Mediated Images Of The South

Mediated Images of the South: The Portrayal of Dixie in Popular Culture, edited by Alison F. Slade, Dedria Givens-Carroll and Amber J. Narro, is an anthology that explores the impact of the image of the Southerner within mass communication and popular culture. The contributors offer a contemporary analysis of the Southerner in the media. In most cases, previous literature situates these media images in the past, most notably through historic analyses of the Southerner during the Civil Rights movement. Mediated Images of the South breaks out of the box of the 1960s and 1970s by including the most recent and contemporary cultural examples of the Southerner. This book represents a long overdue analysis of those images, from both the past and the present. In addition, the discussions are not limited to one genre of media, but provide the reader with an opportunity to see how far-reaching the myth of the Southerner and the Southern image is in American society. While there is a long list of successful southern politicians, historical figures, businessmen and women, actors and actresses, sports figures and other national and world leaders, Slade, Givens-Carroll, and Narro find that there is still work to be done to present southerners as capable and educated.

The key concepts of the book are media, class, poverty, and shaming. The contributors to this book examine how certain social relations and their cultural meanings in the media, namely class and poverty, are transformed into factual or moral attributes of people and situations. Class and poverty are not understood as certain things and actions, or concepts and numbers; both class and poverty are assumed to be, above all, particular social relationships or a set of relations between people, things and symbols. Without denying that contempt for the destitute Other is an affect found throughout history and in various socioeconomic contexts, the chapters in this book – through their concern with the mediated gaze on class – narrate predominantly the challenges brought about by the media’s spectacular take on poverty and low status as they (at least) coincide with the neoliberal era. This volume will be essential reading for the scholars specialising in the study of media and social inequalities form the vantage points of Media Studies, Sociology, Anthropology or European Studies.

"Within the realm of U.S. culture and its construction of its citizenry, geography, and ideology, who are Southerners and who are queers, and what is the South and what is queerness? Queering the South on Screen addresses these questions by examining "the intersections of queerness, regionalism, and identity" depicted in film, television, and other visual media about the South during the twentieth century. From portrayals of slavery to gothic horror films, the contributors show that queer southerners have always expressed desires for distinctiveness in the making and consumption of visual media. Read together, the introduction and twelve chapters deconstruct premeditated labels of identity such as queer and southern. In doing so, they expose the reflexive nature of these labels to construct fantasies based on southerner's self-identification based on what they were not"--

As nation-states in the Northern Hemisphere experience economic crisis, political corruption and racial tension, it seems as though they might be 'evolving' into the kind of societies normally associated with the 'Global South'. Anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff draw on their long experience of living in Africa to address a range of familiar themes - democracy, national borders, labour and capital and multiculturalism. They consider how we might understand these issues by using theory developed in the Global South. Challenging our ideas about 'developed' and 'developing' nations, Theory from the South provides new insights into key problems of our time.

A Theology for a Mediated God introduces a new way to examine the shaping effects of media on our notions of God and divinity. In contrast to more conventional social-scientific methodologies and conversations about the relationship between religion and media, Dennis Ford argues that the characteristics we ascribe to a medium can be extended and applied metaphorically to the characteristics we ascribe to God—just as earlier generations attempted to comprehend God through the metaphors of father, shepherd, or mother. As a result, his work both challenges and bridges the gap between students of religion and media, and theology.

This book analyzes the 500 top-grossing films of the last 20 years to show how speakers of traditionally stigmatized dialects are represented, underrepresented, misrepresented, and mocked. Ultimately, the author demonstrates how Hollywood reinforces long-standing negative beliefs about the languages of marginalized communities.

In recent years, spectacular images of ruined boats, makeshift border camps, and beaches littered with life vests have done much to consolidate the politics of movement in Europe. Indeed, the mediation of migration as a crisis has worked to shore up various forms of militarized surveillance, humanitarian response, legislative action, and affective investment. Bridging academic inquiry and artistic and activist practice, the essays, documents, and artworks gathered in Moving Images interrogate the mediation of migration and refugeeism in the contemporary European conjuncture, asking how images, discourses, and data are involved in shaping the visions and experience of migration in increasingly global contexts.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.