” namely the “war between or among rappers,
dancers, DJs, or emcees for prizes or bragging rights and to see who is best. The winner
is judged by crowd applause or originality” (Westbrook 2002: 8). The sapeur who emerges
victorious will take the title of “Grand” and be considered an “accomplished” sapeur
(Gandoulou 1989b: 67). In Blue White Red, Alain Mabanckou provides an account of
such a battle, highlighting the performative quality of the practice as well as the degree
of humor:

The battle commenced. The public was ecstatic. At bottom, they were waiting
only for the grand duel between the two opposing club presidents . . . . My
adversary stunned me by executing an acrobatic leap that left the spectators
cheering hysterically. He was dressed in a black leather outfit with boots and a
black buckskin helmet. He smoked a fat cigar and turned his back on me—one
way to ignore me and make a fool of me. I moved calmly toward the center of
the dance floor. I was wearing a colonial helmet and a long cassock that swept
the ground when I moved. I held a Bible in my right hand and while my
adversary had his back turned to me, I read aloud in an intelligible voice a
passage from the Apocalypse of Saint John. The audience was euphoric, swept
away by my originality. I had outwitted all predictions, arriving at the buvette
with my cassock and colonial helmet hidden in a large suitcase. I had been
dressed differently. We pulled a fast one on our adversaries. The president of the
opposing club had fallen into the trap. When he turned around he took note of
the gap I had created between us. I was cheered. The crowd was on its feet for
the first time. They chanted my name. I decided to speed things up. I had
another trick up my sleeve. I took the Bible and handed it to a young girl, while
my competitor looked on in astonishment. He didn’t grasp what I was about to
undertake. He stayed on his feet, blinking nervously. His cigar was no longer lit.
He chewed it and spat. He sweat big drops of perspiration. I suddenly took off
my cassock in public, then turned it inside out. And, like in a magic trick,
another cassock appeared in scotch plaid.
(2013: 53–4)

Traveling to Paris in order to acquire designer clothes constitutes an “initiatory Parisian

voyage, conditioned by the acquisition of a whole range of clothing gear, and then the
descent, the moment of apotheosis and consecration” (Gandoulou 1989b: 73), “a jour-
ney into the interior of the self” (MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000: 62), that is
also “there to conceal his social failure and to transform it into apparent victory”
(Gondola 1999a: 31).
Historically, La Sape may appear somewhat contradictory given that the act of
embracing French fashion during the Communist era could have been construed by the
authorities as a gesture of assimilation and identification with bourgeois ideology and
aesthetic codes and values that had nothing to do with the stated parameters of govern-
ment ideology. However, this “particular form of resistance through the creation of an
oppositional, counter-hegemonic culture [provided individuals an opportunity to] assert
their identity and compete for status according to their own system of values. In this
process, they exclude those who are part of the system that has excluded them”
(MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000: 137). In reality, though, the President from
1979 to 1991, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, was himself known as a “Cardin-Communist” as

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a way of underlining his fondness for the clothes of the Pierre Cardin design house. The
context is even more fascinating when one looks at variations across the Congo River
in Mobutu’s Zaire. Shortly after his election in 1970, Mobutu outlined his project of
“zaïrianisation,” effectively deploying a campaign of “authenticity” whose guidelines
were provided by a conscious distancing from European influences. Among these newly
delineated standards was the required “abacost,” the “[n]ame for the male attire favored
by Mobutu and promoted as part of the authenticity campaign, consisting of a short-
sleeved suit worn without a tie” (which literally means “down with the suit”, or à bas le
costume in French) (“Zaire,” n.d.).
This style was immediately adopted by members of the established political party. The
internationally acclaimed “world music” artist Papa Wemba is widely perceived as one
of the most powerful advocates of La Sape, and for him it constitutes a “[a] form of rebel-
lion against poverty and the blues, but La Sape is also a way of fighting against the
dictatorship of the abacost, a local form of the three piece suit, and also the quasi-official
uniform of men under Mobutu’s regime” (Papa Wemba n.d.). In this context, La Sape is
clearly reformulated as a counter-hegemonic practice that operates symbiotically with
those dictates of political authority that serve as a catalyst for its dynamism. Nevertheless,
as we shall see, the broader problematic of adapting and adopting European aesthetic
codes to subvert local practices raises a number of issues.
The question of power is central to Jean Allman’s edited volume Fashioning Africa:
Power and the Politics of Dress, in its objective of highlighting “the ways in which power
is represented, constituted, articulated, and contested through dress. It seeks to under-
stand bodily praxis as political praxis, fashion as political language” (2004: 1). Likewise,
clothing plays an integral role in the construction of identity, and La Sape has much to
reveal with regard to a broad range of gender-related issues in the Congolese but also the
African context more generally. Rigid social categories of differentiation and prescrip-
tive modes of behavior are often only to be found in official discourses; however, these
are always open to explicit or implicit challenge and redefinition.
Didier Gondola’s essay, “Popular Music, Urban Society, and Changing Gender
Relations in Kinshasa, Zaire (1950–1990),” provides an insightful account of these
issues, of

the extent to which the triptych gender, colonization, and urbanization

functioned in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), and how in its origins Congolese
popular music appeared as an eminently male culture . . . .From the colonial
perspective, the African city . . . was a male bastion from which women had to
be excluded.
(1997: 65–66)

Colonial practices are shown to have consciously structured the urban environment,
and thus have much to reveal concerning the development of cultural practices within
these spaces:

Congolese music culture owed much to various musical currents that were also
characterized by male initiative . . . .Fashion, for instance, was one of the
elements that manifested this [gender] gap and fostered the invisibility of
women and, by contrast, the visibility of men.
(Gondola 1997: 70)

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Not surprisingly, the social environment was characterized by a broad range of

homosocial practices: “Heavy smoking, drinking, obscene sexual jokes, and sexual talk
were the favorite pastime for male customers” (Gondola 1997: 70). The homosocial
aspect of La Sape privileges, rewards, or at the very least condones modes of behavior
(alcohol consumption, promiscuity) often deemed unacceptable for women, in social
environments traditionally dominated by men (the above-mentioned Guinness com-
mercial certainly fastens upon this dimension).
However, important reformulations of gender relations could be witnessed during the
final years of colonial rule when women began to alter urban demographics. Several
developments are worth noting. First, the “appearance of the associations féminines
d’élégances, women’s social clubs whose main purpose was mutual assistance . . . explains
how women became influential thought music” (Gondola 1997: 72), and, second, “the
fashions adopted by these clubs suggest resistance to European values. Unlike African
men, who rapidly borrowed the European suit, African women avoided wearing
European dresses and skirts” (Gondola 1997: 74). As an intrinsically masculinist prac-
tice, centered on European aesthetic codes and value systems, La Sape has much to
reveal. As Barbara Burman and Carole Turbin have argued, “Gender issues are interwo-
ven into this emerging field of dress and textile history” (2003: 6). Naturally, the work
of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has been foundational in further elucidating the question of
homosocial desire. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire,
Sedgwick shows us how “male homosocial desire” operates as an essentially oxymoronic
construct that contains both “discriminations and paradoxes,” since the term homosocial
“is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with ‘homosexual,’ and just as obviously
meant to be distinguished from ‘homosexual’” (1985: 1). Yet, “in a society where men
and women differ in their access to power, there will be important gender differences, as
well, in the structure and constitution of sexuality . . . society could not cease to be
homophobic and have its economic and political structures remain unchanged”
(Sedgwick 1985: 2–4).
To this end, Ackbar Abbas’ analysis of Walter Benjamin’s objective of locating the
“unconscious of modernity . . . when the shock of modernity overwhelms and smothers
the individual, threatening to reduce private life in the big city to inconsequentiality”
(1989: 64) shares points of commonality with the colonial experience and the introduc-
tion of Africa into Western modernity and capitalism. For Benjamin, this moment
provides examples of an “unconscious form of resistance . . . this makes it difficult to
place and hence to control them” (Abbas 1989: 55). In this framework, “even the dandy,
whom the very notion of protest would strike as inelegant and hence alien, shows traces
of resistance” (Abbas 1989: 55) since, for Benjamin, “[t]he dandies . . . developed the
ingenuous training that was necessary to overcome these conflicts. They combined an
extremely quick reaction with a relaxed, even slack demeanor and facial expression”
(Abbas 1989: 55). The figure of the African “dandy” warrants additional focus, espe-
cially given the homosocial and homoerotic dimensions of La Sape.
As Tim Edwards has argued in his book Men’s Fashion, Masculinity, and Consumer
Society, “The problematic relationship of homosexuality to masculinity and the myth/
part reality of effeminacy, although mixed up and undermined in various ways through-
out the centuries, has never quite been severed” (1997: 108). The economic and social
emasculation of Congolese youth may partially explain the hyper-adherence to mascu-
linist codes, but, as Joanne Entwistle has shown in her book The Fashioned Body: Fashion,
Dress and Modern Social Theory, the dandy was

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a figure who made it his occupation to be a man of leisure, who prided himself
on his aesthetic superiority, seeking distinction through the exercise of his
exquisite taste . . . .Frequently without occupation, with no regular source of
income and generally no wife or family, the dandy lived by his wits.
(2000: 127)

This image has in turn survived in the postcolonial context where, as Didier Gondola
has shown, “it remains above all a response, a way for this ‘sacrificed’ youth to adjust to
changing realities over which they have virtually no control. Through this voyage into
the sape we witness the death of reality and its reincarnation in dreams” (1999b: 40–41)
and “These extemporized and spontaneous parades are the expression of a urban culture
looking for new reference parameters and codes such as non-violence and elegance.
They reflect the wish of young people in particular not to be left apart by society” (Giusti
2009).
La Sape’s fashion headquarters are to be found at “Connivences” in Paris’ 18th arron-
dissement, a clothing store whose motto is “L’art de faire chanter les couleurs” [The art
of making colors sing]. “Connivences” is featured in the promotional video for Alain
Mabanckou’s CD Black Bazar, a musical adaptation of the novel by that name. La Sape
features extensively in his novels Blue White Red (2013), Broken Glass (2010), Black
Bazaar (2012), and Tais-toi et meurs (2012), short-stories (“Confessions of a Sapeur”
2014), and theatrical adaptations of his work, as well as in the film script Black Bazar
written by Sandro Agenor and the author, to be produced by Eoa Production in 2014.
Unique perspectives on La Sape are thus available in an increasing range of expressive
forms—literature, sociology, photography, music, film, and so on—thereby further
underscoring the interest in and influence of this cultural and social practice, one that
simultaneously exhibits the characteristics of localized and globalized expressive forms.

Note
1 An earlier discussion of La Sape, especially in the context of francophone sub-Saharan African literature,
is available in Dominic Thomas, Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2007).

References
Abbas, A. (1989) “On Fascination: Walter Benjamin’s Images,” New German Critique 48: 43–62.
Allman, J., ed. (2004) Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Barthes, R. (1990, first pub. 1967) The Fashion System, translated by Matthew Ward and Richard
Howard, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Bhabha, H. (1994) “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location
of Culture, London: Routledge, 85–92.
Burman, B. and C. Turbin (2003) “Material Strategies Engendered,” in Barbara Burman and Carole
Turbin (eds.), Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective, Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 1–11.
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de Brunhoff, J. (1963, first pub. 1937) Le Roi Babar, translated by Merle S. Haas, New York: Random
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 46
“POPULAR CULTURE”
IN A CHANGING
BRAZIL
Edson Farias and
Bianca Freire-Medeiros

Introduction
Throughout the last century, the idea of popular culture in Brazil was intertwined with
matters affecting the nation and national identity – symbols and practices that in com-
bination became representative emblems of the essence of the country. However, there
is a structural ambiguity that pervades and constitutes the idea of popular culture among
us. At the same time, popular culture can undeniably be equated with the nation, since
the weaknesses and social disruptions that have beset Brazilian history are constantly
being examined and debated. These include colonialism, slavery, imperialism, back-
wardness/underdevelopment, social inequality and ethnic/racial exclusion.
This ambiguity makes it difficult to resort to the idea of a popular culture, particularly
in the world of contemporary Brazil, whether it is regarded as an object of knowledge or
an analytical category. At the same time, since there are clear polysemic signs, what
stands out when one traces the pattern of popular culture are perhaps the semantic slip-
pery slopes that in fact constitute the ideal viewpoint for discussing it.
The reader should bear in mind that since 1980, the majority of Brazilians have
become urbanised. It is not just that increasingly towns and cities – their life-styles and
ways of living – have been advancing beyond religious and secular dimensions. In addi-
tion, a sales strategy involving agricultural land has been established which combines
agro-industrial capital with financial services branch operations. Both factors have had
a significant effect on the added complexity of the class system, insofar as new groupings
have been added to the financial supply chain, trade intermediary services and con-
sumption, with regard to social stratification and its socio-spatial repercussions.
In addition to the expansion of the middle class, we perceive a greater presence of
newly affluent groups and segments. This means that the new consumption pattern of
goods and services is permeated by all sorts of stratification (gender, sex, age, ethnicity);
this is why an increasing emphasis is laid on entertainment and access to information.
In this chapter, rather than attempting to conceptualise popular culture, we have
decided to pursue the idea that its ambiguous and multiple facets supply us with
 “ PO PU LA R CU LTU RE” I N A C H A N G I N G B R A Z I L

information about the sensitive areas that have witnessed changes in Brazilian life. In
the section that follows, we will provide a sociogenetic summary which is aimed at a
historical reconstruction; this can enable us to draw up the semantic boundaries of
popular culture as a “national culture”, which is what, to a great extent, prevailed
throughout the 20th century.

The Mestizo “Ethnicization” of Popular Culture

It would be no exaggeration to state that the “ethnicization” associated with the concept
of mixed race policies [miscegenation] is grounded on the field of popular culture in
Brazil. This ethnicization was acted out through a modernization of culture that occurred
in the period 1900–1930. Intellectuals and modernist artists who were inspired by folk-
lore, appropriated the idea of popular culture – its activities, knowledge, religious beliefs
and recreational expressions – as a source of input for the political and ideological
scheme of building a national identity.
Thus, the ethnogenesis of the Brazilian nation brought together architects, literary
figures, artists, poets, historians and social scientists, as well as pockets of ethnic groups
who were turned into figures of folklore; this allowed a recognition of the value of the
“practices of the people” to be viewed as a part of the national heritage (Moraes, 1998;
Santiago, 2002, pp. 86–87).
According to Eduardo Subirats, unlike what occurred with the European vanguard
movements, which were their contemporaries, the Brazilian “Movimento Antropofágico”,
led by the poet Oswald de Andrade, was not polarised between “traditional” and
“modern”. On the contrary, it laid stress on a:

reconstruction of cultural memories, a kind of re-creation based on its symbols

and an awareness of a relationship between nature and civilisation that was free
from any notion of hostility. This was a pleasing restoration of a sanctified
nakedness and a disavowal of an oppressed civilisation that was magnificently
embellished.
(Subirats, 2002, p. 29)

These symbols and practices helped extend and add to the complexity of the network
in the cultural sphere which included authors, intermediaries, financiers and the
public.
From the 1930s onwards, the allusion to subaltern social groups has played an
increasing role in the discursive framework of the “national-popular”. This has occurred
by way of enacting a whole spectrum of symbols and practices in the pantheon of the
national culture. These groups were identified (and stigmatised) on ethnic grounds and
were reclassified as negro-mestizo and Amerindian matrices of the population whose
contribution to national culture was largely in leisure-art, religion and gastronomical
expressions.
The course followed by Samba music provides us with a striking example: the rhyth-
mical and choreographic features embedded in the musical fashions of the poorest social
classes were gradually elevated to becoming emblems of the heritage of “modern Brazil”
(Ortiz, 1984; Chaui, 1986). In Rio de Janeiro, the samba was originally the backcloth
for the setting for the Carnival festival, and then moved on to providing the images for
consumer goods that were propagated through different systems of communication

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(sound and visual media and the music industry) and their audiences in the market
(Fenerick, 2005, pp. 27–200). In this way, the popular-national Brazilian arose through
the triad of: a) nation-state modernity; b) the urban-industrial structure; and c) services
(Farias, 1998, pp. 211–2140).
It should be borne in mind that after the 1950s, when there was a large-scale migra-
tion of people from various parts of the country to the main cities of the central-south
region (i.e. the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo), it became an increasingly
urgent matter to bring them in line with the modernizing ideas of the elites. This was
so that a pact of governance could be established that would ensure the power of the
sovereign state remained dominant. The citizen population could thus be held in a
position of collective subjugation. While the consensus gaps, with regard to policies,
were being closed by weaving an idea of Brazilian culture, the adjustment between the
intellectual elites and political leaders defined the borderlines of a power struggle that
was accentuated by the sharp divisions between the respective spheres of culture and
politics.
While Brazil was entangled in the political and economic web of the post-war
period, the notion of Brazilian culture was retrieved from the imaginary world of
romantic illusions, and embodied in a moral and territorially-based organic unity.
This desired unity required its own unique form of ontology and cosmology to ensure
there was a united standpoint that stemmed from a shared image of the Brazilian
world.
This heteroclite world of popular habits and customs can thus be strengthened in a
discursive way as a crucible of mixed ingredients from which a pattern of skilful behav-
iour can emanate by mixing races. This can lead to a rise in status that is essential
(because it is authentic) for a country that is telluric, mystical and tropical.
However, at the same time that an attempt was made to determine the nature of the
inheritance of colonial traditions (understood as what has been held over from the
past), a number of traditional ethnic features were given a new “signification” and
regarded as signs of “backwardness” after they had been rooted out by pedagogical and
civilizing measures. Hence it is not surprising that a large number of fresh questions
resulting from modernizing explanations have been raised by groups who seek to
underline their social status as representatives of scientific reason (Lima & Hochman,
1996, pp. 23–40).
In this register, popular semantics are not only under moral and epistemological vigi-
lance but also the target of the brutality of the state. If, as a result, the people have come
to be regarded as ignorant plebeians, the definition of ‘popular’ (both as a taxonomy and
traditional term) causes ambivalence by oscillating between celebration and stigma
when confronted with the priority given to modernising tendencies.
To speak about popular culture in Brazil is thus to draw attention to life-styles and
symbolic worlds, impressive kinds of heritage and various “subaltern groups” whose
cultural matrices – whether based on indigenous, African or European origins – are
pervaded by a concern with miscegenation. For this reason, understanding the sociogen-
esis of the way the public has become more traditional and ethnic requires the following
point to be made clear: the different forms of popular culture are not the reverse of
modern culture. Finally, as we argue here, the range of “national-popular” activities has
provided the structural basis for the idea of a modern Brazil that became established in
the course of the 20th century through the marketing of cultural goods and support of
various sections of the intellectual community (Ortiz, 2013).

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The Complex Nature of the “Culturas Populares” in Brazil

The industrialisation of the symbolic, the popularisation of the media and expansion of
consumer culture in recent decades have required a reassessment of people’s groups
(especially “national-popular”) in Latin America (Escosteguy, 2001; Farias, 2010,
pp. 73–129). More recently, this reassessment has been synchronised with an analytical
description of the variations that have occurred in the international bibliography; that
is, from the advent and powerful effect of both semiotic/interpretivist models and
Anglo-Saxon cultural studies (Canclini, 1983, 1990, 1987, 1988; MartÍn-Barbero, 1987,
1995; Gonzalez, 1990).
In the case of Brazil, this reassessment has taken place within an expansion of the
urban-industrial framework and service industry, as well as in the spread of the so-called
new middle classes. Signs of well-being, dictated by the rationale of the market, intersect
society in a vertical direction and are combined, for example, with access to private
services (in particular, education and health), which had previously been regarded as
the welfare dimension of the National Health system.
Thus, Brazilian academics have turned back to the fringes of metropolitan cities with
their new intellectual panoramas, and are themselves producers of narratives about
“peripheral culture”. As a result, the images of poverty and the symbols of what can be
regarded as popular are being redefined and renegotiated. This what one of us has called,
in previous writing, the travelling favela (Freire-Medeiros, 2013): since this sharp rise,
favelas of Rio de Janeiro which were once an object of curiosity among the elite are now
a source of attraction that has reached fever pitch.
There is an endless list of films, books and other cultural products that have employed
favelas as the setting and inspiration of their work; some of these have been produced
by individuals or groups who identify themselves as coming from “within”. In contrast,
there are bars, restaurants and clubs (the most obvious example being the “Favela Chic”
chain), artistic installations and design pieces that describe themselves as “favela” (or
“coming from the favela”). These turn favelas into brands that can be “consumed” in
products and places beyond their geographical boundaries. And it is in this situation,
where the favela has been marketed as a territory of the imagination and a privileged
locus of popular Carioca culture, that its gradual transformation into a tourist destination
can be witnessed.
Since they are largely in the environment of cities, the semantics of popular culture
are increasingly embedded in a field where systems of leisure and artistic activities that
follow a line of hybridism, are predominant – folklore and the megapolitan citizen, tech-
nology and the craftsman, the locality and international pop culture, the civilised and
the barbaric, the aesthetic and the political. A star system is thus established in which
the newly-rich are acclaimed as artistic celebrities, while producers of culture and pro-
viders of entertainment services work in highly precarious conditions.
This leads us to theorise that in the contemporary scene there is a convergence of
three trends in the field of popular culture:

#1. Complicity between Cultures and Markets

Particular cultural features are changed into “artistic cultures” which are in a position
to be marketed and for which remuneration can be offered. Either by means of public or
private forms of management, these “popular cultures” pervade different cycles of

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production and consumption in a competition which involves struggling for a space in

the globalised markets. The peculiar aspects of these cycles is that they are conditioned
by their regional and class derivation, as well as racial, gender, age/generation and sexual
orientation factors, which can clearly not be ignored.

#2. Socio-Technical Meanings and Systems

It has been noted that there has been an increasing involvement of so-called cultural
agents with the media and industrial networks in the production and placement of a
wide range of symbolic goods of an audiovisual kind. These networks mark the disinte-
gration of areas of production and consumption, including those that are informal,
illegal or forbidden.

#3. Collective Identities and Ethnic Narratives

New parameters for the assertion and recognition of collective identities are being
formed, mainly from the attempts to revive the traditions behind the formation of “neo-
communities” and to establish cosmopolitan flows where consumer practices and
symbols can be disseminated.
There appears to be a convergence between devices of personal and institutional
“reflexivity”, on the one hand, and the current tendency to give relief to ethnic identity
frames. By means of the activities of the NGOs, the departments attached to the state
apparatus and a series of “translateral” institutions, some adjustments were made to the
criteria employed to define the identities schemes. In so doing, the broader context of
the cultural politics agenda gained resonance.
Even though the different gender, sexual, age-generation and regional categories may
be diverse and mixed, these devices have implications for the struggle to define the
traditional heritage in historical/cultural terms and have repercussions for defining the
spaces that will be contested by a wide range of sociopolitical, economic and cultural
interests.

***

In refining the point of convergence between three meeting-points, the resulting common
denominator is a quadrilateral comprising (a) identities (and their recognition), (b) the
self-regulated market, (c) sociotechnical systems and (d) the state. The next section will
address the question of the presence of a narrative of cultural diversity within the seman-
tic operations of a Brazilian state which is increasingly committed to cultural matters.

The Brazilian State and “Cultural Matters¨

There has been a significant amount of work in the field of human and social sciences
that has addressed the question of public policies in the sphere of culture (see Bothelho,
2001a, 2001b; Durand, 2001; Calabre, 2006, 2007; Rubim, 2008 and Alves, 2011) and/
or the so-called non-material heritage (Alves, 2011; Carvalho, 2006; Cavalcanti, 2006;
Cavalcanti & Fonseca, 2008; Gonçalves, 2009; Gonçalves & Ribeiro, 2006; Laraia,
2004; Fonseca, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2009; Nogueira, 2007; Oliveira, 2004; Oliven, 2009;
Velho, 2006; and Vianna, 2004.

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These studies investigate the position of public power – whether in its national,
regional and/or local shape – and examine the effects of the triangulation that inter-
links the production, distribution and consumption of symbolic goods (as well as
forming a nexus with law, justice and citizenship). Other studies are concerned with
policymaking with regard to the goals of cultural diversity, and, in particular, with
what concerns ethnic/racial stratifications of gender and sexual orientation in the
regions.
This discursive reorientation in the social and human sciences has accompanied the
emergence of non-material heritage as a key issue in the country’s politics. Intellectuals,
alongside those who work to preserve traditional and local knowledge, believe that
emphasising intangibility may turn the former conception of cultural heritage inside-
out, and thus move in the opposite direction to the monophonic and epic narrative of
the nation.
To a certain extent, these intellectual voices are echoed in the notion (which has
been much vaunted since the 1990s) that the nation-state has been superseded by the
appearance of “nation-states” insofar as ethnic/cultural diversity has been imposed on
them, even in the republican delineations of the democratic states on the right. Other
experiences of collectivity have acquired heuristic status elevation and have shown clear
signs of the emergence of “the right to a voice” on the part of groups that traditionally
occupied “a place of ‘otherness’ in the main national narratives” (Abreu & Chagas,
2003, p. 13).
The National Plan for Culture (PNC) was approved by the National Congress in
2011 and laid down a set of goals that were to be achieved by 2020. In her presentation
of PNC, the then Minister of Culture, Ana de Hollanda, highlighted the fact that the
essential feature of the Plan was a large-scale social involvement:

The PNC was compiled by thousands of people by means of different degrees

and levels of experimenting and participation. It is a plan that reflects a
collective attempt to ensure that Brazilians can fully exercise their cultural
rights in every kind of economic situation involving different localities, ethnic-
based groups and people of all ages.
(Ministério da Cultura do Brasil, 2011)

The extract quoted above raises two questions. From an institutional standpoint, what
exactly is the “right to a voice” grounded on – among all these multifarious factors?
Since it is the nation-state that underpins the judicial/institutional features of this right,
how can the competence, legitimacy and proportionality of the state public order be
reconciled with the expression of relative autonomy of the multiple voices that can be
found in various narratives?
Certainly these two questions reveal a failure in the understanding of the relationship
between state and culture in Brazil. Following the political/institutional revolution of
1930, both the increase of the dual phenomena of urbanisation and industrialisation,
and the predominance of a modern view that was committed to rediscovering Brazil
with the aim of giving rise to a society that was national, modern and original, were
governed by the overriding importance of making the nation an ideological unity
(Oliven, 2002, pp. 13–43). Although it was weighed down by historical nuances and
inherent structural contradictions, the state, as an apparatus, was at the forefront of this
movement in its influence on cultural questions.

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Thus we are led to conclude that the gradual return of the country to a state democ-
racy of the right – with the establishment of a new Constitution in 1988 – was also a
turning-point in the correlation of the state with culture. This took place in a way that
meant that the country was prepared (among the legal obligations of the state) to keep
watch over the right to culture of Brazilian citizens, in a dual sense, both ensuring people
had access to cultural products and that they belonged to a particular culture.
We suspect that the socio-historical dynamics that have led to the guarantee of the
right to cultural citizenship in Brazil have been reflected in the alterations to the state’s
responsibilities, particularly when its attributions are conferred with legitimacy. At the
moment when an attempt is made to put into effect the right to cultural citizenship in
a way that impinges on various measures to maintain the public order of the state,
greater efforts are made to offset the different demands for recognition and equitable
distribution of rights, with directives designed to maintain the sovereignty of the state
machine. However, this can only be put into effect by including mechanisms for regulat-
ing the people and coordinating society which entail employing devices that foster the
valuation of human capital as both a psychic resource (involving identity) and an instru-
mental means (of survival).
Hence, it is not surprising that institutional networks are increasingly being fostered
with a view to giving logistical, pedagogical and financial support to all kinds of activi-
ties that appear to be “native undertakings”. (Such networks are allied to governments
on at least three levels, alongside the “transliteral” organs and NGOs.) By incorporating
the condition of the raw material and of the investor on only a single occasion, the
human agencies are pressurised to be self-regulatory so that they can accommodate the
rules of the state and/or non-governmental powers, as well as market designs. If they are
successful, the “natives” (especially those employed in craftsmanship and popular festi-
vals) will be able to turn their skills and activities into merchandise of value (Mira,
2009, pp. 563–697; Nery, 2011, pp. 59–88; Farias, 2011).
The connections between environments and popular cultures, with marketing
strategies for entertainment, leisure and tourism, also involve socio-technical transitions
to an ecology based on digital information processing and communications. One cannot
think of popular culture today without the techno-informational dissemination of
images, sounds, goods and people on a large scale, or without the stress that is being laid
on recognising the value of cultural diversity
Once again, it is worth recalling the establishment of the Rio de Janeiro favelas as
tourist destinations: policymakers, NGO activists, as well as the subaltern and stigma-
tised groups, have united and become partners in the dynamics of using cultural products
for marketing purposes. The favelas and the culture which is supposedly peculiar to them
are being reinvented as the entrepreneurial domains of the “new urban middle classes”
par excellence.

Conclusion
As we have sought to demonstrate here, since the end of the 1980s, the debate about
popular culture in Brazil has undergone a theoretical and analytic re-evalution, against
a background of “redemocratisation”. Despite general divergences of opinion, those who
have taken part in this debate have tended to agree that the historical links which are
the key features both with regard to Brazilian culture and its society (Cavalcanti, 2006;
Carvalho, 2006) no longer reflect the popular culture of Brazil in the new millennium.

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We are faced with a popular culture that is increasingly being defined in terms of
capital, and, as a result, is more dependent on relations with the world of entertainment
and tourism. In contrast, the displacement of the appropriations made in this complex
web include – to borrow the idea of Roy Wagner (2010) – the “reinvention” of the
semantics of popular culture.

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518
 INDEX

Abbas, A. 507 Antena 3 313–14

ABC (Australia) 327 Antena 3 313, 316, 318
ABC (US) 95, 150 Antheunis, M. L. 429
Activism 134, 268–81, 471–80 Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere 179
Adams, D. 161–62 ANZACS 436–48
Adams, J. Q. 210–12, 214 Anzacs, The 440
Adams, M. 220 Apartment, The 97
Addams Family, The 359 Apple 16, 18, 151, 400
Ade, K. S. 285 Apprentice, The 329
Adorno, T. 4, 6, 67, 121, 177–78, 183, 223, 293 Are You Smarter Than? 27
Affectiva 85–90 Armstrong, L. 296
Affleck, B. 235 Arnold, M. 4, 40, 165
Agenor, S. 508 Arom, S. 287
Alberoni, F. 356 Aroyo, G. M. 424
Alea, T. G. 215, 223 Arthur, W. B. 169
Alexander, M. 385 Arts Council 451
Alexandra 328 Atatürk, M. K. 441
Alfa 397 Atlantic Monthly 79
Ali, W. 452 Atlantic Records 283
All is Lost 223 Audiences 45–55, 77–102, 155–56
Allen, D. 208 Australian War Memorial 443
Allen, J. P. 431 Australian, The 327, 443
Alles Neu 274–75 Avant-Garde 173–86
Allman, J. 506 Avatar 357
Alonso, B. I. 311 Avnet, J. 154–55
Althusser, L. 108 Ayech, S. xxii
Alyokhina, M. 471
Amazon 93, 151–52, 156 Bacall, L. 245
Ambani, D. 372, 374 Bacevich, A. 385
AMC 93–102, 188 Bachchan, A. 373
American Express 154 Bachmann, M. 381
American Graffiti 367 Bacon-Smith, C. 50
American Idol 191 Baker, D. 385
American Society for Bioethics and Baker, L. 283
Humanities 339 Baldwin, C. 176
Amistad 207–28 Ballard, J. G. 209
Amkoullel 286 Ballet Méchanique 176
Amnesty International 475 Balzac, H. 107
Andrejevic, M. 70, 78, 85 Bandura, A. 46
Ang, I. 49, 100 Bangs, L. 180–81
Aniston, J. 329 Banks, J. 71, 73
Annoying Orange 154 Baras, S. 319
 I N DE X

Barrow, C. 191 Blyth, A. 264–66

Barrymore, D. 359 Boa 486
Barsamian, D. 383 Bobbit, S. 219
Barthes, R. 38, 40, 42, 103–12, 504 Bobby 371
Bartholomew, F. 359 Bobettes, The 283
Bartlett, M. 87–88 Boedigheimer, D. 154
Bataille, G. 112 Bogart, H. 47–48, 245
Baudelaire, C. 181 Boheme 287
Baudrillard, J. 121, 489 Boltanski, L. 405
Bauman, Z. 269, 271–72, 279, 400–01 Bonner, F. 122, 153
Bazenguissa-Ganga, R. 500–01 Bonnie and Clyde 187
BBC 25, 327, 455, 459 Bono 130, 132–33, 397, 400
Beatles, The 178 Boorstin, D. 120–21, 401
Beaumont, J. 439 Bordwell, D. 150
Beavers, L. 262–65 Born, G. 24, 34
Beck, U. 400 Botti, C. 298
Beethoven, L. 67, 180 Bourdieu, P. 24, 27–28, 30–31, 34
Beeton, S. 394 Bowie, D. 399
Behind the Green Door 197, 201–02 Bowker, G. 31
Belafonte, H. 134, 283 boyd, d. 84
Bello, L. 319 Boyle, K. 198–99
Belton, J. 244 Boys from the Blackstuff 450
Benjamin, W. 65, 175, 247 Brakhage, S. 175
Bennett, B. 60 Brando, M. 215
Bennett, L. 400 Bratich, J. 83–84
Bennett, T. 298 Braudy, L. 119, 389
Beretta 187 Braverman, H. 16–17
Berlin 181 Breaking Bad 97, 188, 190–91, 195
Berne, E. 253 Brecht, B. 6, 65, 176, 184–85
Bertélemy, J.-S. 346 Brennan, E. 31
Bertelsmann 18 Briner, L. R. 430
Bevir, M. 452 Bringing Up Baby 232
Beyond Borders 404 Brinkley, F. 494
Bhabha, H. 502 Brockington, D. 124–25
Bhaskar, R. 407 Brockman, L. 430
Bhedwar, S. 371 Brook, V. 389
Biberman, H. 214 Brooks, R. 462
Bieber, J. 125, 357 Brown, J. D. 430
Big Brother 23, 33 Brown, S. 385
Big C, The 190–92 Brubeck, D. 294
Big Sleep, The 244 Brunius, J. 246
Billboard 283, 285, 293 Bruns, A. 62
Birth of a Nation, The 176, 216, 231 Brunsdon, C. 49
Bizet, R. 353 Bublé, M. 298
Björk 475 Buchanan, P. 381
Blackenstein 231 Buckingham, D. 362
Blair, T. 449 Buonanno, M. 61
Blake, P. 179 Burawoy, M. 27
Blakovich, S. 200 Bureau of Applied Social Research 79
Blip Studios 152 Bureau of Labor Statistics 232
Bloc Party 272 Burke, M. 429
Blockbuster Video 98 Burman, B. 507

520
 I N DEX

Burn! 215, 223 Chatto & Windus 360

Burnett, C. 248 Chen, K.-H. 483
Bush, G. W. 241 Cheng, S. 486
Butler, J. 473 Chester, J. 431–32
Butsch, R. 46 Chi, C. L. 487
Byrne, D. 284 Chiapello, È. 405
Chicago Magazine 160
Cage, J. 180 Chinatown 367
Cagney and Lacey 187 Chomsky, N. 382, 385, 459
Caine, J. M. 260 Chopra, Y. 373
Calacanis, J. M. 383 Chornet-Roses, D. 311
Caldeirão do Huck 401–05 Chou, F. 486
Cale, J. 180 Chouliaraki, L. 124, 403–04
Calhoun, J. 211 Christakis, D. A. 430
Call of Duty 24 Christian, A. J. 152
Calypso 283 Chun, A. 481
camera obscura 360 Cingel, D. P. 429
Cameron, D. 269–71, 462, 466 Clapton, E. 399
Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University 443 Clark, M. 95
Canal Sur 313, 319 Clarke, K. 271
Canclini, N. G. 419 Clarke, M. 248
Capone, A. 191 Clifford, J. 439, 492
Captain Phillips 223 Clinton, W. J. 233
Cardin, P. 506 Clockwork Orange, A 187
Carroll, B. 467 Clooney, G. 397
Carroll, N. 150 Close Encounters of the Third Kind 209
Casarett, C. 338 CNN 18, 336
Cash Cab 27 Cobbs, P. M. 235
Castells, M. 138 Coca-Cola 289
Castillo, C. 409 Cockburn, A. 385
Castle, I. 350–51, 353 Coelho, P. 398
Castle, V. 350 Cohen, J. 379
Castro, F. 409 Colbert, C. 262–65
Cathcart, B. 464 Cole, C. 329
Cato Institute, The 189 Coleman, O. 297
Cave, D. 239 Collette, T. 236
CBC 184 Collier, G. 414
CBS 23, 95, 150 Color Purple, The 209
Celebrity 119–36, 356–65, 397–406 Columbia 150
Celebrity Big Brother 123 Columbia University 79
Celebrity Studies 123 Coma 334
Çelik, K. 443 Comaroff, J. 501
Cha-Jua, S. 385 Come Find Me! 205
Chamberlin, F. 421 Confédéración de Nacionalidades Indígenas del
Chambers, M. 201 Ecuador 408
Chambers, R. 350 Consejo Regional Indígena del Cuaca, El 408
Champagne, P. 28 Consumers 77–92
Chan, B. 488 Conversation Analysis 112–18
Chan, M. 311 Cooder, R. 284
Chanda, S. 373 Coogan, J. 358–59
Changing Lanes 229–43 Cook, D. T. 358
Chaplin, C. 176 Cook, P. 367

521
 I N DE X

Coolio 191 de Brunhoff, J. 502

Coombs, A. 438 de Certeau, M. 39, 112, 477
Cooper, J. 359 de Holanda, A. 515
Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting 95 de Lauretis, T. 113
Copeland, R. 351 de Medici, C. 344
Cops 190 DEA, The 190
Cordillera People’s Alliance 424 Dean, H. 59
Corner, J. 124 Dean, J. 356
Corporation for Public Broadcasting 381 Debord, G. 176, 182–83
Corrections Corporation of America 189–90 Debray, J. R. 409
Corset 342–55 Decca 180
Couldry, N. 64 Dee, S. 266
Coulson, A. 462 Deep Forest 286–88
Craig, D. 356 Deep Throat 197, 202–03
Craigslist 463 Deewar 373–74
Crawford, J. 264–66 DeLanda 477
Creation Records 452 DeLaria, L. 195
Crenshaw, R. 289–90 Deleuze, G. 494
Crossley, A. 95 della Porta, D. 460–61
Crossroads 49 Delsarte, F. 351
Cruise, T. 356 Democratization 56–65
Cube, The 27 Dench, J. 357
Cukier, K. 100 Denisoff, R. S. 268
Culkin, M. 359 Derrida, J. 39
Cullum, J. 298 Desai, N. 371
Cultural Policy 449–70 Descartes, R. 144
Cultural Science 159–70 Deuze, M. 71, 73
Cultural Studies 481 Development 128–36
Cumberbatch, B. 220 Devereux, R. 452
Curran, J. 57 Devgan, A. 371
Curtin, M. 150, 154 Devi, P. 125
Curtiz, M. 259 Devil in Miss Jones, The 197, 203–04
Cyril, S. 369–70 Dexter 188, 192
Cyrus, M. 329, 362 Diani, M. 461
Dibango, M. 283
Dae Jang Geum 482, 485–86, 488 Dichter, E. 79
Daily Mail 327–30 Dietrich, M. 357
Daily Mail and General Trust 327 Dimock, W.-C. 499
Daily Mirror 183, 327, 330 Dior, C. 183
Daily Telegraph (Australia) 327 Discourse Analysis 137–48
Daily Telegraph (UK) 327 Disney 150, 283
Dallas 49 Dixon, T. 231
Daltrey, R. 179 Django Unchained 240
Dance 301–07, 342–55 Do They Know It’s Christmas? 132
Dancing with the Stars 25 Dobbs, M. 23
Dande Disco 370 Dog’s Life, A 176
Dano, P. 220 Dogg, S. 192
Darwin, C. 166–67, 169, 234 Domizlaff, H. 79
Davis, B. 357, 398 Donen, S. 246
Davis, M. 294 Dorfman, A. 502
Davison, G. 440 Douglas, M. 329
Day, D. 266 Douglass, F. 230

522
 I N DEX

Dovey, J. 58 Erickson, M. 70
Downey, Jr., R. 192 Erikson, E. H. 429
Doyal, R. 336 Erni, J. 487
DreamWorks 388 Escobar, A. 413
Dred Scott 213 Essex, J. 328
Driessens, O. 60 Ethnomethodology 112–18
Dubrovskaya, T. 311 Eugénie 347
Dueling Banjos 191 European Journal of Cultural Studies 481
Duggan, M. 270, 279 European Union 328, 454, 473
Duncan, I. 351–52 Evans, C. 350, 353
Dyer-Witheford, N. 74 Evans, J. 122
Dyer, R. 122, 125, 356 Evans, M. E. 431
Dylan, B. 399 Executive Review 212
Exide 369
E! 192 Exorcist, The 181
E. T. 209 Extreme Makeover: Home Edition 401
Ealing College of Art 178
Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution 191 Facebook 58, 68, 73, 99, 138, 140–41, 151, 324,
Eastwood, C. 357 397–98, 401–02, 426–35, 475
eBay 463 Fairbanks, D., Jr. 246
Ebert, R. 213 Fairfax Media 327
Eckert, C. 360 Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting 379
Eco, U. 103–04 Fallon, J. 191
Edison, T. A. 351, 390 Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front 409
Edwards, A. 362 Farm Security Administration 217
Edwards, T. 507 Farmer, P. 400
Ehrenreich, B. 385 Fashion 183–84, 191–93, 195, 260–62, 342–55,
Eisenhower, D. D. 296 500–08
Eisenstein, E. 149 Fashion Police 192
Eisenstein, S. 38, 40 Fassbinder, M. 215, 220–21
Ejiofor, C. 218, 222 Favre, B. 191
Ek, R. 140 Fawkes, G. 125
Ekman, P. 244 Federal Communications Commission 380
El-Khalil, Z. 492–99 Femen 472
El-Shorouq 495, 497 Femina Potens Art Gallery 200
Electronic Sound 181 Filth and the Fury, The 182
Eliot, T. S. 165–66, 168 Fincher, D. 175
Elizabeth II 183 Fins, J. 339
Elle 195 Firth, S. 293
Ellington, D. 294–95 Fisk, R. 496
Ellis, H. 194 Fiske, J. 63, 68
EMI 182 Fitzsimmons, L. 486
Emotient 77, 85–90 Fletcher, B., Jr. 385
Empire 180 Flintstones, The 176
Empire 357 Flipper 358
Empire of the Sun 209 Flores, A. 200, 203
Emporio Armani 400 Fondo para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos
Endemol 33 Indígenas de América, El 411
Entman, R. M. 413 Foner, E. 213
Entwistle, J. 179, 507 Fontana, J. 310
Enzensberger, H. M. 65, 460–61 Forbes 464
Epstein, J. 246 Ford, H. 120, 177–78

523
 I N DE X

Ford, H. 357 Gates, M. 130

Ford, J. 361 Gauntlett, D. 68, 71–73
Ford, S. 69, 71 Gaver, W. 476
Format Recognition and Protection Geertz, C. 292
Association 32 Geldof, B. 133, 399
Fornäs, J. 484 Gender 45–55, 197–206, 259–67, 301–07
Fortune 500 77 General Electric 18, 379
Foster, J. 359 General Motors 379, 392
Foster, J. B. 385 Genres 171–374
Foucault, M. 39 Gerbner, G. 317
Fox News 336 Gerrard, L. 289
Fox, P. 274–75 Gevinson, S. 160
Fox/Twentieth Century Fox/21st Century Fox Gevinson, T. 160–62, 164, 170
18, 150, 155, 327, 360, 363 Ghosh, B. 124–25
Frank, T. 385 Ghost Town 450
Frankenstein 229–43 Giamatti, P. 219
Franzoni, D. 214 Gibson, M. 192, 440
Free Press 384 Giddens, A. 400
Freedom House 475 Gillard, J. 438
Freeman, M. 210 Gillespie, D. 296
Freeview 62 Gillespie, M. 50
Frentz, T. S. 229 Gillett, C. 284–85
Freud, S. 112 Gilmore, A. 453
Frida 36–44 Gilroy, P. 305
Friedman, T. 382, 384 Giral, S. 215
Friesen, W. 244 Girl In Every Port, A 248
Frith, S. 182 Girl Pile 205
Front Page, The 248 Giroux, H. 233–34
Fuchs, C. 25, 69–71, 73 Gladiator 289
Fugitive, The (film) 361 Glee 194
Fugitive, The (television) 187 Globo 401–02, 405
Fuglsig, N. 500 Godard, J.-L. 7
Fuller, L. 351–52 Goffman, E. 254
Fung, A. 482 Goldberg, D. T. 233, 238
Fussell, P. 439 Goldenthal, E. 41
Golding, P. 15
Gabriel, P. 130, 284–85 Goldsmith, B. 391
Gaga 112, 482 Gondola, D. 501, 506, 508
Galbraith, J. 385 Gone With the Wind 216
Gallipoli 440–48 Gonzalez, J. 385
Gallup, George 80, 95 Goodman, A. 383, 385
Game of Thrones 112 Google 16, 18, 63, 68, 73, 141, 151, 356, 403
Gandoulou, J.-D. 501, 504 Gordon, E. 413
Gangnam Style 282, 486 Gorski, P. S. 30
Gaonkar, D. 499 Goya, F. 209–10, 221
Garbo, G. 104 Graceland 283–85, 287
Garcia, R. 154 Gramsci, A. 4, 7
Gardner, D. 184 Grand Theft Auto 454
Garfinkel, H. 115 Grant, C. 244–58
Garland, J. 122, 356 Graves, R. 343
Garnham, N. 15, 25 Gravity 223
Gates, B. 130 Gray, A. 50

524
 I N DEX

Gray, J. 153–54, 156 Havens, T. 30

Green Forest, My Home 484 Hawke, B. 438, 440–41
Green Mile, The 240 Hawks, H. 244–58
Green, J. 69, 71 Hawthorne, N. 210
Greene, G. 360–61 Hayek, S. 41–42
Greene, R. 221 Hayles, K. N. 143
Greenpeace 142 Hayworth, R. 245
Greenwald, G. 385 HBO 23, 96–98, 156, 188, 190
Gregory, D. 230–31, 235 Health 333–42
Greimas, A. J. 103 Hebdige, D. 39, 63
Grey, S. 202 Hedges, C. 385
Greyson, J. 184–85 Heidegger, M. 115, 117
Grier, W. H. 235 Hellman, J. H. 413
Griffith, D. W., 176, 187, 231 Hepburn, A. 404
Gross, L. 317 Here Comes Honey Boo 363
Gross, T. 383 Herman, E. 459
Grundy, B. 182–83 Hernández Salván, M. xxii
Guardian, The 8, 268, 320, 323, 326–27, 331, Hesmondhalgh, D. 28, 122
462, 475, 495, 497 Heywood, J. 328
Guattari, F. 494 Hill Street Blues 188
Guevara, E. C. 407, 409 Hills, M. 50
Guffey, E. 366–67 Hilton, P. 192
Guinness 500, 507 Hindman, M. 59, 62
Gumtree 463 Hindustan Times, The 373
Gunning, T. 417 His Girl Friday 244–58
Guru 366–75 Hitchens, C. 382
Gyimóthy, S. 142 Hitler, A. 330
Hjelmslev, L. 109
Hacked-Off 464–68 Ho, T. H. 483
Hackett, B. 467 Hobbitt, The 357, 392
Hale, C. 413 Hobsbawm, E. 293–94
Haley, J. 361 Hobson, D. 49
Hall, S. 48, 268–69, 272–73, 438 Hockney, D. 179
Halliday, M. 37 Hodge, A. 343
Hamilton, R. 179 Hodge, B. 37
Hancock, H. 298 Hogan, P. 440
Hardy, T. 162–64 Hoggart, R. 47, 107
Hare, A. L. 431 Holder, E. 189
Harper’s Bazaar 195 Hollande, F. 318
Harper’s Weekly 348 Hollinshead, K. 419
Harrison, G. 181 Hollywood Reporter 1
Harrison, W. H. 214 Holmes, S. 123
Harry 328 Holmstrom, J. 359, 363
Hartley, J. 58, 168, 403 Homeland 23
Harvey, D. 31 Hood, R. 371
Hasan, W. 492 Hooper, C. 95
Hashmi, E. 371 Hopkins, A. 210
Haskell, M. 361 Horkheimer, M. 4, 67, 121, 177–78
Haspel, K. C. 240 Horne, H. 182
Hastings, M. 385 Horse Whisperer, The 240
Hatari! 244 Hounsou, D. 209
Hatch, K. 360–63 House of Cards 23–35, 153, 190

525
 I N DE X

How to Look Naked 27 Jameson, F. 367

Howard, J. 438 Jarrett, K. 195
Howard, R. 359 Jaws 181, 209
Hu, K. 483 Jazz 292–300
Huck, L. 397–406 Jean, W. 301–07
Huda, R. 371 Jenkins, H. 50, 58–59, 63, 68–69, 71
Hudson, R. 262–65 Jim Dandy 283
Hulu 151, 155 Johansson, S. 130, 356
Human Rights Watch 475 John, E. 181
Hunger 215, 221 Johnson-Yale, C. 394
Hunt, A. 189, 195 Johnson, C. 385
Hunter, J. D. 438 Johnson, M. 142
Hurst, F. 260 Jolie, A. 130, 132–33, 397, 404
Hurt, W. 234 Jones, Q. 295
Huyssen, A. 49 Jones, S. 182–83
Journal of African Cultural Studies 481
I Hate Straights 184 Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 481
I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here 123, 328 Jowell, T. 455
Ibrahim, D. 371 Jump Cut 336
Ice Age 358 Jun, B. Y. 486
Ill Manors 268–81 Jung, C. 175
Imitation of Life 259–67
Immigrant, The 176 Kackman, M. 190–91, 194
Independent Police Complaints Kahlo, F. 36–44
Commission 270 Kahn, N. F. A. 290
Independent, The 323, 328, 463 Kaká 398
Indiana Jones 209 Kaminski, J. 209
Indigenous Peoples 407–25 Kant, I. 3, 113
Ingersoll, H. 346 Kapoor, I. 124
Inglis, F. 120 Kapoor, R. 371
Inglis, K. S. 437 Kardashian, K. 330
Instagram 329, 397 Kasaysayan ng Lahi 419–25
Institute for Motivational Research 79 Kavanagh, T. 463
Institute on Assets and Social Policy 232, 239 Kaye, D. 124
Instituto Criar 405 Keating, P. 438
Intel 151 Keaton, B. 176
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements 481 Keen, A. 139, 152
International Federation of Human Rights 475 Kelly, G. 357
International Herald Tribune, The 325 Kendall, E. 351
International Journal of Cultural Studies 481 Kerman, P. 188–89, 193–94
International Publishing Company 330 Kettling 272
IRA 215 Key, J. 393
Isabella II 211, 214 Khan, F. 366–75
Isla 181 Khan, S. 368–70
Isou, I. 176 Kher, K. 369
Kick-Ass 364
Jackson, J. 385 Kidjo, A. 286
Jackson, K. M. 358 Killing, The 23
Jackson, M. 266 Kim, S. 484
Jackson, S. L. 234 King Mob 182
Jacobs, S. xxii King, C. H. 330
Jagger, M. 399 King, C. R. 408

526
 I N DEX

King, L. 383 Lee, T. T. 488

King, N. xxii Lefebvre, H. 107, 112
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 418–19 Léger, F. 176
Kitzinger, C. 339 Legge-Bourke, T. 328
Kitzinger, J. 337, 339 Lei, B. Q. B. 484
Klein, N. 385 Leila, M. 494
Koester, J. 309 Lenhart, A. 428
Kohan, J. 188, 193 Lenin, V. I. 501
Kojak 187 Lennon, J. 181
Kolhatkar, S. 383 Lennox, A. 239
Kraig, B. 178 Lent, J. 486
Krall, D. 298 Lento, T. 429
Krcmar, M. 429 Lenya, L. 184
Kress, G. 37 Lessig, L. 385
Krugman, P. 385 Lettres Nouvelles 103
Kuppens, A. 310 Leveson 462–68
Kuttner, R. 385 Lévi-Strauss, C. 103
Kyi, A. S. S. 475 Lichty, L. W. 95
Kymlicka, W. 408 Life 217
Lighthorsemen, The 440
L Word, The 188, 194 Limbaugh, R. 381
LA Law 188 Lincoln 212
La llorona 41–44 Lincoln, A. 212
La1 313 Linda, S. 282, 288
Lacroix, M. 353 Lion 282, 288
Lacy, M. G. 240 Lion King, The 283, 358
Lake Erie Correctional Institution 190 Lipovetsky, G. 398
Lakoff, G. 142 Lippman, W. 459
Lambert, C. 179 Literature 492–99
Lambert, K. 179 Little Caesar 187
Lanier, J. 152 Liu, B. 84
Lassie 358 Live Aid 398–99
Last Supper, The 215, 223 Livingston, E. 114, 116
Latour, B. 475 Lloyd, H. 176
Lauren, R. 191 Lobato, R. 155
Law & Order 187 Lohan, L. 192
Law, J. 145, 474 Loiseau de Persuis, L.-L. 346
Law, W.-S. 484 Lomax, A. 282
Lawrence, F. 357 London Evening Standard 183, 463
Lazarsfeld, P. 79 London Gaiety Girls 349
Le Sueur, J.-F. 346 Looseley, D. 450, 455
Leadbelly 217 Lord of the Rings 392
Leadbetter, C. 139 Lord, W. B. 344
Learning Tree, The 217 Lost 190
Lears, T. J. J. 79 Lotz, A. 153–54, 156
Leavis, F. R. 165 Lovelace, L. 202–03
Lebedev, E. 463 Lowenthal, L. 121
Lebrón, J. 319 Luhmann, N. 163–64
Lee, C.-C. 150 Lukács, G. 184–85
Lee, J. 200–01 Lustig, M. W. 309
Lee, J. Y. 483 Luthria, M. 366–75
Lee, M. 440 Lynskey, D. 268

527
 I N DE X

Maxwell, R. 124
Ma, E. K.-W. 487 Mayer-Schöenberger, V. 100
Mabanckou, A. 500–01, 503, 505, 508 Mbembe, A. 502
MacCannell, D. 418 Mbube 282, 288
Macchiavelli, N. 23 McCabe, A. 311
MacGaffey, J. 500–01 McCain, J. 382
Mack the Knife 184 McCarthy, C. 418
Mack, H. 246, 248 McCartney, P. 399, 475
Macli-ing Dulag 423–24 McChesney, B. 468
Macpherson, C. B. 119 McDonald, K. P. 98
Mad Men 94, 97, 191, 368 McElhaney, J. 244, 254
Made in Chelsea 328–29 McGee, A. 452
Made of More 500 McGonaughey, M. 210
Madonna 132–33, 183, 399, 475, 482 McGuigan, J. 68–69, 73
Magna Carta for the Information Age 8 McHoul, A. 39
Mail on Sunday 328 McKay, D. 421
MailOnline 328–31 McKernan, M. 443
Makeba, M. 283 McLaren, M. 182–83
Making of “Monsters”, The 184–85 McLeod, J. 440
Malcolm X 217 McQueen, S. 207–28
Malin, B. 80 McRobbie, A. 48
Malone, D. 266 Media Lens 460
Man From Snowy River, The 394 Media Matters 384–87
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The 97 Media Reform Coalition 464–68
Mankekar, P. 50 MediaSet 25
Mankiewicz, J. L. 246 Melbourne 450
Mann, S. 324 Melchor, A. 423
Manning, S. 351 Melodrama 259–67
Manovich, L. 60 Melody, W. 25
Mansfield, J. 266 Merayo, M. C. 484
Marcos (Mexico) 407, 413 Merkela, A. 475
Marcos, F. 417–25 Merton, R. K. 150, 398–99
Marey, J. E. 350 Metal Machine Music 180–81
Márez, C. 190 Meteor Gardens 488
Markham, T. 64 Metz, C. 38
Marley, B. 125, 239 Metzger, G. 178–79
Marlow, C. 429 MGM 150, 356
Márquez, G. G. 410 Miami Vice 190
Marshall, P. D. 122–24 Michelet, J. 108
Martin, P. M. 501, 504 Michell, R. 236
Martínez-Guillem, S. 310 Microsoft 18, 63, 151
Marwick, A. 84 Middle-Range 149–58
Marx, K. 7, 13–14, 18, 24–25, 27, 32–34, 37–38, Mighty Heart, A 404
70, 108–09, 121, 166, 329–30, 410, 483, 501 Mikami, A. L. 431
Marxism Today 450 Mildred Pierce 259–67
Massey, D. 451, 473, 477 Milestone, L. 248
Mast, G. 244–45, 254 Miliband, D. 329
Mast, J. 310 Miliband, E. 271, 329
Mastan, H. 371 Miliband, R. 329–30
Masters, I. 383 Mill, J. S. 13
Mattelart, A. 5, 15, 502 Miller, P. 139
Matthews, G. 260 Miller, S. 328

528
 I N DEX

Miller, T. 24, 39, 69–70, 124, 385 My Sassy Girlfriend 486

Mintel 73 Mythologies 103–11
Mirren, H. 357
MIT 77 Nabokov, V. 175
Mittell, J. 190 Nader, R. 385
Mobutu, S. S. 501, 506 Nakamura, L. 145
Modern Family 194 Naremore, J. 247
Modern Times 176 Narita, H. 217
Mol, A. 145 National Academy of Recording Arts and
Molina, I. 305 Sciences 285
Monaco, J. 123 National Endowment for Science, Technology
Monica O My Darling 371 and the Arts 454–55
Monroe, M. 122, 266, 356–57 National Endowment for the Arts 295–96
Montgomery, K. C. 431–32 National Health Service 329
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life 163 National Security Agency 468
Moore, A. 274 National Union of Journalists 464
Moore, M. 385 NBC 18, 95, 150, 154, 187, 190, 275
Moran, A. 24 Netflix 23–35, 93–102, 151, 155–56, 188, 193,
Moreno, M. 430 195
Moretti, F. 154 New Behind the Green Door, The 198, 201–02
Moretz, C. G. 364 New Devil in Miss Jones, The 198, 203–04
Morgan, S. 120 New India Assurance Company 370
Morley, D. 48–49, 52 New International Division of Cultural Labor 1,
Morris, D. 244, 247 6, 15, 17, 19, 23–35, 288–89, 388–96
Morrissey 357 New York Times Company, The 327
Morse, R. 493 New York Times, The 160, 193, 323, 325–26,
Mosley, O. 330 330, 373, 475
Mother of God, Drive Putin Away 471 New Yorker 99
Motorola 400 News 308–32, 458–70
Mountbatten, L. 330 News Corp/International 16, 18, 154, 326–28,
Mouquet, E. 287 464–68
Moyers, B. 383, 386 News of the World 462
Mozart, W. A. 180 Newton, I. 144
Mr. Lee 283 Nichols, J. 384–85
Mroué, R. 493–94 Nieborg, D. B. 483
MSNBC 386 Nielsen 82, 95, 97, 100
Mubarak, H. 497 Nietzsche, F. 39
Mukawil, S. 385 Night and Day 360–61
Muller, S. 301 Night of the Living Dead 240
Mulligan, C. 216 Nixon, R. 189
Munar, A. M. 140 Noam, E. 151
Murdoch, K. 443 Nolte, N. 192
Murdoch, R. 23, 326–27, 443, 462–68 Northcliffe, A. 327, 330
Murdock, G. 15 Northup, S. 207–28
Muro, F. 422, 424 Nostalgia 198–205
Murphy, S. 183 Novek, E. 193
Murs, O. 277 NPR 379–87
Music 180–81, 268–307, 486–88 Nyong’o, L. 221
Musketeers of Pig Alley 187
Muybridge, E. 350–51 O’Connor, J. 451
My Generation 179 O’Kelly, S. 500
My Hips Don’t Lie 301–07 O’Regan, T. 391

529
 I N DE X

Oakley, A. 49 Perelman, M. 385

Obama, B. 125, 191, 193, 208, 240, Permira 25
388, 403, 472 Perot, R. 387
Occupy 125 Perren, A. 151
Odorono 179 Perry, K. 125
Ofcom 455 Peter, J. 429
Ogilvy 328 Petruska, K. 151
Oko, Y. 181 Pew Research Center 232
Olivier, L. 182 Pezzini, I. 103–04
Olomidé, K. 504 Phalen, P. F. 95
Olsen, A. 1, 8 Philadelphia Dance History Journal 349
Olsen, M-K. 1, 8 Philadelphia Inquirer, The 349
Om Shanti Om 366–75 Phillips, T. 439
Omi, M. 233 Philosophy and Rhetoric 336
Once Upon a Time in Mumbai 366–75 Picart, C. J. S. 229
Only Angels Have Wings 244–45, 250 Pilger, J. 385
Only Way is Essex, The 328 Pimp My Ride 401
Ono, Y. 475 Pink Floyd 183
Orange Is the New Black 153, 187–97 Pitt, B. 133, 222, 356
Orwell, G. 390 Places 375–518
Osterweil, A. 361 Plan B 268–81
Other Francisco, The 215 Planet 24 452
Ovaltine 369 Platt, L. 191
Oxfam 130 Poiret, P. 353
Oz 189 Pokemon 482, 486
Political Economy 13–22
Paasonen, S. 199 Pollack, S. 236
Padukone, D. 368–69 Pollin, R. 385
Pagel, M. 168–69 Pollitt, K. 342
Pahmuk, O. 495, 498 Ponte, S. 135, 399–400
Pall Mall Gazette 347 Pontecorvo, G. 215
Panorama 424 Poole, S. W. 240
Pants on the Ground 191 Porn 197–206, 357
Paquin 353 Portman, N. 130
Paquin, A. 210 Potter, W. 385
Paramount 150 Potts, J. 168
Paris-Match 110 Povinelli, E. 499
Parisot 345, 347 Poyatos, F. 244, 246–47
Parks, G. 207–28 Predator 145
Parr, c. 344 Press Complaints Commission 463
Pata Pata 283 Prison 187–96
Paulson, S. 221 Prison Break 189
Payne Fund 80, 82 Prison Life, The 192
Payton, N. 294 Priya, S. 370
Paz, O. 413 Product RED 400
PBS 381 Project Censored 460
Peck, J. 235 Prouty, O. H. 260
Peete, A. 236 Psy 282
Peirce, C. S. 37 Public Enemy 187
Pels, D. 124 Pudovkin, V. I. 246–47
Pempek, T. A. 428 Punch 347
Percival, J. M. 483 Pussy Riot 125, 471–78

530
 I N DEX

Putin, V. 471–78 Riegert, K. 124

Puttnam, D. 452 Rimbaud, A. 181
Rin-Tin-Tin 358
Queen 182 Rio Bravo 244, 248
Queensbury 347 Rivera, D., 41–42
Rivette, J. 246
R&R Productions 443 Rizzle Kicks 277
Ra, S. 297 RKO 150
Race 207–43 Roberts, M.-L. 121
Radio 377–87 Robeson, P. 122
Radio Caroline 179 Rockford Files, The 187
Radio London 179 Roelvink, G. 472
Rain 486–87 Rojek, C. 123
Raising Arizona 358 Roland, B. 437
Rajagopal, A. 125 Rookiemag 160
Ramírez, C. 503 Rooney, M. 359
Rampal, A. 368 Roosevelt, F. D. R. 363
Ramsey, J. 362 Rose, C. 383–84
Ranaut, K. 371 Rosen, J. 58
Random House 452 Ross, K. 107
Rap 268–81 Rothenbuhler, E. 95
Raphael, S. 189 Rothermere, H. 327, 330
Ratnam, M. 366–75 Rothermere, J. 327
Ravitch, D. 385 Rotten, J. 182
Ray, M. 176 Roy, S. 310
RCA 180 RTÉ 25
Reagan, N. 189 Rubin, J. 31
Reagan, R. 188–89, 233, 357, 397–406 Ruckmick, C. 80
Real Hustle, The 27 Rudd, K. 438
Real L Word, The 188 Ruhleder, K. 31
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm 361 Rus, J. 414
Rebuck, G. 452 Rushdie, S. 409
Recording Industry Association of America 288 Rushing, J. H. 229
Red Cross 130 Ruskin, J. 165
Red River 244 Russell, F. 343
Reddit 324 Russell, R. 244–58
Rediker, M. 208 Rutherford, J. 450
Redmond, S. 123 Ryle, G. 117
Reed, A. 239
Reed, D. 266 Sachs, J. 400
Reed, J. 409 Sacks, H. 114, 117
Reed, L. 180–81, 319 Saint-Laurent, Y. 504
Regional Development Agencies 453 Sakai, N. 498
Reich, R. 385 Salama, E. 452
Reid, J. 182 Sally Can’t Dance 180–81
Reliance Industries 373 Salon 239
Retro 366–76 Salt of the Earth 214
Reynolds, S. 367 Salvert, S. L. 428
Ricardo, D. 17 Samuel, G. 337
Rice, M. 422 Sanborn, K. 177
Richey, L. 135, 399–400 Sanchez, M. 287
Ridley, J. 218 Sanders, B. 385

531
 I N DE X

Sands, B. 215, 221 Shelley, M. 229–30

Sandvine 156 Shin, H. 483
Sandvoss, C. 50 Shirkey, C. 59, 152
Sapeurs 500–08 Shirley Temple Theatre, The 363
Saramago, J. 410 Shirley Temple’s Storybook 363
Sarandon, S. 357 Sholay 369–70
Sarandos, T. 98–100 Shostakovich, D. 269, 274–76
Sartre, J.-P. 109 Showboat 216
Sassou-Nguesso, D. 505 Showtime 188, 191
Saturday Review 349 Shugar, D. R. 199
Saussure, F. de 36–37, 39 Silicon Alley Reporter 383
Savali, K. W. 191 Silver, J. 384
Saxon, J. 220 Simon, P. 283–85, 287–88
Scahill, J. 385 Simon, S. 492, 494
Scheer, R. 385 Simpsons, The 190
Schiavo, T. 334, 336, 338 Singleton, J. 216
Schiller, D. 25 Sirk, D. 266
Schiller, H. I. 5, 14 Sitney, P. A. 176
Schindler’s List 209 Skarsgård, S. 210
Schneider, T. 82, 89 Skeggs, B. 50
Schor, J. 385 Skiba, B. 349
Schouten, A. P. 429 Skins 27
Schudson, M. 28, 79 Slaves 214–15
Schüll, N. D. 83 Smallville 188
Schumpeter, J. 8, 168 Smith, A. 13–14, 17
Schütz, A. 113–15 Smith, C. 449–52
Schwarzenegger, A. 356–57 Smith, D. 438
Scott, W. D. 79 Smith, J. 364
Screen 121 Smith, K. 398–99, 404
Scrutiny 165 Smith, P. 319, 439, 452
Se7en 175 Smith, W. 364
Sedgwick, E. K. 231, 507 Smythe, D. 14, 16, 24, 52, 70
Seeger, P. 283 Snow, C. P. 166
Seiter, E. 49 Social Media 56–76, 426–35, 471–80
Selig, G. 390, 393 Social Semiotics 36–44
Serrano, A. 181 Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes
Sevignani, S. 71 Elégantes 500–08
Sex Education Show, The 33 Solomon Northup’s Odyssey 207–28
Sex Pistols, The 181–83 Solomon, N. 385
Shafak, E. 495 Songlines 285
Shaft 217 Sontag, S. 492
Shaft’s Big Score 217 Sony 18, 25, 77
Shakespeare, W. 167–68, 182, 237 Sopranos, The 188, 190, 192
Shakira 301–07 Sorrells, K. 309
Shame 215, 221 Soueif, A. 492–99
Shannon, C. 163 Soul Makossa 283
Sharrock, W. 116 South China Morning Post 325
Shary, T. 359 Sowinska, A. 311
Shattuc, J. 154 Spacey, K. 23
Shaw, G. B. 349 Spalding, E. 298
She-Wolf of the SS 181 Spears, B. 362
Shell 176 Specials, The 450

532
 I N DEX

Spengler, C. 367 Taylor, E. 359

Spielberg, S. 207–28 Taylor, F. W. 17
Spitzer, L. 105–06 Taymor, J. 41–43
Spotify 155 TED 160
Stacey, J. 122 Telecinco 313, 315, 318
Stahl, J. 259, 262 Telegraph Media Group 327
Staiger, J. 336 Telemadrid 313, 315, 318
Stalin, J. V. 214 Telluride Film Festival 218
Stallone, S. 356 Temple, S. 356–65
Stanistreet, M. 464 Teo, S. 484
Star Trek 50, 177 Thames Television 182
Star, S. L. 24, 30–31, 34 Thatcher, M. 326–28, 450
Staunton, K. 235 Thelma and Louise 100
Steedman, C. 260 Theories 11–170
Steele, J. R. 430 Theresa, M. 125
Steele, V. 342 Theron, C. 319
Steichen, E. 104 Thomas, P. 198
Steiner, M. 383 Thompson, A. 363
Steingold, M. 289 Thomson Reuters 481
Stella Dallas 259–67 Three Men and a Baby 358
Stenport, A. 185 Three Stooges, The 97
Stewart, P. 198 Threepenny Opera, The 184
Stewart, R. 298 Thrift, N. 472, 475, 477
Stiglitz, J. 385 Throat: A Cautionary Tale 198, 202–03
Stigter, B. 216 Throbbing Gristle 182
Sting 475 TIGA 454
Stockhausen, K. 180 Till, E. 105
Stoller, M. 189 Time 8, 130, 137–38, 261
Street, J. 124, 268 Time Warner 16, 18, 150
Strictly Come Dancing 23, 25, 329 Times of India, The 368, 373
Stryker, R. 217 Times, The 327, 462
Studlar, G. 360–61 Titanic 392
Subirats, E. 511 To Have and Have Not 244–45
Sugrue, T. 232 Today Show, The 182
Summers, L. 342 Tokens, The 283
Sun, The (NZ/Aotearoa) 362 Tolonnikova, N. 471
Sun, The (UK) 183, 327, 462–63 Toscanini, A. 275
Sunkist 105 Toudu 156
Sunstein, C. 61 Tourism 436–48
Super Girl 485 Townshend, P. 178–79
Superfly 187 Trans Grrls 205
Swanson, G. 353 Transformers 357
Swartz, D. 30 Treme 190
Sydney Morning Herald, The 325, 437 Trends Group 487
Szwedo, D. E. 431 TripAdvisor 140
Trotsky, L. 41, 43
T., Mr. 189 Trouble, C. 198–205
Taibbi, M. 385 Tumblr 324
Tamayo Duque, A. xxii Turan, K. 239
Tapscott, D. 59 Turbin, C. 507
Tarantino, Q. 240 Turner, G. 51, 122
Taylor, B. 295 Turner, L. 266

533
 I N DE X

Turner, N. 230 Virgin Media 452

TV3 313, 316, 319 Vivid 201–04
TVE 1 316, 319 Vogue 217
Twitter 58, 68, 84, 93, 99, 125, 141, 324, 397, Voina 472
402, 426 Voltmer, K. 56–57
Tyler, I. 60 Vu, H. T. 488

Ugly Betty 23, 487 Wagner, R. 517

Ugly Wudi 487 Waikato Times, The 393
UNAIDS 134 Waiting in Vain 239
Uncle Tom’s Cabin 216 Waldron, M. 297
Undercover Boss 25, 27 Walesa, L. 475
UNESCO 288 Walia, J. 328
Unfinished Music 1: Two Virgins 181 Walker, A. 209
UNHCR 404 Walker, L. 430
UNICEF 124, 404 Wall Street Journal 8, 326
Unilever 154 Wallace, A. 394
United Artists 150 Walters, J. 250
United Nations 317, 363, 408 Wanamaker 353
Universal 150 War Graves Commission 441
University of California, San Diego 77 Ward, S. 391
University of Iowa 80 Warhol, A. 180, 368
Updike, J. 112 Warner Bros. 150
Urban Institute, The 232 Warren, S. 195
Wartella, E. 429
Valdivia, A. 305 Warwick, J. 484
Valentino 504 Washington Post, The 325
Valkenburg, P. M. 429 Washington, F. 262–65
van Buren, M. 210–11, 214 Washington, G. 212
Van der Graaf, S. 483 Wasko, J. 70
van Dijk, T. A. 311–12 Watson, R. 114
van Gorp, B. 413 Wayne, John 97
van Krieken, R. 119–20 Weavers, The 282
vanden Heuval, K. 385 Weber, M. 28
Vargas, C. 41–44 Webster, J. G. 95
Variety 97 Wee Willie Winkie 360–61
Veblen, T. 259 Weeds 188, 190–92, 195
Veja 397, 402 Weill, K. 184
Veltrusky, J. 248 Weir, P. 440, 443
Velvet Light Trap 360 Weisbrot, M. 385
Venuti, L. 492 Welles, O. 177
Vermorel, F. 182 Wells, N. 361
Vermorel, J. 182 Wemba, P. 506
Verred, K. O. 360 Weston, J.-M. 504
Versace, G. 504 Westwood, V. 182–84
Viacom 150 Wetter, E. xxii
Vial, B. 362 Whale, J. 230
Vidal, G. 385–86 What’s My Line? 23
Vidor, K. 259–60 Wheeler, M. 124
Vigarello, G. 343, 345 White, R. 437
Villa, P. 407, 409 Whittle, F. 169
Vimeo 152 WHO 424

534
 I N DEX

Who Sell Out, The 179–80 Worcester, D. C. 421–22

Who Wants to be a Millionaire? 23 World Economic Forum 133, 400
Who, The 178–80 World Music 282–91
Wijdicks, C. 339 World of Music and Dance 285
Wijdicks, E. 339 World Trade Organization 166, 482
Wikipedia 68, 358, 475 WORT-FM 383–84
Wilder, B. 248 Worth, C. F. 183
WILL-AM 384–87 WPP 452
William 328 Wylie, P. 265
Williams, A. 430
Williams, A. D. 59 X Factor 25
Williams, L. 197, 202, 260 Xueli, W. 488
Williams, R. 4, 15, 47, 74, 166
Williams, T. 383 Yahoo! 63, 141, 151
Wilson, E. 78 Yermolayeva, Y. A. 428
Wilson, H. 330 Youku 156
Winant, H. 233 Young, E. 230–31, 239
Winfrey, O. 130, 132–33 Young, L. 180
Winlow, S. 268–69, 272–73 Young, M. 200, 202–03
Winter Sonata 486 Young, N. 191
Wire, The 188–90, 192, 195 YouTube 51, 57–58, 62, 68, 70–72, 138–39,
Witherspoon, R. 192 151–56, 191–92, 277, 304, 306, 471, 500
Witness 130, 155
Wittgenstein, L. 39 Zapata, E. 407
Wolf of Wall Street, The 187 Zapatistas 125, 409–14
Wolma, G. J. 176 Zemp, H. 287
Wolters, C. C. 193 Zeta-Jones, C. 329
Wong, F. 484–86 Zimmer, H. 218–19, 221
Wood, Helen 50 Zinn, H. 385
Wood, Henry 275 Ziplow, S. 197
Woodard, A. 221 Žižek, S. 124, 269
Woolgar, S. 82, 89

535
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