Reviews Archives - Page 14 of 17

Reviews

Solidarity, and the Rise and Fall of the Public Sphere

A Review of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s Media Events

April 18, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Twenty-five years after its publication, Dayan and Katz’s classic study of ceremonial television, Media Events, has continued relevance for understanding the politics of media. With the proliferation of cable television and digital media explosion, television is no longer the hegemonic media form it once was, and the media events they ...

Solidarity, and the Rise and Fall of the Public Sphere

Feature

Get Out & The Horror of White Pleasure

An Examination of Jordan Peele’s 2017 Film

April 12, 2017 • by Ella Myers

The terrific film Get Out -- which writer and director Jordan Peele aptly dubs a “social thriller” -- is a smash hit and critics’ favorite. Many glowing reviews converge on a key claim: the film is a gripping exposé of “white liberal hypocrisy.” And it is. But it is also, and ...

Race

America As It Really Was

The Black Power Mixtape: 1967 – 1975

April 7, 2017 • by Ryan Ross

The Black Power Mixtape: 1967 – 1975 (2011; Producer: Annika Rogell; Director: Göran Olsson) is a collection of largely unseen and unused footage captured by Swedish photojournalists during the Black Power movement. Their aim, as stated in the beginning of the documentary, was “to understand and portray America – ...

Feature

Review of Jodi Dean’s Crowds and Party

On Collectives, Communicative Capitalism, and Suspension of the Individual Ego

March 23, 2017 • by Luke Mergner

Nowhere was this sense more palatable than in Zucotti Park, where the #OccupyWallStreet protesters set up camp. It was a moment when, especially for the Left, the world paused as if the railroad switch of history might suddenly direct the country on a new, more equitable track. Six years later, even ...

Reviews

Why I Wish To Thank Fareed Zakaria

(Even if I don’t always agree with him)

March 10, 2017 • by Roshni Majumdar

I first read his essay, “The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?” in Newsweek several years after he wrote it in October 2001. In the essay, he explained that political stagnation in the Arab World, where he remarked that many Gulf countries had even fewer freedoms than they ...

Reviews

Queer History on Stage

A Review of The View UpStairs by Max Vernon

March 1, 2017 • by Lina Landstroem

No, it is not, they responded. We do not call the LGBTQ community ‘family’ because we don’t need to. We no longer live in a world where we need to call each other family and create homes in public spaces. However, we have already forgotten that it wasn’t always this ...

Feature

Fighting Over and On the Streets of New York

A Review of the ‘Whose Streets? Our Streets!’ Exhibition

January 17, 2017 • by Julia Foulkes

“Whose Streets” features the work of thirty-eight independent photojournalists who documented -- and participated in -- protests in New York from 1980-2000. The issues ranged from housing, abortion rights, housing, queer activism, AIDS, education and labor, police brutality, race relations, the war and environment -- there were a lot, and ...

Education

Simianization in the Film “Sing”

Glaring caricature and stereotype provides teachable moment about racial bias

January 9, 2017 • by Jill Corson Lake

The animated film “Sing,” which opened on December 21, features a lazy, tone-deaf, and hurtful character choice by writer and director Garth Jennings. Whether conscious or unconscious, Jennings’ script perpetuates systemic racism and the history of simianization and oppression of black people by depicting them as gorillas, monkeys, and apes. “Sing” ...

Education

“Great Books Camp” as Political Education

A Reply to Molly Worthen

December 23, 2016 • by Michael Weinman

In “Can I Go to Great Books Camp?” which recently appeared in the New York Times, Molly Worthen provides an historical account of the development of the “Great Books” program and related curricula inside American universities. It is a report about the present deployment of such “canonical” works in various ...

“Great Books Camp” as Political Education

Literature

A Pure Solar World

Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism by Paul Youngquist

December 21, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

One of my favorite moments of personal cognitive dissonance goes back to my time at Michigan State in the mid-1970s when at brunch at IHOP one Sunday morning I looked over to see John Gilmore, June Tyson, and Marshall Allen seated a couple of tables over from me. They were ...

Feature

The Lady in the Van (2015)

Movie Review

December 20, 2016 • by Margaret Kim Peterson

“One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation.” Mary (or is it Margaret?) Shepherd was a pianist. And then she was a nun. And then… well, it’s not clear just what happened next. But by the time we meet her, in Alan Bennett’s ...

Reviews

What Can Cinema Teach Philosophy?

Badiou and Rancière on Film

December 19, 2016 • by Emmanuel Alloa

Philosophy’s general distrust of cinema is a thing of the past. Cinema no longer serves only as a placeholder for reproving wrong conceptions of time (Bergson on the “cinematographic illusion”), as the incarnation of the distraction industry (Adorno), as a symptom of cultural depravation (Heidegger on the remove from “Japanese ...