Sarah Florini
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781479892464
- eISBN:
- 9781479807185
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479892464.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
In a culture dominated by discourses of “colorblindness” but still rife with structural racism, digital and social media have become a resource for Black Americans navigating a society that ...
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In a culture dominated by discourses of “colorblindness” but still rife with structural racism, digital and social media have become a resource for Black Americans navigating a society that simultaneously perpetuates and obscures racial inequality. Though the Ferguson protests made such Black digital networks more broadly visible, these networks did not coalesce in that moment. They were built over the course of years through much less spectacular, though no less important, everyday use, including mundane social exchanges, humor, and fandom. This book explores these everyday practices and their relationship to larger social issues through an in-depth analysis of a network of Black American digital media users and content creators. These digital networks are used not only to cope with and challenge day-to-day experiences of racism, but also as an incubator for the discourses that have since exploded onto the national stage. This book tells the story of an influential subsection of these Black digital networks, including many Black amateur podcasts, the independent media company This Week in Blackness (TWiB!), and the network of Twitter users that has come to be known as “Black Twitter.” Grounded in her active participation in this network and close ethnographic collaboration with TWiB!, Sarah Florini argues that the multimedia, transplatform nature of this network makes it a flexible resource that can then be deployed for a variety of purposes—culturally inflected fan practices, community building, cultural critique, and citizen journalism. Florini argues that these digital media practices are an extension of historic traditions of Black cultural production and resistance.Less
In a culture dominated by discourses of “colorblindness” but still rife with structural racism, digital and social media have become a resource for Black Americans navigating a society that simultaneously perpetuates and obscures racial inequality. Though the Ferguson protests made such Black digital networks more broadly visible, these networks did not coalesce in that moment. They were built over the course of years through much less spectacular, though no less important, everyday use, including mundane social exchanges, humor, and fandom. This book explores these everyday practices and their relationship to larger social issues through an in-depth analysis of a network of Black American digital media users and content creators. These digital networks are used not only to cope with and challenge day-to-day experiences of racism, but also as an incubator for the discourses that have since exploded onto the national stage. This book tells the story of an influential subsection of these Black digital networks, including many Black amateur podcasts, the independent media company This Week in Blackness (TWiB!), and the network of Twitter users that has come to be known as “Black Twitter.” Grounded in her active participation in this network and close ethnographic collaboration with TWiB!, Sarah Florini argues that the multimedia, transplatform nature of this network makes it a flexible resource that can then be deployed for a variety of purposes—culturally inflected fan practices, community building, cultural critique, and citizen journalism. Florini argues that these digital media practices are an extension of historic traditions of Black cultural production and resistance.
Germaine Halegoua
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781479839216
- eISBN:
- 9781479829101
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479839216.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
The Digital City focuses on the interface of people, urban place, and the role that digital media play in placemaking endeavors. Critics have understood digital media as forces that alienate and ...
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The Digital City focuses on the interface of people, urban place, and the role that digital media play in placemaking endeavors. Critics have understood digital media as forces that alienate and disembed users from space and place. This book argues that the exact opposite processes are observable: many different actors are consciously and habitually using digital technologies to re-embed themselves within urban space. Five case studies from cities around the world illustrate the concept of “re-placeing” by showing how different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation technologies, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to reproduce abstract urban spaces as inhabited places with deep meanings and emotional attachments. Through clear and accessible language and timely narratives of everyday urban life, the author argues that a sense of place is integral to understanding contemporary relationships with digital media while highlighting our own awareness of the places where we find ourselves and where our technologies find and place us. Through ethnographic and discourse analysis of everyday digital media practices and technologies, this book expands practical and theoretical understandings of the ways urban planners envision and plan connected cities, the role of urban communities in shaping and interpreting digital architectures, and the tales of the city produced through mobile and web-based platforms. Digital connectivity is reshaping the city and the ways we navigate through it and belong within it. How this happens and the types of places we produce within these networked environments are what this book addresses.Less
The Digital City focuses on the interface of people, urban place, and the role that digital media play in placemaking endeavors. Critics have understood digital media as forces that alienate and disembed users from space and place. This book argues that the exact opposite processes are observable: many different actors are consciously and habitually using digital technologies to re-embed themselves within urban space. Five case studies from cities around the world illustrate the concept of “re-placeing” by showing how different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation technologies, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to reproduce abstract urban spaces as inhabited places with deep meanings and emotional attachments. Through clear and accessible language and timely narratives of everyday urban life, the author argues that a sense of place is integral to understanding contemporary relationships with digital media while highlighting our own awareness of the places where we find ourselves and where our technologies find and place us. Through ethnographic and discourse analysis of everyday digital media practices and technologies, this book expands practical and theoretical understandings of the ways urban planners envision and plan connected cities, the role of urban communities in shaping and interpreting digital architectures, and the tales of the city produced through mobile and web-based platforms. Digital connectivity is reshaping the city and the ways we navigate through it and belong within it. How this happens and the types of places we produce within these networked environments are what this book addresses.
André Brock
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781479820375
- eISBN:
- 9781479811908
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479820375.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This book addresses Black culture, Web 2.0, and social networks from new methodological perspectives. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis, the chapters within examine Black-designed ...
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This book addresses Black culture, Web 2.0, and social networks from new methodological perspectives. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis, the chapters within examine Black-designed digital technologies, Black-authored websites, and Black-dominated social media services such as Black Twitter. Distributed Blackness also features an innovative theoretical approach to Black digital practice. The book uses libidinal economy to examine Black discourse and Black users from a joyful/surplus perspective, eschewing deficit models (including respectability politics) to better place online Blackness as a mode of existing in the “postpresent,” or a joyous disregard for modernity and capitalism. This approach also adds nuanced analysis to the energies powering Black online activism and Black identity.Less
This book addresses Black culture, Web 2.0, and social networks from new methodological perspectives. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis, the chapters within examine Black-designed digital technologies, Black-authored websites, and Black-dominated social media services such as Black Twitter. Distributed Blackness also features an innovative theoretical approach to Black digital practice. The book uses libidinal economy to examine Black discourse and Black users from a joyful/surplus perspective, eschewing deficit models (including respectability politics) to better place online Blackness as a mode of existing in the “postpresent,” or a joyous disregard for modernity and capitalism. This approach also adds nuanced analysis to the energies powering Black online activism and Black identity.
Lindsay V. Reckson
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781479803323
- eISBN:
- 9781479842452
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479803323.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature recovers a series of ecstatic performances in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realism. From camp meetings ...
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Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature recovers a series of ecstatic performances in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realism. From camp meetings to Native American ghost dances to storefront church revivals, Realist Ecstasy explores how realism represents ecstatic bodies as objects of fascination, transforming spiritual experience into the very material of realist description. In an era of “separate but equal” religious pluralism and systematic racial terror, realism mobilized the gestural and performative idioms of religious ecstasy to confront ongoing histories of violence and imagine new modes of social affiliation. Realist Ecstasy demonstrates how the realist imagining of possessed bodies helped produce and naturalize racial difference, while excavating the complex, shifting, and dynamic possibilities embedded in ecstatic performance. Approaching realism as both an unruly archive of performance and a wide-ranging repertoire of media practices, Realist Ecstasy argues that the real was repetitively enacted and reenacted through bodily practice, at a moment when the body’s capacity to reliably signify was everywhere at stake. Interrogating realist practices that worked to order, disorder, and reify racial and religious difference under Jim Crow, Realist Ecstasy challenges and transforms conventional understandings of realism’s relationship to histories of secularization, while reframing secularism itself as a densely heterogeneous set of performances and representations.Less
Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature recovers a series of ecstatic performances in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realism. From camp meetings to Native American ghost dances to storefront church revivals, Realist Ecstasy explores how realism represents ecstatic bodies as objects of fascination, transforming spiritual experience into the very material of realist description. In an era of “separate but equal” religious pluralism and systematic racial terror, realism mobilized the gestural and performative idioms of religious ecstasy to confront ongoing histories of violence and imagine new modes of social affiliation. Realist Ecstasy demonstrates how the realist imagining of possessed bodies helped produce and naturalize racial difference, while excavating the complex, shifting, and dynamic possibilities embedded in ecstatic performance. Approaching realism as both an unruly archive of performance and a wide-ranging repertoire of media practices, Realist Ecstasy argues that the real was repetitively enacted and reenacted through bodily practice, at a moment when the body’s capacity to reliably signify was everywhere at stake. Interrogating realist practices that worked to order, disorder, and reify racial and religious difference under Jim Crow, Realist Ecstasy challenges and transforms conventional understandings of realism’s relationship to histories of secularization, while reframing secularism itself as a densely heterogeneous set of performances and representations.
