Homonationalism and Western progressive narrative: locating ‘conservative heartlands’ with Zenne Dancer (2012) and its Western reviews

In this paper, we analyze the Turkish film Zenne Dancer (2012), which is largely based on what has been called a first gay honor killing in Turkey. We employ a framing analysis to both the film's content and its Western reviews to compare how different media texts frame the murder. The results indicate that while both the film and the reviews recognize tradition, understood here as native and archaic values as well as Islamic religion, as a key factor behind the murder, they locate this tradition quite differently: the film relegates it to the eastern Turkey, and thus implicitly to Kurds, while the reviews tend to extend it to the entire country or even the whole Middle East. We relate these results to the Western progressive narrative that positions the West as a civic and moral ideal that could be achieved by others over time. In particular, we employ Puar's concept of homonationalism to show how different media texts challenge or exploit the Western imperative to ‘come out’ and what effects it has for the East–West juxtapositions.     

The Constables and the ‘Garage Girl’

In the summer of 1928, the arrest on a disorder charge of a young woman in north London who gave her name as Helene Adele led to a press sensation after she claimed that the officers had falsely accused her in order to discredit her claim that one of them had sexually assaulted her. The constables were ultimately prosecuted, convicted and discharged from the Metropolitan Police. This article considers the Adele case in the context of intense concerns about the possible abuse of police powers—particularly in cases involving women—in the late 1920s. Adele was catapulted onto the front pages of Britain's sensationalist press: her serialised memoir appeared in a newspaper and was reprinted in a women's magazine. However, her case was more than just a tabloid spectacle. Contributing to historians' reconsideration of the sensationalist inter-war press, this article shows how the coverage of the case fit into the press's interest in young working-class women's lifestyles and sexuality, highlighting how ‘human interest’ journalism could be intermixed with social critique.     

Presenting “The Other Half”: Jacob Riis's Reform Photography and Magic Lantern Spectacles as the Beginning of Documentary Film

This article examines the emergence of the visual documentary genre through the study of Jacob A. Riis's magic lantern spectacles, writings, photographs, audience reception, and critical reviews as published in the press during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To demonstrate an existing strong connection between Riis's lectures and documentary film, in particular, the article also focuses on a more contemporary idea about documenting society—the concept of documentary modes of representation. The analysis of related primary and secondary sources reveals that despite the limitations of technology, “moving” documentary pictures were produced long before they were part of the film genre, and Riis's work should be viewed as one of the principal antecedents to this visual documentary form.     

Digitally Empowered

In January 2013, Peter Bradshaw, a film critic for The Guardian, said that Twitter users had become the favourite “critics” of the film industry. The implicit concern in this article on a subject dear to cultural journalism—“Would be criticism bankrupted when we are all ‘critics’ on the Web?”—became evident in the following years. It is pertinent, then, to explore the media answer not only to this subject but both to sourcing and expertise in general in the culture section. Did they embrace these new news sources (and which) that emerged in the digital environment, such as the reader, blogs or artists tweets? Assuming the first hypothesis, how did they include them in their editorial model, alongside with the “traditional” experts and sources? We conducted a content analysis to the culture section of an international media—The Guardian—between 2014 and 2016 (n?=?992), identifying the role of what we would like to call digitally empowered sources and the presence of new “experts” in cultural criticism. We concluded that these digitally empowered sources play an important role in the overall editorial, business and engagement media's strategy and are deeply engaged with a new digital feature: hypertextuality. New patterns of expertise also reflect an editorial positioning supported in an engagement strategy and in the recognition of the readers’ added value to content.     

Harry Potter and the Commodity Fetish: Activating Corporate Readings in the Journey from Text to Commercial Intertext

Recent years have seen a productive dialogue develop between political-economic and cultural approaches to media studies. In this spirit, this article draws on the analytic tools of political economy to produce a textual analysis of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. In particular, we argue that Rowling has woven throughout the Potter series a set of contradictory discourses related to class and consumerism. Yet out of this heteroglossia, AOL Time Warner—the holder of the series’ film and merchandising rights—has activated a narrow reading of Harry Potter that subordinates Rowling's critique of social inequality and materialism while amplifying those moments in the texts that celebrate the “magic” of commodity consumption. Our conclusion discusses the role such corporate activations might play in the struggle over how commodity production and consumption will be understood in the wider social field.     

The thing was done in the library: Animating an early eighteenth-century murder mystery

In this article we explore Who Killed Sarah Stout? A Participatory Exhibit as a case study exploring how a multimodal approach to publishing special collections may facilitate dynamic engagement with historical evidence. Stout's murder in 1699 remains unsolved; framing the exhibit as a murder mystery, we consider several key goals: promoting critical engagement and use of primary source collections, advancing curricular and cocurricular learning, developing multimodal exhibitionary practices, creating learning opportunities through hybrid exhibitions, leveraging technology to generate new knowledge, and gaming as a mode of scholarly inquiry. The findings proved almost as interesting as the case itself.     

Marketing China after Tiananmen: Marketing mix as applied to the promotion of international tourism

This study makes an innovative application of the marketing mix as the promotion of international tourism, moving one step beyond the previous literature on tourism as a mode of international and intercultural communication. It examines, in the marketing mix framework, the communications activities in the marketing of China as an international tourism product, between the Tiananmen incident (4 June 1989) and the 11th Asian Games in October 1990 in Beijing. The intervening period witnessed how the Chinese government and the American tour operators attempted to restore China's ‘marketability’. The Asian Games, a planned international event, failed to offset the disruptive impact that the unplanned Tiananmen incident had on China's international image.

The paper argues that the international scope and significance of the case offers a strong opportunity for elucidating innovative, generalizable conceptual applications of the four elements in the marketing mix. The study explores the interplay between the four components of the marketing mix by dissecting into ‘parts’ the ‘whole’ international tourism product—a nation (with its government, people, and other perceptible features).     

The bookstore war on Orchard Road: a study of contemporary sponsors of literacy and ideologies of globalized book retailing in Singapore

Based on a year's worth of fieldwork in Singapore, this article is a case study of the much-publicized ‘bookstore war on Orchard Road’ that pitted Borders' American ‘loosey-goosey’ model of bookselling against Kinokuniya's ‘serious’ Japanese model. It examines the distinctive role that country-of-origin effects play in the cultural practices and perceptions of these two global sponsors of literacy, which have in recent decades rivaled traditional sponsors of literacy such as libraries in guiding individuals on ‘what, when and how’ to read. An analysis of the Orchard Road bookstore war captures some of the competing ideologies of textual practices circulating in Singapore as cosmopolitan print consumers and their professional counterparts express their acceptance and/or rejection of particular bookselling practices. For the professionals, good bookselling involves the promotion of local print cultures. In contrast, the cosmopolitan consumers seldom mentioned this criterion. In fact, many of them were drawn to the ‘globality’ of transnational booksellers. While print professionals clearly favored Kinokuniya's globalization localization practices over Borders, a clear-cut preference did not emerge among cosmopolitan consumers. This study suggests that country-of-origin effects likely informed the way in which print professionals and cosmopolitan consumers perceived Borders and Kinokuniya and the globalization localization strategies of these global sponsors of literacy.     

Beyond the book ‘case’

The incorporation of active learning techniques into library instruction classrooms has been a topic widely explored in the 1990s. Research confirms the success of active learning in increasing student participation as well as student learning. Case study methodology is one of many active learning techniques. “Beyond the Book ‘case’” provides an overview of case—study methodology; discusses the appropriateness of case—study methodology in the library instruction setting; and presents examples of case studies used in a library instruction course at Murray State University, Murray, Kentucky.     

Gross Intrusions

This essay closely analyzes the 1936 British film Sensation, directed by the eccentric queer filmmaker Brian Desmond Hurst. The film participated in an extensive and heated debate about intrusive and ‘sensational’ press practices that erupted in the 1930s. In his cinematic version of events, Hurst made sensational journalism seem like an exciting, if morally dubious, part of modern life—a news form that satisfied a basic human desire to learn about the private lives and hidden secrets of other people. This essay shows how Sensation, in its ambivalent relationship to this fraught cultural issue, reveals some of the complexities of interpreting queer filmmaking before the advent of a self-aware and politicized ‘queer film.’ It argues that intrusive journalism was of interest to Hurst precisely because it engaged with issues at the core of queer identity—exposure, revelation, privacy, and criminality—before the decriminalization of homosexual acts.     

‘Agonised Weeping’: Representing Femininity,Emotion and Infanticide in Edwardian Newspapers

Newspaper reports of actual or suspected infanticide were by no means unusual in early twentieth-century England, yet few of these ever resulted in conviction on the capital charge. This article traces the ways in which both local and national newspapers reported on one of the rare cases which a woman was sentenced to death for the murder of her baby: the 1909 trial of Alice Cleaver at the Central Criminal Court. Despite clear evidence of her guilt, newspapers focused instead on the ways in which the defendant had conformed to ideas about respectable femininity, and were united in depicting Cleaver as deserving of judicial and public sympathy. Comparing press reports of the trial with unpublished Home Office papers also reveals the deliberate silence of the press on matters which conflicted with the ‘standard’ representation of infanticide cases—including the fact that Cleaver had a learning disability.     

Metadata as a machine for feeling in Germaine Greer’s archive

ABSTRACT

What happens when a human coder meets a machine one? This article explores this question with reference to the archive of Professor Germaine Greer: Australian-born feminist, performer, scholar, and professional controversialist. It does so by staging two very different data encounters with the 70,000-word finding aid for the print journalism series, a key component of Greer’s archive. The first encounter is archivist’s creation of the finding aid; the second, archivist and literary scholar’s interpretation of this archival metadata using sentiment analysis. Interrogating these activities side-by-side opens up a productive middle ground between humanities scholars and computer technicians, between historians and archivists, between the hand made and the machine made.

This article argues that sentiment analysis offers a new and highly productive method of interrogating archival metadata, and that, as a method which privileges emotive understandings of content, it is particularly appropriate to the study of feminist archives like Greer’s. It also argues that these kinds of detailed finding aids are new datasets that reward analysis in their own right, and particularly when considered in dialogue with—rather than simply used as straightforward navigational tools for—the ‘original’ archival content.     

Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post‐cinematic Conditions,Limitations, and Possibilities

This paper contextualizes the Stanley Kubrick exhibition, a worldwide exhibition tour program dedicated to showcasing the complete oeuvre of the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, within ‘post‐cinematic’ conditions. Since the mid‐1990s, the formal and experiential components of the cinema in the 20th century have increasingly become displaced from the traditional apparatus and site and ‘relocated’ within new technological and institutional platforms, and museums have become one of those new sites for content consumption. The paper discusses both the limitations and possibilities of the exhibition as it is considered to represent the migration of cinema into the art museum context as one salient phenomenon of post‐cinematic conditions. The Kubrick exhibition is explored to uncover the underlying tensions of the ‘exhibition of cinema’ as a key trend of major international museums, between the movie theater as black box and the art museum's exhibition space as white cube. It considers the difference between these two institutional platforms and their conceptions of objecthood, artifact and the temporal economy of the viewing experience. The author argues that this event succeeds in realizing the possibilities for revivifying three constants of cinema: film auteur, cinematic apparatus, and intermediality. The ambivalence demonstrates that while the museum's exhibition of cinema inevitably removes some of its ontological essences, it also preserves and revivifies others.     

#OscarsSoWhite: how Stuart Hall explains why nothing changes in Hollywood and everything is changing

ABSTRACT

Stuart Hall’s work on culture, representation, ideology and hegemony positions Hollywood as a cultural institution informed by and informative of US social values and norms. Thus contemporary debates over Hollywood's diversity are indicative of broader social conflicts. Empirically the article examines 2014–2015 news coverage of Hollywood to question the Hollywood paradox—the lack of diversity in film/TV production yet TV’s increasing shift towards on-screen diversity. It maps three discursive frames: Hollywood exceptionalism, economic imperatives, and institutionalized racism and sexism. The article concludes by using Hulu’s East Los High to reflect on TV’s digital turn and innovative models in production and representation.     

HAROLD D. LASSWELL'S ANALYSIS OF HITLER'S SPEECHES

The War-Time Communications Project (WTCP), conducted during the Second World War, was a major event in the evolution of communication science. A prominent place in it was occupied by Professor Harold D. Lasswell's study on Hitler's speeches, in which the ‘speech model’ was examined in reference to its vocal components and non-verbal communication elements – in terms of ‘how spoken’, rather than of ‘what said’, with an emphasis on audience feedback. This approach formed part of Lasswell's innovative idea: quantification of the word domain. The study was of one of a series of content analysis research works undertaken at the Library of Congress at that time, part of an attempt at ‘keeping an eye’ on world peace. The present article, the first exposition of Lasswell's opus, highlights one of his central concepts – linguistic transformation.     

Part of imperial communications

From 1934 to 1941, three British-governed radio stations were established in the Middle East: Egyptian State Broadcasting (ESB) in Cairo (1934), the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) in Jerusalem (1936), and the Near East Broadcasting Service (NEBS) in Jaffa (1941). These three stations were modeled on the BBC and run as colonial or imperial stations—but they were also considered national stations. As a result, they operated as hybrid entities with overlapping and sometimes conflicting mandates. Through the three case studies—a contentious hire at the ESB, the PBS' ‘Jerusalem Direct News Service’, and the NEBS' Islamic broadcasts—this article charts the evolving relationship between Great Britain and its Arab-world radio stations, examining these three stations in tandem tension between national and regional broadcasting mandates, as well as the challenge that managing each station raised for British officials in the UK and in-country. It moves away from a focus on the disembodied spheres of ideology and propaganda, and toward the messy administrative decisions that reflected British officials' on-the-ground efforts to navigate the administrative control and programming decisions in the perplexing world of semi-independent radio broadcasting stations in the Middle East. It closes by noting that while UK-based British officials saw these three stations as operating under the aegis of British governance and on the model of the BBC, the ESB and the PBS, in particular, reflected and projected not a British imperial identity but an Egyptian and a Palestinian nationalist one.     

Innovation and the Wiley—Blackwell Compass Journals

‘Innovation’ is one of those words, like ‘challenge', which inspires different reactions in different people. Depending on one's background or job sector, it can either represent an exciting opportunity or a resource‐draining waste of time. Yet innovate we must, to satisfy our markets' increasing expectations, especially in the online environment. Some brand leaders have separate ‘laboratories’ where new features and ideas are developed and floated for feedback. In the absence of such a dedicated space, there are several issues relating to innovation within a publishing organization. This article looks at how these are handled at Wiley–Blackwell in the Compass journals team, and tries to distil some working principles.