Race and Hegemonic Struggle in the United States

Pop Culture, Politics, and Protest

Edited by Michael G. Lacy and Mary E. Triece - Contributions by Evan Beaumont Center; Kristen Hoerl; Linda Horwitz; Casey Ryan Kelly; Brittany Lewis; Catherine H. Palczewski; David W. Seitz and Anna M. Young

Race and Hegemonic Struggle in the United States: Pop Culture, Politics, and Protest is a collection of essays that draws on concepts developed by Antonio Gramsci to examine the imagining of race in popular culture productions, political discourses, and resistance rhetoric. The chapters in this volume call for renewed attention to Gramscian political thought to examine, understand, interpret and explain the persistent contradictions, ambivalence, and paradoxes in racial representations and material realities. This book’s contributors rely on Gramsci’s ideas to explore how popular, political, and resistant discourses reproduce or transform our understandings of race and racism, social inequalities, and power relationships in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Together the chapters confront forms of collective and cultural amnesia about race and racism suggested in the phrases “postrace,” “postracial,” and “postracism," while exposing the historical, institutional, social, and political forces and constraints that make antiracism, atonement, and egalitarian change so difficult to achieve.

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 242 • Trim: 6¾ x 9¼

978-1-61147-709-2 • Hardback • August 2014 • $108.00 • (£83.00)

978-1-61147-759-7 • Paperback • March 2017 • $51.99 • (£40.00)

978-1-61147-710-8 • eBook • August 2014 • $49.00 • (£38.00)

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Communication Studies

Subjects: Social Science / Popular Culture, Literary Criticism / American / General, Social Science / General

Race and Hegemonic Struggle in the United States

Pop Culture, Politics, and Protest

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Race and Hegemonic Struggle in the United States: Pop Culture, Politics, and Protest is a collection of essays that draws on concepts developed by Antonio Gramsci to examine the imagining of race in popular culture productions, political discourses, and resistance rhetoric. The chapters in this volume call for renewed attention to Gramscian political thought to examine, understand, interpret and explain the persistent contradictions, ambivalence, and paradoxes in racial representations and material realities. This book’s contributors rely on Gramsci’s ideas to explore how popular, political, and resistant discourses reproduce or transform our understandings of race and racism, social inequalities, and power relationships in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Together the chapters confront forms of collective and cultural amnesia about race and racism suggested in the phrases “postrace,” “postracial,” and “postracism," while exposing the historical, institutional, social, and political forces and constraints that make antiracism, atonement, and egalitarian change so difficult to achieve.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 242 • Trim: 6¾ x 9¼

978-1-61147-709-2 • Hardback • August 2014 • $108.00 • (£83.00)

978-1-61147-759-7 • Paperback • March 2017 • $51.99 • (£40.00)

978-1-61147-710-8 • eBook • August 2014 • $49.00 • (£38.00)

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Communication Studies

Subjects: Social Science / Popular Culture, Literary Criticism / American / General, Social Science / General

Author

Mary E. Triece is professor in the School of Communication at the University of Akron.

Michael G. Lacy is assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments
Foreword A Moment of Blackness—And Zombies

Eric King Watts
Introduction: Gramsci, Race, and Communication Studies
Mary E. Triece and Michael G. Lacy
Part I: Race and Popular Culture
Hegemony and Disruption in Film, Television, and Documentary
Mary E. Triece

1.Racial Shadows, Threat, Neoliberalism, and
Trauma: Reading The Book of Eli
Michael G. Lacy
2.Bizarre Foods: White Privilege and the
Neocolonial Palate
Casey Ryan Kelly
3.Remembering Radical Black Dissent:
Traumatic Counter-Memories in Contemporary
Documentaries about the Black Power Movement
Kristen Hoerl

Part II:Race and Politics
Change vs. the “Dead Weight” of Tradition in Politics
Mary E. Triece

4.The Mother Tongue as “Back Talk”: Resisting
Racism in Congressional Hearings
Mary E. Triece
5.At the Margins of the American Political
Imagination: Black Feminist Politics and the Racial
Politics of the New Democrats
Brittany Lewis
6.The Birthers: Hegemony and the Politics of
Postracial Positionality
Evan Beaumont Center

Part III:Race and Resistance
“Pessimism of the Intelligence” and “Optimism of the Will”
Mary E. Triece

7.Embodying Unauthorized Immigrants:
Counterhegemonic Protest and the Rhetorical
Power of the “Material Diatribe”
David W. Seitz
8.Racing/Sexing the Rhetorical Situation:
Angela Davis’s Embodied Contextual
Reconstruction
Linda Diane Horwitz and Catherine H. Palczewski

9.The Black Public Intellectual of the Joshua
Generation: Answering the Gramscian Call
Anna M. Young

About the Contributors