Mainstream Representations Research Articles

Blogging through dementia: Reworking mainstream discourse through metaphor in online early-onset dementia narratives.

The depiction of dementia in public discourse tends to operate on two levels: the tragedy discourse or the living well with dementia discourse, where metaphors play a decisive role in the characterization of the condition and the voice of those living with the condition is usually underrepresented. This article analyzes whether and how mainstream discourse on dementia is reworked in first-person accounts of the disease online and explores the attitudes and assumptions about dementia that illness blogs reflect and defy. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the article analyzes a corpus of 10 blogs (622 posts) written by individuals living with early-onset dementia to identify the metaphors used to depict dementia, its impact on the self and its social and relational aspects. Metaphor identification was based on the PRAGGLEJAZ metaphor identification procedure. The study demonstrates that across blogs no single metaphor alone is capable of capturing the complexity of the dementia experience; instead multiple metaphors are deployed to provide a characterization of the multiple faces of this condition. In this way blogs transcend and reshape the reductionist view of dementia that emerges from the either/or dichotomy of the tragedy versus living well with dementia discourses that dominate in media representations. By reshaping some of the metaphors used in mainstream discourse and introducing new ones, blog narratives draw attention to the complex nature of the experience of dementia, acknowledging both the suffering and social and functional losses that the condition brings, while also claiming recognition for personhood, agency, validation, and the aspiration to grow beyond the diagnosis and live a valued life as part of a family and community. Overall, this study demonstrates that metaphor is a useful tool for providing insights into people's experience of dementia and that blogs are a platform where stereotypes may be defied and mainstream representations of dementia reworked offering a more holistic view of the condition and granting narrative agency to those who live with dementia.

‘Oh, This Is More of Stretch’s Show’: Randal Stretch and Puppet Theatre in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

This article outlines the popularity - and financial success - of an eighteenth-century Dublin puppet theatre that threatened mainstream theatres of the time. Randall Stretch’s puppet theatre, in Dublin’s Capel Street, became the centrepiece for satirical and political commentary of the day. Stretch’s theatre caught the attention of Dean Swift and his circle and is commemorated in satirical verse of the period. For decades, Dubliners used the phrase ‘This is more of Stretch’s Show’ to refer to anything outlandish or incredible. The article underlines the power of the puppet theatre as a satirical device and the extent to which it can rival mainstream theatre.

Frustrating white men: Masculinity and genre instability in Eat and Gregory Go Boom

This article draws a connection between the genre instability of Janicza Bravo’s first two short films and her subject position as a Black woman directing films about vulnerable white masculinity. In fluctuating between the tonal and genre markers of comedy and horror, Eat (2011) and Gregory Go Boom (2013) reveal the contradictions between mainstream representations that uplift flawed white male characters and how they are perceived by those they oppress.

Beyond Tourism: Alternative Futures in Contemporary Caribbean Poetry

This essay analyses contemporary Anglophone Caribbean poetry which, in contrast to mainstream representations mostly tailored for a western readership, advances an optimistic, yet non-idealised and incisive, perspective on the region. These poetics resist the pervasiveness of the colonial construction of Caribbean island spaces as tourist havens, addressing the profound impact and overpowering influence of tourism in the region. This essay focuses on two island-based writers, Bahamian poet Sonia Farmer and Saint Lucian poet Kendel Hippolyte, whose poetry highlights and condemns the continuities between colonialism and the tourist industry, as well as the social and psychological effects of the region’s economic subjugation and overall neo-colonial status. Their poetry does not only debunk the myths of island isolation and statism, but also advances new visions for the region which call for the recognition of grassroots alternatives to the present milieu.

A Dramaturgical Analysis of Latina Influencers Use of Props and Settings to Signal Identity

Dramaturgical analysis has been applied by scholars to social media influencers, but how props and settings are used to signal identity is understudied. This study uses a series of in-depth interviews with Latina influencers who live and work in a mid-size city on the U.S./Mexico border and an analysis of corresponding posts to explore how props and settings can be used to signal gender and race while also communicating authenticity. The findings show that influencers have to carefully and strategically navigate the use of props and settings not to appear fake and contrived. They blend the use of frontstage props with calibrated sharing of backstage settings to approximate an authentic online performance of their branded identity that is approachable but also monetizable. When performing their gender, the influencers adopt a having-it-all performance, balancing family, beauty, career success, and health while using backstage settings to create connection. Finally, Latina influencers on the border portray it as a setting that differs from its mainstream representation as a place to avoid. They also strategically deploy Latina identity to market themselves and localize national trends.

Swedish Whiteness, German Multiculturalism, French National Identity, and American Racial Profiling

Populated by characters from the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and Sweden, Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s debut play, Invasion! (2006), marked one of the first intercultural theatrical events on a mainstream Swedish stage. It unapologetically confronted audiences with the consequences of stereotypical representations of Muslim men as fundamentalist terrorists and further criticized the notion of “Swedishness” for not just working as a mere designation of nationality and citizenship, but also a silent, yet powerful signifier of whiteness. Moreover, Invasion! was the first play to be performed in a mainstream theatre by a cast that had an intercultural and international background and could effortlessly switch between standard Swedish (rikssvenska) and suburban Swedish (ortenspråk).Acknowledging the fifteenth anniversary of Invasion!, this article looks back upon the watershed of director Farnaz Arbabi’s original production and the play’s subsequent transnational impact. How did a play that was defiantly at odds with the hegemonic whiteness of the performing arts in Sweden, at that point in time, not only become a modern classic that found its way into the university curricula, but went on to garner an impressively transnational success? What exactly captured the interest and attention of theatre artists in Germany, France, the US, and many other countries? And how did international reviewers react to and interpret the work? What interests me specifically is to study how the play has ‘travelled’, how its characters and themes have migrated to different national and linguistic contexts, engendered new creative networks and transnational dialogues as well as unfolded multiple layers of cultural translations in the process. A genuine understanding and appreciation of Khemiri’s work, I suggest, necessitates a transnational outlook that, in turn, sheds light on Nordic theatre and performance as increasingly intercultural and motivated by concerns that are not regional but global.

Negotiating the Melancholy of Alterity : The Oppositional Digital Visual Culture of East-Asian American Women Artists

Through the interview of four East-Asian American women artists of diverse backgrounds, alongside semiotic analysis of their selected works, I investigate their oppositional digital art practice as well as their general online experiences. The digital sphere replicates the same forms of racially and sexually based oppression that occurs in the non-digital world in rapidly diverging forms. The main findings demonstrate that digital technologies offer novel ways for East-Asian American artists to resist oppression, visibilize their struggles, and explore their identities. Oppositional techniques can be sorted into three broad categories describing the archival, discursive, and voyeuristic capabilities of digital space. These categories describe a broad range of practices including generating alternative autobiographical histories, forging larger communities of resistance, and subverting the white male gaze. East-Asian American women artists actively challenge structural power through innovative multimedia methodologies that challenge mainstream representations in which they are regarded as subhuman, and resist essentialized roles and fixed markers of East-Asian culture and identity. Their diverse experiences converge upon the common goal of resisting hegemonic order and fostering a supportive space in which the voices of their community can be heard. Drawing on movements like postcolonial feminist scholarship from Anne Anlin Cheng, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, and Saidiya Hartman, as well as Third Cinema, I argue that social media sites and other internet communities expand and enable the development of a digital postcolonial aesthetic and art practice for East-Asian American women artists, allowing them to exercise agency over their artistic and historical narratives.

Auditing the representation of migrants in image web search results

Search engines serve as information gatekeepers on a multitude of topics that are prone to gender, ethnicity, and race misrepresentations. In this paper, we specifically look at the image search representation of migrant population groups that are often subjected to discrimination and biased representation in mainstream media, increasingly so with the rise of right-wing populist actors in the Western countries. Using multiple (n = 200) virtual agents to simulate human browsing behavior in a controlled environment, we collect image search results related to various terms referring to migrants (e.g., expats, immigrants, and refugees, seven queries in English and German used in total) from the six most popular search engines. Then, with the aid of manual coding, we investigate which features are used to represent these groups and whether the representations are subjected to bias. Our findings indicate that search engines reproduce ethnic and gender biases common for mainstream media representations of different subgroups of migrant population. For instance, migrant representations tend to be highly racialized, and female migrants as well as migrants at work tend to be underrepresented in the results. Our findings highlight the need for further algorithmic impact auditing studies in the context of representation of potentially vulnerable groups in web search results.

VISUAL SOVEREIGNTY IN SMOKE SIGNALS: A CRITICAL VISUAL ANALYSIS

The current research paper aims to see a film Smoke Signals by American Indian writer Sherman Alexie and director Chris Eyre as an attempt to define visual sovereignty. By applying Critical Visual Theory, the paper seeks to provide not just a close visual reading but also a broad study of American Indian indigenous film’s meanings with the understanding that the film functions as a politicized way of giving voice to the marginalized indigenous community. The film nullifies Hollywood representation of Natives by its celebration of Native storytelling. My contention is that the film is not a passive response to mainstream representation and geographical inaccuracies but rather a creation of indigenous reality in a media saturated world. The film shifts indigenous experience from a victimized stance to a strategic one. It has its visual effects which cannot be extricated from the social context in which it is produced. The analysis intends to delimit the bus scene that includes 10 frames ranging from 21:31- 40:31(time line). Keywords: vision, visuality, visual culture, visual sovereignty, critical visual theory.

Smartphone filmmaking for queer Australian documentary

ABSTRACT This article draws on my experience creating the film What's With Your Nails? (2018), a film about queerness, normality, slowness, and painting fingernails, and which embraces the affordances of smartphone filmmaking for queer documentary production in Australia. Documentary practices in this field are notable for a ‘privileging of authenticity’ through a subjective perspective, and there has been a history of queer filmmakers utilising accessible production technologies. The utilisation of hyper-accessible smartphone technologies presents an opportunity for queer activist filmmakers to make work that alters what we think of empowerment and self-identity by being different to mainstream media. In this article, I observe these concepts at play in notable historical contributions to queer Australian documentary, before discussing the creation of my own film, which was created in response to mainstream representations during and after the successful Australian Marriage Equality Postal Survey in 2017. As such, I argue that mobile media devices are ideal, hyper-accessible tools that can be used to interrogate subjectivities, generate material unlike that seen in mainstream media, and contribute to a growing history of queer documentary in Australia that changes the way we think about representation.

The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture—Photographs from the Walther Collection

The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture—Photographs from the Walther Collection

Television and American consumerism

How did the introduction of mass commercial television in the postwar era change American consumer behavior? Media scholars and U.S. historians claim that TV with its unprecedented advertising appeal drew Americans into a culture of upscaling and purchasing products for social status. I test this prevailing theory using newly digitized nationwide county-level retail sales data from the Census of Business series. I compare growth in retail sales between areas with and without local TV service over the unanticipated Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Freeze, which halted the licensing of new TV stations from 1948–52. I find three results that corroborate TV’s long-attributed role in American consumerism. First, during the Freeze, total retail sales in counties with TV access increased by 3–4% more on average than in counties without access. Second, the effect of TV was concentrated in the automobile sector, which alone accounted for a third of the total difference. Third, TV advertising led to higher growth in sales, but only for durable goods, which neatly aligns with both qualitative reports and theories of conspicuous consumption. Historians also propose that the suburban family life popularized in TV sitcoms became the mainstream representation of the American Dream in the 1950s. Consistent with these accounts, I find that the start of TV access coincides with greater activity in local highway construction and birthrates.

Narratives of the future: immersive stories / indigenous roots

The way we tell stories shapes what we are: it articulates the way we position ourselves in relation to the world. This article explores how immersive practices, as used in virtual reality and intermedial performance, provoke novel dynamics between artist and audience that no longer fit within Western traditions of aesthetic exchange and furthermore challenge our understanding of narrative production and reception. It proposes that new ways of reasoning are needed to allow audience agency and the evolving role of the artist to be explored more fully than is currently possible in mainstream theatre scholarship. One source that can provide a model for considering the dynamics between audience and performer in immersive performance is the Indigenous story systems of Australia. There is a significant synergy between the structure and operation of First Nation songlines and contemporary immersive performance. This is explored with reference to the work of contemporary anthropologists and Indigenous scholars and to recent immersive work from the companies Kaleider and Theatre Conspiracy. The article considers how both ancient narratives and contemporary immersive practices require people to engage with data/ physical space in a specific manner in order for stories to be realised. Furthermore, both bestow creative responsibility and the role of custodian on the user, through whose actions narrative is manifested. Immersive performance challenges assumptions about how information is generated, processed, and passed on, and the power structures involved in such exchanges. This research explores how non-traditional narrative practices can assist the debate about the future of storytelling.

Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt by Sonali Pahwa

Reviewed by: Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt by Sonali Pahwa Mohamadreza Babaee Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt. By Sonali Pahwa. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; pp. 192. Theatre and performance scholarship on Middle Eastern and North African drama remains an infrequently explored topic within the field. With Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt, Sonali Pahwa contributes a much-needed project on how MENA artists use theatre to address social, political, and cultural issues pertinent to their societies. The book explores avant-garde, experimental, and independent theatres of Egypt during the later years of Hosni Mubarak’s presidency, roughly starting in 2001 and leading to the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and its aftermath. Pahwa looks at plays, festivals, manifestos, and workshops to argue that new and independent generations of Egyptian theatre-makers, encumbered by the neoliberal policies of Mubarak’s authoritarian government, used avant-garde poetics to rehearse civic and cultural citizenship on varied theatre stages. Incorporating archival, ethnographic, and performance analysis research methods, Pahwa structures her study in six chapters to discuss how various aspects of national and identity politics undergirded the activist purposes of avant-garde Egyptian theatre in the early twenty-first century. Pahwa begins her book by laying the contextual and historical ground for understanding the purpose of theatre in contemporary Egypt. After the revolution of 1952, a national theatre was formed in Egypt that sought to decolonize the country’s theatre practices by focusing more on folk characters and native playwrights. Following the reestablishment of private theatres in the 1960s, Egyptian theatre experienced a golden age of works featuring the prominent themes of national unity, pan-Arabism, and socialism. When Mubarak became the fourth president of Egypt in 1981, he eventually reduced state support for playwrights and consequently slowed down the progress of the political drama in the country. Impacted by Mubarak’s repressive policies and his later neoliberal attitude toward the arts, the new generations of Egyptian theatre-makers at the dawn of the century found themselves excluded from participating in public modes of theatre, and citizenship writ large. These artists, who Pahwa discusses in chapter 1, used adaptation, hybridization, and improvisation strategies to form an avant-garde theatre that included the voices of the ignored and forgotten. The new independent art movement distanced itself from state institutions to create an undercommon, seeking fresh modes of theatre in which they could more freely address (national) identity politics. Chapter 2 deals with the emergence of avant-garde manifesto movements in connection to the evolution of the highly influential, state-sponsored Cairo International Festival for Theater (CIFET). The festival was inaugurated in the 1980s as a cultural venue for devising new forms of experimental theatre. Mubarak’s government, however, used CIFET to propagate a cosmopolitan image of Egypt as a country ready for global import and export. Feeling ignored and excluded in the CIFET programming, independent troupes and younger artists joined various opposing movements, including the “free theater” (1990) and “September 5” (2005), to ask for more visibility and cultural agency within and beyond a single state-sponsored festival. Dissident theatre artists used the CIFET and independent theatre festivals to devise new forms of experimental theatre outside the dichotomy of Arab and Western theatre, creating cultural and civic opportunities for rehearsing more counterhegemonic self-expression practices. Pahwa addresses gender identity politics and associated generational ideologies in chapters 3 and 4. By analyzing the 2004 multimedia performances of Messing with the Mind (Haraka troupe) and Mother I Want to Be a Millionaire (Al-ma’bad troupe), Pahwa argues that independent Egyptian theatre-makers of the time questioned the efficacy of state-sponsored mass media for representing young Egyptian identity, and challenged images of masculinity championed within more mainstream theatres as a defining feature of Egyptian culture and citizenship. Furthermore, women directors and feminist groups, such as Mirette Mikhail and Abeer Ali’s Misahharati troupe, used hybrid performance genres to create ethnographic, autobiographical, and translated stories centered on women, effectively imagining citizenship from minority perspectives to achieve recognition for subaltern identities. The last two chapters include discussions of...

Visibly Queer- and Trans-Fashion Brands and Retailers in the Twenty-First Century

Socially conscious fashion entrepreneurs in the twenty-first century built many of the first visibly queer- and trans-focused fashion brands. In this paper, we critically examine nine of these brands that produced and distributed undergarments or other objects worn near or against the skin, such as binders, packers, underwear, lingerie, and bras. We draw upon oral histories with the brand directors, objects from each company, news articles, and online content. The brands emerged during significant socio-cultural and political changes and simultaneously engaged in dismantling and queering the past oppressive notions of the fashion industry. Unlike mainstream representation that often has positioned fashionable queer people as thin, cisgender, and white, these brands embraced an intersectional and social-justice lens throughout their business processes. The history of these brands demonstrates the interconnected complexity of fashioning queer and trans identities, fashion commodities, and fashion activist philosophies in the twenty-first-century capitalist marketplace.

Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820–1860Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism

Book Review| September 01 2021 Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820–1860Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820–1860. By Burnett, Katharine A., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press. 2019. xi, 266 pp. Cloth, $49.95.Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism. By Brown, Nicholas. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. 2019. x, 219 pp. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $25.95; e-book available. Christopher Bundrick Christopher Bundrick Christopher Bundrick is an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina Lancaster. His research focuses on southern regionalism, and he is the author of essays about Thomas Nelson Page, Mary Murfree, Charles Chesnutt, and Elliott White Springs. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2021) 93 (3): 531–533. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361335 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Christopher Bundrick; Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820–1860Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism. American Literature 1 September 2021; 93 (3): 531–533. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361335 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search Katharine A. Burnett opens Cavaliers and Economists with the premise that southern literature developed “in tandem with economic modernization—not in spite of it” (4). She goes on to suggest that, even as early as the 1830s, southern literary efforts “developed in resistance to shifts in an emerging capitalist system and used those shifts to rationalize slavery and southern society as it existed” (4). Burnett’s work is clearly influenced by recent attempts to approach southern studies through a global lens, yet her insistence that earlier southern literature embraces, rather than resists, global capitalism becomes especially interesting when she suggests that nineteenth-century southern writers used “the language of economics . . . to reframe mainstream representations of the region through popular literary forms and genres that proliferated in the early-nineteenth century transatlantic literary culture” (9). Hinting at a similarity between capitalist systems’ use of the marketplace to generate and sustain economic values... Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

The construction of (white) working-class identity in narrative literary texts and its contribution to socio-cultural and politico-financial inequality

ABSTRACT Using Fredric Jameson’s theory of the ideologeme to trace representations of working- and white working-class characters through a selection of contemporary literary texts, this article shows how the construction of (white) working-class identity in literature has been influenced by, and fed back into, mainstream representations of the (white) working class in politics and media, thus contributing to cycles of socio-cultural, financial and political exclusion. This article continues by arguing that there is a lack of rounded and developed white working-class characters in British fiction, specifically in London and the South-East, and that contemporary authors continue to rely on typified representations rather than interrogate them, therefore remaining complicit in feedback loops that work to marginalise the (white) working class. To conclude, an argument is put forward in support of opening up space in the public arena for both imagined and real individual voices from marginalised groups to be heard, providing more direct access to channels of representation and an interrogation of the blame narratives that are used to maintain these groups’ socio-economic and political exclusion.

No-Reference Quality Assessment for 3D Synthesized Images Based on Visual-Entropy-Guided Multi-Layer Features Analysis.

Multiview video plus depth is one of the mainstream representations of 3D scenes in emerging free viewpoint video, which generates virtual 3D synthesized images through a depth-image-based-rendering (DIBR) technique. However, the inaccuracy of depth maps and imperfect DIBR techniques result in different geometric distortions that seriously deteriorate the users’ visual perception. An effective 3D synthesized image quality assessment (IQA) metric can simulate human visual perception and determine the application feasibility of the synthesized content. In this paper, a no-reference IQA metric based on visual-entropy-guided multi-layer features analysis for 3D synthesized images is proposed. According to the energy entropy, the geometric distortions are divided into two visual attention layers, namely, bottom-up layer and top-down layer. The feature of salient distortion is measured by regional proportion plus transition threshold on a bottom-up layer. In parallel, the key distribution regions of insignificant geometric distortion are extracted by a relative total variation model, and the features of these distortions are measured by the interaction of decentralized attention and concentrated attention on top-down layers. By integrating the features of both bottom-up and top-down layers, a more visually perceptive quality evaluation model is built. Experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art in assessing the quality of 3D synthesized images.

Remediating AIDS Archives

Abstract In response to mainstream narratives of AIDS history, which too often highlight only experiences of white, cisgender gay men, this article argues that an analysis of recent AIDS activist media is crucial to complicate mainstream representations. It looks to recent video work as an important site of a diversified AIDS history and analyzes three videos made by Thomas Allen Harris, Shanti Avirgan, and Nguyen Tan Hoang for the Visual AIDS Alternate Endings series. Instead of presenting AIDS history as firmly embedded in the past, much of this newer work intertwines past and present to show the ongoing nature of the crisis. Many videos use archival footage to highlight the persistent nature of racism, poverty, drug use stigma, and health care barriers in the epidemic. Through temporal contrast, the videos powerfully show that progress is not always linear, and the past has much to teach us about the present.

#Renziscappa: The Transmedia Story of a Hashtag between Online and Offline Activism

This paper analyzes how the hashtag #Renziscappa was used to create a link between online and offline forms of political activism. Launched in November 2014 by the Italian collective Wu Ming, #Renziscappa aimed to encourage the reporting online of any form of offline protest against the Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. The implementation of #Renziscappa by Wu Ming and their followers sought to counter mainstream representations of Renzi’s purported consensus, and to catalyze and organize the offline protests. Conversely, offline participation linked the hashtag to impact-making political actions. However, the uncontrolled proliferation of #Renziscappa and its appropriation by the Movimento 5 Stelle made the online campaign increasingly lose its connection with the offline protests. By contrast, the concerted transmedia diffusion of #Renziscappa through Wu Ming’s blog Giap and interactive maps preserved this connection. In particular, the maps contextualized #Renziscappa in the genealogical evolution, geo-temporal settings, and socio-political composition of the offline movement. The network of these transmedia extensions constituted a narrative alternative to the mainstream that made users perceive the collective dimension of the movement in a national perspective and fostered the formation of a political subjectivity.