Episodes

  • Bilge Yesil, "Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

    Bilge Yesil, "Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
    Jul 28 2024
    In the 2010s, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) began to mobilize an international media system to project Turkey as a rising player and counter foreign criticism of its authoritarian practices. In Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order (University of Illinois Press, 2024), Bilge Yesil examines the AKP’s English-language communication apparatus, focusing on its objectives and outcomes, the idea-generating framework that undergirds it, and the implications of its activities. She also analyzes the decolonial and pan-Islamist messages AKP-sponsored outlets deploy to position Turkey as a burgeoning great power opposed to imperialism and claiming to be the voice of oppressed Muslims around the world. As the AKP wields this rhetoric to further its geopolitical and economic goals, media outlets pursue their own objectives by obfuscating facts with identity politics, demonizing the West to aggrandize the East and rallying Muslims under Turkey’s purportedly benevolent leadership. Insightfully exploring the crossroads of communications and authoritarianism, Talking Back to the West illuminates how the Erdogan government and its media allies use history, religion, and identity to pursue complementary agendas and tighten the AKP’s grip on power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Lindsay Goss, "F*ck The Army!: How Soldiers and Civilians Staged the GI Movement to End the Vietnam War" (NYU Press, 2024)

    Lindsay Goss, "F*ck The Army!: How Soldiers and Civilians Staged the GI Movement to End the Vietnam War" (NYU Press, 2024)
    Jul 27 2024
    F*ck The Army! How Soldiers and Civilians Staged the GI Movement to End the Vietnam War (NYU Press, 2024) offers a comprehensive history of the FTA, an antiwar variety show featuring Jane Fonda that played to tens of thousands of active-duty troops over nine months in 1971. From its conception, the civilian-led show was directed towards making visible the growing antiwar movement organized GIs, inspired by but also acting as a rebuttal to the USO tours presented by Bob Hope. Through an analysis of the FTA’s tactical performances of solidarity and resistance, Lindsay Goss brings into view the theatrical dimensions of the GI movement itself, revealing it as representative of the revolutionary and theatrical politics of the period. Dr. Lindsay Goss is a theater historian, artist, and lecturer in English and Theater Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her work explores how popular discourses of authenticity and identity rely upon historical anxieties about the actor in proximity to politics, and how these anxieties shape the fields of theater history, activism, and contemporary performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    41 mins
  • Christina Yi et al., "Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)

    Christina Yi et al., "Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
    Jul 27 2024
    Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire (U Hawaii Press, 2023) interrogates the intersections between cultural production, identity, and persuasive messaging that idealized inclusion and unity across Japan’s East Asian empire (1895–1945). Japanese propagandists drew on a pan-Asian rhetoric that sought to persuade colonial subjects to identify with the empire while simultaneously maintaining the distinctions that subjugated them and marking their attempts to self-identify as Japanese as inauthentic, illegitimate forms of “passing” or “posing.” Visions of inclusion encouraged assimilation but also threatened to disrupt the very logic of imperialism itself: If there was no immutable difference between Taiwanese and Japanese subjects, for example, then what justified the subordination of the former to the latter? The chapters emphasize the plurality and heterogeneity of empire, together with the contradictions and tensions of its ideologies of race, nation, and ethnicity. The paradoxes of passing, posing, and persuasion opened up unique opportunities for colonial contestation and negotiation in the arenas of cultural production, including theater, fiction, film, magazines, and other media of entertainment and propaganda consumed by audiences in mainland Japan and its colonies. From Meiji adaptations of Shakespeare and interwar mass media and colonial fiction to wartime propaganda films, competing narratives sought to shape how ambiguous identities were performed and read. All empires necessarily engender multiple kinds of border crossings and transgressions; in the case of Japan, the policing and blurring of boundaries often pivoted on the outer markers of ethno-national identification. This book showcases how actors—in multiple senses of the word—from all parts of the empire were able to move in and out of different performative identities, thus troubling its ontological boundaries. Christina Yi is associate professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of British Columbia. Her research field is modern and contemporary Japanese literature, with a particular focus on issues of postcoloniality, language politics, genre, and cultural studies. Yi’s first monograph, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea, was published by Columbia University Press in 2018. Andre Haag is associate professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His research explores how the insecurities and terrors of colonialism attendant to the annexation of Korea and internalization of the “Korea Problem” were inscribed within the literature, culture, and vocabularies that circulated within the Japanese imperial metropole. Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    1 hr and 17 mins
  • Bishnupriya Ghosh, "The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media" (Duke UP, 2023)

    Bishnupriya Ghosh, "The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media" (Duke UP, 2023)
    Jul 26 2024
    Welcome to the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. In this episode, Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh joins our host, Zehra Husain, to discuss her latest book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP, 2023). Over the course of the interview, you’ll learn about: The origins of the book and how Ghosh became interested in the body as a material medium The importance of conceptualizing global epidemics in multiscalar ways What Ghosh means by multispecies relationality and “lively media” The distinctions between the “global” and the “planetary” Ghosh’s research process for the book and her thoughts on using an ethnographic mode The media archive Ghosh assembled while conducting research for the book How and why Ghosh conceptualizes blood as media in the book The expansive sites, scales, and temporalities that Ghosh tracks across The Virus Touch …and much more! About the book “In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.” Learn more about the book on the publisher’s website! Guest Biography Bishnupriya Ghosh publishes in global media cultures, environmental media, and critical health studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    53 mins
  • Rosemary Pennington, "Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media" (Indiana UP, 2024)

    Rosemary Pennington, "Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media" (Indiana UP, 2024)
    Jul 26 2024
    As Muslim American representation becomes more prominent in popular culture, how are they continued to be portrayed? Rosemary Pennington's new book Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media (Indiana University Press, 2024) explores the “trap of hypervisibility” faced by Muslims in popular media and the burden of representation that follows them. More representation may not always be generative, if there is not an intentional move away from stereotypes or caricatures of Muslim humanity to portraying real complicated and diverse human beings. Using a wide variety of case studies from prime-time television shows, such as Lost, 24, or Ramy to stand-up comedians such as Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari, Kumail Nanjiani to Zainb Johnson, reality shows (like Project Runway or Top Chef), magazines (like Teen Vogue) and comic books (Ms. Marvel), Pennington carefully guides us through some of the binary representations we continue to see in popular culture around us, especially those that are framed as portraying "authentic" Muslims. Thus representation may not be the only answer, as Islamophobia and anti-Muslim violence continues to grow, but more is needed as we more forward, as the book contends. This book will be of great interest to those who work on popular culture, media, comedy, gender, and Islam, and a great addition to courses on Islam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    1 hr and 17 mins
  • Jonathan Branfman, "Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, and White Supremacy" (NYU Press, 2024)

    Jonathan Branfman, "Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, and White Supremacy" (NYU Press, 2024)
    Jul 26 2024
    Jewish stars have longed faced pressure to downplay Jewish identity for fear of alienating wider audiences. But unexpectedly, since the 2000s, many millennial Jewish stars have won stellar success while spotlighting (rather than muting) Jewish identity. In Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, and White Supremacy (NYU Press, 2024), Jonathan Branfman offers case studies on six top millennial Jewish stars: the biracial rap superstar Drake, comedic rapper Lil Dicky, TV comedy duo Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, “man-baby” film star Seth Rogen, and chiseled film star Zac Efron. Branfman argues that despite their differences, each star’s success depends on how they navigate racial antisemitism: the historical notion that Jews are physically inferior to Christians. Each star especially navigates racial stigmas about Jewish masculinity―stigmas that depict Jewish men as emasculated, Jewish women as masculinized, and both as sexually perverse. By embracing, deflecting, or satirizing these stigmas, each star comes to symbolize national hopes and fears about all kinds of hot-button issues. For instance, by putting a cuter twist on stereotypes of Jewish emasculation, Seth Rogen plays soft man-babies who dramatize (and then resolve) popular anxieties about modern fatherhood. This knack for channeling national dreams and doubts is what makes each star so unexpectedly marketable. In turn, examining how each star navigates racial antisemitism onscreen makes it easier to pinpoint how antisemitism, white privilege, and color-based racism interact in the real world. Jonathan Branfman is the Eli Reinhard Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Stanford University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    59 mins
  • Charles Barr, "British Cinema: a Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2022)

    Charles Barr, "British Cinema: a Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2022)
    Jul 23 2024
    Cinema has had a hugely influential role on global culture in the 20th century at multiple levels: social, political, and educational. The part of British cinema in this has been controversial–often derided as a whole, but also vigorously celebrated, especially in terms of specific films and film-makers. In British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2022), Charles Barr considers films and filmmakers, and studios and sponsorship, against the wider view of changing artistic, socio-political, and industrial climates over the decades of the 20th Century. Considering British cinema in the wake of one of the most familiar of cinematic reference points–Alfred Hitchcock–Barr traces how British cinema has developed its own unique path, and has since been celebrated for its innovative approaches and distinctive artistic language. Charles Barr worked for many years at the University of East Anglia, helping to develop one of the first UK programs in film studies at the graduate and undergraduate level. He has since taught in St. Louis, Galway, and Dublin, and is currently a Research Fellow at St. Mary's University, Twickenham. Much of his published work has been on British cinema, including the books Ealing Studios and English Hitchcock, and he was cowriter, with director Stephen Frears, of Typically British, part of the centenary history of cinema broadcast on Channel 4 in 1995. He has continued writing on Hitchcock, with a study of Vertigo in the BFI Classics series and Hitchcock: Lost and Found, coauthored with the Parisian scholar Alain Kerzoncuf. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. His writing and other interviews about literature and film can also be found on Pages and Frames. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Filmmaker, Artist, Writer: A Conversation with Paromita Vohra

    Filmmaker, Artist, Writer: A Conversation with Paromita Vohra
    Jul 19 2024
    This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. In this episode, our host, Kinjal Dave, sits down with filmmaker, artist, and writer Paromita Vohra for a wide-ranging conversation about the artist’s career. As an artist, Vohra has worked across a variety of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art and writing to explore themes of feminism, desire, sexuality and popular culture. In this interview, she reflects on the provocations and practices that have shaped her approach as an artist, as well as the pedagogical possibilities that multimodal artworks provide in the classroom. Over the next forty-five minutes, you will hear about: What inspired Paromita Vohra to pick up a camera The challenges of building and sustaining a career as an independent filmmaker Social, political, and cultural shifts in the India during the 1990s that informed Vohra’s media production How digital media technologies and the Internet shaped Vohra’s work How Unlimited Girls sought to capture a particular moment within a globalizing feminist discourse, How Vohra has rejected certain aesthetic and narrative paradigms to craft her own style and voice as an artist, straddling comedy, irony, and politically incisive commentary Vohra’s digital platform Agents of Ishq and the sense of community the project has built How to cultivate and encourage complex conversations about gender, sex, desire, and politics in the classroom Building intimacy with audiences and being vulnerable to criticism Vohra’s upcoming projects …and more! Guest Biography Paromita Vohra is an artist who works with a range of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art and writing to explore themes of feminism, desire, sexuality and popular culture. Her extraordinary body of truth-telling, kinetic and intensely sensuous films, online videos, art installations, television programming and writing have made sense of feminism, love, sexuality, urban life and popular culture for a diverse and loving audience for over 25 years. Host Bio Kinjal Dave is a PhD Student at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She researches critical perspectives on gender, technology, and labor in the South Asian diaspora at the intersection of Media and Communication Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Diaspora Studies. She is a fellow with the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) and an affiliate of Data & Society Research Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    51 mins