SCMSTV Publications of Interest

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please fill out the submission form and provide the relevant info.

2007

Haggins, Bambi. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Prior to the civil rights movement, comedians performed for audiences that were clearly delineated by race. Black comedians performed for black audiences and white comedians performed for whites. Yet during the past forty-five years, black comics have become progressively more central to mainstream culture. In Laughing Mad, Bambi Haggins looks at how this transition occurred in a variety of media and shows how this integration has paved the way for black comedians and their audiences to affect each other. Historically, African American performers have been able to use comedy as a pedagogic tool, interjecting astute observations about race relations while the audience is laughing. And yet, Haggins makes the convincing argument that the potential of African American comedy remains fundamentally unfulfilled as the performance of blackness continues to be made culturally digestible for mass consumption. Rather than presenting biographies of individual performers, Haggins focuses on the ways in which the comic persona is constructed and changes across media, from stand-up, to the small screen, to film. She examines the comic televisual and cinematic personae of Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, and Richard Pryor and considers how these figures set the stage for black comedy in the next four decades. She reads Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock as emblematic of the first and second waves of post-civil rights era African American comedy, and she looks at the socio-cultural politics of Whoopi Goldberg's comic persona through the lens of gender and crossover. Laughing Mad also explores how the comedy of Dave Chappelle speaks to and for the post-soul generation. A rigorous analytic analysis, this book interrogates notions of identity, within both the African American community and mainstream popular culture. Written in engaging and accessible prose, it is also a book that will travel from the seminar room, to the barbershop, to the kitchen table, allowing readers to experience the sketches, stand-up, and film comedies with all the laughter they deserve.

SUMMER 2006

Havens, Timothy. Global Television Marketplace. London: British Film Institute
Publishing, International Screen Studies Series: expected July 2006. Leaving aside conventional questions about the production contexts, textual strategies, or popular reception of entertainment television worldwide, this book focuses on the business practices of global television sales in order to provide a lucid overview of the diversity of firms, business practices, and programming genres present in international television. It provides the first comprehensive portrait of the operations of the international television business, the people who work in the business, and the ideas that circulate among these businesspeople. <http://www.ucpress.edu/books/bfi/pages/PROD0542.html>

WINTER/SPRING 2006

Anderson, Tim J., “For the Record: Interdisciplinarity, Cultural Studies and the Search for Method in Popular Music Studies,” published in Cultural Studies and the Questions of Method, eds. James Schwoch and Mimi White (Blackwell Publishing Professional: Oxford, UK), 2006.

Chris, Cynthia, "Can You Repeat That? Patterns of Media Ownership and the 'Repurposing' Trend," The Communication Review V. 9, No. 1 (January-March 2006): 63 - 84. The article examines shifting patterns of ownership for cable programming services from 1994 to 2003. In these years, vertical integration in the cable industry declined, as cable's multi-system operators divested equity in programming services. Meanwhile, broadcast network-owning conglomerates invested heavily in cable, a trend that, as the author shows, contributed to the development of the new synergistic practice of repurposing.

Chris, Cynthia, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Watching Wildlife traces the history of the wildlife genre from its origins in precinematic, colonial visual culture to its contemporary status as flagship programming on global television. Chris's analysis shows how—particularly in the genre's preoccupation with mating and the favoritism bestowed on certain species—documentary images of animals are and always have been about prevailing ideologies of human gender, sexuality, and race. For more information, see http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/C/chris_watching.html.

2005

Acham, Christine. REVOLUTION TELEVISED: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power. University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Establishes the influence of the Black Power movement on black television of the 1960s and 1970s-now in paperback. “It’s f---ing great that someone recognizes and appreciates what we were doing during this important period in television history. Christine Acham gets it and spells it out. Got it?” Richard Pryor. “This work is vitally important to understanding how the Black Power and Arts movements, the Chitlin’ Circuit, and television history converged in the 1970s with mixed results.” Black Issues Book Review. For more information, including an excerpt and the table of contents, visit the book’s webpage: http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/A/acham_revolution.html. Sign up to receive news on the latest releases from University of Minnesota Press:
http://www.upress.umn.edu/eform.html.

Becker, Christine. "Television Film Stardom in the 1950s." Framework: The Journal of
Cinema and Media vol. 46 no. 2 (2005). This article assesses why some film stars avoided TV and others fled to TV, and using the 1950s sitcom Mr. Adams and Eve as a case study, it considers the impact that film stars' moves to television had on stardom in the fifties.

Kackman, Michael. CITIZEN SPY: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture.
University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Looking at secret agents on television in the 1950s and 1960s, Michael Kackman explores how Americans see themselves in times of political and cultural crisis. From parodies such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart to the more complicated situations of I Spy and Mission: Impossible, Kackman situates espionage television within the culture of the civil rights and women's movements and the war in Vietnam. For more information, including the table of contents, visit the book’s webpage:
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/K/kackman_citizen.html. For more information on the Commerce and Mass Culture Series: http://www.upress.umn.edu/byseries/commerce.html.Sign up to receive news on the latest releases from University of Minnesota Press:
http://www.upress.umn.edu/eform.html.

Staiger, Janet. Media Reception Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
Media Reception Studies broadly surveys the past century of scholarship on the ways in which audiences make meaning out of mass media. It synthesizes in plain language social scientific, linguistic, and cultural studies approaches to film and television as communication media. The book traverses a broad terrain, covering the Chicago School, early psychological approaches, Soviet theory, the Frankfurt School, mass communication research and critical theory, linguistics and semiotic theory, social-psychoanalytical research, cognitive psychology, and cultural studies. It offers these theories as a set of tools for understanding the complex relationships between films and their audiences, TV shows and their viewers. It explains such questions as the behavior of fans; the implications of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity with regard to the media; the effect of violence, horror, and sexually explicit images on viewers; and the place of memory inspectatorship.


		Recent and Upcoming Publications of Interest to SCMSTV Members
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	To submit a book or article for listing on this page, please fill out the submission form and provide the relevant info. 2007 *Haggins, Bambi. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007.* Prior to the civil rights movement, comedians performed for audiences that were clearly delineated by race. Black comedians performed for black audiences and white comedians performed for whites. Yet during the past forty-five years, black comics have become progressively more central to mainstream culture. In Laughing Mad, Bambi Haggins looks at how this transition occurred in a variety of media and shows how this integration has paved the way for black comedians and their audiences to affect each other. Historically, African American performers have been able to use comedy as a pedagogic tool, interjecting astute observations about race relations while the audience is laughing. And yet, Haggins makes the convincing argument that the potential of African American comedy remains fundamentally unfulfilled as the performance of blackness continues to be made culturally digestible for mass consumption. Rather than presenting biographies of individual performers, Haggins focuses on the ways in which the comic persona is constructed and changes across media, from stand-up, to the small screen, to film. She examines the comic televisual and cinematic personae of Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, and Richard Pryor and considers how these figures set the stage for black comedy in the next four decades. She reads Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock as emblematic of the first and second waves of post-civil rights era African American comedy, and she looks at the socio-cultural politics of Whoopi Goldberg's comic persona through the lens of gender and crossover. Laughing Mad also explores how the comedy of Dave Chappelle speaks to and for the post-soul generation. A rigorous analytic analysis, this book interrogates notions of identity, within both the African American community and mainstream popular culture. Written in engaging and accessible prose, it is also a book that will travel from the seminar room, to the barbershop, to the kitchen table, allowing readers to experience the sketches, stand-up, and film comedies with all the laughter they deserve. SUMMER 2006 Havens, Timothy. Global Television Marketplace. London: British Film Institute Publishing, International Screen Studies Series: expected July 2006. Leaving aside conventional questions about the production contexts, textual strategies, or popular reception of entertainment television worldwide, this book focuses on the business practices of global television sales in order to provide a lucid overview of the diversity of firms, business practices, and programming genres present in international television. It provides the first comprehensive portrait of the operations of the international television business, the people who work in the business, and the ideas that circulate among these businesspeople. <http://www.ucpress.edu/books/bfi/pages/PROD0542.html> WINTER/SPRING 2006 Anderson, Tim J., “For the Record: Interdisciplinarity, Cultural Studies and the Search for Method in Popular Music Studies,” published in Cultural Studies and the Questions of Method, eds. James Schwoch and Mimi White (Blackwell Publishing Professional: Oxford, UK), 2006. *Chris, Cynthia, "Can You Repeat That? Patterns of Media Ownership and the 'Repurposing' Trend," The Communication Review* V. 9, No. 1 (January-March 2006): 63 - 84. The article examines shifting patterns of ownership for cable programming services from 1994 to 2003. In these years, vertical integration in the cable industry declined, as cable's multi-system operators divested equity in programming services. Meanwhile, broadcast network-owning conglomerates invested heavily in cable, a trend that, as the author shows, contributed to the development of the new synergistic practice of repurposing. Chris, Cynthia, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).** Watching Wildlife traces the history of the wildlife genre from its origins in precinematic, colonial visual culture to its contemporary status as flagship programming on global television. Chris's analysis shows how—particularly in the genre's preoccupation with mating and the favoritism bestowed on certain species—documentary images of animals are and always have been about prevailing ideologies of human gender, sexuality, and race. For more information, see http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/C/chris_watching.html. 2005 *Acham, Christine. REVOLUTION TELEVISED: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power. University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Establishes the influence of the Black Power movement on black television of the 1960s and 1970s-now in paperback. “It’s f---ing great that someone recognizes and appreciates what we were doing during this important period in television history. Christine Acham gets it and spells it out. Got it?” Richard Pryor. “This work is vitally important to understanding how the Black Power and Arts movements, the Chitlin’ Circuit, and television history converged in the 1970s with mixed results.” Black Issues Book Review. For more information, including an excerpt and the table of contents, visit the book’s webpage: http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/A/acham_revolution.html. Sign up to receive news on the latest releases from University of Minnesota Press: http://www.upress.umn.edu/eform.html. Becker, Christine. "Television Film Stardom in the 1950s." Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media vol. 46 no. 2 (2005). This article assesses why some film stars avoided TV and others fled to TV, and using the 1950s sitcom Mr. Adams and Eve* as a case study, it considers the impact that film stars' moves to television had on stardom in the fifties. Kackman, Michael. CITIZEN SPY: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Looking at secret agents on television in the 1950s and 1960s, Michael Kackman explores how Americans see themselves in times of political and cultural crisis. From parodies such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart to the more complicated situations of I Spy and Mission: Impossible, Kackman situates espionage television within the culture of the civil rights and women's movements and the war in Vietnam. For more information, including the table of contents, visit the book’s webpage: http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/K/kackman_citizen.html. For more information on the Commerce and Mass Culture Series: http://www.upress.umn.edu/byseries/commerce.html.Sign up to receive news on the latest releases from University of Minnesota Press: http://www.upress.umn.edu/eform.html. *Staiger, Janet. Media Reception Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2005.* Media Reception Studies broadly surveys the past century of scholarship on the ways in which audiences make meaning out of mass media. It synthesizes in plain language social scientific, linguistic, and cultural studies approaches to film and television as communication media. The book traverses a broad terrain, covering the Chicago School, early psychological approaches, Soviet theory, the Frankfurt School, mass communication research and critical theory, linguistics and semiotic theory, social-psychoanalytical research, cognitive psychology, and cultural studies. It offers these theories as a set of tools for understanding the complex relationships between films and their audiences, TV shows and their viewers. It explains such questions as the behavior of fans; the implications of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity with regard to the media; the effect of violence, horror, and sexually explicit images on viewers; and the place of memory inspectatorship.