Screen Enemies of the American Way

Screen Enemies of the American Way
Title Screen Enemies of the American Way PDF eBook
Author Fraser A. Sherman
Publisher McFarland
Total Pages 241
Release 2014-01-10
Genre Performing Arts
ISBN 0786462256

Download Screen Enemies of the American Way Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

American films, like America itself, have long been fascinated by the threat of outsiders posing as citizens to destroy the American way of life. This book tracks real-world fears appearing in the movies--Nazi agents, Japanese-American spies, Communist Party subversives, Islamic sleeper cells--as well as the science-fiction threats that play to the same fears, such as alien body-snatchers and android doppelgangers. The work also examines fears inspired by World War I German spies, the Japanese-American internment and the McCarthyite witch-hunts and shows how these issues, and others, played out on screen.

Fascism Comes to America

Fascism Comes to America
Title Fascism Comes to America PDF eBook
Author Bruce Kuklick
Publisher University of Chicago Press
Total Pages 254
Release 2022-11-22
Genre Political Science
ISBN 0226822451

Download Fascism Comes to America Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

A deeply relevant look at what fascism means to Americans. From the time Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, Americans have been obsessed with and brooded over the meaning of fascism and how it might migrate to the United States. Fascism Comes to America examines how we have viewed fascism overseas and its implications for our own country. Bruce Kuklick explores the rhetoric of politicians, who have used the language of fascism to smear opponents, and he looks at the discussions of pundits, the analyses of academics, and the displays of fascism in popular culture, including fiction, radio, TV, theater, and film. Kuklick argues that fascism has little informational meaning in the United States, but instead, it is used to denigrate or insult. For example, every political position has been besmirched as fascist. As a result, the term does not describe a phenomenon so much as it denounces what one does not like. Finally, in displaying fascism for most Americans, entertainment—and most importantly film—has been crucial in conveying to citizens what fascism is about. Fascism Comes to America has been enhanced by many illustrations that exhibit how fascism was absorbed into the US public consciousness.

Racism in American Popular Media

Racism in American Popular Media
Title Racism in American Popular Media PDF eBook
Author Brian D. Behnken
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages 208
Release 2015-03-24
Genre Social Science
ISBN

Download Racism in American Popular Media Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book examines how the media—including advertising, motion pictures, cartoons, and popular fiction—has used racist images and stereotypes as marketing tools that malign and debase African Americans, Latinos, American Indians, and Asian Americans in the United States. Were there damaging racist depictions in Gone with the Wind and children's cartoons such as Tom and Jerry and Mickey Mouse? How did widely known stereotypes of the Latin lover, the lazy Latino, the noble savage and the violent warrior American Indian, and the Asian as either a martial artist or immoral and tricky come about? This book utilizes an ethnic and racial comparative approach to examine the racism evidenced in multiple forms of popular media, enabling readers to apply their critical thinking skills to compare and analyze stereotypes, grasp the often-subtle sources of racism in the everyday world around us, and understand how racism in the media was used to unite white Americans and exclude ethnic people from the body politic of the United States. Authors Brian D. Behnken and Gregory D. Smithers examine the popular media from the late 19th century through the 20th century to the early 21st century. This broad coverage enables readers to see how depictions of people of color, such as Aunt Jemima, have been consistently stereotyped back to the 1880s and to grasp how those depictions have changed over time. The book's chapters explore racism in the popular fiction, advertising, motion pictures, and cartoons of the United States, and examine the multiple groups affected by this racism, including African Americans, Latino/as, Asian Americans, and American Indians. Attention is also paid to the efforts of minorities—particularly civil rights activists—in challenging and combating racism in the popular media.

The American Imperial Gothic

The American Imperial Gothic
Title The American Imperial Gothic PDF eBook
Author Johan Hoglund
Publisher Routledge
Total Pages 224
Release 2016-03-16
Genre Social Science
ISBN 131704519X

Download The American Imperial Gothic Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The imagination of the early twenty-first century is catastrophic, with Hollywood blockbusters, novels, computer games, popular music, art and even political speeches all depicting a world consumed by vampires, zombies, meteors, aliens from outer space, disease, crazed terrorists and mad scientists. These frequently gothic descriptions of the apocalypse not only commodify fear itself; they articulate and even help produce imperialism. Building on, and often retelling, the British ’imperial gothic’ of the late nineteenth century, the American imperial gothic is obsessed with race, gender, degeneration and invasion, with the destruction of society, the collapse of modernity and the disintegration of capitalism. Drawing on a rich array of texts from a long history of the gothic, this book contends that the doom faced by the world in popular culture is related to the current global instability, renegotiation of worldwide power and the American bid for hegemony that goes back to the beginning of the Republic and which have given shape to the first decade of the millennium. From the frontier gothic of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly to the apocalyptic torture porn of Eli Roth's Hostel, the American imperial gothic dramatises the desires and anxieties of empire. Revealing the ways in which images of destruction and social upheaval both query the violence with which the US has asserted itself locally and globally, and feed the longing for stable imperial structures, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of popular culture, cultural and media studies, literary and visual studies and sociology.

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques
Title Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques PDF eBook
Author Michael E. Heyes
Publisher Lexington Books
Total Pages 291
Release 2018-08-10
Genre Religion
ISBN 1498550770

Download Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques examines the intersection of religion and monstrosity in a variety of different time periods in the hopes of addressing two gaps in scholarship within the field of monster studies. The first part of the volume—running from the medieval to the Early Modern period—focuses upon the view of the monster through non-majority voices and accounts from those who were themselves branded as monsters. Overlapping partially with the Early Modern and proceeding to the present day, the contributions of the second part of the volume attempt to problematize the dichotomy of secular/religious through a close look at the monsters this period has wrought.

The Aliens Are Here

The Aliens Are Here
Title The Aliens Are Here PDF eBook
Author Fraser A. Sherman
Publisher McFarland
Total Pages 252
Release 2022-10-06
Genre Performing Arts
ISBN 1476685045

Download The Aliens Are Here Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Aliens: They have taken the form of immigrants, invaders, lovers, heroes, cute creatures that want our candy or monsters that want our flesh. For more than a century, movies and television shows have speculated about the form and motives of alien life forms. Movies first dipped their toe into the genre in the 1940s with Superman cartoons and the big screen's first story of alien invasion (1945's The Purple Monster Strikes). More aliens landed in the 1950s science fiction movie boom, followed by more television appearances (The Invaders, My Favorite Martian) in the 1960s. Extraterrestrials have been on-screen mainstays ever since. This book examines various types of the on-screen alien visitor story, featuring a liberal array of alien types, designs and motives. Each chapter spotlights a specific film or TV series, offering comparative analyses and detailing the tropes, themes and cliches and how they have evolved over time. Highlighted subjects include Eternals, War of the Worlds, The X-Files, John Carpenter's The Thing and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman.

Troubling Masculinities

Troubling Masculinities
Title Troubling Masculinities PDF eBook
Author Glen Donnar
Publisher Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages 241
Release 2020-07-23
Genre Performing Arts
ISBN 1496828615

Download Troubling Masculinities Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 is the first multigenre study of representations of masculinity following the emergence of violent terror as a plot element in American cinema after September 11, 2001. Across a broad range of subgenres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, postapocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and home invasion horror, action-thrillers, and frontier westerns—author Glen Donnar examines the impact of “terror-Others,” from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, especially in relation to cinematic representations in earlier periods of national turmoil. Donnar demonstrates that the reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Taking up critical arguments about Hollywood’s attempts to resolve male crisis through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this failure reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they are supposed to be fighting. Donnar concludes that interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nationhood continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, the volume offers an important counternarrative to this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.