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"Munby, Jonathan"
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Protecting Home
Through a close exploration of a boys' baseball league in a gentrifying neighborhood of Philadelphia, sociologist Sherri Grasmuck reveals the accommodations and tensions that characterize multicultural encounters in contemporary American public life. Chapters explore coaching styles, parental involvement, institutional politics, parent-child relations, and children's experiences. Grasmuck identifies differences in the ways that the mostly white, working-class \"old-timers\" and the racially diverse, professional newcomers relate to the neighborhood. Through an innovative combination of narrative approaches, this book succeeds both in capturing the immediacy of boys' interaction at the playing field and in contributing to sophisticated theoretical debates in urban studies, the sociology of childhood, and masculinity studies.
eBook
The Best Laid Plans
The heist—a carefully organized robbery of a financial institution or other lucrative business—has been a persistent and popular mainstay of the crime film. The Best Laid Plans: Interrogating the Heist Film asks the question: why has the heist film proved so appealing to audiences over many years and in diverse cultural contexts? The twelve essays in this volume, edited by Jim Leach and Jeannette Sloniowski, explore the significance of the heist film in different national cinemas, as well as its aesthetic principles and ideological issues such as representation of gender, race, and class. The essays are organized in three parts dealing with the heist film's international presence, the subgenre's social and cultural implications, and some theoretical ways of approaching it. For example, contributor Tim Palmer challenges traditional notions of French film history that emphasize critically acclaimed art films by pointing to the rich achievements of critically defamed and neglected, but extremely popular, crime films; Gaylyn Studlar surveys heist films in light of feminist theories that illuminate stereotypical characterizations of both men and women in the heist; and Hamilton Carroll compares James Marsh's documentary Man on a Wire—which draws on heist conventions to depict Philippe Petit's unauthorized tightrope walk in 1974 between the two towers of the World Trade Center—to Spike Lee's New York–set heist film Inside Man. The Best Laid Plans includes an accessible group of essays that will meet the needs of students and scholars in film and media studies by offering new insights into an important and neglected area in genre criticism.
eBook
Manhattan Melodrama's “Art of the Weak”: Telling History from the Other Side in the 1930s Talking Gangster Film
Ever since gangsters first appeared on the American screen (officially with D. W. Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley, in 1912) they have been involved in a prolonged battle with the forces of “legitimate” culture. Having fought their fights from the wrong side of the street gangsters have continually drawn attention to the line which separates legitimate from illegitimate Americans. This has raised problems in accounting for the gangster genre's significance. In stigmatizing the ethnic urban poor as criminal, the gangster genre betrays its origins in a nativist discourse which sought to cast “hyphenated” Americans as “un-American” and in need of “ Americanization. ” Yet, as perhaps the most powerful vehicle for the nationalization and popularization of ethnic urban American life, the gangster genre overturned many aspects of its iniquitous origin, playing an important part in the re-writing of American history from the perspective (and, as I shall demonstrate, quite literally in the voice) of the ethnic urban lower class. This contradiction is characteristic of the dynamic and changing role American popular culture artifacts play in the mediation of the nation's history. Regardless of the poetic and ideological licence gangster fictions take with the very real socio-historical problems of the ethnic urban poor, the central conflict which informs these narratives remains the question of social, economic, and cultural exclusion.
Journal Article
Gangs and Mobs
This chapter contains sections titled:
Towards a History of Gangster Fiction
Original Gangsters: Lippard and Fitzgerald
The Legacy of the Reforming Gaze: From Riis to Asbury
New Perspectives: Burnett and Clarke
After Prohibition: Fuchs, Wolfert, and the Pathology of the Organization Man
Future Gangster: Nostalgia or Global Corruption ‐ Puzo or Winslow?
Book Chapter
Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-Representation in African American Popular Culture
Jonathan Munby, Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-Representation in African American Popular Culture (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011, $22.50). Pp. 216. isbn 978 0 226 155036 7. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. An electronic version of this article can be accessed via the internet at http://journals.cambridge.org
Book Review
Screening crime in the United States of America, 1929-1958: From Hays code to HUAC; from ''Little Caesar'' to ''Touch of Evil'
Attending to the double meaning of \"screening\" crime--as a system of narrative representation on one hand, and as something policed by censorship on the other--this dissertation is a case study of the shared features of both the \"classic\" 1930s gangster genre and film noir (the 1940s and 1950s crime cycle) which made them antagonistic elements within Hollywood's studio system. The American crime film mediated the various crisis contexts of its reception (immigration history, urbanization and modernization, Prohibition, the Depression, World War II, postwar demobilization and redomestication of women, and the Red Scare), in controversial ways. Over this period of dramatic socio-cultural transformation, the gangster genre and film noir, rather than ameliorating crisis, posed awkward questions about the line separating legitimate from illegitimate Americans (in terms of class and ethnicity)--provoking the two most significant attempts on the part of moral and political authority to control the film industry: the Production Code Administration's (Hollywood's internal censoring authority) declaration of a moratorium on gangster film production in 1935 (the Code's first enforcement); and the House Un-American Activities Committee's (HUAC) Hollywood inquisition, 1947-53. To uncover the stakes involved in policing Hollywood's crime film over the period in question, censorship data (from Production Code Administration files) is combined not only with close visual and textual analyses, but analyses of the changing star system, the coming of sound (the popularization of urban vernacular speech), the changing organizational environment of the film industry, and the influence of Austro-German Jewish exiles on the American crime film. Beyond challenging the critical dogma surrounding Hollywood's ideological function, this study questions, more broadly, the axioms which underpin our understandings of mass/popular culture's relationship to power and crisis in a consumer capitalist society.
Dissertation