Blockbuster Film Research Articles

The Martian: science fiction and science fact

Abstract The book and the film The Martian stand as a testament to the powerful synergy between art, science fiction and science. Written by Andy Weir, the book was turned into a blockbuster film by Fox Studios that wowed audiences and critics alike. To accomplish this visually stunning film, the collaboration between Director Ridley Scott’s production team and the NASA Mars team with other key consultants delivered an unforgettable cinematic masterpiece, one that not only entertained but also inspired audiences to dream big and embrace the spirit of exploration that drives humanity’s quest for knowledge about space and Mars. The Martian captivates audiences with its breathtaking Mars landscape visuals and realistic portrayal of space exploration. It strikes a perfect balance between science and storytelling, grounding its depiction of Mars and the challenges faced by astronauts in, mostly, scientific reality. The film’s reasonably accurate portrayal of Mars, supported by collaboration with NASA, adds to its authenticity and appeal.

Exhuma: a Korean cultural paradox

ABSTRACT The Korean blockbuster film Exhuma (original title Pamyo) (2024) features several selling points that appeal to both audience and film reviewers. From these selling points, this review will focus on a dark side in Korean modern history: colonial remnants that should have been cleared away since the Liberation, but have still remained pretty much intact. Jae-hyun Jang, the director of Exhuma, approached the unresolved issue from the perspective of Korean shamanism, historically oppressed and marginalized, having lost its special function to help beings communicate, including human beings and higher beings. Chong-ho Kim (2003) calls the dominant ambivalence and complexity toward shamanism found in Korean society a ‘cultural paradox.’ The film Exhuma is an example of cultural paradox. It shows that clearing away the remnants of Japanese colonialism in Korea still has a long way to go, even 80 years after the Liberation.

<신과 함께> 웹툰과 영화에 반영된 뮈토스(mythos) 고찰

Ju Ho-min’s webtoon Along with the Gods (Singwa hamkke), serialized on Naver Webtoons from 2010 to 2012, reimagined Korea’s Buddhist and shamanic mythology regarding the afterlife. It achieved immense popularity and was adapted into two films in 2017 and 2018, both of which performed exceptionally well at the box office. This paper compares the first volume of the webtoon (the “Afterlife Volume”) with the first of these two films (subtitled “The Two Worlds”), examining how the message of the narrative changed in the process of media conversion. The concept of “mythos(μῦθος),” meaning an overriding set of values or worldview that may include individual myths, is borrowed
 to examine both the webtoon’s and the film’s messages. The webtoon makes active use of traditional myths with which general readers might not be familiar, and by taking an everyman as its protagonist and depicting the afterlife in a modernized, familiar way it encourages readers to imagine themselves in the same situation that protagonist Kim Ja-hong finds himself in. This gives readers the opportunity to put themselves in Ja-hong’s shoes and reflect on their own sins. In addition, comparisons drawn between this life and the afterlife express social criticism, demonstrating in particular how unreasonable modern society is and how difficult it is for someone to live a decent
 life. This is ultimately a criticism of the “success mythos” prevalent in modern Korean society. The film, on the other hand, introduces viewers to a heroic protagonist and depicts the afterlife in a variegated way suited to fantasy or historical drama. In particular, the punishment of sinners in the various hells, the journey undertaken between the hells by the protagonist and the Guardians, the scenes of fights with terrifying creatures or spirits, and the scenes depicting a Guardian chasing and fighting a vengeful spirit all present spectacles worthy of a blockbuster film. This spectacle may function to immerse the viewer in the film, but it also presents an obstacle to the viewer putting themselves in the protagonist’s shoes. In addition, the film’s final message of “forgiveness” and “love” perpetuates the modern mythos of motherhood seen in concepts such as “wise mother, good wife.” It is unlikely that this mythos was expressed intentionally; more likely, it simply shows that it still exists implicitly in Korean society, and it emerged as the filmmakers attempted to heighten viewer empathy for the characters.

Barbie and body image: a scholar's take on the research - and the blockbuster film.

Barbie and body image: a scholar's take on the research - and the blockbuster film.

Bigil Adicha Massu Da: Self-reflexivity and Masculinity in Bigil (2019)

Contemporary Tamil films are largely dependent on viewers having prior knowledge of film canon, celebrities, industry happenings and social issues in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Taking the form of complicated chains of intertextuality, self-reflexive moments are fundamental to the ways in which Tamil film narratives, particularly the narratives of mass hero films, are constructed. The 2019 blockbuster film Bigil ( Whistle), a sports film about a male coach leading an all-women soccer team, highlights the extent to which Tamil mass hero films rely on self-reflexive techniques to uphold the portrayal of specific gendered identities. This article examines the ways in which Bigil constructs contemporary Tamil masculinity through both the narrative representation of the central character Michael and the use of cinematic techniques, which privilege and celebrate the star’s (Vijay) relationship with his fans. This article conducts a close textual analysis of key sequences in the film, including song sequences, and interactions between Michael and the women soccer players. In doing so, it unpacks the ways in which the hypermasculinity of the male protagonist fundamentally diminishes the film’s supposedly empowering storyline and the ways in which contemporary Tamil films seek to capitalise on the marketability of such narratives.

‘NowyouareRobin Hood: Prince of Thieves™’: Intermedial Medievalism

AbstractThe 1991 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves console video game constitutes a significantly different vision of the Middle Ages than the blockbuster film upon which it was based. Prince of Thieves is one among a prolific tradition of Robin Hood-themed digital games, which produce anew a legend that has thrived across intermedial networks of representation since the Middle Ages. The game represents a desire to transform popular medievalist narratives into play formats, but also the entwined and invested relationship between Hollywood and the game industry over the last half-century. This article will analyse how three core thematic elements of the game are inherently shifted in the adaptation process: the range of perspectives reduced by a first-person game, the modes of violence, and the role of familial relationships. The game is more than just a remediated version of the same story, as its adaptation process is a result of not only the medievalist tradition of Robin Hood and a connection to this film but also of the history of the action-adventure game genre and movie-adaptation games. This article will argue that the context of video game adaptation and genre conventions shape the way this text operates as a piece of franchise media, and that these constraints or choices in the game’s design in turn shape the production of vastly different historical meanings.

Катастрофизм и восстание природы: экологическая монструозность в нарративах популярной медиакультуры

This article examines the cinematic transformations of monstrosity within the context of a growing ecological awareness and the Anthropocene. The authors argue that these transformations reflect a posthumanist shift in popular culture ethics, suggesting that human nature is intertwined with the natural world, indigenous cultures should be protected, and our relationships with other beings should be nurtured. The blockbuster film franchise MonsterVerse illustrates similar shifts occurring in the portrayal of movie monsters. It creates new narratives for cinema’s most iconic monsters, the Japanese Godzilla and American King Kong. The authors analyze the types of monstrosities presented in the franchise, the narratives they are placed in, and whether the media franchise reflects posthumanist trends in contemporary culture by constructing images of monsters. In the MonsterVerse, Godzilla and American King Kong are reimagined as ecological monsters of the Anthropocene era that represent nature’s rebellion, the urgency to save the planet, and popular posthuman perspectives on ecology. MonsterVerse thus becomes one of the popular manifestations of posthuman ethics.

Curious About George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism by Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre

Reviewed by: Curious About George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism by Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre Tharini Viswanath (bio) Curious About George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism. By Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre. University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre's Curious About George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism examines how the circulation of Curious George materials—such as the book series, films, TV shows, and art exhibits—promotes negative US exceptionalism. The main focus of the monograph is to unpack the rhetorics of colonialism that circulate within US media by viewing the famous monkey, George, as a cultural icon. Accordingly, the chapters in this monograph take up "four of the mediated reincarnations of George—his rise to literacy success, his emergence in film, his placement in STEM education, and his Holocaust remembrance narratives—in order to demonstrate how contemporary postcolonial theory can offer a provocative re-reading of each discourse individually" (6). Schwartz-DuPre's introductory chapter is largely comprised of an extensive literature review. The chapter begins with a detailed overview of the emergence and circulation of Curious George books and media from the monkey's first appearance in Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys in 1939, to more recent productions including the 2006 Curious George blockbuster film, stuffed toys, collectables, entertainment media, and even giant Curious George parade balloons. Schwartz-DuPre argues [End Page 334] that these various productions make George more than just a character; he is a cultural icon who has the power to direct audiences. The next section provides readers with an overview of cultural icons, metaphors, and ciphers, and George's role as an icon who has immense capacity to uphold certain (American) cultural values. Next, the author provides an overview of postcolonial studies, positing that the US has become one of the greatest colonizing powers in the world. She further argues that "[i]ncluding the US in the rhetoric of postcoloniality is central to understanding that one can be both a victim of violence and a perpetuator of it" (36). In addition to situating the argument and offering definitions and explanations for terms in both literary and media studies, this chapter emphasizes that audiences don't need to have read a Curious George book to be influenced by the monkey's icon status, because the marketing and media surrounding the character is all pervasive. Chapter 2, "Curious George Explores the Diaspora," focuses primarily on postcolonial children's literary criticism to contend that "the Curious George book series, both past and present, fits neatly into the genre of colonial literature and accordingly benefits from a post-colonial re-reading" (46). More than half this chapter is devoted to the following: the intentionality of writers versus the critical rhetorical model, a brief overview of the importance of studying children's literature, and what postcolonial theory has to offer critical readings of children's literature. The literature review is lengthy and can seem a bit dry for those already familiar with the fields of children's literature and postcolonial theory. The literary analysis of the book series, however, redeems this chapter. Building on June Cummins's groundbreaking article "The Resisting Monkey," which demonstrates the parallels between the Curious George narrative and African American enslavement narratives, Schwartz-DuPre analyzes the visual metaphors in the book series to better understand George's diasporic identity and themes of assimilation. This section is most interesting as the author uses media in the form of letters—written by both adults and children—to the Reys to support her argument. The third chapter, "George Teaches Science," is excellent. Schwartz-DuPre analyzes various media depictions of George including Google's Nexus 7 ad (2012), blockbuster films, the popular television series spearheaded by PBS (airing for fifteen seasons from 2006-2022) that offers lessons in STEM education, and digital adventures available on devices such as the iPad or iPhone to demonstrate how, "[i] n George's narrative, a rhetoric of curiosity is upheld as a justification for the colonial quest" (109). Schwartz-DuPre reads the icon of George through the lens of postcolonial Science Technology Studies (STS) to make an important point: while George...

Mapping tropicality in the masculinities and femininities of global Singapore in Crazy Rich Asians

The blockbuster film based on the acclaimed novel Crazy Rich Asians provides an alternative representational space to examine how masculinities, femininities, Chinese ethnicity and networks of economic power feature in the reproduction of the gendered body-in-space and body-as-space. In the reproduction of the gendered body in cartographic space, it is argued that in the film, the projection of temperate qualities avoids incorporation of Singapore’s natural environment into identity narratives of self. This resonates with wider debates about the state’s masculinist ambition to ensure the longevity of the country’s living standards, advanced economy and cultural products found only in the temperate world. In the reproduction of the temperate body-as-space in the tropics, the femininity of the strong mother and weak wife is embodied in food preparation processes which enact gendered boundaries that simultaneously ‘speak’ class and ethnicity by way of arousing feelings inside the body.

The New Zombie Apocalypse and Social Crisis in South Korean Cinema (translation into Russian)

The popular culture version of the zombie, developed over the latter half of the twentieth century, made only sporadic appearances in South Korean film, which may in part be attributed to the restrictions on the distribution of American and Japanese films before 1988. Thus the first zombie film Monstrous Corpse (Goeshi 1980, directed by Gang Beom-Gu), was a loose remake of the Spanish-Italian Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti (1974). Monstrous Corpse was largely forgotten until given a screening by KBS in 2011. Zombies don’t appear again for a quarter of a century. This article examines four zombie films released between 2012 and 2018: “Ambulance”, the fourth film in Horror Stories (2012), a popular horror portmanteau film; Train to Busan (2016) (directed by Yeon Sang-Ho), the first South Korean blockbuster film in the “zombie apocalypse” sub-genre; Seoul Station (2016), an animation prequel to Train to Busan (also directed by Yeon Sang-Ho); and Rampant (2018, directed by Kim Seong-Hun ), a costume drama set in Korea’s Joseon era. Based on a cognitive studies approach, this article examines two conceptual metaphors which underlie these films: the very common metaphor, LIFE IS A JOURNEY, and the endemically Korean metaphor THE NATION IS A FAMILY.

Istanbul Greek identities in film discourse

ABSTRACT Considering the prominent role of popular culture in forming our perceptions about national/ ethnic identities and historical memory, in the present study, we explore the way in which Greek-Turkish relationships as well as the ethnic identities implicated are depicted in the Greek blockbuster film Α Touch of Spice/ Politiki Kouzina, which deals with the Greek community of Istanbul in the 1950s and the 1960s. For the study of ethnic identities in the cinematic text, a social constructionist framework for the analysis of identities in discourse is adopted. The analysis suggests that the film maker, being part of the ethnic group, adopts an ingroup Istanbul Greek gaze. In this way, the emphasis placed on the similarities with the Istanbul Greek self and on the distinctions from the Greek and the Turkish other could be seen as an ideological strategy, through which an ethnic “body” is constituted.

Sustainability and eco-friendly movement in movie production

These days, environmental issues become a grand theme of a blockbuster film and earn much profit for its popularity. However, does the movie with environment themes also apply a green production conducted to minimize environmental impact? The movie industry is reported as one most of the most significant contributors to the carbon footprint. Film with budget estimated over $70m can produced 2,840 tonnes of CO2 and it’s equivalent of 11 times trip from moon to the earth. This paper explores the emerging phenomenon of sustainability and eco-friendly movement in film production by collecting data from movie production and sustainability reports from various industries contributing to filmmaking production. Instead of ruining the earth, the green production movement already moves and is supported by the university, nation, and community planning to reduce emissions to net zero before 2051. Researchers hope this paper will elaborate on how green production becomes valuable lessons for filmmakers to produce a green film using 5 keys area that have been identified to reduce emissions. And understand why it is essential and beneficial for society and industry to oversee environmental initiatives on-set.

Adapting Complex Time: Story of Your Life (1998) and Arrival (2016)

In both literature and film, we’re faced with complex characters, complex plots, complex themes, complexity in narration and, occasionally, complexity in narrative structure, all of which have been long present in fictional works and all of which have been addressed extensively by scholars (we’ve witnessed a resurgence of these terms in academic circles in recent years following the rise of the puzzle film in the 1990s).But what can be inferred when we consider narrative complexity in terms of adaptation?For this study, I consider complexity in relation to nonlinear storytelling and apply stylistic methods of analysis to the blockbuster film Arrival (2016) and its source text - Ted Chiang’s short story, Story of Your Life (1998). The aim of this paper is to examine narrative complexity in adaptation and address questions surrounding what is adapted in such cases, how it is adapted, and the effects both versions of such a text can produce.The argument that I advance is based on the premise that by breaking down the text (moving image and printed text) into its narrative components, we can develop a better understanding of how complex narratives such as this operate across platforms. My analysis focuses on the nonlinear narration, narrative focalisation and the presentation of coinciding narrative frames that are present in the source text and its film adaptation.

The New Chinese Individual: Confronting the Divided Self in Ne Zha: Birth of the Demon Child

ABSTRACT Researchers have demonstrated how the image of the Chinese child has shifted from that of a political messenger in the socialist period to that of a consumer with rights in the reform era. Using the concept of the guai (“good”) child, this article expands on these understandings of the Chinese child by examining the tensions a divided self faces between balancing individual desires and societal expectations in the 21st century. Through a close semiotic analysis of the blockbuster Chinese animated film Ne Zha: Birth of the Demon Child (2019), we argue that the child characters Ne Zha and Ao Bing represent a new, multi-layered Chinese individual. This ideal contemporary Chinese child is an agentive critical thinker who resists traditional expectations and takes control of their future instead of blindly obeying adult authority. These characters are simultaneously individualistic and collectivist.

Black Disability Gone Viral: A Critical Race Approach to Inspiration Porn

Black Disability Gone Viral:A Critical Race Approach to Inspiration Porn Sami Schalk (bio) On May 31, 2018, tattoo artist Milton Purnell of Tattoo Supreme in Raleigh, North Carolina posted a striking video on his Instagram and Face-book pages. The video shows Purnell presenting Michael Mack, Jr., a ten-year-old Black boy amputee, with a new prosthetic leg.1 The leg features custom airbrush artwork, with white and silver flames around the name and image of the Black Panther, the Marvel superhero from the blockbuster film, Black Panther (2018). The video captures young Mack's eyes growing wide with excitement, as Purnell shows him the prosthetic, asking the boy what he thinks of it. Suddenly, Mack's jaw drops. He spins off the stool he is seated on and hops away briefly, with his hand over his mouth. He then returns to his seat, where he grasps the leg in his hands, admiring it. In the background, two voices, including Mack's mother, Sandra Mc-Neill, express awe and admiration for the custom artwork. In front of the camera, Purnell encourages Mack to try it on, stating "Put yo leg on man! Put yo leg on!" In the background, we hear McNeill saying that she forgot the "connecting part" for the new leg, but that Mack should still put it on for a picture. Mack puts on the prosthetic, stands up, and starts to dance. Within days, this video went viral, with hundreds of thousands of views, shares, likes, and comments across multiple social media platforms. Whenever a video, image, or story of a disabled person goes viral, it most often occurs within the context of inspiration porn, a term popularized by the late Australian disability rights activist Stella Young.2 Generally, inspiration porn refers to representations that "objectify disabled people for the benefit of non-disabled people."3 The term, which has taken strong hold within disability and activist communities, is beginning to appear in academic scholarship, and was even featured in an episode of the ABC sitcom Speechless in 2017. Inspiration porn has strong similarities to the older concept of supercrip, a term used to describe narratives about [End Page 100] disabled people who are represented as inspiring or extraordinary for performing both mundane and exceptional activities. Inspiration porn and supercrip narratives are similar in several ways. Both concepts rely on certain affective registers, such as inspiration, awe, tragedy, triumph, and pity; they also presume a non-disabled audience and engage ableist concepts, such as overcoming or compensating for the perceived obstacle caused by disability. They are also both narrative frameworks.4 That is, the people represented in these images and stories are not themselves supercrips nor inspiration porn, but rather supercrip and inspiration porn frameworks are applied to represent people and their stories in this way. There are a few differences between inspiration porn and supercrip narratives, however. The main difference is that inspiration porn often includes representations of non-disabled people "helping" disabled people, an approach not typically considered part of supercrip narratives. Inspiration porn is also used primarily in reference to memes, photos, videos, and news stories that are shared on the internet, whereas the term supercrip has most often been applied to news stories and fictional representations. Scholarly work on inspiration porn and supercrip narratives lacks engagement with race. In most cases, scholars never mention race and the objects of analysis represent white or non-racially identified subjects. With a few exceptions, scholars do allude to race, such as in Russell Meeuf's footnote acknowledging that his analysis of John Wayne as supercrip is specifically focused on white masculinity and my argument that Christopher Reeve's racial and class privilege is often overlooked in representations of him as supercrip.5 In both cases, racial privilege is acknowledged as a constitutive factor in supercrip narratives, but race is not a central analytic of the scholarship. Relatedly, only a few scholars have analyzed how audience identity impacts the reception and interpretation of representations of disabled people, while focusing primarily on how disabled people at large respond, as opposed to disabled people of color or people of color more generally.6 A major exception to...

Heterotopia of the road: driving and drifting in Siberia

AbstractThe article demonstrates how development of the car cultures in the city of Yakutsk, northeastern Russia, is facilitated by the proximity of Japan, where street racing and drift driving became popular through such outlets as the manga series, animation films, YouTube, and a blockbuster film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. These influences, which arrived in Siberia from across the Sea of Japan and Hollywood, highlight the shifting geographies and multiple cultural entanglements of the technological advancements in the global space. Through these cultural engagements, young people in the city establish a different perception of the road, endowing it with heterotopic qualities. The article explores the heterotopia of the road in anthropology.

‘The storyteller who survived’: the Greek crisis through its biggest blockbuster film Worlds apart by Christopher Papakaliatis (2015)

ABSTRACT This article explores aspects of the Greek crisis through the reception of its biggest blockbuster film Ένας άλλος κόσμος [Worlds Apart] by Christopher Papakaliatis (2015). Based on articles, interviews, reviews and virtual ethnography findings, it argues that before the crisis Papakaliatis’ work had largely encapsulated through millennium’s careless life politics. During the crisis, however, Papakaliatis shifted to political topics, combining emotive and anti-austerity rhetorics with pretty aesthetics and abundant referents to the pre-crisis prosperity. Blending aesthetics of the leisurely 2000s with the (re)politicized 2010s Papakaliatis attracted mixed audiences, and intrigued viewers who were previously reluctant to his work. Hence, he became one of the few 2000s pop icons who survived in the crisis era.

Russia’s ‘fortresses of solitude’: Social imaginaries of loneliness after the fall of the USSR

Based on the distinction between three approaches to loneliness, and the development of the phenomenological and existential framework of loneliness studies, this article explores Russia’s discourse of national loneliness on three levels: a) the level of the official discourse of the Russian government; b) the level of political and philosophical concepts; and c) the level of popular media and cinema (with a specific focus on a case-study of the post-Soviet Russian blockbuster film Brother and its sequel, Brother 2). In this article I concentrate on the particular experiences of loneliness and their interpretations in Russia after the fall of the USSR. The case of the fall of the USSR has shown that social and political exploitations of different forms of national loneliness can become the flip side of the doctrine of autonomy, equal individual rights and freedom from authoritarian rule. This should be considered and never disregarded within our analysis of the contours and new transformations of emerging hegemonic discourses, including the different forms of nationalism in Russia, and in a wider cross-cultural perspective.

Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil by Brian Whitener

Reviewed by: Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil by Brian Whitener Alberto Ribas-Casasayas Whitener, Brian. Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil. U of Pittsburgh P, 2019. Economic criticism of culture has had a robust comeback after the Great Recession. Arguably, though, most scholarly work has tended to focus on the cultural production of richer countries. In this context, Crisis Cultures by Brian Whitener represents a fundamental contribution to cultural approaches to contemporary Latin America from the perspective of finance and economics, and, more extensively, to global cultural critique. The stated objective of the book is to investigate “how the rise of finance has impacted social and cultural life” (13), with a focus on cultural production in Mexico and Brazil from the last decade of the twentieth century to present. Whitener’s account contextualizes this production beyond neoliberalism, which he understands as a modulation of a longer-term downturn originated in the decrease of capital returns in the 1970s and the hyperinflation and debt crisis of the 1980s. Whitener’s analysis is sustained by a comprehensive and solid theoretical grounding paired with a thorough understanding of the concrete particularities of political economic developments in both Mexico and Brazil. The book opens with a thorough and substantial introduction situating the importance of a financial approach to culture after nearly 40 years of a state of crisis, “and perhaps a Marxist and antistate critique of it” (9). Whitener understands that the rise of financial forms of accumulation were “fueled by a secular declining rate of profit or ongoing, underlying problems in the sphere of production” (11). Whitener understands that, after nearly 40 years in a crisis cycle in Latin America, we cannot ignore the cultural impact of economy and finance, particularly when, in a context of increasing surplus capital and surplus population, states resort to policing and violence to subordinate the latter. Whitener eschews traditional critiques of the “shrinking state” under neoliberalism, attending instead to infrastructures that organize bodies and producing them as weak individuals and collectivities defined by—borrowing an expression from Ruth Gilmore—“group-differentiated individuality to premature death” (19). Chapter one focuses largely on Jorge Volpi’s novel En busca de Klingsor as an intellectual response to the embedding of chaos and indeterminacy in Mexican consciousness—the result of dramatically deteriorating living conditions following the 1982 and other successive crises. Whitener’s interpretation of the novel is thorough and internally consistent, suggesting that the novel’s “schatologic” discourse attests to the institution of a “catastrophic and chaotic” concept of history (47). Hence, “the novel’s ontology that reality is indeterminate and that believing [End Page 885] in determinism tendentially leads to illiberalism” (50). Whitener further argues that Volpi’s novel partakes in a general conceptual recodification that leads to the expansion of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous discourse to the more tenuous blanket identifier of “delincuencia” to surplus population in an escalating drug war conflict (44–46), a claim that may require more extensive verification and contrast with contemporaneous discourse. Nonetheless, Klingsor arguably “allows us to register this specific sense of the end of history and of the ideologies of progress in its context of semi-peripheral financial crisis” (52) and demonstrates “the deep roots of the tropes of ontology and catastrophe within a response to financial and state crisis and their continued importance in both literary and popular discursive spheres” (52, 53). Chapters two and three, focused on Brazil, elaborate on this latter point with particular pertinence to urban culture and society by means of an insightful discussion of Zuenir Ventura’s chronicle Cidade partida, Paulo Lins’s novel Cidade de Deus, the blockbuster film Tropa de elite, and the soap opera Cheias de charme. Chapter two explains how the socialization of crisis through hyperinflation and unemployment, inflected by an accelerated State violence, and aimed particularly towards the urban periphery, was accompanied by the development of an intellectual production that refashioned racial and discursive formations. The social forms that arose from local conditions of financial crisis reveal how debilitated national narratives such as “racial democracy” and the failure of social synthesis were animated by forces inherent to racialization and “real...

Fandom while black: Misty Copeland, Black Panther, Tyler Perry and the contours of US black fandoms

Using 50 interviews with black people about their fandoms (and anti-fandoms) of Tyler Perry’s media output, the blockbuster film Black Panther and the African American ballerina Misty Copeland, this article illuminates black fandom’s four interlocking discourses. First, must-see blackness describes black fans’ “civic duty” to see blackness in all of its forms. Second, economic consumption drives “must-see blackness” in the sense that black fans are cognizant of the precariousness of blackness’s existence in spaces that are either historically white and/or have been hostile to the presence of blackness. Third, black fandoms (and anti-fandoms) are driven by their pedagogical properties: how fit are fan objects for learning and role modeling? Finally, the pedagogical fitness of fan objects intersects with economic consumption and must-see blackness, which, in turn, illuminates black fans’ attentiveness to the machinations of the culture industries.