Depictions Of Race Research Articles

Class as Performance in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven

Class as Performance in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven Jessica Hausmann (bio) It has been noted that Sarah Orne Jewett’s texts resist easy classification in form and structure. Are her book-length works Deephaven and The Country of the Pointed Firs novels? Collections of short stories? Sketches? Jewett’s slipperiness extends beyond the issue of structure, however. Majorie Pryse, in her influential article “Sex, Class, and ‘Category Crisis’: Reading Jewett’s Transitivity,” argues that Jewett’s resistance to easy categorization and classification causes some critics to misread Jewett’s treatment of issues of gender, race, and class as well. Indeed, Jewett, known for writing women-centered texts that focus on the representation of communities in her native Maine, has alternately been praised for her celebration of women and questioning of gendered categories and criticized for her alleged promotion of racist and classist ideas that reinforce the privileges of being of the white and middle- or upper-class. This latter reading of Jewett undercuts the idea of her being truly inclusive in her work. I am particularly interested in looking at how Jewett’s depiction of class resists easy classification, recognizing, of course, that class cannot be considered without an awareness of how this issue intersects with gender and race. The issue of class itself is complicated. Clearly, it has associations with economic power, but it is also culturally defined; being well-educated and having certain manners, for example, are associated with class, and, indeed, Jewett seems often to play with the idea of manners as a class marker. In this paper, I am interested in all these aspects of class. Specifically, I am interested in how Jewett plays with the issue of class in Deephaven in ways that sometimes seem contradictory. At times, she clearly defines the class differences between the novel’s two main protagonists, middle- and upper-class young Boston women, and most of the residents of the Maine country town they are visiting for the summer. At other times, however, there is a blurring of this class divide, which occurs when the young women are able to react to other characters with compassion, sympathy, or genuine emotional engagement. Additionally, I would argue, the issues of class are problematized when the protagonists “perform,” or act out, different social class roles. The young protagonists become more than mere observers, or “tourists,” even if they do not fully transcend class boundaries. It was Jewett’s focus, in works like Deephaven, on relationships between women, her women-centric communities, and her creation of characters who often did not fit gender stereotypes that resulted in renewed attention [End Page 289] to her work in the 1970s by feminist critics. However, while Jewett continues to have her champions, some later critics point to what they see as problematic patterns in her depiction of race and class. Critic June Howard notes the divide and has described the separate critical impulses as being divisible into those that are “historicizing” and those that are “feminist,” with feminist work tending to be more “celebratory” of Jewett’s work and historicizing work more often a source of critique (qtd. in Pryse 38). One of the criticisms leveled against Jewett, which would be more consistent with what Howard would term the “historicizing” category, is that her characters sometimes behave as “tourists,” outsiders who temporarily enjoy a simplified and sentimentalized version of quaint village life without truly experiencing the hardships the villagers, most of whom occupy a lower socioeconomic position, must endure. Amy Kaplan is one who levels this criticism, pointing to the narrator in The Country of Pointed Firs as one who engages in “literary tourism.” Kaplan notes the narrator is an urban woman of a higher social class than the townspeople she engages with, and because of her position, she is able to visit the rural countryside and then withdraw whenever she chooses—she is merely an observer absorbing the interesting local culture (qtd. in Pryse 31). Other critics make similar charges. Although Kaplan is referring to The Country of Pointed Firs, the protagonists in Deephaven, one of whom is also the narrator, share a background similar to that of the narrator of The Country of Pointed...

Manufacturing white criminals: Depictions of criminality and violence on Law & Order

AbstractThis study examines exposure to the police drama television genre and its impact on perceptions of crime and racial criminality. Content analyses of three seasons of Law & Order were examined to evaluate the show’s portrayal of race and crime compared to actual crime statistics for New York City during the same periods. A survey was also conducted to examine perceptions of personal safety and the influence of television’s depiction of race and crime. Results suggest whites are disproportionately portrayed as criminals five to eight times more often on police dramas compared to actual crime statistics for the city of New York, exposure to police dramas increases beliefs of threats to personal safety, and exposure to police dramas leads to elevated perceptions of white criminality among non-whites. Results provide additional support for cultivation theory and “Mean World Syndrome,” and implications for delimitation and racial distrust.

‘Your household accounts have always been so interesting’: family relations and gender politics in Lincoln's two ‘houses’

Since the release of Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln (2012), film critics and scholars have debated the film's depictions of race and who was responsible for abolition, as well as its historical accuracy and the actors' portrayals of the Lincolns and key characters in the White House and House of Representatives. There has been a more scattered response, however, to the film's representations of family relationships and gender politics. This essay explores how the film blends twenty-first century perceptions about nineteenth-century expectations of fathers and mothers, men and women, and political and familial agency. The film encourages this type of analysis by turning the two ‘Houses’ into sites for affirming, reinforcing, policing, and challenging gender appropriate practices.

Shakespeare's Turks and the spectre of ambivalence in the History Plays

Critical interest in Shakespeare's depiction of race and ethnicity has usually been confined to exploring his Moorish characters, contextualised by historical accounts of Anglo-Islamic relations focused on Morocco. This paper offers a different approach based on the fashion for Turk plays which defined the Elizabethan playhouses in the 1590s. It asks why Shakespeare did not put a Turk on his stage, and explores instead the ghostly presence of this figure in his History Plays. Starting with the reference to Mohammad in Henry VI Part 1, it examines the recurring motif of the Turk as it appears throughout the Henriad, culminating in the ambivalent depiction of Henry V as simultaneously a virtuous Christian prince and scheming, Machiavellian tyrant who threatens to ‘turn Turk’. Tracing the spectre of the Turk back through a range of humanist and Reformation texts including those by Erasmus, this article argues that Shakespeare draws on the ambivalent spectre of the Turk as a particularly satisfying and enjoyable theatrical fantasy, which throws new light on Othello.

A critical discourse analysis of race and gender in advertisements in the South African in-flight magazine Indwe

In a critical discourse analysis of two in-flight magazines, Qantas and Air New Zealand, Small et al. (2008, p. 33) found that the advertising texts in these magazines are designed to appeal to an elite minority of air travellers who have the wealth to pursue a life of leisure and luxury. As a consequence, consumers who have the means to pursue this lifestyle are constructed as legitimate air travellers – a status that others must aspire to. A further implication is that the manner in which consumers are depicted in these advertisements may reveal advertisers' assumptions about which demographic is most likely to fall in this elite category. Small et al. (2008, p. 31) found that the majority of the advertisements in their sample depicted white consumers. On the basis of this argument, the current article aims to conduct a critical discourse analysis of a South African in-flight magazine, Indwe, in order to investigate depictions of race and gender in the advertising images in this magazine. The results suggest that Indwe is only marginally more balanced in its portrayal of race, while depictions of gender differ significantly from Small et al.'s (2008) analysis.

Characterizations of Criminal Athletes: A Systematic Examination of Sports News Depictions of Race and Crime

The present content analysis systematically analyzed the frequency and quality of newspaper coverage of race and crime in sports news. A social identity framework, incorporating insights from framing, was applied. It was expected that the features associated with athletes as well as the tone and style of news reports would vary based on the race/ethnicity of the athlete. For African American athletes (and African Americans, generally) these findings are of greatest consequence as they indicate that this group is disproportionately presented (compared with real-world demographics in sports) and characterized in a manner likely to promote unfavorable intergroup outcomes.

‘‘When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong’’: Resident Evil 5, Racial Representation, and Gamers

Videogames’ ability to depict cultural iconographies and characters have occasionally led to accusations of insensitivity. This article examines gamers’ reactions to a developer’s use of Africans as enemies in a survival horror videogame, Resident Evil 5. Their reactions offer insight into how videogames represent Whiteness and White privilege within the social structure of ‘‘play.’’ Omi and Winant’s (1994) racial formation theory notes that race is formed through cultural representations of human bodies organized in social structures. Accordingly, depictions of race in electronic spaces rely upon media imagery and social interactions. Videogames construct exotic fantasy worlds and peoples as places for White male protagonists to conquer, explore, exploit, and solve. Like their precursors in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, videogame narratives, activities, and players often draw from Western values of White masculinity, White privilege as bounded by conceptions of ‘‘other,’’ and relationships organized by coercion and domination.

The Rise of `Recruitmentology'

Recent debates concerning the biomedical meaning and significance of race have paid relatively little attention to the practical implications of new policies in the US mandating the inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities (along with other 'underrepresented groups') as research subjects in clinical studies. I argue that pressures to enroll underrepresented groups have stimulated the development in the US of an auxiliary science I term 'recruitmentology': an empirical body of studies scientifically evaluating the efficacy of various social, cultural, psychological, technological, and economic means of convincing people (especially members of 'hard-to-recruit populations') that they want to become, and remain, human subjects. Via the filtering of social scientific frameworks into the clinical research domain, recruitmentology has promoted hybrid ways of thinking about race--awkward encounters in which depictions of race as a bounded, quasi-biological medical and administrative category sit uneasily alongside an interest in understanding racial identities and communities as sociocultural phenomena. I analyze how recruitmentologists, in addressing the mandate to recruit racially diverse subject populations, conceptualize race while simultaneously grappling with problems of trust, collective memory, and participation. I also examine how the increasingly transnational character of biomedical research is intensifying the exploitative dimensions of recruitment while further transforming the racialized character of human experimentation. This analysis highlights the tensions underlying projects to eliminate health disparities by race.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Toward a Sociology of Reality Television

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Toward a Sociology of Reality Television

Jon Koplo

This essay examines the tragi-comical fictional episodes and accompanying cartoons, Ah... tenane (Oh... really), in the local newspaper, SOLOPOS. The daily lives of the fictional characters in these episodes were played out against a background of the violent mass student demonstrations and the May 1998 riots in Solo, Central Java. Within the newspaper, the characters provide a face to the crowd and give a voice to the silent majority. Their role is reminiscent of that played by the punakawan, or clowns in traditional wayang puppet theatre, who provide relief from the main narrative, fooling around while their masters are serious. This essay compares these fictional episodes both to wayang and to comic strips in other Indonesian newspapers, commenting on the changing identities of the characters, the depiction of race and gender and the interaction of fact and fiction.

Racializing subversion: The FBI and the depiction of race in early Cold War movies

During the 1940s, as part of its investigation of 'Communist Infiltration Into the Motion Picture Industry', the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] borrowed criteria for determining if a motion picture contained communist propaganda from the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals [MPAPAI], a private, anti-communist organization located in Hollywood. An analysis of the FBI's interpretation of movies that featured black characters or explored racial themes reveals how the agency racialized its investigation of subversiveness in the early Cold War period. In the FBI's application of the MPAPAI criteria, blackness became synonymous with subversiveness and whiteness with Americanism. The FBI's racial project, as revealed in these reviews, is linked to its framing of the Communist threat and contrasted to the Truman administration's racial project and framing of the Communist threat

The Bible Tells Me So: Depictions of Race, Gender, and Authority in Children's Videos

The study of what children learn from media has more recently included measures of diversity in children's programming. This article looks to what Veggie Tales, a popular children's video series, presents in terms of race, gender, and authority. The study finds that nonracialized, normative, predominantly male characters occupy positions of authority and are presented as those from which one can learn key lessons. The series also presents the main characters, those with which the child is intended to identify, as lacking in racially based signifiers, thus permitting them to occupy the position of norm. Using not only theories of children's social learning and prior research of representation in children's media, but also theory of how whiteness is defined through the identification of other and neo-Marxist deviance theory, the study connects these issues to problematize the subtle lesson that difference is suspect.

Television News, Prejudicial Pretrial Publicity, and the Depiction of Race

The current study is a content analysis that measured the extent of pretrial publicity on Los Angeles television news and examined the relationship of race of the accused and amount of prejudicial information in the news- cast. Results indicated that 19% of the defendants described in crime stories were associated with at least one category of potentially prejudicial information, as defined by the American Bar Association. Blacks and Latinos were twice as likely as Whites to be associated with prejudicial statements on local television news. Latinos who victimized Whites were almost 3 times as likely as White defendants to be associated with prejudicial information. The social, legaI, and psychological implications of these findings are discussed.

Work and Masculine Identity in Kevin Smith's New Jersey Trilogy

Work and Masculine Identity in Kevin Smith's New Jersey Trilogy