Author: Eric Lott File Type: pdf Blackness, as the entertainment and sports industries well know, is a prized commodity in American pop culture. Marketed to white consumers, black culture invites whites to view themselves in a mirror of racial difference, while at the same time offering the illusory reassurance that they remain wholly white. Charting a rich landscape that includes classic American literature, Hollywood films, pop music, and investigative journalism, Eric Lott reveals the hidden dynamics of this self-and-other mirroring of racial symbolic capital. Black Mirror is a timely reflection on the ways provocative representations of racial difference serve to sustain white cultural dominance. As Lott demonstrates, the fraught symbolism of racial difference props up white hegemony, but it also tantalizingly threatens to expose the contradictions and hypocrisies upon which the edifice of white power has been built. Mark Twains still-controversial depiction of black characters and dialect, John Howard Griffins experimental cross-racial reporting, Joni Mitchells perverse penchant for cross-dressing as a black pimp, Bob Dylans knowing thefts of black folk music these instances and more show how racial fantasy, structured through the mirroring of identification and appropriation so visible in blackface performance, still thrives in American culture, despite intervening decades of civil rights activism, multiculturalism, and the alleged post-racialism of the twenty-first century. In Black Mirror, white and black Americans view themselves through a glass darkly, but also face to face. **

Author: Melissa Mohr File Type: epub Almost everyone swears, or worries about not swearing, from the two year-old who has just discovered the power of potty mouth to the grandma who wonders why every other word she hears is obscene. Whether they express anger or exhilaration, are meant to insult or to commend, swear words perform a crucial role in language. But swearing is also a uniquely well-suited lens through which to look at history, offering a fascinating record of what people care about on the deepest levels of a culture--whats divine, whats terrifying, and whats taboo. Holy Sh*t tells the story of two kinds of swearing--obscenities and oaths--from ancient Rome and the Bible to today. With humor and insight, Melissa Mohr takes readers on a journey to discover how swearing has come to include both testifying with your hand on the Bible and calling someone a *#$&!* when they cut you off on the highway. She explores obscenities in ancient Rome--which were remarkably similar to our own--and unearths the history of religious oaths in the Middle Ages, when swearing (or not swearing) an oath was often a matter of life and death. Holy Sh*t also explains the advancement of civility and corresponding censorship of language in the 18th century, considers the rise of racial slurs after World War II, examines the physiological effects of swearing (increased heart rate and greater pain tolerance), and answers a question that preoccupies the FCC, the US Senate, and anyone who has recently overheard little kids at a playground are we swearing more now than people did in the past? A gem of lexicography and cultural history, Holy Sh*t is a serious exploration of obscenity--and it also just might expand your repertoire of words to choose from the next time you shut your finger in the car door.

Author: Dušan Dragosavac File Type: pdf

Author: Robert B. Silvers File Type: epub For the past fifty years, The New York Review of Books has covered virtually every international revolution and movement of consequence by dispatching the worlds most brilliant writers to write eyewitness accounts. The New York Review Abroad not only brings together twenty-eight of the most riveting of these pieces but includes epilogues that update and reassess the political situation (by either the original authors or by Ian Buruma). Among the pieces included are Susan Sontags personal narrative of staging Waiting for Godot in war-torn Sarajevo Alma Guillermoprietos report from inside Colombias guerrilla headquarters and her disturbing encounter with young female fighters Ryszard Kapuscinskis terrifying description of being set on fire while running roadblocks in Nigeria Caroline Blackwoods coverage of the 1979 gravediggers strike in Liverpoola noir mini-masterpiece Timothy Garton Ashs minute-by-minute account from the Magic Lantern theater in Prague in 1989, where the subterranean stage, auditorium, foyers, and dressing rooms had become the headquarters of the revolutionAmong other writers whose New York Review pieces will be included are Tim Judah, Amos Elon, Joan Didion, William Shawcross, Christopher de Bellaigue, and Mark Danner. A tour de force of vivid and enlightening writing from the front lines, this volume is indeed the first rough draft of the history of the past fifty years.