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Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?
In mid-October 2008, the American Studies Association (ASA) hosted its annual conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. According to its website, the ASA “is the nation’s oldest and largest association devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and history.” Over the past two decades, the ASA conference has emerged as a leading venue for vibrant discussions about race, ethnicity, transnationalism, gender, and sexuality. While the ASA represents scholars with a diverse array of methodological approaches from a variety of disciplines, the society is a welcome home to academics whose work is interpretative and theoretical. During the meeting, I attended a
Book Chapter
Pretty People
In the 1990s, American civil society got upended and reordered as many social, cultural, political, and economic institutions were changed forever.Pretty Peopleexamines a wide range of Hollywood icons who reflect how stardom in that decade was transformed as the nation itself was signaling significant changes to familiar ideas about gender, race, ethnicity, age, class, sexuality, and nationality.
Such actors as Denzel Washington, Andy Garcia, Halle Berry, Angela Bassett, Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez, and Antonio Banderas became bona fide movie stars who carried major films to amazing box-office success. Five of the decade's top ten films were opened by three women-Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster, and Whoopi Goldberg. \"Chick flick\" entered the lexicon as Leonardo DiCaprio became the \"King of the World,\" ushering in the cult of the mega celebrity. Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise defined screen masculinity as stark contrasts between \"the regular guy\" and \"the intense guy\" while the roles of Michael Douglas exemplified the endangered \"Average White Male.\" A fascinating composite portrait of 1990s Hollywood and its stars, this collection marks the changes to stardom and society at century's end.
eBook
AFTERWORD
My favorite line of this volume comes, perhaps not surprisingly, given his always charming way with words, from Scott Romine’s consideration of southern foodways. There he writes, “I believe that the idea of the South has been mostly a bad idea.” Such a statement brings to mind Leigh Anne Duck’s pronouncement that we need a “Southern studies without ‘The South,’” a call referenced in this volume by Jon Smith.¹ Perhaps much of the action (and anxiety) in U.S. southern studies of the past ten years can best be summed up as a struggle around this very notion, the idea that
Book Chapter
No Natural Disaster: New Orleans, Katrina, and War
It has always been difficult to talk about new orleans without resorting to cliché. Long positioned as “America's most European city” or “the city that care forgot,” the locale looms large in the national—and the literary—imagination, triggering vivid fantasies of excess and decadence but also of old–world gentility and grandeur. New Orleans, especially in its juicy Gothic flavorings, has often performed as a stand–in for the South at large, while also exhibiting a certain unique cosmopolitanism or hybridity. We might even think of it as an early manifestation of a networked global hub, the routes of the slave trade mapping our first virtual navigation system. New Orleans and indeed the entire South perform powerful ideological work for the nation, functioning throughout the twentieth century as a convenient repository and origin story for much that ails the country: poverty, racism, rigid fundamentalism, decadence, and crime.
Journal Article
Revamping the South
During the 2006 Oscar telecast, Academy Awards president Sid Ganis commented on Hollywood’s efforts to help rebuild New Orleans post-Katrina, citing the production of several films in the region. Subsequently, a good deal of film and television production moved to Louisiana, particularly to Shreveport. While the rise of “Hollywood South,” as Louisiana is now sometimes known, might seem an act of good will on the part of the film industry toward a storm-ravaged region, the seeds for this change were planted before Katrina wreaked havoc along the coast. In July 2005 Louisiana State House Bill 731 took effect, providing healthy
Book Chapter
Scholarship beyond the Word
The College Art Association's caa.reviews published an online exhibition review [http://scalar.usc.edu/hc/caa.reviews-bernini/index] that included a video walk-through of a major Bernini exhibition along with scholarly commentary, additional images, floor plans, and other materials. [...]if a scholar has studied a group of testimonies about, say, hunger in the ghetto, whenever one of those testimonies is watched, the archive will be able to tell the viewer that there is interesting research connected to it. ANVC is currently in a prototyping phase for Scalar, working with a select group of institutions to test our ideas and to develop appropriate infrastructure. In addition to Shoah's Visual History Archive, our archival partners include a video database of performance art addressing cultural memory (the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library), the nonprofit Internet Archive, and the USC-based research and teaching archive Critical Commons, among others.
Journal Article
After Authenticity
This chapter provides an afterword for the volume as a whole. It examines the value of notions of authenticity for southern studies and argues that it is time to shift our focus from the authentic (or inauthentic) toward larger questions of labor, production, globalism, and capitalism. Beyond engaging the diverse set of essays included in this volume, the piece also turns to other scholars of the South, including Melanie Benson Taylor, Leigh Anne Duck, Katherine McKee, Annette Trefzer, and Grace Hale, to displace a certain tendency within southern studies to fixate on the fake and the real. Nonetheless, the essay does understand the study of the south to be a crucial field of inquiry even as southern studies must also engage the world at larger scales.
Book Chapter
